This is a review of NeSI's training strategy from 2015-2017 that reflects on the activities and impacts of the strategy, and provides:a snapshot of NeSI training activities over the years 2015-2017an estimate of the penetration of training activities in the research sectoran estimate of the potential of NeSI training activities to provide direct or indirect support for researcher up-skillinga framework to guide how future NeSI training activities could/should be deployed - taking into account NeSI's capacity - to maximise impactSince 2012, NeSI has been building New Zealand researchers' computational abilities, with a focus on developing advanced computational skills. Within the early days of its Training Strategy, NeSI identified Software Carpentry as a leadership community in building researcher skills training underpinned by sound pedagogy.NeSI embraced this approach and in 2013 it hosted the first New Zealand Software Carpentry event, immediately witnessing the positive impact of the Carpentries' peer-led workshop format. NeSI's first Software Carpentry instructors were trained in early 2015 during an instructor training event in Melbourne. What followed was a rapid succession of New Zealand workshops delivered with colleagues from across the New Zealand research sector.Following this period of expertise-building and experimentation, NeSI mapped out a Training Strategy to carry its training programme over the next few years. By launching its strategy in 2015, NeSI has made a tangible contribution to growing a network of passionate practitioners across the research sector, all working together to lift foundational computational and data science skills. NeSI reached all goals set out for its first three years of the Training Strategy, which are reported on in this review.This Training Strategy review will inform NeSI's next steps in this space, using the insights gained from these first formative years to identify the role NeSI can play in future training activities in NZ.-----New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) enables researchers across a wide range of communities and disciplines to tackle large or highly complicated problems and to investigate scientific challenges that were previously impossible. NeSI makes approaching these problems easier for researchers through offering a specialised platform of computational and analytics software and services powered by supercomputers, and placing a strong emphasis on support and training alongside the raw power of its technology platform. NeSI is a collaboration of the University of Auckland, the University of Otago, Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research, NIWA, and MBIE.


Spring migration of birds in many parts of the world has advanced as the climate has become warmer. Variation in advancement among species has been proposed to correlate with geography and life history features, but individual studies have reported variable results, and general patterns have been elusive. In a quantitative review of data from 389 bird species sampled at 69 European and 23 North American localities, we evaluated associations between change in the timing of migration and life history (body size, molt, broodedness), ecology (habitat, diet, nest position), and geography. We confirmed that spring migration advanced: -0.214 d yr-1 (95% CI: -0.266, -0.162) for first-arriving individuals and -0.104 d yr-1 (-0.139, -0.071) for the median date of passage. The rate of change in autumn was more variable: 0.090 d yr-1 (0.002, 0.176) delay for median passage and 0.019 d yr-1 (-0.175, 0.204) delay for the date of last departure. The response during spring was weaker in the far north and in species that migrate long distances to the wintering area. Autumn migration became increasingly delayed in species that are large-bodied, molt before departure, and that feed on seeds, insects, or fruits. Variation among species, especially during autumn, was associated in part with constraints surrounding the timing of the postnuptial molt. The results suggest that ecological and life history features of species may influence their ability to respond to climate change.


This paper presents the results from the work of joint working group C4.110: a cooperation between CIGRE, CIRED and UIE. Its mandate period stretches from early 2006 through early 2009. The group has addressed several aspects of the immunity of, especially, industrial equipment against voltage dips. Quantifying or specifying equipment performance is part of the assessment or improvement of the voltage-dip ride-through of an industrial process.


Manageability and evolvability are crucial needs for IP networks. Unfortunately, planned topological changes may lead to transient forwarding loops in link-state routing protocols commonly used in IP networks. These lead to service unavailability, reducing the frequency at which operators can adapt the network topology. Prior works proved that the state of a given link can be modified while avoiding forwarding inconsistencies without changing protocol specifications. In this paper, we study the more general problem of gracefully modifying the state of an entire router, while minimizing the induced operational impact. As opposed to a single-link modification, the router update problem is k-dimensional for a node of degree k. Moreover, we show that the interplay between operations applied at the router granularity can lead to loops that do not occur considering a single-link modification. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm that computes minimal sequences of weights to be configured on the links of the updated node. Based on real IP network topologies, we show that the size of such sequence is limited in practice.


In this paper, we examine price movements over time around the collapse of a bid-rigging conspiracy. While the mean decreased by sixteen percent, the standard deviation increased by over two hundred percent. We hypothesize that conspiracies in other industries would exhibit similar characteristics and search for "pockets" of low price variation as indicators of collusion in the retail gasoline industry in Louisville. We observe no such areas around Louisville in 1996-2002.


Abstract. An effective method is presented for determining the ozone (O 3 ) mixing ratio in the onshore flow of marine air at the North American west coast. By combining the data available from all marine boundary layer (MBL) sites with simultaneous wind data, decadal temporal trends of MBL O 3 in all seasons are established with high precision. The average springtime temporal trend over the past two decades is 0.46 ppbv/yr with a 95% confidence limit of 0.13 ppbv/yr, and statistically significant trends are found for all seasons except autumn, which does have a significantly smaller trend than other seasons. The average trend in mean annual ozone is 0.34±0.09 ppbv/yr. These decadal trends at the North American west coast present a striking comparison and contrast with the trends reported for the European west coast at Mace Head, Ireland. The trends in the winter, spring and summer seasons compare well at the two locations, while the Mace Head trend is significantly greater in autumn. Even though the trends are similar, the absolute O 3 mixing ratios differ markedly, with the marine air arriving at Europe in all seasons containing 7±2 ppbv higher ozone than marine air arriving at North America. Further, the ozone mixing ratios at the North American west coast show no indication of stabilizing as has been reported for Mace Head. In a larger historical context the background boundary layer O 3 mixing ratios over the 130 years covered by available data have increased substantially (by a factor of two to three), and this increase continues at present, at least in the MBL of the Pacific coast region of North America. The reproduction of the increasing trends in MBL O 3 over the past two decades, as well as the difference in the O 3 mixing ratios between the two coastal regions will present a significant challenge for global chemical transport models. Further, the ability of the models to at least semi-quantitatively reproduce the longer-term, historical trends may an even greater challenge.


This paper provides a thorough economic evaluation of the anti-drug policies implemented in Colombia between 2000 and 2006 under the so-called Plan Colombia. The paper develops a game theory model of the war against illegal drugs in producer countries. We explicitly model illegal drug markets, which allows us to account for the feedback effects between policies and market outcomes that are potentially important when evaluating large scale policy interventions such as Plan Colombia. We use available data for the war on cocaine production and trafficking as well as outcomes from the cocaine markets to calibrate the parameters of the model. Using the results from the calibration we estimate important measures of the costs, effectiveness, and efficiency of the war on drugs in Colombia. Finally we carry out simulations in order to assess the impact of increases in the U.S. budget allocated to Plan Colombia, and find that a three-fold increase in the U.S. budget allocated to the war on drugs in Colombia would decrease the amount of cocaine that succesfully reaches consumer countries by about 17%.


This study focuses on how traditional rural landscape and proximity to a Natura 2000 Site of Community Importance (SCI) might influence consumers' choice of an agritourism farm for a weekend stay. Data were collected in Umbria region's (Italy) agritourism farms in 2014 by interviewing 160 tourists. Results from a discrete choice experiment reveal that the most important feature affecting the interviewees' propensity to pay a premium price to stay in an agritourism farm is the well-preserved traditional landscape (willingness to pay 32.32€/night for two people), followed by the availability of a swimming pool (willingness to pay 20.95€/ night for two people), the proximity to a historical village (willingness to pay 18.37€/night for two people) and, the location in a Natura 2000 SCI (willingness to pay 13.57€/night for two people). Furthermore, the results underline how the preservation of the traditional landscape and protection of the surrounding environment play a strategic role in developing agritourism and provide economic benefits to local communities.


Roads have the potential to serve as dispersal corridors for invasion into pristine habitats for invasive exotic species. However, undisturbed habitats may also resist such invasion. Torpedograss (Panicum repens L.) is an aggressive invasive grass in many parts of the world and, although most problematic in lakes and ponds, frequently occurs in roadsides and in other disturbed habitats. We studied torpedograss dynamics along roadsides adjacent to upland habitats in southcentral Florida to determine whether observed tiller population growth rates differed among roadside populations adjacent to different habitats. We also examined seasonal growth and persistence patterns of this invasive species in sand roads, quantifying torpedograss density, growth, and panicle production at 10 roadside sites every other month for 14 mo. Four populations were adjacent to disturbed habitats (pastures or disturbed Florida scrub) containing established populations of torpedograss, while six populations were adjacent to undisturbed Florida scrub lacking torpedograss. Population growth rates were negative in most roadsides neighboring undisturbed scrub, and positive when neighboring disturbed habitats. Tiller density, tiller height, and panicle production were all greatest in late summer, and tiller density increased with temperature and relative humidity. We observed no evidence of recruitment from seed. We never found any invasion of undisturbed Florida scrub, consistent with the hypothesis that undisturbed Florida scrub resists invasion. Results suggest that, in xeric habitats, land managers should give higher priority to restoring disturbed habitats or controlling expansion from disturbed habitat edges rather than to eradicating roadside populations of torpedograss.


The research on production and operations management and its linkage to environmental sustainability has seen growth in recent years. The International Journal of Production Research (IJPR) community of scholars has contributed to the advancement of this field. This paper provides an overview of how the research in IJPR has evolved alongside the social-environmental evolution. An overview of the literature of the past 55 years, especially more recent works, is provided. Future predictions of research topics and influences are introduced. Overall, this review found that the call for incorporating environmental sustainability into production research goes back for decades to the early years of IJPR publications. Recent work shows a broader perspective on production research expanding to inter-organisational, supply chain, research. This expanded focus is especially evident in environmental sustainability research. There is still a need and call for expanding the horizon of production and operations management research and environmental sustainability. Travelling the road less travelled is more difficult and complex, but the rewards at the end of this road are a healthy society and environment.


Pile foundations subjected to cyclic load is an age-old problem dealt with for decades by geotechnical engineers. The ocean environment necessitates the piles supporting offshore structures to be designed against lateral cyclic loading initiated by wave action. Substantial experimental and analytical investigations have already been conducted by the author and other researchers. The quasi-static load reversal induces deterioration in the strength and stiffness of the soil-pile system introducing progressive reduction in the bearing capacity as well as settlement of the pile foundation, the degree of such degradation has been observed to be a function of the cyclic load parameters and the type of soil. Based on these observations, a design recommendation has been attempted in this paper for piles subjected to cyclic load in cohesive soil.


For over 40 years, NASA has been putting humans safely into space in part by minimizing microbial risks to crew members. Success of the program to minimize such risks has resulted from a combination of engineering and design controls as well as active monitoring of the crew, food, water, hardware, and spacecraft interior. The evolution of engineering and design controls is exemplified by the implementation of HEPA filters for air treatment, antimicrobial surface materials, and the disinfection regimen currently used on board the International Space Station. Data from spaceflight missions confirm the effectiveness of current measures; however, fluctuations in microbial concentrations and trends in contamination events suggest the need for continued diligence in monitoring and evaluation as well as further improvements in engineering systems. The knowledge of microbial controls and monitoring from assessments of past missions will be critical in driving the design of future spacecraft.


In Scotland as a whole, around 2% of the population are from minority ethnic backgrounds, although the distribution of people from such backgrounds is uneven across the country. In Aberdeenshire, out of a total population of 232,850, 1,165 people come from ethnic minority backgrounds, around 0.5 % of the total population. According to the 2001 Census, there are nine main ethnic minority groups in Aberdeenshire, the largest of which is Chinese, comprising around a quarter of the total ethnic minority population of the area (n=277, 24%). The remaining groups are made up of Indians, Pakistanis, other South Asians, Africans, Black Scottish and people from the Caribbean. However, around 29% come from ˜other minority ethnic groups. With respect to the latter, there has been a noticeable influx of people from Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, Lithuania and Latvia following the accession of ten new member states to the European Union on the 1st April 2004. It has been estimated that around 800 migrant workers and their families are now coming to Grampian each month (400 of whom are Polish), if levels of applications for National Insurance numbers are indicative in this respect (NHS Grampian, 2005). The health needs of migrants is becoming increasingly recognised. As such, the International Organization for Migrations most recent World Migration Report (2005) argued that, ˜the social and economic costs of neglecting migration health, also as a public health issue, can be immeasurable. The experience of migration can lead to increased vulnerability to ill health as well as ill health, which arises after arrival. Poorer migrants are often lowly paid, living in damp conditions, badly nourished and exposed to higher risks in working environments yet under-utilise health services. In addition, the stigma generated from wider perceptions of poor migrant health can contribute to an undermining of the benefits of migration. In short, migration is a public health issue, which seems likely to endure in an emerging age of migration (Castles and Miller 2003). Finally communication is considered fundamentally important to the health of migrants due to ˜language barriers having adverse effects on the accessibility of care, the quality of care received, patient satisfaction and patient health outcomes (Bischoff 2003). To help in-migrants settle into Scotland generally and Aberdeenshire in particular the Scottish Executive and a range of national and regional bodies have introduced a range of policies. Within healthcare, NHS Grampian (2005) aims to make genuine and lasting improvements in the quality of services provided to the local ethnic communities and to make NHS Grampian the leader, for other Health Boards to follow. To this end a range of policies are being implemented. These include, interpretation and translation services, training for NHS Grampian staff to better understand the needs of the local ethnic communities, access and service delivery, racial equality within NHS Grampian, appointments procedures, training procedures, actively promoting health within the ethnic communities and meeting the healthcare needs of recently arrived migrant workers and their families and asylum seekers.


Using a differences-in-differences approach and controlling for individual unobserved heterogeneity, we evaluate the impact of a 1999 law that granted all workers with children younger than 7 years old protection against a layoff if the worker had previously asked for a work-week reduction due to family responsibilities. As only mothers took advantage of these arrangements, we find that after the law, employers were: (i) more likely to let childbearing-aged working women "go" relative to their male counterparts; (ii) less likely to promote childbearing-aged women into good jobs; and (iii) less likely to hire childbearing-aged women. In addition, employers were able to pass at least part of the cost to childbearing-aged women through lower wages, and the amount passed to workers increased with the precariousness of the job. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the effect on employment transitions is mainly driven by low-skilled workers and those in blue-collar jobs, while the effect on wages holds across all groups. Evidence that the substitution away from (good) jobs widens over time suggests employer learning. These results are robust to the use of different specifications and placebo tests.


We focus on Graph-Constrained Coalition Formation (GCCF), a widely studied subproblem of coalition formation where the set of valid coalitions is constrained by a graph. We propose COP-GCCF, a novel approach that models GCCF as a COP. We then solve such COP with a highly-parallel GPU implementation of Bucket Elimination, which is able to exploit the high constraint tightness of COP-GCCF. Results on realistic graphs, i.e., a crawl of the Twitter social graph, show that our approach outperforms state of the art algorithms (i.e., DyCE and IDP G ) by at least one order of magnitude, both in terms of runtime and memory.


Using open-structure (nanoporous) solids, advantage may be taken of single-site catalytically active centres to effect an enormous range of conversions of organic compounds where regio-selectivity and shape-selectivity loom large. When the single-site active centres are accommodated within a well-defined nanospace (typically pores of ca 30 Å diameter), uniquely powerful enantio-selective conversions may also be achieved; thus organometallic complexes, composed of cheap (nitrogen-based) chiral ligands anchored to the concave walls of the nanoporous solid, are especially powerful enantio-selective hydrogenation catalysts for pharmaceutically significant precursor species. The design, characterization and performance of single-site nanoporous catalysts are described and their application in (1) aerobic, shape-selective oxidation of cyclohexane to adipic acid; (2) region-specific oxidation of linear alkanes; (3) bromine-free synthesis of terephthalic acid from p-xylene using air as oxidant; (4) the in situ generation of hazardous reagents for Baeyer–Villiger oxidation of ketones to lactones and for the epoxidation of olefins; and (5) the single-step production of ε-caprolactam from cyclohexanone are outlined. Atomically engineered, multinuclear nanoparticle (bimetallic) catalysts are also described and their application in (1) one-step, solvent-free hydrogenation of polyenes; (2) asymmetric synthesis of pharmaceutical intermediates; (3) region-selective and stereo-selective allylic aminations; (4) single-step hydrogenation of dimethyl tererpthalate to 1,4-cyclohexane-dimethanol; and (5) renewable nylons from glucose and its biocatalytic derivatives is summarized. The key features of these solid catalysts (which facilitate separation of products from reactants) are that (a) they dispense with the use of corrosive reagents (and often of solvents); (b) permit the replacement of aggressive oxidants (e.g. HNO3, CrO3, etc) or even H2O2 and alkyl hydroperoxides, with molecular oxygen as the oxidant, thereby facilitating use of low-temperature and otherwise environmentally benign processes; (c) they are generally stable and recyclable and require no chemical initiators; and (d) they offer significant processing advantages in large scale and industrial operations when compared to homogeneous catalysts, especially in the generation of vital intermediates (surfactants, detergents, pharmaceuticals, polymers, perfumes and cosmetics). Typically, just one of the products (nylon-6), made by the "green", environmentally benign bifunctional catalysts described herein, is in great demand industrially for the manufacture of (i) apparel and other textiles; (ii) floor coverings; (iii) industrial yarns; (iv) engineering plastics and (v) films for food and industrial packaging.


OBJECTIVE
Chronic pain improves with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), yet few case reports account for treatment of comorbid major depression, a significant confounder of the analgesia of ECT. This study reports on the analgesia of ECT, controlling for treatment of depression.

METHODS
This is a case-matching study comparing outcomes of inpatients with chronic pain and major depression in a multidisciplinary pain treatment unit treated with ECT and medications (cases) with those of inpatients treated with medications only (controls). Both groups received the same behavioral and pharmacological treatments for depression and chronic pain. Outcome measures included 0-10 pain rating scales and the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Inventory. Patients were matched on sex, age within 5 years, admission date within 6 months, psychiatric diagnoses, and, as much as possible, on race and pain syndrome diagnosis. Percentage changes in depression scores and pain scores were calculated from the beginning to the end of admission.

RESULTS
There were nonsignificant differences in demographics, except in the proportion married. Twenty-five of 28 ECT patients were matched. Depression improvements were similar between cases and controls (55.9% vs 40.5%). Despite higher initial pain (8.1 vs 6.9 on a 10-point scale), the ECT group had less final pain (3.4 vs 5.5). The ECT group had a 59.8% drop in pain versus a 15.8% drop in the control group, P > 0.01.

CONCLUSIONS
ECT has analgesic properties independent of its improvement of depression in patients with chronic pain and major depression. Improvements in depression were similar, while there was a significantly greater improvement in pain with ECT. The lower post-ECT treatment pain scores suggest a specific analgesic effect of ECT.


Title of Document: ALLOCATING STATE FUNDS FOR PUBLIC SCHOOL LIBRARY MEDIA PROGRAMS: A CASE STUDY OF EDUCATION POLICYMAKING IN MARYLAND Gail Margaret Bailey, Ed. D., 2007 Directed By: Professor Betty Malen, Department of Education Policy Studies The research had three purposes: to determine what factors account for the legislative decision outcomes resulting in the allocation of state funds for Maryland's school library media programs in 1998 and the denial of continued funding in 2001; to test the capacity of an integrated policymaking model to account for legislative victory and defeat; and to add to literature on state education policymaking in Maryland and school library media funding decisions in state arenas. The study employed an integrated framework developed by combining Kingdon's (1995) multiple streams model with Mazzoni's (1993) power and influence model to examine each legislative decision making event as a political process influenced by the power of the players and shaped by developments in each of the multiple streams. In combination, these two frameworks helped to analyze how efforts to secure dedicated state funding for school library media programs succeeded in 1998 and failed in 2001. The investigator employed an exploratory case study to render a provisional interpretation of the two legislative decision outcomes regarding state funds for school library media programs. The case study produced findings that point to two significant factors that impacted the ability of advocates to secure categorical state funding for school library media programs in 1998 but not in 2001: (1) the key role played or not played by the governor and (2) contextual forces that either enabled or constrained advocacy efforts. The study demonstrates the utility of the integrated model in explaining state education policymaking. Kingdon's multiple streams concept provides broad analytic categories as manageable units of analysis and Mazzoni's power and influence categories provide the analytic tools required to map out the dynamics in each stream. The study includes implications for those who may want to influence education policy decisions in state arenas. ALLOCATING STATE FUNDS FOR PUBLIC SCHOOL LIBRARY MEDIA PROGRAMS: A CASE STUDY OF EDUCATION POLICYMAKING IN MARYLAND


Painters mastered replicating the regularities of the visual patterns that we use to infer different materials and their properties, via meticulous observation of the way light reveals the world's textures. The convincing depiction of bunches of grapes is particularly interesting. A convincing portrayal of grapes requires a balanced combination of different material properties, such as glossiness, translucency and bloom, as we learn from the 17th-century pictorial recipe by Willem Beurs. These material properties, together with three-dimensionality and convincingness, were rated in experiment 1 on 17th-century paintings, and in experiment 2 on optical mixtures of layers derived from a reconstruction of one of the 17th-century paintings, made following Beurs's recipe. In experiment 3 only convincingness was rated, using again the 17th-century paintings. With a multiple linear regression, we found glossiness, translucency and bloom not to be good predictors of convincingness of the 17th-century paintings, but they were for the reconstruction. Overall, convincingness was judged consistently, showing that people agreed on its meaning. However, the agreement was higher when the material properties indicated by Beurs were also rated (experiment 1) than if not (experiment 3), suggesting that these properties are associated with what makes grapes look convincing. The 17th-century workshop practices showed more variability than standardization of grapes, as different combinations of the material properties could lead to a highly convincing representation. Beurs's recipe provides a list of all the possible optical interactions of grapes, and the economic yet effective image cues to render them.


Smoking is the largest avoidable cause of preventable morbidity worldwide. It causes most of the cases of lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and contributes to the development of other lung diseases. SmokeFreeBrain aims to address the effectiveness of a multi-level variety of interventions aiming at smoking cessation in high risk target groups within High Middle Income Countries (HMIC) such as unemployed young adults, COPD and asthma patients, and within the general population in Low-Middle Income Countries (LMIC). The project addresses existing approaches aimed to prevent lung diseases caused by tobacco while developing new treatments and evaluating: (i) Public Service Announcement (PSA) against smoking, (ii) the use of electronic cigarettes, (iii) neurofeedback protocols against smoking addiction, (iv) a specifically developed intervention protocol based on behavioral therapy, social media/mobile apps and short text messages (sms) and (v) pharmacologic interventions. Emphasis in this paper, however, is placed on the e-heath, m-health, open (big) data, mobile game and neuroscientific challenges and developments upon facilitating the aforementioned interventions.


It is hypothesized that in particular cases, conventional planar chromatography provides a more effective and robust system than column chromatography with regard to separation efficiency and peak distribution of mixtures composed of low-retarded analytes. Under similar reversed-phase experimental conditions, a regular distribution of thin-layer chromatography (TLC) spots of four natural estrogens (estetrol, estriol, 17β-estradiol, and estrone) corresponds to strong irregular dispersion of peaks in chromatograms generated by high performance liquid chromatography. In both cases, the efficiency of separation was assessed using simple optimization criteria such as selectivity (α min ) and resolution (R s min ). The distribution of chromatographic spots was evaluated using the relative resolution product (r). The results revealed that an excellent separation of the components of interest could be achieved easily using simple nonforced and isocratic TLC. Such an interesting property of planar chromatography is mainly driven by the nonlinear relationship between k and R f retention factors. This article also reports the practical advantages of TLC for the separation of estrogenic steroid mixtures at different temperatures.


Government at all levels prepares budget annually, however there are inconsistencies in budgetary implementation as government failure to stick to its appropriation bill is always clearly evident. This has resulted in the failure government to meet budgetary obligations as planned such as delay in payment of staff salaries, execution of capital projections to mention a few. This study examined the link between budgetary control and performance with a focus on Bayelsa State of Nigeria as a case study. The study adopted actual expenditure (AEX) representing performance as the dependent variable, while capital expenditure budget (CEB) and recurrent expenditure budget (REB) were used as the independent variables. Time series data on the variables were obtained from the Budget Department of the Ministry of Budget covering the period 2007 to 2016. The type of research design adopted in the study was ex-post facto research design. Data collected was analyzed using descriptive statistics and multiple regression analysis based the E-view version 10 computer software. Based on the findings the study concluded that the two independent variables have no statistical effect on actual budget performance. This means that there was no link between budgetary control and performance in Bayelsa State. The study recommended among others that government should encourage budgetary participation, consider resource availability in budgeting, strive to improve the state internally generated revenue, and employ qualified and highly skilled personnel in budget administration to ensure that budgetary control would bring about improved performance.


This report summarizes the ARIMS analysis for the 1990 Farm Bill Conservation Initiatives Work Group. Three major tasks were completed. First, ARIMS was updated to reflect the short-run nature of possible 1990 farm bill policies. Specifically, ARIMS now incorporates a more differentiated set of land resources and crop production technology to match the requirements of the 1985 Food Security Act. Second, baseline solutions for 1990, 1995, and 2000 were estimated. The solutions included the conservation titles of the 1985 Food Security Act. The baselines differed in the specification of acres in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and in conservation compliance provisions. The 1990 baseline had a 40-million-acre CRP requirement; the 1995 baseline has a 40-million-CRP plus conservation compliance; and the 2000 baseline has an eight-million CRP with conservation compliance. Third, two alternative farm bill policy options were evaluated. The water quality option involved adding 10 million acres to the 40-million-acre CRP enrollment in the 1995 baseline. The selection of the 10 million acres was based on potential water quality impacts. The Trees for the U.S. program evaluated the conversion to tress of 37 million targeted acres of cropland and marginal pasture land.


Pitaya or Dragon fruit is an interesting fruit crop for the farmers who grow fruit trees in the northern part of Thailand. The main problem of pitaya production is plant diseases which could reduce yield in both quantity and quality. Results from surveys showed that there are four major diseases in the planting areas e.g. stem rot caused by bacteria and caused by fungi; anthracnose; and brown spot diseases. Fruit rot disease was found to be the most serious disease at the postharvest stage. The commonly used method for control of the mentioned diseases is using chemical pesticides to spray the diseased plants. For this research, the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) was used for controlling pests and diseases in the planting plots and the use of biopesticides to reduce chemical pesticides was also practiced. Management of fruit rot disease caused by Bipolaris cactivora was studied by using pyroligneous acid or wood vinegar at concentrations of 1% and 1.5% (v/v) to soak the fruit at various times. The results showed that soaking the fruits in wood vinegar solution at concentration of 1% (v/v) for 3 minutes was effective for reduction of fruit rot disease of at 92.14% which is significantly at 95% level (LSD p=0.05).


This paper mainly compares the prevailing competition laws and practices of both the United States of America and Saudi Arabia with respect to their historical development and the legal systems of these countries. These objectives emanate from the globalization of trade and commerce, which necessitates considerable knowledge on the part of the global investors of the similarities and differences between the two countries for ease of trade. Being a comparative study, the current work adopts a comparative analysis methodology whose main objective is to evaluate the characteristics of each competition practice. Furthermore, there has been a need to reconcile the various views regarding the practices in both systems, as some deemed them similar while others advanced that they were opposites. The results of the research were quite mixed. The research established that the similarities and differences between the competition laws of both countries vary depending on each country's unique legal systems, socioeconomic practices, political organization, and legislations. Generally, some of these factors, particularly the political organization, resulted in the commercially restrictive practices culminating in price violation. A striking similarity is that both competition practices do not prohibit domination by a given business entity but instead prohibit the abuse of such dominance. Alternatively, a key difference between them is that while Saudi laws are borrowed from the Islamic Sharia laws, the American system is tailored to capitalistic principles. Notably, the Saudi laws are reflective of the much broader Islamic jurisprudence. This paper shall be essential because it deconstructs the competition practices of American Law and Islamic Jurisprudence in an easier way, hence helpful to those interested in this research area.


While swarms that execute decisions are well known in the swarm community, swarms that exhibit this capability a priori have never before been achieved. We demonstrate a methodology, based on the Hamiltonian method of swarm design, that enables the design and implementation of swarms that exhibit decision-making capability. We develop the theoretical structure of the method and apply it to the development of an ant algorithm and a swarm capable of deciding whether its density exceeds a specific predetermined value. The swarm designs are validated in simulation. keywords. swarm engineering, distributed decision making, Hamiltonian method of swarm designs


What happens in the case of immigrant groups who have had such pre-migration experiences as to require specialized assistance in the adaptation process, and yet whose population is not substantial enough to convince governmental sources of funding their demands? The wave of Burmese refugees fleeing the 1988 crackdown in their country is one such example. Drawing from perspectives of Participatory Action Research (PAR), this study has several objectives. First, it explores the current settlement needs of the Burmese population by way of relating it to the pre-migration context. By identifying those characteristics which influence the ability of this group to effectively compete for resources among organized ethno-cultural groups in Canada, this study hopes to highlight barriers to full participation. Second, a related objective is the documentation of the settlement and integration issues faced by the Burmese population, namely through an exploratory study of experiences of Burmese communities in Winnipeg and Toronto. Third, it seeks to explore the question of social capital within the Burmese population and its possible implications for resettlement and integration process. Fourth, it will attempt to contribute to the testing of Participatory Action Research as a methodological tool in improving our understanding of refugee resettlement. And fifth, it seeks to generate recommendations that will improve the settlement and integration of this target population within Canadian society. Broadly, it is hoped that this study might demonstrate how the particular needs of immigrant groups, in this case statistically small ethno-cultural groups arriving with traumatic refugee experiences, require careful consideration in seeking to facilitate integration through enhanced social capital and selfhelp.


Background Increased risks of acute pancreatitis in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus have been reported recently in several countries. We aimed to estimate the risks of acute pancreatitis in Japanese patients with diabetes mellitus. Methods/Findings We examined a large-scale hospital administrative database consisting of one million patients in 16 secondary medical care hospitals, from 2003 to 2010. The incidence rates of acute pancreatitis were estimated with cohort design; the odds ratios associated with diabetes mellitus and other comorbid risk factors were estimated with separate case-control analyses. In cohort analysis, the incidence of acute pancreatitis was higher in 14,707 diabetic patients than in 186,032 non-diabetic patients (4.75 vs. 1.65 per 1,000 patient-years) and increased in male patients and as age advanced. The adjusted odds ratio of acute pancreatitis in patients with diabetes mellitus was 1.86 (P<0.001) compared with non-diabetic patients in case-control analysis from 1,372 cases and 5,469 matched controls, which is consistent with the ones reported in previous studies. Alcoholism and gallstones were associated with a large increase in the risk of acute pancreatitis (adjusted odds ratio 13.40 and 14.29, respectively, P<0.001), although dyslipidemia was associated with significant risk reduction (adjusted odds ratio 0.62, P<0.001). Conclusions This observational study ascertained the elevated incidence rates and risk of acute pancreatitis in Japanese patients with diabetes. The risk estimates in Japanese patients with diabetes were in agreement with the ones reported in previous studies, and the elevated risk of acute pancreatitis in patients with diabetes would be generalized in different locations/populations.


Compared with the placental mammals, marsupials are born at an almost embryonic stage, but nearly all of these neonates immediately climb or crawl to one of their mother's teats using precociously developed forelimbs. Marsupial adults also exhibit limited forelimb shape diversity relative to the members of their sister group. That the functional requirements of this natal climb have imposed a developmental constraint on marsupial forelimb evolution represents a compelling and widely accepted hypothesis, yet its resulting predictions for the comparative patterns of mammal limb shape diversity have never been tested. In order to perform such tests we conducted extensive taxonomic sampling of mammal limb morphology (including fossil specimens), and then examined these data using morphometric methods, non-parametric analyses of anatomical disparity, and phylogenetic comparative analyses of evolutionary rates. Our results strongly support the constraint hypothesis, and indicate that the highly significant differences between marsupial and placental forelimb shape diversity has been strongly influenced by different rates of morphological evolution among the distal forelimb elements in these two important mammal lineages.


The central zone of the Stiavnica stratovolcano (Western Carpathians) hosts an extensive subvolcanic intrusive complex, dominated by a granodiorite pluton (16.3- 15.5 Ma) (Lexa et al., 1999). The granodiorite intrusion locally forms apophyses at the margins associated with Fe-skarns, while in the central, apical part it contains an irregular network of fractures, hosting base metal mineralisation. In order to develop a complex genetic model for the mineralization processes, detailed geochemical, fluid inclusion and stable isotope research were undertaken on the intrusion and on related mineralisation & alteration.
The granodiorite intrusion, especially the marginal facies, is altered.Geochemical studies show that subsolidus alteration, intimately related to the skarns, resulted in an apparent depletion in Fe[sub]total, MnO, Zn and an increase in CaO, MgO, Na[sub]2 O (± K[sub]2 O), Cu. Hydrothermal alteration, closely related to stockwork mineralisation, is characterised by an enrichment in K[sub]2 O, MnO, Cu, Pb, Zn and depletion in Na[sub]2 O and Sr.
Studies of fluid inclusion in skarn minerals (from Vyhne-Klokoc deposit) showed a large variation in salinity (4-23 wt% NaCl eq.) and Th (271°-371°C), reflecting a mixing process. In retrograde skarn minerals these fluids become progressively more dilute and cooler with indications of boiling at shallow depth. Fluid inclusions from the stockwork minerals (from B1 drill hole) also showed progressively more dilute and cool fluids (0.5-5.3 wt% NaCl eq., 191-328°C) resulting from mixing. Fluids related to acid leaching alteration in andesite (from Rozalia mine) were of moderate temperature (-300°C). Secondary fluid inclusions in granodiorite were of variable vapour/liquid/solid ratios, Th values, salinities, and contained high proportions of Ca, Fe, K in addition to Na. The admixing effect of these components substantially decreased the solubility of NaCl, which significantly influenced the interpretation of PT evolution. The interpretation of data from the skarn-related granodiorite favoured here is that early immiscibility of an exsolved magmatic fluid (at -650°C and -600 bars) was followed by autonomous evolution of the saline liquid toward Fe-enriched NaCl saturated brine (650°-400°C). Subsequent cooling was followed by penetration of Ca¬rich fluids, late hydrothermal boiling and mixing with dilute fluids (400°-200°C). Studies on the stockwork-related granodiorite suggest broadly similar fluid properties in the apical part of the intrusion, but at depth the Th data suggest that there was no accumulation of magmatic fluids below -400°C.The isotopic composition of magmatic minerals indicates open magmatic degassing during granodiorite crystallisation, influenced by re-equilibration to variable degrees. Fluids in equilibrium with skarn and stockwork-related minerals showed a clear progressive mixing trend. Heavy, possibly [delta][sup]18 O-shifted, meteoric water seems to be most probable source of external waters that diluted the magmatically derived fluids.
According to the fluid evolution model proposed here, magmatic brine accumulated only along the margins of the pluton. Chemical re-equilibration with the rock caused subsolidus reactions, while the liquid was further enriched in iron. The magmatic fluid was able to penetrate through the apophyses of the granodiorite into carbonates. In this hydrodynamic regime it mixed with circulating meteoric waters, forming magnetite and skarn lenses. These were later overprinted by retrograde mineralisation, dominated by heated groundwaters. In the apical part of the intrusion the magmatic vapour phase (the counterpart of saline liquid), escaped through several vents into the over-lying andesites, forming acid leaching alteration upon condensing into groundwater. Rapid cooling of this part of the intrusion caused extensive fracturing during the transition from ductile to brittle deformation (-400°C). Increased permeability enabled a large convective hydrothermal system and related K-rich alteration to form. Simultaneously, a low salinity supercritical magmatic fluid, exsolved from the intrusion at larger depths, probably contributed metals for the accompanying Pb-Zn mineralisation.


Text classifiers have promising applications in high-stake tasks such as resume screening and content moderation. These classifiers must be fair and avoid discrim-inatory decisions by being invariant to perturbations of sensitive attributes such as gender or ethnicity. However, there is a gap between human intuition about these perturbations and the formal similarity specifications capturing them. While existing research has started to address this gap, current methods are based on hardcoded word replacements, resulting in specifications with limited expressivity or ones that fail to fully align with human intuition (e.g., in cases of asymmetric counterfactuals). This work proposes novel methods for bridging this gap by discovering expressive and intuitive individual fairness specifications. We show how to leverage unsupervised style transfer and GPT-3's zero-shot capabilities to automatically generate expressive candidate pairs of semantically similar sentences that differ along sensitive attributes. We then validate the generated pairs via an extensive crowdsourcing study, which confirms that a lot of these pairs align with human intuition about fairness in toxicity classification. We also show how limited amounts of human feedback can be leveraged to learn a similarity specification.


"Balance of Power" has always been one of the leading justification narratives in international relations. In the introduction section this paper gives an overview of the usages of the principle which is not limited to a particular epoch or geographic area. However, it was classically attributed to the European state system, to brand the era between the treaty systems of Utrecht 1713 and Vienna 1815 when it was discussed as legal and political principle. My paper argues that the international legal doctrine of the 19th century became increasingly reluctant in juridically approving this principle. This shift indicates a vanishing sympathy for the balance of power as an adequate instrument to regulate 19th century interstate relations; this was likewise related to a rejection of the restorative Vienna order. Most international lawyers disguised their reserve behind the formal-positivist distinction between international law and politics (which could be understood as moral and political decision). The principle of the balance of power was devaluated as a mere expression of Realpolitik. At the end of the 19th century, the majority of international lawyers regarded the balance of power as political, not juridical principle. It was shifted to the historiography of international law and to political sciences.


Reliable verification and identification can be achieved by fusing hard and soft information from multiple classifiers. Correlation filter based classifiers have shown good performance in biometric verification applications. In this paper, we develop a method of fusing soft information from multiple correlation filters. Usually, correlation filters are designed to produce a strong peak in the correlation filter output for authentics whereas no such peak should be produced for impostors. Traditionally, the peak-to-sidelobe-ratio (PSR) has been used to characterize the strength of the peak and thresholds are set on the PSR in order to determine whether the test image is an authentic or an impostor. In this paper, we propose to fuse multiple correlation output planes, by appending them for classification by a Support Vector Machine (SVM), to improve the performance over traditional PSR based classification. Multiple Unconstrained Optimal Tradeoff Synthetic Discriminant Function (UOTSDF) filters having varying degrees of discrimination and distortion tolerance are employed here to create a feature vector for classification by a SVM, and this idea is evaluated on the plastic distortion set of the NIST 24 fingerprint database. Results on this database provide an Equal Error Rate (EER) of 1.36% when we fuse correlation planes, in comparison to an average EER of 3.24% using the traditional PSR based classification from a filter, and 2.4% EER on fusion of PSR scores from the same filters using SVM, which demonstrates the advantages of fusing the correlation output planes over the fusion of just the peak-to-sidelobe-ratios (PSRs).


In modern systems, it is often desirable to extract relevant information from large amounts of data collected at different spatial locations. Applications include sensor networks, wearable health-monitoring devices and a variety of other systems for inference. Several existing source coding techniques, such as Slepian-Wolf and Wyner-Ziv coding, achieve asymptotic compression optimality in distributed systems. However, these techniques are rarely used in sensor networks because of decoding complexity and prohibitively long code length. Moreover, the fundamental limits that arise from existing techniques are intractable to describe for a complicated network topology or when the objective of the system is to perform some computation on the data rather than to reproduce the data. This thesis bridges the technological gap between the needs of real-world systems and the optimistic bounds derived from asymptotic analysis. Specifically, we characterize fundamental trade-offs when the desired computation is incorporated into the compression design and the code length is one. To obtain both performance guarantees and achievable schemes, we use high-resolution quantization theory, which is complementary to the Shannon-theoretic analyses previously used to study distributed systems. We account for varied network topologies, such as those where sensors are allowed to collaborate or the communication links are heterogeneous. In these settings, a small amount of intersensor communication can provide a significant improvement in compression performance. As a result, this work suggests new compression principles and network design for modern distributed systems. Although the ideas in the thesis are motivated by current and future sensor network implementations, the framework applies to a wide range of signal processing questions. We draw connections between the fidelity criteria studied in the thesis and distortion measures used in perceptual coding. As a consequence, we determine the optimal quantizer for expected relative error (ERE), a measure that is widely useful but is often neglected in the source coding community. We further demonstrate that applying the ERE criterion to psychophysical models can explain the Weber–


We analyze the trajectories of 313 particles seen in the near‐Bennu environment between December 2018 and September 2019. Of these, 65% follow suborbital trajectories, 20% undergo more than one orbital revolution around the asteroid, and 15% directly escape on hyperbolic trajectories. The median lifetime of these particles is ∼6 hr. The trajectories are sensitive to Bennu's gravitational field, which allows us to reliably estimate the spherical harmonic coefficients through degree 8 and to resolve nonuniform mass distribution through degree 3. The particles are perturbed by solar radiation pressure, enabling effective area‐to‐mass ratios to be estimated. By assuming that particles are oblate ellipsoids of revolution, and incorporating photometric measurements, we find a median axis ratio of 0.27 and diameters for equivalent‐volume spheres ranging from 0.22–6.1 cm, with median 0.74 cm. Our size distribution agrees well with that predicted for fragmentation due to diurnal thermal cycling. Detailed models of known accelerations do not produce a match to the observed trajectories, so we also estimate empirical accelerations. These accelerations appear to be related to mismodeling of radiation pressure, but we cannot rule out contributions from mass loss. Most ejections take place at local solar times in the afternoon and evening (12:00–24:00), although they occur at any time of day. We independently identify ten ejection events, some of which have previously been reported. We document a case where a particle ricocheted off the surface, revealing a coefficient of restitution 0.57±0.01 and demonstrating that some apparent ejections are not related to surface processes.


Fringe projection profilometry (FPP) has been widely studied for measurements of three-dimensional (3D) shapes. However, the measurement of moving objects is still a challenging problem associated with commonly used methods. Phase-shifting profilometry (PSP) suffers from motion-induced errors when applied to moving objects, while Fourier transform profilometry (FTP) is sensitive to background light and noise. This paper proposes a novel data fusion approach to improve the measurement of moving objects by alleviating noise-induced errors. Firstly, a set of coarse measurements on the shape of the object are obtained at different time instants by FTP. Then the parameters associated with the motion of the object over these time instants are retrieved from these coarse estimates by applying the iterative closest point (ICP) method. Finally, the parameters are utilized to adaptively fuse the coarse measurements based on their quality. Simulations and experiments verify that the proposed approach can significantly improve the measurement accuracy.


This paper attempts to examine the socioeconomic determinants of primary school dropout in Uganda with the aid of a logistic model analysis using the 2004 National Service Delivery Survey data. The Objectives were to establish the household socioeconomic factors that influence dropout of pupils given free education and any possible policy alternatives to curb dropout of pupils. Various logistic regressions of primary school dropout were estimated and these took the following dimensions; rural-urban, gender, and age-cohort. After model estimation, marginal effects for each of the models were obtained. The analysis of the various coefficients was done across all models. The results showed the insignificance of distance to school, gender of pupil, gender of household head and total average amount of school dues paid by students in influencing dropout of pupils thus showing the profound impact Universal Primary Education has had on both access to primary education and pupil dropout. Also the results vindicated the importance of parental education, household size and proportion of economically active household members in influencing the chances of pupil dropout. The study finally calls for government to; keep a keen eye on non-school fees payments by parents to schools as these have the potential to increase to unsustainable levels by most households especially in rural areas; roll-out adult education across the entire country; and expand free universal education to secondary and vocational levels as it would allow some of those who can not afford secondary education to continue with schooling. This has the effect of reducing the number of unproductive members in the household.


In this thesis we develop practical tools for quantum key distribution (QKD) security proofs. We apply the tools to provide security proofs for several protocols, ranging from discrete variable protocols in high dimensions, protocols with realistic implementations, measurement device independent QKD and continuous-variable QKD. The security proofs are based on the Devetak-Winter security framework [31, 57]. In the key rate calculation, it is often convenient to assume that the optimal attack is symmetric. Under the assumption that the parameter estimation is based on coarsegrained observations, we show that the optimal attack is symmetric, if the protocol and the postselection have sufficient symmetries. As an example we calculate the key rates of protocols using 2, d and d+ 1 mutually unbiased bases in d-dimensional Hilbert spaces. We investigate the connection between the optimal collective eavesdropping attack and the optimal cloning attack, in which the eavesdropper employs an optimal cloner to attack the protocol. We find that, in general, it does not hold that the optimal attack is an optimal cloner. However, there are classes of protocols, for which we can identify the optimal attack by an optimal cloner. We analyze protocols with mutually unbiased bases in d dimensions, and show that for the protocols with 2 and d+ 1 mutually unbiased bases the optimal attack is an optimal cloner, but for the protocols with d mutually unbiased bases, it is not. In optical implementations of the phase-encoded BB84 protocol, the bit information is usually encoded in the phase of two consecutive photon pulses generated in a MachZehnder interferometer. In the actual experimental realization, the loss in the arms of the Mach-Zehnder interferometer is not balanced, for example because only one arm contains a lossy phase modulator. Since the imbalance changes the structure of the signals states and measurements, the BB84 security analysis no longer applies in this scenario. We provide a security proof for the unbalanced phase-encoded BB84. The loss does lower the key rate compared to a protocol without loss. However, for a realistic parameter regime, the same key rate is found by applying the original BB84 security analysis. Recently, the security of a measurement device-independent QKD setup with BB84 signal states was proven in Refs. [61, 14]. In this setup Alice and Bob send quantum states to an intermediate node, which performs the measurement, and is assumed to be controlled by Eve. We analyze the security of a measurement device-independent QKD protocol with B92 signal states, and calculate the key rates numerically for a realistic implementation. Based on our security proof we were able to prove the security of the strong reference pulse B92 protocol.


A strict gluten-free diet (GFD) is the only currently available therapeutic treatment for patients with celiac disease (CD). Traditionally, treatment with a GFD has excluded wheat, barley and rye, while the presence of oats is a subject of debate. The most-recent research indicates that some cultivars of oats can be a safe part of a GFD. In order to elucidate the toxicity of the prolamins from oat varieties with low, medium, and high CD toxicity, the avenin genes of these varieties were cloned and sequenced, and their expression quantified throughout the grain development. At the protein level, we have accomplished an exhaustive characterization and quantification of avenins by RP-HPLC and an analysis of immunogenicity of peptides present in prolamins of different oat cultivars. Avenin sequences were classified into three different groups, which have homology with S-rich prolamins of Triticeae. Avenin proteins presented a lower proline content than that of wheat gliadin; this may contribute to the low toxicity shown by oat avenins. The expression of avenin genes throughout the development stages has shown a pattern similar to that of prolamins of wheat and barley. RP-HPLC chromatograms showed protein peaks in the alcohol-soluble and reduced-soluble fractions. Therefore, oat grains had both monomeric and polymeric avenins, termed in this paper gliadin- and glutenin-like avenins. We found a direct correlation between the immunogenicity of the different oat varieties and the presence of the specific peptides with a higher/lower potential immunotoxicity. The specific peptides from the oat variety with the highest toxicity have shown a higher potential immunotoxicity. These results suggest that there is wide range of variation of potential immunotoxicity of oat cultivars that could be due to differences in the degree of immunogenicity in their sequences.


OBJECTIVE
This report presents national estimates on access to health care for the following five subgroups of Hispanic or Latino women aged 18 years and over in the United States: Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, and other Hispanic. For comparison, estimates are also presented for non-Hispanic white women and non-Hispanic black women.

METHODS
Data for persons of all ages in the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population are collected each year in the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), which is conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics. Each year, data are collected for approximately 100,000 persons in 40,000 households. In the 2000-2002 surveys combined, data were collected for 54,763 women aged 18 years and over (9,082 Hispanic or Latino women), with an overall response rate of 73.4%. Estimates in this report are presented as annual estimates, averaged over the 3 survey years. Estimates were age adjusted to the 2000 U.S. standard population to permit comparison among the various race and ethnic subgroups.

RESULTS
Among the 33.4 million Hispanic or Latino women in the United States, 31% lacked health insurance coverage at the time of interview, 20% had no usual place to go for medical care during the past year, and 22% experienced unmet health care needs during the past year due to cost. Of the five subgroups of Hispanic or Latino women, Mexican women (35%) and Central or South American women (36%) were more likely than Puerto Rican women (14%) and Cuban women (23%) to lack health insurance coverage. Mexican women (78%) and Central or South American women (78%) were less likely to have a usual place to go for health care compared with Puerto Rican women (90%), Cuban women (82%), and other Hispanic women (90%). The percentage of Hispanic or Latino women who had an unmet medical need due to cost was highest among Mexican women (24%) and lowest among Cuban women (14%). Lack of access to health care was most prevalent among Hispanic or Latino women who had poor or near poor poverty status, had less than a high school diploma, or were foreign born.

CONCLUSION
Access to health care varied among subgroups of Hispanic or Latino women. Understanding these subgroup differences may help community-based programs improve access to care among Hispanic or Latino women.


Can whites teach African-American literature effectively and legitimately? What is at issue when a man teaches a women's studies course? How effectively can a straight woman educate students about gay and lesbian history? What are the political implications of the study of the colonizers by the colonized? More generally, how does the identity of an educator affect his or her credibility with students and with other educators? In incident after well-publicized incident, these abstract questions have turned up in America's classrooms and in national media, often trivialized as the latest example of PC excess. Going beyond simplistic headlines, Teaching What You're Not broaches these and many other difficult questions. With contributions from scholars in a variety of disciplines, the book examines the ways in which historical, cultural, and personal identities impact on pedagogy and scholarship. Essays cover such topics as the outsider's gaze as it applies to the study of non-white literature; an able-bodied woman's reflections on teaching literature by disabled women; and the challenges of teaching the Western canon at an African American college.


The aim of the paper is to point to the mutual linkage between the changes in the extent and directions of the commuting flows and contemporary changes in the economic structure of Serbia. Even though the increase in the number of commuters in total and commuters employed in the industrial sector has been evident on the national level, on the local level the research results indicate a considerable decrease in the number of industrial commuters in the case of large industrial centres ('transition losers'). Unprepared for rapid transformation, the industrial centres faced economic (mono-functional economic structure, collapse of large systems, undeveloped entrepreneurship, slow privatisation process), structural (high unemployment), social and demographic problems. Consequently, there have been changes in the intensity and structure of the migration flows.


The field of Egyptology has been intrigued by an ancient Egyptian pharaoh named Akhenaten, from the fourteenth century BCE, who attempted large-scale ideological, religious, political, and rhetorical changes—only to be erased from history until the nineteenth century. His project was known only indirectly through tomb texts, texts on boundary stelae, as well as through visuals, architecture, and other material objects. The examination here conducts a preliminary archaeological rhetorical study, as proposed by Richard Enos, of the scholarly treatments of Akhenaten's projects, focusing on major Egyptologists from Victorian and Edwardian England, the Gilded and Progressive eras in America, the Weimar Republic and National Socialist eras in Germany, and the Third Republic in France. Through examination of the cultural contexts and the scholarly texts, the study finds the scholarship of these major Egyptologists to be heavily influenced by their particular cultural settings, agendas, and frameworks.


Purpose – The purpose of this article is to develop a conceptual framework for studying value creation derived from an ethical perspective, in a business marketing context. Design/methodology/approach – First, a conceptual and comparative analysis is made of the ethics and value concepts in two research traditions: the stakeholder approach and the business network approach. Second, a conceptual framework is developed that contains tools for conducting research on value co‐creation in business networks from an ethical perspective. An exemplifying case study from the paper industry is included. Findings – Four key concepts are proposed for further research into ethics and value creation in business networks that enable the study of ethical embeddedness: ethical network identity, ethical role, ethical position, and ethical atmosphere. The analysis also presents fundamental differences between the stakeholder and the business network approaches when dealing with ethics and value. Research limitations/implications – The developed conceptual framework should be applied in more extended empirical settings to evaluate its usefulness. Practical implications – The paper provides an ethical perspective for understanding value in industrial markets using a network approach. Originality/value – The study presents a novel approach to incorporating ethics and value creation to an industrial marketing context. Ethical issues are traditionally studied using stakeholder, agency or institutional perspectives and such research in business‐to‐business contexts is almost non‐existent. The business network approach contains very few studies from an ethical point of view. The paper covers this gap and offers a starting‐point for further inquiry into this field.


Populations of bats (Order Chiroptera) are difficult to monitor. However, current recognition of the importance of bats to biodiversity, their ecological and economic value as ecosystem components, and their vulnerabilityto declines makes monitoring trends in their populations a much-needed cornerstone for their future management. We report findings and recommendations of a recent expert workshop on monitoring trends in bat populations in the United States and territories. We summarize selected case reports presented by others at the workshop, including reviews of methods and ongoing efforts to monitor a wide range of species of bats in a diverse array of situations. Most efforts at monitoring bat populations involve use of indices that are uncalibrated in relation to population size, do not incorporate measures of variation or detectability, are discontinuous in time and space, and sometimes lack standard protocols. This is in part because the complex and variable natural history of bats poses many challenges to monitoring. We also review principal findings and recommendations made by workshop participants. Recommendations centered on improving methods for monitoring populations of bats, defining objectives and priorities for monitoring, gaining mandates for monitoring, and enhancing information exchange.


Four new crystalline adducts of the Lawsone molecule (2-hydroxy-1,4-naphthaquinone) with 4,4′-bipyridine, 4-(2-pyridine-4-ethyl)pyridine, 1,3-di(4-pyridyl)propane and 2-hydroxy pyridine are reported. Adduct formation leads to colour shifts, which are characterised by UV/visible spectroscopy. Complementary quantum-chemical calculations are used to study the energetics of the adduct formation, and to gain insight into the origin of the observed colour changes.


Compliance with U.S. air quality regulatory standards for atmospheric fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is based on meeting average 24 hour (35 μ m−3) and yearly (15 μg m−3) mass‐per‐unit‐volume limits, regardless of PM2.5 composition. Whereas this presents a workable regulatory framework, information on particle composition is needed to assess the fate and transport of PM2.5 and determine potential environmental/human health impacts. To address these important non‐regulatory issues an integrated approach is generally used that includes (1) field sampling of atmospheric particulate matter on filter media, using a size‐limiting cyclone, or with no particle‐size limitation; and (2) chemical extraction of exposed filters and analysis of separate particulate‐bound fractions for total mercury, trace elements and organic constituents, utilising different USGS laboratories optimised for quantitative analysis of these substances. This combination of sampling and analysis allowed for a more detailed interpretation of PM2.5 sources and potential effects, compared to measurements of PM2.5 abundance alone. Results obtained using this combined approach are presented for a 2006 air sampling campaign in Shenandoah National Park (Virginia, USA) to assess sources of atmospheric contaminants and their potential impact on air quality in the Park. PM2.5 was collected at two sampling sites (Big Meadows and Pinnacles) separated by 13.6 km. At both sites, element concentrations in PM25 were low, consistent with remote or rural locations. However, element/Zr crustal abundance enrichment factors greater than 10, indicating anthropogenic input, were found for Hg, Se, S, Sb, Cd, Pb, Mo, Zn and Cu, listed in decreasing order of enrichment. Principal component analysis showed that four element associations accounted for 84% of the PM2.5 trace element variation; these associations are interpreted to represent: (1) crustal sources (Al, REE); (2) coal combustion (Se, Sb), (3) metal production and/or mobile sources (Mo, Cd, Pb, Cu, Zn) and (4) a transient marine source (Sr, Mg). Concentrations of Hg in PM2.5 at background levels in the single pg m−3 were shown by collection and analysis of PM2.5 on filters and by an automated speciation analyser set up at the Big Meadows air quality site. The speciation unit revealed periodic elevation of reactive gaseous mercury (RGM) that co‐occurred with peaks in SO2, indicating an anthropogenic source. GC/MS total ion current chromatograms for the two sites were quite similar indicating that organic signatures were regional in extent and/or that the same compounds were present locally at each site. Calculated carbon preference index values for n‐alkanes indicated that plant waxes rather than anthropogenic sources, were the dominant alkane source. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) were detected, with a predominance of non‐alkylated, and higher molecular weight PAHs in this fraction, suggestive of a combustion source (fossil fuel or forest fires).


BACKGROUND
Capturing the complex time pattern of physical activity (PA) and sedentary behavior (SB) using accelerometry remains a challenge. Research from occupational health suggests exposure variation analysis (EVA) could provide a meaningful tool. This paper (1) explains the application of EVA to accelerometer data, (2) demonstrates how EVA thresholds and derivatives could be chosen and used to examine adherence to PA and SB guidelines, and (3) explores the validity of EVA outputs.

METHODS
EVA outputs are compared with accelerometer data from 4 individuals (Study 1a and 1b) and 3 occupational groups (Study 2): seated workstation office workers (n = 8), standing workstation office workers (n = 8), and teachers (n = 8).

RESULTS
Line graphs and related EVA graphs highlight the use of EVA derivatives for examining compliance with guidelines. EVA derivatives of occupational groups confirm no difference in bouts of activity but clear differences as expected in extended bouts of SB and brief bursts of activity, thus providing evidence of construct validity.

CONCLUSIONS
EVA offers a unique and comprehensive generic method that is able, for the first time, to capture the time pattern (both frequency and intensity) of PA and SB, which can be tailored for both occupational and public health research.


Well-established evidence shows that children born preterm/low birth weight (LBW) are at increased risk of academic difficulties (Lee, Yeatman, Luna, & Feldman, 2011; Pritchard et al., 2009) and, despite global IQ scores within the normal range, nonetheless display lower academic performance than their same age peers (Bhutta, Cleves, Casey, Cradock, & Anand, 2002; Kerr-Wilson, Mackay, Smith, & Pell, 2011). This is not fully understood and previous attempts to improve these circumstances through means of cognitive intervention have met with little success. Therefore, the current thesis investigates possible underlying mechanisms of this intellectual disparity and tests the effectiveness of one potential intervention. In doing so, the studies presented focus specifically on fluid intelligence (Taub, 2002). The investigation through fluid intelligence is relatively novel in the current literature and therefore worthy of further exploration. Normal individual differences in fluid intelligence have been explained with reference to information processing parameters. Previous studies have shown that children born preterm/LBW have impairments in basic processes identified with executive function (Aarnoudse-Moens, Smidts, Oosterlaan, Duivenvoorden, & Weisglas-Kuperus, 2009; Mulder, Pitchford, Hagger, & Marlow, 2009). However, the current study is the first to test whether differences in fluid intelligence, as measured by the Cattell Culture Fair Tests, between preterm (n = 217) and typically developing children (n = 145) could be accounted for by differences in working memory and cognitive flexibility, as measured by the digit span tasks and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test respectively. Results indicate that the seven to nine years old preterm cohort performed less well on measures of fluid intelligence than their peers across all age groups and their differences were partially mediated by both working memory and cognitive flexibility in a multiple mediation analysis. It also identified at least one year of developmental delay in fluid intelligence between the clinical group and their peers.

Provided with evidence from Study 1 and parallel research suggesting that computerized working memory training may enhance working memory and fluid intelligence in non-clinical groups (Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, & Perrig, 2008; Klingberg, Forssberg, & Westerberg, 2002; Studer et al., 2009), the second goal of this thesis was to conduct a preliminary study to investigate the feasibility of cognitive training for children born preterm/LBW. Therefore, in the second study, the utility of a brief adaptive working memory span training program (Buschkuehl, Jaeggi, Kobel, & Perrig, 2008) was tested in typically developing children. Sixty-three children, aged seven to nine years, were randomly assigned to one of three groups: Intervention, active control and passive control. The intervention group was trained in the adaptive version of the working memory span task and the active control group was trained in the nonadaptive version. Both groups trained for 15 minutes each day for a duration of 20 days. Participants in the passive control group participated only in pre and post assessments. All participants were assessed using the digit span and spatial span tasks for measuring working memory, the Stroop task for measuring executive control, a reaction time task for measuring processing speed and the Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices for measuring fluid intelligence. Results indicate that children in the intervention group improved on their trained task and demonstrated significant far transfer effects on the assessment of fluid intelligence compared to both control groups. However, no near transfer to other measures was found. The reason behind the occurrence of far transfer effect without evidence of near transfer effects was unclear. However, given that the adaptive complex working memory training task was not in any way similar to the fluid intelligence measure, significant differences in fluid intelligence gains were unlikely to have been a consequence of practice or general familiarity effects but, rather, a consequence of the training.

Although Study 1 identified that working memory and cognitive flexibility partially mediate birth status-related differences in Gf, the impact of these variables on academic performance in children born preterm is still unknown. Nonetheless, current evidence of far transfer to fluid intelligence after adaptive complex working memory span training provides support for the utility of WM training and modifiability in Gf. This in turn provides a preliminary evidence-base approach for psychologists to work toward providing neuro-remediation treatment options to targeted clinical groups, such as those born preterm with fluid intelligence deficiencies. In combination, the outcomes of these two studies provide both a theoretical contribution to our understanding of the deficits observed in children born preterm and an applied contribution to beginning the process of developing appropriate intervention programmes suitable for this clinical group in the future, with hopeful prospects for improving cognitive outcomes.


IZA DP No. 14135 FEBRUARY 2021 The Making and Unmaking of Opportunity: Educational Mobility in 20th CenturyDenmark* We study intergenerational educational mobility in Denmark over the 20th century during which the comprehensive Danish welfare state was rolled out. While mobility initially was low, schooling reforms benefiting children from disadvantaged backgrounds led to dramatic increases in mobility for cohorts born between 1940 and 1960. However, the college expansion affecting cohorts born from 1970 onward has mainly benefited children from affluent backgrounds, resulting in rapidly declining mobility. Comparisons to educational mobility trends in the U.S. reveal that the two countries converge in mobility levels for the most recent cohorts despite the dramatically different welfare policies in place. JEL Classification: H0, I0, J0


ssgm.bellschool.anu.edu.au The gender disparities in employment in Solomon Islands are well documented (see ADB 2015). This In Brief describes recent research on women's informal urban livelihoods and economic participation.1 It forms part of the SSGM project Honiara Urbanisation: Managing Change, Harnessing Opportunities, which aims to better inform donors and policymakers about development priorities, opportunities, and prospects by engaging with a range of stakeholders, including settlement communities. From August to September 2016, the authors partnered with World Vision Solomon Islands to conduct five focus groups with a total of 50 women aged 18–65 from Sun Valley, White River, and Lord Howe settlements.2 The findings reflect the complexities of women's livelihoods, which encompass not just engagement with the labour market, but traditional gender roles in the urban family and community, and networking and associations such as lending schemes and savings clubs.


Genetics and organic chemistry are areas of science that students regard as difficult to learn. Part of this difficulty is derived from the disciplines having representations as part of their discourses. In order to optimally support students' meaning-making, teachers need to use representations to structure the meaning-making experience in thoughtful ways that consider the variation in students' prior knowledge. Using a focus group setting, we explored 43 university students' reasoning on representations in introductory chemistry and genetics courses. Our analysis of eight focus group discussions revealed how students can construct somewhat bewildered relations with disciplinary-specific representations. The students stated that they preferred familiar representations, but without asserting the meaning-making affordances of those representations. Also, the students were highly aware of the affordances of certain representations, but nonetheless chose not to use those representations in their problem solving. We suggest that an effective representation is one that, to some degree, is familiar to the students, but at the same time is challenging and not too closely related to "the usual one". The focus group discussions led the students to become more aware of their own and others ways of interpreting different representations. Furthermore, feedback from the students' focus group discussions enhanced the teachers' awareness of the students' prior knowledge and limitations in students' representational literacy. Consequently, we posit that a focus group setting can be used in a university context to promote both student meaning-making and teacher professional development in a fruitful way.


We investigate interband photorefraction in pure and Mg-doped near-stoichiometric LiTaO 3 at the deep ultraviolet wavelength of 257 nm. By controlling the stoichiometry, the response time and dynamic range of the interband photorefractive effect can be very much improved. Measured time constants are in the order of a few tens of milliseconds for UV light intensities of about 100 mW/cm 2 . Further, we report that Mg doping of near-stoichiometric LiTaO 3 increases the grating response rate by a factor of 50 compared with the one in undoped crystals. For UV light intensities larger than 500 mW/cm 2 the response time is faster than one millisecond. In Mg-doped near-stoichiometric LiTaO 3 , quasi-fixing of holographic gratings with UV light and nondestructive readout in the visible has been observed.


This book features critical and interpretive, linguistic perspective on foreign language teaching and learning in the 21st century Poland. By juxtaposing two conceptions of identity: essentialist and poststructuralist, the author attempts to present the problem of an EFL teacher identity construction and performance. Language is key to the study, both as a methodology for making more evident how identity operates through discourses and also as the object being studied. The author brings together these two dimensions of language with attention to both the specifics of participants' words and to the wider frames of discourse. The two conceptions of identity are discussed on the basis of the research conducted in one community of practice, i.e. Polish teachers of English. The results of the study lead to the conclusion that an EFL teacher identity should be recognized as an individual self-concept that is (re)fashioned every time individuals engage in interactions with varied milieus.


This paper studies general equilibrium theory, for both complete and incomplete markets, under Knightian uncertainty. Noting that the preference represented by Knightian uncertainty induces a set of complete preferences, we set ourselves the task of inquiring the relationship between an equilibrium under Knightian uncertainty and its counterpart under the induced complete preferences. It is shown that they are actually equivalent. The importance of this result is due to its applications, among which the existence of equilibria under Knightian uncertainty and their computation follow at once from the existing knowledge on general equilibrium theory under complete preferences. Moreover, by means of that equivalence, we are in a position to investigate the problem of efficiency and indeterminacy of equilibria under Knightian uncertainty.


This amicus brief filed in the Ninth Circuit appeal of Dr. Seuss Enterprises v. ComicMix seeks to rectify and restore the balances underlying the Copyright Act of 1976 — particularly the interplay of the Section 106(2) right to prepare derivative works and the fair use doctrine. The District Court granted the defendants' motion for summary judgment on the ground that OH THE PLACES YOU'LL BOLDLY GO! — the defendants' illustrated book combining Dr. Seuss's OH THE PLACES YOU'LL GO! and other Dr. Seuss books with Star Trek characters and themes — made fair use of the Dr. Seuss works.

Based on the works at issue, uncontested facts, and the judge's factual findings, the brief contends that defendants' unauthorized derivative work plainly supported a grant of summary judgment for the plaintiff on the fair use defense. The District Court's conclusory finding that the defendants' work is "highly transformative," disregard of the second and third fair use factors, analysis of the fourth factor, and allocation of the burden of proof misapply the standards for fair use analysis.

The District Court's decision destabilizes essential copyright law principles that have long supported markets for collaborations and derivative works. If this decision stands, competitors could flood publishing, television, film, and merchandising markets with unauthorized derivative works merely by "mashing" in other elements. Lucasfilm could produce OH THE PLACES YODA'LL GO! without obtaining a license from Dr. Seuss Enterprises. The developers of the Pokemon series could offer OH THE PLACES YOU'LL Pokemon GO!. Castle Rock Entertainment could introduce OH THE PLACES YOU'LL Yada Yada Yada!. Warner Bros. could freely mash together Bugs Bunny with Marvel Comic's Iron Man or Sesame Street's Kermit the Frog. Moreover, anyone could produce and distribute such works. That result contravenes what Congress intended in establishing an exclusive right to prepare derivative works subject to the fair use defense.

While mashups can qualify for fair use in particular cases — for example, where they offer parodic or even satirical commentary and insights; or where a fan adapts his or her favorite characters or scenes for a school project — a categorical rule that commercial, non-parodic, non-satirical mashups automatically qualify as "highly transformative" for purposes of fair use analysis goes well beyond the Copyright Act's regime for promoting expressive creativity.

Promoting mashup art beyond the limits set by copyright law's exclusive rights, limiting doctrines, and fair use analysis may well be a desirable policy reform for the digital age. Such a course, however, is for Congress and not the judiciary.


PURPOSE
Functional iron deficiency may impair response to erythropoiesis-stimulating agents (ESAs) in iron-replete patients with chemotherapy-associated anemia (CAA). This study evaluated whether coadministration of parenteral iron improves ESA efficacy in patients with CAA.

PATIENTS AND METHODS
This prospective, multicenter, randomized trial enrolled 502 patients with hemoglobin (Hb) less than 11 g/dL who were undergoing chemotherapy for nonmyeloid malignancies. All patients received darbepoetin alfa once every 3 weeks and were randomly assigned to receive either ferric gluconate 187.5 mg intravenously (IV) every 3 weeks, oral daily ferrous sulfate 325 mg, or oral placebo for 16 weeks.

RESULTS
There was no difference in the erythropoietic response rate (ie, proportion of patients achieving Hb ≥ 12 g/dL or Hb increase ≥ 2 g/dL from baseline): 69.5% (95% CI, 61.9% to 76.5%) of IV iron-treated patients achieved an erythropoietic response compared with 66.9% (95% CI, 59.1% to 74.0%) who received oral iron and 65.0% (95% CI, 57.2% to 72.3%) who received oral placebo (P = .75). There were also no differences in the proportion of patients requiring red cell transfusions, changes in quality of life, or the dose of darbepoetin administered. Adverse events (AEs) tended to be more common in the IV iron arm: grade 3 or higher AEs occurred in 54% (95% CI, 46% to 61%) of patients receiving IV iron compared with 44% (95% CI, 36% to 52%) who received oral iron and 46% (95% CI, 38% to 54%) who received oral placebo (P = .16).

CONCLUSION
In patients with CAA, addition of IV ferric gluconate to darbepoetin failed to provide additional benefit compared with oral iron or oral placebo.


Why do bureaucratic principals appoint agents who hold different policy views from themselves? We posit an explanation based on the interplay between two types of agency costs: shirking on information production and policy bias. Principals employ biased agents because they shirk less. This creates an incentive for the principal to use review mechanisms that mitigate the resulting bias in the agents' decisions. The availability of such review mechanisms encourages principals to employ more extreme agents. We apply the theory to explain various features of the administrative state. In contrast to existing accounts, in our model the use by the president of ideological bureaucrats at regulatory agencies and centralized regulatory review are complements. The use of bias to mitigate shirking results in an amplification of the swings of regulatory policy and heightens the role of regulatory policy in partisan politics.


At the outbreak of the First World War, relations between the Scandinavian countries were not exactly cordial. The dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian Union in 1905 had created deep divisions in the Nordic region, and only during the War did Nordic cooperation regain its place of honour. The authorities were engaging in diplomatic and trade cooperation to try to ease the huge difficulties which the war between the Great Powers was causing. This stimulated Nordically minded opinion, which was not blind to the opportunities created by the outside pressure. The idea of a Nordic association for strengthening Nordic cooperation was launched by Danish ophthalmologist C.F. Heerfordt, but differences in opinion among the Danish Nordicists on how best to tackle the matter restricted the numbers taking up membership in the association which Heerfordt was instrumental in founding in Denmark in June 1917. Through his active lobbying in Sweden, Heerfordt provided the impulse for the foundation of a corresponding Swedish association, but several of the leading Swedish Nordicists held aloof from the ophthalmologist's advances, partly owing to his federal ambitions for Nordic cooperation. In April 1918, instead of entering a partnership with the Danish association, the Swedish Nordicists approached a small group of prominent Danish Nordicists under the leadership of the influential conservative politician and industrialist Alexander Foss, and it was this small group which was chiefly responsible for founding the Danish "Norden" Association in April 1919. Heerfordt and his supporters had given their approval for the new initiative, but were unable to give it unconditional backing. The Swedes had proposed that the associations should work for political and economic rapprochement between the Nordic countries, but this met fierce Norwegian resistance, and the aim was changed to the mere strengthening of cultural and economic cooperation.


Geographic tongue is a common benign condition involving the tongue with an unknown etiology.This study aimed to measure the salivary level of alpha-amylase as well as the level of anxiety of patients with geographic tongue.This case-control study was performed on 180 subjects including 89 patients with geographic tongue and 91 controls. The subjects were requested to fill out the Spielberger's State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-S, STAI-T). Unstimulated saliva samples were collected by the spitting method to assess the salivary level of alpha-amylase. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 23, t-test and Pearson's test (α=0.05).The mean salivary level of alpha-amylase and the mean scores of state and trait anxiety in geographic tongue patients were higher than those of healthy controls. But these differences did not reach statistical significance (P>0.05).Anxiety may be an influential factor in the occurrence of geographic tongue. Salivary level of alpha-amylase cannot serve as a specific biomarker for assessment of geographic tongue.


Introduction The knowledge accrued through research in the domain of crossmodal correspondences has had a significant influence on a diverse array of disciplines, including behavioral studies, neuroscience, computational modeling, and notably, marketing, with the objective of aligning sensory experiences to help shape patterns of consumer behavior. A study is reported that explores the extension of these principles to the communication of products having a notably complex sensory profile, specifically within the context of wine. The central aim of the project is to explore the feasibility of using crossmodal communication as a strategic tool to augment the congruence between the consumers' multisensory expectations and their sensory experiences. For consumers venturing into the realm of wine selection without the advantage of prior tasting experience, it is of paramount importance to possess a robust understanding of the mandated information. This encompasses critical elements such as the wine's origin, grape varietal(s) used, geographical indications, producer qualifications, and the potential implications of these factors on the final wine product. This level of comprehension stands as a necessary prerequisite, enabling these consumers to make informed choices that align with their preferences, even in the absence of previous sensory encounters. Nonetheless, semiotic investigations underscore the significance attributed to symbolic components such as signs, logos, colors, gestures, and linguistic cues. Research from the field performing multisensory studies, presents a counterpoint to prevailing communication paradigms, advocating for a heightened incorporation of metaphors, analogies, symbols, metonymies, and allegories. This alternative approach aims to enhance the efficacy of communication strategies, offering a more profound and evocative means of conveying intricate messages on a more holistic level. Methods A questionnaire was sent to a specific group of engaged wine consumers (n = 329). Besides questions regarding demographics, purchase behavior, and consumption behavior, the questionnaire included examples of multisensory communication through a selection of symbols, as well as alternative wine information. Results The results showed significant correlations between demographics, consumption behavior, and attitudes toward the tested multisensory symbols and alternative information, thus helping to gain a better understanding of the sensory properties that should be communicated on wine labels. Discussion The findings reported here highlight the effectiveness of visual crossmodal communication as a promising pathway capable of skillfully capturing consumer attributes, conveying multisensory experiences, and portraying the comprehensive timeline of taste evolution. As a result, it assumes a pivotal role as a communicative tool for intricate consumables, like wine, functioning at the crossroads of visual and sensory dimensions.