Studies show that mental disorders are highly prevalent among students. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine the role of mindfulness and spiritual intelligence in the students' mental health studying at university of medical sciences. The study population included all undergraduate and medicine students. A total of 393 female and male students (193 medical and 200 non-medical students) were selected through randomly. General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) and spiritual intelligence and mindfulness questionnaire were used to evaluate the participants. The results revealed the negative correlation of mental health with mindfulness and spiritual intelligence and a positive correlation between mindfulness and dimensions of spiritual intelligence. Also, the dimension of spiritual life (43.1%) and mindfulness (31%) had a significant negative effect on the explained variance of the students' mental health. Analysis of variance showed that the scales of mindfulness, perception of existence, somatic symptoms, and anxiety were higher among women. Therefore, the students can be more capable of coping with existing traumas and pressures by boosting their spirituality, consciousness, and mindfulness.


Scheduling tasks on a standalone system can be complex but applying it to a cloud environment can be even more complex because of the large amount of resources available. An added complexity in a Cloud environment is that of security. This paper addresses scheduling from a security point of view and presents a Scheduling Security Model and evaluates its effectiveness to meet user's requirements with a number of worked examples with different scenarios.


We study the effects of envy on the feasibility of relational contracts in a standard moral hazard setup with two agents. Performance is evaluated via an observable, but non-contractible signal which reflects the agent´s individual contribution to firm value. Both agents exhibit disadvantageous inequity aversion. In contrast to the literature, we find that inequity aversion may be beneficial: In the presence of envy, for a certain range of interest rates relational contracts may be more profitable. Furthermore, for some interest rates reputational equilibria exist only with inequity averse agents.


In 2018, the European financial regulation MiFID II introduced research unbundling rules that banned the bundling of research payments with execution costs. The aim of research unbundling is to increase transparency for investors and to avoid agency conflicts. Opponents argue that research unbundling reduces small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) research and, thereby, SMEs' financing opportunities because this research can no longer be cross-subsidized by research fees paid for larger companies. The outbreak of COVID-19 and its impact on financial markets fueled intense discussions on rebundling for SMEs. Consequently, in February 2021, the European Commission adopted a Capital Markets Recovery Package that allows bundled research for SMEs below a market capitalization of EUR 1 billion. Against this backdrop, the authors conducted a survey among European market participants to investigate changes in research services due to research unbundling and the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, they examine market participants' views on the expected effects and improvements of the option to rebundle SME research as provided by the recovery package.


A new, cost-efficient and on-site-applicable thermal spraying process for depositing NiAl metallic overlay or bond-coat coatings for high temperature applications by synthesizing the desired intermetallic phases in-flight during oxy-acetylene flame spraying is presented. Base-metal powders were used for spraying and, by adjusting the spraying conditions, excellent NiAl-based coatings were achieved on various substrates, including mild steel, stainless steel and aluminium alloys. Expensive, pre-alloyed or agglomerated powders are avoided and the method is very promising for in-situ work and repairs. We call the new method "Combustion-Assisted Flame Spraying" (CAFSY) and its viability has been demonstrated at a pre-industrial level for coating metallic substrates. The NiAl-based coatings produced by CAFSY exhibit very high integrity with good adhesion, very low porosity, high surface hardness and high erosion resistance at a substantially lower cost than equivalent coatings using pre-prepared alloy powders.


Vegetation burning is a global environmental threat that results in local ecological, economic and social impacts but also has large-scale implications for global change. The burning is usually a result of interacting factors such as climate, land use and vegetation type. Despite its importance as a factor shaping ecological, economic and social processes, countries highly vulnerable to climate change in Central America, such as El Salvador, lack an assessment of this complex relationship. In this study we rely on remotely sensed measures of the Normalized Vegetation Difference Index (NDVI) and thermal anomaly detections by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor to identify vegetation cover changes and fire occurrences. We also use land use data and rainfall observations derived from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) data to determine the spatial and temporal variability and interactions of these factors. Our results indicate a highly marked seasonality of fire occurrence linked to the climatic variability with a peak of fire occurrences in 2004 and 2013. Low vegetation indices occurred in March–April, around two months after the driest period of the year (December–February), corresponding to months with high detection of fires. Spatially, 65.6% of the fires were recurrent and clustered in agriculture/cropland areas and within 1 km of roads (70%) and only a 4.7% of fires detected were associated with forests. Remaining forests in El Salvador deserve more attention due to underestimated consequences of forest fires. The identification of these clear patterns can be used as a baseline to better shape management of fire regimes and support decision making in this country. Recommendations resulting from this work include focusing on fire risk models and agriculture fires and long-term ecological and economic consequences of those. Furthermore, El Salvador will need to include agricultural fires in the contribution to national accounts emissions.


In a series of articles and now in their new book, Religious Freedom and the Constitution, Lawrence Sager and Christopher Eisgruber (E&S) defend an interpretation of the religion clauses of the First Amendment which, they write, "denies that religion is a constitutional anomaly, a category of human experience that demands special benefits and/or necessitates special restrictions." While not a book review in the traditional sense, my essay takes E&S's defense of a secular First Amendment as a starting point and asks, how did we get to the point where an interpretation of the First Amendment which denies that religion is "special" came to seem plausible and even desirable? My essay proceeds in three parts. In the first part, I look at contemporary liberal political theory, in order to understand why it might be a desideratum of contemporary constitutional interpretation that the religion clauses of the First Amendment be read as denying any special place to religion. In part two, I describe E&S's project of interpreting the religion clauses in a secular manner as borrowing heavily from liberal political theory. In the third part, I present the beginnings (but only the beginnings) of a theory of religion's value, one that I believe is opposed to the theory I ascribe to E&S. According to Ronald Dworkin's theory of Constitutional interpretation, the best interpretation of a constitutional word or phrase is that it best "fits" with the Constitutional text and best captures the "value" underlying the word or phrase. I suggest that that treating religion as no more special than any other system of belief does not give the best interpretation of religion, neither in terms of fit with the text of the Constitution nor in terms of capturing the unique value of religion.


Background: The World Health Organization considered health literacy as one of the most important determinant factors to promote various aspects of public health. Low health literacy can contribute to increased rates of hospitalization, reduced rates of medication adherence, decreased capacity to manage chronic diseases and increased the rate of emergency department visit. Objective: To evaluate the degree of health literacy among the sample, and to examine the relation between age and education level of the participants and health literacy level. Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted, by using an Arabic version of SAHL scale. Data were collected between November 2015 to December 2015 with 105 females in outpatient clinics. Result: The selected females in outpatient clinics have adequate health literacy levels, with a mean score (15.13±1.856). Moreover, there is no relation between the level of health literacy with age and education level of the participants. Conclusion: This study provides knowledge that can be applied to evolve schemes to encourage the health literacy level among females in Saudi Arabia.


The problem of the law making power of judges and the legitimacy and limits of judicial discretion recur throughout the history of legal thinking. It has been addressed from many angles and seen in many perspectives from Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" to Ronald Dworkin's "Law's Empire". The legitimacy of public power is more and more frequently questioned and doubted. As long as a substantial proportion of the exercise of public power is entrusted to courts and court-like bodies, there is a need for finding clear and comprehensible limits between the realm of judicial and political decision-making. The role of the judiciary in relation to the legislature has naturally become a subject of strong topical interest and is vividly discussed in many quarters and countries. This collection of essays on judicial discretion takes off with a jurisprudential introduction, which deals with different understandings of judicial discretion, its sources and links to the objectives of European Integration. This includes an elaboration of the relationships between conceptual understanding, actual practice and normative boundaries of judicial discretion. The second theme focuses on the actual practice of judicial discretion of European courts and deals with interpretation and justification against the vision of creating a coherent European legal order.


This paper describes a security system for authorization in open networks. Authorization means authority to access certain resources, to perform certain operations, or to use certain system functions. In this paper the authorization system is based on use of attribute certificates. An attribute certificate is a signed object containing authorization attributes of a user. Before checking whether a user is authorized to perform an action or to access an object, the identity of the user must be verified. The identity verification system is based on public key certificates. We separate authorization system from authentication system because the same authority does not always establish authorization and authentication information. However these two systems must be combined and that is done by including the serial number of the user's public key certificate as a field in the user's attribute certificate, which carries authorization information. The topology of the authorization system comprises authorization authority servers issuing attribute certificates to users, application clients handling those certificates, and application servers verifying user access rights based on attribute certificates. Furthermore, all these components are themselves certified by standard PKI certification authorities, thus supporting mutual authentication and cross–domain scaling.


We analyse the cross-sectional evolution of an englacial meltwater conduit that contracts due to inward creep of the surrounding ice and expands due to melting. Making use of theoretical methods from free-boundary problems in Stokes flow and Hele–Shaw squeeze flow we construct an exact solution to the coupled problem of external viscous creep and internal heating, in which we adopt a Newtonian approximation for ice flow and an idealized uniform heat source in the conduit. This problem provides an interesting variant on standard free-boundary problems, coupling different internal and external problems through the kinematic condition at the interface. The boundary in the exact solution takes the form of an ellipse that may contract or expand (depending on the magnitudes of effective pressure and heating rate) around fixed focal points. Linear stability analysis reveals that without the melting this solution is unstable to perturbations in the shape. Melting can stabilize the interface unless the aspect ratio is too small; in that case, instabilities grow largest at the thin ends of the ellipse. The predictions are corroborated with numerical solutions using boundary integral techniques. Finally, a number of extensions to the idealized model are considered, showing that a contracting circular conduit is unstable to all modes of perturbation if melting occurs at a uniform rate around the boundary, or if the ice is modelled as a shear-thinning fluid.


A huge amount of academic papers(including research reports) are being released in web pages. It is important to extract these papers in a structured way for many popular applications, such as science and technology information retrieval and digital library. However, few investigations have been done on the issue of academic paper extraction. This paper proposed a unified approach for automatically extracting academic papers from web pages based on CRF model. In the proposed approach, both academic paper extraction and semantic labeling are performed simultaneously by employing the theoretical Conditional Random Fields(CRF) model. Experimental results show that our approach can achieve significantly better extraction results.


This paper analyses the status of current researches in the area of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for the improvement of Energy Efficiency (EE) design and operation of buildings.Currently, research and technology developers focus on different domains and sub-domains in the area of EE, such as the integration of renewable energy sources and related monitoring, simulation, and management software. In order to improve harmonisation between different research and technology developments (RTD) including International and European research projects and scientific programs these activities need to be categorised and analysed. As a result of RTD gap analysis, the challenges, commonalities, deficits, and potentials for collaboration are identified contributing to the development of a "Scientific Road Map". This paper focuses on development of a comprehensive vision on Cartography of recently completed, ongoing, and recently announced research European projects and International research initiatives for further implementation of its results in global vision of the REEB project [cf. http://www.ict-reeb.eu/index.html], and proposes a systematic categorization approach to identify gaps in the current research agenda in the area of IT for Energy in Buildings.Our RTD gap analysis is based on a qualitative categorization specifying common classification criteria.At the present, there are more than 270 projects worldwide were analysed, five Main Classification Categories (MCC) were developed.The proposed methodology should allow the identification of deficits of the related research activities within the specified (in T3.1, D3.1) categories.


The 2015 reform of the EU's court system will go down in history as the most radical transformation of the EU judicial architecture since the establishment of the General Court in 1989. It doubles the number of General Court judges but also dissolves the Civil Service Tribunal. This article offers a critical assessment of these two major, structural changes, addressing both the process by which they were adopted and their overall merits. After providing a detailed examination of the reform's tortuous legislative history and highlighting its unique underlying procedural feature – with the Court itself initiating the process – this article identifies and systematizes its major shortcomings. It criticizes the underlying diagnosis and the cure administered. It concludes by presenting this reform process as a missed opportunity to address, in a more holistic manner, the pressing non-docket related challenges facing the EU judicial system, in particular, to reform a governance structure which is no longer fit for purpose considering the massive transformation of the EU judicial branch since 1951.


This study explored the moderating effect of psychological reactance on the success of traditional and paradoxical mental imagery treatments that were aimed at reducing anxiety in athletes. Intramural college basketball players (N = 73) were recruited through advertisements for a free-throw contest, and their anxiety and free-throw performance were measured following treatment in one of three groups: confidence imagery, paradoxical imagery, or control. As predicted, in the paradoxical condition, high-reactant athletes reported having significantly lower somatic state anxiety and significantly higher state self-confidence than did low-reactant athletes. In contrast, high- and low-reactant athletes did not differ in their anxiety scores in both the confidence imagery and control conditions. Results suggested that reactance does moderate the effect of the success of traditional and paradoxical imagery treatments for reducing athletes' anxiety.


Extracted from text ... EDITORIAL S Afr Psychiatry Rev 2004;7:1-2
South African Psychiatry Review - November 2004 1
Weight and psychiatry
whether we need BED or not, we are going to get it. Vested interests
are seemingly playing a larger role in determining the diagnostic
landscape than scientific merit.
Beyond the physical aspects of weight, the psychological meaning
sees the virtues of control, discipline and willpower adding allure
to the attainment of a thinner body. The association of weight
and health has further intensified the drive for leanness, with any
hint of overweight being deemed unhealthy. In traditional and contemporary
societies, size matters ..


This thesis examines processes and practicalities of police collaboration with
partner agencies and consultation with the public. It considers police and partner
agency perspectives in detail, highlighting practical and strategic outcomes of
collaboration and consultation.
The police service in England and Wales along with most of the public sector,
has been driven by central government to collaborate with other agencies and
consult with the public for the last three decades, especially since 1979 under the
influence of New Public Management. The formal obligation to do so has
increased considerably since the late 1990s. Since the Labour administration
came into power in 1997, collaboration and consultation have become core
ingredients of many government led policy initiatives. This in turn has increased
the emphasis placed upon these two processes within the police. The most recent
and significant initiatives affecting collaboration and consultation will be
considered within this thesis as will the police and partner representatives'
outlook on these initiatives.
Funded as anESRC (CASE) studentship, the research was conducted in close
collaboration and with support from a Constabulary in the North-West of
England. This created an important opportunity to undertake in-depth
observational qualitative research on the police. This qualitative case study
approach utilises police and collaborative agency respondents' narratives, gained
in the main through 35 semi-structured interviews. The use of rich narrative data illuminates the intricate practices, process and perceptions of the police and their
partners. It is argued that while there is much written on 'outcomes' and 'what
works', there exists a lack of qualitative analytical academic research detailing
the perceptions of those involved to highlight the hidden processes, practicalities,
and consequences surrounding the introduction of government policies
stipulating collaboration and consultation.


We propose a novel online planning algorithm for ad hoc team settings--challenging situations in which an agent must collaborate with unknown teammates without prior coordination. Our approach is based on constructing and solving a series of stage games, and then using biased adaptive play to choose actions. The utility function in each stage game is estimated via Monte-Carlo tree search using the UCT algorithm. We establish analytically the convergence of the algorithm and show that it performs well in a variety of ad hoc team domains.


Safety and organization of a construction site were improved with the application of safety leading indicators and a 5-S assessment tool on a project managed using Lean principles. Safety related data collected on safety walks on a daily basis was organized for each specialty contractor and normalized for worker hours. The implementation of the 5-S assessment rated the site organization from zero to five for each contractor by a variety of key stakeholders. The observation of safety leading indicators provided a measure of safety risk on the construction site and a measure and mechanism for continuous learning. As a result, safety continually over the life of the project. Early results of the 5-S program clustered at the low end of the scale at the beginning of the project and significantly improved over time and reached almost 5 as the project approached completion. The paper will reflect on related conceptual foundations and propose follow up investigations aimed at exploring leading indicators and other assessment tools related to safety and quality of work. The paper will also explore challenges faced by a general contractor in the on going efforts to implement the leading indicators principles on a company-wide basis.


The equilibrium inorganic aerosol model ISORROPIA was embedded in a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm to develop a powerful tool to analyze aerosol data and predict gas phase concentrations where these are unavailable. The method directly incorporates measurement uncertainty, prior knowledge, and provides a formal framework to combine measurements of different quality. The method was applied to particle- and gas-phase precursor observations taken at La Merced during the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (MCMA) 2003 Field Campaign and served to discriminate between diverging gas-phase observations of ammonia and predict gas-phase concentrations of hydrochloric acid. The model reproduced observations of particle-phase ammonium, nitrate, and sulfate well. The most likely concentrations of ammonia were found to vary between 4 and 26 ppbv, while the range for nitric acid was 0.1 to 55 ppbv. During periods where the aerosol chloride observations were consistently above the detection limit, the model was able to reproduce the aerosol chloride observations well and predicted the most likely gas-phase hydrochloric acid concentration varied between 0.4 and 5 ppbv. Despite the high ammonia concentrations observed and predicted by the model, when the aerosols were assumed to be in the efflorescence branch they are predicted to be acidic (pH~3).


This research weighed the impact made by the economy, welfare policy and human capital on unemployed welfare mothers in the USA. Specifically, it asked how welfare mothers' employment status, poverty status, and enrolment for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) are affected by these three factors. Longitudinal data from the Survey of Income Program Participation (SIPP) provided a sample of TANF mothers. The SIPP data shed light on modes of economic adaptation exhibited by these mothers. Event history analysis was applied to the data (for years 1996–2000), and results were obtained showing that restrictive welfare policies combined with high unemployment can boost the number of working poor Americans by severing them from TANF. Human capital contingencies – which here comprised development of the sample's occupational skills, work experience and education – helped TANF mothers gain employment and even leave welfare. Some were able to do so and live above the poverty level. Social support, especially family support, was another factor included in this study that was found to be of some use to unemployed mothers in terms of finding work. Results bear several implications for TANF policy.


Rats and mice learn to freeze when they hear a tone previously encountered at the same time as an electric shock. This type of learning takes place in the amygdala. Rumpel et al. examined the cellular basis of the learning by tagging the glutamate receptors that are recruited into synapses during learning with a subunit that can be detected electrophysiologically. They found that fear conditioning drives these receptors into synapses in about 35% of the cells in the lateral amygdala. Inhibition of this recruitment inhibits the formation of the tone-shock memory. If only 10 to 20% of the synapses are inactivated, learning is blocked. Thus, synaptic modification is required for behavioral learning, which is unexpectedly sensitive to the loss of a small fraction of modified synapses. S. Rumpel, J. LeDoux, A. Zador, R. Malinow, Postsynaptic receptor trafficking underlying a form of associative learning. Science 308, 83-88 (2005). [Abstract] [Full Text]


Culture has received increasing attention in critical development studies, though the notion that there are important cultural differences within and between development organizations has received less consideration. This paper elaborates elements of a framework for studying organizational culture in multi-agency development projects. It draws on selected writings in anthropology and in organizational theory and suggests that these two bodies of literature can be usefully brought together, as well as on insights from ongoing fieldwork in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso and Peru. At the centre of this framework is the analysis of context, practice and power. Where development projects involve multiple organizations (such as donors, government agencies, non-governmental organizations and grassroots groups) an analysis of cultures both within and between organizational actors can help explain important aspects of project performance. The paper argues that organizational culture is constantly being produced within projects, sometimes tending towards integration, often towards fragmentation. This fragmentation, indicative of the range of cultures within development organizations, is an important reason why some projects fail, and why ideas stated in project documents are often not realized, especially in the case of the newer and more contentious objectives such as 'empowerment'. © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Geographic markets are extremely important to agriculture because agricultural products are bulky and/or perishable and production and consumption areas are separated. This study investigates how mandatory price reporting has influenced the degree of spatial market integration between U.S. regional fed cattle markets. Results indicate the market prices across the regional cattle markets are cointegrated. In addition, the amount of time it took for one market to react to the other markets change in price varied across the three time periods used in this study. This suggests mandatory price reporting has not substantially increased market integration.


Eukaryotic elongation factor 1A (eEF1A) appears to be a multifunctional protein because several biochemical activities have been described for this protein, in addition to its role in protein synthesis. In maize (Zea mays) endosperm, the synthesis of eEF1A is increased in o2 (opaque2) mutants, and its concentration is highly correlated with the protein-bound lysine content. To understand the basis of this relationship, we purified eEF1A isoforms from developing endosperm and investigated their accumulation and their functional and structural properties. Formation of three isoforms appears to be developmentally regulated and independent of the o2 mutation, although one isoform predominated in one high lysine o2 inbred. The purified proteins differ in their ability to bind F-actin in vitro, suggesting that they are functionally distinct. However, they share similar aminoacyl-tRNA-binding activities. Tandem mass spectrometry revealed that each isoform is composed of the four same gene products, which are modified posttranslationally by methylation and phosphorylation. The chemical differences that account for their different actin-binding activities could not be determined.


Rituximab (RTX) is used for the treatment of lymphomas and rheumatoid arthritis (RA), achieving its beneficial effect through B cell depletion.1 2 Recently it has been suggested that the effect of RTX may be inhibited by the concomitant use of statins.3,–,5 B cell depletion is achieved through apoptosis of B cells induced by hypercrosslinking of CD20 molecules with RTX. This process depends on the presence and integrity of lipid rafts in the cell membrane.3 6 7 In vitro, Winiarska et al showed that cholesterol depletion reduces apoptosis by RTX, inhibiting B cell depletion.3 However, two clinical studies that investigated concomitant statin use in patients with lymphoma reported no diminished effect on patient survival.8 9 These patients …


Lack of access to high-quality Internet connectivity affects how people participate in all aspects of life, from education to work to recreation; disparities in Internet access thus carry over into many other aspects of life. Historically, the discussions on Internet inequity centers mainly around the rural vs. urban divide in the United States. The Covid-19 pandemic has also brought the prevalence of Internet inequity in urban areas to the broader collective attention. To further the study of this issue, this paper characterizes the state of Internet equity in Chicago, focusing on different dimensions of Internet equity, including availability, affordability, and adoption. To this end, we combine multiple existing datasets to understand the digital divide in Chicago and the contributing factors. Our findings show disparity in broadband adoption rates across neighborhoods in Chicago: Broadband adoption varies between 58–93% across community areas, with low access areas mostly concentrated in South andWest Chicago. Furthermore, adoption rates are positively correlated with income and education level and negatively correlated with age. The former highlights the need to provide affordable Internet access, while the latter suggests introducing technology training programs, especially for the elderly.We also find disparity in broadband availability—with the number of ISP options in a census block significantly varying across the city, indicating infrastructure equity issues.


Using a novel statistical approach that efficiently explores the space of possible defect configurations, the present study investigates the chemomechanical coupling between interfacial structural defects and phase boundary alignments within phase‐separating electrode particles. Applied to the battery cathode material LiXFePO4 as an example, the theoretical analysis reveals that small, defect‐induced deviations from an ideal interface can lead to dramatic shifts in the orientations of phase boundaries between Li‐rich and Li‐lean phases, stabilizing otherwise unfavorable orientations. Significantly, this stabilization arises predominantly from configurational entropic factors associated with the presence of the interfacial defects rather than from absolute energetic considerations. The specific entropic factors pertain to the diversity of defect configurations and their contributions to rotational/orientational rigidity of phase boundaries. Comparison of the predictions with experimental observations indicates that the additional entropy contributions indeed play a dominant role under actual cycling conditions, leading to the conclusion that interfacial defects must be considered when analyzing the stability and evolution kinetics of the internal phase microstructure of strongly phase‐separating systems. Possible implications for tuning the kinetics of (de)lithiation based on selective defect incorporation are discussed. This understanding can be generalized to the chemomechanics of other defective solid phase boundaries.


Service firms and sectors are emerging as important players in the innovation process. The intangible nature of many service innovations creates challenges for Intellectual Property Right (IPR) systems. IPR systems both shape and are shaped by structural changes in the economy, and the technologies being employed. It is well known that many service firms do not patent, and that the patent system has largely been developed to deal with more tangible innovations. This study considers the issues that arise in this context. It presents empirical material concerning the management of knowledge, innovation, and Intellectual Property in Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS). Different branches of the service sector are founded on very different knowledge bases; and there are also persistent differences in the activities performed by service firms of different sizes. Accordingly, though they have much in common where it comes to the management of expertise and the use of Information Technology (IT), they may follow dissimilar innovation trajectories, and adopt highly variegated strategies.


Intermediate lavas from the middle Miocene McDermitt caldera complex, Nevada-Oregon, have very high FeO* (= total Fe as FeO; 9.1 to 10.2 wt %) and low MgO (0.4 to 2.1 wt %) contents at SiO 2 contents of 59.5 to 62 wt %. With the exception of significantly higher K 2 O contents (3.1 to 4.7 wt %), these lavas are compositionally very similar to icelandite ("tholeiitic andesite") from oceanic areas. In addition to the voluminous comendite tuffs of the complex, a thin unit of densely welded crystal-rich pantellerite tuff of probable air-fall origin is exposed on the northern wall of the McDermitt caldera. The pantellerite tuff contains 1.5% aenigmatite phenocrysts. The high FeO*/MgO ratios of the icelandites and the peralkaline nature of the silicic rocks suggest differentiation under conditions of low f O 2 and f H 2 O. The existence at McDermitt of a continuous series of rocks ranging from potassic icelandite to comendite and pantellerite is consistent—as are other geologic, geochemical, and geophysical data—with the derivation of the icelandites and ultimately of the voluminous peralkaline silicic rocks of the complex from mafic magma generated from upwelling mantle material. Labile U released during the crystallization of late subvolcanic bodies of peralkaline silicic magma may have provided an appreciable proportion of the epigenetic U now present in the upper part of the caldera complex. Reducing conditions produced by the very Fe-rich glassy icelandites may have contributed to the fixation of U at the Aurora and Bretz prospects.


For most of us, librarians are the quiet people behind the desk, who, apart from the occasional shush, vanish into the background. But in Quiet, Please, McSweeneys contributor Scott Douglas puts the quirky caretakers of our literature front and center. With a keen eye for the absurd and a Kesey-esque cast of characters (witness the librarian who is sure Thomas Pynchon is Julia Robertss latest flame), Douglas takes us where few readers have gone before. Punctuated by his own highly subjective research into library history-from Andrew Carnegies Gilded Age to todays Afghanistan-Douglas gives us a surprising (and sometimes hilarious) look at the lives which make up the social institution that is his library.


In this paper, an approach to the finite-horizon optimal state-feedback control problem of nonlinear, stochastic, discrete-time systems is presented. Starting from the dynamic programming equation, the value function will be approximated by means of Taylor series expansion up to second-order derivatives. Moreover, the problem will be reformulated, such that a minimum principle can be applied to the stochastic problem. Employing this minimum principle, the optimal control problem can be rewritten as a two-point boundary-value problem to be solved at each time step of a shrinking horizon. To avoid numerical problems, the two-point boundary-value problem will be solved by means of a continuation method. Thus, the curse of dimensionality of dynamic programming is avoided, and good candidates for the optimal state-feedback controls are obtained. The proposed approach will be evaluated by means of a scalar example system


Blind people may detect objects from the information in reflected sounds, echolocation. Detection as a function of the number of clicks compared to a continuous noise was tested by presenting clicks of 5 ms with rates from 1 to 64 clicks during a 500 ms period and a 500-ms continuous white noise. The sounds were recorded in an ordinary room through an artificial binaural head. The reflecting object was an aluminum disk, diameter 0.5 m, at distances of 1 and 1.5 m. These sounds were later presented to 3 blind and 16 sighted participants in a laboratory using a 2AFC methodology. The task was to detect which of the two sounds that contained a reflecting object. Feedback was provided. The blind participants had a higher detection than the sighted, but there were also differences among the blind. These results are put in relation to physical features such as the autocorrelation function and spectral variations.


In 1998, when I wrote the first law review article advocating Geoengineering as a climate change mitigation strategy, Geoengineering was both unknown and unpopular. Twelve years later, the political economy of Geoengineering – or as I prefer to call it, Climate Management (CM) – has shifted, precisely because the conditions I outlined in 1998 have stayed so strikingly the same. Then, I argued that the lack of political will, absence, complexity, and sheer expense of climate change mitigation made meaningful preventive measures, i.e. cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, extremely difficult to undertake. After a decade of obfuscation and misinformation by powerful political actors, the case seems stronger than ever.Today, while CM remains at the margins of our popular political discourse, there has been an explosion of scientific and policy analyses. Solar Radiation Management (SRM: increasing the concentration of sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere) and Ocean Iron Fertilization (OIF: seeding gigantic phytoplankton carbon sinks in the oceans by fertilizing them with iron) have both been explored and advanced by credible scientists, scholars, and even entrepreneurs. Additionally, CM has been tentatively explored by conservative think-tanks and pundits – to the horror of environmentalists.Yet the mere fact that conservatives support Geoengineering should not, in itself, cause liberals and greens to oppose it. Supporting CM should give any environmentalist pause, both because of its riskiness and because so many of our political foes support it. But CM is a climate change strategy that, unlike regulation, might actually stand a chance of becoming reality. It is the only approach to climate change that can act as a compromise between liberals and libertarians, greens and browns. As climate change becomes ineluctable, geoengineeering becomes inevitable.


Robust and reproducible methods for extracting thylakoid membranes are required for the analysis of photosynthetic processes in higher plants such as Arabidopsis. Here, we compare three methods for thylakoid extraction using two different buffers. Method I involves homogenizing the plant material with a metal/glass blender; method II involves manually grinding the plant material in ice-cold grinding buffer with a mortar and method III entails snap-freezing followed by manual grinding with a mortar, after which the frozen powder is thawed in isolation buffer. Thylakoid membrane samples extracted using each method were analyzed with respect to protein and chlorophyll content, yields relative to starting material, oxygen-evolving activity, protein complex content and phosphorylation. We also examined how the use of fresh and frozen thylakoid material affected the extracts' contents of protein complexes. The use of different extraction buffers did not significantly alter the protein content of the extracts in any case. Method I yielded thylakoid membranes with the highest purity and oxygen-evolving activity. Method III used low amounts of starting material and was capable of capturing rapid phosphorylation changes in the sample at the cost of higher levels of contamination. Method II yielded thylakoid membrane extracts with properties intermediate between those obtained with the other two methods. Finally, frozen and freshly isolated thylakoid membranes performed identically in blue native-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis experiments conducted in order to separate multimeric protein supracomplexes.


This paper assesses the efficacy and relevance of visitor payback as a tool for recreation management in the UK. Visitor payback is essentially a voluntary payment made by visitors towards conservation, differing significantly from the compulsory tourist or bed tax practised in other countries. Attention has recently focused on this technique as a means to supplement the limited funds available for conservation work. However, whilst there are several schemes operating in the UK, there is a dearth of published research that has critically reviewed the concept and operationalization of visitor payback. The research reported here utilizes primary and secondary data to include case studies, semi-structured interviews and focus groups. The findings reveal that visitor payback is a complex concept to evaluate, both in theory and practice, involving a range of benefits and disbenefits. Financial benefits appear less prevalent than the more esoteric 'feel good' factor, increased awareness about conservation and partnerships that are evident in payback schemes. Support for visitor payback varies considerably with visitors strongly receptive, whilst the tourism business interests are more cautious. It is concluded that visitor payback needs to be re-conceptualized in more positive terms as a 'visitor investment scheme' where conservation takes precedence over financial considerations. Further research is required to try and demystify the tourism business resistance to visitor payback as its potential seems somewhat constrained in the present climate.


Childhood mood and behavioral disorders are increasingly common in the United States, but are often not recognized and treated in a timely fashion. Pediatricians and other primary care providers are urged to play a key role in monitoring and fostering children's mental as well as physical health, but time constraints are often limiting. One way of facilitating interactions in this domain, is to have parents provide the longitudinal tracking of their child's mood and behavior on a weekly basis on a secure website. The ratings can then be printed out and brought to the physician for a more detailed assessment of symptom fluctuations, need for treatment, and degree of response. The informed consent for such a system is available for parents at www. bipolarnews.org (click on Child Network). We hope physicians will encourage parents to join the Child Network, as this should help facilitate earlier recognition and treatment of a wide range of psychiatric disorders presenting in childhood.


A miniaturized ceramic atmospheric plasma source for the utilization in life sciences has been developed. It is manufactured in LTCC-technology (low temperature cofired ceramic). The plasma generation is based on buried electrodes which lead to a Dielectric Barrier Discharge (DBD). The employed technology allows small feature sizes (electrode width 150 μm, barrier thickness 40μm etc.) as well as precision in the μm range, resulting in a very low power consumption of the system (approx. 5 W). Thus, the maximum temperature at the point of use can be kept below 40 °C. The flexibility of the manufacturing process (layer lamination, screen printing, patterning with picosecond laser etc.) offers additional features like robust fluidic structures (channels, chambers, gas distribution etc.) as well as the direct implementation of electronic components. The technology concept as well as the design of the ceramic parts and the handhold matched to the multi-well plate format is demonstrated. The plasma of the system can be tuned depending on the assembly of the system and the electric excitation. To prove the biocompatibility and the experimental compatibility with cell cultures (low temperature at the point of use), a method for temperature measurements on the bottom of a multi-well plate was developed. First results of the impact of the plasma source on cell cultures are presented. The effects occurring in the plasma, as well as their effects on the cell cultures (ozone formation, ultraviolet radiation etc.) are separately considered. Furthermore, the cell tolerability of the treatment with the micro-plasma source is investigated with L929 fibroblast cells.


The possibility of life after death is a significant theme in cinema, in which ghosts return to the world of the living to wrap up unfinished business, console their survivors, visit lovers, and just enjoy a well-wreaked scaring. This work focuses on film depictions of survival after death, from meetings with the ghost of Elvis to AIDS-related ghosts: apparitions, hauntings, mediumship, representations of heaven, angels, near-death experiences, possession, poltergeists, and all the other ways in which the living interact with the dead on screen. The work opens with a historical perspective, which outlines the development of pre-cinematic technology for "projecting" phantoms, and discusses the use of these skills in early ghost cinema. English-language sound films are then examined thematically with topics ranging from the expiation of sins to "hungry" ghosts. Six of the most significant films, Dead of Night, A Matter of Life and Death, The Innocents, The Haunting, The Shining, and Jacob's Ladder, are given a detailed analysis. A conclusion, filmography, and bibliography follow.


Switch and examine combing (SEC) diversity scheme provides a lowest-complexity closed-loop transmit diversity solution. Furthermore, by probing sequentially available branches with different power loading levels, the SEC based transmit diversity systems can offer considerable amount of transmit power savings. In this paper we propose two variants for the SEC with power loading schemes proposed earlier, namely: post and early selection schemes, and we analytically evaluate their performance and complexity. It is shown that early selection scheme has the advantage of lower average transmit power by selecting the best branch with the minimal power required, and the least number of channel probes. Post selection scheme on the other hand has less average feedback load at the expense of slightly higher average transmit power.


The National Geographic Encyclopedia of Space offers clear and concise explanations of the planets; telescopes; manned space flight; satellites; the origin of the universe; the contributions of Nicolaus Copernicus, Edwin Hubble, and Stephen Hawking; and much more. The Encyclopedia of Space answers such questions as How vast is the Milky Way? What makes a satellite stay up? How does deep space affect our daily climate? Arranged in six thematic chapters, the Encyclopedia of Space brings together in one accessible volume the varied aspects of space science: the solar system, deep space exploration (manned and unmanned) and discovery, satellites and orbits, and the commercial, scientific, and military uses of space. Tables, diagrams, maps, and fact boxes provide additional information and value. The encyclopedia is enriched by recently declassified intelligence material and photographs from the U.S. Navy and the National Reconnaissance Office, the latest Hubble images, and essays written by leading professionals in the field, such as Kathryn Sullivan and Sylvia Earle. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who landed on the Moon with Neil Armstrong, will write a foreword to the encyclopedia.


Lorentz-violating gravity theories with a preferred foliation can have instantaneous propagation. Nonetheless, it has been shown that black holes can still exist in such theories and the relevant notion of an event horizon has been dubbed "universal horizon." In stationary spacetimes the universal horizon has to reside in a region of spacetime where the Killing vector associated with stationarity is spacelike. This raises the question of what happens to the universal horizon in the extremal limit, where no such region exists anymore. We use a decoupling limit approximation to study this problem. Our results suggest that at the extremal limit, the extremal Killing horizon appears to play the role of a degenerate universal horizon, despite being a null and not a spacelike surface, and hence not a leaf of the preferred foliation.


Abstract. This study focuses on two new aspects of inverse modelling of volcanic emissions. First, we derive an observation operator for satellite retrievals of plume height, and second, we solve the inverse problem using an algorithm based on the 4D-Var data assimilation method. The approach is first tested in a twin experiment with simulated observations and further evaluated by assimilating IASI SO2 plume height and total column retrievals in a source term inversion for the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajokull. The inversion resulted in temporal and vertical reconstruction of the SO2 emissions during 1–20 May 2010 with formal vertical and temporal resolutions of 500 m and 12 h. The plume height observation operator is based on simultaneous assimilation of the plume height and total column retrievals. The plume height is taken to represent the vertical centre of mass, which is transformed into the first moment of mass (centre of mass times total mass). This makes the observation operator linear and simple to implement. The necessary modifications to the observation error covariance matrix are derived. Regularization by truncated iteration is investigated as a simple and efficient regularization method for the 4D-Var-based inversion. In the twin experiments, the truncated iteration was found to perform similarly to the commonly used Tikhonov regularization, which in turn is equivalent to a Gaussian a priori source term. However, the truncated iteration allows the level of regularization to be determined a posteriori without repeating the inversion. In the twin experiments, assimilating the plume height retrievals resulted in a 5–20 % improvement in root mean squared error but simultaneously introduced a 10–20 % low bias on the total emission depending on assumed emission profile. The results are consistent with those obtained with real data. For Eyjafjallajokull, comparisons with observations showed that assimilating the plume height retrievals reduced the overestimation of injection height during individual periods of 1–3 days, but for most of the simulated 20 days, the injection height was constrained by meteorological conditions, and assimilation of the plume height retrievals had only small impact. The a posteriori source term for Eyjafjallajokull consisted of 0.29 Tg (with total column and plume height retrievals) or 0.33 Tg (with total column retrievals only) erupted SO2 of which 95 % was injected below 11 or 12 km, respectively.


How does interstate rivals' intervention in a third-party civil war impact conflict duration and outcome in that country? More specifically, (1) how do interstate rivals engage in third party civil conflicts and (2) how do conflict parties attract, utilize, and sustain the external support they receive from their supporters? I answer these questions by comparing Saudi Arabia and Iran's intervention in two distinct conflicts in Yemen. This dissertation applies a qualitative case study
method and selects two within-case methods: structured-focused comparison and process tracing.
In the structured-focused comparison, I compare the support Saudi Arabia and Iran has provided to the Government of Yemen (GoY) and the Houthis respectively, differentiating between military and non-military types of support. I compare these during the Saada wars (2004-2010) and in the current internationalized civil war (2014-2018). To ensure the validity of my causal inferences I
triangulate data from three sources: the development of a novel mediation and ceasefire dataset1 (1), semi-structured in-depth elite-interviews2 (2), and document reviews (3).
This dissertation develops a mechanism-focused analytical framework that integrates both rivalry and civil war dynamics to explain civil war duration and outcome. I build on five distinct literatures (strategic rivalry, civil war studies, third-party intervention in civil wars, mediation, and rebel governance) and complement them with the literature on Middle East Area Studies. In the
analytical framework first, I look at the inter-state dimension and propose that rivals' initial decision to intervene and their subsequent decisions to remain engaged in third-party civil wars are two distinct processes. Rivals seek to inflict costs on their counterparts, but at the same time they seek to avoid direct confrontation. Their cognitive rigidities lock them in their own conflicts and give rise to the mechanism of conflict integration in third-party conflicts. Besides interveners,
I also take into account domestic dynamics and examine civil war conflict parties' capacity to impact rivals by keeping them engaged in their conflict through the mechanism of rivalry instrumentalization. The external and internal perspectives are reinforcing each other and create networked interdependencies. With this two-dimensional logic, I move beyond the conventional
framework of proxy wars.


Objectives: To document the dose received by brachial plexus (BP) in patients treated with intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) for head-and-neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) and report the incidence of brachial plexopathy. Methods: Newly diagnosed patients of HNSCC treated with radical or adjuvant IMRT were included in this retrospective study. No dosimetric constraints were applied for BP maximum dose equivalent dose (EQD2 α/β = 3). Patients with minimum 6-month follow-up were included and patients with suspicion of plexopathy were evaluated further. Results: Sixty-seven patients were eligible and 127 BP were analyzed. The mean BP maximum dose (BPmax) was 62.4 Gy (+6.9), while mean BP volume was 28.1 cc (+4.1). Proportion of patients receiving BPmax >66 and >70 Gy were 34.7% and 14.2%. The mean BPmax for T4 tumors was significantly higher than T1 tumors (65 vs. 57.5 Gy, P = 0.005) but when adjusted for N-category, T-category was not independently significant in accounting for BPmax >66 or >70 Gy. Mean BPmax for N0 versus N2+ was 59.8 versus 65.6 Gy (P = 0.0001) and N1 versus N2+ was 61.6 versus 65.6 Gy (P = 0.018). After adjusting for T-category, patients with N2+ had a mean 4.2 Gy higher BPmax than N0-N1 (P = 0.0001). Stage III–IV patients had a mean six Gy higher BPmax doses than Stage I–II disease (P = 0.0001). With a median follow-up of 28 months (interquartile range 16–42), no patient had brachial plexopathy. Conclusion: Clinically significant plexopathy was not seen in spite of majority having over 2-years follow-up and a third of patients having dose above the recommended tolerance. Only nodal category independently influenced dose to the brachial plexii.


Digital transformation in Higher Education and Science is a mission-critical demand to prepare educational institutions for their future competition on the international market. In many cases, the digitization goes along with the search for and acquisition of new software. For easily exchangeable software, wrong product decisions, in the worst case, lead to calculable financial losses. However, if a planned software requires a lot of technological adjustments and is to be applied as central component of a business-and/or security-critical environment, wrong decisions during the software acquisition process might lead to hardly calculable damage. Questions arising are how to decide for a product and how many resources should be invested for the acquisition process. We planned to apply a commercial Business Support System, which should replace the currently used in-house developed software. Our goals were the increase of our university's level of data security, to ease the interaction between stakeholders, to eliminate media discontinuities, to improve the process management and transparency, and to reduce the execution time of automated processes. Alongside with the introduction of the electronic case file, our agenda stipulates the digitization (and automation) of administrative university processes, especially, but not limited to, the student self-service and the administrative student life cycle. Usual tools and practices, commonly applied to (simple) software acquisition, failed in our scenario. With the case study introduced in this paper, we address all persons, involved within software acquisition processes: From our experiences, we strongly recommend to place greater value on an exhaustively completed acquisition process, than on short-termed economic advantages.


Classical Islam is a symbol and a reflection of the thought of the ancient clerics who contributed positions and solutions in the life of a nation and religion, so that life would be safe, peaceful, loving, just and democratic without oppressing each other. And people who learn classical Islam will have extraordinary personality, because it is a consequence of a Muslim's faith, which must have two fundamental aspects, namely the mindset ('aqliyyah) and the pattern of the soul (nafsiyyah) based on the classical Islamic aqidah. And to develop a classical Islamic personality there are three steps that must be taken, as exemplified by the Prophet, namely: first Inculcating aqidah Islam. Second Inculcate consistent attitude and istiqâmah in people who already have aqidah of Islam so that way of thinking and berprilakunya remain on the foundation of aqidah which is believed. When Develop the personality of Islam that has been formed on someone by always invites him to earnestly fill his thoughts with tsaqâfah islâmiyyah and obedient to Allah SWT


A new flowsheet is proposed to achieve energy-neutral wastewater treatment (even better, electricity-neutral) while removing nitrogen using the proven nitrification-denitrification metabolic pathway. It is compatible with solid-liquid separation by conventional clarification or membrane filtration. The new flowsheet is based on a hybrid membrane-aerated biofilm reactor process which uses hollow fiber membranes arranged in modules and cassettes deployed in a way similar to immersed hollow fiber filtration membranes used for MBR (e.g., the ZeeWeed 1 500 product). Atmospheric air is fed down the lumen of hollow fibers and oxygen is transferred to the biofilm growing on the outer surface of the membrane without the formation of bubbles. The new energy-neutral flowsheet is compared to a conventional activated sludge (CAS) flowsheet including complete wastewater and sludge treatment with anaerobic digestion and combined heat and power energy recovery. The new flowsheet has an electricity consumption 40% lower and energy production 18% higher as compared to the CAS flowsheet and is overall electricity-neutral.


Zinc oxide (ZnO) nanostructures were synthesized in the form of nanoparticles, nanoflowers and nanourchins. Structural, electronic and optical characterization of the samples was performed via standard techniques such as X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), photoluminescence, Raman and ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) spectroscopy. Point defect structures which are specific to each morphology have been investigated in terms of their concentration and location via state-of-the-art electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy. According to the core-shell model, all the samples revealed core defects; however, the defects on the surface are smeared out. Finally, all three morphologies have been tested as electrode materials in a real supercapacitor device and the performance of the device, in particular, the specific capacitance and the storage mechanism, has been mediated by the point defects. Morphology-dependent defective ZnO electrodes enable the monitoring of the working principle of the supercapacitor device ranging from electric double-layer capacitors (EDLC) to pseudo-supercapacitors.


BIOGRAPHY Journeys Through the Life and Music of Nancy Van de Vate. By Laurdella Foulkes-Levy and Burt J. Levy. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005. [xi, 393 p. ISBN 0-8108-5135-0. $69.95.] Music examples, index, bibliography, works list, compact disc. During her lifetime, Nancy Van de Vate has been a composer, teacher, performer, spouse, mother, women's rights advocate, author, and co-founder of a record company. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, on 30 December 1930, Van de Vate has accomplished much in her seventy-four years. She has composed over one hundred thirty works, currently focusing on opera and musical theater. Among her many honors are fellowships, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Austrian Foreign Ministry, the City of Vienna, and the American Association of University Women. She was a resident fellow at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and Ossabaw Island in the United States, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland, Brahmshaus in Germany, and the Kunstlerhaus in Switzerland. Her piece, Chernobyl, was nominated for the 1989 Koussevitzky International Recording Award as best new work by a living composer and for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, and her orchestral music has received Pulitzer and Grawemeyer nominations. In addition, she has contributed articles to Musical America, The International Musician, The Instrumentalist, Symphony News, as well as other professional periodicals. Van de Vate has led a productive life, presenting lectures and master classes in Austria, Germany, Poland, Slovakia, the United States, and China. Having experienced gender discrimination throughout her career, she fought tirelessly for women's rights. For example, she started the Knoxville Chapter of the National Organization for Women in 1971 and founded The League of Women Composers in 1975. In 1994, she received dual Austrian and American citizenship, a privilege rarely approved by the Austrian government, because of her accomplishments as a composer. Starting her own recording company (Vienna Modern Masters) with her second husband, Clyde Smith, allowed her the opportunity to produce her own recordings. In fact, it has been stated that Van De Vate is one of the most recorded living composers of orchestral music. Similarly, to publish her scores, Van de Vate and Smith founded a company in 1989, the BMI publisher, Vienna Masterworks, and in 1997 an ASCAP publisher, Vienna Modern Composers. Several of her pieces were issued by Arsis Press and Sisra Publications in the early 1980s, but the majority of her works were self-published. The idea for Journeys Through the Life and Music of Nancy Van de Vate began in the early 1990s when Van de Vate and Smith decided to publish the story of her career. They felt it was important to document her "tumultuous" life (as described in the publisher's press release). After Smith died of cancer in 1999, Van de Vate was urged to contact Laurdella Foulkes-Levy, assistant professor of music at the University of Mississippi (where Van de Vate received her MMus in 1958). …


In the publication entitled "Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR" (Eurosurveillance 25(8) 2020) the authors present a diagnostic workflow and RT-qPCR protocol for detection and diagnostics of 2019-nCoV (now known as SARS-CoV-2), which they claim to be validated, as well as being a robust diagnostic methodology for use in public-health laboratory settings.  In light of all the consequences resulting from this very publication for societies worldwide, a group of independent researchers performed a point-by-point review of the aforesaid publication in which 1) all components of the presented test design were cross checked, 2) the RT-qPCR protocol-recommendations were assesses w.r.t. good laboratory practice, and 3) parameters examined against relevant scientific literature covering the field.  The published RT-qPCR protocol for detection and diagnostics of 2019-nCoV and the manuscript suffer from numerous technical and scientific errors, including insufficient primer design, a problematic and insufficient RT-qPCR protocol, and the absence of an accurate test validation. Neither the presented test nor the manuscript itself fulfils the requirements for an acceptable scientific publication. Further, serious conflicts of interest of the authors are not mentioned. Finally, the very short timescale between submission and acceptance of the publication (24 hours) signifies that a systematic peer review process was either not performed here, or of problematic poor quality.  We provide compelling evidence of several scientific inadequacies, errors and flaws. Considering the scientific and methodological blemishes presented here, we are confident that the editorial board of Eurosurveillance has no other choice but to retract the publication.


Clay-bearing rocks exhibit a broad range of disintegration behaviors, with second-cycle slake durability index values from 0 percent for some claystones to nearly 100 percent for some siltstones. This variability comes from their geologic makeup, especially clay content, clay mineral composition, and related index properties. To investigate the influence of geologic and index properties on disintegration behavior under natural climatic conditions, 12 replicate samples of each of 20 clay-bearing rocks (five claystones, five mudstones, five siltstones, and five shales) were exposed to natural conditions for 12 months. After each month, one replicate sample of each rock was tested for grain size distribution. Disintegration ratio (DR), the ratio of the area under the grain size distribution curve of slaked material for a given rock to the total area encompassing all grain size distribution curves of the tested samples, was used to quantify the amount of disintegration. Additionally, clay mineralogy, natural water content, dry density, void ratio, absorption, adsorption, Atterberg limits, and slake durability index were determined. Clay mineralogy and index properties were correlated with DR values after 1, 6, and 12 months of exposure. Results show that clay content, percentage of expandable clay minerals, plasticity index, adsorption, and slake durability index are better indicators of short-term disintegration behavior, whereas expandable clay mineral content and absorption influence long-term behavior. Regression models suggest that short-term disintegration behavior can be predicted more accurately than long-term behavior, as indicated by decreasing R 2 values for samples exposed for 1, 6, and 12 months, respectively.


Microstructures and damping properties have been investigated in Fe-23%Mn-(0~2)%Si and Fe-23%Mn-(0~2)%Co alloys, based on experimental results from metallography, X-ray diffractometry and vibration test in a flexural mode. The amount and number density of ε martensite are increased with an increase in Co content, resulting in the improvement of damping capacity. For the same ε martensite content, the higher the Co content, the greater the damping capacity. On the contrary, an addition of Si affects to decrease the amount and number density of ε martensite, giving rise to a decay of damping capacity. The decreased ε martensite content by the addition of Si would be attributed to an increase in critical driving force for the γ→ε martensitic transformation by solution hardening effect.


As opposed to other areas of company law, directors' duties have not been the subject of any extensive harmonization at the European level. The system of directors' duties in the EU continues to be characterized by a variety of approaches and legal strategies. However, the practical effect of the legal strategies deployed in the Member States, which have been in focus, is often quite similar. A very good example is the business judgment rule. The duty of loyalty shows greater variance than the duty of care. In UK law directors' duties are regulated in quite detailed manner, especially the duty of loyalty. But in Germany, France and the Scandinavian countries the duties are not comprehensively regulated and the law relies on general principles based on fiduciary and agency laws.


The thermoelastoplastic behavior of a unidirectional metal matrix composite (SiC/Al) under thermomechanical loading was studied with a micromechanical model based on the average field theory. The silicon carbide fiber is considered elastic and temperature independent whereas the matrix is thermoviscoplastic and fitted into a series of power law strain hardening models. The thermoelastoplastic analysis of the composite was carried out by introducing the concept of secant properties of the matrix. Analytical predictions were compared with experimental results. Under longitudinal tensile loading the predicted stress-strain curves were in good agreement with experimental curves at three temperatures (24, 288, and 399 C). Under transverse tensile loading the secant properties of the matrix and the average stresses in the matrix and fiber (at room temperature) were obtained as a function of applied stress. The predicted stress-strain curves under transverse loading were in satisfactory agreement with experimental ones at temperatures up to 399 C. Longitudinal and transverse thermal strains as a function of temperature were also predicted and compared favorably with experimental measurements.


This article uses a data envelopment analysis (DEA) and a stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to assess the relative technical efficiency of 177 decision-making units in the French water supply sector in 2009. Water utilities can be directly managed by the local authorities or contracted out and then managed by a private operator. The use of a three-stage model mixing DEA and SFA enables us to dissociate managerial inefficiencies from the structural inefficiencies and statistical noise. After having taken the environmental variables into account, we find that private management are on average slightly less efficient than public management. An explanation to this performance gap can be different resource management.


A comparison of the Conventional Moments Method (CMM) with the L-Moments Method (LMM) for selecting a distribution is made. Five distributions GEV (Generalized Extreme Value), LNO (Lognormal), PE3 (Pearson Type III), GLO (Generalized Logistic) and GPA (Generalized Pareto) were used as the parent models for a regional frequency analysis of 228 daily and 122 hourly rainfall stations in Pennsylvania. Scatter diagrams of skewness and kurtosis and L-skewness and L-kurtosis were used to define the goodness-of-fit by applying four criteria. A Real-Data Check (RDC) was used to confirm the results. The CMM indicated that the PE3 was the optimum distribution, while the LMM indicated that the GEV was the optimum distribution. The RDC indicated that the GEV is the most suitable distribution and the LMM is the more desirable method for parameter estimation. The results show that the GEV II is more suitable for modeling the extreme events, while the GEV I or Gumbel is the worst.


Cereal grains are vital components of our diet, and therefore understanding of the biology of breakage of dormancy and initiation of germination very important. These processes are far from fully understood, despite extensive studies, and no specific markers for germination have been identified at the protein or the DNA level. In addition, germination of barley seeds is of interest for the brewing industry since this process corresponds to the steeping process that starts the industrial malting. In the present study a proteomics approach was employed to understand the initial changes in the water soluble protein composition of the barley seed upon imbibition and the following events that occur until to 72 h post imbibition (PI). 2D gel electrophoresis of proteins extracted from dissected barley seeds tissues during germination (0-24 h) and the subsequent radicle elongation (24-72 h) describes spatio-temporal variations in the protein patterns. Seeds from 8 time points (0, 4, 12, 24, 36, 52, 60, and 72 h PI) were dissected into embryo, aleurone layer and endosperm and small scale protein extractions enabled us to obtain good resolution 2D gels. The 2D gels were compared between the time points and the different tissues and protein spots of changing intensity were tracked and identified by in-gel digestion, mass spectrometry, and database searches. Forty-eight different proteins in 79 protein spots were tracked through-out the processes and the distribution of these protein spots differed among embryo, aleurone, and endosperm emphasizing individual tissue functionalities. The most significant changes occurred in the two living tissues, namely the embryo and the aleurone layer, both of which resume metabolic activity upon imbibition. The earliest and the largest number of changes were observed in the embryo. This is in contrast to the endosperm which serves as storage reserve, where the hydrolytic enzymes, produced in the aleurone layer, take action in order to provide nutrients for the embryo growth. β-Type proteasome subunit and a fragment of heat shock protein 70 were identified at 4 h PI as the first proteins to appear in embryo together with changes in the spot pattern of desiccation stress related proteins such as late embryonic abundant (LEA) proteins and abscisic acid induced proteins. After 12 h well-known desiccation stress related proteins and other proteins (putative embryonic protein and abscisic acid induced protein), that we suggest are involved in desiccation, rapidly disappear. Other proteins including several redox-related proteins, which are involved in protection against water stress and reactive oxygen species, changed in abundance at the end of germination and start of radicle elongation. These proteins had different tissue distribution and most of them either remained constant or decreased in abundance during radicle elongation, except for ascorbate peroxidase (APX) which was only present in the germinating barley embryo after 24 h. Other proteins involved in osmotic and salinity stress, storage breakdown, folding, and housekeeping were identified and tracked through 72 h PI. APX and the other enzymes involved in the ascorbate-glutathione cycle (dehydroascorbate reductase, monodehydroascorbate reductase, and glutathione reductase) were thought to have an important function during germination and radicle elongation, since the high energy demand upon imbibition generates reactive oxygen species, especially in the metabolically active and dividing embryo tissue. These four enzymes were subjected to activity assays carried out using barley embryo protein extracts and the activity profiles were compared IV to the 2D gel patterns. This gave both concordant and deviating enzymes activity and 2D gel spot intensities during radicle elongation. APX activity detection in zymograms and gene expression analysis indicated that at least two APX isoforms are present in the germinated embryo extract. The APX mRNA of both isoforms were present in the dry mature seed, whereas increasing activity was only observed after 36 h, which supports that the ascorbate-glutathione cycle is not functioning in the desiccated seed, but that the mRNA is ready for translation. Both APX and DHAR are suggested targets of Trx h-linked redox regulation, and this is discussed based on the present results, although it was not possible to detect changes in the dehydroascorbate reductase activity by addition of reduced, recombinant Trx h to the embryo extract. Post-translational modification of APX was further studied by mass spectrometry based on the 2D gel pattern of APX in germinated barley embryos, which indicated the presence of several APX forms with different pI values. The barley limit dextrinase inhibitor (LDI) is thought to be at least partly responsible for the presence of non-fermentable branched dextrins (α-limit dextrins) in barley malt by inhibiting the starch debranching enzyme limit dextrinase (LD). By producing the low abundant LDI in a heterologous host organism, the aim was to characterize the interaction between LD and LDI and the influence of Trx h on the interaction. Trx is suggested to reduce LDI and thereby indirectly increasing the activity of LD during malting. LDI cDNA was cloned from developing barley seeds and several vector constructs were made for heterologous expression; however, LDI was only successfully produced as a fusion protein with E. coli Trx h attached to the N-terminus. The fusion protein showed 16 fold lower activity than LDI purified from barley seeds. By removing the Trx tag by the endoprotease, enteropeptidase, the inhibitory activity further decreased 3-10 fold. This activity decrease was probably caused by unspecific cleavage by enteropeptidase in the LDI sequence due to non-native folding.


SOMMARIO: 1. Premessa - 2. La blasphemy law - 3. Un campo di falsa , un sorso d'acqua e il "peccato" contro Asia Bibi - 4. La sentenza della Corte Suprema - 5. Leading case o moral suasion ? "More sinned against than sinning":  the Pakistan Supreme Court and Asia Bibi case ABSTRACT:  Asia Bibi case, a Christian woman falsely accused of being a blasphemer, finds her 'judge in Berlin' in the Supreme Court of Pakistan. The Court does not address the ratio legis of blasphemy law but points out how contrary to the spirit of Islam is the misuse of law for political purposes. The wide international echo of the case makes this SC verdict a possible leading case in theme of presumption of innocence.


© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018. This book offers both a theoretical and empirical examination of elite education, at all stages from the early years to university level. The book explores the various manifestations of internationalisation of education; the implications of these for national education systems; the formation and re-articulation of elite forms of education locally and globally; and how these facilitate the reproduction or disruption of processes of inequality. The collection critically considers these questions by drawing on contributions from around the world, and focuses on how internationalisation processes shape the various stages of the education system - from early years settings to higher education - in oftentimes quite different ways. At the same time, by engaging with the issues through a range of theoretical lenses, the book invites readers to consider in greater depth the various ways we can come to understand how processes of internationalisation are both embedding but also at times destabilising the formation and purpose of elite education provision and potentially the configuration of elite groups themselves. The book will be relevant to academics, researchers, students, policymakers and educators working in or on the field of 'education' across the world.


Elaine Showalter has noted in her book, Sexual Anarchy, that ends of centuries are often marked by an increased fascination with sexual scandals; 19th-century England had the Woman Question, the Oscar Wilde homosexuality trial, and public health scares over syphilis and prostitution (2-4). The 20th century is no different. Our fin-de-siecle scandals have often entered public discourse as debates about what distinguishes pornography from art, or more accurately, at what point the putative pornographic content of a photograph or a movie outweighs its salutary effect on the public. In 1989 the work of photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano was decried as obscene on the floor of the United States Senate in a flap over whether their work should be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1997 Oklahoma police removed copies of Volker Schlondorff's film The Tin Drum from the shelves of libraries and video stores after a district court judge determined that it was obscene under the state's child pornography laws. Clearly, the place of sexuality in art is being contested by the conservative cultural right. But this, too, is nothing new. Those who would defend pornography often draw fire themselves. Critics such as Simone de Beauvoir and Susan Sontag have defended the aesthetic legitimacy of pornographic works - not, however, in spite of the works' offensiveness, but because of it. Beauvoir points out in her 1952 essay, "Must We Burn Sade?" that his writings are indefensible from almost any other stance. The philosophy is banal, the prose is ham-handed, the sexual escapades are unoriginal "The fact is that it is neither as author nor as sexual pervert that Sade compels our attention: it is by virtue of the relationship which he created between these two aspects of himself" (12). Sade's achievement is that he shows us his own struggle to justify the unjustifiable. It is this tension that compels us when we read Sade; without the pornographic pull, we are left merely with the ham-handedness and banality. Sontag makes a similar argument for the power of pornographic fiction, what she calls "one of the extreme forms of consciousness" (46). Cleverly using the brush that is usually used to tar pornographic fiction - that it is designed to produce physical arousal in its readers - she paints an all-the-more compelling portrait of its power: "The physical sensations involuntarily produced in someone reading the book carry with them something that touches upon the reader's whole experience of his humanity - and his limits as a personality and a body." Pornographic literature, as she sees it, is not rendered ineffectual because it produces arousal; instead, this most visceral of reader's responses renders it more cogent in that it aims at "disorientation, at psychic dislocation" (47). The visual art of Hans Bellmer (1902-78) and the pornographic fiction of Georges Bataille (1897-1962) both exhibit this aim to attack philosophical systems through depictions of sexuality. Moreover, in their case it is a concerted project: Bellmer provided a series of engravings to illustrate two pornographic novels by Bataille, Story of the Eye and Madame Edwarda. Bellmer was a German artist who first came to the attention of Andre Breton and his Surrealist circle when Bellmer created a mannequin-type sculpture that he called Die puppe (the Doll), which he photographed in a variety of frankly sexual positions. These photographs were hand-tinted and published in France in two art books: La Poupee (1936) and Les Jeux de la poupee (1949). Bataille - primarily known today as a critic who wrote on a wide variety of topics, including economics (The Accursed Share), literature (Literature and Evil), philosophy (Erotism and Inner Experience) - was known during his lifetime, as Allan Stoekl notes, "mainly as the editor of Critique. . .and as an author of 'erotic' or 'pornographic' literature. . ." ("Preface" 1). According to Stoekl, it is misleading to treat these two Batailles, scholar and pornographer, as distinct, for Bataille's philosophical writings and his fiction share a single purpose: to confront the reader with what he called "heterogeneous matter" and what Stoekl characterizes as "matter so repulsive that it resisted not only the idealism of Christians, Hegelians, and surrealists, but even the conceptual edifice-building of traditional materialists" ("Introduction" xi). …


This qualitative study explored students' experience of collaborating to undertake a neuromusculoskeletal group research project which was conducted in partial fulfilment of their MSc course. A phenomenological approach was adopted to gain insight into participants' experience of learning and working in a group. Six participants who were all alumni took part in individual telephone interviews conducted by an independent researcher. The interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim. Thematic analysis identified four main themes: the role of the supervisor, peer assisted learning, quality enhancement and learning to work in a research team. Participants felt that group projects facilitated their confidence in the research process. This has been demonstrated as two of the alumni have presented their projects at conferences and published in an international journal. Some of the alumni found working in a group challenging, but were able to reflect on the skills which they learned through managing the group dynamics. The potential benefits of group projects are an increase in peer assisted learning, the development of problem solving and critical reasoning, enhanced communication and team skills. The presence of a group member who fails to contribute has been identified as a potential constraint. Reflection on emerging themes highlighted the importance of the supervisor's role in facilitating the process. A framework for supervising group research projects work has been produced to facilitate others in supervising to best effect; this will feed into staff and curriculum development.


This work was undertaken to characterise the interaction of the leukocyterestricted integrin LFA-1 (CD1la/CD18) with its ligands. LFA-1 function is critical for an immune response and, for example, allows leukocyte binding and transmigration across the endothelium, antigen presentation and cytotoxic T lymphocyte-mediated killing. The ligands for LFA-1 are the Intercellular Adhesion Molecules (ICAMs), with ICAM-1, ICAM-2 and ICAM-3 being the best characterised.
 The binding sites on ICAM-1 and ICAM-3 for LFA-1 were investigated with the use of antibodies and mutated proteins. The following regions were found to have a role in binding LFA-1: the CFG face of ICAM-3 domain 1; domain 2 of ICAM-1; a residue in domain 1 of ICAM-1 that is mutated at high frequency in African populations and is associated with susceptibility to cerebral malaria.
 Binding of Mg2+ or Mn2+ to the extracellular region of LFA-1 and intracellular signalling can both stimulate LFA-1 to adhere to ICAM-1, but by different processes. The former mechanism induces a high affinity form of LFA-1, which was shown to be achieved by an inter-domain movement involving the I domain of the LFA-1 α subunit. This is the first physical evidence for a conformational change occurring in an integrin upon activation. The mechanism by which intracellular signalling activates LFA-1 was demonstrated to involve calpaindependent clustering of LFA-1 in the membrane, thus increasing the avidity of LFA-1 for ICAM-1.
 Leukocyte Adhesion Deficiency-1 and Glanzmann's Thrombasthenia are genetic disorders in which mutations in the integrin genes result in absence of expression or expression of a non-functional integrin. The defects in function of leukocytes from a patient with clinical features of both disorders were studied. The results suggest that the patient has a novel form of integrin dysfunction in which integrins are expressed at normal levels, can be induced to bind their ligands by mechanisms which increase the affinity of interaction, but cannot be stimulated to bind ligand by intracellular signalling pathways.


At the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg in 2002, the international community agreed to a target to halve the proportion of people who lack access to basic sanitation by 2015. Available information paints a grim picture of the water and sanitation conditions in much of the developing countries. The great majority of these people live in Asia and Africa. Over one-half of the rural inhabitants of these continents are without a quality water supply and improved sanitation. Some progress has been made to improve water supply and sanitation in some developing countries. This report attempts to evaluate water supply and sanitation in developing countries, with a view to outlining the benefi ts of a good quality water supply and good sanitation, progress made so far and the issues in the drive to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).


Introduction. Chronic renal disease (BRC) is considered worldwide as a public health problem, mainly due to high morbidity and mortality. Chronic periodontitis (PC) is an immune-inflammatory disease caused by Gram-negative bacteria that destroy tooth support tissues and which induce local inflammation associated with an inflammatory systemic response. Recent studies have shown an association between high levels of reactive protein C PCR) and interleukin-6 (IL-6) and periodontitis, an association that decreases after periodontal treatment (periodontal therapy). Because of this association with the systemic inflammatory response, PC has recently been included as a risk factor for BRC. The purpose of the study. In this study we wanted to evaluate the clinical effect of periodontal treatment in patients with CKD and CP. Materials and methods. The patients were divided into two groups: the first group consisted of CKD patients who were conservatively treated with periodontal treatment and the second group was a control group consisting of patients without any systemic disease who presented moderate to severe CP, also undergoing conservative periodontal treatment. Results. At baseline, PC was more severe in BRC group than in the control group, as most of the sites with the periodontal pocket depth PPD ≥ 5mm periodontal (p = 0.03) and loss of attachment CAL (p = 0.003). However, the results of periodontal treatment were noticeably improved only in the group of patients with periodontal disease but without chronic conditions. Conclusions. Successful periodontal disease reduces the abnormal level of clinical parameters and that can induce an increase of systemic inflammatory response, indicating that it can be animportant intervention therapy at patients with chronic kidney disease.


Face obfuscation (blurring, mosaicing, etc.) has been shown to be effective for privacy protection; nevertheless, object recognition research typically assumes access to complete, unobfuscated images. In this paper, we explore the effects of face obfuscation on the popular ImageNet challenge visual recognition benchmark. Most categories in the ImageNet challenge are not people categories; however, many incidental people appear in the images, and their privacy is a concern. We first annotate faces in the dataset. Then we demonstrate that face obfuscation has minimal impact on the accuracy of recognition models. Concretely, we benchmark multiple deep neural networks on obfuscated images and observe that the overall recognition accuracy drops only slightly ( ≤ 1 . 0% ). Further, we experiment with transfer learning to 4 downstream tasks (object recognition, scene recognition, face attribute classification, and object detection) and show that features learned on obfuscated images are equally transferable. Our work demonstrates the feasibil-ity of privacy-aware visual recognition, improves the highly-used ImageNet challenge benchmark, and suggests an important path for future visual datasets. Data and code are available at https: //github.com/princetonvisualai/imagenet-face-obfuscation .


ABSTRACT Since the 1990s, comparative scholars and constructivists have recognized the universally liberal character of democracy promotion and yet continued the analysis of difference in this area. Mainly in studies of German and US democracy promotion, constructivists have demonstrated the recurring and difference-generating impact of ideational factors. In this article, I hence assume the likeliness of difference and address the question of how we can analyse and explain those differences through a comparison of German and US democracy assistance in transitional Tunisia. I conceive of Germany and the US as a dissimilar pair and adopt a broad perspective to uncover differences at the diplomatic level and between and within the respective approaches to democracy assistance in Tunisia. Theoretically, I argue that national role conceptions hardly impact democracy assistance in a clear manner, and that roles are renegotiated in the process. I rather focus on liberal and reform liberal conceptions of democracy, which shape perceptions of the local context, and democracy assistance agencies different organizational cultures, which impact civil society support. Finally, I account for transnational dialogue and coordination as a factor mitigating differences in democracy promotion.


In the first century, Jews were expelled from Rome on various occasions. Ancient literary sources offer contradictory information on these expulsions. As a result, scholars have offered different reconstructions of what really happened. In contrast to earlier scholarship on the subject, this article seeks to place the expulsions of Jews from first-century Rome into the larger framework of Roman policy toward both Jews and other non-Roman peoples. It is argued that the decision to banish Jews from Rome resulted from pragmatic and not from specifically anti-Jewish considerations: Roman magistrates just wanted to maintain law and order. It is then suggested that the reasons underlying the decision to expel Jews from Rome were essentially the same as those triggering expulsions of other groups such as Isis worshipers, devotees of Bacchus, or astrologers. Such evidence serves to illustrate the two main theses of this article. First, it is argued that in late Republican and early Imperial times, Rome never developed a systematic "Jewish policy." During this period, Rome rather responded to situations when confronted with disputes over Jewish rights. This conclusion then serves to bolster the second thesis of this paper, namely that in the first century, Rome never pursued a consistent policy of tolerance (or intolerance) toward its Jewish subjects.


Abstract. The decision to close airspace in the event of a volcanic eruption is based on hazard maps of predicted ash extent. These are produced using output from volcanic ash transport and dispersion (VATD) models. In this paper the fractions skill score has been used for the first time to evaluate the spatial accuracy of VATD simulations relative to satellite retrievals of volcanic ash. This objective measure of skill provides more information than traditional point-by-point metrics, such as success index and Pearson correlation coefficient, as it takes into the account spatial scale over which skill is being assessed. The FSS determines the scale over which a simulation has skill and can differentiate between a "near miss" and a forecast that is badly misplaced. The idealized scenarios presented show that even simulations with considerable displacement errors have useful skill when evaluated over neighbourhood scales of 200–700 (km)2. This method could be used to compare forecasts produced by different VATDs or using different model parameters, assess the impact of assimilating satellite-retrieved ash data and evaluate VATD forecasts over a long time period.


As witnessed by the rising popularity of overlay networks, applications increasingly demand more flexibility from their networks. In e-Science the need is especially pressing. As more and more sites collaborate via wide area networks (WANs) in e-Science experiments, latency and bandwidth become major issues. This makes the topology and dimensioning of the network of vital importance (e.g., because queuing in intermediate hops adds to the latency). Moreover, it would be desirable to allow for network partitioning to prevent cross-interference by applications (e.g., to shield TCP-friendly connections from newly developed aggressive protocols on high-speed WANs). Unfortunately, in existing networks the topology and dimensioning of networks is fixed, and the number of hops between two nodes is immutable. Similarly, it is impossible for applications to request partitioning of network resources. Optical networking will change the way networks are used. New control technology permits an application, in principle, to set up one or more end-to-end 'lightpaths', providing it with hundreds of Gbit/s of aggregate bandwidth fully dedicated to the application. This moves the bandwidth bottleneck, as the network outside the computer becomes much faster than the connections inside. Using lightpaths, applications may allocate networks much like they allocate physical memory. For instance, applications may configure and dimension their own network topology, which would then consist of true end-to-end lightwave connections without intermediate queuing, switching or cross-interference. This is in contrast to current work in overlay networks, where a virtual link often consists of multiple switching/routing nodes connected by different types of links. Unfortunately, while it is technically feasible to set up lightpaths, there exist neither the management plane to let individual applications exploit this functionality directly, nor the knowledge of how to integrate optical networks with applications. The proposed StarPlane project addresses both of these concerns.