As the global banking boom of the early twenty-first century expanded towards implosion, Icelandic media began calling the country's celebrity financiers utrasarvikingar: "raiding vikings." This new coinage encapsulated the macho, medievalist nationalism which underwrote Iceland's exponential financialisation. Yet within a few days in October 2008, Iceland saw all its main banks collapse beneath debts worth nearly ten times the country's GDP.

Hall charts how Icelandic novelists and poets grappled with the Crash over the ensuing decade. As the first English-language monograph devoted to twenty-first-century Icelandic literature, it provides Anglophone readers with an introduction to one of the world's liveliest literary scenes. It also contributes a key case study for understanding global artistic responses to the early twenty-first century crisis of runaway, unregulated capitalism, exploring the struggles of writers to adapt realist forms of art to surreal times.

As Iceland's biggest crisis since their independence from Denmark in 1944, the effect of the Crash on the national self-image was as seismic as its effects on the economy. This study analyses the centrality of whiteness and the abjection of the "developing world" in Iceland's post-colonial identity, and shows how Crash-writing explores the collisions of Iceland's traditional, nationalist medievalism with a dystopian, Orientalist medievalism associated with the Islamic world.

The Crash in Iceland was instantly recognised as offering important economic insights. This book shows how Iceland also helps us to understand the cultural convulsions that have followed the Financial Crisis widely in the West.

This book charts how Icelandic novelists and poets grappled with the Crash over the ensuing decade. As the first English-language monograph devoted to twenty-first-century Icelandic literature, it provides Anglophone readers with an introduction to one of the world's liveliest literary scenes. It also contributes a key case study for understanding global artistic responses to the early twenty-first century crisis of runaway, unregulated capitalism, exploring the struggles of writers to adapt realist forms of art to surreal times.

As Iceland's biggest crisis since their independence from Denmark in 1944, the effect of the Crash on the national self-image was as seismic as its effects on the economy. This study analyses the centrality of whiteness and the abjection of the "developing world" in Iceland's post-colonial identity, and shows how Crash-writing explores the collisions of Iceland's traditional, nationalist medievalism with a dystopian, Orientalist medievalism associated with the Islamic world.

The Crash in Iceland was instantly recognised as offering important economic insights. This book shows how Iceland also helps us to understand the cultural convulsions that have followed the Financial Crisis widely in the West.


This thesis is the first attempt to construct a standardized measure of literacy for the medium of video games, filling a gap in the literature by synthesizing various items of skills, behaviors, and affective components from existent studies and determining their correlations through analysis of survey data. The five categories that were derived from conceptual review and factor analysis have high measures of internal consistency: Information and Systems Management; Exploration and Enjoyment; Teamwork; Design; and Socialization. To test for external consistency and reliability, the proposed gaming literacy model was compared to the Novak and Hoffman (1997) construction of flow, using the three primary components of Challenge, Skill, and Play. Flow is the ultimate level of optimal experience possible with any activity, so it was assumed that high levels of self-reported literacy would coincide with similarly elevated scores with the flow phenomenon. The data shows that, indeed, there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between the two constructs. Nomological validity tests between males and females were conducted post-hoc, using the available data. The intended use for this scale is to establish a baseline measurement system for self-report methods of assessing literacy with video games. Future research should attempt to correlate the scale to actual gaming activity, test the importance of each component in an experimental setting, and determine the discriminate validity by comparing it to scales that have been established for other forms of digital literacy.


How Nations Remember draws on multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to examine how a nation's account of the past shapes its actions in the present. National memory can underwrite noble aspirations, but the volume focuses largely on how it contributes to the negative tendencies of nationalism that give rise to confrontation. Narratives are taken as units of analysis for examining the psychological and cultural dimensions of remembering particular events and also for understanding the schematic codes and mental habits that underlie national memory more generally. In this account, narratives are approached as tools that shape the views of members of national communities to such an extent that they serve as co-authors of what people say and think. Drawing on illustrations from Russia, China, Georgia, the United States, and elsewhere, the book examines how "narrative templates," "narrative dialogism," and "privileged event narratives" shape nations' views of themselves and their relations with others. The volume concludes with a list of ways to manage the disputes that pit one national community against another.


Introduction: This paper presents data from a study examining how and to what extent older people are socially excluded, factors leading to social exclusion, and how social exclusion can be prevented/reduced. The data is drawn from the first qualitative phase of the study that explores the factors that older people report as causing social exclusion. Methods and materials: Older people were recruited within each of the five districts of Barnsley Metropolitan Borough, England, via networks established by Age Concern. All individuals recruited within a given district formed the membership of a focus group, with each of the five groups meeting on two separate occasions. A total of 40 older people participated. Discussions were guided by a topic schedule and analysed using the framework method. Results: Being active was seen as important for life satisfaction by all participants. However, not all participants were able to achieve a satisfactory level of activity and some reported being isolated and lonely. Contributing factors to low levels of activity were identified as depression, low self confidence and caring responsibilities. A minority of participants argued that lack of activity was the individual's own fault. Analysis identified factors linked to social exclusion in general: deterioration in community spirit; fear of crime; life changing events such as retirement and widowhood; frailty; poor finances; transport; and accessibility including the physical environment. Conclusion: There was a consensus among older people that being active is central to preventing social exclusion. The data suggest a model of social exclusion in which many of the factors identified as related to social exclusion may act on an individual's quality of life primarily through their effects on social activity levels. This model will be tested in the next stage of the study, a questionnaire survey of 1,200 older people in Barnsley.


Recent work has explored how to train machine learning models which do not discriminate against any subgroup of the population as determined by sensitive attributes such as gender or race. To avoid disparate treatment, sensitive attributes should not be considered. On the other hand, in order to avoid disparate impact, sensitive attributes must be examined, e.g., in order to learn a fair model, or to check if a given model is fair. We introduce methods from secure multi-party computation which allow us to avoid both. By encrypting sensitive attributes, we show how an outcome-based fair model may be learned, checked, or have its outputs verified and held to account, without users revealing their sensitive attributes.


This Article introduces a recent string of "hair stories" involving the regulation of Black women's blonde hair in the workplace. At first glance, these "hair stories" appear unlawful, unreasonable, and unfathomable, as it is difficult to imagine that an employer would prohibit and could lawfully bar Black women from wearing blonde hair in the twenty-first century. However, these cases illustrate that modern employers have exacted a "no blonde hair in the workplace" ban that is singularly applied to Black women, and courts have ruled disparately regarding the legality of this proscription. Thus, this Article argues that it is imperative that courts begin to address, in a meaningful and consistent fashion, the particular discrimination that Black women suffer at the intersection of race, color, and sex pursuant to employers' arbitrary hair regulations. Additionally, this Article maintains that hair proscriptions – though largely viewed by courts as irrelevant to equal employment opportunity – are indeed critical to Black women's ability to acquire and maintain employment. This Article's broader examination of "hair stories" involving Black women illustrates the conflicting and restrictive demands the judiciary (and employers) impose upon Black women and their hair. Employers are allowed to force Black women to wear their hair in a straightened style and thus conform to an "invisible" norm of white womanhood and beauty to maintain and acquire employment. Yet, employers are able to lawfully deny Black women employment opportunities if they venture into territory that is deemed "visibly white" by wearing blonde hair – a hair color presumably natural to only white women. Simultaneously, employers are allowed to prohibit natural hairstyles that are deemed "visibly Black" such as braids, twists, and locks. Accordingly, courts have constructed and reified a very narrow space in which Black women can express their natural or chosen hair style and color without reprobation, stigmatization, or exclusion. Therefore, with respect to hair, Black women's freedom, autonomy, and privilege are constrained in ways that are unique to Black women, which our antidiscrimination law needs to address.


ABSTRACT In what respects can military basic training affect veterans' civic identities? According to a 2015 report published by the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC), military service positively affects civic health. While social scientists have also noted this possible connection, little attention has been paid to how and why this link might exist. To test the purported relationship between military training and increased civic capacities, I explored the United States Marine Corps' (USMC) Recruit Training program. I conducted 20 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 17 enlisted Marine veterans and Marine drill instructors (DI) to ascertain their perceptions of the pedagogical aspirations of their service's recruit training. The study's participants reported that Marine Corps Recruit Training does seek to inculcate skills, values, and habits that are consistent with a civic identity as discussed in the civic-engagement and civic-education literature.


The published articles and papers that form this submission focus on the nature of English Society between 1689 and 1900. In particular they address the nature of the family and the Church as social institutions. The underlying theme of the three groups of publications is the strength of continuity in these institutions.
1. THE EARLY MODERN FAMILY.
This group of publications considers the nature of the family between the Restoration and the Edwardian eras. The function of the family, and the desire to make provision for its survival
was an important feature, reflected in the practise of nepotism among the middle class professional families that dominated the clergy. Dynastic survival was also important, perhaps even socially imperative, for families from the upper echelons of society. As a result these landed families frequently resorted to social and legal fictions to suggest the continuity and legitimacy of their dynasties. Against the background of the vicissitudes that affected the Wane family, these fictions often assured survival.
2. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY CHURCH.
This group of publications demonstrates that the Church in the eighteenth century was not the moribund and corrupt institution it has been held to be by Victorian historians. It was, rather, a vibrant and dynamic institution, whose bishops and clergy were painstaking, committed and achieved a significant level of professional success. Where reform and
change was necessary, there is evidence that eighteenth century bishops undertook it; often reversing the neglect of the preceding century. The system of patronage, often the subject of attack, contained more integrity than is often allowed, and even solicitous clergy are not easily censured.
3. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY CHURCH.
This group of publications advances the view that the sharp delineation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into two `eras' of ecclesiastical history is untenable. The reforms of the eighteenth century were extended into the realm of patronage by the Governments of 1812-30; the re-introduction of rural deans started in the 1820s and the career and educational
patterns within the episcopate evolved only slowly. Thus rather than the Whig reforms of the 1830s acting as a historical watershed, they were another feature in a series of evolutionary reforms. Equally, features of the Church in the eighteenth century persisted late into the nineteenth century: the exercise of personal patronage by prime ministers, motivated by a range of secular factors, and the career and educational pattern of the episcopate are examples of this persistence.
These three themes confirm a number of associated historical trends. There is no doubt that they lend weight to the importance of the hereditary element among the professional classes. They also confirm the view that English society was one in which social mobility was present, particularly within the Church. Though it would be rash to suggest the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the rise of a meritocracy, it may however be reasonable to suggest that the rise and reward of merit in the eighteenth century was more prevalent than has hitherto been suggested.


The application of learning model, methode, and the technique in every learning process would create the better atmosphere in classroom and students' activity. One of the methods that could be used was Poster Comment Method. This method was used in Classrom Action Research with the subject was Science and the material was Environmental Change in grade IV SDN 012 Koto Kari. The purpose of this research was to represent how the learning result improved as the Poster Comment Method was applied in Science with the material was Environmental Change in grade IV SDN 012 Koto Kari. This research used four steps of Classroom Action Research; planning, proceeding, observing, and reflecting. One cycle consisted those four steps while the research was done in two cycles. The result showed in beginning data, there were only 9 students passed or 47%. After the treatment was given, in cycle 1 it showed that 15 students or 78% students passed, and finally in the second cycle the data increased to be 18 students or 95% students passed out of 18 students.


This study examines the demonization of images of the goddess Durga in Indonesia, viewed first as a long-term historical process that appears to have begun in East Java sometime during the first half of the second millennium CE. An attempt is then made to show how this long-term process reflected largely in mythology may be related to the demonization of images of women of the Indonesian Women's Movement (Gerwani) during the transition from the Old Order of President Soekarno (1945-1966) to the establishment of the New Order by Indonesia's second president, Suharto (1966-1998). In this view, images of Durga and the women of Gerwani have shared a similar fate, moving from a state of being considered attractive and beneficial, but later being understood as terrifying, demonic figures feared by the community. I contrast my study of the demonization of images of Durga in Indonesia with the situation in India, where the goddess Durga developed from its sources in the Indus Valley civilization where the "mother goddess" as a source of agricultural and human fertility. During a later period images of this "mother goddess" were incorporated into the pantheon of the nomadic Indo-Aryans as a female counterpart of prominent warrior gods of the pantheon. This has led to an understanding of the goddess Durga as a powerful, protective goddess who is worshipped throughout India during the festivals known as Durga Puja or Navaratri. It was this form of Durga that was most prominent in the early centuries of Indian influence in the archipelago (c.700-900 CE), and continued to be important to the kingdoms of East Java. In the Malay-Indonesian archipelago images of Durga went through a radical change in comparison to representations of the goddess Durga Mahisasuramardini of India, which always show her as a beautiful and sensual warrior goddess who protects her devotees from any threat to their safety and well-being. Through a long process of evolution and change images of Durga in the archipelago came to depict her in demonic form. The first radical transformations of this type began to develop during the East Javanese period (c. 10th -15th centuries CE). In this dissertation, I look at the question of external and internal threats to the security of the Majapahit dynasty as possible pressures that led to the development of a special exorcistic tale (the Sudamala tale), which featured a demonic form of the goddess Durga, which eventually is transformed back into an auspicious form through the power of a male figure of authority, in this case the god Shiva. The further demonization of images of the goddess Durga began in East Java with the composition of the Calon Arang, a tale about an angry widow named Rangda who becomes a devotee of Durga who dwells in the graveyard called Setra Gandamayu, where she eats corpses. Rangda calls upon the goddess Durga to assist her in bringing disease and pestilence to the kingdom of King Airlangga. This tale has been immortalized in the Balinese performing arts, and has led to the identification of the goddess Durga as the patron of black magic in which form she is worshipped in order to gain magical powers, or kesaktian. It is this fully demonized form of images of Durga that I believe allowed the founders of the New Order to play on fears of the power of uncontrolled women, and to create a mythology about the women of Gerwani that identified them with all the negative aspects of the goddess that are brought out in tales about Durga and Rangda, which are well-known throughout much of Indonesia.


Scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have identified an enzyme that helps trigger the development of leukemia, a cancer of blood cells. The enzyme hDOT1L activates a set of genes that plays a key role in the rare and largely incurable acute myeloid leukemia (AML). This disease affects less than 2 percent of the estimated 16,000 individuals diagnosed with acute leukemia nationwide each year. The discovery, based on research using bone marrow cells from mice, offers a potential target for new drugs against this form of leukemia, the researchers said. The new findings appear in the April 21, 2005 issue of the journal Cell. The report demonstrates that hDOT1L helps transform, or immortalize, bone marrow cells, causing their unrestrained growth, a hallmark of leukemia, the researchers said. Dr. Yi Zhang, associate professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UNC's School of Medicine and a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, led the study. Zhang is the university's first Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, one of the most prestigious appointments among biomedical researchers. "We demonstrate that not only is hDOT1L required for transformation of bone marrow cells, but, more importantly, that its enzymatic activity is required to maintain the transformed status," said Zhang. "That means if we have a way to prevent the activity of hDOT1L, then the affected cells of particular leukemia patients can be killed." Zhang investigates a group of enzymes that modifies five core histone proteins forming the molecular scaffold that helps organize DNA within the nucleus of every cell. Histone modifications affect gene activity and include methylation, in which a methyl component is attached to the histone protein. "The prevailing model is that methylation on histones serves as a docking site," Zhang said. "It will recruit proteins that 'read' this histone modification, and it's those proteins that directly have an impact on gene expression - either activating or silencing a gene." As an enzyme that adds a methyl component to histone H3, hDOT1L activates the gene associated with that histone. Zhang and fellow researchers now provide evidence that in some leukemias, hDOT1L activates so-called Hox genes, whose increased activity is closely tied to AML. Leukemia most often arises from a chromosomal translocation, a breaking and joining of two distinct chromosomes, that creates a hybrid gene. The product of the hybrid gene is called a "fusion protein," meaning that the newly formed gene encodes a protein made of fragments from each of the two genes that were fused together by the rearrangement. Some leukemia patients carry rearrangements of a gene on chromosome 11 called the mixed lineage leukemia gene, or MLL. Translocations involving MLL are most often found in childhood leukemias and as a secondary cancer in adults who have undergone chemotherapy to treat a previous leukemia. Individuals with MLL translocations have an especially poor prognosis, with less than a 50 percent survival rate. "There are more than 40 proteins that have been found fused to MLL in leukemia patients, and different ones can cause leukemia by different mechanisms," Zhang said. When MLL functions as it should, without a fusion partner, it binds to and controls the expression of Hox genes, which in turn control cell growth and maturation. Until now, the role of the MLL-AF10 fusion protein in causing leukemia was unknown. "We show how at least one MLL fusion can lead to the over-expression of Hox genes in bone marrow cells. MLL-AF10 directs hDOT1L to the Hox genes, where it normally shouldn't be, causing a different pattern of histone methylation and, therefore, extraordinarily high activity of the Hox genes," Zhang said. Treatments used for AML patients have been largely ineffective against cells harboring the MLL-AF10 fusion protein, drawing attention to the need for a new medication. Zhang's study reveals that leukemia cells containing MLL-AF10 require hDOT1L to survive. When the researchers introduced into leukemia cells a defective form of hDOT1L, one that cannot methylate histone proteins, the cells were no longer able to grow. "This study highlights the potential of hDOT1L as a possible drug target," Zhang added. Co-authors on the study from Zhang's lab include postdoctoral fellow Dr. Yuki Okada and Dr. Qin Feng, a former graduate student. Also at UNC were Drs. Qi Jang and Vernon M. Coffield, both postdoctoral fellows in the lab of Dr. Lishan Su, associate professor of microbiology and immunology. Dr. Guoliang Xu, a professor at the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, and his graduate students Yihui Lin and Yaqiang Li also contributed. The study was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.


Context: In Finland, vocational education has been competence-based and learner-orientated since the beginning of 2018. Teachers' work has changed because there is a need to pay more attention to students and their specific personal needs. Learning processes are planned individually and more learning options are offered in the workplace. Approach: In this article we ask the following: What kind of teachers' competencies can be identified in Finland? The metadata comprises twelve recent pieces of research on teachers' competencies in the field of Vocational Education and Training (VET) in Finland. We apply data-driven content analysis. Findings: According to our results, the work of vocational teachers included 53 separate skills comprising seven categories of competencies and three main categories of scholarships as follows: Scholarship in teaching and learning relating to pedagogy, guidance and counselling, and interaction, Scholarship in authentic learning and development referring to pedagogical leadership, partnership and innovator competency, and Scholarship in evaluation and monitoring associated with assessment. Conclusion: The work of vocational teachers in Finland has become fragmented. The fragmented work of a vocational teacher may influence the teacher's identity. The fragmented nature of the work of vocational teachers also raises the need to share expertise in educatio*Corresponding author: firstname.lastname@example.com 244 Identifying teachers' competencies nal institutions. Scholarship in teaching and learning, as well as evaluation and monitoring, are related to the more traditional way to be a teacher. The main challenge for teachers in vocational education in Finland is to adopt ways of authentic learning and development.


We introduce a model of strategic thinking in games of initial response. Unlike standard level-k models, in this framework the player's `depth of reasoning' is endogenously determined, and it can be disentangled from his beliefs over his opponent's cognitive bound. In our approach, individuals act as if they follow a cost-benefit analysis. The depth of reasoning is a function of the player's cognitive abilities and his payoffs. The costs are exogenous and represent the game theoretical sophistication of the player; the benefit instead is related to the game payoffs. Behavior is in turn determined by the individual's depth of reasoning and his beliefs about the reasoning process of the opponent. Thus, in our framework, payoffs not only affect individual choices in the traditional sense, but they also shape the cognitive process itself. Our model delivers testable implications on players' chosen actions as incentives and opponents change. We then test the model's predictions with an experiment. We administer different treatments that vary beliefs over payoffs and opponents, as well as beliefs over opponents' beliefs. The results of this experiment, which are not accounted for by current models of reasoning in games, strongly support our theory. Our approach therefore serves as a novel, unifying framework of strategic thinking in games.


Street gangs are prevalent throughout the United States. Recently, law enforcement agencies estimated there are approximately 30,000 gangs and 850,000 gang members across the United States. Gang members commit assaults, street-level drug trafficking, robberies, and threats and intimidation. However, they most commonly commit low-level property crime and marijuana use. Rival gang members or law-abiding citizens are often the targets of these crimes. Other than crime, the influence of gangs can disrupt the socializing power of schools, families, and communities. These institutions help socialize young people to learn and follow the appropriate rules of a law-abiding society. The presence of gangs and gang-related activity induces fear in the local community and great concern among citizens, impacting the quality of life of neighborhoods and cities. To confront these concerns, law enforcement is often considered the first line of defense. Despite the tenuous relationship between law enforcement and gangs, police officers have special knowledge and access to gang members and at-risk youth, which puts law enforcement in a unique position to reduce juvenile gang violence through prevention, intervention, and suppression efforts.
 There are several ways in which law enforcement responds to gang violence. In its efforts to prevent gang violence, law enforcement plays a crucial role in regulating gang activity and in preventing those at risk of joining gangs. Primary prevention is broad in scope as the programs and strategies focus on the entire community. Primary prevention programs, such as the Gang Resistance Education and Training (GREAT) program, target a wide population and attempt to teach youths the skills to resist peer pressure to join a gang. Secondary prevention programs narrow their focus by identifying and reaching out to youths at risk for joining gangs. Secondary prevention programs, such as Los Angeles's GRYD Secondary Prevention Program, offer psychological and substance abuse counseling, tutoring, and employment training, among other services. Law enforcement can also reduce gang violence through intervention by implementing strategies that provide alternatives to gang membership and strategies that prevent gang activity. Gang alternative programs, such as the Gang Employment Program (GEP), aim to get individuals to leave their gangs, but also provide opportunities to prevent the individual from rejoining the gang. Gang activity prevention strategies, such as the Dallas Anti-Gang Initiative's enforcement of curfew and truancy laws, focus on specific activities, places, or behaviors associated with gang activity. These strategies typically include special laws, mediation, and situational crime prevention strategies. As a last resort, law enforcement responds to gang violence through suppression strategies. Suppression strategies are deterrence-based strategies. Although the effectiveness of these aforementioned programs varies, law enforcement is better utilized in a prevention capacity rather than an enforcement one. Moreover, law enforcement should not tackle gang violence alone, but in partnership with other community organizations and stakeholders such as Boston's Operation Ceasefire or Chicago's Project Safe Neighborhoods. These partnerships with community organizations and visible commitment to combating gang violence through prevention and suppression efforts can build trust and increase police legitimacy in at-risk communities.


BACKGROUND
This study examined whether prazosin reduces alcohol drinking over the course of prolonged treatment and whether it blocks the initiation of alcohol drinking in rats with a genetic predisposition toward high alcohol drinking, that is alcohol-preferring (P) rats.

METHODS
In study one, alcohol-experienced P rats that had been drinking alcohol for 2 h/d for several months were treated daily with prazosin (0, 0.5, 1.0, or 2.0 mg/kg body weight [BW]) for 7 weeks. In study two, alcohol-naïve P rats were treated daily with prazosin (0, 1.0, or 2.0 mg/kg BW) for 2 weeks prior to, or concomitantly with, the initiation of alcohol access and throughout 3 weeks of alcohol availability. Prazosin treatment and alcohol access were then discontinued for 2 weeks followed by reinstatement of alcohol access without prazosin treatment for 4 weeks, followed by resumption of daily prazosin treatment (2.0 mg/kg BW) for 3 weeks.

RESULTS
Prazosin reduced alcohol drinking throughout 7 weeks of treatment in P rats accustomed to drinking alcohol. Following termination of prazosin treatment, alcohol drinking slowly returned to pretreatment baseline. Reduced alcohol intake was accompanied by increased water intake. In alcohol-naïve P rats, prazosin administration prior to the first opportunity to drink alcohol and throughout 3 weeks of alcohol access retarded acquisition of alcohol drinking and reduced the amount of alcohol consumed. When prazosin was administered concomitantly with the first opportunity to drink alcohol, it abolished acquisition of alcohol drinking. Discontinuation of prazosin treatment allowed expression of a genetic predisposition toward high alcohol drinking to gradually emerge. Prazosin retained the ability to reduce alcohol intake with repeated treatments.

CONCLUSIONS
Prazosin decreased alcohol drinking during prolonged treatment and may be useful for treating alcoholism and alcohol-use disorders. Prazosin may also be useful for deterring the initiation of drinking in individuals with a family history of alcoholism.


A little area located in the northern margin of the Hyblean Plateau (SE Sicily), close to the little town of Palagonia (administrative territory of Catania), in the archaeological area of Caltagirone, was studied by means of geological and petrographic integrated surveys. The starting point for the study was the occasional discovery of an uninterpreted ancient artefact, whose manufacture was our subject of interest. The geological-geomorphological study consists of detailed field mapping at 1:10.000 scale and of the reconstruction of the stratigraphy and of the hydrogeological setting of the site. The area is characterized by a succession of interbedded volcanic and sedimentary litotypes ranging in time from the late Pliocene to Holocene affected by tectonic episodes causing the formation of a graben-horst setting. In detail, the find is located close to a graben whose floor was occupied by a lake (now disappeared) in the Holocene time, representing a superficial aquifer system. Furthermore, the detailed reconstruction of the stratigraphic succession, represented by a thick horizon of vulcanoclastites (late Pliocene-early Pleistocene) overlapped by a thin level of calcarenites (early Pleistocene) was coupled with petrographic investigations, that emphasized the degree of alteration of the volcanoclastic sequence, as testified by the widespread occurrence of secondary authigenic minerals such as clayey material that substitute volcanic glass and primary minerals and, at the same time, fills in the open vesicles; this process determines an increase in impermeability of the site's substratum compared to the overlying calcarenite. Thus, the geological and petrographic data suggest the presence during the recent past, of a shallow unconfined aquifer. The collected data, that testify a probable high availability of water, are in agreement with the direct observation of the ancient artefact, mainly represented by a system of circular and squared chambers linked by narrow trenches, of which we also estimated potential the water amount that could be stored in.


type="main"> We examine factors behind firms' decisions to contribute to open standard setting. Our study highlights a novel explanation: firms seek to improve their positions in an interfirm cooperation network. In the wireless telecommunications standard-setting organization we study, firms develop new technical specifications in small committees. Our panel data analyses demonstrate that interorganizational network connections influence firms' decisions to support committees. Additionally, firms are more likely to support committees when they are technologically distant from the firm that initiated the committee. We argue that standard setting presents opportunities for information exchange and for accessing complementary R&D assets through the cooperation network.


Critics of Barometer Rising (1941) tend to treat the novel's various personages as rigigly representing aspects of Canadian identity. Such an approach, however, reduces characters to components of an abstract national schema that sits awkwardly alongside the novel's visceral descriptions of the Halifax Explosion. This dualist view fails to account for how feelings and sensations are also among the building blocks of national identity in the novel. Sara Ahmed insists that "affective economies" are key to aligning individuals with communities through public events that elicit shared emotional responses. Barometer Rising stages such events to bring Haligonians together emotionally and physically, representing and rehearsing a particularly somatic nationalism. In this regard the novel makes a significant contribution to accounts of national identity in its insistence that citizens are drawn into the nation through their emotional and erotic lives.


Aerosols affect the climate system by changing cloud characteristics in many ways. They act as cloud condensation and ice nuclei and may have an influence on the hydrological cycle. Here we investigate aerosol effects on con-vective clouds by extending the double-moment cloud mi-crophysics scheme developed for stratiform clouds, which is coupled to the HAM double-moment aerosol scheme, to con-vective clouds in the ECHAM5 general circulation model. This enables us to investigate whether more, and smaller cloud droplets suppress the warm rain formation in the lower parts of convective clouds and thus release more latent heat upon freezing, which would then result in more vigorous convection and more precipitation. In ECHAM5, including aerosol effects in large-scale and convective clouds (simulation ECHAM5-conv) reduces the sensitivity of the liquid water path increase with increasing aerosol optical depth in better agreement with observations and large-eddy simulation studies. In simulation ECHAM5-conv with increases in greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions since pre-industrial times, the geographical distribution of the changes in precipitation better matches the observed increase in precipitation than neglecting microphysics in convective clouds. In this simulation the convective precipitation increases the most suggesting that the convection has indeed become more vigorous .


Sleep deprivation impairs a wide range of cognitive processes, but the precise mechanism underlying these deficits is unclear. One prominent proposal is that sleep deprivation impairs vigilant attention, and that impairments in vigilant attention cause impairments in cognitive tasks that require attention. Here, we test this theory by studying the effects of caffeine on visual vigilant attention and on placekeeping, a cognitive control process that plays a role in procedural performance, problem solving, and other higher order tasks. In the evening, participants (N = 276) completed a placekeeping task (UNRAVEL) and a vigilant attention task (the Psychomotor Vigilance Task [PVT]) and were then randomly assigned to either stay awake overnight in the laboratory or sleep at home. In the morning, participants who slept returned to the lab, and all participants consumed a capsule that contained either 200 mg of caffeine or placebo. After an absorption period, all participants completed UNRAVEL and PVT again. Sleep deprivation impaired performance on both tasks, replicating previous work. Caffeine counteracted this impairment in vigilant attention but did not significantly affect placekeeping for most participants, though it did reduce the number of sleep-deprived participants who failed to maintain criterion accuracy. These results suggest that sleep deprivation impairs placekeeping directly through a causal pathway that does not include visual vigilant attention, a finding that has implications for intervention research and suggests that caffeine has limited potential to reduce procedural error rates in occupational settings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).


Objective: To evaluate the clinical efficacy of a standardized special root extract from the plant Petasites hybridus as a preventive therapy for migraine. Methods: This is a three-arm, parallel-group, randomized trial comparing Petasites extract 75 mg bid, Petasites extract 50 mg bid, or placebo bid in 245 patients with migraine. Eligible patients met International Headache Society criteria for migraine, were ages 18 to 65, and had at least two to six attacks per month over the preceding 3 months. The main outcome measure was the decrease in migraine attack frequency per month calculated as percentage change from baseline over a 4-month treatment period. Results: Over 4 months of treatment, in the per-protocol analysis, migraine attack frequency was reduced by 48% for Petasites extract 75 mg bid (p = 0.0012 vs placebo), 36% for Petasites extract 50 mg bid (p = 0.127 vs placebo), and 26% for the placebo group. The proportion of patients with a ≥50% reduction in attack frequency after 4 months was 68% for patients in the Petasites extract 75-mg arm and 49% for the placebo arm (p < 0.05). Results were also significant in favor of Petasites 75 mg at 1, 2, and 3 months based on this endpoint. The most frequently reported adverse reactions considered possibly related to treatment were mild gastrointestinal events, predominantly burping. Conclusions: Petasites extract 75 mg bid is more effective than placebo and is well tolerated as a preventive therapy for migraine. Petasites 50 mg PO bid was not significantly more effective than placebo on the primary study endpoints.


From the Publisher:
In the past decade, high-quality interfaces have become standard in a growing number of areas such as games and CD-ROM-based encyclopedias. Yet the overwhelming majority of programmers edit their code using a single font within a single window and view code execution via the hand insertion of print statements. Software Visualization (SV) redresses this imbalance by using typography, graphics, and animation techniques to show program code, data, and control flow. This book describes the history of SV, techniques and frameworks for its construction, its use in education and program debugging, and recent attempts to evaluate its effectiveness. In making programming a multimedia experience, SV leaves programmers and computer science researchers free to explore more interesting issues and to tackle more challenging problems.


Human doctors with well-structured medical knowledge can diagnose a disease merely via a few conversations with patients about symptoms. In contrast, existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems often require a large number of dialogue instances to learn as they fail to capture the correlations between different diseases and neglect the diagnostic experience shared among them. To address this issue, we propose a more natural and practical paradigm, i.e., low-resource medical dialogue generation, which can transfer the diagnostic experience from source diseases to target ones with a handful of data for adaptation. It is capitalized on a commonsense knowledge graph to characterize the prior disease-symptom relations. Besides, we develop a Graph-Evolving Meta-Learning (GEML) framework that learns to evolve the commonsense graph for reasoning disease-symptom correlations in a new disease, which effectively alleviates the needs of a large number of dialogues. More importantly, by dynamically evolving disease-symptom graphs, GEML also well addresses the real-world challenges that the disease-symptom correlations of each disease may vary or evolve along with more diagnostic cases. Extensive experiment results on the CMDD dataset and our newly-collected Chunyu dataset testify the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art approaches. Besides, our GEML can generate an enriched dialogue-sensitive knowledge graph in an online manner, which could benefit other tasks grounded on knowledge graph.


This Article considers the second-best design of Pigouvian taxes and subsidies in the presence of agents who are imperfectly aware of the instrument. Until very recently, the price instrument literature has assumed perfect rationality, and even the handful of prior attempts to account for "hidden" prices focus mainly on the income tax. I extend these efforts in several directions. First, I show that the best available instrument for correcting negative externalities is often one whose price is partially adjusted upwards -- or, in the case of subsidies, downwards -- to counter-act the neglect of irrational actors. In addition, I argue that the salience of a price instrument can affect the choice between sticks and carrots, potentially making carrots a more viable option than is usually claimed in existing literature. I also address the cases of positive externalities, "hyper-salient" actors who are excessively attentive to price instruments, and combinations of each. Finally, I highlight evidence suggesting that the problem of imperfect awareness of price instruments is likely inevitable and widespread, implying that even if government does not intentionally set out to manipulate public awareness of its policies, salience will typically be an important factor in policy design.


Developed on the boundary between medicine and sociology, this thesis develops a critique of the perspectives of these disciplines through analysis of a study of women's perspectives on hormone replacement therapy. Women's perspectives are explored through a postal questionnaire survey and a study using individual interviews and focus groups. The survey results provide a measure of women's attitudes towards, and knowledge of, hormone replacement therapy. The individual interviews detail the way women move towards a decision about the therapy and identifies common themes, particularly women's fears and what influences their fears. The focus groups explore contrasting themes including women's control and choice in decisions about therapy, contrary themes in women's attitudes and the different ways of thinking used by the women. The results of the studies are assessed for their implications for clinical general practice. The thesis also takes a sociological perspective on women and HRT and on the research process, in particular exploring two themes. Firstly, the interaction between the social context, the research subject and the research process. This includes the social factors influencing the development of the research and choice of research methods, and the influence of the research methods on the results obtained. The second theme is the perspectives and levels of analysis used by the main disciplines contributing to the thesis; biomedicine, biostatistics, general practice and sociology. The thesis explores how the different perspectives and levels of analysis influence research and how they are used to manage the social context. These explorations are used to suggest future directions for research on hormone replacement therapy and for general practice.


To celebrate the flourishing artists' moving image practice in Scotland and the triumph of the international tour to China, a culminating event will be held on 17 February amongst a vista of moving image featuring all 24 artists' works, illuminated by performances, readings and talks. The Culminating event is co-organised with British Council.

My film 'The Ballad of 20 Years of Real Life' is presented in a sculptural screen installation, with Chinese subtitles. This work addresses the construction of a durational performance lasting nearly 25 years selecting a work from each year paid together in a song, in the key of A. How is longevity of artist's practice constructed and engaged with through audience engagement? How can this be used as a tool to inspire young people?

'Here' is fickle. Moving between different times and places, 'here' is nomadic and it is often an elsewhere. Inherently mobile, here and its elsewhere institute connections and routes of exchange.

Here Was Elsewhere: >>FFWD holds these passages in the frame of the moving image, producing histories and memories of what was and could be. Displacing elsewhere into here, Here Was Elsewhere: >>FFWD is a reprise of Cooper Gallery's International Project CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland (Phase Two), in which >>FFWD was first shown at the Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum in 2016.

Capturing the distinctive concerns driving contemporary artists' moving image works made in Scotland, Here Was Elsewhere: >>FFWD evokes the body, history, time and narrative; the material of here and elsewhere. Featuring works made since 2000 by 24 up-and-coming and established artists, including winners and nominees of the prestigious Turner Prize, Max Mara Art Prize for Women, Margaret Tait Award and The Derek Jarman Awards, Here Was Elsewhere: >>FFWD is a panorama of a medium defined by the urgencies of the contemporary. Cut together as a four-week 'film strip', the exhibition, with the camera as its medium, brings to clarity the diverse ethos of looking, recording and seeing that thrives in artists' moving image practices from Scotland.

Placing the eye and the gesture as intrinsic aspects of the moving image, the first week of Here Was Elsewhere: >>FFWD positions the human body as a question of place and situation. Acknowledging the voice and the materiality of sculpture, the second week evades history as merely an account of what has been, registering it instead as a concrete vocal presence. For the third week, Here Was Elsewhere: >>FFWD foregrounds the description of distance implicit in the moving image as an ephemeral grammar of time. Giving form to narrative, the fourth and final week focuses on methods and demonstrations as images that mediate practices of living into an ethos. The selection of works in the exhibition is supported by Modern Edinburgh Film School.


We examine the effect of malaria on economic development in Africa over the very long run. Using data on the prevalence of the mutation that causes sickle cell disease, we measure the impact of malaria on mortality in Africa prior to the period in which formal data were collected. Our estimate is that in the more afflicted regions, malaria lowered the probability of surviving to adulthood by about ten percentage points, which is twice the current burden of the disease. The reduction in malaria mortality has been roughly equal to the reduction in other causes of mortality. We then ask whether the estimated burden of malaria had an effect on economic development in the period before European contact. Using data at the ethnic group level, we find little evidence of a negative relationship between malaria burden and population density or other measures of development.


Bidding challenges learning theories. Even with the same bid, experiences vary stochastically: the same choice can result in either a gain or a loss. In such an environment, the question arises of how the nearly universally documented phenomenon of loss aversion affects the adaptive dynamics. We analyse the impact of loss aversion in a simple auction using the experienced-weighted attraction model of learning. Our experimental results suggest that individual learning dynamics are highly heterogeneous and affected by loss aversion to different degrees. Apart from that, the experiment shows that loss aversion is not specific to rare decision-making.


ABSTRACT
 The influence of intercropping strips of non-crop vegetation on the above-ground arthropod community was assessed, including natural enemy populations and interference with pest colonization in an adjacent yellow squash crop (Cucurbita pepo L.). Four non-crop border treatments were evaluated including: sorghum × sudangrass hybrid (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench × S. sudanense (Piper) Stapf); pigeon pea, (Cajanus cajan (L.) (Millsp.); the native weed complex; and a bare ground control. Border treatments were established on both sides of experimental plots containing 'Early Crookneck' squash. Sticky cards, pitfall traps, pan traps, and in situ counts were used to assess differences in the arthropod community within each of the border treatments and the adjacent squash crop. Natural enemies were most abundant in the native weed complex and pigeon pea borders; however, the spill-over of natural enemies into the neighboring crop was only observed in 2008, when predatory Coleoptera were most abundant in both the sorghum-sudangrass treatment and adjacent squash. Border crops did not influence the movement of thrips and whiteflies; however, in situ aphid counts were lower on squash bordered by sorghum-sudangrass than in the control. Flea beetles (Altica spp.) were consistently most abundant in the bare ground border, but many arthropod groups were unaffected by the treatments. None of the border treatments could prevent a heavy infestation of melonworm (Diaphania hyalinata L.), which defoliated and killed many of the squash plants.


Human actions captured in video sequences contain two crucial factors for action recognition, i.e., visual appearance and motion dynamics. To model these two aspects, Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks (CNNs and RNNs) are adopted in most existing successful methods for recognizing actions. However, CNN based methods are limited in modeling long-term motion dynamics. RNNs are able to learn temporal motion dynamics but lack effective ways to tackle unsteady dynamics in long-duration motion. In this work, we propose a memory-augmented temporal dynamic learning network, which learns to write the most evident information into an external memory module and ignore irrelevant ones. In particular, we present a differential memory controller to make a discrete decision on whether the external memory module should be updated with current feature. The discrete memory controller takes in the memory history, context embedding and current feature as inputs and controls information flow into the external memory module. Additionally, we train this discrete memory controller using straight-through estimator. We evaluate this end-to-end system on benchmark datasets (UCF101 and HMDB51) of human action recognition. The experimental results show consistent improvements on both datasets over prior works and our baselines.


Namibia is revising and reforming its Electoral Act (Act No 24 of 1992). In this undertaking stakeholders were consulted and public meetings were held throughout the country. In the subsequent report (2012) there were 59 recommendations of ways in which the Electoral Act could be improved. Electoral revision implies re-examining the Electoral Act within the context of democracy. The aim is to discover and rectify errors and shortcomings. Since electoral revision achieves reform, the two concepts are intertwined, with the intention of both being to strengthen the qualities of an Electoral Act. In this process, apart from efficiency, public desires and expectations must be attended to. In addition to the administrative and managerial task of running elections attention must be paid to the normative character of an electoral process, which is substantially determined by electoral justice. A number of principles are identified in relation to the character of electoral justice. These principles should be pursued both by stakeholders in the electoral process and the electoral bodies responsible for conducting elections in a democratic environment.


Session Description: Privacy laws like GDPR and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have created a much more regulated environment in which enterprises need to operate in regards to consumer data permissions. Built on hyperledger fabric, HealthVerity Consent is an enterprise-level platform that allows organizations to aggregate and manage all existing touchpoints across the organization in one central location to comply with evolving privacy requirements.
 In this session we'll review what it took to deliver an enterprise blockchain installation where we drove business process change across departments and companies to better manage rights to data access and use. We'll cover:

5 key lessons learned you can apply to future blockchain implementations
How to integrate into a non-blockchain ecosystem
What challenges were faced in order to drive business process change with blockchain
How to manage existing barriers when migrating from legacy systems and business process to distributed ledger technology


Studies of cytotoxic and proliferative activities of splenocytes as well as concentration of glucocorticoid hormones and testosterone in blood of rats, exposed to cold stress at different regimes, have shown that the changes in functional activity of immune-competent cells depend on the intensity of stress application, whereas alterations in blood hormone level do not depend on these conditions: employment of the both stress models revealed increased corticosterone concentration and reduced testosterone level in rat blood. Novel immunomodulatory effects of native DNA preparation Derinat under stress conditions were shown, including its normalizing action upon changed stressinduced activities of the immune system cells.


There exist problems in fuzzy finite element methods because technique of solving fuzzy equations is not perfect. For example, computation amount is too big and both sides of the equality are not exactly equal when solutions are substituted into the original equation. The concept of monosource fuzzy number is developed to simplify the calculation process of fuzzy equations. However the source of fuzziness in practical engineering is difficult to be judged and the source of fuzzy coefficient is non-unique. Indeed, no efficient method is available to solve fuzzy finite element equations. In this paper, fuzzy coefficient programming is combined with the essence of elasticity. In other words, the force equilibrium of elastic object is the process of minimizing energy of a quadratic equation. A new fuzzy finite element solution and a new neural network algorithm of fuzzy finite element are developed. The method was proved to be efficient and feasible through circuit simulation.


OBJECTIVE
Surgical site infection (SSI) is defined as infection at or near surgical incisions within 30 days of an operative procedure and classified either incisional superficial and deep or organ/space. The aim of the study is to report and compare the incidence and management of SSIs after robot-assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy (RALP) and retropubic radical prostatectomy (RRP).

MATERIAL AND METHODS
Within the last 4 years, we identified 285 patients that underwent RRP, n=187 (66%) or RALP, n=98 (34%). We reviewed the frequency, types and way of management of SSI complications.

RESULTS
A significant difference was found between RALP and RRP (2/98, 2% vs. 27/187, 14.4%; p<0.0001) as for SSIs. The time interval between the time of surgery and diagnosis of SSIs was longer in RALP relative to RRP (median 13.5 vs. 12.9 days, p=0.761).

CONCLUSION
All types of SSIs could be developed after RP, however RALP patients only experienced organ or space SSIs and have a lower rate of SSIs and shorter treatment time.


Skeletal muscle satellite cells (SCs) are involved in remodeling and hypertrophy processes of skeletal muscle. However, little knowledge exists on extrinsic factors that influence the content of SCs in skeletal muscle. In a comparative human study, we investigated the muscle fiber type-specific association between emergence of satellite cells (SCs), muscle growth, and remodeling in response to 12 wk unilateral resistance training performed as eccentric (Ecc) or concentric (Conc) resistance training ± whey protein (Whey, 19.5 g protein + 19.5 g glucose) or placebo (Placebo, 39 g glucose) supplementation. Muscle biopsies (vastus lateralis) were analyzed for fiber type-specific SCs, myonuclei, and fiber cross-sectional area (CSA). Following training, SCs increased with Conc in both type I and type II fibers (P < 0.01) and exhibited a group difference from Ecc (P < 0.05), which did not increase. Myonuclei content in type I fibers increased in all groups (P < 0.01), while a specific accretion of myonuclei in type II fibers was observed in the Whey-Conc (P < 0.01) and Placebo-Ecc (P < 0.01) groups. Similarly, whereas type I fiber CSA increased independently of intervention (P < 0.001), type II fiber CSA increased exclusively with Whey-Conc (P < 0.01) and type II fiber hypertrophy correlated with whole muscle hypertrophy exclusively following Conc training (P < 0.01). In conclusion, isolated concentric knee extensor resistance training appears to constitute a stronger driver of SC content than eccentric resistance training while type II fiber hypertrophy was accentuated when combining concentric resistance training with whey protein supplementation.


The temporal envelope profile and the phase of a steady-state pulse propagating through a resonant medium in the presence of nonresonant nonlinearity are derived. The formation of solitonlike pulses takes place as a result of the balance of the self-phase modulation generated by nonresonant nonlinearity and the nonlinear resonant group-velocity dispersion induced by the self-induced-transparency effect in a resonant medium. Self-phase-modulation action leads to distortion of the pulse when its power and inverse duration exceed the critical values Pcr and τcr-1. We show the destructive role of self-phase modulation in the case of self-induced-transparency pulse generation in a laser with erbium-doped fiber as an intracavity coherent absorber.


The Department of Epidemiology integrates diverse educational programs with a rapidly growing research portfolio. Graduate students have the opportunity to study and participate in faculty research projects in a variety of academic disciplines, including infectious disease, cancer, nutritional and disaster epidemiology, and public health laboratory science. In their practicum, students work closely with scientists at local health departments, the NIH and other federal agencies, academic institutions, and international health organizations. By exploring the core quantitative sciences of public health and taking advantage of opportunities to learn by doing, students are prepared to become the next generation of public health leaders and practitioners.


Over the last two decades, the call for autonomous agencies has reverberated throughout all corners of the globe: many governments – from Great-Britain to Japan, from Tanzania to America – were unbundled into smaller agencies with a certain degree of autonomy. In most cases, these agencies carry out public services with sovereignty over policy design, decision-making and managerial matters. They are nonetheless tied to their respective ministry, because the political executives bear the responsibility for their performance. Well-known examples of services that are executed at arm's length include tax collection, benefits administration, and scientific research. The rationale behind this agencification is that agencies are better equipped to deliver public services than the rather unwieldy government. Both the great expectations and the proliferation of semi-autonomous agencies raise the question whether the creation of these agencies is justified – i.e. whether their effects are in line with prior expectations.


Economics Skills and Practice is aimed at the new 2011 Economics Diploma programme and is suitable for Higher and Standard level. Packed full of examples and activities this new series takes the IB student step-by-step through the essential skills development needed to be successful in the course and examination. Special attention is paid to unpacking the language of the subject with plenty of workbook-style exercises to engage students and reinforce the lessons learnt in the course. Detailed guidance on the new mathematical elements of the Higher Level syllabus will provide extra reinforcement and build confidence. DTPlenty of activities to practise essential skills, improving exam performance DTInformation on designing, selecting and using diagrams to explain challenging concepts DTUnpicks tricky terminology and guides the correct use of language, supporting your EAL students DTIncludes lots of examples and model answers to ensure full comprehension and strengthen exam potential DTDetailed, step-by-step guidance on the new quantitative element of the syllabus to help students succeed in this new syllabus area DTHelpful guidance and advice on the Internal Assessment and the Extended Essay, ensuring high-quality work About the series: Cement student confidence and fully embed all the key skills central to IB study. IB Skills and Practice provides learners with the essential practice needed to enable confident skills application, tangibly building capabilities for IB assessment.


2015 was the United Nations International Year of Soils and, for
the first time, soils and the life within them were in the spotlight
globally. An international group
of experts and scientists from the European Commission's Joint
Research Centre (JRC), in close collaboration with colleagues
from the Commission's Directorate-General for the Environment
and the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative, have produced the first
ever Global Soil Biodiversity Atlas.
Soils are vital for human survival and underpin many sectors of
our economy. It is estimated that 99% of the world's food comes
from the terrestrial environment. But soils are also home to over a
quarter of global biodiversity. Millions of soil-dwelling organisms
promote essential ecosystem services – from plant growth to
food production. They support biodiversity, benefit human health,
promote the regulation of nutrient cycles that in turn influence
climate, and represent an unexplored capital of natural sources.
Our knowledge of soil life is growing continuously, thanks to
recent technological advances and awareness of its value.
However, it is estimated that only 1% of soil microorganism
species have been identified. Therefore, understanding the highly
complex and dynamic life below ground remains one of the most
fascinating challenges facing scientists today. A clearer picture
of our soils will allow us to better understand environmental and
global climate change processes whilst also exploring possible
adaptation strategies.
Pressures on soil organisms are well known. An ever increasing
global population, and increased demand for food and fibre lead
to intensified agriculture, greater use of fertilisers and pesticides
as well as monocultures. Unsustainable agricultural practices,
climate change, soil erosion and loss of aboveground diversity all
negatively affect organisms that live in soil. To develop actions
that will preserve soil life, we need to better understand the
consequences of the loss of soil biodiversity.
The Global Soil Biodiversity Atlas raises awareness of the role of
soil organisms in sustaining life on our planet, and presents the
latest research on soil biodiversity. It is also a major contribution
to the EU target of halting the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem
services in the EU by 2020, and the goals of the 2030 Agenda
for Sustainable Development on sustainable food production and
fighting land degradation.
This publication marks a crucial step towards a global
coordinated effort to assess life below ground, and highlights
the need to improve soil conservation and the diversity of life within it.


In the past, clinicians have diagnosed acquired apraxia of speech based upon the presentation of an inconsistent error pattern. However, recent research studies have begun to suggest quite the contrary, pointing towards a consistent pattern of errors in the speech of those with apraxia. The present study utilized an intensive Sound Production Treatment (SPT) for a 51-year-old male with severe acquired apraxia of speech and moderate-severe aphasia. Treatment was administered over a period of five days per week, three hours a day, for two consecutive weeks. During this treatment, probes were gathered daily to evaluate the efficacy of the intensive SPT for apraxia. Baseline data and follow-up data for one, four and eight weeks post treatment were also collected. Based upon analyses of transcriptions from speech samples, collected during the baseline, probe, and follow-up testing,, accuracy data was used to evaluate the argument for consistency of errors in apraxia of speech. The analysis of consistency comprehensively focused on the manner of articulation in consonants including the categories: stop, fricative, affricate, nasal approximant, retroflex approximant, and lateral approximant. Results of this study support recent research indicating that errors are indeed consistent rather than inconsistent in the speech of those with apraxia. Future studies will seek to confirm these findings with analyses of a larger sample size and evaluation of vowels as well. These findings have important implications for increasing our understanding of the diagnostic criteria of apraxia of speech and its appropriate treatment.


In a move that would forever alter the map of the Middle East, Israel captured the West Bank, Golan Heights, Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula in 1967's brief but pivotal Six Day War. Cursed victory is the first complete history of the war's troubled aftermath - a military occupation of the Palestinian territories that is now well into its fifth decade. Drawing on unprecedented access high-level sources, top-secret memos and never-before-published letters, the book provides a gripping and unvarnished chronicle of how what Israel promised would be an 'enlightened occupation' quickly turned sour, and the anguished diplomatic attempts to bring it to an end. Bregman sheds fresh light on critical moments in the peace process, taking us behind the scenes as decisions about the fate of the territories were made, and more often, as crucial opportunities to resolve the conflict were missed. As the narrative moves from Jerusalem to New York, Oslo to Beirut, and from the late 1960s to the present day, Cursed victory provides vivid portraits of the key players in this unfolding drama, including Moshe Dayan, King Hussein of Jordan, Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat. Yet Bregman always reminds us how diplomatic and back-room negotiations affected the daily lives of millions of Arabs, and how the Palestinian resistance, especially during the first and second intifadas, in turn shaped political developments. As Bregman concludes, the occupation has become a dark stain on Israel's history, and an era when international opinion of the country shifted decisively. Cursed victory is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the origins of the ongoing conflict in the region.


I have argued elsewhere that the psychological aspects of Nietzsche's later works are best understood from a psychodynamic point of view. Nietzsche holds a view I dubbed the tenacity of the intentional (T): When an intentional state loses its object, a new object replaces the original; the state does not disappear entirely. In this article I amend and clarify T to T": When an intentional state with a subpropositional object loses its object, the affective component of the state persists without a corresponding object, and that affect will generally be redeployed in a state with a distinct object. I then trace the development of the tenacity thesis through Nietzsche's early and middle works. Along the way, I discuss a number of related topics, including the scope of the tenacity thesis (does it apply to all intentional states?), the reflexive turn one often finds in Nietzsche's examples (why does he so often say the new object is oneself?), and the relations among will to power, drives, and the tenacity of the intentional.


CONTEXT
Recent emphasis on systems-based approaches to patient safety has led to several studies demonstrating worse outcomes associated with surgery at night.

OBJECTIVE
To evaluate whether operative time of day was associated with thoracic organ transplant outcomes, hypothesizing that it would not be associated with increased morbidity or mortality.

DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS
We conducted a retrospective cohort study of adult heart and lung transplant recipients in the United Network for Organ Sharing database from January 2000 through June 2010. Primary stratification was by operative time of day (night, 7 PM-7 AM; day, 7 AM-7 PM).

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Primary end points were short-term survival, assessed by the Kaplan-Meier method at 30, 90, and 365 days. Secondary end points encompassed common postoperative complications. Risk-adjusted multivariable Cox proportional hazards regression examined mortality.

RESULTS
A total of 27,118 patients were included in the study population. Of the 16,573 who underwent a heart transplant, 8346 (50.36%) did so during the day and 8227 (49.64%) during the night. Of the 10,545 who underwent a lung transplant, 5179 (49.11%) did so during the day and 5366 (50.89%) during the night. During a median follow-up of 32.2 months (interquartile range, 11.2-61.1 months), 8061 patients (28.99%) died. Survival was similar for organ transplants performed during the day and night. Survival rates at 30 days for heart transplants during the day were 95.0% vs 95.2% during the night (hazard ratio [HR], 1.05; 95% confidence interval, 0.83-1.32; P = .67) and for lung transplants during the day were 96.0% vs 95.5% during the night (HR, 1.22; 95% CI, 0.97-1.55; P = .09). At 90 days, survival rates for heart transplants were 92.6% during the day vs 92.7% during the night (HR, 1.05; 95% CI, 0.88-1.26; P = .59) and for lung transplants during the day were 92.7% vs 91.7% during the night (HR, 1.23; 95% CI, 1.04-1.47; P = .02). At 1 year, survival rates for heart transplants during the day were 88.0% vs 87.7% during the night (HR, 1.05; 95% CI, 0.91-1.21; P = .47) and for lung transplants during the day were 83.8% vs 82.6% during the night (HR, 1.08; 95% CI, 0.96-1.22; P = .19). Among lung transplant recipients, there was a slightly higher rate of airway dehiscence associated with nighttime transplants (57 of 5022 [1.1%] vs 87 of 5224 [1.7%], P = .02).

CONCLUSION
Among patients who underwent thoracic organ transplants, there was no significant association between operative time of day and survival up to 1 year after organ transplant.


As deep reinforcement learning (RL) is applied to more tasks, there is a need to visualize and understand the behavior of learned agents. Saliency maps explain agent behavior by highlighting the features of the input state that are most relevant for the agent in taking an action. Existing perturbation-based approaches to compute saliency often highlight regions of the input that are not relevant to the action taken by the agent. Our approach generates more focused saliency maps by balancing two aspects (specificity and relevance) that capture different desiderata of saliency. The first captures the impact of perturbation on the relative expected reward of the action to be explained. The second downweights irrelevant features that alter the relative expected rewards of actions other than the action to be explained. We compare our approach with existing approaches on agents trained to play board games (Chess and Go) and Atari games (Breakout, Pong and Space Invaders). We show through illustrative examples (Chess, Atari, Go), human studies (Chess), and automated evaluation methods (Chess) that our approach generates saliency maps that are more interpretable for humans than existing approaches.


Indian Journal of advanced nursing (IJAN) is an open access peer reviewed journal which aims mainly at promoting and disseminating research related to nursing and midwifery. IJAN provides its readers with the multidisciplinary information they need to provide clinically excellent patient care and to enhance their nursing practice


In this article we present the results of a study in which we examine our use of literacy portfolios in our elementary education methods courses through the inclusion of an ex ternal reviewer in the portfolio evaluation process. Preservice teachers at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse are concurrently enrolled in a field-based block of three pro fessional elementary education courses. They are required to create a literacy portfolio as a combined requirement in our two methods courses (Elementary Level Reading and Curriculum and Methods in Language Arts) in which they demonstrate and reflect upon the development of their knowledge and skills as literacy educators. Our one-semester study provided an external professional audience for the re view of these literacy portfolios, and provided us new insights to improve the ways in which we evaluated these assess


Measurements from seven spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit are analyzed to determine the decay rate of the number density of the outer electron radiation belt prior to the onset of high-speed-stream-driven geomagnetic storms. Superposed-data analysis is used with a collection of 124 storms. When there is a calm before the storm, the electron number density decays exponentially before the storm with a 3.4-day e-folding time: beginning about 4 days before storm onset, the density decreases from ∼4 × 10−4 cm−3 to ∼1 × 10−4 cm−3. When there is not a calm before the storm, the number density decay is very small. The decay in the number density of radiation belt electrons is believed to be caused by pitch angle scattering of electrons into the atmospheric loss cone as the outer plasmasphere fills during the calms. This is confirmed by separately measuring the density decay rate for times when the outer plasmasphere is present or absent. While the radiation belt electron density decreases, the temperature of the electron radiation belt holds approximately constant, indicating that the electron precipitation occurs equally at all energies. Along with the number density decay, the pressure of the outer electron radiation belt decays, and the specific entropy increases. From the measured decay rates, the electron flux to the atmosphere is calculated, and that flux is 3 orders of magnitude less than thermal fluxes in the magnetosphere, indicating that the radiation belt pitch angle scattering is 3 orders weaker than strong diffusion. Energy fluxes into the atmosphere are calculated and found to be insufficient to produce visible airglow.


Abstract The civil and military utilization of nuclear power results in continuously increasing stockpiles of spent fuel and separated plutonium. Since fast breeder reactors are at present not available, the majority of spent fuel discharged from commercial nuclear reactors is intended for direct final disposal or designated for interim storage. An effective form of intermediate plutonium storage is recycling in thermal reactors. Recycling of the recovered plutonium in commercial light water reactors (LWRs) is currently practiced in Belgium, France, Germany, and Switzerland. The number of mixed-oxide (MOX) assemblies reloaded each year in a large variety of reactors demonstrates that plutonium recycling in LWRs has reached industrial maturity. The status of experience gained today at Framatome ANP confirms the reliability of the design codes and the suitability of fuel assembly and core designs. The validation database for increasing exposures of MOX fuel is being continuously expanded. This provides the basis for further extending the discharge exposures of MOX assemblies and for licensing the use of higher plutonium concentrations. Options to support the weapons plutonium reduction programs and for the development of advanced MOX assembly designs are investigated.


When individual-level health data is shared in biomedical research the privacy of patients and probands must be protected. This is typically achieved with methods of data de-identification, which transform data in such a way that formal guarantees about the degree of protection from re-identification can be provided. In the process it is important to minimize loss of information to ensure that the resulting data is useful. A typical use case is the creation of predictive models for knowledge discovery and decision support, e.g. to infer diagnoses or to predict outcomes of therapies. A variety of methods have been developed which can be used to build robust statistical classifiers from de-identified data. However, they have not been tuned for practical use and they have not been implemented into mature software tools. To bridge this gap, we have extended ARX, an open source anonymization tool for health data, with several new features. We have implemented a method for optimizing the suitability of de-identified data for building statistical classifiers and a method for assessing the performance of classifiers built from de-identified data. All methods are accessible via a comprehensive graphical user interface. We have used our implementation to create logistic regression models from a patient discharge dataset for predicting the costs of hospital stays. The results show that our approach enables the creation of privacy-preserving classifiers with optimal prediction accuracy.


Currently an advanced remotely controlled vibration laboratory is developed and implemented at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden. The new developments in the laboratory setup will provide users to carry out vibration measurements on a cantilever beam system with remotely adjustable dynamic properties and to estimate dynamic characteristics of it. The dynamic properties of the cantilever beam are remotely modified by attaching structural parts such as a block of mass, a spring mass system and a non-linear spring. In the development of this remote-lab, a number of different approaches were adopted for the production of well-defined experiments. Also, the new prototype laboratory is designed based on finite elements modeling (FEM) and LABVIEW. The test object, attachment mechanism for sub structures, relevant experiments, and proper interface for managing the lab via Internet and many other things have been considered.


Over the last decade, ultrafast time-resolved X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) has evolved to be now a mature and well-established experimental technique, giving extremely detailed information about the local geometrical and electronic structure in the early stages of a chemical reaction or biological process. Electronic structure changes are the fundamental driving forces triggering structural modifications in many chemical and biological reactions. Ultrafast time-resolved XAS is an ideal experimental technique to probe these changes in "real time" during the course of a chemical reaction, a biological function or a physical process. Ideally, the observation of ultrafast processes is made in conditions as close as possible as the natural ones, i.e., biological processes in physiological media (instead of crystals or frozen films). In this sense XAS offers unique capabilities, since it can be applied to any kind of system. In this thesis we successfully implemented a new scheme for measuring time-resolved XAS spectra with picosecond temporal resolution at MHz repetition rate. The increase in the data acquisition repetition rate provided an increase in the signal-to-noise (S/N) of a factor of > 20 compared to previous experiments in the kHz regime. To assess the improvements in this new data acquisition methodology, we used the light-induced spin transition in aqueous solutions of [Fe(bpy)3]2+ to benchmark our experiments. This system has been well-characterized by both ultrafast laser and x-ray time-resolved spectroscopies. The expected gain in data quality was confirmed, which allowed the recording of subtle changes in the pre-edge region of the XAS spectrum, reflecting the different electronic structure of [Fe(bpy)3]2+ upon the spin transition. We also present the investigation of the electronic and geometric structures of a series of metalloproteins (Myoglobin) in physiological solutions by means of X-ray absorption spectroscopy. To our knowledge, this is the first study of the structure of the different forms of Myoglobin in physiological media using XAS. The analysis of the XANES region of the spectrum using full-multiple scattering (FMS) formalism revealed that the ironnitrogen bond length in the porphyrins ring converged to a common value of about 2 A, in contrast to the wide variation found in the crystallographic structures. Porphyrins are known to be very rigid structures due to the big number of carbon-carbon double bounds, supporting our conclusion. The relative geometry of the ligands with respect to the heme is reported for the whole series of Myoglobins investigated. In addition, time-resolved XAS has been measured for two types of Myoglobin, Carboxy-Myoglobin (MbCO) and (Nitrosyl-Myoglobin) MbNO. It has been shown that, as expected from previous studies, the transient structure of photo-excited MbCO resembles that of the deligated ferrous Myoglobin (deoxyMb). On the other hand, the transient structure of photo-excited MbNO at 50 ps deviates slightly from that of deoxyMb. The analysis of the transient XANES indicates that the NO molecule moves 2.88 A away from the heme, staying closer to the iron atom than in the case of photo-excited MbCO. The NO geminate recombination time with the heme was also measured in "real time", and it has been found to occur in 216 ± 24 ps. This is the first direct measurement, i.e. sensitive to structural changes, of this geminate recombination time.


Applicability of the angular properties of scatter elements as a tool to achieve improved slow light performance with small group velocity dispersion and large bandwidth in photonic crystal waveguides is investigated. A polyatomic photonic crystal waveguide, including two scatter elements with different geometrical shapes in each primitive cell, is proposed to investigate the feasibility of our method. Numerical results show that a versatile control of the dispersion relation of slow light modes, with large normalized delay-bandwidth products ranging from 0.2085 to 0.3394, can be obtained using a unique geometrical parameter.


Water availability is an important issue addressed by Cooperative Extension programs nationwide. Rapid population growth and urbanization present unique challenges and opportunities for Extension programming. In this study, we explored whether urban Extension audiences in Florida had unique characteristics that could be used to design tailored programs. We used electronic surveys to collect water conservation and landscape management behaviors along with demographic information. Applying audience segmentation concepts, we divided respondents into subgroups by rural-urban continuum codes. We then described the resulting subgroups and made comparisons to identify differences that could inform Extension programming. The most urban residents had lived in Florida the longest, were least engaged in most water conservation practices, most likely to use a professional landscape company for landscape maintenance activities, and most likely to reside in a homeowners' association. The findings revealed somewhat of a disconnect between urban residents and protection of water resources. Understanding these differences among urban audiences can be useful insights to guide impactful Extension programs. Urban landscape water conservation programming should be designed to build a connection between residents and their local water bodies, and should engage the many partners present in urban systems. More research is needed to examine the relationship between residing in more urban areas and engaging less in landscape water conservation practices.


Holocaust Archaeologies: Approaches and Future Directions aims to move archaeological research concerning the Holocaust forward through a discussion of the variety of the political, social, ethical and religious issues that surround investigations of this period and by considering how to address them. It considers the various reasons why archaeological investigations may take place and what issues will be brought to bear when fieldwork is suggested. It presents an interdisciplinary methodology in order to demonstrate how archaeology can (uniquely) contribute to the history of this period. Case examples are used throughout the book in order to contextualise prevalent themes and a variety of geographically and typologically diverse sites throughout Europe are discussed. This book challenges many of the widely held perceptions concerning the Holocaust, including the idea that it was solely an Eastern European phenomena centred on Auschwitz and the belief that other sites connected to it were largely destroyed or are well-known. The typologically , temporally and spatial diverse body of physical evidence pertaining to this period is presented and future possibilities for investigation of it are discussed. Finally, the volume concludes by discussing issues relating to the "re-presentation" of the Holocaust and the impact of this on commemoration, heritage management and education. This discussion is a timely one as we enter an age without survivors and questions are raised about how to educate future generations about these events in their absence.


Cod Gadus morhua population in the Barents Sea was found to be spatially structured with regard to length-at-age. Results were based on data collected during research surveys in the Barents Sea between 1982 and 1997. The identified spatial structure was most pronounced for age groups 2–4 years and decreased for the older age groups with higher potential for migration. A positive linear correlation between mean length-at-age and mean geographical temperature was established for age groups 2–4 years. This correlationwas shownto be strongest when based on mean temperatures during 3 year periods ending with the year of capture. The spatial structure in length-at-age was shown to follow the temperature gradient of the Barents Sea. A large part of the observed area effects could be explained by temperature variation between areas. Evidence is also presented which indicates that the predictability and sensitivity of the dependence of length-at-age on temperature increases under extreme environmental conditions, i.e. in the northern and eastern areas of the Barents Sea. # 2003 The Fisheries Society of the British Isles


Disclosed is a method for maintaining and/or improving skin health in the area of a wearer covered by an absorbent article. The absorbent article includes a vapor permeable backsheet, a liquid pervious topsheet positioned in facing relation with the backsheet, an absorbent core located between the backsheet and the topsheet. The absorbent article also includes skin care compositions thereon for maintaining and/or improving skin health.


A multi-institutional study led by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) shows that patients whose colorectal cancer has spread to the liver and who received chemotherapy directly to the liver through a pump in the abdomen (an approach called Hepatic Arterial Infusion or HAI) fare better than those who received systemic (intravenously administered) chemotherapy. The study was published online in the February 27, 2006, issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology. "This study demonstrates that HAI therapy extends survival and improves quality of life in patients with colorectal cancer that has spread to the liver," said the study's lead author Nancy E. Kemeny, MD, medical oncologist in the Department of Medicine at MSKCC. "These positive findings are particularly important, given that metastasis to the liver occurs in 60 percent of patients with metastatic colorectal cancer, and most patients with these liver tumors eventually die of their disease." Several smaller studies have previously compared outcomes of HAI with systemic chemotherapy, but this is the first large study that had no crossover between the groups, meaning that none of the patients in the systemic group received HAI therapy. The study included 135 patients who were assigned randomly to receive either HAI or systemic chemotherapy. All of the patients underwent surgical removal of their primary tumors in the colon or rectum before beginning chemotherapy. Patients receiving HAI then underwent a surgical procedure to have a chemotherapy pump inserted into the abdomen. This procedure can sometimes be done using a minimally invasive laparoscope. Researchers found that patients receiving HAI lived longer than those receiving systemic chemotherapy, with a median survival of 24 versus 20 months. In addition, patients receiving HAI had better response rates (47 percent versus 24 percent) and longer time to disease progression in the liver (9.8 months versus 7.3 months). Patients receiving HAI did not experience the usual side effects associated with systemic therapy such as diarrhea, decreased white blood cell counts, and hair loss. However, because patients on the HAI regimen experienced mild toxicity to the liver, their liver function was monitored closely throughout the duration of treatment to prevent the toxicity from becoming more severe. The research began in 1996, before chemotherapy drugs such as irinotecan and oxaliplatin were available, so both sets of patients received the standard drugs at the time, fluorouracil and leucovorin, and had access to the newer drugs as they became available. According to Dr. Kemeny, studies are currently underway at MSKCC using HAI therapy in combination with newer drugs, and response rates appear to be even higher. Furthermore, the addition of HAI therapy is also being investigated in patients with primary liver cancer. The multi-institutional trial was conducted by researchers from the Cancer and Leukemia Group B and the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group. It was supported in part by the National Cancer Institute. Researchers from the following institutions participated in the study in addition to MSKCC: University of Southern California; University of California at San Francisco; Wake Forest University School of Medicine; Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; and Fox Chase Cancer Center. Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center is the world's oldest and largest institution devoted to prevention, patient care, research, and education in cancer. Scientists and clinicians at MSKCC generate innovative approaches to better understand, diagnose, and treat cancer. Specialists are leaders in biomedical research and in translating the latest research to advance the standard of cancer care worldwide.