This study examines whether business strategy affects information transfers from one firm to its industry peers. I use Miles and Snow's (1978, 2003) organizational typology to classify firms along a continuum with innovative 'prospector' firms at one end and stable low-growth 'defender' firms at the other. When a firm announces its earnings, the information transfer to other peer firms in the same industry is weaker (stronger) when the announcing firm is a prospector (defender). In addition, information transfers from the announcing firm to industry peers are weaker (stronger) when the industry peer is a prospector (defender). Taken together, the evidence in this paper suggests that firms' business strategies affect the strength of information transfers.


Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) has been widely used in information retrieval due to its efficiency in solving the problems of polysemy and synonymy. However, LSI is notably a computationally intensive process because of the computing complexities of singular value decomposition and filtering operations involved in the process. This paper presents MR-LSI, a MapReduce based distributed LSI algorithm for scalable information retrieval. The performance of MR-LSI is first evaluated in a small scale experimental cluster environment, and subsequently evaluated in large scale simulation environments. By partitioning the dataset into smaller subsets and optimizing the partitioned subsets across a cluster of computing nodes, the overhead of the MR-LSI algorithm is reduced significantly while maintaining a high level of accuracy in retrieving documents of user interest. A genetic algorithm based load balancing scheme is designed to optimize the performance of MR-LSI in heterogeneous computing environments in which the computing nodes have varied resources.


LTE- A and Next Generation Wireless Networks: Channel Modeling and Performancedescribes recent advances in propagation and channel modeling necessary for simulating next generation wireless systems. Due to the radio spectrum scarcity, two fundamental changes are anticipated compared to the current status. Firstly, the strict reservation of a specific band for a unique standard could evolve toward a priority policy allowing the co-existence of secondary users in a band allocated to a primary system. Secondly, a huge increase of the number of cells is expected by combining outdoor base stations with smaller cells such as pico/femto cells and relays. This evolution is accompanied with the emergence of cognitive radio that becomes a reality in terminals together with the development of self-organization capabilities and distributed cooperative behaviors. The book is divided into three parts:Part I addresses the fundamentals (e.g. technologies, channel modeling principles etc.) Part II addresses propagation and modeling discussing topics such as indoor propagation, outdoor propagation, etc. Part III explores system performance and applications (e.g. MIMO Over-the-air testing, electromagnetic safety, etc).


The introduction to this special issue proposes a three-stage periodization for the development of weird fiction, the unstable hybrid of horror, science fiction, and fantasy most often associated with H. P. Lovecraft: Old Weird (1880–1940), which is centered on Lovecraft's literary and critical work and the pulp magazine Weird Tales that gave the genre its name; Weird Transition (1940–80), a period marked by the apparent decline of the genre but that actually sees the migration of weird elements into a broad range of genre and media practices; and New Weird (1980–present), which critiques the Old Weird's reactionary politics by adopting a radically affirmative perspective on the body and the alien. During the New Weird period, philosophy and critical theory are also infected with weird elements of nihilism and radical antihumanism, as in the speculative realist school. This historical perspective reveals the weird to be a form of "pulp modernism" that is irreducible to high modernism or postmodernism


Natural gas as a source of energy has attracted a lot of interest as its emissions rate and price are lower than other fossil fuel energy sources. In the U.S., natural gas-fired power generation has been rising, as coal has declined as a share of the fuel mix. Likewise, Mexico recently launched its energy reform with focus on greatly expanding use of natural gas over other fossil fuels, primarily in the energy sector, by opening the market to private investors. These recent economic and policy changes, along with increasing gas production in the U.S. (shale gas boom) are likely to drive the natural gas market in North America in a new direction. For instance, the Annual Energy Outlook 2015 describes the U.S. for the first time as a net exporter of natural gas (via pipelines and LNG) by 2017. In order to study the current North American gas market with its new regulations like the Mexican energy reform, this paper presents the North American Natural Gas Market Model (NANGAM). We propose a long-term partial-equilibrium model of the United States, Mexican, and Canadian gas markets. NANGAM considers more granular details regarding market regions and pipelines in Mexico than other existing models, allows for endogenous infrastructure expansion, and is built in five year time-steps up to 2040, considering three seasons (low, high, and peak demand) for each time-step. NANGAM is calibrated using up-to-date data, which reflects current gas market trends, such as the increasing U.S. shale gas production. Using NANGAM, we assess the implications of the Mexican energy reform using a set of ad-hoc future scenarios. Results from the model show that, in the case of disappointing development of natural gas production in Mexico, the census region US7 (Texas and adjacent states) is the most affected, reaching an increase of natural gas production of up to 12% by 2040 compared to baseline projections.


Child caretaking in the United States today frequently is undertaken by adults who do not operate under court orders or private agreements. The adults may, but need not then be, legal parents. There are usually constraints when one of the adults desires to relocate with the child within his/her state or to another American state. When an international relocation with the child is desired, moves from any American state are governed by the Hague Convention on Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (Convention). Here, issues arise regarding the child's "habitual residence," as well as who possess rights of custody and whether there had been exercises of such custodial rights by the nonrelocating childcaretakers.
Though the Convention guides only international child relocations, it generally defers to the American state custody laws in the states of the children's habitual residences. While common sense suggests the principles guiding international relocations should be comparable to, if not more demanding than, intrastate or interstate moves, surprisingly this is sometimes not the case. This is illustrated by a 2016 Seventh Circuit ruling on an international child relocation from Illinois.
While the issue of "habitual residence" has been deemed "pivotal" in many international child relocation cases, receiving much attention, this article focuses on possessions and exercises of custody rights in Convention proceedings. Unfortunately, here common sense is sometimes lacking. This article, in particular, reviews the challenges in determining custody rights due to by the expanding U.S. state laws on de facto (and comparable) parentage and on nonparent childcare orders over parental objections.
The article concludes by urging more sensible approaches to international child relocations from the United States. It proposes that current state laws on intrastate and interstate child relocations be consulted, and at least somewhat employed. Further, it provides guidance on the challenges posed in child relocation cases by the emerging de facto parent doctrines, founded on imprecise norms typically applied only after childcare disputes arise, as well as by the increased recognitions of nonparent childcare interests, which can override superior parental rights to serve the best interests of children.


The definitive guide to automating SQL Server admnistration with Powershell scripts If you're a SQL Server database administrator, this book will make your life easier. Windows PowerShell is an administrative scripting tool that allows you to automate many tasks you're probably currently doing by hand. This nuts-and-bolts guide shows you how to create Windows PowerShell scripts to administer almost every aspect of SQL Server. You'll get a thorough introduction to PowerShell basics and all the PowerShell components that have been integrated into SQL Server 2008, as well as actual administration tasks. The book provides complete scripts that have been tested and proven, saving you hours of effort. The new release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 now includes Windows PowerShell, allowing administrators of large-scale enterprise databases to automate many tasks SQL Server 2008 Administration with Windows PowerShell introduces you to PowerShell, covering its components in detail as well as providing basic instruction in using scripts to administer the database The book includes numerous examples of SQL tasks that have been automated and also provides completed scripts that you can put to use immediately The Companion Web site includes complete code scripts If you're a database administrator, the scripts and techniques in SQL Server 2008 Administration with Windows PowerShell will save you hours of effort.


The purpose of this thesis has been to provide new insight into sociological coherencies between work and family life. The main subject has been to study how the everyday life of parents and children is formed in an interaction between work life, family life and welfare arrangements for children and parents. The "voices" of the children, and their perspectives have been absent in debates on time and time squeeze in the family. The work life is the adult's home ground, whereas schools and kindergartens are arenas made for children. This division is also reflected in sociological research. Work life research has only dealt with children's perspectives in a very limited degree, while the research on children has not fully included work life as a central and important context in the life of children.This thesis consists of five articles in total. In the first article, I explore the perspective on spending time with children amongst employed parents. In article number 2 I move on into a theoretical discussion on sociological understandings of children and I will also introduce the question about children's perspective in sociological work life research. The articles in the thesis are based on data from two qualitative researches. The first one was performed in relation to the evaluation of the cash support (Bungum, Brandth and Kvande 2001). The cash support research was based on interviews with parents of small children on three different places of work. The analysis in article 1 and 3 are based on this. The other data used is also taken from interviews with children and their parents. This data was gathered during the spring of 2005, as part of this thesis and for the research programme "Time conflicts amongst parents and the flexible work life" by NTNU. Design and method in this second research can be considered a continuation of experiences made during the cash support project. Article 4 and 5 are based on this data.The background for the introduction of the cash support was to give parents of small children more time to spend with their minors. The support sets no requirements regarding adjustments to the work life. The findings in article 1 show that when welfare arrangements are individually adapted and optional like the cash support, work life draws the longer straw for those parents that work the most from before. If one, politically speaking, really wants to make changes in how parents spend time with their children, looking at the time use of fathers in the work life would have more potential for change. Changes in how fathers spend time with their children would however require new welfare arrangements to be tied to collective rights in the work life. The variations in regards to the participation of parents in different work cultures, has been a vital context in this study, but also how the gender patterns between work and family life forms the time practises of mothers and fathers.In the study I emphasize stories from children about their own everyday life with full time working parents. A finding in this relation is that the flexible time cultures in parent's work life can be limitless with regards to time use, but can also give the children a bigger space to negotiate time with their parents. The standardized time cultures give limiting time practises, where the space for negotiating is smaller but the everyday life seems more predictable and lucid to the children.In the thesis I will also show how children's time practises are formed in an interaction between the time cultures of the working life and the committed schoo time. The stories from the children about their own everyday life makes it clear that the organizing of time in school is based on a model created in a society where most mothers were working at home, and that it is not adapted to the standardized time cultures in work life.The stories from the children can give us differentiated perspectives on the modern childhood. The variations in the children's experiences of negotiations with the work life of their parents, is a contribution to give depth and width to the polarized debate on time crisis and the everyday life of children in Norway today.


Working in his villa in the south of France, Pierre Bonnard (1867--1947) suffused his late canvases with radiant Mediterranean light and dazzling color. Although his subjects were close at hand--usually everyday domestic scenes--Bonnard rarely painted from life. Instead, he made pencil sketches in diaries and relied on these, along with his memory, as he executed the works in his studio. These interiors thus often conflate details from the artist's daily life with fleeting, mysterious evocations of his past. The spectral figures who appear at the margins of the canvases, overshadowed by brilliantly colored baskets of fruit or other props, create an atmosphere of profound ambiguity and puzzling abstraction: the mundane rendered in a wholly new pictorial language. The 75 paintings, drawings, and watercolors in this volume, some rarely seen treasures from private collections, all made between 1923 and 1947, are central to the ongoing reappraisal of Bonnard as a leading figure of French modernism.


Objetive The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of a physical activity (PA) program and subsequent detraining on the contractile capacity of the Vastus Lateralis (VL) and Biceps Femoris (BF) in patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Methods A total of 37 subjects were divided in: the intervention group (IG) consisted of 19 subjects (75.58 years ±6.18) and the control group (CG) for 18 subjects (79.92 years ±7.03). The PA intervention program was 4 month length, 60 training sessions and 5 days/week. The Tensiomyography (TMG) was used to assess the maximum radial displacement of the muscle belly (Dm) and the normalized response velocity (Vrn) in VL and BF of both legs. The assessment was performed before intervention (Pre), at the end of four months of intervention (Post) and two months after finishing the intervention (Post 2). Results Vrn for VL in IG increased in both legs after the intervention program (p≤0.05) while later decreased in the post2 (p≤0.05). Although we observe an increase of Vrn in CG (p≤0.05) it was not significantly higher than baseline levels (pre). The BF shows the same trend than VL for Vrn in IG, whereas in CG there is a tendency to maintain values. Dm for VL shows a decrease in post and an increased in post 2 assessment in IG. Dm values for left BF show significant differences in IG whereas in CG there is a tendency to maintain values. Dm for VL in IG decrease in both legs in post assessment (p≤0.05), and increases in post2 (p≤0.05). However, Dm showed only significant increases in right VL post assessment compared to baseline. Conclusions A PA program adapted to elderly diagnosed with AD, produces changes in morphology and muscle responses. Further, it enhances balance and motor skills, which results in a reduction in the risk of falls, improves the quality of life, and return to baseline values.


Existing literature provides an insight into CFS/ME, but it is fractured, in that it does little to serve understanding, empathy or coping. Moreover the experiences of people with CFS/ME are under theorised. The literature demonstrates that issues of identity appear central to the lived experience of chronic illness, yet the mechanisms underpinning identity are not fully explored. Consequently there is little understanding of the crisis of identity in CFS/ME. Therefore, the aims and objectives of the current research endeavoured to examine identity within the context of the lived experience of CFS/ME.

Drawing upon Wenger's (1998) 'Communities of Practice' theory (CoP), the current research aimed to make transparent the mechanism of identity by exploring the lived experience of identity in chronic illness; specifically CFS/ME. It is argued throughout, that a millennia of meaning underpins the crisis of identity in CFS/ME and that CoP, whilst predominantly a social theory of learning, was re-conceptualised here to illuminate the crisis of identity in chronic illness.

Data were gathered via a closed Facebook group; cfsid, which was created for the purpose of the current research. Participants (n. 37) contributed over time and in depth and in so doing revealed the complex foundation of their shifting identities. The data was analysed using a theoretical thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006).

Aligned with CoP, the key findings indicate that the mechanism underpinning the crisis of identity in CFS/ME is the changing nature of participation. The history of CFS/ME is one defined by scepticism and as such the controversy surrounding CFS/ME interacted with the lived experience of the illness for participants. The lived experience of CFS/ME for participants was reliably defined by their inability to participate in either life or self. Lives and selves were unrecognisable, but all was not lost as acceptance and adjustment allowed participants to negotiate ways in which they could participate despite their CFS/ME. Participants' experiences of participation emerged within the analysis as a journey to finding a new way to be in the world. On looking to the future, if people with CFS/ME are to be better supported and enabled within their lived experience of chronic illness, the burdening history of CFS/ME needs to be replaced by legitimacy, and the importance of the negotiation of participation in chronic illness needs to be illuminated further.


Until the beginning of the 20th century, there was no way to reason formally about proofs. In particular, the question of proof equivalence had never been explored. When Hilbert asked in 1920 for an answer to this very question in his famous program, people started looking for proof formalizations. Natural deduction and sequent calculi, which were invented by Gentzen in 1935, quickly became two of the main tools for the study of proofs. Gentzen's Hauptsatz on normal forms for his sequent calculi, and later on Prawitz' analog theorem for natural deduction, put forth a first notion of equivalent proofs in intuitionistic and classical logic. However, natural deduction only works well for intuitionistic logic. This is why Girard invented proof nets in 1986 as an analog to natural deduction for (the multiplicative fragment of) linear logic. Their universal structure made proof nets also interesting for other logics. Proof nets have the great advantage that they eliminate most of the bureaucracy involved in deductive systems and so are probably closer to the essence of a proof. There has recently been an increasing interest in the development of proof nets for various kinds of logics. In 2005 for example, Lamarche and Straßburger were able to express sequent proofs in classical logic as proof nets. In this thesis, I will, starting from proof nets for classical logic, turn the focus back on intuitionistic logic and propose proof nets that are suited as an extension of natural deduction. I will examine these nets and characterize those corresponding to natural deduction proofs. Additionally, I provide a cut elimination procedure for the new proof nets and prove termination and confluence for this reduction system, thus effectively a new notion of the equivalence of intuitionistic proofs.


ABSTRACT Conventionally, investors could not sue states directly under international law and arbitration tribunals did not have general jurisdiction over international investment disputes. This has changed, especially since the early 1990s, with the emergence of an international system of investor protection that combines investor-state arbitration and broad standards of investor protection. The system elevates the legal status of investors (but not other individuals) in international law by allowing them to make international claims for damages against host states. Although the system depends on state authority for its establishment and ongoing effectiveness, the system adopts private authority as a method of transnational governance by permitting private investors to make claims and by giving private arbitrators the power to resolve those claims. This provides significant advantages to multinational enterprises at the expense of governmental flexibility in both capital-importing and capital-exporting states, as revealed by the recent explosion of investor claims. This article examines the legal architecture of the system in order to demonstrate how it expands private authority in the context of transnational governance.


The recent series of mass cetacean strandings in the stranding-prone regions of Australia and New Zealand (BBC News 2004) and the ensuing speculation regarding their cause demonstrate that debates surrounding this phenomenon continue to be of issue. As most interested in these debates are aware, hypotheses addressing their causes range from the more biologically plausible— including climate and oceanographic variation (MignucciGiannoni et al. 2000; Evans et al. 2005), navigational errors arising from particular magnetic configurations (Walker et al. 1992; Brabyn & Frew 1994) or bathymetric and ocean current features (Brabyn & McLean 1992), and anthropogenic noise and sonar interference (Balcomb & Claridge 2001; Madsen et al. 2002)—to the less-supported, including sensory stimulation (Mawson 1978), distraction (Wood 1979), regression to instinctive behaviors (Cordes 1982), and even the suggestion that earthquakes are responsible (ABC News 2004). Rather than supplying more fuel for conjecture in light of severe shortages of convincing data, we believe it is more constructive to provide a scientific framework for testing hypotheses that seek to explain the patterns observed and mechanisms responsible for strandings. The most reliable and long-term data are the time series of stranding events. Recently, our research group, in collaboration with a large multidisciplinary team, examined the periodicity of these events in the southeastern region of Australia, including one of the world's stranding hotspots—the southern island state of Tasmania (Evans et al. 2005). Substantial records of strandings are available in this region from the 1920s, and in some years there were >20 mass-stranding events recorded involving sometimes >300 individuals per event. Our analyses showed that not only were there clear cycles in the number of stranding events of approximately 12–14 years' periodicity, but that these pulses were related to measurable changes in climate patterns. We found that increases


Cyber security has quickly become an overwhelming challenge for governments, businesses, private organizations, and individuals. In an increasingly connected world, the trend is for resources to be accessible from anywhere at any time. Greater access to resources implies more targets and potentially a larger surface area for attacks, which makes securing systems more difficult. Automated and semi-automated solutions are needed to keep up with the deluge of modern threats, but designing such systems requires a distributed architecture to support development and testing. Several such architectures exist, but most only focus on providing a platform for running cyber security experiments as opposed to automating experiment processes. In response to this need, we have built a distributed framework based on software agents which can manage system roles, automate data collection, analyze results, and run new experiments without human intervention. The contribution of this work is the creation of a model for experiment automation and control in a distributed system environment, and this paper provides a detailed description of our framework based on that model.


Abstract. The Forests gAses aeRosols Clouds Exploratory (FARCE) campaign was conducted in March–April 2015 on the tropical island of La Réunion. For the first time, several scientific teams from different disciplines collaborated to provide reference measurements and characterization of La Réunion vegetation, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), biogenic VOCs (BVOCs), (bio)aerosols and composition of clouds, with a strong focus on the Maïdo mountain slope area. The main observations obtained during this 2-month intensive field campaign are summarized. They include characterizations of forest structure, concentrations of VOCs and precursors emitted by forests, aerosol loading and optical properties in the planetary boundary layer (PBL), formation of new particles by nucleation of gas-phase precursors, ice-nucleating particles concentrations, and biological loading in both cloud-free and cloudy conditions. Simulations and measurements confirm that the Maïdo Observatory lies within the PBL from late morning to late evening and that, when in the PBL, the main primary sources impacting the Maïdo Observatory are of marine origin via the Indian Ocean and of biogenic origin through the dense forest cover. They also show that (i) the marine source prevails less and less while reaching the observatory; (ii) when in the PBL, depending on the localization of a horizontal wind shear, the Maïdo Observatory can be affected by air masses coming directly from the ocean and passing over the Maïdo mountain slope, or coming from inland; (iii) bio-aerosols can be observed in both cloud-free and cloudy conditions at the Maïdo Observatory; (iv) BVOC emissions by the forest covering the Maïdo mountain slope can be transported upslope within clouds and are a potential cause of secondary organic aerosol formation in the aqueous phase at the Maïdo Observatory; and (v) the simulation of dynamics parameters, emitted BVOCs and cloud life cycle in the Meso-NH model are realistic, and more advanced Meso-NH simulations should use an increased horizontal resolution (100 m) to better take into account the orography and improve the simulation of the wind shear front zone within which lies the Maïdo Observatory. Using various observations and simulations, this work draws up an inventory of the in situ studies that could be performed in La Réunion and at the Maïdo Observatory. It also aims to develop scientific collaborations and to support future scientific projects in order to better understand the forest–gas–aerosol–cloud system in an insular tropical environment.


In developed countries agricultural lime is a commodity that is largely taken for granted. In the less developed parts of southern Africa, where agriculture plays a crucial role in daily survival, it is often difficult to get hold of, prohibitively expensive and the 'forgotten input'. This is largely due to the scarcity of production sites, relatively high transport costs and inadequate support for farmers from government agricultural extension services. As part of the UK government-funded research project 'FarmLime' agricultural lime production sites in South Africa and Zambia were studied. The operations in the Western Cape work Precambrian marbles and recent marine limestones using modern plants and operate standard supply chains. In contrast, the operations in Zambia work Precambrian marbles using plant that ranges from the moderately well run to the ad hoc, "home made" variety. The market in Zambia is largely confined to the large commercial farms that can afford to transport and apply their own lime. Small-scale farmers, of which there are upwards of 700,000 in Zambia, struggle with acid soils that they cannot afford to lime with the result that they are trapped in the cycle of poverty. The 'FarmLime' research project has been working on a means of producing affordable agricultural lime from local sources using a redesigned maize mill. It has also demonstrated the benefits of using agricultural lime to farmers by carrying out simple crop trials with groundnuts and maize.

Clive Mitchell is an industrial mineralogy and mineral processing expert who has worked for the British Geological Survey (BGS) for over 12 years. He has worked on several research projects based in southern Africa, funded by the UK Governments Department for International Development (DfID). Clive is the project leader of ''FarmLime: Low cost lime for small-scale farming". This project, based in Zambia, has developed a hammer mill that can be used for the small-scale production of agricultural lime for subsistence farmers.


Contemporary inhabitants of the Balkan Peninsula belong to several ethnic groups of diverse cultural background. In this study, three ethnic groups from Bosnia and Herzegovina - Bosniacs, Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs - as well as the populations of Serbians, Croatians, Macedonians from the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegrins and Kosovars have been characterized for the genetic variation of 660 000 genome-wide autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms and for haploid markers. New autosomal data of the 70 individuals together with previously published data of 20 individuals from the populations of the Western Balkan region in a context of 695 samples of global range have been analysed. Comparison of the variation data of autosomal and haploid lineages of the studied Western Balkan populations reveals a concordance of the data in both sets and the genetic uniformity of the studied populations, especially of Western South-Slavic speakers. The genetic variation of Western Balkan populations reveals the continuity between the Middle East and Europe via the Balkan region and supports the scenario that one of the major routes of ancient gene flows and admixture went through the Balkan Peninsula.


commercial on vitro study. ABSTRACT: The aim of this study was to compare the antibacterial effect of eight different commercial (MWs) on two Streptococcus mutans (SM) strains by using the agar well diffusion method. Eight commercial MWs were selected, all of them combined several ingredients in different concentrations, the main active ingredients were: Chlorhexidine gluconate, cetylpyridinium chloride, sodium fluoride, zinc lactate, vitamin B5 and super-oxidized water. The SM strains were extracted from Cultiloops¤ and incubated for 24 hours at 37 (cid:176) C. The antimicrobial activity was evaluated using the agar well diffusion method. The inhibition zones were measured using an electronic digital caliper. The R' software was used to perform the statistical analysis using Kruskall-Wallis test and Dunn(cid:213)s multiple comparisons test. Seven commercial formulas demonstrated inhibitory effect over both SM strains. Only the MW containing super-oxidized water did not exhibit antibacterial activity. Higher inhibitory effect was observed in the chlorhexidine gluconate formula (27.38 – 0.98 mm and 31.52 – 0.64 mm). No statistically significant differences were observed when comparing formulas containing chlorhexidine gluconate in combination with other active ingredients. Seven MWs showed antibacterial activity except super-oxidized water formula. MWs containing chlorhexidine gluconate demonstrated the best effect against SM. However, no statistically significant differences were found when comparing formulas using exclusively chlorhexidine gluconate or combined with other antiseptics. Future research must be performed, focused on developing new MWs with similar antibacterial effects to chlorhexidine, but free of side effects, particularly in long-term treatments


The recent COVID-19 pandemic is a treatment challenge in the acute infection stage but the recognition of chronic COVID-19 symptoms termed post-acute sequelae SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC) may affect up to 30% of all infected individuals. The underlying mechanism and source of this distinct immunologic condition three months or more after initial infection remains elusive. Here, we investigated the presence of SARS-CoV-2 S1 protein in 46 individuals. We analyzed T-cell, B-cell, and monocytic subsets in both severe COVID-19 patients and in patients with post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC). The levels of both intermediate (CD14+, CD16+) and non-classical monocyte (CD14Lo, CD16+) were significantly elevated in PASC patients up to 15 months post-acute infection compared to healthy controls (P=0.002 and P=0.01, respectively). A statistically significant number of non-classical monocytes contained SARS-CoV-2 S1 protein in both severe (P=0.004) and PASC patients (P=0.02) out to 15 months post-infection. Non-classical monocytes were sorted from PASC patients using flow cytometric sorting and the SARS-CoV-2 S1 protein was confirmed by mass spectrometry. Cells from 4 out of 11 severe COVID-19 patients and 1 out of 26 PASC patients contained ddPCR+ peripheral blood mononuclear cells, however, only fragmented SARS-CoV-2 RNA was found in PASC patients. No full length sequences were identified, and no sequences that could account for the observed S1 protein were identified in any patient. Non-classical monocytes are capable of causing inflammation throughout the body in response to fractalkine/CX3CL1 and RANTES/CCR5.


This study explores strategies in pro and anti-shale organizations' discourse by combining the Discourse-Historical Approach (Wodak, 2001) with corpus linguistics. With the help of keyword lists, collocations, concordances, and key semantic domains, the representations of shale gas extraction, relevant actors and argumentation schemes in opposing discourses of the pro-shale Marcellus Shale Coalition and anti-shale Americans Against Fracking were analyzed. The findings of the study show that the advocates presented shale gas as a bonus for the crisis-struck American society while backgrounding its environmental impacts. The opponents, on the other hand, represented shale gas as a threat to the American ecosystem and public health through an alarming and scientific discourse. The empirical findings of this study add to a growing body of literature on discursive strategies employed by opposing camps of environmental controversies. Keywords: shale gas, environmental issues, the Discourse-Historical Approach, corpus linguistics, discursive strategies


A technique is presented that allows for the determination of boron in a great number of iron and nickel base alloys with the use of only one set of standards. Along with this advantage, another feature of the method is that the sensitivity can be increased in an alloy where an extremely low boron concentration is known to exist. The base metals of an alloy are removed by the use of the mercury cathode. To each of these stripped samples, copper is added to make up its new matrix. These samples are then compared to boron standards which have the same matrix. The technique greatly facilitates the speed at which boron can be determined in alloys that have varying matrices


Meta and transfer learning are two successful families of approaches to few-shot learning. Despite highly related goals, state-of-the-art advances in each family are measured largely in isolation of each other. As a result of diverging evaluation norms, a direct or thorough comparison of different approaches is challenging. To bridge this gap, we perform a cross-family study of the best transfer and meta learners on both a large-scale meta-learning benchmark (Meta-Dataset, MD), and a transfer learning benchmark (Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark, VTAB). We find that, on average, large-scale transfer methods (Big Transfer, BiT) outperform competing approaches on MD, even when trained only on ImageNet. In contrast, meta-learning approaches struggle to compete on VTAB when trained and validated on MD. However, BiT is not without limitations, and pushing for scale does not improve performance on highly out-of-distribution MD tasks. In performing this study, we reveal a number of discrepancies in evaluation norms and study some of these in light of the performance gap. We hope that this work facilitates sharing of insights from each community, and accelerates progress on few-shot learning.


Web search logs are of growing importance to researchers as they help understanding search behavior and search engine performance. However, search logs typically contain sensitive information about users and therefore considerable caution must be exercised when considering releasing the logs to the research community. Current approaches to releasing search logs focus on either protecting the privacy of users or enhancing the utility of data to researchers. In this work, we address the privacy-utility tradeoff by providing safe access to search logs, instead of releasing them. We propose a policy based safe interactive framework built on semantic policies and differential privacy to allow researchers access to search logs, while maintaining the privacy of the users. Semantic policies are used to infer the higher levels of information that can be mined from a dataset based on the fields accessed by a researcher. The accessed fields are then used to build research profile(s) that guide the amount of privacy to be enforced using differential privacy. We show the additional utility that can be obtained in our framework by two demonstrative experiments that involve access to user level information. Our results indicate that valid research can be conducted in our framework without forgoing the privacy of individuals.


Starch microcellular foams (SMCF) containing pores in the micron size range may be prepared by pore-preserving drying processes, developing highly porous, high specific surface area materials useful for applications such as opacifying pigments or as adsorbent materials. The objective of this research was to understand how the exchange of water with ethanol, used as a pore preserving step, affected the dimensional properties of the starch material during and after processing. SMCF were prepared from molded aquagels of cooked corn starch that were subjected to ethanol exchanges with different time intervals (6, 12, or 48 hrs) and number of exchanges (1, 2, or 3) and then air dried. To study the transformation of water-swollen starch into precipitated starch foam in ethanol, the volume of the starch material was measured in the wet state after each exchange and after final air drying. As water is replaced by ethanol, the starch material contracts, with the greatest contraction during the first ethanol exchange. The amount of contraction during air drying decreased with decreased starch water content just before air drying, presumably due to less pore collapse of the stiffer cell walls on drying. Interestingly, the minimum density of 0.37 g/cc SMCF was for the 12 hour exchange time, not the longest exchange time. Evidence of a skin-core morphology included SEM images as well as dimensional instability data on dried samples. The results indicate that SMCF of low density with fewer tendencies to deform during drying does not necessarily require extremely long exchange times.


We study the phases of hard-core-bosons on a two-dimensional periodic honeycomb lattice in the presence of an on-site potential with alternating sign along the different y-layers of the lattice. Using quantum Monte Carlo simulations supported by analytical calculations, we identify a weak topological insulator, characterized by a zero Chern number but non-zero Berry phase, which is manifested at either density 1/4 or 3/4, as determined by the potential pattern. Additionally, a charge-density-wave insulator is observed at 1/2-filling, whereas the phase diagram at intermediate densities is occupied by a superfluid phase. The weak topological insulator is further shown to be robust against any amount of nearest-neighbor repulsion, as well as weak next-nearest-neighbor repulsion. The experimental realization of our model is feasible in an optical lattice setup.


The 28th Call to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission ("TRC") is for law schools to "require all law students to take a course in Aboriginal people and the law, which includes the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, Indigenous law, and Aboriginal–Crown relations." Professors teaching corporate and commercial law may want to respond to the TRC's Call to Action, but the connection between Aboriginal people and the law in these courses is less obvious than in public law courses. This article provides concrete examples of how six corporate and commercial law professors have tried to advance the project of reconciliation in their classroom, and identifies common themes emerging from their efforts.


This study discusses the storytelling movement in England and Wales as an
example of the traditional arts "revival." "Revivals" are qualitatively different
from mature traditions, but this distinction eludes theorisation. This creates
shortcomings in the literature, which are identified and discussed. It is
concluded that mature traditions and "revivals" are both subcategories of
traditional milieu. The "revival" is distinguished, firstly, by its attenuated
diachronic chains of transmission and synchronic bonds of social cohesion,
resulting in a loss of deep aesthetic consensus in the participant group; and,
secondly, by its self-traditionalisation: its selfconscious self-presentation as a
traditional form socioculturally opposed to a traditionless mainstream
modernity. The "revival" is therefore often understood as a nostalgic and
symbolic re-enactment of desired sociocultural conditions.
The study is an inductive, transparent consideration of storytelling revivalism
in England and Wales in the light of this preliminary conclusion, considering
three issues: the history of the movement; the whole-group performance of
storytelling events; and emic interpretations and understandings of
involvement, elicited in interview. The evidence is that storytelling revivalism
is part of a long-lived appropriative process transcending sociocultural
distinctions; that its performative idioms do not express but mediate -
eventually, undermine - its iconoclastic separateness from modernity,
integrating the formally "revived" form into the informal mainstream; and that
interviews demonstrated nostalgic sociocultural beliefs to be contingent and of
secondary importance to aesthetic experience. In conclusion, revivalistic
communities indulge selfconscious self-traditionalisation sparingly and
reluctantly. Emically, it is an uninteresting implication or a necessary
cognitive and behavioural stopgap facilitating a deeper experiential familiarity
with the form itself "Revival," although occupying an intellectually
enfranchised milieu, is properly a nascent non-intellectual, aesthetic and social
form. This conclusion overturns the preliminary conclusion, and suggests the
general fallaciousness of assuming that cultural forms are primarily coded
representations of sociocultural conditions.


Since the millennium, the labor market participation of women and mothers is increasing across European countries. Several work/care policy measures underlie this evolution. At the same time, the labor market behavior of men and fathers, as well as their involvement in care work, is relatively unchanging, meaning that employed mothers are facing an increased burden with respect to gainful employment and providing care. We propose a family working time model that incentivizes fathers and mothers to both work in extended part-time employment. It provides a benefit in form of a lumpsum transfer or income replacement for each parent if, and only if, both parents work 30 hours per week. Thus, it explicitly addresses fathers and – contrary to most conventional family policies – actively promotes the dual earner/dual carer paradigm. Combining microsimulation and labor supply estimation, we empirically analyze the potential of the family working time model in the German context. The relatively small share of families already choosing the symmetric distribution of about 30 working hours would increase by 60 per cent. By showing that a lump-sum transfer especially benefits low-income families, we contribute to the debate about redistributive implications of family policies. The basic principles of the model generalize to other European countries where families increasingly desire an equal distribution of employment and care. In order to enhance the impact of such a policy, employers' norms and workplace culture as well as the supply of high-quality childcare must catch-up with changing workforce preferences.


European legal teaching - historically formalistic, doctrinal, hierarchical, and passive - is coming under increasing pressure to re-imagine itself as pragmatic, policy-aware, and action-oriented. Out of this context, a bottom-up movement of university law clinics appears to be emerging in Europe. Although intellectually indebted to the US model, the European variant reflects legal education and practice in Europe, specifically the multi-layered and multi-genetic legal landscape resulting from the Europeanization and internationalization of national legal systems, the globalization of European legal markets, and the growing demand for civic engagement in view of increasingly powerful supra-national institutions. Through the prism of clinical legal education, Reinventing Legal Education is the first attempt to gather scholarly and systematic reflections on the developments taking place in European legal teaching and practice. This groundbreaking book should be read by anyone interested in how clinical legal education is reinventing legal education in Europe.


Practitioners in Reception Classes are required to observe and assess children in order to record, understand and support each unique child's development to the fullest. The increasing education policy focus on numeracy and literacy teaching for four and five year-old children has been criticised however, for reducing time for child-led play which is widely acknowledged to be an appropriate and accurate way to observe and assess young children. Assessment frameworks are not designed to catch the 'essence' of who children are, however, the increasing emphasis on numeracy and literacy skills may arguably lead children being defined by their level of development in these areas at the expense of 'knowing' children in a broader sense. This small-scale, qualitative study aims to investigate 'joining in with child-led imaginary role-play' as an original observation method to explore the possibilities of discovering different aspects of two reception class children that might not be apparent through adult-led assessment. The study highlights the tensions and complexities of the 'knowledge' gained about children during observations. Voice recordings and field notes were taken during episodes of child-led play. The researcher experienced unexpected conflicts of roles at times which appeared to unsettle the autonomous nature of the play, however, the method allowed insights into the children's personalities and 'ways of being' during play and was a surprisingly meaningful relationship building arena based in shared humour and co-created playful meanings. This method may offer reflective food for thought for researchers and practitioners wishing to celebrate different aspects of children to those contained


The thermal behaviour of an organic photovoltaic (OPV) binary system comprised of a liquidcrystalline fluorene-based polymer and a fullerene derivative is investigated. We employ variabletemperature ellipsometry complemented by photo- and electroluminescence spectroscopy as well as optical microscopy and scanning force nanoscopy to explore phase transitions of blend thin films. The high glass transition temperature correlates with the good thermal stability of solar cells based on these materials. Furthermore, we observe partial miscibility of the donor and acceptor together with the tendency of excess fullerene derivative to segregate into exceedingly large domains. Thus, for charge generation less adequate bulk-heterojunction nanostructures are poised to develop if this mixture is exposed to more elevated temperatures. Gratifyingly, the solubility of the fullerene derivative in the polymer phase is found to decrease if a higher molecular-weight polymer fraction is employed, which offers routes towards improving the photovoltaic performance of non-crystalline OPV blends.


Leaf spots caused by fungal pathogens or abiotic factors can be prevalent on southern blueberries after harvest during the summer and fall, yet little is known about how they affect physiological processes that determine yield potential for the following year. In this study, we measured CO2 assimilation and leaf conductance on field-grown blueberry plants affected by Septoria leaf spot (caused by Septoria albopunctata) or by edema-like abiotic leaf blotching. Net assimilation rate (NAR) on healthy leaves varied between 6.9 and 12.4 μmol m-2 s-1 across cultivars and measurement dates. Infection by S. albopunctata had a significant negative effect on photosynthesis, with NAR decreasing exponentially as disease severity increased (R2 ≥0.726, P < 0.0001). NAR was reduced by approximately one-half at 20% disease severity, and values approached zero for leaves with >50% necrotic leaf area. There was a positive, linear correlation between NAR and leaf conductance (R2 ≥ 0.622, P < 0.0001), suggesting that the disease may have reduced photosynthesis via decreased CO2 diffusion into affected leaves. Estimates of virtual lesion size associated with infection by S. albopunctata ranged from 2.8 to 3.1, indicating that the leaf area in which photosynthesis was impaired was about three times as large as the area covered by necrosis. For leaves afflicted by edema-like damage, there also was a significant negative relationship between NAR and affected leaf area, but the scatter about the regression was more pronounced than in the NAR-disease severity relationships for S. albopunctata (R2 = 0.548, P < 0.0001). No significant correlation was observed between leaf conductance and affected area on these leaves (P = 0.145), and the virtual lesion size associated with abiotic damage was significantly smaller than that caused by S. albopunctata. Adequate carbohydrate supply during the fall is critical for optimal flower bud set in blueberry; therefore, these results document the potential for marked yield losses due to biotic and abiotic leaf spots.


Traditional analytical methods of determining secondary metabolite levels (e.g., chromatography, spectrophotomety) are based on extraction of the tested tissue and involve its destruction. As a result, it is very difficult to determine such levels in a small localized area. Moreover, because measurements performed in the course of culture necessarily refer to different samples of tissue, levels recorded could reflect variability in the hairy roots themselves, rather than variation as a function of time or morphological location. In this communication we report on a method developed to measure local and overall secondary metabolite levels in a non destructive manner using image analysis and apply it to determine metabolite concentrations in hairy root cultures of Beta vulgaris. To develop the method, after scanning a root under sterile conditions and replacing it in the growth vessel, we converted the image data from red-green-blue to the hue-saturation-intensity coordinate system. Hue and saturation values served respectively for thresholding and determination of pigment level. Root diameter, simulated by thickness of root extract films, was found to be proportional to saturation values, and thus is taken into account when pigment concentration is determined. The data obtained by image analysis were used to determine local and overall accumulation of betacyanin and betaxanthin pigments over time and results were then validated by spectrophotometric analysis. It was concluded that the proposed non destructive method enables accurate determination of changes in local secondary metabolite level at any point in the root, as well as monitoring of changes in overall levels in the entire root system throughout the growth period.


An ethno-medicinal plant survey was carried out in five sacred groves in Cuddalore district, Tamilnadu, for the express purpose of discovering the kinds of herbal remedies used by the local populations. It resulted in about 33 medicinal plants for the treatment of several diseases either in single or in combination with some other ingredients. The information on correct botanical identities with family, local name and traditional practice of 33 plant species belonging to 22 families are discussed here for the treatment of various illnesses.


In this paper, the impact of improper Gaussian signaling is studied for an underlay cognitive radio (CR) scenario comprised of a primary user (PU), which has a rate constraint, and a secondary user (SU), both single-antenna. We first derive expressions for the achievable rate of the SU when it transmits proper and maximally improper Gaussian signals (assuming that the SU is solely limited by the CR constraint). These expressions depend on the channel gains to and from the SU through a single variable. Thereby, we observe that improper signaling is beneficial whenever the SU rate is below a threshold, which depends on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and rate requirement of the PU. Furthermore, we provide bounds on the achievable gain that also depend only on the PU parameters. Then, the achievable rate is studied from a statistical viewpoint by deriving its cumulative distribution function considering a constant received SNR at the PU. In addition, we specialize this expression for the Z interference channel, for which the expected achievable rate is also derived. Numerical examples illustrate our claims and show that the SU may significantly benefit from using improper signaling.


Advances in biophysics and biochemistry have pushed back the limits for the structural characterization of biomolecular assemblies. Large efforts have been devoted to increase both resolution and accuracy of the methods, probe into the smallest biomolecules as well as the largest macromolecular machineries, unveil transient complexes along with dynamic interaction processes, and, lately, dissect whole organism interactomes using high‐throughput strategies. However, the atomic description of such interactions, rarely reached by large‐scale projects in structural biology, remains indispensable to fully understand the subtleties of the recognition process, measure the impact of a mutation or predict the effect of a drug binding to a complex. Mixing even a limited amount of experimental and/or bioinformatic data with modeling methods, such as macromolecular docking, presents a valuable strategy to predict the three‐dimensional structures of complexes. Recent developments indicate that the docking community is seething to tackle the greatest challenge of adding the structural dimension to interactomes. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


The current high exchange rate volatility in the face of globalization, underpinned by growing trade and financial and commodity markets liberalization has attracted the resurgence of considerable interest from both financial economists and policy makers, into the validity of international parity relationships. Using multivariate cointegration framework and long run structural modeling, this paper investigates the evidence in support of two of the parity relationships that underpin either implicitly or explicitly much of international macroeconomics. The first is the purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis or the theorem that there exists an invariable long-run equilibrium real exchange rate. The second is the uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) theorem, a hypothesis, which implies that yields of domestic and foreign financial assets (real interest rates) can differ only by the expected change in the price of foreign exchange. These tests are conducted on 8 of the 14 SADC economies using South Africa and United States as numeraires for the postBretton era; for the intra-continental and the intercontinental approaches respectively. All tests generally suggest that regardless of the approach used, there is significant evidence supporting cointegration, when the PPP is tested in its simple form and when the joint PPP and UIP hypothesis is tested. Except for a few countries, results are less favorable when the simple UIP is tested. We are therefore able to conclude that the simple PPP and joint PPP and UIP variables are cointegrated or that they do move together in the long-run for most countries indicating that the propositions are valid. However, most of the estimated cointegrating vectors rejected the restrictions of symmetry and proportionality implied by the PPP and UIP theories. With the simple UIP our conclusion is that support is sample dependent as the UIP generally holds only for those countries with very strong economic ties and whose currencies are pegged one to one.


Most prior work on task-oriented dialogue systems are restricted to limited coverage of domain APIs. However, users oftentimes have requests that are out of the scope of these APIs. This work focuses on responding to these beyond-API-coverage user turns by incorporating external, unstructured knowledge sources. Our approach works in a pipelined manner with knowledge-seeking turn detection, knowledge selection, and response generation in sequence. We introduce novel data augmentation methods for the first two steps and demonstrate that the use of information extracted from dialogue context improves the knowledge selection and end-to-end performances. Through experiments, we achieve state-of-the-art performance for both automatic and human evaluation metrics on the DSTC9 Track 1 benchmark dataset, validating the effectiveness of our contributions.


Large herbivores are key components of terrestrial biomes because of their relative abundance and pronounced influence on ecosystem functioning and habitat structure. To manage and conserve these species effectively, requires greater understanding of their distribution and use of resources at varying spatial and temporal scales. Sexual dimorphism is one aspect of large herbivore ecology likely to have a significant effect on resource use and community level interactions. Elephants present an ideal species to test the influence of sexual dimorphism due to their marked body size and pronounced behavioural differences. This study used location and behavioural data collected over an 8 year period in five different South African reserves, all of which had well documented elephant populations. The reserves were relatively small «1000 km) and had augmented water supplies so analyses were not influenced by surface water availability. Results indicated that male and female elephants resolve their available range at distinctly different scales. Both sexes were shown to expand their ranges with increasing forage quality, however males were the most flexible in their temporal and spatial response during periods of low resource availability. Females were more selective than males, targeting higher quality forage and being less destructive in their feeding approach. This may be due to females' higher mass specific energy requirements associated with their smaller body size and substantial reproductive investment. They were also constrained by the costs of group living compared to male elephants which range independently. Sexual segregation is a consequence of body size dimorphism and was investigated at both the habitat and plant scale to elucidate the mechanism driving the separation of the sexes. Whilst individual habitat preferences exist, these are not sufficient to segregate the sexes. At the plant scale, significant differences were shown with regard to foraging duration, tree size and plant parts eaten. Further investigation of sexual segregation involved testing the recently proposed activity budget hypothesis. Males and females have similar daily activity budgets and relatively high levels of behavioural synchrony, which is not sufficient to explain segregation. Instead, the marked sexual segregation appeared to be caused by social organisation, reproductive strategies and the divergent foraging behaviour of males and females at the plant scale. This research highlights the importance of considering male and female dimorphic herbivores as ecologically distinct species. For example, male elephants are likely to be driving the majority of destructive foraging bouts and this will often be in a heterogeneous manner, especially during periods of resource scarcity. Therefore, the effective management of elephants requires considering population structure, individual behaviour and population size.


In 2011, several states passed anti-shari'ah laws arguing that they were necessary to protect the United States' from the infiltration of Islamic law. According to supporters, these new law protect us from "shari'ah creep," which has allegedly already influenced several recent civil cases, particularly in family law, that had an Islamic dimension or involved Muslims. Supporters further argue that any reference to Islamic law in our civil courts presages an unacceptable shift towards the formal establishment of a parallel or alternative legal code to our laws. Such accommodation, in their view, threatens to augment or replace our secular system with religious extremism. Finally, proponents of these new model laws argue that they reflect vital national security measures because terrorists follow shari'ah law and seek to install it in the United States. As such, the laws are critical to our ongoing war against Islamist terror. This Article examines the recently proposed anti-shari'ah laws of Tennessee, Oklahoma and Arizona. It begins by examining the laws and their justifications and analyzes the 10th Circuit decision in Awad v. Ziriax upholding the injunction against Oklahoma's Save Our State amendment. It then carefully analyzes the cases that have been cited as examples of shari'ah-creep and reveals that they are actually routine examples of comity and conflicts of law rules applied properly by a properly functioning judiciary. If these laws are not national security measures, what is their true purpose? The Article posits that the new laws are the latest in an ongoing legal and social resignification of Islam and Muslims in an effort to maintain a visible and "alien" threat. It argues that even if they are ineffective as national security laws and even if they are struck down as unconstitutional, anti-shari'ah laws have social effects on Muslims, marginalizing them from the mainstream and singling them out for differential treatment. The Article then analyzes the anti-shari'ah laws as part of a broad spectrum of social and legal methods used in the post 9/11 War on Terror that have the overall effect of "casting out" Muslims from the protection of both civil and human rights law. As such, the anti-shari'ah laws which form a part of this edifice of exclusion must be taken seriously. The Article concludes with the suggestion that states should refuse to participate in the Manichean construction of the Muslim enemy in a global War on Terror, and that we should recognize that our security depends, not on the ongoing exclusion of Muslims, but on their participation and cooperation.


This paper introduces a new encoder-decoder architecture that is trained to reconstruct images by disentangling the salient information of the image and the values of attributes directly in the latent space. As a result, after training, our model can generate different realistic versions of an input image by varying the attribute values. By using continuous attribute values, we can choose how much a specific attribute is perceivable in the generated image. This property could allow for applications where users can modify an image using sliding knobs, like faders on a mixing console, to change the facial expression of a portrait, or to update the color of some objects. Compared to the state-of-the-art which mostly relies on training adversarial networks in pixel space by altering attribute values at train time, our approach results in much simpler training schemes and nicely scales to multiple attributes. We present evidence that our model can significantly change the perceived value of the attributes while preserving the naturalness of images.


The objective of this paper was to use a modified Jones (1996) natural capital inventory model to construct a baseline inventory of species, as well as the number of individual specimens against which future increases and decreases in the fern inventory of NZ University can be measured. By comparing historical records to the fern inventory, the paper provides some preliminary views on the university's stewardship of ferns. The study found that although the natural inventory model developed by Jones (1996) has utility in informing research into measuring and inventory of biodiversity and natural assets, it has inherent limitations when applied to situations involving complex accountabilities. While the relative simplicity of the model makes it a helpful tool for thinking about management of natural capital in 'wilderness' contexts, its usefulness in urban and already modified environments is more doubtful. A new model which takes into account complex accountability relationships was developed. This is the first paper that considers the accounting for biodiversity by a higher education provider.


Although standard works on the Emancipation of 1861, Russian and Western, reveal that the division of land and other resources between erstwhile masters and serfs was to be laid down in land charters (ustavnye gramoty) and brokered by newly appointed peace mediators, little attention has been devoted to the texts of the documents and the "negotiating" process that led to their finalization.• Soviet scholars have, however, devoted much attention to those terms that served as indicators of the massive expropriation of lands formerly in peasant use through the system of socalled cutoffs (otrezki), a notion backed by Lenin's unimpeachable authority. In 1958, P. A. Zaionchkovskii devoted an entire monograph to the question based not only on his own investigations but also those of his students (2,457 charters from sixteen uezdy or provincial districts) and other scholars, most notably B. G. Litvak (with S. S. Phillipov) on the province of Moscow (3,025 charters).


Several studies on ticks infesting small mammals, including elephant shrews, have been conducted in South Africa; however, these studies have included only a single four-toed elephant shrew and no hedgehogs. This study thus aimed to identify and quantify the ixodid ticks infesting four-toed elephant shrews and Southern African hedgehogs. Four-toed elephant shrews (Petrodromus tetradactylus) were trapped in dense shrub undergrowth in a nature reserve in north-eastern KwaZulu-Natal. They were separately housed, first in cages and later in glass terraria fitted with wire-mesh bases to allow detached ticks to fall through for collection. Southern African hedgehogs (Atelerix frontalis) were hand caught on a farm in the eastern region of the Northern Cape Province and all visible ticks were collected by means of tweezers while the animals were anaesthetised. The ticks from each animal were preserved separately in 70% ethanol for later identification and counting. The immature stages of five ixodid tick species were collected from the elephant shrews, of which Rhipicephalus muehlensi was the most common. It has not been recorded previously on any species of elephant shrew. Three ixodid tick species were collected from the hedgehogs. Large numbers of adult Haemaphysalis colesbergensis, which has not been encountered previously on hedgehogs, were collected from these animals. Four-toed elephant shrews are good hosts of the larvae and nymphs of R. muehlensi, and Southern African hedgehogs are good hosts of adult H. colesbergensis.


Policy decisions aimed at improving farm animal welfare involve balancing several competing objectives. Not only do such decisions involve tradeoffs between social, ethical, economic and welfare considerations, animal welfare itself is a multi-dimensional concept and some husbandry practices may satisfy some welfare needs but fail to satisfy others. Multi-criteria decision analysis is a decision theoretic tool that has been used to inform decision making in fields such as environmental policy, urban and regional planning, and biosecurity – all of which are characterised by competing goals and multiple stake-holders. This paper presents a preliminary multi-criteria framework for the analysis of animal welfare policies at the national level using indoor housing options for layer hens as an empirical example. Preliminary results are presented, but major emphasis is placed on highlighting the information needed to make such a framework both transparent and tractable.


Recent work introduces the AI2 Reasoning Challenge (ARC) and the associated ARC dataset that partitions open domain, complex science questions into an Easy Set and a Challenge Set. That work includes an analysis of 100 questions with respect to the types of knowledge and reasoning required to answer them. However, it does not include clear definitions of these types, nor does it offer information about the quality of the labels or the annotation process used. In this paper, we introduce a novel interface for human annotation of science question-answer pairs with their respective knowledge and reasoning types, in order that the classification of new questions may be improved. We build on the classification schema proposed by prior work on the ARC dataset, and evaluate the effectiveness of our interface with a preliminary study involving 10 participants.


Accelerated carbonation of ultramafic mine tailings has the potential to offset CO2 emissions produced by mining ores from Cu-Ni-platinum group element, podiform chromite, diamondiferous kimberlite, and historical chrysotile deposits. Treatments such as acid leaching, reaction of tailings with elevated concentrations of gaseous CO2, and optimization of tailings pore water saturation have been shown to enhance CO2 sequestration rates in laboratory settings. The next challenge is to deploy treatment technologies on the pilot and field scale while minimizing cost, energy input, and adverse environmental impacts. Implementation of accelerated tailings carbonation at field scale will ideally make use of in situ treatments or modified ore-processing routes that employ conventional technology and expertise and operate at close to ambient temperatures and pressures. Here, we describe column experiments designed to trial two geochemical treatments that address these criteria: (1) direct reaction of partially saturated ultramafic tailings with synthetic flue gas from power generation (10% CO2 in N-2) and (2) repeated heap leaching of ultramafic tailings with dilute sulfuric acid. In the first experiment, we report rapid carbonation of brucite [Mg(OH)(2)] in the presence of 10% CO2 gas within tailings sampled from the Woodsreef chrysotile mine, New South Wales, Australia. Within four weeks, we observe a doubling of the amount of CO2 stored within minerals relative to what is achieved after three decades of passive mineral carbonation via air capture in the field. Our simulated heap leaching experiments, treated daily with 0.08 M H2SO4, produce high-Mg leachates that have the potential to sequester 21.2 kg CO2 m(-2) which is approximately one to two orders of magnitude higher than the rate of passive carbonation of the Wood-sreef mine tailings. Although some nesquehonite (MgCO3 center dot 3H(2)O) forms from these leachates, most of the Mg is precipitated as Mg sulfate minerals instead. Therefore, an acid other than H2SO4 could be used; otherwise, sulfate removal would be required to maximize CO2 sequestration potential from acid heap leaching treatments. Reactive transport modeling (MIN3P) is employed to simulate acid leaching experiments and predict the effects of heap leaching for up to five years. Finally, our synchrotron X-ray fluorescence microscopy results for leached tailings material reveal that valuable trace metals (Fe, Ni, Mn, Co, Cr) become highly concentrated within secondary Fe (hydr)oxide minerals at the pH neutralization horizon within our column experiments. This discrete horizon migrates downward, and our reactive transport models indicate it will become increasingly enriched in first-row transition metals in response to continued acid leaching. Acid-leaching treatments for accelerated mineral carbonation could therefore be useful for ore processing and recovery of base metals from tailings, waste rock, or low-grade ores.


Today, there is increasing awareness of the multiple dynamic roles of lipids in cell life.

Knowing how lipid molecular species are organized, interact with proteins, and change with environmental stress and metabolic state is crucial to understanding the membrane structure and the cellular functions.

The present view of lipid biology arises from the availability of technologies able to detect even minor lipid components with short lifetimes. In the late 1990s, the technical innovation in mass spectrometry led to the development of "lipidomics" as an evolution of lipid biochemistry. Furthermore, progress in microscopy and the availability of many types of fluorescent probes, together with genetic engineering, presently offer the possibility to move quickly towards lipid systems biology. As a consequence, besides being able to analyze major and minor lipids of all structures and sizes by mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance, we can study topology, structural organization, and dynamics of lipids by microscopy and fluorescent probes in living cells and microbes.

Lipids are among the taxonomic traits that can be used to clearly delineate the archaea from all other organisms. Archaeal phospholipids are built on glycero-1-phosphate and contain ether-linked isoprenoid chains, while bacterial and eukaryal lipids are constituted of fatty acids ester-linked to glycero-3-phosphate. The radical structural differences between lipids of archaea and bacteria or eukaryotes raise many questions about early evolution of cell membranes.

This special issue contains selected papers dealing with archaeal phospholipid biosynthetic pathways, physical chemical properties and biotechnological applications of archaeal lipids, mass spectrometry lipid analyses and lipids of the archaeal viruses.

An updated phylogenic analysis of enzymes involved in archaeal phospholipid biosynthetic pathways is presented by the group of D. Moreira. The biosynthetic pathways have also been analyzed from the experimental point of view in a study of the group of H. Hemmii, which has expressed 4 genes involved in the biosynthesis of archaeal phospholipids in E. coli resulting in the production of archaeal-type lipids in the bacterium; in the future such engineered E. coli cells may serve to test the properties of mixed membranes constituted of both archaeal and bacterial phospholipids.

Lipid components of the membranes of Pyrococcus furiosus have been analyzed by MALDI/TOF-MS coupled to TLC in a study of S. Lobasso et al.; while lipids of uncultured methanogens present in geological samples have been detailed characterized by ESI-MS by M. Y. Yoshinaga et al.

The ability of archaeal lipids to act as adjuvant in vaccines designed to give protection against solid tumor has been examined in a study by G. D. Sprott et al.

A review article by E. Roine and D. H. Bamford describes the specific lipid components of viral membranes of archaeal viruses, in the frame of their possible functional roles in the mechanism of infection.

The chemical physical properties of the lipid core of membranes constituted of archaeal diether lipids have been examined in a study by A. Ota et al. by using fluorescence steady-state anisotropy and electron paramagnetic resonance measurements and in a review article of P. L. Chong et al. where the role of cyclopentane rings in the lipid chains of tetraether lipids on membrane fluidity is examined.

Finally an interesting contribution of Y. Koga comparatively examines the different mode of adaptation to high temperature of archaea and bacteria pointing out the role that differences in chemical physical properties of archaeal and bacterial lipids might have played in the differentiation of archaea and bacteria during evolution.

We hope that this issue will contribute to the understanding of the multiple roles of lipids in the cell biology of archaea and will stimulate further investigation in this field, opened by the pioneering studies of Morris Kates in the 60s.

Angela Corcelli

Parkson Lee-Gau Chong

Yosuke Koga


This thesis investigates the relationship between the apocalyptic narrative and the postmodern novel. It explores and builds on Patricia Waugh"s hypothesis in Practising Postmodernism: Reading Modernism (1992) which suggests that that the postmodern is characterised by an apocalyptic sense of crisis, and argues that there is in fact a strong relationship between the apocalyptic and the postmodern. It does so through an exploration of apocalyptic narratives and themes in five postmodern novels. It also draws on additional supporting material which includes literary and cultural theory and criticism, as well as historical theory. In using the novel as a medium through which to explore apocalyptic narratives, this thesis both assumes and affirms the novel"s importance as a cultural artefact which reflects the concerns of the age in which it is written. I suggest that each of the novels discussed in this thesis demonstrates the close relationship between the apocalyptic and the postmodern through society"s concern over the direction of history, the validity of meta-narratives, and other cultural phenomenon, such as war, the development of nuclear weaponry, and terrorism. Although the scope of this thesis is largely confined to the historical-cultural epoch known as postmodernity, it also draws on literature and cultural criticism from earlier periods so as to provide a more comprehensive framework for investigating apocalyptic ideas and their importance inside the postmodern novel. A number of modernist writers are therefore referred to or quoted throughout this thesis, as are other important thinkers from preceding periods whose ideas are especially pertinent. The present thesis was researched and written between March 2010 and August 2011 and is dedicated to all of those people who lost their lives in the apocalyptic events of the February 22 nd Christchurch earthquake.


This PhD project is motivated by the need to develop and achieve better and energy efficient computing through the use of parallelism and heterogeneous systems. Our contribution consists of both theoretical aspects, as well as in-depth and comprehensive empirical studies that aim to provide more insight into parallel and heterogeneous computing. Our first problem is a theoretical problem that focuses on the scheduling of a special category of jobs known as deteriorating jobs. These kind of jobs will require more effort to complete them if postponed to a later time. They are intended to model several industrial processes including steel production, fire-fighting and financial management. We study the problem in the context of parallel machine scheduling in an online setting where jobs have arbitrary release times. Our main results show that List Scheduling is $(1+b_{max})$-competitive and that no deterministic algorithm is better than $(1+b_{max})^{1-\frac{1}{m}}$, where $b_{max}$ is the largest deteriorating rate. We also extend our results to online deterministic algorithms and show that no deterministic online algorithm is better than $(1+b_{max})$-competitive. Our next study concerns the scheduling of $n$ jobs with precedence constraints on $m$ parallel machines. We are interested in the precedence constraint known as chain precedence constraint where each job can have at most one predecessor and at most one successor. The jobs are modelled as directed acyclic graphs where nodes represent the jobs and edges represent the precedence constraints between jobs. The jobs have a strict deadline that must be met. The parallel machines are considered to be unrelated and a communication network connects each pair of machines. Execution of the jobs on the machines as well as communication across the network incurs costs in the form of time and energy. These costs are given by cost matrices that covers processing and communication. The goal is to construct a feasible schedule that minimizes the total energy required to execute the chain of jobs on the machines, such that all deadlines are met. We present a dynamic programming solution to the problem that leads to a pseudo polynomial time algorithm with running time $O(nm^2d_{max})$, where $d_{max}$ is the largest deadline. We show that the algorithm computes an optimal schedule where one exists. We then proceed to a similar problem that involves the scheduling of jobs to minimize flow time plus energy. This problem is based on a dynamic speed scaling heuristic in literature that is able to adjust the speed of a processor based on the number of \emph{active jobs}, called AJC. We present a comprehensive empirical study that consists of several job selection, speed selection and processor allocation heuristics. We also consider both single processor and multi processor settings. Our main goal is to investigate the viability of designing a fixed-speed counterpart for AJC, that is not as computationally intensive as AJC, while being very simple. We also evaluate the performance of this fixed speed heuristic and compare it with that of AJC. Our fourth and final study involves the use of graphics processing unit (GPU) as an accelerator for compute intensive tasks. The GPU has become a very popular multi processor for heterogeneous computing both from an economical point of view and performance standpoint. Firstly, we contribute to the development of a Bioinformatics tool, called GapsMis, by implementing a heterogeneous version that uses graphics processors for acceleration. GapsMis is a tool designed for the alignment of sequences, like protein and DNA sequences, and allows for the insertion of gaps in the alignment. Then we present a case study that aims to highlight the various aspects, including benefits and challenges, involved in developing heterogeneous applications that is vendor-agnostic. In order to do this we select four algorithms as case studies including GapsMis and the algorithm presented in our second problem. The other two algorithms are based on the Velocity-Verlet integration and the Fruchterman-Reingold force-based method for graph layout. We make use of the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) and C++ for implementation of the algorithms on a range of graphics processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and NVIDIA Corporation. We evaluate several factors that can affect performance of these applications on each hardware. We also compare the performance of our algorithms in a multi-GPU setting and against single and multi-core CPU implementations. Furthermore, several metrics are defined to capture several aspects of performance including execution time of application kernel(s), execution time of application including communication times, throughput, power and energy consumption.


Machine learning is an increasingly used computational tool within human-computer interaction research. While most researchers currently utilize an iterative approach to refining classifier models and performance, we propose that ensemble classification techniques may be a viable and even preferable alternative. In ensemble learning, algorithms combine multiple classifiers to build one that is superior to its components. In this paper, we present EnsembleMatrix, an interactive visualization system that presents a graphical view of confusion matrices to help users understand relative merits of various classifiers. EnsembleMatrix allows users to directly interact with the visualizations in order to explore and build combination models. We evaluate the efficacy of the system and the approach in a user study. Results show that users are able to quickly combine multiple classifiers operating on multiple feature sets to produce an ensemble classifier with accuracy that approaches best-reported performance classifying images in the CalTech-101 dataset.


Cities are complex systems, comprising of many interacting parts. How we simulate and understand causality in urban systems is continually evolving. Over the last decade the agent-based modeling (ABM) paradigm has provided a new lens for understanding the effects of interactions of individuals and how through such interactions macro structures emerge, both in the social and physical environment of cities. However, such a paradigm has been hindered due to computational power and a lack of large fine scale datasets. Within the last few years we have witnessed a massive increase in computational processing power and storage, combined with the onset of Big Data. Today geographers find themselves in a data rich era. We now have access to a variety of data sources (e.g., social media, mobile phone data, etc.) that tells us how, and when, individuals are using urban spaces. These data raise several questions: can we effectively use them to understand and model cities as complex entities? How well have ABM approaches lent themselves to simulating the dynamics of urban processes? What has been, or will be, the influence of Big Data on increasing our ability to understand and simulate cities? What is the appropriate level of spatial analysis and time frame to model urban phenomena? Within this paper we discuss these questions using several examples of ABM applied to urban geography to begin a dialogue about the utility of ABM for urban modeling. The arguments that the paper raises are applicable across the wider research environment where researchers are considering using this approach.


Japanese women, who comprise more than 40% of the workforce, are essential to the Japanese economy but are not typically thought of as managers. Jean Renshaw challenges that perception in this pathbreaking book. Traditional norms of lifetime employment, the seniority system, and the bureaucratic, tightly knit nature of Japanese industry all serve to restrict women's entry into management. Despite these enormous barriers, the last ten years have seen the number of Japanese women managers almost double. Renshaw interviewed over 150 successful women managers of Japan, exploring family backgrounds, personal characteristics, socialization, professional experiences, and corporate cultures to discover the secrets of their success. Showing the reader where and how this "invisible evolution" is occurring, Renshaw surveys the history of Japanese women in management and reveals the potential of the rising female managerial class to change in profound ways the male-dominated culture of modern Japan.


This paper gives the main findings of research designed to inform decisions about the format of a food selection guide, subsequently published as the National Food Guide. The research involved 2074 members of the public and 230 professionals involved in nutrition education. Different formats for the guide were assessed for performance (how well the information was understood and recalled) and preference with a quota sample of C2 and D socioeconomic groups. Preferences were also assessed with a sample of various professionals involved in nutrition education. The investigations involved different versions of the guide which varied in shape, background colour, presentational style (whether the foods depicted were many or few, photographic or drawn) and in the wording of the food group headings. The key findings were that exposure to a guide can have a significant effect on people's understanding of guide concepts and that some aspects of the design enhanced that effect. In particular, guides which were in the shape of a tilted plate were better at conveying nutritional concepts than those which were pyramid-shaped. Members of the public and nutrition educators both preferred a plate shape but, whereas the public preferred a tilted plate to a flat plate, the nutrition educators thought that a flat plate would be more appealing to their clients than a tilted plate.


The book brings together scholarship on three different forms of state violence, examining each for what it can tell us about the conditions under which states use violence and the significance of violence to our understanding of states. The contributors to this book demonstrate that states of violence have a history and sociology. Wherever the state does act violently, however, the legitimacy of its acts must be engaged with the real facts of war, capital punishment, and the ugly realities of death. This book calls into question the legitimacy of state uses of violence and mounts a sustained effort at interpretation, sense making, and critique. This book suggests that condemning the state's decisions to use lethal force is not a simple matter of abolishing the death penalty or – to take another exemplary case of the killing state – demanding that the state engage only in just (publicly declared and justified) wars. It points out that even such overt instances of lethal force are more elusive as targets of critique than one might think. Indeed, altering such decisions might do little to change the essential relationship of the state to violence. To change that relationship, we must also attend to the violent state as a state of mind, a state of mind that is not just a social or psychological condition but also a moral commitment or a philosophical position.


No single unifying theory exists that explains the plethora of behaviors that bring individuals before the courts on a daily basis. No biological, social, or familial model for criminal behavior is without limitations, or exempt from controversy and criticism. We suggest, however, that it is appropriate, and often necessary, for the psychiatric expert to advance lucid, intelligible, and simplified psychodynamic formulation, either alone or in conjunction with another explanatory model of criminal behavior, to assist the court in its understanding and disposition of a given case. In some cases, apparent criminal behaviors result when unconscious motivating factors, particularly unconscious fantasies, find expression in conscious life. In this article, we consider the etiologic role of unconscious fantasy in certain seemingly inexplicable criminal behaviors. The concept of unconscious fantasy is explained and a detailed case description and formulation are provided in order to illustrate the central role of unconscious fantasy in some of these behaviors. Recommendations are offered for the manner in which psychodynamic formulation should be presented in reports and in courtroom testimony through reference to the author's experience.


Ontologies are the corner stone of data modeling and knowledge representation, and engineering an ontology is a complex task in which domain knowledge, ontological accuracy and computational properties need to be carefully balanced. As with any engineering task, the identification and documentation of common patterns is important, and Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) provide ontology designers with a strong connection to requirements and a better communication of their semantic content and intent. This book, Advances in Pattern-Based Ontology Engineering, contains 23 extended versions of selected papers presented at the annual Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns (WOP) between 2017 and 2020. This yearly event, which attracts a large number of researchers and professionals in the field of ontology engineering and ontology design patterns, covers issues related to quality aspects of ontology engineering and ODPs for data and knowledge representation, and is usually co-located with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), apart from WOP 2020, which was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Topics covered by the papers collected here focus on recent advances in ontology design and patterns, and range from a method to instantiate content patterns, through a proposal on how to document a content pattern, to a number of patterns emerging in ontology modeling in various situations and applications. The book provides an overview of important advances in ontology engineering and ontology design patterns, and will be of interest to all those working in the field. © 2021 Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft AKA GmbH, Berlin. All rights reserved.


A fusion of the promoter of the Medicago sativa flavanone-3-hydroxylase gene to the gus reporter gene was introduced into three leguminous plants, M. truncatula, M. sativa subsp. varia, and Vicia hirsuta. Expression of this fusion was detected in the parenchyma cells surrounding the vascular tissues in the nodules of the Medicago spp. plants, correlating with the presence of flavonoid compounds detected in situ in these cells. In V. hirsuta nodules, the fusion was expressed in the meristematic region, where high accumulation of flavonoids could also be detected. Our results indicate that flavonoids of the dihydroflavonol pathway are not found in the same tissues of the nodules in these three species, where they may play different roles. In light of these results, the possible roles of the F3H products in this organ are discussed.


In 2011, the federal government accelerated payments to their small business contractors, spanning virtually every county and industry in the US. We study the impact of this reform on county-sector employment growth over the subsequent three years. Despite firms being paid just 15 days sooner, we find payroll increased 10 cents for each accelerated dollar, with two-thirds of the effect coming from an increase in new hires and the balance from an increase in earnings. Importantly, however, we document substantial crowding out of non-treated firms employment, particularly in counties with low rates of unemployment. Our results highlight an important channel through which financing constraints can be alleviated for small firms, but also emphasize the general-equilibrium effects of large-scale interventions, which can lead to a substantially lower net impact on aggregate outcomes.


Emerging immigrant communities differ from established communities in terms of needs and available resources. Students in these emerging communities may still be acculturating to new contexts and establishing their ethnic identities, which may impact their ability to engage in planning for the future. The current study examines what impact these cultural identity variables, in addition to perceptions of barriers to college entrance, would have on educational aspirations and college-going self-efficacy beliefs of Latino adolescents. Findings from 171 middle- and high school Latino students from immigrant families indicated that public ethnic regard and resilience to barriers were positively associated with college-going self-efficacy, and Anglo orientation had a trend-level effect, while perceived barriers were negatively related to that outcome. Private ethnic regard and person-based barriers were negatively associated with educational aspirations. Generation status, gender, mother's education, and age were control variables. Implications for research and practice are provided, focusing on perceived barriers and self-efficacy beliefs.


We consider problems for which one has incomplete binary matrices that evolve with time (e.g., the votes of legislators on particular legislation, with each year characterized by a different such matrix). An objective of such analysis is to infer structure and inter-relationships underlying the matrices, here defined by latent features associated with each axis of the matrix. In addition, it is assumed that documents are available for the entities associated with at least one of the matrix axes. By jointly analyzing the matrices and documents, one may be used to inform the other within the analysis, and the model offers the opportunity to predict matrix values (e.g., votes) based only on an associated document (e.g., legislation). The research presented here merges two areas of machine-learning that have previously been investigated separately: incomplete-matrix analysis and topic modeling. The analysis is performed from a Bayesian perspective, with efficient inference constituted via Gibbs sampling. The framework is demonstrated by considering all voting data and available documents (legislation) during the 220-year lifetime of the United States Senate and House of Representatives.