DRAMATIC MONETARY FLUCTUAtions have, in recent years, markedly reduced international confidence in the dollar, especially in the Asia-Pacific region where the dollar has served for years as a foundation for local currencies and international trade. Questioning the region's reliance on the dollar, economists and Asian leaders are beginning to see the Japanese yen as a viable potential successor to the dollar as the dollar as the region's chief currency. In 1994, the US dollar dipped below the symbolically significant level of 100 Japanese yen. Since January 1995, the yen has risen against the dollar by 20 percent. These signals indicate the rising influence of the Japanese yen in international markets. The vague but evocative phrase "yen bloc" is appearing with greater frequency in analysts' predictions about Asia's monetary future. In the past, this term has been used to describe a wide variety of phenomena, but the most recent and prominent discussions usually refer to a revamped Asian currency system with the yen as the focal point. One of the major characteristics of such a yen bloc would be huge increases in the use of the yen in Asian international trade and currency markets. Only 15 percent of Japanese imports and 40 percent of Japanese exports are presently denominated in yen, according to Japan's Finance Minister Masayoshi Takemura; these percentages are significantly smaller than corresponding percentages for the United States, Germany, and other economies of comparable size. However, intra-Asian trade is increasing rapidly, thereby eroding the relative prominence of the United States as a trading partner. As Japan's role as a market for goods from the rest of Asia expands, exporters in those countries should begin to deal and to analyze options in terms of yen. A similar effect should follow in other Asian nations as they import more from Japan. Another major component of a monetary yen bloc is a significant increase in the proportion of Asian central banks' foreign-exchange reserves that are denominated in yen. Currently, this fraction is incongruously lower than the nations' ratio of Japanese trade to their total trade. For example, South Korea held less than 15 percent of its foreign-exchange reserves in yen in 1989. In contrast, between 20 and 25 percent of South Korea's international trade that year was conducted with Japan. Increased reserves of yen can lessen the exchange-rate risks associated with these transactions. Furthermore, most nations in the region have received yen-denominated loans from Japan. The higher price of the yen means that repayment of those loans will place a heavy burden on those nations unless they acquire yen for themselves immediately in order to alleviate the rapid upward spiral of those debt burdens. Economists have also claimed that these two major components of the yen bloc will be accompanied by the decision of Asian governments to peg their national currencies to the yen. Despite the yen's appreciation against the dollar and other major currencies, trade is increasing between Japan and its neighbors. Currencies stabilized against the yen would significantly reduce the risks presently faced by Asian nations in their economic transactions with Japan. While these three traits are generally accepted as the most fundamental foundations of a monetary yen bloc, the specific characteristics of such a structure are more difficult to predict. For example, there is the question of which nations would participate. South Korea, Taiwan, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)--Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Brunei--are the most likely to be involved, but speculations about the potential role of Australia, New Zealand and the People's Republic of China abound. Another point of contention among experts is the pace at which a yen bloc might develop. The Nomura Research Institute in Japan reported that a de facto yen bloc might emerge by 2025; a Deutsche Bank economist, however, claimed that such a structure could take shape as early as 2005. …


Background: Water management is a key focus area globally, and especially for the state of Qatar given its extremely arid environment. As such, research to develop technologies to enhance beneficial re-use of treated industrial waste water is recognized as a key challenge in this region. As a part of the Water Re-Use Research Program at ExxonMobil Research Qatar, a model was developed in collaboration with Simon Fraser University (Canada) for predicting the environmental fate of contaminants in constructed wetlands. Objective: This work will aid in design and monitoring of engineered wetlands to support water reuse applications. Methods: This model provides a method to estimate the extent to which contaminants of various kinds can be expected to be removed from wetlands through a combination of transformation and transport processes under various environmental conditions and wetland characteristics. The model was constructed to represent steady-state conditions and is based on conservation of mass principles. The model was developed for the use of Type I and Type II chemicals. Type I chemicals include organic substances and Type II chemicals include trace metals and inorganic substances .The model combines calculations for (i) environmental distribution of contaminants in aquatic systems; (ii) uptake, translocation and biotransformation of contaminants in vegetation; (iii) bioaccumulation in aquatic biota of wetlands; and (iv) toxicity in aquatic biota. Model inputs include wetland characteristics (e.g. compartment volumes, dimensions, organic carbon content, biotic growth rates); environmental conditions (e.g. Inflow& temperature); contaminant properties (e.g. molecular weight, degradation half-lives). The model outputs include predicted concentrations in various wetland compartments and mass balance inventory characterizing mass distribution and various loss processes. Results: Application of the model was tested for pyrene, arsenic and a naphthenic acid. The results show distinct differences in the predicted ability of wetlands to remove these contaminants from waste water. Conclusion: The evaluative model presented in this study provides useful insights that can guide further studies for designing and monitoring the effectiveness of engineered wetlands for wastewater reclamation purposes.


As 2020 began, experts on political violence were already alarmed by increasing mass shootings, hate crimes, police killings, and political polarization in the United States. They did not imagine how much worse it would get: between the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, street protests in which Americans killed each other and the police attacked protesters, government disinformation campaigns, and incitement to violence by the President, we arrived at an Election Day when, as political scientist Brian Klaas put it, "all the red flags that you see in other countries that have political violence are being raised in the United States."

In those other countries – which are often transitioning to democratic governance after autocratic or military rule, wars, or mass violence – Western governments including the United States' try to reduce the risk of violence by providing advice and funding to strengthen electoral systems. Codes of conduct for elections – typically agreements in which candidates and other members of political parties commit to uphold certain standards during and after an election campaign – is one tool they offer. The first such codes focused on technical matters like campaign finance regulation, but since the 1980s they have also tried to prevent election-related violence by discouraging certain types of speech and behavior.

This includes dangerous speech, which we define as any form of expression (e.g. speech, text, or images) that can increase the risk that its audience will condone or participate in violence against members of another group. Such speech has abounded in the United States in recent years, and has become even more common and more potent in the final weeks of the campaign.

Since this problem will not end with this election, we have examined electoral codes from around the world for attempts to guide or govern speech that might be used in the United States to reduce the risk of violence in future elections.


This thesis presents work concerning the analysis of behaviour specific facial motion and its automatic synthesis. Psychology research has shown that facial motion provides important cues to the human visual system for recognition of emotion, identity and gender. Similarly, in Computer Vision facial motion information has been used in face and facial expression recognition. However, the fact that facial motion is behaviour specific has not yet been exploited in facial animation systems. Two parametric modelling techniques have been evaluated, MultiVariate AutoRegressive (VAR) temporal modelling and a tensor framework for modelling facial motion dynamics. Both modelling techniques adopt a 'black box' approach to facial motion modelling, where the emphasis of modelling is on motion information and not on textural information. Of these methods, VAR modelling is found to be more suitable for motion synthesis. Nevertheless, it is found that the tensor framework is more suited than VAR modelling as a potential tool for facial motion analysis. It is found that the VAR modelling technique encapsulated the temporal and motion dynamics of facial motion behaviour. VAR models constructed from behaviour specific facial motion generate facial motion sequences which are similar but non-identical to the original facial motion training data (i.e. 'synthesis by example'). These sequences are novel and can be indefinitely long. Moreover, VAR model analysis demonstrated that the models themselves are behaviour specific. VAR models constructed from gender specific motion were found to have similar statistics to the original motion data. Using these models a human psychology experiment was conducted where it was found that participants could distinguish between synthetic male and female facial motion. Emotion specific VAR models were incorporated into a prototype animation tool. This tool enables a user to explore an interactive 'emotion space' and by traversing this space novel emotion specific sequences are automatically generated 'on the fly'. The study shows that the tensor framework can encapsulate facial motion information. Using speed domain facial motion tensor framework (which encapsulates motion information only) can be used successfully for facial motion recognition (emotion and gender), with recognition greater than chance. Furthermore, it is found that tensor gender recognition results were comparable to those of a human psychology experiment when both utilised the same facial motion data. The results and observations of VAR modelling and tensor framework testing corroborate psychology and computer vision research that motion alone is sufficient to encapsulate emotion specific and gender specific information. Additionally, results indicate that emotion specific information is encoded in a shorter temporal period than gender/identity specific information. This has implications in the automatic synthesis of new facial motion sequences and possible animation systems which wish to exploit motion to generate believable realistic CG characters. In addition the recognition of emotion and gender from just motion/speed information could have relevance to security systems where textural information (low resolution imagery) is poor.


Conventional operating systems, like Silicon Graphics' IRIX and IBM's AIX, adopt a single memory management algorithm. The choice of this algorithm is usually based on its good performance in relation to the set of programs executed in the computer. Some approximation of LRU (least-recently used) is usually adopted. This choice can take to certain situations in that the computer presents a bad performance due to its bad behavior for certain programs. A possible solution for such cases is to enable each program to have a specific management algorithm (local strategy) that is adapted to its memory access pattern. For example, programs with sequential access pattern, such as SOR, should be managed by the algorithm MRU (most-recently used) because its bad performance when managed by LRU. In this strategy it is very important to decide the memory partitioning strategy among the programs in execution in a multiprogramming environment. Our strategy named CAPR (Compiler-Aided Page Replacement) analyze the pattern of memory references from the source program of an application and communicate these characteristics to the operating system that will make the choice of the best management algorithm and memory partitioning strategy. This paper evaluates the influence of the management algorithms and memory partitioning strategy in the global system performance and in the individual performance of each program. It is also presented a comparison of this local strategy with the classic global strategy and the viability of the strategy is analyzed. The obtained results showed a difference of at least an order of magnitude in the number of page faults among the algorithms LRU and MRU in the global strategy. After that, starting from the analysis of the intrinsic behavior of each application in relation to its memory access pattern and of the number of page faults, an optimization procedure of memory system performance was developed for multiprogramming environments. This procedure allows to decide system performance parameters, such as memory partitioning strategy among the programs and the appropriate management algorithm for each program. The results showed that, with the local management strategy, it was obtained a reduction of at least an order of magnitude in the number of page faults and a reduction in the mean memory usage of about 3 to 4 times in relation to the global strategy. This performance improvement shows the viability of our strategy. It is also presented some implementation aspects of this strategy in traditional operating systems.


To the Editor: I just returned from my state Academy of Family Physicians annual meeting. I noted that time and again the moderators would introduce a speaker as a "diplomat" of the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM). In general, a diplomat is an individual who uses skill and tact in dealing with other persons (which physicians certainly do), and this designation usually describes an ambassador appointed to represent a government in its relations and dealings with other governments. To the uninitiated, then, a "diplomat" of the ABFM would have about the same status as a public relations specialist. A "diplomate," however, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is "one who has received a diploma, especially a physician certified as a specialist by a board of examiners." As ABFM diplomates, we demonstrate to our colleagues that we have acquired a broad body of medical knowledge through intensive examination by a national board of senior family medicine specialists. However, do our patients understand what "diplomate" status means? How many of our political leaders appreciate the significance of the title of diplomat? I submit that the above is much more than a mere matter of semantics and has significance in a much larger context, not only in the delivery of primary health care but also in shaping health care policy. It is entirely possible for non-board-certified family medicine physicians to practice, albeit perhaps with some possible restrictions on issues like insurance participation and medical staff membership. However, the family medicine physician who has pursued and earned diplomate status has demonstrated a dedication to scholarship and expertise in the practice of our discipline. Simply put, diplomate status shows a personal commitment to excellence, and every ABFM diplomate knows what rigorous requirements his or her fellow diplomates had to meet to earn the title. However, many among the general public and important decision makers in the political leadership very well may not appreciate exactly what ABFM diplomate status entails. By clarifying their understanding of the significance of ABFM diplomate status, I believe that we enhance our credibility in contributing to the discussion of these critical issues. Considering the current discussions for use of midlevel providers to assume an ever larger role in delivery of primary care, if the specialty of Family Medicine is to succeed and thrive in the future it is critical for family medicine physicians to assertively define and defend our role in the health care delivery arena and to enlist allies. Thus, as diplomates of the ABFM, each of us must to educate our patients, the public, and legislators about the unique qualifications of the board-certified family medicine physician as distinguished from other primary health care providers. Midlevel providers play an important role in health care delivery, but this complements—is does not replace—the physician. The knowledge base and skill set developed through medical school and residency training and manifested by attainment of diplomate status set the board-certified family physician apart. In addition, it is essential for us as family medicine physicians to assume a more active role in advising and shaping the reform of the health care system. Passionate, board-certified family medicine physicians are among the best qualified to help guide this task and ensure the process is focused on patients and centered around primary care. The insight that family physicians are equipped to bring to this process are important to help reduce the administrative and regulatory burdens that add to health care costs and take time away from patient care, reform medical liability laws, reduce the costs of pharmaceutical therapy, and assist in making primary and preventive care and mental health and substance abuse services more readily available to patients. All family physicians can attest that our discipline is currently buffeted by numerous pressures from within and without: the Medicare Access CHIP Reauthorization Act, with its associated reporting requirements; the impact of noncompliant patients on quality metrics tied to compensation; increases in prior authorization requirements for testing and therapy; negotiations with payers; patient satisfaction scores; increased time spent on administrative and documentation tasks; maintenance of certification; and numerous other forces affecting our daily practices. Coupled with the debate regarding changes in health care delivery and policy, as noted earlier, it is understandable that many family physicians are questioning what the future of our discipline will be. Several years ago representatives from numerous family medicine organizations convened to define the role of family physicians in order to establish a clear identity for our specialty in the future:


A Cat, A Seagull, An Impossible Task...Caught up in an oil spill, a dying seagull scrambles ashore to lay her final egg and lands on a balcony, where she meets Zorba, a big black cat from the port of Hamburg. The cat promises the seagull to look after the egg, not to eat the chick once it's hatched and - most difficult of all - to teach the baby gull to fly. Will Zorba and his feline friends honour the promise and give Lucky, the adopted little seagull, the strength to discover her true nature?A moving, uplifting and life-enhancing story with a strong environmental theme, Luis Sepulveda's instant children's classic has been a worldwide best-seller and is presented here with new drawings by acclaimed illustrator Satoshi Kitamura.


Online Search (OLS) is a key component of many popular Internet services. Datacenters running OLS consume significant amounts of energy. However, reducing their energy is challenging due to their tight response time requirements. A key aspect of OLS is that each user query goes to all or many of the nodes in the cluster, so that the overall time budget is dictated by the tail of the replies' latency distribution; replies see latency variations both in the network and compute. Previous work proposes to achieve load-proportional energy by slowing down the computation at lower datacenter loads based directly on response times (i.e., at lower loads, the proposal exploits the average slack in the time budget provisioned for the peak load). In contrast, we propose TimeTrader to reduce energy by exploiting the latency slack in the sub-critical replies which arrive before the deadline (e.g., 80% of replies are 3–4× faster than the tail). This slack is present at all loads and subsumes the previous work's load-related slack. While the previous work shifts the leaves' response time distribution to consume the slack at lower loads, TimeTrader reshapes the distribution at all loads by slowing down individual sub-critical nodes without increasing missed deadlines. TimeTrader exploits slack in both the network and compute budgets. Further, TimeTrader leverages Earliest Deadline First scheduling to largely decouple critical requests from the queuing delays of sub-critical requests which can then be slowed down without hurting critical requests. A combination of real-system measurements and at-scale simulations shows that without adding to missed deadlines, TimeTrader saves 15% and 40% energy at 90% and 30% loading, respectively, in a datacenter with 512 nodes, whereas previous work saves 0% and 30%. Further, as a proof-of-concept, we build a small-scale real implementation to evaluate TimeTrader and show 10–30% energy savings.


This study analyses whether a group of learners' productive and receptive knowledge of some of the most common phrasal verbs (PVs) is related to the frequency of those PVs. Secondly, we look at factors which may have affected the learners' PV knowledge. The learners completed two tests (productive, receptive) and were also required to complete a biodata questionnaire containing questions about age, gender and nationality, and items relating to the language instruction they received and the incidental exposure they had to English. The analysis of the data shows that there is a relationship between learner knowledge and PV frequency, and that extensive reading and watching English language films and TV programmes appear to have a positive effect on the acquisition of PVs.


Differentiated services (DiffServ) is a proposed architecture for the Internet in which various applications are supported using a simple classification scheme. Unlike its counterpart model of IntServ (integrated services) plus RSVP (resource reservation protocol), the DiffServ framework does not need to maintain large state information in core routers, and only carries out aggregate resource reservation at edge routers. Therefore, DiffServ calls for a very different routing framework from IntServ. In this paper, we propose two new QoS-based routing algorithms under the SiMO (single service, multiple options) framework for DiffServ architectures. These are kthQoSR (kth-shortest QoS routing) and EVQoSR (maximum energy value QoS routing). We also introduce QoS extensions to OSPF and compare it to our SiMO routing protocols. Our core routing strategy in SiMO, kthQoSR. is executed at the path level and selects one or more routes from a set of computed routes according to defined selection metrics. On the other hand, EVQoSR is a link level, online distributed routing algorithm. Through extensive simulation, we show that our proposed SiMO routing framework can achieve better route qualities in terms of load balancing, and network throughput.


OBJECTIVES
This systematic review examines the evidence on the effectiveness of programmes that aim to improve the oral health of Indigenous populations worldwide, as well as presents a qualitative analysis to explore the design and implementation of these initiatives.

METHODS
MEDLINE and EMBASE were searched. Studies were included if they described an oral health programme for an Indigenous population in any country worldwide. A thematic synthesis of the qualitative findings was undertaken for each study's results and discussion sections.

RESULTS
Nineteen studies were included. Sixteen studies reported positive results, twelve of which reported statistically significant findings. Three themes regarding design and implementation emerged from the qualitative analysis: (i) elements of successful programmes, (ii) challenges and barriers to successful interventions and (iii) suggestions for improvements.

CONCLUSIONS
Successful programmes considered cultural appropriateness in their design-including extensive community engagement before, during and after implementation to enhance ownership of, and thus participation in the programme. Collaborative approaches were seen as an advantage, not only with Indigenous communities, but also with local health providers and organizations, with particular emphasis on incorporation into existing services. Challenges included low community participation, unstable funding and staffing issues. In addition, future programmes should also incorporate advocacy and community development, focus on changes to public policy, utilize evidence-based interventions that include traditional models of health, attempt to secure a stable funding base, target strategies to ensure staff retention and develop interventions that target the multilevel causes of general and oral health. This review provides an evidence base that can aid in the successful design, implementation and sustainability of oral health programmes for Indigenous people in the future.


This paper examines the role of language mediators in the education and health sectors in Italy. In the Italian tradition 'language mediation' and 'intercultural mediation' are terms commonly used to describe a profession that include, but do not totally overlap with, 'community interpreting'. We will therefore be looking at language mediation rather than interpreting 'proper'. Our analysis draws on both 'hard' and 'soft' data: a study by two researchers from the Municipality of Bologna based on 27 semi-structured interviews, the results of a questionnaire-survey in the Region of Emilia Romagna and six semi-structured interviews in the Region of Marche. Using these data we look at how mediators construct professional roles and how these roles are governed by institutional mandate in the health and education sectors, two of the major domains in which language and cultural mediators operate. These two sectors are both major employers of language mediators but with — historically — two very different approaches to language mediation. We will, therefore, look at how roleconstruction is performed differently in the different sectors, how the expectations (and level of information) of service providers, the needs of the institutions, the mediators' training and their own migratory experiences impact on their role and on the rapport between the three parties. We also look at the issue of what type of shared background (cultural or migratory) is thought to be most conducive to implementing a productive working relationship. Lastly, we have attempted to contextualize our data in the local demographical, historical and socio-political situation as we believe that such factors impact quite radically on professional categories, especially those professions related to the politically volatile area of migration.


Key aspects of culture change include familiarizing oneself with how relationships are structured and encouraging an awareness of how people relate to one another on a domination/partnership continuum (Eisler & Potter, 2014). In 2013, 200 nurse leaders were asked to rate their own cultures on a continuum of domination to partnership based on Eisler's Cultural Transformation Theory (1987). Of those nurse leaders, 37.5% rated their organizations as being closer to a domination culture than a partnership culture. These findings prompted the development and delivery of a webinar series that applied Cultural Transformation Theory to healthcare culture. The attendees noted an overall change in self-rating of their healthcare culture as they learned about domination and partnership culture. This shift in rating could indicate Cultural Transformation Theory's usefulness in understanding healthcare culture, and in identifying domination and partnership relationships. In discussions during the webinar three themes emerged: 1) Healthcare culture inclines toward domination and this has an impact on patients, 2) Leadership impacts organizational culture, and 3) Leaders are unaware of domination tendencies within their own cultures. Further discussion is needed to identify strategies that support cultural changes, ultimately leading to improvements in safety, quality, and patient experience within healthcare.


This thesis presents an experimental investigation into several applications of the Raman scattering effect in communication optical fibres as well as how some of these applications can be modified to enhance the resulting performance. The majority of the work contained within is based on laboratory results using many commercially available components. The results can be divided into and presented in three main parts: Firstly, a novel application of a known effect is used to broaden Raman pump light in order to achieve a more continuous distribution of gain with respect to wavelength. Multiple experimental results are presented, all based around the prior spreading of the pump spectrum before being used in the desired transmission fibre. Gathered results show that a notable improvement can be obtained from applying such a technique along with the scope for further optimisation work. Secondly, an investigation into the interaction between the well known effect of Four Wave Mixing (FWM) and Raman scattering is provided. The work provides an introduction to the effect as well commenting on previous literature regarding the effect and its mitigation. In response to existing research experimental results are provided detailing some limitations of proposed schemes along with concepts of how further alleviation from the deleterious effects maybe obtained. Lastly, the distributed nature of the Raman gain process is explored. A novel technique on how a near constant distribution of gain can be employed is implemented practically. The application of distributed gain is then applied to the generation of optical pulses with special mathematical properties within a laboratory setting and finally the effect of pump noise upon distributed gain techniques is acknowledged.


The idea of libertarian paternalism might seem to be an oxymoron, but it is both possible and desirable for private and public institutions to influence behavior while also respecting freedom of choice. Often people's preferences are unclear and ill-formed, and their choices will inevitably be influenced by default rules, framing effects and starting points. In these circumstances, a form of paternalism cannot be avoided. Equipped with an understanding of behavioral findings of bounded rationality and bounded self-control, libertarian paternalists should attempt to steer people's choices in welfare-promoting directions without eliminating freedom of choice. It is also possible to show how a libertarian paternalist might select among the possible options and to assess how much choice to offer. Examples are given from many areas, including savings behavior, labor law, and consumer protection.


Human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC)-derived cardiomyocytes provide a promising regenerative cell therapy for cardiovascular patients and an important model system to accelerate drug discovery. However, cost-effective and time-efficient platforms must be developed to evaluate the quality of hPSC-derived cardiomyocytes during biomanufacturing. Here, we develop a non-invasive label-free live cell imaging platform to predict the efficiency of hPSC differentiation into cardiomyocytes. Autofluorescence imaging of metabolic co-enzymes is performed under varying differentiation conditions (cell density, concentration of Wnt signaling activator) across three hPSC lines.


Seven factors limiting the performance of photovoltaic solar energy converters are listed and explained. They can be classified into basic and technology determined limitations. Possibilities for improvement on technology determined limitations are investigated for the silicon solar cell. Such possibilities are: heavier p-layer doping; change of geometry, possibly by application of grid structures; improvement of the material constants; and utilization of drift fields for improved collection. Discussed are materials other than silicon in regard to their potential for better performance than that obtainable from the silicon solar cell; and finally, new methods of approach, such as the multilayer and the multiple transition solar cell. Both of these methods yield theoretically large improvements, but realization depends on further advances in compound semiconductor technology and in knowledge about localized centers in the forbidden gap. Limit conversion efficiencies of 38.2 per cent for a 3-layer cell and of 51 per cent for a 3-transition cell, compared to 23.6 per cent for a single p-n junction, single transition cell, are obtained. Also discussed are the possible merits of the application of the graded energy gap to photovoltaic energy converters, and potential improvement in collection efficiency is found for certain cases.


Synthetic peptides are valuable tools in fundamental and applied biomedical research. On one hand, these molecules provide highly efficient access to competitive inhibitors of molecular interactions and enzyme substrates by rational design. On the other hand, peptides may serve as powerful vectors to mediate cellular uptake of molecules that otherwise enter cells only poorly. The coupling of both such functionalities provides access to molecules interfering with molecular processes inside the cell. However, the combination of several functionalities on one synthetic peptide may be compromised by problems associated with the synthesis of long peptides. Native chemical ligation enables the chemoselective coupling of fully deprotected functional building blocks. However, peptide thioesters are still not accessible by standard solid-phase peptide synthesis. Here, we demonstrate the cofunctionalization of a thioester-activated N-hydroxypropyl methacrylamide (HPMA) copolymer (28,500 Da) with the cell-penetrating peptide (CPP) nonaarginine and a bioactive peptide as independent building blocks by native chemical ligation. Nonaarginine was employed as a cell-penetrating peptide (CPP), a fluorescein-labeled analogue of a pro-apoptotic peptide as a biofunctional cargo. Incorporation of the fluorescein label enabled the highly sensitive quantification of the coupling stoichiometry by fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) using 0.4 pmol/12 ng of labeled construct. A construct only bearing the functional cargo peptide required cellular import by electroporation in order to show activity. In contrast, a construct combining all functionalities was active upon incubation of cells, validating the modular nature of the approach.


The research presented in this paper examined the audit of "environmental matters" and asks the question whether legitimacy theory provides an explanation for the observed audit phenomenon. This task is important because, as members of the accountancy profession, auditors are expected to act in the public interest (ICANZ, 2003, Code of Ethics, paragraphs 14 and 15) and environmental matters are issues of public interest. The evidence for this study was collected using semi-structured in-depth personal interviews with twenty-seven auditors: eighteen were financial auditors in chartered accounting practice (FA); seven were public sector auditors (PS) and two were from the office of the Auditor General (OAG). The interviews which were guided by a small number of broad open-ended questions were conducted in the interviewees" offices by the researcher. The research findings indicated that legitimacy theory does not provide the appropriate explanation for the audit of environmental matters in accordance with Audit Guidance Statement (AGS) 1010: The consideration of environmental matters in the audit of financial reports. The introduction of AGS-1010 by the New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants (NZICA) was due to a necessity to maintain equivalence with global partners. Public Sector Auditors" explicit focus on environmental matters for every public sector and government entity is in compliance with the legislated mandate as required by the Auditor General and the Local Government Act 2002. On the other hand, the financial auditors" consideration of environmental matters is no different from their consideration of other audit issues. At the present time, there is no apparent tension between the New Zealand public and there is no public outcry which causes the organisation to perceive that its reputation or legitimacy is threatened, thus the notion of legitimacy theory would not come into play in regards to environmental matters, i.e. business is as usual. Findings from this study substantiate and explain more clearly the underlying concepts in legitimacy theory. Very obviously, organisational survival must be present (Bansal & Roth, 2000). Something drastic must also have happened that impacted detrimentally on an organisation"s reputation or legitimacy (Patten, 1991) and social pressure had caused management to perceive that there is a legitimacy crisis that led to a legitimacy gap. Only in such circumstances would legitimation strategies be considered for narrowing the gap.


Abstract. Microscopy methods used to measure Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) between fluorescently labeled proteins can provide information on protein interactions in cells. However, these methods are diffraction-limited, thus do not enable the resolution of the nanodomains in which such interactions occur in cells. To overcome this limitation, we assess FRET with an imaging system combining fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy with stimulated emission depletion, termed fluorescence lifetime imaging nanoscopy (FLIN). The resulting FRET-FLIN approach utilizes immunolabeling of proteins in fixed cultured neurons. We demonstrate the capacity to discriminate nanoclusters of synaptic proteins exhibiting variable degrees of interactions with labeled binding partners inside dendritic spines of hippocampal neurons. This method enables the investigation of FRET within nanodomains of cells, approaching the scale of molecular signaling.


A great deal of interest has been generated within the past few decades on supercritical fluid technology applied to polymerization processes, polymer purification and fractionation processes, and solution coatings and powder formation processes. A critical issue for each of these potential applications is the determination of polymer solubility in supercritical carbon dioxide, a highly preferred processing solvent. There exists a fair amount of experimental data on solubility of polymers and copolymers in CO2 from which it is possible to obtain insight into the properties of the polymer that control solubility. It is now well-known that fluorinating a polymer enhances its solubility in supercritical CO2; however, it is also accepted that polymer polarity and backbone flexibility also have a strong influence on the temperatures and pressures needed to dissolve a polymer in supercritical CO. In addition, it has been shown that fluorinating an alkyl side chain improves polymer solubility, and likewise, it has been shown that polymer solubility decreases significantly as the length of a nonfluorinated alkyl side chain is increased.


The article deals with the problem of professional training of future specialists in economics to work in the foreign exchange market based on the MetaStock computer program.The aim of the article is to reveal the peculiarities of the technical methods of preparing future economists for the testing of trading systems based on the software product such as MetaStock. The algorithms of students work with the MetaStock computer program with the aim of acquiring skills in the currency market based on computer technologies are determined. It is determined that the prerequisite for successful professional activity in the foreign exchange market is the mastery by future economists of their professional knowledge, skills and skills of trading systems testing while using the MetaStock computer program.It was proved with the help of experiments that the implementation of these methods of training of future economic specialists for testing trading systems based on the computer program MetaStock has led to a significant increase of their readiness to work in the currency market on the basis of computer technology.


Background: The present study is based on two assumptions. First is the racial and ethnic differences in the presentation of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and its response to drugs. And the second is the interaction between nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and the disease modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) particularly methotrexate (MTX) with the possibility of enhanced toxicity. Objectives: to investigate the efficacy and toxicity of MTX alone or in combination with diclofenac in the treatment of RA. Methods: Design: A three month randomized comparative clinical trial Setting: Rheumatology Unit at the Teaching Hospital and the Department of Pharmacology, College of Medicine, University of Basrah, Basrah, Iraq. Patients: Patients with moderate to severe RA were classified into, Group I: received MTX (7.5 mg orally as a single weekly dose). Group II: received MTX single weekly dose plus diclofenac sodium 100 SR tablets once daily Measurements and evaluation Pain, morning stiffness, joint function (number of the swollen and tender joints), patients and physician global assessment, radiological evaluation (according to modified Sharp score for joint space narrowing and erosions), ACR criteria for progression and remission of RA, laboratory findings (complete blood picture and ESR, blood groups, Hb electrophoresis, AST, ALT, blood urea) and drug adverse effects were evaluated. Results: Twenty eight patients with moderate to severe RA were randomly allocated into two treatment groups as cited in the Methods. Only 25 patients managed to complete the 12 week treatment course. Oral MTX (7.5 mg) resulted in a statistically significant clinical improvement after 12 weeks of treatment. The improvement seems to be time dependent. The average percent improvement in six clinical parameters mounted to about 35% compared to the baseline measurements. The 20% improvement at 12 weeks of treatment using ACR criteria involved 42.8% of patients. Radiological findings (joint space narrowing and erosion) increased slightly by only 5.7% over the 12 week treatment period. No significant change in all laboratory parameters measured. No important side effects peculiar to MTX could be figured out. Concurrent administration of diclofenac (sustained release formulation) with MTX resulted in a paradoxical finding. Instead of enhancing efficacy or toxicity of MTX, diclofenac reduced the efficacy of MTX from 35.25% to only 15.78% at the end of the treatment period. The two groups, however, differed in some aspects e.g. disease duration and severity, and the type of blood groups which might possibly have contributed to this difference. The ACR20 in the combination group is 36.3% (compared to 42.8% in MTX group). Radiological findings progressed by 48.3% in the joint space narrowing and erosion. When results of MTX and MTX+diclofenac groups were analyzed according to disease severity and blood groups, it was found that the response of patients with severe but not moderate disease was comparable in the two groups. Blood group (A) seems to be associated with enhanced response and group (O) with a reduced one. Conclusion: Methotrexate 7.5 mg as a single oral dose per week produced a significant clinical improvement over the 12 week treatment period. The drug seems to be well tolerated with no important adverse effects. In contrast to what is expected, sustained formulation of diclofenac sodium reduced the efficacy of MTX. The latter finding, if proved to be true, could have an important clinical implication.


In empirical education and labour market research, different approaches for measuring education have been pursued; they reach from number of years of schooling and educational scoring as continuous measures to typologies as ISCED and the CASMIN classification as categorical approaches. The value of the CASMIN educational classification has been demonstrated in many studies in comparative social mobility and labour market research. The original CASMIN coding scheme does not capture the institutional changes that took place in the course of the educational reforms that affected most European societies following WWII. In this paper, we concentrate on France, West-Germany, the United Kingdom and Hungary as a former socialist society. For these countries, we have updated the original CASMIN coding scheme according to recent developments in the educational systems. In addition, specific refinements and modifications of the CASMIN-classification are proposed


This paper investigates the role of real estate developers in shaping land use legislation, land use planning and property law. The conceptual framework draws on third-phase institutionalism and socio-legal theory to examine actors and ideas that influence knowledge and practices of land use, planning and property. This paper confronts absences in planning theory that overlook the role of real estate developers in disputes over land, especially their role in shaping the legislative framework governing land use. The argument is that property law is not simply an objective system of rules interpreted by lawyers, judges and the courts. Neither is it a singular concept protecting private property rights. Rather, it is a complex concept and institution that emerges in practice through political processes, such as social movements, the exercise of power and influence by elite actors, and strategic acts by political actors navigating diverse and competing agendas. The empirical evidence informing this argument derives from case study research of land conflicts on the Oak Ridges Moraine in the Toronto region, Canada, with particular attention given to the relationship between real estate developers, social movement actors, and politicians involved in resolving the conflict.


Existing grasp synthesis methods are either analytical or data-driven. The former one is oftentimes limited to specific application scope. The latter one depends heavily on demonstrations, thus suffers from generalization issues; e.g., models trained with human grasp data would be difficult to transfer to 3-finger grippers. To tackle these deficiencies, we formulate a fast and differentiable force closure estimator, capable of producing diverse and physically stable grasps with arbitrary hand structures, without any training data. Although force closure has commonly served as a measure of grasp quality, it has not been widely adopted as an optimization objective for grasp synthesis primarily due to its high computational complexity; in comparison, the proposed differentiable method can test a force closure within milliseconds. In experiments, we validate the proposed method's efficacy in six different settings.


A 40MFLOPs DSP(Digital Signal Processing) based data acquisition and engine control system with 2-microprocessors (one for DSP, the other for host computer) has been developed for the rapid acquisition of analog data from an engine with ECU.
With the use of a DSP system, it has been demonstrated that high speed data acquisition by 8 channels (0.8MHz/CH) as well as real time display and real time processing of various thermodynamic & knocking analyses are successfully performed. The engine operating conditions are to be changed through a serial communication interface, and performance of an engine can be analyzed as a function of time or crank angle. As a result, the correlations between engine performance and various engine operating conditions can be obtained with high speed and ease.


Summary Honey bee queens and workers, both of which are female, develop from the same type of genome, but they have substantial morphological and physiological differences. Epigenetic modifications have been suggested to be involved in caste differentiation that is induced by royal jelly. 10-hydroxy-2(E)-decenoic acid (10-HDA), which can inhibit histone deacetylation, is a main component of royal jelly. In this study newly hatched larvae were artificially fed with diets containing 1.10%, 1.70%, 2.30%, 2.90% 10-HDA, referred to as control (C), treatment 1 (T1), treatment 2 (T2) and treatment 3 (T3), respectively, to study its effects on larval development. Compared to the control group, the weight of emerged adults was significantly reduced in the 10-HDA-treated groups. The expression level of the histone deacetylase 3 (HDAC3) gene was significantly up-regulated in the 10-HDA-treated groups than in the control group. The expression level of DNA methyltranferase 3 (DNMT3) gene was initially down-regulated, but subsequently up-regulated with increasing 10-HDA concentration. The results suggested 10-HDA not only reduces the weight of the newly emerged workers but also regulates activation of HDAC3 and DNMT3 that control epigenetic changes.


Abstract Human cognition requires coping with a complex and uncertain world. This suggests that dealing with uncertainty may be the central challenge for human reasoning. In Bayesian Rationality we argue that probability theory, the calculus of uncertainty, is the right framework in which to understand everyday reasoning. We also argue that probability theory explains behavior, even on experimental tasks that have been designed to probe people's logical reasoning abilities. Most commentators agree on the centrality of uncertainty; some suggest that there is a residual role for logic in understanding reasoning; and others put forward alternative formalisms for uncertain reasoning, or raise specific technical, methodological, or empirical challenges. In responding to these points, we aim to clarify the scope and limits of probability and logic in cognitive science; explore the meaning of the "rational" explanation of cognition; and re-evaluate the empirical case for Bayesian rationality.


For the purpose of developing an operational oceanography system for the greater Agulhas Current regime, a high resolution Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) has been set in a nested configuration. The intense and complex current regime poses a challenge in modelling. However, access to satellite and in-situ data with strong and persistent signals of the dynamics and mesoscale variability ensure that adequate model validation is feasible. The study concludes that HYCOM reproduces the general larger scale circulation of the greater Agulhas Current reasonably accurately in addition to the regionally specific characteristics and mesoscale variability. Furthermore, strong anticyclonic eddies occurring in the Mozambique Channel at a frequency of 5–6 per year, are found to drift southward and merge with the northern Agulhas Current. Evidence of these eddies can also be tracked further southwestwards into the southern Agulhas Current and sometimes all the way towards the Agulhas retroflection region. Operational forecasting of the greater Agulhas Current, and in particular the retroflection, must therefore adequately account for the presence and influence of the Mozambique Channel eddies, in order to forecast their evolution on time scales from days to weeks


Significance This paper presents unprecedented evidence on the transmission mechanism underlying the spread of a broad cross-cultural assemblage of folktales in Eurasia and Africa. State-of-the-art genomic evidence is used to directly assess the relevance of demic diffusion processes, in particular on the distribution of Old World folktales at intermediate geographic scales, and identify individual stories that are more likely to be transmitted through population movement and replacement. The results provide an empirical solution to operate with linguistic barriers and highlight the impossibility of disentangling genetic from geographic relationships at a cross-continental scale, warning against the direct use of extant genetic variability to infer processes of long-range cultural transmission. Observable patterns of cultural variation are consistently intertwined with demic movements, cultural diffusion, and adaptation to different ecological contexts [Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981) Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach; Boyd and Richerson (1985) Culture and the Evolutionary Process]. The quantitative study of gene–culture coevolution has focused in particular on the mechanisms responsible for change in frequency and attributes of cultural traits, the spread of cultural information through demic and cultural diffusion, and detecting relationships between genetic and cultural lineages. Here, we make use of worldwide whole-genome sequences [Pagani et al. (2016) Nature 538:238–242] to assess the impact of processes involving population movement and replacement on cultural diversity, focusing on the variability observed in folktale traditions (n = 596) [Uther (2004) The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography. Based on the System of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson] in Eurasia. We find that a model of cultural diffusion predicted by isolation-by-distance alone is not sufficient to explain the observed patterns, especially at small spatial scales (up to ∼4,000 km). We also provide an empirical approach to infer presence and impact of ethnolinguistic barriers preventing the unbiased transmission of both genetic and cultural information. After correcting for the effect of ethnolinguistic boundaries, we show that, of the alternative models that we propose, the one entailing cultural diffusion biased by linguistic differences is the most plausible. Additionally, we identify 15 tales that are more likely to be predominantly transmitted through population movement and replacement and locate putative focal areas for a set of tales that are spread worldwide.


Bis(dicyanomethylene)-substituted quinoidal π-conjugated systems possess a high electron-accepting nature and thus have been extensively investigated for application as n-type semiconductors. We focus on the utilization of benzene-annelation for the stabilization of the quinoidal electronic structure against the biradicaloid structure by designing quinoidal thiophenes 3-mer (BTQ) and 6-mer (BTQ-6) that have benzo[c]thiophene units. We also develop quinoidal oligothiophenes (BTQ-F) consisting of both benzo[c]thiophene and fluorinated thiophene units. The influence of benzo[c]thiophene on the quinoidal electronic structure is investigated by theoretical studies and property measurements. The molecular structure of BTQ-F is unambiguously confirmed through single-crystal X-ray diffraction. Analyses of cyclic voltammetry reveal that the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital energy levels of these compounds lie below −4.0 eV, leading to good electron-transporting characteristics even under ambient conditions in organic field-effect transistors (OFETs). Due to an increased highest occupied molecular orbital energy level, ambipolar transport is observed in BTQ-6, indicating the versatility of quinoidal π-conjugated systems incorporating benzo[c]thiophene.


We analyse the implementation of Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) as a solution to better manage storm water runoffs and reduce urban flooding, and at the same time provide significant Ecosystem Services (ES). ES vary from temperature control at urban and building scale to main water savings, depending on the type of SuDS considered. The general objective is to incorporate the monetary value of SuDS' ecosystem services into the decision making process on storm water management (SWM) of an urban catchment affected by regular floods, and to optimize the design of the drainage solution, in order to justify the feasibility of larger investment on this type of systems. The case study is an urban catchment of 220 ha in the city of Montevideo, Uruguay, where approximately 600 houses are affected by pluvial floods. Rain barrels and green roofs are the two types of SuDS considered in the study. An optimization algorithm together with the hydraulic model of the drainage system is used to determine the optimum size and distribution of the drainage elements (SuDS and storages). The results show that the inclusion of ES benefits justifies significantly larger investments on SuDS. When detention storages are considered in combination with SuDS, the largest flood reductions are achieved as well as the largest total benefits.


Genome variation is the main underlying reason for phenotypic
differences observed between organisms from the same species.
This includes minor variations like single nucleotide polymorphisms,
but also large sequence polymorphisms due to deletions and
insertions. Some of these variations are of insignificant functional
importance, but others may lead to an increase in viability and, in the
case of microbes, possibly an increase in pathogenicity. However,
the influence of variations on phenotype is not always dependent
on the size of the mutated domain, and even single nucleotide
polymorphisms can cause significant changes in an organism. This
is of course an important area of research into studying pathogenic
organisms and their epidemiological features. Mycobacterium
tuberculosisl/Ig strains also display a degree of strain variation, which
has been previously suggested to be important for the outcome of
disease. Certain strains are postulated to be more or less virulent,
persistent, transmissible, or immunopathological. These variations
do not only have important implications for the spread of the
disease, but provide us with tools to characterize transmission,
which have been used extensively for a number of years in tuberculosis
molecular epidemiology. In this article, we discuss the different
methods which are available for detecting genome variation;
we look at the different mechanisms which cause this variation
(including insertions, deletions, duplications and single nucleotide
polymorphisms), and review the consequences and implications of
this genome variation with regard to Mycobacterium tuberculosis
pathogenicity.


The absence of effective treatment methods for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) calls for new therapeutic approaches. One of the promising treatment methods for DMD is stem cell therapy. This study demonstrates the impact of fetal stem cells (FSCs) on functional capacity and life quality of DMD patients and the ability of FSCs to prevent DMD-related complica- tions in order to inhibit the disease progression. FSC therapy substantially improves functional capacity, life quality, left ventricular ejection fraction, and forced vital capacity of the lungs of DMD patients; this was confirmed by comparison of neurological, laboratory (aspartate amino- transferase, alanine aminotransferase, creatine phosphokinase, and lactate dehydrogenase), and morphofunctional findings (left ventricular ejection fraction and forced vital capacity) in DMD patients before the treatment, and 6 and 12 months after the FSC treatment.


A strong case can be made against world theatre history as a subject of scholarly study. This paper analyzes seven arguments that can be levelled against world theatre history as an academic subject. It then offers rebuttals to each of these arguments. In so doing, it seeks not only to establish the legitimacy of world theatre history as a subject of study, but also to clarify the methodologies and the goals of such study. Steve Tillis received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches at St Mary's College of California. He has previously published articles on world theatre history in Asian Theatre Journal, TDR, Theatre Topics, and Theatre Survey.


An algorithm for text/graphics separation is presented in this paper. The basic principle of the algorithm is to erase nontext regions from mixed text and graphics engineering drawings, rather than extract text regions directly. This algorithm can be used to extract both Chinese and Western characters, dimensions, and symbols and has few limitations on the kind of engineering drawings and noise level. It is robust to text-graphics touching, text fonts, and written orientations.


Accurate predictions of population dynamics require an understanding of the ways by which environmental conditions and species-specific traits affect the magnitude of density dependence. Here, we evaluated the potential impact of season and habitat (characterized by sediment grain size and seagrass biomass) on the magnitude of density dependence in shell growth of 3 infaunal bivalve species dominating the tropical intertidal benthic communities of Banc d'Arguin, Mauritania. Two of our focal species were filter feeders (Senilia senilis and Pelecyora isocardia) and one was a facultative mixotroph (Loripes orbiculatus), mainly relying on organic carbon provided by sulphide-oxidizing endosymbiotic gill-bacteria (i.e. chemosymbiotic). Distinguishing 2 seasons, winter and summer, we manipulated local bivalve densities across habitats (from bare sandy sediments to seagrass-covered mud). In situ growth of individually tagged and relocated clams was measured and compared with those of tagged clams that were allocated to adjacent sites where local bivalve densities were doubled. Growth was negatively density-dependent in both winter and summer in P. isocardia and L. orbiculatus, the 2 species that mainly inhabit seagrass sediments, but not in S. senilis, usually found in bare sediments. As reproduction and survival rates are generally size-dependent in bivalves, our results suggest that in our tropical study system, the bivalve community of seagrass-covered sediments is more strongly regulated than that of adjacent bare sediments, regardless of species-specific feeding mode or season. We suggest that ecosystem engineering by seagrasses enhances environmental stability, which allows bivalve populations within tropical seagrass beds to stay close to carrying capacity.


A vibrant example of living literature, The Bhagavata Purana is a versatile Hindu sacred text containing more than 14,000 Sanskrit verses. Finding its present form around the tenth century C.E., the work inspired several major north Indian devotional (bhakti) traditions as well as schools of dance and drama, and continues to permeate popular Hindu art and ritual in both India and the diaspora. Introducing The Bhagavata Purana's key themes while also examining its extensive influence on Hindu thought and practice, this collection conducts the first multidimensional reading of the text's entire twelve volumes.The Bhagavata Purana is a hard-to-classify embodiment of classical Indian cultural, religious, and philosophical thought. Its language and poetic expression are on par with the best of Sanskrit poetry ( kavya), while its narrative structure holds together tightly as a literary work. Its theological message centers on devotion to Krishna and Vishnu, while its philosophical content is grounded solidly in the classical traditions of Vedanta and Samkhya. Each essay in this volume focuses on a key theme of The Bhagavata Purana and its subsequent presence in Hindu dance, music, ritual recitation, and commentary. The authors consider the relationship between the sacred text and the divine image, the text's metaphysical and cosmological underpinnings, its shaping of Indian culture, and its ongoing relevance to contemporary Indian concerns. A glossary aids in the understanding of the work. Featuring original, expert scholarship, this volume is an essential companion for courses and research on India, Hinduism, and related topics.


Introduction In honor of Labor Day 2002, Louisiana Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Blanco made an announcement that was carried by local media throughout the state publicizing the ongoing archeological research at the slave quarters site at Rosedown State Historic Site, a one-time antebellum cotton plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana. Lt. Governor Blanco's announcement was her way of recognizing the labor of historical enslaved African Americans that helped found and build Louisiana's economy, marking a renewed place for historical enslaved African Americans. The Lt. Governor's announcement was an indication that Louisiana recognizes African American history as central to the state's identity and central to the history of Louisiana's plantation heritage. In this study, I will show how this proclamation is an indication of a significant postmodern transition unfolding in south Louisiana. A remarkable pattern of slave life representation has emerged in south Louisiana. As of this writing, I have counted 25 historical sites that interpret slave life, 13 of which exhibit slave dwellings. Most of these opened with interpreted tours for visitors after 1990. (1) The significance of the relatively recent appearance of historical slave life interpretation in south Louisiana is more than a trend led by the region's tourism industry. Silenced African American slavery history is re-surfacing, along with the unearthed slave dwelling artifacts at Rosedown and the emerging slave cabin exhibits, bringing to light more stories about who we presently are as Louisianans and Americans. In this paper, I analyze four south Louisiana historical sites and show how the appearances of the slave life exhibits at these sites are symptomatic of the region's changing identity from an exclusive melancholic European American identity to a mournful racially integrated regional identity. Slave cabin exhibits are indicative of white grief working through mourning the losses of economic and social control. The appearance of slave life exhibits at European American history museums in south Louisiana suggests that these 21st century museum workers are part of that generation able to begin letting go of their ancestors' losses and move into a mournful process of reckoning. My research spanned from 1999 to 2003. I have been a visitor, worker, and researcher at four historical plantations in the Baton Rouge metropolitan area that have added slave dwelling structures to their landscapes. My methods included giving tours to visitors; going on tours as a visitor; walking independently among the slave dwellings; reading the tour training manuals from these sites; and interviewing the directors and docents to discuss their thoughts about slavery representation at their respective museums. (2) Methodologically ethnographic, my field work revealed present day grieving patterns within slave life representations. These signs of grief were evident in museum workers' conversations and tour narratives that oscillated between lofty testimonies to white patriarchal plantation achievement and reverent commemorations to enslaved African Americans. I used a psychoanalytic framework, in the spirit of Britzman (1998), Eppert (2000), and Morris (2001), to analyze my field work data to identify representations of melancholia and mourning in south Louisiana. The next section briefly examines two preconditions for the relatively recent appearance of slave dwelling exhibits: the rise of social history in American academia and the increase of historical site museums and African American history museums in the nation. The third section describes the four publicly owned historical plantations used in this study: Magnolia Mound Plantation (MMP), LSU Rural Life Museum (Rural Life), Oakley Plantation at Audubon State Historic Site (Oakley), and West Baton Rouge Museum (WBR Museum). The fourth section, Inaugurating Mourning, analyzes how the slave dwelling exhibits at the four sites represent a major paradigm shift that works to signify an emerging racially-integrated regional identity. …


Abstract. It has been claimed that a focused word may project its focus to a syntactic constituent larger than the focused item, under what are known as Focus Projection principles (Selkirk 1995; Rochemont 1998). Engdahl and Vallduvi (1996) rejected this purely syntax-based approach and proposed considering the interactions between the grammatical function and the types of an argu-ment. Chung, Kim, and Sells (to appear) applied Engdahl and Valduvi's theory to Korean and claimed that in Korean only a theme argument, but not an oblique argument (1.O or Locative PP), can project its focus to the Verb Phrase. This paper examines how VP focus is realized in Korean and tests Chung et al.'s claim that the types and the order of arguments can affect the focus projec-tion (especially 'VP focus'). The results show that there is no sensitivity to argument type, word order, or the length of VP in projecting the domain of focus to VP in Korean. Regardless of these factors, VP focus was prosodically marked by boosting the prominence of all words inside the VP, with the VP-initial word being the most prominent. Our data suggest that focus projection rules can be eliminated as proposed in Buring (2003).


Harold Nicolson is one of the three great political diarists of the 20th century (along with Chips Channon and Alan Clark). Nicolson was an MP (Conservative, 1935-45, who also flirted with Labour after WWII). He had previously been in the Foreign Office and attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and material from his period is included in this new edition for the first time. Nicolson (like Channon and Clark) never achieved high office, but rarely a day went by when he didn't record what was going on at Westminster. He socialised widely, was married to the poet and author Vita Sackville-West, and together they created the famous garden at Sissinghurst. Both were bi-sexuals and had affairs outside their marriage. This new edition also drawx on diary entries and letters previously considered too sensitive for inclusion. The diversity of Harold Nicolson's interests and the irony in his writing make his diary a highly entertaining record of his life and times, as well as a document of great historical value.


In 2006 residential real estate prices peaked and started to fall, then threatened the world's financial institutions in 2007, and confronted the global economy with disaster in 2008. In the past few years, millions of people have lost very substantial portions of their wealth. And while the markets have rebounded considerably, they are still far from a full recovery. Now, professional economists, policy experts, public intellectuals, and the public at large are all struggling to understand the crisis that has engulfed us. In The Financial Crisis of Our Time, Robert W. Kolb provides an essential, comprehensive review of the context within which these events unfolded, arguing that while the crisis had no single cause, housing finance played a central role, and that to understand what happened, one must comprehend the mechanism by which the housing industry came into crisis. Kolb offers a history of the housing finance system as it developed throughout the twentieth century, and especially in the period from 1990 to 2006, showing how the originate-to-distribute model of mortgage financing presented market participants with a "clockwork of perverse incentives. " In this system, various participants-simply by pursuing their narrow personal interests-participated in an elaborate mechanism that led to disaster. The book then gives a narrative of the crisis as it developed and analyzes all of the participants in the housing market, from the home buyers to investors in collaterialized debt obligations (CDOs). At each step, the book explains in a nontechnical manner the essential relationships among the market participants and zeroes in on the incentives facing each party. The book also includes an extensive glossary and a detailed, authoritative timeline of the subprime financial crisis. Offering a unique look at the participants and incentives within the housing finance industry and its role in the biggest financial catastrophe in recent history, Robert W. Kolb provides one of the most comprehensive and illuminating accounts of the events that will be studied for decades to come as the financial crisis of our time.


This paper presents a novel indoor topological localization method based on mobile phone videos. Conventional methods suffer from indoor dynamic environmental changes and scene ambiguity. The proposed Visual Landmark Sequence-based Indoor Localization (VLSIL) method is capable of addressing problems by taking steady indoor objects as landmarks. Unlike many feature or appearance matching-based localization methods, our method utilizes highly abstracted landmark sematic information to represent locations and thus is invariant to illumination changes, temporal variations, and occlusions. We match consistently detected landmarks against the topological map based on the occurrence order in the videos. The proposed approach contains two components: a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based landmark detector and a topological matching algorithm. The proposed detector is capable of reliably and accurately detecting landmarks. The other part is the matching algorithm built on the second order hidden Markov model and it can successfully handle the environmental ambiguity by fusing sematic and connectivity information of landmarks. To evaluate the method, we conduct extensive experiments on the real world dataset collected in two indoor environments, and the results show that our deep neural network-based indoor landmark detector accurately detects all landmarks and is expected to be utilized in similar environments without retraining and that VLSIL can effectively localize indoor landmarks.


We present a computational tool for fabrication-oriented design of flexible rod meshes. Given a deformable surface and a set of deformed poses as input, our method automatically computes a printable rod mesh that, once manufactured, closely matches the input poses under the same boundary conditions. The core of our method is formed by an optimization scheme that adjusts the cross-sectional profiles of the rods and their rest centerline in order to best approximate the target deformations. This approach allows us to locally control the bending and stretching resistance of the surface with a single material, yielding high design flexibility and low fabrication cost.


Abstract This Article examines the concept of sovereign trusteeship in the context of the history of empire. Many accounts of sovereign trusteeship and the responsibility to protect explain the development of those concepts in terms of seventeenth century natural law theories, which argued that the origins of the social contract were in subjects seeking self-preservation. The state, accordingly, was based upon its duty to protect its subjects, while also having a secondary responsibility for subjects beyond its borders arising from human interdependence. I shall show that the concepts underlying sovereign trusteeship - human fellowship, self-preservation and the protection of others' interests - were as entangled with the expansion of early modern states as they were with the justification of those states themselves. The legacy of that history is that arguments employed to justify sovereign trusteeship and the responsibility to protect remain highly ambiguous and subject to rhetorical manipulation. On the one hand, they can be represented as underpinning a new liberal international order in which states and international organizations are accountable to the human community, not only to their own subjects. On the other, these same terms can be deployed to justify expansionism in the name of humanitarianism, as they have done for hundreds of years. Only by paying careful attention to the contexts in which these claims are made can we discriminate the intentions behind the rhetoric.


Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East, by Ehud R. Toledano. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1998. xii + 168 pages. Bibl. to p. 177. Index to p. 185. $18 paper. Reviewed by Michael R. Fischbach Bringing together some 20 years of expertise, noted Ottomanist Ehud R. Toledano has produced an excellent short work that is designed to attract a wide audience by connecting the study of Ottoman slavery with the literature on global slavery. The result is a very readable account that not only surveys slavery, the slave trade, and abolition in the half century of waning Ottoman rule but also makes a contribution to the extensive theoretical literature on slavery. Toledano does this by discussing the complex series of relationships of slavery in the empire that often militate against attempts to categorize them. Toledano approaches the subject in a way that situates him within the debate about precisely what constitutes "slavery." He predicates the book on the belief that, for all their variety, the "various manifestations of servile status" (p. x) in the Ottoman Empire all reflect one form or another of slavery. Thus, in addition to a discussion of domestic and agricultural slavery, we find Toledano discussing the elite phenomenon of what he calls kul/harem (male/female) slavery. He highlights the differences among these forces but also notes the ways in which they all represented types of slavery. Throughout the author's attempt to develop a model to explain Ottoman slavery and place it within a wider international context, he strives, in his words, to "humanize the narrative" (pp. x-xi) by focusing on the social and cultural dimensions of slavery and even detailing the lives of individual slaves. Toledano begins with a useful outline of Ottoman slavery and the slave trade. He discusses the state of slavery in the empire during what he calls the "long Tanzimat [reforms]" (p. 4) of the 1830s-1880s and notes the categories of slavery that existed at the time: male and female, elite and domestic, African and white. He also attempts to quantify slavery during the 19th century and notes that, despite the scholarly interest in elite male (kul) and female (harem) slavery-a topic which, by his own admission, also comprises a sizeable percentage of the present study-the average slave in the empire, numerically speaking, was an African female working as a domestic laborer (about whom he writes little; see his explanation on p. 112). Toledano generally focuses on elite servitude. The author details the life of harem slaves, including that of concubines, as well as the eunuchs who guarded the harems. Throughout, Toledano notes the important role played by the imperial household in Istanbul, which both functioned as the empire's largest customer of harem slaves and served as a model for its elite households, especially in Cairo. …


Study Design
Repeated measures.

Background
Both clinicians and researchers often utilize treadmills to analyze spatiotemporal and biomechanical factors during running. However, there is question of whether or not treadmill running mimics overground running. The development of new wearable technology, such as pressure sensor insoles, presents an opportunity to compare the two running conditions.

Purpose
To compare the spatiotemporal factors between overground and treadmill running in collegiate runners, using pressure sensor insoles.

Methods
Twenty-one collegiate runners (age 20.1 ± 1.5 years, 81% female) were recruited from a Division I Cross Country team. Subjects participated in two 15-minute testing sessions. During the first session, subjects ran at their "easy run pace" for 200 meters, while wearing pressure sensor insoles. During the second session, subjects ran at a speed-matched pace on a treadmill for one minute at a level grade, and one minute at a 1% incline. Cadence, stance duration and swing duration were processed using Moticon Science Pro + software (Munich, DE). Data between overground and treadmill running was compared using repeated measures analysis of variance with α = 0.05.

Results
Compared to overground running, level and incline treadmill running was associated with increased cadence (mean difference [MD] = 3.55-3.22 strides per minute; p < 0.01), decreased stance duration (MD = 14-16 ms; p < 0.01), and decreased swing duration (MD = 11-12 ms; p < 0.05).

Conclusion
In collegiate runners, overground and treadmill running differ in spatiotemporal comparisons.

Levels of Evidence
3.


Purpose – The purpose of this work is to explore whether there is a "fulfilment gap" between customer expectations and fashion retail strategies over the purchase journey. Specifically this study focuses on two small-to-medium sized enterprise (SME) retail firms in Iceland.

Design/methodology/approach – An on-going case study is still being conducted. We present here our initial findings from interviews with two Icelandic fashion retailers and a customer survey of 237 female customers. The work is designed to explore the strategies being applied by these retailers. Our aim is to determine if they are actually fulfilling customer expectations over the purchase journey. In the first research phase we developed an "Integrated Omni Channel Purchase Journey" framework. We sought to advance this through the second phase – interviews and a survey linked to an on-going case study. From the interplay of theory and data we aim in this paper to report our preliminary advancement of the framework and provide initial answers to three research questions.

Findings –The initial findings indicate a "fulfilment" gap between customer expectations and retail strategy. For instance, while customers expect cross-channel fulfilment and customized solutions, Icelandic fashion retailers are currently only applying a multi-channel strategy. This lacks both integration and customized solutions.

Research limitations/implications – This study is limited with respect to its generalizability. It focuses on the relationship between two fashion retailers and female fashion customers. However the findings provide SME fashion retailers with a starting point for retail strategy development in omni-channel environments. This will enable them to begin to identify the extent to which they are currently meeting their target customer expectations (throughout the purchase journey). Future research will collect more rigorous case data to fully test the framework.

Practical implications – Fashion retailers need to build their capabilities to meet the technology- driven expectations of their customers. They are applying social pressure for new distribution channels and customized solutions. It is therefore recommended that fashion retailers analyse target customer's expectations throughout the fashion purchase journey and adapt their retail strategies accordingly.

Originality/value – To this date there is no research available on the retail strategies' being applied by the fashion sector in Iceland and how they meet fashion customer expectations. The findings indicate that retailers have an opportunity to meet target customer expectations better by providing cross channel fulfilment and customized solutions.


A key United Kingdom policy initiative in the management of diabetes is empowerment through structured education. Nonetheless, motivating attendance in Diabetes Education Centres remain problematic. The central aim of this study was to identify barriers and enabling factors associated with uptake of structured patient education for type 2 diabetes in a Primary Care Trust in South East of England. This three tier mixed methods study used a focus group interview to collect data from (n=10) diabetes educators (Dieticians, podiatrists and diabetes specialist nurses), questionnaire survey of 207 patients (102 attenders and 105 non-attenders), and finally individual face-to-face interviews (n=9) of referring practitioners (practice nurses) in different General Practitioners surgeries. The findings of the qualitative data yielded five key themes: healthcare beliefs, personal circumstances of the patient, ineffective communication, organisation of care and bureaucratic processes. The Chi-square tests run on the quantitative data relating to the health beliefs held by both groups suggested differences between attenders and non-attenders attitudes towards the uptake of Diabetes Education Programmes. Independent T-test, t (165.69) = 12.43, p < .001 results indicated that attenders in this study reported a more positive belief about self-care, importance of the diabetes education session and belief about the seriousness of diabetes as a medical condition in comparison to non-attenders. Logistic regression analysis of key demographic variables on attendance suggested that living arrangements (p < .001), employment (p < .001) and family history of diabetes (p = .05) can be used to predict non-attendance and the odd ratios also supported these findings. Whilst, it may be difficult to completely avoid non-attendance, positive steps to promote attendance include enhanced communication, organisational efficiency and offering adequate support to develop a positive attitude towards diabetes education.


In this paper we show that most sequential randomized incremental algorithms are in fact parallel. We consider several random incremental algorithms including algorithms for comparison sorting and Delaunay triangulation; linear programming, closest pair, and smallest enclosing disk in constant dimensions; as well as least-element lists and strongly connected components on graphs. We analyze the dependence between iterations in an algorithm, and show that the dependence structure is shallow for all of the algorithms, implying high parallelism. We identify three types of dependences found in the algorithms studied and present a framework for analyzing each type of algorithm. Using the framework gives work-efficient polylogarithmic-depth parallel algorithms for most of the problems that we study. Some of these algorithms are straightforward (e.g., sorting and linear programming), while others are more novel and require more effort to obtain the desired bounds (e.g., Delaunay triangulation and strongly connected components). The most surprising of these results is for planar Delaunay triangulation for which the incremental approach is by far the most commonly used in practice, but for which it was not previously known whether it is theoretically efficient in parallel.


Especially in tough economic times, running offers an affordable and positive way to relieve stress and gain a sense of accomplishment. Marathons and - more than ever - half-marathons are the ultimate achievement for runners and have experienced an unprecedented boom in the last several years. New hunger for reliable information on marathon and half-marathon training, as well as new technologies that have revolutionized ordinary people's ability to train intelligently, means the time is right for a new edition of longtime "Runner's World" contributor Hal Higdon's classic guide to taking the guesswork out of preparing for a marathon, whether it is a reader's first or fiftieth. Since its original publication in 1993, Higdon's definitive manual has sold over a quarter of a million copies through all channels. The book is such a consistent seller for many reasons, but above and beyond all the others is this one: It works. At the core of the book remains Higdon's clear and essential information on training, injury prevention, and nutrition. With more than 25 per cent new material, this fourth edition of a running classic will be a must-own for both longtime runners and those new to the sport.


This report (1) summarizes provisions of several laws and regulations, including the Patent Law, the Atomic Energy Act, International Traffic in Arms Control regulations, the USA PATRIOT Act (P.L. 107-56), the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-188), and the
Homeland Security Act (P.L. 107-296), that permit the federal government to restrict disclosure of scientific and technical information that could harm national security; (2) describes the development of federal controls on "sensitive but unclassified"
(SBU) scientific and technical information; (3) summarizes current controversies about White House policy on "Sensitive But Unclassified Information," and "Sensitive Homeland Security Information" (SHSI) issued in March 2002; and (4) identifies controversial issues which might affect the development of Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) and agency guidelines for sensitive unclassified information, which are expected to be released during 2003.


Theoretical solid-state physicists formulate their models usually in the form of a Hamiltonian. In quantum mechanics, the Hamilton operator (Hamiltonian) is of fundamental importance in most formulations of quantum theory. Mentioned operator corresponds to the total energy of the system and its spectrum determines the set of possible outcomes when one measures the total energy. Interpretation of results obtained by the applying of models based on the Hamiltonian indicates very specific mechanisms of some observed phenomena that are not fully consistent with the experience. Such approach may occasionally lead to surprises when obtained results are confronted with expectations. The aim of this work is to find Hamilton operator of acoustic phonons in inhomogeneous solids. The transport of energy in the vibrating crystal consisting of ions whose properties differ over long distances is described in the work. We modeled crystal lattice by 1D "inhomogeneous" ionic chain vibrating by acoustic frequencies and found the Hamiltonian of such system in the second quantization. The influence of long-distance inhomogeneities on the acoustic phonons quantum states can be discussed on basis of our results.


The development of highly complex vocal skill, like human language and bird songs, is underlain by learning. Vocal learning, even when occurring in adulthood, is thought to largely depend on a sensitive/critical period during postnatal development, and learned vocal patterns emerge gradually as the long-term consequence of vocal practice during this critical period. In this scenario, it is presumed that the effect of vocal practice is thus mainly limited by the intrinsic timing of age-dependent maturation factors that close the critical period and reduce neural plasticity. However, an alternative, as-yet untested hypothesis is that vocal practice itself, independently of age, regulates vocal learning plasticity. Here, we explicitly discriminate between the influences of age and vocal practice using a songbird model system. We prevented zebra finches from singing during the critical period of sensorimotor learning by reversible postural manipulation. This enabled to us to separate lifelong vocal experience from the effects of age. The singing-prevented birds produced juvenile-like immature song and retained sufficient ability to acquire a tutored song even at adulthood when allowed to sing freely. Genome-wide gene expression network analysis revealed that this adult vocal plasticity was accompanied by an intense induction of singing activity-dependent genes, similar to that observed in juvenile birds, rather than of age-dependent genes. The transcriptional changes of activity-dependent genes occurred in the vocal motor robust nucleus of the arcopallium (RA) projection neurons that play a critical role in the production of song phonology. These gene expression changes were accompanied by neuroanatomical changes: dendritic spine pruning in RA projection neurons. These results show that self-motivated practice itself changes the expression dynamics of activity-dependent genes associated with vocal learning plasticity and that this process is not tightly linked to age-dependent maturational factors.


We consider Benders decomposition for solving two-stage stochastic programs with complete recourse based on finite samples of the uncertain parameters. We define the Benders cuts binding at the final optimal solution or the ones significantly improving bounds over iterations as valuable cuts. We propose a learning-enhanced Benders decomposition (LearnBD) algorithm, which adds a cut classification step in each iteration to selectively generate cuts that are more likely to be valuable cuts. The LearnBD algorithm includes two phases: (i) sampling cuts and collecting information from training problems and (ii) solving testing problems with a support vector machine (SVM) cut classifier. We run the LearnBD algorithm on instances of capacitated facility location and multicommodity network design under uncertain demand. Our results show that SVM cut classifier works effectively for identifying valuable cuts, and the LearnBD algorithm reduces the total solving time of all instances for different problems with various sizes and complexities.


PURPOSE
To assess whether subvolumes of tumors extracted from hepatic arterial perfusion images can predict treatment outcome in radiation therapy (RT) of intrahepatic cancer.

METHODS
21 patients who had 25 unresectable intrahepatic cancers and underwent focal RT were enrolled in a prospective IRB-approved study of dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI. DCE MRI scans of the patients were acquired prior to RT, after delivering ∼60% planned doses and 1 month after the completion of RT. Hepatic arterial perfusion images were quantified by using a dual-input single-compartment pharmacokinetic model of DCE MRI. Each treated tumor was classified into the subvolumes with low-normal, or high hepatic arterial perfusion. The changes in the subvolumes with high hepatic arterial perfusion and in the volumetric means of hepatic arterial perfusion over the whole tumors from pre-RT to during-RT were evaluated for differentiation of responsive and progressive tumors using Mann-Whitney U test. The performance of the early changes in the new metrics for predicting tumor progression following treatment was evaluated by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis.

RESULTS
Of the 25 tumors, 6 tumors in 5 patients progressed 5-21 months after the completion of RT, the other tumors responded to treatment. From pre-RT to during-RT, the tumor subvolumes with high hepatic arterial perfusion significantly increased (118%, p=0.007) in the progressive tumors compared to responsive ones. For predicting tumor progression, the change percentage in the tumor subvolume with high hepatic arterial perfusion had an area under curve (AUC) of 0.87 ± 0.09, while the change in mean hepatic arterial perfusion over the whole tumors had AUC of 0.85 ± 0.10.

CONCLUSION
The tumor subvolume with high hepatic arterial perfusion could be an early predictor for treatment outcome in RT of intrahepatic cancer, and could be a candidate for radiation boost. (Supported by NIH grant RO1CA132834).


Although peacekeeping operations on the ocean have never held a central position in security studies or peace and conflict studies, a small body of work has been produced on what has been called 'naval peacekeeping'. This article argues that empirical insights provided by intervention against piracy in the Horn of Africa from 2008 suggest a critical turn in the naval peacekeeping debate, from a perspective primarily concerned with identifying unconventional threats at sea and justifying new roles for navies in addressing such threats, to a new perspective concerned with a critical vision on peace and security on the oceans and a more reflexive approach to the notion of peacekeeping at sea. The naval peacekeeping debate needs to encompass such factors as the origins and connections of ocean governance to land-based structural roots, local, regional and global dynamics, as well as historical conditions underlying the problems at sea.


A study on Avian clinical cases handled at the Poultry Unit of the University of Calabar Teaching and Research Farm, Calabar from January 2006 – December 2009 revealed that a total of 120,344 cases were treated with an annual mean of 30,086 cases. A total of 20,881 cases or 17.35% were treated in the months of February followed by 14,400 cases or 11.97% in August months; 12,460 cases or 10.47% in July months, 11,107 or 9.23% in March months; 9,600 or 7.98% in September months; 9,300 or 7.80% in January months; 8,860 or 7.40% in May months; 8,796 or 7.31% in June months; 8,700 or 7.23% in November months; 5,800 or 4.82% in April months and 2,860 or 2.38% in October months, 8700 cases or 7.23% in December months.Of the clinical cases treated, other cases (otherwise referred to or comprising cases of Avitaminosis and other Nutritional deficiencies) accounted for 30,687 or 25.50%; followed by Coccidiosis 18,216 or 15.14%; Ectoparasitism, 16,930 or 14.07%; Infectious Coryza 14,733 or 12.24%; Helminthiasis, 12,655 or 10.52%; Chronic Respiratory Disease (CRD) 10,960 or 9.11%; Salmonellosis, 8988 or 7.47% and Fowl cholera 7,175 or 5.96%. The Epizootiological significance of this study lies principally on an assessment of the causative agents, the environment, close monitoring, prompt and accurate diagnosis of these clinical cases as well as maintaining and also recommending effective disease control measures.


Social presence, or the "being there" and "being real" presence of others in an online learning environment, is widely considered to have a positive impact on student motivation and participation, actual and perceived learning, course and instructor satisfaction, and retention in online courses (Richardson et al. 2017; Oh et al. 2018). Several aspects of social presence remain understudied however, such as how gender, class rank, and other demographical characteristics may influence perceptions of social presence and condition the relationship between perceptions of social presence and academic performance or course satisfaction. Furthermore, although studies of the impact of social presence abound, few studies examine the impact of perceptions of social presence on academic performance and course satisfaction across modalities – sections of online and face-to-face classes.