Introduction When first encountering an infant or child with cholestatic liver disease, it is essential that diagnostic evaluation be conducted promptly in order to (1) recognize disorders amenable either to specific medical therapy (e.g. galactosemia, tyrosinemia, hypothyroidism, urinary tract infection) or to early surgical intervention (e.g. biliary atresia, choledochal cyst); (2) institute treatment directed toward enhancing bile flow; and (3) prevent and treat the varied medical, nutritional, and emotional consequences of chronic liver disease. Because many of the treatable causes require early diagnosis and prompt institution of therapy, the evaluation of the cholestatic infant should never be delayed. Although "physiologic cholestasis" (hypercholemia or elevated bile acids) may be present in the infant, there is no state of "physiologic conjugated hyperbilirubinemia". For the jaundiced infant, historical and clinical information such as color of the stools, birth weight, and presence of hepatomegaly may provide important clues as to the etiology of cholestasis. Consanguinity or liver disease in siblings suggests the possibility of metabolic, familial, or genetic disease. Review of the prenatal and postnatal course may reveal intrauterine infection, occurrence of hypoglycemia or seizures, and exposure to toxins/drugs (i.e. total parenteral nutrition (TPN)). Careful physical examination may reveal features of typical disorders or syndromes. For the older child and adolescent, a history of exposure to drugs/toxins (e.g. acetaminophen), the presence of vascular insufficiency, and the presence of underlying disease (e.g. inflammatory bowel disease) provide helpful clues. The diagnostic evaluation of the infant with cholestasis is detailed in Chapter 8.


The ways people connect, interact, share, and communicate have changed due to recent developments in information technology. These developments, categorized as social media, have captured the attention of business executives, technologists, and education professionals alike, and have altered many business models. Additionally, the concept of social media impacts numerous sub-disciplines within business and has become an important issue with operational, tactical, and strategic considerations. Despite this interest, many business schools do not have courses involving social media technologies and applications. In those that do, the placement and focus of the course varies considerably. This article provides motivation and insight into the process of developing an approach for effectively teaching social media use in business. Additionally, it offers implementation examples of courses taught at three major universities. The article concludes with lessons-learned that will give instructors practical guidance and ensure that social media courses taught in a business school provide students with a solid basis for integrating social media into business practice.


The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is investigating how the social networking site Twitter, a popular service for sending and receiving short, public text messages, can augment USGS earthquake response products and the delivery of hazard information. Rapid detection and qualitative assessment of shaking events are possible because people begin sending public Twitter messages (tweets) with in tens of seconds after feeling shaking. Here we present and evaluate an earthquake detection procedure that relies solely on Twitter data. A tweet-frequency time series constructed from tweets containing the word "earthquake" clearly shows large peaks correlated with the origin times of widely felt events. To identify possible earthquakes, we use a short-term-average, long-term-average algorithm. When tuned to a moderate sensitivity, the detector finds 48 globally-distributed earthquakes with only two false triggers in five months of data. The number of detections is small compared to the 5,175 earthquakes in the USGS global earthquake catalog for the same five-month time period, and no accurate location or magnitude can be assigned based on tweet data alone. However, Twitter earthquake detections are not without merit. The detections are generally caused by widely felt events that are of more immediate interest than those with no human impact. The detections are also fast; about 75% occur within two minutes of the origin time. This is considerably faster than seismographic detections in poorly instrumented regions of the world. The tweets triggering the detections also provided very short first-impression narratives from people who experienced the shaking.


Given the current prolonged life expectancy, various pathologies affect increasingly the aging subjects. Regarding the musculoskeletal apparatus, bone fragility induces more susceptibility to fractures, often not accompanied by good ability of self-repairing, in particular when critical-size defects (CSD) occur. Currently orthopedic surgery makes use of allografting and autografting which, however, have limitations due to the scarce amount of tissue that can be taken from the donor, the possibility of disease transmission and donor site morbidity. The need to develop new solutions has pushed the field of tissue engineering (TE) research to study new scaffolds to be functionalized in order to obtain constructs capable of promoting tissue regeneration and achieve stable bone recovery over time. This investigation focuses on the most important aspect related to bone tissue regeneration: the angiogenic properties of the scaffold to be used. As an innovative solution, scleral ossicles (SOs), previously characterized as natural, biocompatible and spontaneously decellularized scaffolds used for bone repair, were tested for angiogenic potential and biocompatibility. To reach this purpose, in ovo Chorioallantoic Membrane Assay (CAM) was firstly used to test the angiogenic potential; secondly, in vivo subcutaneous implantation of SOs (in a rat model) was performed in order to assess the biocompatibility and the inflammatory response. Finally, thanks to the analysis of mass spectrometry (LCMSQE), the putative proteins responsible for the SO angiogenic properties were identified. Thus, a novel natural biomaterial is proposed, which is (i) able to induce an angiogenic response in vivo by subcutaneous implantation in a non-immunodeficient animal model, (ii) which does not induce any inflammatory response, and (iii) is useful for regenerative medicine application for the healing of bone CSD.


Viscous damping can be used to limit structural response due to seismic excitation. However, if large response velocities occur during an extreme seismic event such as a Maximum Considered Event (MCE), then significant damping forces can be created due to the damper velocity dependence. These damping forces are important as they must be resisted by the foundation, increasing design demand. Therefore, methods to predict and limit peak damping forces are important. To avoid the possibility of large foundation demands a yielding fuse can be used in series with the viscous damper to enable incorporation of large capacity viscous dampers to dissipate large amounts of energy during lowerlevel seismic events without inducing unacceptably high foundation demands during larger events. This paper delineates the impact of this approach in a probabilistic spectral design analysis using a suite of probabilistically scaled seismic events and a nonlinear model. Reduction factors versus a linear system with the same damper are calculated for base shear and displacement. A reduced sacrificial fuse yield force of 25% of the median base-shear force of the uncontrolled structure has only a small impact on displacement response, but can significantly reduce peak baseshear during extreme seismic events. The 95th percentile displacement reduction factors increase from 0.85 to 0.96 (small displacement reductions) but 95th percentile base-shear reduction factors decrease from 2.0 to 1.4, which is a significant reduction in peak foundation demand. This analysis clearly outlines the design tradeoffs and considerations for realistic structural design scenarios using added viscous damping.


The skills required in craft practice involve a high degree of tacit knowledge which is frequently difficult for the craft expert to articulate. N. Wood, a multimedia designer, has undertaken extensive research over the last ten years seeking to understand the knowledge of skilled craftsmen and find methods of capturing and passing it on. She has developed an elicitation strategy that employs an expert learner to uncover the skilled knowledge of master craftsmen, and a transmission strategy based on the concept of bridges to assist the design of learning resources for novices. U. H. Lassen has used the techniques developed by Wood to record and transmit the skilled knowledge needed to make timber-framed buildings, knowledge that today is in danger of being lost. The focus of the study has been the procedure for scribing timbers, which is a central part of the building process. The aim of the research was to investigate the possibility of combining the two roles defined in Wood's research as an expert learner and designer. Being a skilled carpenter, Lassen has acted as an expert learner, learning the skills of scribing through a combination of researching existing documentation, working with master craftsmen and his own experimentation. At the same time, he developed and tested a multimedia learning resource to provide 'bridges' for new learners to this knowledge. The outcome of the application of Wood's elicitation and transmission strategy to plumb line scribing is a demonstration of the transferability of Wood's methods within this new context. This is important because it reveals the potential for other craft practitioners to apply Wood's methods to their own learning and teaching, and produce learning resources to provide bridges to their craft knowledge and preserve their unique skills.


This CEPS Policy Brief is based on a larger study for the EEAS and European Commission, written by the same authors in the run-up of the Milan ASEM summit of 16-17 October 2014. The main idea of the study is to assess whether ASEM works and how, by verifying the factual evidence in detail. After all, ASEM has no institutions, no budget and no treaty, whilst dialogues and a loose improvement over time in Asia-Europe relations refer to process much more than genuine 'results'. The stocktaking covers all ASEM activities since the 2006 Helsinki summit. Summit and foreign ministers' declarations and ASEM calendar of activities (and interviews) are used to trace ASEM activities in the three ASEM pillars (political, economic, and peoples-to-peoples/cultural). All the 'regular' ASEM meetings at ministerial and other levels (many of which are only known to relatively few) have been mapped. Also the ASEM working methods, based on the 2000 AECF framework and many subsequent initiatives, have been scrutinised, including whether they are actually implemented or not or partially. Such methods refer to how to work together in areas of cooperation (beyond the typical ASEM dialogue), organisation, coordination and ASEM visibility.

The main conclusion is that ASEM works reasonably well, once one accepts the ASEM of today, although some inefficiencies still characterise the 'system'. There is a host of secondary conclusions on the three pillars, the foreign ministers, the strong government-to-government nature of ASEM and the working methods. We recommend that today's ASEM needs no reform and that not having ASEM would entail political and diplomatic costs. We emphasise that ASEM is well placed to stimulate exchange of information between the mega-FTAs such as TPP, RCEP and TTIP. However, the ASEM of tomorrow might be different, given the great changes in geo-political and economic conditions since ASEM began in the mid-1990s. Moreover, the size of ASEM has become such that classical ways of operating with (after Milano) 53 countries (including the EU and ASEAN) cannot possibly be effective all the time. We suggest that, in the run-up to the 20th ASEM birthday (2016), EU and Asian independent think-tanks get together to write an 'options report' reconsidering options for a new ASEM, as the basis for a profound and wide debate how to get more value-added out of ASEM.


The game-based approach is a popular methodology for structuring cryptographic proofs as sequences of games. Game-based proofs can be rigorously formalized by taking a code-centric view of games as probabilistic programs and relying on programming language techniques to justify proof steps. In this dissertation we present CertiCrypt, a framework that enables the machine-checked construction and verification of game-based cryptographic proofs. CertiCrypt is built upon the general-purpose proof assistant Coq, from which it inherits the ability to provide independently verifiable evidence that proofs are correct, and draws on many areas, including probability and complexity theory, algebra, and semantics of programming languages. The framework provides certified tools to reason about the equivalence of probabilistic programs, including a relational Hoare logic, a theory of observational equivalence, verified program transformations, and ad-hoc programming language techniques of particular interest in cryptographic proofs, such as reasoning about failure events. We validate our framework through the formalization of several significant case studies, including proofs of security of the Optimal Asymmetric Encryption Padding scheme against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attacks, and of existential unforgeability of Full-Domain Hash signatures.


[Abstract]:
A major project is being undertaken in Queensland to design how a market-based instrument in the form of an offset mechanism can be used to achieve improvements in water quality in the lower Fitzroy River. Like other river systems draining into the Great Barrier Reef lagoon, the Fitzroy River has deteriorating water quality levels with high sediment and nutrient loads. This may cause damage to estuaries, the coastal zone and the Great Barrier Reef, although the level of scientific knowledge about the linkages between poor water quality and potential environmental damage is incomplete. There is substantial public interest in improving water quality outflows to the Great Barrier Reef lagoon.
The impacts on water quality come from a number of different sectors and regions within the Fitzroy Basin. Existing measures to improve water quality include regulatory controls over many point source discharges, and a range of education, persuasion and devolved funding grants over many non-point source discharges. The potential for introducing a market-based instrument (MBI) stems from the range of different opportunity costs for improvement actions between and within sectors, and the need to tailor incentives at the specific enterprise level. Offsets, competitive tendering and capand-trade mechanisms are the types of MBI mechanisms that may be used.
A key issue in designing a market-like mechanism is to predict the gains from trade and the appropriate institutional arrangements. Asymmetric information means that much of that knowledge is hidden to system planners, so a non-market valuation mechanism termed Choice Modelling will be trialed in this project. Potential MBI participants will have a trading scenario described to them, and will then be asked to identify their preferred level of involvement from several trading options. The outcomes of a series of these questions will allow the identification of the range of opportunity costs involved and the market behaviour under different institutional structures. In this report, a summary of the water quality issues in the Fitzroy Basin is presented, together with an overview of the process that will be undertaken to complete the project.


Dementia is a progressive disease in which patients lose their ability to decide and communicate. Advance directives (AD) allow patients to express their preferences on end of life care in the early stages of the disease. Primary care practitioners (PCP) are in the best position to promote AD. The aim of this study was to elicit PCPs views about the discussion of AD with early stage dementia patients. A qualitative approach was taken, focus groups and individual interviews to elderly patients' PCPs from the Hospital italiano de buenos aires were conducted. A purposive sampling was performed, conforming homogeneous groups according to age and seniority. The discussion was stimulated by a vignette. We performed thematic content analysis in an interdisciplinary team. Twelve PCPs = 30 year of age, 32 middle-aged and 8 over 45 years participated of the study. The youngest group favored the discussion of AD while those over 45 regarded the family as the decision maker, and thus, the discussion as useless. Besides, they expressed that our society is not mature enough to discuss AD. Difficulties in AD implementation, in predicting the evolution of a patient's disease, the span of time between the discussion and AD implementation, lack of legislation and specific institutional policies were other factors that conditioned the discussion. Younger PCPs expressed concern on the lack of communication skills and difficulties to broach this subject with patients. PCPs perspectives on AD vary, their age should be taken into account when designing strategies to their implementation.


This paper presents new approaches to characterize the achieved performance of hybrid control-access small cells in the context of two-tier multi-input multi-output (MIMO) cellular networks with random interference distributions. The hybrid scheme at small cells (such as femtocells) allows for sharing radio resources between the two network tiers according to the densities of small cells and their associated users, as well as the observed interference power levels in the two network tiers. The analysis considers MIMO transceivers at all nodes, for which antenna arrays can be utilized to implement transmit antenna selection (TAS) and receive maximal ratio combining (MRC) under MIMO point-to-point channels. Moreover, it tar-gets network-level models of interference sources inside each tier and between the two tiers, which are assumed to follow Poisson field processes. To fully capture the occasions for Poisson field distribution on MIMO spatial domain. Two practical scenarios of interference sources are addressed including highly-correlated or uncorrelated transmit antenna arrays of the serving macrocell base station. The analysis presents new analytical approaches that can characterize the downlink outage probability performance in any tier. Furthermore, the outage performance in high signal-to-noise (SNR) regime is also obtained, which can be useful to deduce diversity and/or coding gains.


In an earlier study [1], we reported that on average 89% of the visits to the advertiser's site from search ad clicks were incremental. In this research, we examine how the ranking of an advertiser's organic listings on the search results page affects the incrementality of ad clicks expressed through Incremental Ad Clicks (IAC) and as estimated by Search Ads Pause models [1]. A metaanalysis of 390 Search Ads Pause studies highlights the limited opportunity for clicks from organic search results to substitute for ad clicks when the ads are turned off. On average, 81% of ad impressions and 66% of ad clicks occur in the absence of an associated organic search result. We find that having an associated organic search result in rank one does not necessarily mean a low IAC. On average, 50% of the ad clicks that occur with a top rank organic result are incremental, compared to 100% of the ad clicks being incremental in the absence of an associated organic result.


ABSTRACT This article explores the fiscal effects of aid in Ethiopia using the Cointegrated Vector Auto-Regressive (CVAR) methodology to model complex long-run and short-run dynamics. We use national data for 1961–2010, including a measure of aid capturing flows through the budget as measured by the recipient. The data suggests three main conclusions on the long-run equilibrium. First, government long-term spending plans are based on domestic sources, treating aid as an additional source of revenue. Second, both grants and loans are positively related to tax revenue. Third, aid is positively associated with spending, with a particularly strong relation between capital expenditure and grants. Overall, our results show that aid in Ethiopia had beneficial fiscal effects.


Dowels are inserted at the mid-depth of joints in jointed concrete pavements that are exposed to heavy loading to provide load transfer and reduce pumping and faulting. Dowel alignment tolerances in North America have traditionally been strict, although not based on substantial performance data. In this paper, new laboratory testing methods are proposed for evaluation of the effects of dowel misalignment on concrete joint behavior. In these tests, dowels with various levels of rotations and translations were subjected to pullout and shear loading. It was found that dowel misalignment does not have a significant effect on pullout and shear forces for certain ranges of misalignments, which far exceed the tolerances recommended by the Federal Highway Administration. At the same time, it was found that extreme cases and combinations of misalignment resulted in a significant decrease in initial stiffness and shear capacity. Therefore, there is a need for the establishment of rational alignment tolerances. The results of this study provide important information for the development of such tolerances.


Widespread appreciation of the complexity of signaling pathways involving the protein tyrosine kinase (PTK) superfamily of enzymes has resulted in the need for more sophisticated reagents to dissect the role of PTKs in normal and disease states. To meet this need, Promega has developed the SignaTECTTM PTK Assay System, a novel method based on the use of optimized PTK Biotinylated Peptide Substrates in conjunction with the unique SAM2TM Biotin Capture Membrane. This system provides selective, accurate and rapid detection of PTK activity, while minimizing handling and radioisotope requirements. The SignaTECTTM PTK Assay System is a broadspecificity assay that measures the activity of a wide variety of PTKs, including both transmembrane receptor and cytosolic enzymes.


Hypertension is increasingly common in overweight and obese children. The mechanisms behind the development of hypertension in obesity are complex, and evidence is limited. In order to effectively treat obese children for hypertension, it is important to have a deeper understanding of the pathophysiology of hypertension in obese children. The present review summarizes the main factors associated with hypertension in obese children and discusses their potential role in its pathophysiology. Systematic searches were conducted in PubMed and EMBASE for articles published up to October 2014. In total, 60 relevant studies were included. The methodological quality of the included studies ranged from weak to strong. Several factors important in the development of hypertension in obese children have been suggested, including endocrine determinants, such as corticosteroids and adipokines, sympathetic nervous system activity, disturbed sodium homeostasis, as well as oxidative stress, inflammation and endothelial dysfunction. Understanding the pathophysiology of hypertension in overweight and obese children is important and could have implications for its screening and treatment. Based on solely cross‐sectional observational studies, it is impossible to infer causality. Longitudinal studies of high methodological quality are needed to gain more insight into the complex mechanisms behind the development of hypertension in obese children.


Recent morphology-based cladistic analyses of Scolopendromorpha have contributed suites of characters from the epipharynx and hypopharynx (peristomatic structures) and the foregut/gizzard that have been analysed together with traditional characters. Cladistic relationships in the Scolopocryptopidae and Scolopendridae and their implications for deep branchings in Scolopendromorpha as a whole are appraised in light of a new analysis of 84 morphological characters that adds and illustrates taxa not available for previous studies, notably the Neotropical scolopocryptopid Tidops Chamberlin, 1915, and the Australian scolopendrid Notiasemus Koch, 1985. Analysis with implied weights resolves the basal nodes of Scolopendridae in a pattern compatible with the traditional classification of Attems, including Edentistoma [Arrhabdotini] as sister to Otostigmini, and Asanadini as sister to Notiasemus + Scolopendrini; Plutoniuminae is sister to a 23-segmented scolopocryptopid clade. With equal character weights, the monophyly or paraphyly of blind Scolopendromorpha (Cryptopidae and Scolopocryptopidae) have equal cost, and a basal position of Arrhabdotini in the Scolopendridae emerges as an alternative.


The Orchidaceae on the island of Saba, Netherlands Antilles, have only briefly been studied and described. In January 2003, in cooperation with the Saba Conservation Foundation, a 3-year orchid population study of the island was established and is expected to continue as an on-going project. Unique in its geology, as well as its lack of serious tourism impact, the island of Saba provides a distinct research environment for Caribbean Island orchid habitation and ecology data. To date, the study has identified 13 species in eight genera of Caribbean orchids that may be considered naturalized. A unique copper form of Epidendrum ciliare has been located, which presents possible indications of variation from the usual E. ciliare Caribbean types. Orchid populations have been identified and GPS-located for use in future studies. Populations of significant size have been map-plotted for use by the Saba Conservation Foundation in its land-based environmental management programs. This paper addresses species recordings of the Saba Orchidaceae, with previous historical citations, to date of publication.


While corporate boards, audit committees and remuneration committees have been subject to extensive analysis and research, one of the most important elements of corporate governance has been largely disregarded: the nomination committee.

This paper suggests that the nomination committee (NC) should be a primary focus of attention in corporate governance debates. The reason is that, if companies make the right initial appointments of board of directors then much else follows; if they do not then no other aspect of corporate governance – monitoring, measurement or incentives – can fully rectify the damage. Thus, the legitimacy of the NC in the eyes of the shareholder community and the trust received from minority shareholders is pivotal to the empowerment of the board. This is especially true in the context of institutional investors.

The paper draws on examples from the UK and Swedish model of the nomination committee. Whereas UK has an internal committee and a mainly dispersed shareholder base; Sweden by contrast, has an external committee and a block-holder governance regime. The article elaborates on the differences and their implication for the efficacy of the NC.

Arguing that there appears to be merits, but also critique, of both systems, the article ends reasoning that the way forward might be to combine elements of them. For example, some of the board positions could be nominated by external and other by internal committees. Alternatively, all appointments could be by internal committee as in the UK but with some external shareholder representation and, within both models, collaboration between external and internal parties can be encouraged to ensure the nomination of a cohesive team of directors.


To gain insight into ideas and beliefs of students who finished an introductionary course on programming without any formal education on testing, we asked students to fill in a small questionnaire, to make four exercises in which they had to write test cases to decide whether a specific method is correct or not and to determine the correctness of a given implementation, and to fill in a second questionnaire. We interviewed eleven of these students, in a semi-structured interview, to obtain more in-depth insight. The main outcome of our research shows that students do not test systematically, while most of them think they do test sytematically. We found that many (of most) students can only think of test cases based on programming code. Even if no code was provided (black box testing), students try to come up with code to base their test cases up on. We found more misconceptions related to testing.


In this paper we face the problem of positioning a camera attached to the end-effector of a robotic manipulator so that it gets parallel to a planar object. Such problem has been treated for a long time in visual servoing. Our approach is based on linking to the camera several laser pointers so that its configuration is aimed to produce a suitable set of visual features. The aim of using structured light is not only for easing the image processing and to allow low-textured objects to be treated, but also for producing a control scheme with nice properties like decoupling, stability, well conditioning and good camera trajectory.


In this study we investigated the effects of variously derived sources of low-dose caffeine on mood/arousal and cognitive performance. Twenty-two participants (15 men, 7 women; M age: 28.2, SD = 9.0 years) undertook five randomized, crossover trials in which they consumed either a water control (CON) or 80 mg of caffeine from one of four sources (coffee [COF], energy drink [END], capsule [CAP], and dissolvable mouth strip [STR]). We measured the participants' perceived efficacy of these varied caffeine sources pre-treatment; and we measured mood/arousal at pre-treatment, and again at 15 and 45 minutes post-treatment. We also measured choice reaction-time at 15 and 45 minutes post-treatment, and participants completed the psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) 45 minutes post-treatment. Caffeine increased participant ratings of alertness and decreased their ratings of tiredness irrespective of source (p's < .05), and all sources of caffeine decreased reaction time on the PVT (p's < .05), with ex-Gaussian distributional analysis localizing this to the tau-parameter, indicating lower variability. However, only the COF source was associated with improved 'overall mood' (p's < .05). Participants expected to perform better on the PVT with COF compared to CON, but there were no other significant associations between source expectancy and performance. In sum, a modest dose of caffeine, regardless of source, positively impacted mood/arousal and cognitive performance, and these effects did not appear to be influenced by expectations.


The research orientation for this improvised live performance sets out to investigate embodied processes beyond systems of knowledge using sound recordings of digestion, the womb and rivers. The sonic environment produced allows the audience to understand similarities purely in terms of chaotic, ephemeral, sonic experience. The performer and audience are inside the experience as opposed to being outside of it (imposing an ordered cultural system). The continual rerecording and slowing down of audio through analogue tape allows for the audio selections to move from being a medium of representation to being sonic materiality. The use of analogue tape is especially important to my research practice. Sonic effects stem from the physical deterioration of the tape. They are not distorted or decayed through any other device. This demonstrates—experientially via the performance—my research interests in the foregrounding of physical existence over mental constructions or systems of knowledge. Using ephemeral, technologically obsolete equipment allows the performance to be physical-experiential in contrast to using a laptop. In this performance the laptop is used only as a live mixer. The materiality of the sound alters as the tape rots away.

Robert Curgenven and Will Montgomery also gave performances at this event.

http://www.bangthebore.org/archives/3985


This volume addresses three major issues: What are the circumstances in which people elect to protest; what are the forms of such action; and how do people organize to do so? Phrased differently, what are the contexts of protest (collective behavior), personal readiness for protest (conversion), and finally joining together for protest in movement organizations and movement strategies. The key to the book's value is its theoretical sophistication. These studies address in a systematic way fundamental alternatives to organizing protests and outline in detail options for structuring units of social movement. The author deals especially with movement organization locals, including "corps" and "cells." Such units are examined in terms of how they coexist and how they exist sequentially through time. Several case studies of movement organization are included, such as the Unification Church and Mankind United. The work places a heavy emphasis on protest action or strategy. In the final section four chapters examine the entire gamut of strategic possibilities, ranging from polite politics to violent action. Protest is a distinctive and complex strategy. The work carefully evaluates varieties of protest that have become significant in the 1980s. In each section of the book Lofland draws out underlying themes and issues that interrelate the studies and places protest in the larger context of political and social change and theories to date.


This paper describes SCIRTSS (a sequential circuit test search system). An analytical basis is given for using tree search techniques in determining test sequences for sequential circuits. The basic algorithm for the system of SCIRTSS programs is described and the extent to which the user can influence the search procedure is discussed. Included are the results of the application of SCIRTSS to eight sequential circuits of varying complexity on each one of which it succeeded in finding a fault detection sequence for at least 98 percent of the simple logical faults. This suggests that SCIRTSS can be effective on more complex LSI parts than other automatic test generation methods currently available. Breaking the tree search into two separate search procedures and partitioning circuits when possible into control and data sections are unique features which contribute to SCIRTSS efficiency.


It is widely acknowledged that woman's networks and their social capital considerably differ from men's. Given that social capital is an important resource for getting ahead in society it is important to understand these differences. Do women and men create different forms of social capital and are there differences in the benefits of social capital? Furthermore, what is the role of the neighbourhood where the business is located; what are the benefits of local social ties and of the macro-level social capital for these businesses? These questions are addressed in order to determine whether gender differences impact the way entrepreneurs run their business. Two opposing arguments are employed: firstly, given the social position of women in society – female entrepreneurs are expected to focus more on family and less on instrumental relationships than men, regardless of their education and labour market activity. The second and opposing argument is that women who design and run a business are acting beyond traditional gender roles. Data from a 2014 survey of entrepreneurs in the Netherlands (SSNE) are used for the analysis. Results show that men and women differ in their number of weaker ties. In addition, while women's businesses benefit from a neighbourhood's social capital, that is, macro-level social capital, men's seem to benefit in particular from access to many diverse positions in the neighbourhood and beyond and men's beneficial ties are located at the micro level.


in a supplement in Anesthesia and Analgesia 2000; 90: SCA 14. Anaesthesia, 2003, 58, pages 597–616 Correspondence ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 2003 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 603 segment elevation myocardial infarction. Circulation 2002; 106: 1893–900. 2 Kovesi T, Royston D. Is there a problem with platelet active drugs? British Journal of Anaesthesia 2002; 29: 159–63. Monitoring of platelet function We read with interest the recent review about thienopyridine antiplatelet drugs (Kam & Nethery. Anaesthesia 2003; 58: 28–35). A major problem faced by anaesthetists is the monitoring of the effects of antiplatelet medication. Although the platelet function analyser (PFA-100, Dade Behring, Dearfield, IL) appears to be the answer to this problem, it is a global test of primary haemostasis and is not specific for antiplatelet drugs [1]. The PFA-100 has been used to monitor the antiplatelet effect of aspirin [2]; however, the results may be affected by the citrate concentration in the sampling tube [3]. There is less experience in use of the PFA-100 to assess the effect of clopidogrel, and it is uncertain whether the citrate concentration is also important in this situation. Results from the PFA-100 may also be affected by smoking, haematocrit and gender [1]. The Thrombelastograph (TEG ) Haemostasis Analyser (Haemoscope Corp., Niles, IL, USA) is a near-patient method of monitoring whole blood coagulation. Standard use of the TEG system cannot detect the effect of aspirin [4]. However, a new TEG assay has been developed specifically for this purpose (Personal communication: Haemoscope Corp., Niles, IL, USA). The use of antiplatelet medication has implications for the safety of regional anaesthesia and propensity to bleed during surgery. Further studies are needed to provide a sufficiently robust method of platelet function assessment to guide anaesthetic management.


More and more companies address collaborations and cooperation as strategic topics to build competitive networks and broaden the global competences provided by the community thus created. These companies can cooperate with partners to share resources, competences, risks, or costs. Besides, penetrating new markets can be easier when associating new partners. The selection process of an adequate partner considered for a specific objective is a key success factor. This paper proposes an evaluation methodology for selecting an alliance partner in the case of a network of enterprises, manufacturing high precision mechanical components. An extensive group decision methodology is developed using both quantitative data and qualitative judgments in the evaluation of criteria. Since some performances cannot be represented with crisp numbers, the proposed methodology allows experts to use linguistic variables to express their judgments for the assessment of qualitative criteria. Two main phases are integrated in this methodology. In the first phase, criteria and experts weightings are calculated to determine the criteria importance using fuzzy the analytical hierarchy process. In the second phase, a technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution is proposed to rank the different alternatives, corresponding to the alternative partnerships.


OBJECTIVES
We examined gender differential changes in employment-related health inequalities according to occupational position (professional/nonprofessional) in South Korea during the last decade.

METHODS
Data were taken from four rounds of Social Statistical Surveys of South Korea (1995, 1999, 2003, and 2006) from the Korean National Statistics Office. The total study population was 55435 male and 33 913 female employees aged 25-64. Employment arrangements were divided into permanent, fixed-term, and daily employment.

RESULTS
After stratification according to occupational position (professional/nonprofessional) and gender, different patterns in employment - related health inequalities were observed. In the professional group, the gaps in absolute and relative employment inequalities for poor self-rated health were more likely to widen following Korea's 1997 economic downturn. In the nonprofessional group, during the study period, graded patterns of employment-related health inequalities were continuously observed in both genders. Absolute health inequalities by employment status, however, decreased among men but increased among women. In addition, a remarkable increase in relative health inequalities was found among female temporary and daily employees (p = 0.009, < 0.001, respectively), but only among male daily employees (p = 0.001). Relative employment-related health inequalities had clearly widened for female daily workers between 2003 and 2006 (p = 0.047). The 1997 Korean economic downturn, in particular, seemingly stimulated a widening gap in employment health inequalities.

CONCLUSIONS
Our study revealed that whereas absolute health inequalities in relation to employment status increased in the professional group, relative employment-related health inequalities increased in the nonprofessional group, especially among women. In view of the high concentration of female nonstandard employees, further monitoring of inequality should consider gender specific patterns according to employee's occupational and employment status.


The purpose of this study was to examine the use of six early numeracy measures to monitor the mathematics progress of kindergarten and first grade students across 13 weeks. Seventy one kindergarteners were administered oral counting, number identification, missing number, and quantity discrimination measures weekly for 13 weeks. Simultaneously, seventy five first grade students were administered oral-counting, number identification, missing number, next number, number facts, and quantity discrimination measures weekly for 13 weeks. All data was collected via PDA Palm Pilot handheld technology with web-based data management supplied by Wireless Generation, Inc. ( mclass:Math software). Alternate form reliability was adequate for instructional decision making on some measures, and low reliability was reported for quantity discrimination, as well as for the next number and number facts measures. Concurrent criterion validity coefficients comparing the measures with student performance on a standardized assessment resulted in weaker coefficients as compared to previous studies that have compared similar measures with the same standardized test. We used hierarchical linear modeling at each grade level to ascertain the ability of the six measures to model weekly growth trajectories over 13 weeks. All measures produced growth rates that were significant across time, for both kindergarten and first grade, with linear growth observed in all measures.


The world aspires to sustainable healthy living for all. This ambition is challenged by accelerating global change, fuelled directly by entrenched patterns of land and water use and loss of biodiversity, combined with rising consumption and ongoing population growth. We can and must improve levels of agricultural productivity to feed the world. At the same time, the hope of a continuing 'green revolution' as future salvation focussed on a few mainstream crops seems increasingly unlikely without new land and water ethics, economics, and political and financial systems that value social and natural capital as much as present systems focus on financial goals. We are at a global turning point, comparable to that when slavery was abolished. Plant diversity has never been more important than now to help with solutions towards sustainable livelihoods. This presentation will touch upon global plant diversity patterns, ongoing scientific discovery, and strategies that have helped and will help towards humans living with and sustainably using biodiversity.


Bacteria of the genus Salmonella sp is the bacteria causing the infection. If ingested into the body and cause symptoms called Salmonellosis. More than 90% incidence of human disease caused by consuming food contaminated with pathogenic bacteria, such as Salmonella and Shigella sp s. there were 60% of cases of poisoning in developed countries, a result of the handling of food is not good and bacterial contamination in food at the point of purchase. This study aims to determine the presence of Salmonella sp. the processed beef (meat burgers) before frying and after frying. Type a descriptive research is to describe the hygiene and sanitation and the contamination of Salmonella sp. the burger meat. Object of this study is the burger meat that is used by five merchants burger. The result showed that none of the burger vendors meet the requirements of hygiene and sanitation vendors selling burger place. Salmonella sp found in sample 2 and sample 4 before being fried and Salmonella sp found in sample 1 after frying Hygiene traders most meet health requerements are merchent 5 and merchent 3. merchents who at least meet the requerment of hygiene are merchant 1 and merchant 2. To consumers to attention to the hygiene of the seller and the place before buying a burger. To The environmental health section of the health department to give traders an appeal to hygiene and sanitation in order to become a better trader. Key words: Hygiene, Sanitation, Burger, Salmonella sp


Background: Early and rapid onset of obesity in the Qatari population, consequent to expansion primarily of abdominal adipose tissue, is closely associated with inflammation and insulin resistance. Recent interest has focused on microRNA (miRNA), both as biomarkers and mediators, of disease and therefore potentially therapeutic targets. MiRNAs are stable, non-coding species involved in the post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. Aims: This study investigated the expression of a panel of miRNAs associated with inflammation and insulin resistance in peripheral blood cells of subjects with a range of adiposities and insulin sensitivities. The effect of surgical weight loss on these miRNAs was also investigated in a subset of patients. Method: Non-diabetic Qatari subjects were recruited from patients awaiting weight reduction surgery and from a normal population. Anthropometric measures were recorded. Fasting blood samples were obtained from all subjects, and in a subset after surgical weight loss, for determination of lipids, glucose, insulin and adipokines. miRNA from peripheral blood cells was used to assess their expression using an inflammatory array. Subjects were grouped by body mass index and insulin sensitivity. Results: Three comparisons were carried out: 1. Normal/over-weight (N/OW) versus obese (Ob), 2. Insulin Sensitive (IS) versus Insulin Resistant (IR), and, 3. Before (BWL) and after weight loss (AWL). Despite being matched for age (M 29.5±9.8 vs F 30.1±6.5 years), and BMI (M:36.1±12.9 vs 36.6±10.0 kg/m2) the males had higher systolic and diastolic blood pressure and mean arterial pressure, while levels of both leptin and adiponectin were higher in females. The N/OW, compared to the Ob group, had lower levels of systolic blood pressure, higher HDL-cholesterol, lower leptin, interleukin-6 and higher adiponectin levels. The IS group compared to the IR, matched for BMI, age and plasma glucose, had lower insulin and HOMA index of insulin resistance, as well as leptin and adiponectin. Weight loss was accompanied by a significant reduction in BMI (BWL:41.6±8.6 vs AWL 34.7±8.7 kg/m2), leptin, insulin and HOMA-IR. Three miRNA were significantly different between the different body weight groups. Conversely, 12 miRNA changed significantly when IS were compared to the IR. Weight loss also produced changes in the expression of ten miR species. Conclusion: It is apparent that significant differences in expression of the miR species occur along with changes in metabolic and inflammatory parameters in the different body weight groups, which are further enhanced both synergistically and independently by insulin resistance. Some, but not all, of the metabolic and inflammatory lesions that accompany obesity and insulin resistance appear to be ameliorated by weight loss. The target genes of these miRNAs are currently being investigated to assign possible functionality.


Desiccant effectiveness in hastening sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) harvest is based on research conducted for conventional sunflower hybrids; however, information is lacking regarding plant drydown response of more recently developed stay-green hybrids to desiccation. Stay-green and conventional sunflower hybrids were evaluated for plant drydown response to desiccant and control treatments in 2000 and 2001 at Carrington, Casselton, and Prosper, ND. The experiment was a randomized complete block arranged in a split-split-plot design with desiccation, hybrid, and harvest date representing main, sub-, and sub-subplot, respectively. Pioneer Hy-Bred International oilseed hybrids '6338' (stay-green) and '63M91' (conventional), and nonoilseed Seeds 2000 stay-green hybrid 'Bigfoot' were evaluated for plant drydown response under natural (control) conditions and when desiccated with paraquat (1,1'-dimethyl-4,4'bipyridinium dichloride) applied at the labeled rate. Timing of desiccant application was based on visual characteristics of the capitulm and targeted at physiological maturity when achene moisture ≈ 350 g kg -1 . Four harvest dates occurred at 7-d intervals following desiccant application where achene, receptacle, and stalk moistures were evaluated. Results indicated hybrid achene-moisture response across harvest dates was similar for the desiccated and control treatments, although desiccation hastened achene-moisture loss to harvestable levels by 7 d. Harvestable achene and receptacle moistures were concurrent for the conventional hybrid 63M91, however, high receptacle moisture for the stay-green hybrids 6338 and Bigfoot could prevent harvest even though achene moisture was at harvestable levels. Desiccation hastened hybrids 63M91, 6338, and Bigfoot receptacle drydown to harvestable levels by ≈7 d, however 63M91 reached harvestable moisture ≈5 d earlier than the stay-green hybrids. Receptacle and stalk moisture differences indicated greater receptacle than stalk moisture differences between stay-green and conventional hybrids. Desiccation is an important harvest management practice to hasten harvest especially for stay-green hybrids where receptacle moisture determines harvestability. Increased levels of the stay-green trait in sunflower may result in desiccation becoming a more common harvest management practice.


This study examined students' perception on academic performance using five-factor ratings namely, principal's instructional leadership, school climate, school facilities, teachers' effectiveness and family support. Data for this study were collected from selected Parent's Private Seventh - day Adventist Secondary Schools (PPSDASS) in Southern Province of Rwanda. Questionnaires were used to collect data from 240 students. The study was descriptive in nature. The findings indicate that the principals did not seem to involve students in the matters of decision making. However, students were satisfied with the kind of climate schools provided and the support they were getting from their families. Student involvement in decision making may be a new ground for intervention in future studies.


The lexicon of the U.S. food movement has expanded to include the term 'food justice.' Emerging after approximately two decades of food advocacy, this term frames structural critiques of agri-food systems and calls for radical change. Over those twenty years, practitioners and scholars have argued that the food movement was in danger of creating an 'alternative' food system for the white middle class. Alternative food networks drew on white imaginaries of an idyllic communal past, promoted consumer-oriented, market-driven change, and left yawning silences in the areas of gendered work, migrant labor, and racial inequality. Justice was often beside the point. Now, among practitioners and scholars we see an enthusiastic surge in the use of the term food justice but a vagueness on the particulars. In scholarship and practice, that vagueness manifests in overly general statements about ending oppression, or morphs into outright conflation of the dominant food movement's work with food justice (see What does it mean to do food justice? Cadieux and Slocum (2015), in this Issue). In this article, we focus on one of the four nodes (trauma/inequity, exchange, land and labor) around which food justice organizing appears to occur: acknowledging and confronting historical, collective trauma and persistent race, gender, and class inequality. We apply what we have learned from our research in U.S. and Canadian agri-food systems to suggest working methods that might guide practitioners as they work toward food justice, and scholars as they seek to study it. In the interests of ensuring accountability to socially just research and action, we suggest that scholars and practitioners need to be more clear on what it means to practice food justice. Towards such clarity and accountability, we urge scholars and practitioners to collaboratively document how groups move toward food justice, what thwarts and what enables them.


From Heraclitus in the sixth century B.C.E. to the twentieth-century philosopher-physicist Werner Heisenberg, intellectuals have struggled to make sense of war and its presence in human society. Yet Christopher Coker contends that philosophers are the ones who created the concept of war, largely by defining its rules and establishing an oppositional dialectic of peace. The Greeks were the first to outline what Blaise Pascal called the "rules of war," and through their description of its "nature," influenced the thinking of contemporary generals and military strategy. Nevertheless, Coker's book focuses less on the philosophical underpinnings of war and more on the particular problems we face while fighting war today. Guided by the work of sixteen major thinkers, it examines several paradoxes of combat: the belief that war is a continuation, rather than a negation, of politics by other means; the idea that we should respect those who don't respect us; the notion that war can help a soldier reaffirm his humanity; and the odd fact that the concept of peace is still contested. Coker draws on the work of philosophers who have tackled war directly and intensely in their writing. Each chapter begins with an epigram distilling the essence of a chosen philosopher's thinking on war and uses it as a prism through which to analyze aspects of war most relevant to contemporary combat. Barbarous Philosophers entirely reorients our understanding of armed conflict throughout human history.


This work deals with the creation of a stochastic translation algorithm capable of encompassing the reactions for translation initiation, elongation and termination in a unified framework based on Gillespie's algorithm. By looking at reactions from the point of view of the ribosome. That is as transitions from one of the 64 available codons to the next, the system was reduced to 64+2m equations, with m being the number of mRNA species in the system. Using this approach, the system no longer scales with molecule numbers or mRNA length, increasing only by 2 reactions for each additional mRNA species. The algorithm was validated by replicating the results from the HeinrichRapoport (H-R) model as well as the Zouridis-Hatzimanikatis (Z-H) model. The stochastic protein translation model by Mitarai et al. was also recovered using the algorithm. Furthermore the use of the stochastic translation algorithm allows for a complete analysis of the noise of the system. In the H-R model it is shown that increased noise levels in polysome sizes around the phase shift correspond to the fast increase in polysome size observed in their results. From comparing the Z-H model to the stochastic translation algorithm, it was shown that as protein production reaches its maximum with respect to polysome size, protein noise reaches a minimum. The report ends by suggesting further work that can be accomplished by using this algorithm and the questions that can be answered, opening the door to several interesting experiments. Lausanne, June 19 2009, Olivier Burri


Although often intended to address injustices in food access, farmers markets tend to cater to affluent communities, and to exclude on the basis of race and class. One means of addressing this is federal subsidy programs, like the Senior Farmers Market Nutritional Program (SFMNP). We explore the dynamics of the SFMNP program in Memphis' farmers market landscape in 2011. We examine the visible barriers experienced by SFMNP patrons to market access including delays in establishing the program in a largely African-American neighborhood, and the more subtle barriers such as perceptions of more affluent markets as white spaces. We then explore some successful efforts to make these issues visible and address them, including activism on the part of seniors and public dialog in social media. Despite this, we find that ongoing resistance to acknowledging farmers markets as spaces of racial inequality continues to challenge their food justice potential.


Robot path-planning methods can be used in real-time computer games but then need to run fast to ensure that the game characters move in real time, an issue addressed by incremental heuristic search methods. In this paper, we demon- strate how one can speed up D* Lite, an incremental heuristic search method that implements planning with the freespace assumption to move game characters in initially unknown or partially unknown terrain to given goal coordinates. We speed up D* Lite by implementing its priority queue with buckets rather than a binary heap. This non-trivial change reduces its runtime by a factor of two and effectively doubles the number of game characters that real-time computer games can afford.


This thesis examines the extent to which ideas play a role in policy
activity and, if so, how.
Mainstream policy studies paradigms focus on either the decision
making processes or the formal goals and authoritative structures
underpinning policy activity to understand the process and outcomes.
However, like other work in the emerging 'post-positivist' policy studies
literature, this thesis questions the traditional 'rationality' of the conventional
paradigms and demonstrates that argumentation, ideas, interpretation and
learning within policy networks are also key factors in understanding how
and why policy happens. In this approach, focusing on the ideas in play is
crucial. So are the policy networks which provide the sites of argumentation
and the hustle and bustle of everyday policy work. So is the idea of policy
learning in order to understand the circumstances under which ideas emerge,
cluster and change.
Ideas are classified in the thesis by level of abstraction ranging from
macro ideas (eg. social justice, liberalism) to meso-level ideas (eg. merit,
charging for public goods) to more concrete, micro-level ideas (eg. a seniors
card for the ageing). As becomes evident in the analysis, meso level proximate
ideas are central - ideas that link abstract and largely ideological ideas with
concrete manifestations in particular cases. Moreover, as proximate ideas
become institutionalised and legitimated within the workings of policy
networks and the policy process, their influence significantly increases.
To examine the role of ideas in policy activity this thesis presents four
case studies: equal employment opportunity; social justice; concessions in
social policy; and charging for public services. The range of ideas present in
each case is examined, as is their emergence, the role of policy networks, and
the conditions under which particular ideas or clusters of ideas become more
or least influential.
The EEO case reveals how central ideas regarding justice, equality,
compensation for prior harm and structural efficiency are essentially political
resources which are constituted and employed variously by actors in policy
networks to manage and shape the process of policy argumentation. the social
justice case - examined in relation to the Labor/Green Accord in Tasmania -
reveals how, while social justice may be symbolically central to some settings,
it was strategically challenged and weakened by more powerful proximate
ideas based around economic rationalism, the case of user charging for entry
to national parks reveals how some 12 ideas were marshalled against user
charging, but that these alternate ideas lacked policy network organisation or
institutional consolidation and were therefore ineffectual in competing with
the proximate idea of user charging. In the case of concessions reform in social
policy the analysis demonstrates how, in the absence of proximate ideas and
associated active networks, change is likely to be incremental and uncertain.
The central arguments emerging from the analysis are, first, that ideas do
play a central role in policy processes and outcomes and that the emergent
post positivist approach to policy studies - unlike the traditional paradigms -
is able to grasp and reveal that role. Second, it is clear from the case studies
that ideas which are given proximate form - made objective, institutionalised
and legitimated - are far more likely than others to be influential in the policy
process. Third, it is also clear that the manner in which actors in policy
networks, learn about, interpret and use these ideas in their relations with
other policy networks is also crucial. Integrating these types of arguments
with those emerging from research into policy networks and policy learning
will contribute to further understanding policy activity and outcomes.


Within the Information Systems literature, there has been an emerging interest in the use of formative measurement in structural equation modeling (SEM). This interest is exemplified by descriptions of the nature of formative measurement (e.g., Chin 1998a), and more recently the proper specification of formatively measured constructs (Petter et al. 2007) as well as application of such constructs (e.g., Barki et al. 2007). Formative measurement is a useful alternative to reflective measurement. However, there has been little guidance on interpreting the results when formative measures are employed. Our goal is to provide guidance relevant to the interpretation of formative measurement results through the examination of the following six issues: multicollinearity; the number of indicators specified for a formatively measured construct; the possible co-occurrence of negative and positive indicator weights; the absolute versus relative contributions made by a formative indicator; nomological network effects; and the possible effects of using partial least squares (PLS) versus covariance-based SEM techniques. We provide prescriptions for researchers to consider when interpreting the results of formative measures as well as an example to illustrate these prescriptions.


Collective modes of doped two-dimensional crystalline materials, namely graphene, MoS$_2$ and phosphorene, both monolayer and bilayer structures, are explored using the density functional theory simulations together with the random phase approximation. The many-body dielectric functions of the materials are calculated using an {\it ab initio} based model involving material-realistic physical properties. Having calculated the electron energy-loss, we calculate the collective modes of each material considering the in-phase and out-of-phase modes for bilayer structures. Furthermore, owing to many band structures and intreband transitions, we also find high-energy excitations in the systems. We explain that the material-specific dielectric function considering the polarizability of the crystalline material such as MoS$_2$ are needed to obtain realistic plasmon dispersions. For each material studied here, we find different collective modes and describe their physical origins.


Derlin in Lights, chosen as a New York Times Notable Book, is the collection of German aristocrat Harry Kessler's diaries between the two world wars. Count Harry Kessler (1868-1937), the son of a German banker and an Irish beauty, was a diplomat and publisher who moved easily among the worlds of art, politics, and society. He lived in Berlin but traveled throughout Europe, always with a keen eye to the political climate of the times. His diaries encompass an extraordinary variety of people: Einstein engages him in long discussions on his theories, and Josephine Baker dances naked in Kessler's drawing room. Kessler had lunch with Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, and Erik Satie, and dinner with Max Reinhardt, George Grosz, Virginia Woolf, Jean Cocteau, and Andre Gide, to name a few. His diaries encapsulate this tumultuous time frame, recording at first hand the agonizing collapse and death of Weimar Germany and the arrival of the Nazis. Beautifully written, the diaries provide rare insight into the frenetic, constantly changing mood and give us a brilliant portrait of Germany and Europe between the wars.


Objectives: The objective was to report the ability of a magnetic resonance image to document the integrity of the obturator externus tendon after posterior hip dislocation as a potential predictor for preserved femoral head vascularity. Design: Retrospective radiographic and clinical pilot study. Setting: Level I trauma center. Patients/Participants: Nineteen consecutive patients with traumatic posterior hip dislocation. Outcome Evaluation: Intraoperative correlation of soft tissue damage and radiographic assessment of avascular necrosis of the femoral head 3 years postinjury. Methods: Magnetic resonance imaging performed in the acute phase of posterior hip dislocation. Correlation with intraoperative findings during surgical hip dislocation and with avascular necrosis 3 years postinjury. Results: The obturator externus tendon was intact in all cases with preserved femoral head vascularity. After a 3-year follow up, there were no cases of avascular necrosis. Conclusion: In this small series of patients, posterior hip dislocation did not imply a tear of the obturator externus muscle. An intact obturator externus tendon suggests preservation of the deep branch of the medial femoral circumflex artery to the femoral head.


Many Online Social Networks horizontally partition data across data stores. This allows the addition of server nodes to increase capacity and throughput. For single key lookup queries such as computing a member's 1st degree connections, clients need to generate only one request to one data store. However, for multi key lookup queries such as computing a 2nd degree network, clients need to generate multiple requests to multiple data stores. The number of requests to fulfill the multi key lookup queries grows in relation to the number of partitions. Increasing the number of server nodes in order to increase capacity also increases the number of requests between the client and data stores. This may increase the latency of the query response time because of network congestion, tail-latency, and CPU bounding. Replication based partitioning strategies can reduce the number of requests in the multi key lookup queries. However, reducing the number of requests in a query can degrade the performance of certain queries where processing, computing, and filtering can be done by the data stores. A better system would provide the capability of controlling the number of requests in a query. This paper presents Moolle, a system of controlling the number of requests in queries to scalable distributed data stores. Moolle has been implemented in the LinkedIn distributed graph service that serves hundreds of thousands of social graph traversal queries per second. We believe that Moolle can be applied to other distributed systems that handle distributed data processing with a high volume of variable-sized requests.


It has been observed that people tend to resist changing their software even alternatives are better then the current one. This study examines the user resistance to change in the use of software from the switching costs perspective based on status quo bias theory. For this study, we select Web Browser as software. Based on the classification of switching costs into three groups (psychological, procedural, and loss), this study identifies six types of switching costs (uncertainty, commitment, learning, setup, lost performance, and sunk costs). This study tests the effects of six switching costs on user resistance to change based on the survey of 204 web browser users. The results indicate that lost performance costs and emotional costs have significant effects on user resistance to change. This research contributes towards understanding of switching costs and the effects on user resistance to change. This study also offers suggestions to software vendors for retaining their users and to organizations for managing user resistance in switching and adopting software.


This paper discusses the issue of the Hungarian infinitive suffix that has as many as eight surface shapes occurring in the various inflected forms of the infinitive. The final conclusion is that the issue is best treated in terms of morphology (allomorph selection) and not in terms of morphophonological rules/constraints involving segment insertion and deletion, respectively. The bulk of the discussion is couched in Optimality Theoretic terms but an alternative treatment by Rebrus and Kalman (2009) is also summarized and tentatively accepted in the final part of the paper. However, their alternative solution only serves to fill in the gaps left by the specific OT implementation proposed here: the general conclusion reached in this paper is not thereby undermined.


I take it as given that in publishing this piece Barbara Epstein sought to stir up controversy. I take it also that her effort seeks to revive feminism, rather than to bury it. And I agree with her notion that the situation of the women's movement should be a subject for critical analysis. But I am surprised that such an acute observer of social movements should paint a picture so isolated from the larger political and economic context. In this response I will try to add some pieces of the broader picture.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.


Al-Qaida emphasises its ability to communicate its core message to those who might be sympathetic towards the group and its aims. Yet we have little sense of how this relationship, between al-Qaida as messenger, and potential sympathisers as message recipients, unfolds, especially in the West. To shed light on this question, this article analyses evidential materials from police counterterrorism investigations in the UK, exploring the way and extent to which al-Qaida-related materials have featured. The analysis identifies al-Qaida as one of the more prominent groups responsible for content found in these investigations but emphasises the overall heterogeneity of the extremist Islamist media content that has been discovered. The analysis also illustrates the importance of English-language content for this particular audience and the ability of prominent ideologies, especially Anwar al-Awlaki, to retain popularity and influence beyond his grave.


We study the nonequilibrium transport for the asymmetric and negative differential magnon tunneling driven by temperature bias. We demonstrate that the many-body magnon interaction that makes the magnonic spectrum temperature-dependent is the crucial factor for the emergence of rectification and negative differential spin Seebeck effects in magnon tunneling junctions. When magnonic junctions have temperature-dependent density of states, reversing the temperature bias is able to give asymmetric spin currents and increasing temperature bias could give an anomalously decreasing magnonic spin current. We show that these properties are relevant for building spin Seebeck diodes and transistors, which could play important roles in controlling information and energy in magnonics and spin caloritronics.


This chapter examines the regulatory arrangements implemented by the Republic of Indonesia governing intergovernmental fiscal arrangements relating to specific funding allocations. The Specific Allocation Fund (DAK) is a statutorily created and governed policy instrument enabling the central government to make specific fiscal transfers to regional and district governments that qualify for horizontal equalization assistance. The question that forms the basis of this chapter is whether the measures implemented to achieve DAK policy objectives constitute a coherent and operationally effective regulatory scheme. The mechanics and operational well functioning of the regulatory scheme are analyzed by examining the regulatory coherence of the statutory arrangements underlying the DAK. An outcome of this analysis includes consideration of the benefits of creating of a special administrative body to improve the functioning of the regulatory scheme.


We introduce coroICA, confounding-robust independent component analysis, a novel ICA algorithm which decomposes linearly mixed multivariate observations into independent components that are corrupted (and rendered dependent) by hidden group-wise stationary confounding. It extends the ordinary ICA model in a theoretically sound and explicit way to incorporate group-wise (or environment-wise) confounding. We show that our proposed general noise model allows to perform ICA in settings where other noisy ICA procedures fail. Additionally, it can be used for applications with grouped data by adjusting for different stationary noise within each group. Our proposed noise model has a natural relation to causality and we explain how it can be applied in the context of causal inference. In addition to our theoretical framework, we provide an efficient estimation procedure and prove identifiability of the unmixing matrix under mild assumptions. Finally, we illustrate the performance and robustness of our method on simulated data, provide audible and visual examples, and demonstrate the applicability to real-world scenarios by experiments on publicly available Antarctic ice core data as well as two EEG data sets. We provide a scikit-learn compatible pip-installable Python package coroICA as well as R and Matlab implementations accompanied by a documentation at this https URL


Mentalization is a key social ability that develops from infancy to adulthood, starting from early familiar attachment relationships. Children experience several contexts, in particular, educational ones such as school, where they build new attachment relationships with teachers. Although the amount of research on the links between mentalization and attachment has been increasing in recent years, there is still little evidence on the teacher-child relationship from a mentalization perspective. Moreover, only few studies focus on middle childhood, a crucial age for building positive school relationships. This study aims to investigate the possible effects of some measures of teachers' mentalization, namely, mind-mindedness and mentalised affectivity, and of pupils' representation of the educational attachment relationship on the mentalization abilities of children aged 8 to 10. The results show that a teacher's tendency to describe a pupil through physical comments and not mental comments, and her/his ability to use autobiographical memory to interpret the present emotional experience, impact children's mentalization abilities. This highlights the important role of the teacher in the construction of a class climate that supports pupils' mentalization.


Aims: To investigate staff and client views on the design, acceptability and effectiveness of a take home "emergency relapse pack" (ERP) containing naloxone, information on avoiding relapse and contacts for support in the event of an overdose or feared relapse. Design: A qualitative study using semi-structured focus-groups and interviews was undertaken. Verbatim transcripts were coded and thematically analysed (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Participants were given pseudonyms to maintain anonymity of quotes. Setting: Turning Point residential rehabilitation and a detoxification service in the North of England. Participants: Three focus groups were undertaken with clients attending the detoxification or rehabilitation service for opiate and/or alcohol addiction (N=20). Two focus groups were carried out with staff (N=8, including nurses, support workers, and team lead) and a one-to-one semi-structured interview with a peer mentor. Findings and Conclusions: Four themes emerged, 'Pack position in life', 'Individualised', 'Training' and 'Overall design.' Narratives captured by the 'pack position in life' theme highlighted the need to clearly articulate the purpose of the ERP "you're not gonna inject [the naloxone] yourself (.) it's more like the community [relapse] packs" (Janine - Staff). Participants also identified that logistically, to ensure the ERP was available at the time and place when a relapse occurs, clients needed to carry it with them. This presents many challenges to the success of the ERP. However, participants suggested an option to individualise the information and a ensuring a discrete ERP design, would help clients adopt it into their day-to-day lives. All participants felt they needed training on how to use naloxone, but preferences varied on whether training should be one-to-one or in a group and whether a nurse or peer mentor should deliver the training.


Pipeline dents have historically been regulated and assessed using dent depth as the primary metric. Many of the earliest analytical models for dent remaining life are based upon depth. Current assessment guidelines from ASME and the Code of Federal Regulations utilize depth as a primary metric. Consequently, ILI geometry tool capabilities are stated in terms of dent depth. However, the best modern dent assessments, including both strain and fatigue assessments, are based on dent shape. At a minimum, these models require both axial and circumferential dent profiles, or the models may utilize the full three-dimensional shape of the dent. The utilization of advanced dent assessments is expected to grow in the future as the methods are incorporated into API Recommended Practices and US regulations. While operators may have confidence in the ability of an ILI tool to confidently capture the dent depth, the shape of a dent is a recent consideration that is not addressed by current tool specifications. Unlike depth alone, dent shape is often a function of sensor coverage, speed, and caliper technology. Unfortunately, there is virtually no information available on the reliability of these assessment methods when they are based on ILI data. To-date, there have been no published comparisons examining the variation in strain or fatigue life in identical dents between multiple inspections. The reliability of these dent assessment methods is critical when choosing safety factors or reinspection intervals. This study presents a first look at the repeatability of strain and remaining life assessments based on two separate geometry inspection using different technologies. The study examines dent strain according to ASME B31.8 and fatigue life calculated using shape factors and finite element methods for 257 dents. The paper examines the variation in each of the methods and provides guidance on how users should understand the results when they are based on a single geometry inspection.


Programmers make rich use of natural language in the source code they write through identifiers and comments. Source code identifiers are selected from a pool of tokens which are strongly related to the meaning, naming conventions, and context. These tokens are often combined to produce more precise and obvious designations. Such multi-part identifiers count for 97% of all naming tokens in the Public Git Archive - the largest dataset of Git repositories to date. We introduce a bidirectional LSTM recurrent neural network to detect subtokens in source code identifiers. We trained that network on 41.7 million distinct splittable identifiers collected from 182,014 open source projects in Public Git Archive, and show that it outperforms several other machine learning models. The proposed network can be used to improve the upstream models which are based on source code identifiers, as well as improving developer experience allowing writing code without switching the keyboard case.


This research aimed to identify and understand the learning beliefs among adult Malay Muslim learners participating in non-formal Islamic learning environments. In addition, it explored how far these learning beliefs are transformative in nature and in what ways these learning beliefs of adult Muslim learners fit Islamic views and perspectives of learning and education. This study focused on learning as interpreted and understood from the perspective of the learners themselves, from the general as well as holistic perspective based on their learning experiences and learning processes. Utilizing the phenomenological qualitative research method, the sample for this study were seven adult learners who are in the middle adulthood and above,in the 40 year old and above age group. They participated voluntarily and regularly in at least two non-formal religious learning programs. Data were mainly collected using in-depth interviews, informal conversations and email interviews, and were analysed by thematic analysis. The findings of this study show that the meanings
attached to the informants' learning beliefs were common among them and that these beliefs were hierarchical in nature, ranging from simple to complex. At the simplest
level, learning was considered as merely to be acquiring and gaining knowledge; whilst at a more complex level, learning became internalized and practised by the
informants; and at the highest end, learning was conceived as internalizing and changing not just one's physical perspective but also one's worldview in relation to
God. This study moreover revealed that learning beliefs (in these non-formal learning programs) were more transformative in nature, involving changes in
applying practical knowledge, heightened religious consciousness, enhancing personal development, and seeking spiritual pleasure. In addition, the acknowledged
motivation for holding learning beliefs from the Islamic perspective was based on three inter-related reasons –temporal, temporal as well as moral, and Hereafter and
Godly reasons; with the last reason being the most dominant. Therefore, these beliefs among adult Malay Muslim Learners were shown to be spiritualistic in nature and
consequently, all the themes were tied strongly to eternal and Godly reasons. The main conclusions are all these different themes converged into a singular spiritual
essence at the summit, and thus learning in non formal situations is deeply connected to the essences and perspectives of spirituality; the key to understanding adult learning is to understand the adult learners themselves; adults participate and seek educational activities that relate to personal growth and development; and it is particularly important to look at cultural and religious contexts of the learners and the learning environment to understand better how their beliefs and experiences shape the learners' beliefs on learning. Implications of the study are that educators need to
consider the significance and relevance of culture, religion, and spiritual essences in adult learning, to promote critical thinking in non-formal learning among adults, and to consider the nature of learning as lifelong, transformative and experiential. These are the challenges to the practice of adult education.


Circuit weight training (CWT) is currently at the forefront of the fitness industry. During the past 10 years, its popularity has increased due to its ability to combat common deterrents of exercise program adhesion. Many individuals that utilize CWT not only use it to fulfill their weekly exercise requirements, but are looking to maintain or lose weight as well. The purpose of this study was to compare the energy expenditures (EE) in total kcals and average rate of perceived exertion (RPE) values of a 20 min CWT protocol and a 20 min steady state aerobic protocol of equivalent intensity based on an individual's average heart rate during the CWT protocol. The CWT protocol consisted of 10 machine weight stations: chest press, leg press, latissimus pull down, shoulder press, hamstring curl, leg extension, assisted pull-up, pec fly, seated row, and back extension. EE was calculated by means of indirect calorimetry by the Cosmed K4 b© (Rome, Italy) and heart rate (HR) was monitored by means of a FT1 Polar heart rate monitor (Polar Electro, Kempele, Finland). RPE values were taken at the end of every 4 CWT station and every 2 min during the steady state aerobic activity. Paired samples t-tests revealed significant differences in EE and average RPE values during the CWT protocol and steady state aerobic activity. While EE values were greater during the steady state aerobic activity, RPE values were higher during the CWT protocol. These findings add to the limited literature on EE and RPE during CWT and steady state aerobic activity of equivalent


As rural public transit systems are vital to the livelihood of rural Americans, improving the operations of these systems is the focus of this work. The use of performance measures to evaluate operation is essential to maintain growth and avoid becoming stagnant. The main goal of this study was to examine existing performance measures (PM) and modify them to allow for comparison of performance among rural transit agencies in Alabama. The tasks presented in this paper are a review of performance measures, data collection, and data analysis for agencies in Alabama. The report concludes that performance measures can be developed that balance external factors in the analysis and allow for a fair comparison of agencies.


Objective - To produce a highly-usable intranet site, use the project to explore the practical application of evidence-based librarianship (EBL), and refine the library's project management methodology.

Methods - Evidence was gathered via a literature review, an online survey, scenario-based usability testing, and completion of a usability checklist. Usability issues were then addressed, guided by the Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines.

Results - After a preliminary revision, the site achieved a usability index of 79% after application of the "Raward Library Usability Analysis Tool". Finding the information and supporting user tasks were identified as areas of weakness. Usability testing and client feedback supported these findings. After these issues were addressed by a major site redevelopment, the usability index increased to 98%.

Conclusions - Raward's checklist is an easy and effective tool for measuring and identifying usability issues. Its value was enhanced by scenario-based usability testing, which yielded rich, client-specific information. The application of EBL and project management principles enhanced the outcomes of the project, and the professional development of the project team.


This article compares external real objects (images, video) with the internal world of their semantic representation. An algorithm is proposed for semantic learning and the recognition of visual patterns. A definition is given of the concept of "intelligent optics." The world is not everything that can be (not Infinitum, but Indeterminatum). The advance of science both toward the infinitely small and the infinitely large requires "intelligent optics" and new metaphysical postulates. G. W. Leibniz


Seismic damage-resistant structures, such as jointed precast connections and rocking wall structures, usually require supplementary energy dissipation devices to limit peak displacements. Yielding steel fuses or buckling restrained braces (BRBs) can provide energy dissipation but have a tendency to create residual compressive forces after joint closing that can resist the re-centring of the structure and fight the post-tensioning forces on subsequent cycles. A ratcheting, tension-only fuse device has been developed to offer resistance to loading in tension, while offering negligible resistance to compressive motion. This lack of compressive forces allows re-seating of a rocking connection to minimise residual structural displacements. Upon re-loading, fuse engagement will be more rapid due to the ratcheting mechanism, as the absence of residual compressive loads reduces the amount of elastic take-up before yielding occurs. A prototype ratcheting fuse mechanism with a yield force of 45kN and an ultimate tensile force of 65kN has been designed and experimentally tested. The design was refined to provide ease of manufacture, eliminating complex and expensive processes, to reduce the overall construction costs. Experimental proof-of-concept testing on six fuse elements demonstrated the function of the ratcheting mechanism and assessed the hysteretic behaviour of the fuse element and the overall device with two different tooth pitch sizes. High speed camera footage of the ratcheting mechanism was recorded to assess engagement timing.


Research at the UC Hopland Research and Extension Center (HREC) has improved our understanding of how to reduce sheep depredation while minimizing the impact on coyotes. Analysis of a 14-year data set of HREC coyote-control efforts found that sheep depredation losses were not correlated with the number of coyotes removed in any of three time scales analyzed (yearly, seasonally and monthly) during corresponding intervals for the next 2 years. Field research using radiotelemetry to track coyotes supported and explained this finding. For example, in 1995, dominant "alphas" from four territories were associated with 89% of 74 coyote-killed lambs; "betas" and transients were not associated with any of these kills. Relatively few coyotes were killing sheep, and these animals were difficult to capture by conventional methods at the time of year when depredation was highest. However, selective removal of only the problem alpha coyotes effectively reduced losses at HREC.


Primary ectopic craniopharyngioma is a rare entity. Isolated petrous apex bone location has not been reported previously. This study reports a case of 26-year-old male with right abducent nerve palsy. CT and MRI imaging reveal right petrous apex cystic lesion. No sellar or suprasellar region involvement was found. Endoscopic endonasal transphenoid approach has been successfully performed. Histopathology examination confirms the diagnosis of adamantinomatous craniopharyngioma. So far, it's probably the first case report of primary ectopic craniopharyngioma isolated in the petrous apex. This case report supports the premise that primary ectopic craniopharyngioma is a multifactorial process that starts with an error from migrated embryological cells.


We conducted a three-year field experiment to determine if amending soils with mulched European buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica) can limit reinvasion, and whether two methods of incorporation—tilling or surface application—produce similar results. Mulch (a high carbon:nitrogen [C:N] material) may reduce reinvasion by stimulating soil microbial immobilization of N. Converting the woody waste generated during buckthorn removal into mulch would also eliminate both the need to remove this waste from restoration sites and the expense of acquiring amendments from elsewhere. We found that adding buckthorn mulch to soils, whether tilled or not, did not decrease either buckthorn reinvasion or soil N availability. The mechanical disturbance of tilling, however, caused a large, prolonged reduction in reinvasion by killing a previously unrecognized but major contributor to reinvasion—small buckthorn individuals (most < 5 cm tall) that were undetected during initial removal. Recruitment of new individuals occurred during the experiment, but recruitment rate decreased rapidly over time, suggesting that buckthorn seeds are short-lived. Three major recommendations emerge: (1) buckthorn mulch should not be used to limit reinvasion; (2) tilling can greatly reduce reinvasion by killing buckthorn individuals that are undetected during initial removal; and (3) because buckthorn seeds appear to be short-lived, reinvasion can be reduced by repeated, annual follow-up control of undetected and newly recruited individuals.


Many combinatorial optimization and constraint satisfaction problems can be formulated as a search for the best leaf in a tree of bounded depth. When exhaustive enumeration is infeasible, a rational strategy visits leaves in increasing order of predicted cost. Previous systematic algorithms for this setting follow predetermined search orders, making strong implicit assumptions about predicted cost and using problem-specific information inefficiently. We introduce a framework, bestleaf-first search (BLFS), that employs an explicit model of leaf cost. BLFS is complete and visits leaves in an order that efficiently approximates increasing predicted cost. Different algorithms can be derived by incorporating different sources of information into the cost model. We show how previous algorithms are special cases of BLFS. We also demonstrate how BLFS can derive a problem-specific model during the search itself. Empirical results on latin square completion, binary CSPs, and number partitioning problems suggest that, even with simple cost models, BLFS yields competitive or superior performance and is more robust than previous methods. BLFS can be seen as a model-based extension of iterativedeepening A*, and thus it unifies search for combinatorial optimization and constraint satisfaction with traditional AI heuristic search for shortest-path problems.


It is well-known that operating within the boundaries of a national park provides commercial actors with the opportunity to charge a price premium, though this has to a lesser degree been demonstrated for marine protected areas. We estimate national tourists' willingness-to-pay a price premium for boat trips in the Nha Trang Bay Marine Protected Are, Vietnam, using a discrete choice experiment. Our results show that tourists are willing to pay an average price premium of 18 USD per trip for a large improvement in environmental quality, and that avoiding the loss of jobs for local fishermen is of minor importance. Furthermore, the economic benefits generated from management scenarios that combine biodiversity restoration and environmental quality improvement within the reserve sufficient to cover additional costs of such improvements.


Adopting an industry project-oriented approach in Higher Education teaching, research and management activities, under given quality metrics, has been intensively studied within Agile software development practices. The current work investigates Agile applicability and its practical implications into Higher Education, through a Systematic Assessment. The lack of a secondary study approach results in trending gaps and misalignments between new research proposals and the current state-of the art. Directions for further research and specific current developments are addressed in a structured manner, through relevant distributions of the publication fora according to Agile facets (research areas, methodologies, type of intervention and contribution). Study selection and data extraction have been performed under the Systematic Mapping protocol (question formulation, selection and filtering, mapping) offering a conclusive review on means of Agile integration over almost a decade.


The open-source software community is now comprised of a very large and growing number of contributors and users. The GNU/Linux operating system for instance has an estimated 18 million users worldwide and its contributing developers can be counted by thousands. The critical mass of contributors taking part in various opensource projects has helped to ensure high quality for open source software. However, despite the achievements of the open-source software industry, there are issues in the production of large scale open-source software (OSS) such as the GNU/Linux operating system that have to be addressed as the numbers of users, of contributors, and of available applications grow. EDOS is a European project supported by IST started October 2004 and ending in 2007, whose objective is to provide a new generation of methodologies, theoretical models, technical tools and quality models specifically tailored to OSS engineering and to software distribution over the Internet.


In this paper we present a novel foreground segmentation and 3D reconstruction system for multi-view scenarios. The system achieves correct 3D object reconstruction even when foreground segmentation presents critical misses in some of the views. We introduce the spatial redundancy of the multi-view data into the foreground segmentation process by combining segmentation and the 3D reconstruction in a two steps workflow. First, the segmentation of the objects in each view uses a monocular, region-based foreground segmentation in a MAP-MRF framework for foreground, background and shadow classes. Next, we compute an iterative volume reconstruction in a 3D tolerance loop, obtaining an iteratively enhanced SfS volume. Foreground segmentation is improved by updating the foreground model of each view at each iteration. The results presented in this paper show the improved foreground segmentation and the reduction of errors in the reconstruction of the volume.