The Fibre Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) represents the new generation of local area networks (LANs). These high speed LANs are capable of supporting up to 500 users over a 100 km distance. User traffic is expected to be as diverse as file transfers, packet voice and video. As the proliferation of FDDI LANs continues, the need to interconnect these LANs arises. FDDI LAN interconnection can be achieved in a variety of different ways. Some of the most commonly used today are public data networks, dial up lines and private circuits. For applications that can potentially generate large quantities of traffic, such as an FDDI LAN, it is cost effective to use a private circuit leased from the public carrier. In order to send traffic from one LAN to another across the leased line, a routing algorithm is required. Much research has been done on the Bellman-Ford algorithm and many implementations of it exist in computer networks. However, due to its instability and problems with routing table loops it is an unsatisfactory algorithm for interconnected FDDI LANs. A new algorithm, termed ISIS which is being standardized by the ISO provides a far better solution. ISIS will be implemented in many manufacturers routing devices. In order to make the work as practical as possible, this algorithm will be used as the basis for all the new algorithms presented. The ISIS algorithm can be improved by exploiting information that is dropped by that algorithm during the calculation process. A new algorithm, called Down Stream Path Splits (DSPS), uses this information and requires only minor modification to some of the ISIS routing procedures. DSPS provides a higher network performance, with very little additional processing and storage requirements. A second algorithm, also based on the ISIS algorithm, generates a massive increase in network performance. This is achieved by selecting alternative paths through the network in times of heavy congestion. This algorithm may select the alternative path at either the originating node, or any node along the path. It requires more processing and memory storage than DSPS, but generates a higher network power. The final algorithm combines the DSPS algorithm with the alternative path algorithm. This is the most flexible and powerful of the algorithms developed. However, it is somewhat complex and requires a fairly large storage area at each node. The performance of the new routing algorithms is tested in a comprehensive model of interconnected LANs. This model incorporates the transport through physical layers and generates random topologies for routing algorithm performance comparisons. Using this model it is possible to determine which algorithm provides the best performance without introducing significant complexity and storage requirements.


Water safety plans (WSPs) represent a holistic risk assessment and management approach covering all steps in the water supply process from the catchment to the consumer. Since 2004, the World Health Organization (WHO) has formally recommended WSPs as a public health intervention to consistently ensure the safety of drinking water. These risk management programs apply to all water supplies in all countries, including small community supplies and large urban systems in both developed and developing settings. As of 2017, more than 90 countries had adopted various permutations of WSPs at different scales, ranging from limited-scale voluntary pilot programs to nationwide implementation mandated by legislative requirements. Tools to support WSP implementation include primary and supplemental manuals in multiple languages, training resources, assessment tools, and some country-specific guidelines and case studies.
 Systems employing the WSP approach seek to incrementally improve water quality and security by reducing risks and increasing resilience over time. To maintain WSP effectiveness, water supply managers periodically update WSPs to integrate knowledge about prior, existing, and potential future risks. Effectively implemented WSPs may translate to positive health and other impacts. Impact evaluation has centered on a logic model developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as well as WHO-refined indicators that compare water system performance to pre-WSP baseline conditions. Potential benefits of WSPs include improved cost efficiency, water quality, water conservation, regulatory compliance, operational performance, and disease reduction. Available research shows outcomes vary depending on site-specific context, and challenges remain in using WSPs to achieve lasting improvements in water safety. Future directions for WSP development include strengthening and sustaining capacity-building to achieve consistent application and quality, refining evaluation indicators to better reveal linked outcomes (including economic impacts), and incorporating social equity and climate change readiness.


In 2008, Tanzania was one of the 11 countries responsible for 65% of all maternal deaths in the world. The Ministry of Health and Social Welfare of Tanzania in 2008 acknowledged lack of commendable progress in reducing maternal deaths. At the heart of the lack of progress are challenges in human resources for health, including poor motivation among health workers.
In 2009, the Government of Tanzania decided to introduce P4P in mother, newborn and child health (MNCH), in order to bring down the MMR and accelerate progress towards Millennium Development Goals 5&4 addressing mother and child health. Pay for performance links incentives with performance and assumes that better health worker performance improves acceptability, utilisation and quality of health services. The study explores how service provision and the use of incentives in maternal health is perceived by health practitioners and community members
The study was carried out in Mvomero district in Tanzania, at 5 health facilities. The study"s approach was qualitative. Twelve in-depth interviews were conducted with health workers and 3 focus group discussions were also conducted with community members. A number of perceived barriers to the access of health services were reported. The barriers existed on both the provider and the user side. By and large, provider side factors seemed to play a major role in the low-utilisation of health services and of these, supply shortages were the mostly cited impediment to the provision of health services. Health workers reported dissatisfaction and demotivation with the current working conditions citing mainly the perceived unfair remuneration system and supply shortages as major factors.
Mixed views to the use of incentives in health care were reported. There were some concerns that P4P might undermine the quality of health services by promoting unethical behaviours such cheating, emphasis on quantity against quality or prioritisation of rewarded services. On the other hand P4P was perceived to have the potential of increasing health worker motivation, cooperation and teamwork at facility level.
The study concluded that in view of health workers and community members" perceptions and experiences related to incentives and service provision, steps should be taken to ensure that the conditions for successful implementation should be in place before the P4P programme is scaled up. This involves ensuring the availability of basic equipments, staff and routines at facility level.


Increases in the tree: grass ratio with accompanying changes in herbaceous composition, called bush or shrub encroachment, is a worldwide phenomenon in savanna regions. Although heavy grazing by livestock is often believed to be the cause, it is clear that the factors and processes involved in bush encroachment are poorly understood. The effects of soil type and grazing on the tree: grass ratio in encroached Acacia mellifera-dominated savannas in the Northern Cape, South Africa, were investigated by means of vegetation classification and analyses of sequential aerial photographs. Acacia mellifera never occurred on clay pans, and in low numbers only in other clay and sandy soils. This trend is ascribed to the soil texture, soil water regimes and/or heavy utilisation in these areas. Soil rockiness was important in determining the long-term presence and abundance of A. mellifera, perhaps due to better soil moisture conditions. Long-term increases in A. mellifera in non-rocky habitats were also found, although the causes of this remain unclear. Grazing strategy did not prove to be important in determining presence or abundance of A. mellifera in the short- or long-term.


Background : Bacterial vaginosis (BV) is a pathological condition, which can cause premature delivery, low birth weight, pelvic inflammatory disease, and even abortion. Therefore, BV screening on pregnant women is essential. Vaginal pH test is a screening tool for BV that considered practical, time and money saving,and no need specific training or devices like microscope.
Objective : To evaluate sensitivity, specificity, PPV (Positive Predictive Value), NPV (Negative Predictive Value), and external reliability of vaginal pH test to screen BV in pregnant women.
Method : This study was a diagnostic test. The samples were eighty two pregnant women in Poncol Primary Health Care, Semarang between May-July 2007. Inclusion criteria of this study were mothers on 2nd and 3rd trimester pregnancy. Samples were excluded if there was no consent, committed coitus in 24 hours before test and premature rupture of membrane. Vaginal pH measurement was done independently by investigator and midwife.This test compared blindly to gram stain examinate of vaginal smear.
Result : Vaginal pH test has 90 % sensitivity; 19,35% specificity; 26,47% PPV; 85,71% NPV. External reliability of this test was 0.977.
Conclusion : Vaginal pH test has high sensitivity and excelent reliability even though the specificity is low. However, in the screening, high sensitivity is needed more than specificity. Therefore, this study suggest that vaginal pH test can be used as a tool to screen BV in pregnant women.
Key words : BV, pH test


When fitting a mixture of Gaussians to training data there are usually two choices for the type of Gaussians used. Either diagonal or full covariance. Imposing a structure, though may be restrictive and lead to degraded performance and/or increased computations. In this work we use several criteria to estimate the structure of regression matrices of a mixture of Gaussians. Unlike many previous approaches, the criteria tested in this work attempt to estimate a discriminative structure, which is suited for classification tasks. We report results on the 1996 NIST speaker recognition task and compare the performance of our criteria to non-discriminative strtucture-finding algorithm, like structural EM.


Using high-bandwidth feedback, we have synchronized the pulse train from a mode-locked semiconductor laser to an external optical atomic clock signal and achieved what is to our knowledge the lowest timing jitter to date (22 fs, integrated from 1 Hz to 100 MHz) for such devices. The performance is limited by the intrinsic noise of the phase detector used for timing-jitter measurement. We expect such a highly stable device to play an important role in fiber-network-based precise time/frequency distribution.


This article's aims are three-fold: First, it attempts to problematize the current essentialist positions of identity formation, particularly that of the Other, within the social sciences. It attempts to explore how the identity of the Other is formulated through essentialist notions, as well as articulate how this formation of the Other is contextually situated. Secondly, the aim of this project is to offer an introductory analysis of the identity configuration which I refer to as the Other Within. This identity configuration refers to those positions of marginality within an already marginalized group. This analysis, therefore, is sociologically unique in that it attempts to articulate an epistemology of a subgroup within an already Othered category. Lastly, this article offers the concept of the spectrum model as an analytical tool within the sociological study of identity. The model of the spectrum gives the social sciences a method of practicing a more sensitive and inclusive form of identity research by recognizing the relational aspects of identity configurations within a given group, rather than creating epistemological ghettos of difference.


This paper generalizes the framework of Hierarchical Kernel Learning (HKL) and illustrates its utility in the domain of rule learning. HKL involves Multiple Kernel Learning over a set of given base kernels assumed to be embedded on a directed acyclic graph. This paper proposes a two-fold generalization of HKL: the first is employing a generic l1/lp block-norm regularizer (ρ ∈ (1, 2]) that alleviates a key limitation of the HKL formulation. The second is a generalization to the case of multi-class, multi-label and more generally, multi-task applications. The main technical contribution of this work is the derivation of a highly specialized partial dual of the proposed generalized HKL formulation and an efficient mirror descent based active set algorithm for solving it. Importantly, the generic regularizer enables the proposed formulation to be employed in the Rule Ensemble Learning (REL) where the goal is to construct an ensemble of conjunctive propositional rules. Experiments on benchmark REL data sets illustrate the efficacy of the proposed generalizations.


City-wide urban infrastructures are increasingly reliant on network technology to improve and expand their services. As a side effect of this digitalization, large amounts of data can be sensed and analyzed to uncover patterns of human behavior. In this paper, we focus on the digital footprints from one type of emerging urban infrastructure: shared bicycling systems. We provide a spatiotemporal analysis of 13 weeks of bicycle station usage from Barcelona's shared bicycling system, called Bicing. We apply clustering techniques to identify shared behaviors across stations and show how these behaviors relate to location, neighborhood, and time of day. We then compare experimental results from four predictive models of near-term station usage. Finally, we analyze the impact of factors such as time of day and station activity in the prediction capabilities of the algorithms.


Modern vascular closure devices (VCDs) like the Angioseal (Terumo; Tokyo, Japan) and Celt (Vasorum Ltd; Dublin, Ireland) offer rapid mechanical hemostasis of femoral arterial access sites. We recount a case wherein a Celt VCD was rigorously challenged to maintain hemostasis immediately after placement due to extenuating circumstances. The observed lack of consequent vascular complications provokes curiosity about held perceptions regarding achievement of hemostasis and time to ambulation following VCD placement for percutaneous femoral access. A 70-year-old man with a history of hepatocellular carcinoma presented for planning hepatic angiography preceding repeat radioembolization. Given his history of recurrent deep vein thromboses, the patient was chronically anticoagulated on 5 mg Apixaban twice daily. It was strongly felt by his oncologist that anticoagulation should not be stopped for this procedure. Of note, pharmacologic anticoagulation was not discontinued for his previous planning angiogram or subsequent radioembolization. In both of those cases, the femoral access site was successfully closed with an Angioseal VCD (Terumo) without incident or complication. Early in the angiography procedure, the patient's blood pressure was noted to rise precipitously with systolic values reaching >190 mmHg. His blood pressure did not improve despite intravenous administration of 10 mg Hydralazine. It became evident that he was expending significant abdominopelvic effort in response to an urgent need to void. He declined usage of a bedpan and instead indicated strong preference to use a conventional bathroom near the angiography suite. The patient could not be compelled to reconsider this decision despite multiple attempts. Because arterial access had already been achieved, placement of a VCD was considered. Given the team's capacity for continuous monitoring and the patient's close proximity to the procedural suite, the treatment team felt confident that potential complications associated with closure device failure could be effectively managed if necessary. A Celt VCD was deployed at the puncture site, and hemostasis was confirmed. The patient then ambulated approximately 40 m to the nearby lavatory and toileted with some difficulty before returning to the angiography suite under continuous, vigilant monitoring by nursing staff. Femoral access was re-established, and planning angiography was completed without complication. No access site hemorrhage was noted at any point during this relatively arduous sequence of events (Figure 1). A second Celt Short post-procedural bedrest using a vascular closure device in the femoral artery: Is it possible?


Most multicellular terrestrial organisms experience climate at scales of millimetres to metres, yet most species-climate associations are analysed at resolutions of kilometres or more. Because individuals experience heterogeneous microclimates in the landscape, species sometimes survive where the average background climate appears unsuitable, and equally may be eliminated from sites within apparently suitable grid cells where microclimatic extremes are intolerable. Local vegetation structure and topography can be important determinants of fine-resolution microclimate, but a literature search revealed that the vast majority of bioclimate studies do not include fine-scale habitat information, let alone a representation of how habitat affects microclimate. In this paper, we show that habitat type (grassland, heathland, deciduous woodland) is a major modifier of the temperature extremes experienced by organisms. We recorded differences among these habitats of more than 5°C in monthly temperature maxima and minima, and of 10°C in thermal range, on a par with the level of warming expected for extreme future climate change scenarios. Comparable differences were found in relation to variation in local topography (slope and aspect). Hence, we argue that the microclimatic effects of habitat and topography must be included in studies if we are to obtain sufficiently detailed projections of the ecological impacts of climate change to develop detailed adaptation strategies for the conservation of biodiversity.


Net primary production and the flux of dry matter and nutrients from vegetation to soils has increased following four years of exposure to elevated CO2 in a southern pine forest in NC, USA. This has increased the demand for nutrients to support enhanced rates of NPP and altered the conditions for litter decomposition on the forest floor. We quantified the chemistry and decomposition dynamics of leaf litter produced by five of the most abundant tree species in this ecosystem during the third and fourth growing seasons under elevated CO2. The objectives of this study were to determine (i) if there were systemic or species-specific changes in leaf litter chemistry associated with a sustained enhancement of plant growth under elevated CO2; and (ii) whether the process of litter decomposition was altered by increased inputs of energy and nutrients to the forest floor in the plots under elevated CO2. Leaf litter chemistry, including various C fractions and N concentration, was virtually unchanged by elevated CO2. With few exceptions, plant litter produced under elevated CO2 lost mass or N at the same relative rate as that produced under ambient CO2. The relationship between initial litter chemistry and decomposition was not altered by elevated CO2. The greater forest floor mass and nutrient content in the plots under elevated CO2 had no consistent or long-term effect on litter decomposition. Thus, we found no evidence that plant and microbial processes under elevated CO2 resulted in systemic changes in mass loss or N dynamics during decomposition. In contrast to the limited effects of elevated CO2 on litter chemistry and decomposition, there were large differences among species in initial litter chemistry, mass loss and N dynamics during decomposition. If the species composition of this forest community is altered by elevated CO2, the indirect effect of a change in species composition will exert greater control over the long-term rate of nutrient cycling than the direct effect of elevated CO2 on litter chemistry and decomposition dynamics alone.


Qatar produces more than 2.5 million tons of municipal waste per year with an average waste generation rate of 1.8 kg/day/capita which is one of the highest rates in the world. The rapid growth of municipal solid waste has become one of the serious environmental problem that Qatar is facing with. Qatar's municipal waste is composed of organic and recyclables materials. Municipal solid waste incineration has been performed in Qatar since 2011. By incineration of wastes, not only the volume and weight of wastes are reduced but also energy is generated. Prior to incineration of municipal wastes, recyclables are separated from the waste and the remaining waste is incinerated at a minimum temperature of 850oC. Bottom ash and fly ash are produced as a result of incineration process. These by-products may contain heavy metals and pose a thread to the environment hence needs treatment and/or special disposal. Approximately 60 tonnes of fly ash is generated daily from municipal waste incineration in Qatar and this ash called as municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI) fly ash. This MSWI fly ash is stabilised with cement and then disposed into special landfill. However, cementitious property of MSWI fly ash due to similar mineralogical composition with cement and its finer particle size may favor its potential utilisation in cement based materials. As aforementioned before, 40% of municipal waste of Qatar is composed of recyclables of which 14% is plastic. The major portion of plastic wastes, about 90% of total, are composed of light density polyethylene (LDPE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) wastes. Therefore, there is a huge potential for recycling of PE wastes in Qatar considering the shortage of raw materials i.e. natural aggregate for construction industry. The scarcity of available land for disposal of municipal wastes and limited natural resources of raw materials for construction industry has opened new research areas for proper disposal and recycling of municipal wastes. Therefore, in this research work, municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI) fly ash and municipal polymeric wastes were used as secondary raw materials for the preparation of cement based composites. MSWI fly ash was utilised as partial replacement of cement by 10% by weight. Polyetyhlene wastes in granular form were utilised as partial replacement of natural aggregate by 10% by volume. Portland cement, silica fume (10% by weight) and MSWI FA (10% by weight) at constant rates were used as binder in all cement-based composites. Three different cement based composites were fabricated by partial substition of natural aggregate with LDPE and HDPE wastes at 0 and 10% by volume. The mixture without PE waste substitution was called as the reference mixture, with LDPE waste was called as Mix 1 and with HDPE waste was called as Mix 2. Besides mechanical performance, durability of fabricated cement composites containing municipal wastes was investigated to determine if their utilisation has positive contribution or adverse impact. The durability properties were examined by performing drying shrinkage and expansion under sulfate exposure tests. Scanning electron microscopy coupled with EDX were used to determine the degradation products of sulfate exposure. In terms of mechanical strength, samples containing PE wastes showed lower strength at early ages due to weaker bonding between LDPE/HDPE and the cement matrix. At later ages, strength improvement was observed and comparable strength values for Mix 1 and Mix 2 were measured with respect to the reference. The effect of utilisation of municipal wastes on the dimensional stability of cement composites was evaluated by measuring the variation of length change at 4, 11, 18, 25, 126 and 168 days of air drying. This test showed that incorporation of PE wastes (Mix 1 and Mix 2) reduced the drying shrinkage and provided better dimensional stability compared to the reference. Sulfate attack is known as one of the most deleterious effects on cement based composites due to the formation of expansive degradation products. To investigate the sulfate resistance of fabricated composites, the length change at 1 week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 4 weeks, 8 weeks, 13 weeks, 15 weeks, 4 months and 6 months of sulfate exposure was measured. Both the reference and samples containing PE wastes did not show any visual deterioration except a white and soft layer formed on top of all samples. The length change indicated that composites containing PE wastes experienced reduction in expansion compared to the reference and hence considered as more durable for external sulfate attack. More voids and pores were present in PE incorporated samples, therefore sulfate degradation products probably filled these pores and resulted in lower expansion compared to the reference. There was no significant difference between the mechanical performance and durability of cement composites containing LDPE and HDPE. The microstructure and composition of sulfate degradation products were investigated by SEM-EDX. The decalcification of the C-S-H phase were detected in each sample. Gypsum, calcite and thaumasite were identified as the major deterioration related products, while ettringite was found at trace level. This laboratory study showed that MSWI fly ash and PE wastes can be utilised together to produce durable cement based materials with a lower carbon footprint. Keywords: Municipal solid waste incineration, sulfate attack, thaumasite, ettringite, shrinkage, expansion


This report describes the working process and creation of a new website for Lindt & Sprungli Sweden with the help of the content management systems Magento and TYPO3. The report shows how different elements are created and published on the website, how the education in these systems was acquired and how contact with third party companies has been initiated and maintained. It also accounts for what is shown on the website as well as why it is shown. The goal with this project is to deliver a complete website to Lindt & Sprungli Sweden where customers can find information about products as well as the company. The results of this project was a website that was launched on www.lindt.se on the 17th of June 2015.


This talk will cover a FOSS4G case study in which a workflow was implemented in several minority public health organizations in 2013. The three organizations were: 1) the Urban Indian Health Institute (Seattle, WA), 2) Papa Ola Lokahi (Honolulu, HI) and 3) The Nature Conservancy of Hawaii (Honolulu, HI). The end users were not GIS professionals but public health staff. Such community based public health organizations do not typically have dedicated GIS staff or budgets for GIS. However, they have each identified mapping needs. The overarching goals of the project were to demonstrate that FOSS4G tools could be effective in minority public health applications, and that they could be used by non-GIS public health staff. Therefore, a focus was placed on identifying the most intuitive and low cost solution meeting their needs.The workflow started with field data collection and included spatial analysis and online data presentation. Field data collection was performed using smart phones and tablets that the end users already owned. Analysis was done via QGIS and final data presentation was done via GIS Cloud. Training sessions were conducted and support was provided throughout the year. However, each organization was able to use the tools with very little follow up support. Each project produced good results, and each is planning on continuing with additional projects in 2014. The workflow will be introduced and results of the three case studies shared.This work was funded by the National Library of Medicine's Division of Specialized Information Services via their Outreach and Special Populations Branch.


AIM
To review our experience in the surgical treatment of TISH, and to analyze prognostic factors.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
Clinical and imaging data, surgical modalities, and outcomes of 21 patients with TISH who were treated with microsurgery were analyzed retrospectively. Prognostic factors for outcome were analyzed by univariate analysis.

RESULTS
Long-term follow up with outcome assessment according to the Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOS) showed good recovery in 16 cases, moderate disability in two cases, severe disability in one case, and death in two cases. During surgery the origin of bleeding could be identified in all 21 cases. A rupture of the distal anterior cerebral artery or veins in the interhemispheric fissure was seen more frequently in patients with whole interhemispheric fissure hematoma, while hemorrhage from brain tissue laceration was seen more frequently in patients with more localized hematomas. The outcome in patients with an identified rupture of a vessel was better than in those with cortical laceration. Preoperative GCS score and thickness of the interhemispheric hematoma were correlated with outcome (P=0.001 and P=0.004, respectively).

CONCLUSION
Outcome after surgical treatment for TISH can be good, and careful surgical planning and microsurgical techniques to preserve venous drainage are essential.


A fascinating, lively account of the making of the King James Bible. James VI of Scotland - now James I of England - came into his new kingdom in 1603. Trained almost from birth to manage rival political factions, he was determined not only to hold his throne, but to avoid the strife caused by religious groups that was bedevilling most European countries. He would hold his God-appointed position and unify his kingdom. Out of these circumstances, and involving the very people who were engaged in the bitterest controversies, a book of extraordinary grace and lasting literary appeal was created: the King James Bible. 47 scholars from Cambridge, Oxford and London translated the Bible, drawing from many previous versions, and created what many believe to be the greatest prose work ever written in English - the product of a culture in a peculiarly conflicted era. This was the England of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and Bacon; but also of extremist Puritans, the Gunpowder plot, the Plague, of slum dwellings and crushing religious confines. Quite how this astonishing translation emerges is the central question of this book. Far more than Shakespeare, this Bible helped to create and shape the language. It is the origin of many of our most familiar phrases, and the foundations of the English-speaking world. It was a generous and deliberate decision to make the Bible available to the common man: not an immediate commercial success, but which later became a bestseller, and has remained one ever since. Adam Nicolson gives a fascinating and dramatic account of the early years of the first Stewart ruler, and the scholars who laboured for seven years to create the world's greatest book; immersing us in a world of ingratiating bishops, a fascinating monarch and London at a time unlike any other.


The authors evaluate policy arguments for and against the use of card check as a method to determine union recognition. The results of an analysis of data from telephone surveys of 430 workers who had been through the NLRB election or card check campaigns of six unions in 2003 indicate that there was little undue union pressure to support unionization in card check campaigns, and that management pressure on workers to oppose unionization was considerably greater than pressure from co-workers or organizers to support the union in both card checks and elections. The authors also find that although workers in card checks do appear to have had somewhat less information about unions and about the recognition process than workers in elections, workers who felt they had insufficient information to make a decision about unionization tended not to sign cards.


We tested for club convergence in U.S. agricultural total factory productivity using a sigma convergence test. We used the same club of states as used by McCunn and Huffman as well as different states within 10 clubs identified by the cluster analysis. Results showed convergence was evident only in a few club groups. Clusters group identified using a statistical method identified only converging clubs. Variables affecting total factor productivity among states were identified using parametric, semiparametric and nonparametric methods. Semiparametric and nonparametric methods gave a better fit than a parametric method as indicated by the specification test. Our results indicated that health care expenditure, public research and extension investment, and private expenditure are important variables impacting total factor productivity differences across states.


The aim of this research was to gain a deeper understanding of how daily hassles and uplifts interact with each other and with stress reactions over time in military personnel. Interviews were conducted with 15 Swedish veterans five years after an international peace enforcement mission. The grounded theory method was used and result patterns were generated for six specific time periods distributed before, during, and after the mission. A theoretical model was developed showing that everyday uplifts combined with adaptive coping can be sufficient to limit stress reactions related to daily hassles. The model was supported by the fact that, five years after the mission, none of interviewees had received a PTSD diagnosis or needed professional psychological treatment. The last-mentioned outcome is noteworthy in itself given the severe stress often encountered in peace enforcement missions and previous research observations of high PTSD incidence, suicide rates, criminality, and substance abuse in mission participants.


This essay argues that Charles Dickens's imaginative interest in barriers to knowledge and perception throughout Bleak House (1852–53) amplifies and attunes us to the reader's position of exteriority with respect to the implied fictional world. Whereas novel readers readily describe the act of reading in terms of metaphoric transport to a fictional world, Dickens refuses to obscure the ever-present divide between readers and the absent objects of their sustained attention. In particular, he exposes the reader's surprisingly limited ability to "fill in" components of the fictional world that the text leaves underspecified. While these areas of indeterminacy do not deter readers from claiming to enjoy intimate access to fictional persons and scenes, they nonetheless lay bare the underacknowledged constraints upon that access. By self-referentially dramatizing the reader's position as an outsider even as he undertakes to draw readers into his story, Dickens brings us face-to-face with a more intricate phenomenology of reading.


We describe an all-coupler implementation of a polarization-diverse frequency domain reflectometer (OFDR). We measure the transfer function of an FBG by projecting a measurement field onto two orthogonal reference fields and show that the resultant signal is independent of the alignment of the measurement field.


Background: There is equipoise regarding the status of bone mineral density (BMD) in patients with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), where patients need to be on long-term low-dose steroids. Objective: We aimed to evaluate BMD at the hip, spine and forearm in women with CAH and compare it to healthy young adult women of the same age range. Subjects and Methods: Fifteen adult women with CAH with age ranging from 18 to 40 years (mean ± standard deviation = 27.5 ± 6.2 years) underwent dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry along with laboratory evaluation. BMD at lumbar spine, hip, forearm along with T-scores were measured. Serum total calcium, phosphate, alkaline phosphatase, 25 hydroxy Vitamin D, intact parathyroid hormone, total testosterone, and dehydroepiandrosterone were assayed. History of any fractures in the past was taken. Fifteen healthy women in the same age range were taken as controls for comparison. Results: The BMD at hip (0.85 ± 0.02 g/cm2) in CAH was significantly lower as compared with controls (0.92 ± 0.03 g/cm2, P = 0.029). BMD at lumbar spine was also reduced (0.96 ± 0.02 vs. 1.03 ± 0.03, P = 0.057). The BMD at forearm was not significantly different between CAH and controls. The mean Vitamin D was 9.8 ng/ml (deficient range). There was no history of fractures in CAH. Conclusion: Young adult CAH women had lower BMD at spine and hip than healthy young adult women of the same age range. The forearm BMD was not different from controls. No change in fracture frequency was present. Patients with CAH being treated with steroids are at increased risk of osteopenia, and their bone health needs to be monitored.


The video game industry is saturated with new releases at the moment. Digital distribution giant Steam releases on average 10 new games every day and a lot of these games go by unnoticed and unbought. Consumers must often make compromises when deciding what to buy. Mistakes are often made and impulse buying can often take hold.

To solve this problem, IronSight aims to not only help put the massive amounts of releases of games into a consumer's perspective but also to help the consumer decide on what's best for them. The app will list all major and minor releases to the user, allowing the user to search and filter what they want to buy. These titles can then be added to a personal list where updates and notifications will be sent to the user.

Through this personal list of titles, a suggested list will be generated with other games related to what the user is interested in. The data from other users may also add to this suggested list.

The main list is supported by an online database where all titles will be stored. The personal users list is stored on a local database on the device which will be managed by Firebase.

Suggested titles are generated by randomising the titles in the main list and generating a separate list of diverse titles based on genre. This is to encourage the user to broaden their horizons with regard to games they may not have previously considered.

Notifications of game releases are sent to the user by using the Firebase console to schedule notifications to users about the release of games.

Meet ups are also supported as a feature that enables users to contact other users with the intent of joining them in playing any game that has been added to their own personal list.

Links to digital distribution sites will also be included to maximise user convenience.


The project ANTHOLOGY - FEMALE BODY IN LIMITED SPACE examines my own subjective experience of relationships between body and place and the possibility to artistically give form to these. The main focus in the project concerns the female body in limited spaces in exposed situations and how these situations influence self-esteem and identity.The project starts of from post-colonial and feministic queer-theory and examines the possibility of subjective experience to shed light on normalizing and excluding norms. In the project I work with an artistic method where I use the experiences of the relationships between my own body and three specific places; my own artistic studio, a dance studio and a studio used for the research or perception of light and form. The experiences are given shape through text, photography, performance and video.The project is published in the publication ANTHOLOGY - FEMALE BODY IN LIMITED SPACE and is available on the national research database DIVA.


The PUPIL system is a combination of software and protocols for the systematic linkage and interoperation of molecular dynamics and quantum mechanics codes to perform QM/MD (sometimes called QM/MM) calculations. The Gaussian03 and Amber packages were added to the PUPIL suite recently. However, efficient parallel QM codes are critical because calculation of the QM forces is the overwhelming majority of the computational load. Here we report details of incorporation of the deMon2k density functional suite as a new parallel QM code. An additional motivation is to add a highly optimized, purely DFT code. We illustrate with a demonstration study of the influence of perchlorate as a dopant ion of the poly(3,4‐ethylenedioxythiophene) conducting polymer in explicit acetonitrile solvent using Amber and deMon2k. We discuss unanticipated requirements for use of a scheme for semi‐empirical correction of Kohn‐Sham eigenvalues to give physically meaningful one‐electron gap energies. We provide comparison of both geometric parameters and electronic properties for nondoped and doped systems. We also present results comparing deMon2k and Gaussian03 calculation of forces for a short sequence of steps. We discuss briefly some difficult problems of quantum zone SCF convergence for the anionically doped system. The difficulties seem to be caused by well‐know deficiencies in simple approximate exchange‐correlation functionals. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem, 2010


[1] The impact of tropical cyclones on precipitation variability and surface processes in Taiwan is studied using suspended sediment and river discharge data along with a meteorological model of tropical cyclone dynamics. The interactions between tropical cyclones and topography produce distinctive, localized patterns of heavy precipitation that can trigger high sediment discharge in Taiwan's rivers. We focus on Typhoon Toraji, which made landfall in Taiwan on 30 July 2001 and was the first major tropical cyclone to affect Taiwan after the 1999 Chichi earthquake. The passage of the tropical cyclone eye over the east coast of Taiwan produced intense rainfall (>100 mm h 1 ) for a short period (about 2 hours), triggering the highest sediment concentration ever recorded on the Hualien River. Orographic effects localized heavy rainfall (between 10 and 50 mm h 1 ) over the southwestern slopes of the Central Mountain Range, triggering high sediment discharge on the Kaoping River and flushing landslide debris produced during the Chichi earthquake into the Choshui River. We show that a range of atmospheric processes, with distinctive spatial variability and varying degrees of coupling to topography, interacted with tectonic processes of limited spatial extent to produce the overall sediment discharge from Taiwan during Typhoon Toraji. Landscape evolution models may need to be modified to account for the distinctive patterns of localized rainfall in tropical mountain belts. Furthermore, the links between tropical cyclones and topography suggest the potential for a range of previously unrecognized feedbacks between tectonics and climate in tropical mountain belts.


Author(s): Darghouth, NR; Barbose, G; Mills, A; Wiser, R; Gagnon, P; Bird, L | Abstract: Commercial retail electricity rates commonly include a demand charge component, based on some measure of the customer's peak demand. Customer-sited solar PV can potentially reduce demand charges, but the magnitude of these savings can be difficult to predict, given variations in demand charge designs, customer loads, and PV generation profiles. Moreover, depending on the circumstances, demand charges from solar may or may not align well with associated utility cost savings. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are collaborating in a series of studies to understand how solar PV can reduce demand charge levels for a variety of customer types and demand charges designs. Previous work focused on residential customs with solar. This study, instead, focuses on commercial customers and seeks to understand the extent and conditions under which rooftop can solar reduce commercial demand charges. To answer these questions, we simulate demand charge savings for a broad range of commercial customer types, demand charge designs, locations, and PV system characteristics. This particular analysis does not include storage, but a subsequent analysis in this series will evaluate demand charge savings for commercial customers with solar and storage.


An important role of schooling in the U.S. is to prepare students for engagement in the diverse world. This means that education personnel must be aware of, acknowledge, and respect all dimensions of diversity, including gender and sexual diversity. Relatedly is the teacher's role in managing a safe and inclusive classroom climate for all students. Since school bullies frequently target gender and sexually diverse (GSD) students, K-12 teachers are required to manage their classroom culture so that bullying behavior toward all students, including GSD students, is stopped. GSD students who are bullied frequently miss school, earn lower grades, and may decide not to complete post-secondary education. The effects of bullying based upon actual or perceived gender or sexual difference can last a lifetime. Sexual prejudice of educational personnel may inhibit the development of safe learning environments for all students and the preparation of students for a future in diverse environments. This research investigates sexual prejudice among pre-service teachers in one teacher preparation program and relates sexual prejudice to teacher demographic characteristics.


Political liberalism is the main theory of John Rawls in the last period of his intellectual life. Since the theory was developed by Rawls in a book with the same name (referred as PL in this book), an extensive body of literature were created to analyze the different dimensions of this theory. Particularly speaking, the book and the theory have found a large audience in liberalism and religion debates. However, only a few number of works which are only produced in the last years, focus on the relationship between political liberalism and Islam, and far less address this subject within the context of Muslim majority societies. On the other hand, among the extensive literature which are produced on Islam and democracy issue in the recent years, very little number of them look towards this subject from an analytic political philosophy framework. This dissertation tries to fill this gap in the literature. This dissertation can be regarded as an application of Rawls's theory of political liberalism to Muslim majority societies. However,
many arguments of this dissertation are applicable to all nonwestern societies, regardless of whether they are Muslim or nonMuslim. Furthermore, it should be added that our reading of Rawls in this dissertation presumes the continuity between Rawls's main works, that is A Theory
of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism (1993), and the Law of Peoples (1997). This thesis contains five chapters. The first chapter can be regarded as an introduction to whole the work. Justifying the major question of this dissertation, in the first chapter we have tried to answer some of the main the possible objections which may be pointed towards this type of research. Then, the rest of the thesis is divided into two parts: part one on justification and part two on stability. Each of these parts contains two chapters. These two parts are correspondent to two stages of Rawls's political philosophy. In the part one we have tried to develop a universal reading of Rawls by focusing on the ideas of the reflective equilibrium (chapter II) and the original position (chapter III). In chapter two we have argued that all deliberating persons in the world, no matter in which society they live, can get involved with a
dialogue with Rawls and his constructivist argument for justice as fairness via the reflective equilibrium as justificatory tool which is available in political liberalism. In chapter three we have claimed that political constructivism and particularly speaking the idea of the original position, models reasonable and rational individuals who hold reasonable comprehensive doctrines, no matter in which part of the global civil society they live. In addition, we implement that only specific conceptions of society and person, that is the conceptions of society as a fair system of cooperation and the persons as free and equal citizens, are modeled in political constructivism as part of the idea of the reasonable.
The second part of the dissertation is concerned with the stability of justice as fairness within the context of Muslim majority societies. Explaining overlapping consensus as the most reasonable basis of social unity and the main account of stability in political liberalism, in chapter IV we discuss how a constitutional consensus, based on a modus vivendi, develops into an overlapping consensus, when a democracy is established for the first time in a Muslim
majority country. Living under just institutions, in addition to justificatory ethics, has a major role in shifting the comprehensive doctrines of citizens in this process. Defining justificatory ethics as declaration plus conjecture, we also argue that political liberalism is not indifferent to the role of religious arguments in stability of justice as fairness in a religious society.
Chapter V is a work of justificatory ethics in favor of an Islamic full justification for the political conception of justice as fairness in the Muslim majority context, based on Mehdi Haeri Yazdi's Philosophy and Government. This chapter demonstrates that Islamic philosophical and legal tradition may include the fundamental ideas of persons as free and equal citizens and society as affair system of cooperation, as the primary and necessary ideas in constructivist
justification for justice as fairness. In the first section of this final chapter I explain what this thing called Islamic philosophy is. In second part of this chapter I will explain guardianship of the jurist doctrine (velayat-e faqih). As the main basis for contemporary Shiite version of the idea of an Islamic state, this idea is much criticized by Haeri Yazdi as an unreasonable account of Islamic political theory. In the third part of chapter V we give an account of Haeri Yazdi's argument for priority of Islamic philosophy to Islamic jurisprudence. This section includes
Haeri's counterarguments against guardianship of the jurist.
In the fourth section we explain how Haeri's Islamic contractarianism based upon the concepts of agency contract (aqd-e vekalat) and joint ownership (malekiyat-e musha)—already available in Islamic private law and philosophy— paves the way for full Islamic justification for
the political conception. The fifth section is concerned with a linguistic analysis of the notion of
community, based on the distinction already made in Islamic philosophy between universal (kolli) and whole (kol). This section can be read as an argument in favor of individualism. The sixth and final section includes an Islamic declaration on the incompatibility of the voluntary
nature of Sharia, with the coercive and oppressive nature of state power. As a complement to the ideas of Haeri Yazdi in this regard, I also mention Mohamad Fadel's view on hudud Islamic penalties. Being complementary to each other, these six sections of chapter V constitute a full Islamic justification for the possibility of overlapping consensus between Shiite Islam and justice as fairness.


Since its very beginning, modern science has put images at the center of its communicative processes: drawings, diagrams, and schemes, and later photographs, satellite images, and film. In the age of digital communication, specialists and publics live constantly immersed in a visually dense environment, particularly when it comes to science and technology content. Do we have the competence to decipher all these images, often complex and elaborate? If the so-called science literacy has become a standard dimension of public understanding of science at the international level, much less studied so far is visual science literacy. We tested empirical indicators of visual science literacy in the context of three surveys (2014, 2015, and 2016) of public perception in Italy on a representative sample of the population. The results show that respondents fare generally better in recognizing images related to science than in responding to textual questions. Images could offer relevant opportunities for greater public engagement with scientific results.


Continuous improvement and advancement in Pharmaceutical manufacturing industry are a paramount part of FDA's mission to safeguard and encourage public wellness. Product recalls are increasing despite elaborate QA/QC monitoring by most companies. Quality metric is the quantification of systems' effectiveness connected through the manufacturing of drug-based products, including drug-based quality system and are utilized in industry to potentially reduce drug shortages. Quality metrics can incorporate components, for example, consumers' contentment, suppliers' execution, manufacturing defects, complaints and other internal as well as external processes. They are difficult to establish but provide excellent insight into the health of the quality system. Quality metric data leads to further development of FDA's risk-based surveillance schedule and also recognize the conditions that evaluates drug manufacturing and control operations. The objectives of FDA are inspection scheduling based on risk, potential to predict early indicator of drug shortage and advancement in pharmaceutical manufacturing industry. For accomplishing these objectives, FDA initiated voluntary quality metrics reporting program to address regular quality issues in the pharmaceutical industry and allow members to submit information in the underlying period of the program.


The increasing levels and more frequent use of alcohol among females especially those in
younger age groups has been noted with concern worldwide. However qualitative data on this
problem is limited. This study therefore aimed to explore qualitatively factors contributing to
female adolescents' alcohol use and abuse, their knowledge regarding risks associated with
alcohol use and abuse and to understand the contextual and environmental factors that render
female adolescents vulnerable to engage in drinking behaviours. This study was guided by
the Prototype / Willingness model. The data was collected using two (2) focus groups and five
(5) individual semi-structured interviews with Grade 9 female high school learners. Data
analysis was done using thematic analysis. The findings of the study indicated that there are
various individual, social as well as contextual factors contributing to alcohol use among
female learners. These factors include age onset, low self-esteem, influence of significant
others e.g. parents, peers, celebrities, media alcohol adverts especially through Television,
easy availability and accessibility of alcohol as well as lack of law enforcement on selling of
alcohol to minors. Protective factors emerged from the findings and these include parental
monitoring, high self-esteem and good mother-daughter attachment. The study also indicated
various positive perceptions why female adolescents use alcohol. These included perceiving
alcohol use as fun, "cool" and glamorous, as a coping mechanism as well as a symbol of
adult status and being "Western". Although female adolescents have knowledge of most of
the health and social consequences of alcohol most of them believe that they cannot be
affected and they still continue to plan to use alcohol.
Several recommendations are also presented. These could assist female learners, parents (and
other caregivers), community members, policy makers, researchers, program developers
especially those interested in adolescent health as well as other stakeholders e.g. South
African Police Services (SAPS) and Department of Education etc.


Proximate, mineral and amino acid composition of three varieties of date fruits (Dagalla, Dan-Mali and Fari) were investigated. The parameters evaluated were moisture content; ash content; crude protein; crude lipid; crude fibre; carbohydrate; mineral ions and amino acids. The results obtained showed that, moisture content was generally low (1.3- 4.6%), ash contents were within the range of 3.0- 3.3%. The values for crude protein and fibre for Dagalla were 1.53±0.03%; 2.00±0.50%; Dan-Mali 1.34±0.05% and 2.83±0.95% and Fari 1.53±0.03% and 2.17±0.44%. The crude lipid value in Dagalla (1.00±0.00%) was twice the amount for Dan-Mali and Fari; signifying higher fat content in Dagalla dates. All the three dates varieties have high carbohydrate content (90.64±0.6%, 90.47±0.5% and 89.99±1.0%) for Fari, Dagalla and Dan-Mali respectively. The calorific value for all the three dates was around 377.51-386.51kcal/100g. The potassium (K+) content was high in all the three varieties (Fari 360mg/100g; Dan-Mali 310 mg/100g and Dagalla 265mg/100g) suggesting that these dates contributes substantially to the dietry intake of potassium. Na+ concentration was 6.13mg/100g on average in all the samples. Ca2+ and Mg2+ showed moderate concentrations (1.32-1.25mg/100g) for all the samples. Twelve amino acids were detected. Aspartic acid, proline and alanine were present at high concentration in all the three dates fruits. This work revealed that the dates fruits can be considered as efficient sources of carbohydrate, mineral nutrients, quality amino acids and can play a major role in human nutrition and health.


This study was designed to expand the knowledge base of academic division deans by correlating differences in leadership styles (i.e., frames) of the division deans within the North Carolina Community College System. The data was collected using the Leadership Orientation Instrument-Self (LOI-Self) developed by Bolman and Deal (1990) to measure and identify the perceived organizational frames of leadership: human resource, political, structural and symbolic. The LOI-Self survey, the focus of this study, was completed by the North Carolina Community College System division deans. The North Carolina Community College System is the third largest in the nation, composed of 58 community colleges. The first research question in this study identified the primary leadership orientation frame of the division deans. The remaining three research questions used one-way ANOVAs to test the perceived leadership orientation of North Carolina Community College System division deans in relation to educational level, prior business (non-educational) experience, and number of years of serving as dean. The research methodology used in this study is quantitative in design. The results of this study indicate that the human resource frame was found to be most prevalent among the North Carolina Community College System deans along with a paired orientation with the structural frame. Statistical analysis of the findings revealed no significance in reference to the division deans' perceived orientation leadership frames and educational level, prior business (non-educational) experience, or number of years of serving as dean as described in the research questions. Cronbach's Alpha was used to establish reliability and demonstrates a high degree of consistency among the electronic survey respondents. The results of this study correspond to Bolman and Deal's maintained population pool of total group means on the leadership orientations frames based on a collection of other studies. Implications of this study suggest programs which would facilitate the deans in their development and utilization of the lesser used leadership skills of the political and symbolic frame orientations.


Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania have minorities from the Indian sub-continent amongst their population. The East African Indians mostly reside in the main cities, particularly Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar, Mombasa, Kampala; they can also be found in smaller urban centres and in the remotest of rural townships. They play a leading social and economic role as they work in business, manufacturing and the service industry, and make up a large proportion of the liberal professions. They are divided into multiple socio-religions communities, but united in a mutual feeling of meta-cultural identity. This book aims at painting a broad picture of the communities of Indian origin in East Africa, striving to include changes that have occurred since the end of the 1980s. The different contributions explore questions of race and citizenship, national loyalties and cosmopolitan identities, local attachment and transnational networks. Drawing upon anthropology, history, sociology and demography, Indian Africa depicts a multifaceted population and analyses how the past and the present shape their sense of belonging, their relations with others, their professional and political engagement. This book is a must-read for contemporary researchers, students, policy practitioners as well as the general reader.


In this paper, we have proved the diminution in error
approximation when identity authentication is done with Ideal Password
Authentication Scheme (IPAS) for Network Security. Effectiveness of identity
authentication parameters for various attacks and security requirements is
verified in the paper. Result of analysis proves that IPAS would enhance the
transport layer security. Proof of efficiency of result is generated with drastic
diminution in error approximation. IPAS would have advanced security
parameters with implemented RNA-FINNT which would result in fortification of
the transport layer security protocol for enhancement of Network Security.


Benthic microalgal communities often contribute more than 30% of the primary production of shallow coastal and estuarine areas. At Muka Head Penang (Pulau Pinang) and the Songsong Islands (Pulau Songsong), Kedah, Malaysia, high concentrations of suspended solids and phytoplankton biomass (10.6 mg Chl a m-3) has reduced water clarity such that the euphotic zone of these areas is less than 2 m and 3 m deep respectively. The benthic microalgal communities, which were composed of the diatom genera Cocconeis, Fragilaria, Paralia and Pleurosigma, had a low biomass, had low maximum quantum yields (0.325 ± 0.129), were poorly adapted to their light environment and were constantly light limited. These characteristics suggest that the benthic microalgal communities were likely to have made only a minor contribution to the total primary production of the area.


Water is an essential constituent of living matter; and rehydration is very important for athletic performance. The body loses through sweat salt and minerals, together with water; and only water intake causes a decrease in blood sodium concentration that inhibits the nerve center that is responsible for the triggering of thirst. The aim of the study was to identify the relevant aspects of hydration in sport. The loss of 25% of the body water is incompatible with survival; and a decrease in body fluids of only 2%, a drop that is not even perceived as thirst, determines a reduction in exercise capacity by 15%, a highly significant percentage when talking about sports. Moreover, dehydration is highly correlated with fatigue. Regarding the amounts of liquid that must be managed in a training session, they differ depending on the amount of fluid loss in each athlete. The most accurate determination method is to weigh the athlete at the beginning and at the end of training sessions; the weight variation (considering the liquids ingested during exercise) representing the amount of fluid loss. The amount of liquid that must be ingested to balance the proportion of water is 1.5/1 to 1.5 liters of fluid intake per 1 liter of liquid loss.


Interview with business executive and Army Air Forces veteran William E. Cooper. The interview includes Cooper's personal experiences about being a B-29 pilot in the Pacific Theater, pre-flight and flight training, various assignments, and dropping supplies by parachute to prisoners-of-war. Cooper also talks about living on Guam, mechanical weaknesses of the B-29, his descriptions of Nagasaki and Hiroshima from the air after the dropping of the atomic bombs, his disappointment with not being able to fly combat missions, postwar duty as a test pilot on Guam, and his postwar civilian activities.


The Martin Buber Library. Syracuse, New York, Syracuse University Press, 2003. 140 pp. $19.95. The disciplines of Feminist Studies, Gender Studies, and Queer Studies address more than the restricted content areas they designate. More than anything else they query the established disciplines, undermine accepted truisms, and destabilize the activity of study itself. James W. Walters examines the thought of Martin Buber and relates it to the thought of several prominent feminists, noting that they share a "postmodern" orientation that includes a rejection of the "grand narratives" of the Enlightenment, a rejection of rationalistic systems, and an emphasis on relationship (pp. 85-106). Such an endeavor is valuable and illuminates the postmodern adumbrations of some modern thinkers, in this case Buber. The largest section of this book summarizes Buber's life, development, and thought. It provides a far less extensive summary of several feminist writers -- Nel Noddings, Carol Gilligan, and Alison M. Jaggar in particular. The final section seeks to explain the commonality between these thinkers, which is said to lie in the fact that "the interhuman is neither uniquely feminine, nor is it masculine.... It is just profoundly human" (p. 105). Walters emphasizes what he considers the "ethical" message of Buber and relates it directly to Buber's understanding of the I-Thou relation. He claims that this relation falls into the "noumenal realm" and is "normative for what we can discover about ethics" (p. ix). This way of approaching Buber's ethics slants it away from the realistic approach that Buber took to all ethical and moral questions and leads to several problems with Walters' conclusions. Walters to refer to "Buber's romantic development of the I-Thou relation" (p. 4), a descriptive term Buber would reject. Walters likewise misunderstands Buber's insistence that BOTH the word pairs "I-Thou" AND"L-It" are primal and creative language (pp. 11-13). While correctly recognizing that "Buber's ethics is preeminently a way of attending to the world," he misses the fact that, since this is so, it is an ethics as rooted in the realities of I-It being as of I-Thou relationship. This confusion leads Walters to identify a tension that does not exist -- that between "existential commitment to the ineffable sphere of the between" and "his seemingly contradictory affirmation of law" (p. 55). This misunderstanding of the place of I-It choices in Buber's ethics leads Walters to impute a theological message to Buber's thinking. Buber is self-consciously not a theologian and holds a complex view of divinity. He claims that the "lines of relationship" finally "meet" in the Eternal Thou who provides assurance that a truly spoken "I-Thou" will never go unanswered. This is clearly an unconventional view of the divine. Walters fails to note this untraditional and non-theological character of Buber's thought. He uses terms such as a person's "God-Given centeredness" (p. 33) that have little relation to what Buber considers the essential nature or function of divinity. To speak of a God "who was equally available" before and after modernity (p. 41) misunderstands Buber's radical transformation of tradition Jewish thinking about God. Walters also confuses "religion" and response to the divine. …


Background Limiting the amount of alcohol in children's medicines is advisable but as alcohol is the second most common solvent used in liquid preparations, paediatric patients with increased medication intake may be exposed to a considerable alcohol intake. Few medicines are specifically designed for children in Paediatric Intensive Care (PICU), and therefore adult formulations are frequently administered, with high medication use further exposing a PICU patient to undesired alcohol intake. Aims This small pilot study aimed to examiine the intake of a sample of PICU patients, highlight common medicines used on PICU containing alcohol, provide alternatives where possible and where alternatives are not possible, provide the prescriber with a list of the higher alcohol containing medicines. Method A retrospective medication chart review was undertaken as a two point snap shot. Data collected included age, weight, medications prescribed and the formulations used at time of the study. The patients' sedation score was recorded. The electronic medicine compendium (EMC) was consulted for any ethanol content for the commercially available products. The manufacturer was contacted for ethanol content of all 'specials' and any commercial products found to contain ethanol from the EMC. The PICU patient's daily intake of ethanol was calculated. The calculation was converted to an adult equivalent alcohol unit intake and although this method of conversion is crude and does not take physiological differences of adult and children into account, it was done in order to provide the clinician with commonly used terminology in deciding the risk to the patient. Results Twenty-eight patients were prescribed a range of 69 different medications. Of the 69 medicines, 12 products were found to contain ethanol. Patient ages ranged from a 26 week premature infant to 15 years old, weights ranges from 0.7 kg to 45 kg. Only 2 out of the 28 patients did not receive ethanol containing medications, and most patients were prescribed at least two medicines containing ethanol. Daily ethanol intake uncorrected for weight ranged from 0.006 ml to 2.18 ml (median 0.26 ml). Converting this to adult units per week, alcohol intake ranged from 0.07 to 15.2 units (median 1.4 units). The two patients receiving above 15 units/week adult equivalent were prescribed an oral morphine weaning regimen, therefore the high alcohol exposure was short term. The most common drugs prescribed containing alcohol were found to be nystatin, ranitidine, furosemide and morphine. No commercially available alcohol-free oral liquid preparations were found for ranitidine, furosemide or morphine at the time of the study. Correlation of the sedation score against ethanol intake was difficult to analyse as most patients were actively sedated. Conclusions Polypharmacy in PICU patients increases the exposure to alcohol. Some commercially available medicines provide excessive ethanol intake, providing the clinician with ethical, potentially economical dilemmas of prescribing an unlicensed medicine to minimise ethanol exposure. Further research is required to evaluate the scope of the problem, effects of exposure and provision of alcohol free formulations.


Introduction. Part I: Brushing Up on India Business Basics. Chapter 1: So You Want to Do Business with India. Chapter 2: Understanding Breaks and Brakes in Emergent India. Chapter 3: Making Sense of India: A Business Viewpoint. Part II: Getting Your Business Up and Running. Chapter 4: Putting Together a Business Plan. Chapter 5: Starting Up in India. Chapter 6: Doing Business from Abroad: The Long Distance Relationship. Chapter 7: Building Your Team India. Chapter 8: Dealing with the Powers That Be. Chapter 9: Counting Your Rupees and Paise. Part III: Going About Your Business in India. Chapter 10: Enjoying Your Stay in India. Chapter 11: Making the Sale. Chapter 12: Establishing a Manufacturing Presence. Chapter 13: Legal Landmines. Part IV: Ensuring an Indian Success Story. Chapter 14: Understanding Indian Culture. Chapter 15: Being on Your Best Behavior: Indian Etiquette. Chapter 16: Avoiding Potholes on the Road to Success. Part V: The Part of Tens. Chapter 17: Ten Tips for Training Your Team India. Chapter 18: Ten Cultural Tips. Chapter 19: Ten Tips from Chanakya, the World s First Management Guru. Chapter 20: Ten Ways to Enjoy Your Downtime in India. Index.


The aim of this laboratory study was to compare conventional sawdust cooking with a modified cooking method. The modified cooking method included - in addition to common cooking and displacement stages - also an impregnation stage. Two different air-dried wood raw material furnishes were used, one containing only sawdust, and the other one 80 % sawdust and 20 % softwood chips. Comparison of the conventional and the modified sawdust cooking method having an impregnation stage revealed the following benefits in modified cooking: lower kappa number at a certain H-factor, higher screened pulp yield, lower shives content and higher pulp viscosity at the same kappa number. The sawdust pulps obtained were further bleached and refined to clarify the effects of the cooking concept on the paper properties. The bleaching of the pulps revealed no significant differences between the pulps regarding kappa number and brightness. The viscosity of the bleached pulp produced by modified cooking was still higher than that derived by conventional cooking which also consumed more chlorine dioxide. PFI-beating of the bleached pulps also revealed some differences between the pulps. Modified cooking produced pulps with higher tear index, Scott Bond, Zero-span and opacity, whereas conventional cooking resulted in higher tensile index and air resistance (Gurley) at a given sheet density.


The paper describes an apparatus for investigating Raman scattering in carbon nanotubes. Experimental results are presented. Based on these results, the requirements on the optical characteristics of a specialized compact spectrograph for analyzing carbon nanotubes are worked out, and an optical layout is designed, using a technique for designing a flat-field spectrograph. The proposed spectrograph provides a spectral resolution of 3.5 cm−1.


The advent of Web 2.0 technologies has allowed once static Web documents to be transformed into online interactive applications. To facilitate the accessibility of this dynamic content, Google have developed the AxsJAX framework that can insert Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) statements into the content dynamically. Such statements allow assistive technologies to interact with dynamic content and make it accessible to users. SADIe is an approach that uses semantic annotations of a Website's Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to drive a transformation process that can improve access to Web pages for visually impaired users who use a screen reader. Previously SADIe transcoded static pages by refactoring the content into a format more suited to the sequential audio output of a screen reader. In this paper we present a prototype SADIe transcoder that uses CSS annotations to generate AxsJAX framework code and insert it into Web pages. Such an approach allows users to access static content using a consistent set of key presses in a manner akin to an online application. This demonstrates the flexibility of the SADIe approach as the same annotations can be used to generate an alternative transcoding format. It also supports the use of SADIe as a lightweight method for allowing Web designers to make use of AxsJAX without requiring knowledge of the underlying AxsJAX technologies.


Natural arsenic contamination of groundwater, increasingly recognized as a threat to human health worldwide, is characterized by arsenic concentrations that vary sharply over short distances. Variation in arsenic levels in the Mahomet aquifer system, a regional glacial aquifer in central Illinois, appears to arise from variable rates of bacterial sulfate reduction in the subsurface, not differences in arsenic supply. Where sulfate-reducing bacteria are active, the sulfide produced reacts to precipitate arsenic, or coprecipitate it with iron, leaving little in solution. In the absence of sulfate reduction, methanogenesis is the dominant type of microbial metabolism, and arsenic accumulates to high levels.


This paper presents the results of a comprehensive effort to characterize the properties of Inconel 718 produced by a form of laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) additive manufacturing (AM) or 3D-printing, subsequently subjected to hot isostatic pressing (HIP) and heat treatment according to standards F3055-14a and AMS 5663, respectively. Material property data, while broadly available for traditional Inconel 718 presentations (e.g. forgings or castings), is currently lacking for the 3D-printed material.
 It is expected that while limited in size, the experimental data sets presented provide sufficient information to glean the capability of LPBF Inconel 718. These include: 1) Chemical composition, electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD), and x-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS) characterization of 3D-printed material structure; 2) Tensile properties — 0.2% yield stress, ultimate stress, modulus of elasticity, and elongation to failure — based on 108 samples, as functions of temperature and sample print orientation; 3) Creep rupture data including the Larson-Miller parameter, based on 21 samples; and 4) High cycle fatigue data based on 21 samples as a function of temperature.
 Results are compared to available standards and/or data for forged, cast, and other AM Inconel 718. A key observation of this study, based on the EBSD results, is that while the material appears to approach full recrystallization following heat treatment, there is a detectable fraction of the material that does not fully recrystallize, resulting in a material with mechanical properties (e.g. yield stress, creep rupture) measurably lower than those of forgings, but higher than those of castings.


The US Democrats, Australian Labor Party and British Labour Party adopted the issue of childcare assistance for middle-income families as both a campaign and as a legislative issue decades apart from one and other, despite similar rates of female employment. The varied timing of parties' policy adoption is also uncorrelated with labour shortages, union density and female
trade union membership. However, it is correlated with two politically-charged factors: first, each party adopted childcare policy as their rate of 'organised female labour mobilisation' (union density interacted with female trade union membership) reached its country-level peak; second, each party adopted the issue within the broader context of post-industrial electoral change, when shifts in both class and gender-based party-voter linkages dictated that the centre-left could no longer win elections by focusing largely on a male, blue-collar base. Were these parties driven to promote childcare in response to the changing needs of their traditional affiliates (unions), or was policy adoption an outcome of autonomous party elites in search of a new electoral constituency?
Using both qualitative and quantitative techniques, this research analyses the correlates of policy adoption and the specific mechanisms through which party position change on the issue took place (e.g. legislator conversion versus legislator turnover). It finds that parties largely adopted the issue as a means to make strategic electoral appeals to higher-educated, post-materialist and in particular, female voters. However, the speed in which they were able to make these appeals (and hence, the time at which they adopted the issue) was contingent on the speed in which elites were able to reform their party's internal organisation and specifically, wrest power away from both the unions and rank-and-file members in order to centralise decision making power on election campaigns, executive appointments and candidate selection processes into the hands of the leadership.


Climate will change and is already changing and all organisms are going to react to it, as it is a limiting factor to their lives. To be able to have an idea how plants might respond to climate change, it is important to understand how they respond to current climate. Patterns of growth, allocation and germination in correlation with temperature and precipitation were investigated in a species pair of Carex along a climate gradient in western Noway. The aim was to find similarities and differences in growth patterns and allocation strategies between an alpine specialist, C. capillaris and a lowland generalist,  C. pallescens, species. The species were collected as a whole (above ground parts and root system) at eight different sites within the climate grid, plant parts were subsequently measured and weighed. Seeds were counted, weighed and, from C. pallescens, used further in a germination experiment.  The two species reacted very differently  to climatic variables  in respect of growth. While  C. pallescens  showed a strong positive response to higher   temperature  in  several  growth traits, C. capillaris was not found to show any significant reaction to temperature. The increase of precipitation provoked negative reactions in both species, in the case of  C. capillaris  concerning plant size as leaves grow shorter, in C. pallescens concerning lower seed production. Neither with temperature nor precipitation specific allocation patterns became evident for either of the species. Germination of seeds of C. pallescens from sites with different climate showed strong differences in percentage   and   patterns.   Precipitation   has   an   overall   negative   effect   on   germination,   whereas temperature has a positive effect on germination percentage and makes seeds germinate faster, but slow down  after   a  while.   Increasing   seed  mass   also  has   a  positive   effect  on  germination,  but precipitation together with seed mass still shows a negative germination effect. In the context of climate change this might lead to a disadvantage in competition for C. capillaris, as bigger growing plants   might   outcompete   a   smaller   species.   For  C.   pallescens  an   overall   negative   reaction   in reproductive traits to higher precipitation may be the effect that could lead to an overall diminished success in wetter areas.


For more than a millennium, the Byzantine Empire presided over the juncture between East and West, as well as the transition from the classical to the modern world. Jonathan Harris, a leading scholar of Byzantium, eschews the usual run-through of emperors and battles and instead recounts the empire's extraordinary history by focusing each chronological chapter on an archetypal figure, family, place, or event. Harris's action-packed introduction presents a civilization rich in contrasts, combining orthodox Christianity with paganism, and classical Greek learning with Roman power. Frequently assailed by numerous armies-including those of Islam-Byzantium nonetheless survived and even flourished by dint of its somewhat unorthodox foreign policy and its sumptuous art and architecture, which helped to embed a deep sense of Byzantine identity in its people. Enormously engaging and utilizing a wealth of sources to cover all major aspects of the empire's social, political, military, religious, cultural, and artistic history, Harris's study illuminates the very heart of Byzantine civilization and explores its remarkable and lasting influence on its neighbors and on the modern world.


The Direct Debit Guarantee · This Guarantee is offered by all Banks and Building Societies that take part in the Direct Debit Scheme. The efficiency and security of the Scheme is monitored and protected by your own Bank or Building Society. · If the amounts to be paid or the payment dates change, The Ulster Medical Society will notify you 14 working days in advance of your account being debited or as otherwise agreed. · If an error is made by The Ulster Medical Society or your Bank or Building Society, you are guaranteed a full and immediate refund from your branch of the amount paid. · You can cancel a Direct Debit at any time by writing to your Bank or Building Society. Please also send a copy of your letter to us. Instruction to your Bank or Building Society To Pay Direct Debits


Policy makers in the EU and elsewhere are concerned that unilateral pricing of the carbon externality induces carbon leakage through relocation of emission-intensive and trade-exposed production to other regions. A common measure to mitigate such leakage is to combine an emission trading system with output-based allocation (OBA) of allowances where the latter works as an implicit production subsidy to regulated industries. We show analytically that it is optimal to impose in addition a consumption tax on the OBA goods (i.e., goods that are entitled to OBA) at a rate which is equivalent in value to the OBA subsidy rate. The explanation is that the consumption tax alleviates excessive consumption of the OBA goods, which is a distortionary effect of introducing output-based allocation. Using a multi-region multi-sector computable general equilibrium model calibrated to empirical data, we quantify the welfare gains for the EU of imposing such a consumption tax on top of its existing emission trading system with OBA. We run Monte Carlo simulations to account for uncertain leakage exposure of goods entitled to OBA. The consumption tax increases welfare whether the goods are highly exposed to leakage or not, and hence can be regarded as smart hedging against carbon leakage.


We demonstrate experimentally an optical imaging method that makes use of a slit to collect tomographic projection data of arbitrarily shaped light beams; a tomographic backprojection algorithm is then used to reconstruct the intensity profiles of these beams. Two different implementations of the method are presented. In one, a single slit is scanned and rotated in front of the laser beam. In the other, the sides of a polygonal slit, which is linearly displaced in a x-y plane perpendicular to the beam, are used to collect the data. This latter version is more suitable than the other for adaptation at micrometer-size scale. A mathematical justification is given here for the superior performance against laser-power fluctuations of the tomographic slit technique compared with the better-known tomographic knife-edge technique.


Altruism, warm glove, kinship and a sense of duty are the primary driving forces behind blood donation. The concept of donor cycle starts with donor recruitment and ends with donor retention and recall or with notification of sero-reactive donors. Donor Selection criteria vary from country to country and from region to region. Blood donor counseling is a confidential dialogue between the donor and a trained counselor aimed at ensuring the safety of donors and health of recipients. Predonation counseling covers modes of transmission of HIV, tests carried out on donated blood, confidentiality of test results, information on alternate testing sites and confidential self exclusion. Counseling during donation helps allay fears and is likely to reduce the incidence of adverse reactions in the donor. Post donation counselling aims at educating the donors on the interval between donations, care of the phlebotomy site, special instructions in case of adverse events and specific instructions depending on their job, besides nutritional /medical advice to deferred donors. Posttest counseling and notification of reactive donors is essential for the health of the donor and his family, prevention of diseases, improving blood bank economy by avoiding wastage of blood, and reducing exposure to healthcare workers. Problems in notification are diverse. It creates donor anxiety and suicidal tendencies in some. The kits used in a blood centre may give false positive results. NAT reactivity, with sero-negativity further compounds the problem. Response rate to notification is often poor. All these have made donor notification a boon for the community, but a bane for blood donors and blood centers. Every country must evolve specific guidelines for donor notification. This paper discusses Indian Guidelines for Blood donor counseling and sero-reactive Donor Notification.


This Book is the outcome of a long project begun thirty years ago. It is a book on the makings of pan-Africanism through the predicaments of being black in a world dominated by being white. The book is a tribute and celebration of the efforts of the African-American and African-Caribbean Diaspora who took the initiative and the audacity to fight and liberate themselves from the shackles of slavery. It is also a celebration of those Africans who in their own way carried the torch of inspiration and resilience to save and reconstruct the Free Humanism of Africa. As a story of the rise from the shackles of slavery and poverty to the summit of Victors of their Renaissance Identity and Self-Determination as a People, the book is the story of African refusal to celebrate victimhood. The book also situates women as central actors in the Pan-African project, which is often presented as an exclusively masculine endeavour. It introduces a balanced gender approach and diagnosis of the Women actors of Pan-Africanism which was very much lacking. The problem of balkanisation of Africa on post-colonial affiliations and colonial linguistic lines has taken its toll on Africa?s building of its common identity and personality. The result is that Africans are more remote to each other in their pigeon-hole-nation-states which put more restrictions for African inter-mobility, coupled by education and cultural affiliations, the communication and transportation and trading networks which are still tied more to their colonial masters than among themselves. This book looks into the problem of the new wave of Pan-Africanism and what strategies that can be proposed for a more participatory Pan-Africanism inspired by the everyday realities of African masses at home and in the diaspora. This book is the first book of its kind that gives a comprehensive and multidimensional coverage of Pan-Africanism. It is a very timely and vital compendium.


Non Violent Resistance (NVR) is a multi-modal systemic, community-based form of intervention for serious behaviour problems in young people. The vulnerabilities of young people with conduct problems are largely obscured by their aggressive behaviour. Aggression also leads to alienation between them and their parents, carers, teachers, and other adults. This alienation further inhibits the recognition of young people"s distress by significant others. Following on from an introduction to the theoretical background and therapeutic methodology of the NVR approach, this article examines the need for a child focus in parents" or carers" nonviolent resistance to violent and destructive behaviour; it further outlines some therapeutic possibilities that are inherent in NVR reconciliation work, when reconciliation gestures are used to raise the awareness of young people"s unmet needs.


Background Severe falciparum malaria is a medical emergency characterised by potentially lethal vital organ dysfunction. Patient fatality rates even with parenteral artesunate treatment remain high. Despite considerable research into adjuvant therapies targeting organ and tissue dysfunction, none have shown efficacy apart from renal replacement therapy. Understanding the causal contributions of clinical and laboratory abnormalities to mortality is essential for the design and evaluation of novel therapeutic interventions. Methods and findings We used a structural model causal inference approach to investigate causal relationships between epidemiological, laboratory, and clinical variables in patients with severe falciparum malaria enrolled in clinical trials and their in-hospital mortality. Under this causal model, we analysed records from 9,040 hospitalised children (0–12 years, n = 5,635) and adults (n = 3,405, 12–87 years) with severe falciparum malaria from 15 countries in Africa and Asia who were studied prospectively over the past 35 years. On admission, patient covariates associated with increased in-hospital mortality were severity of acidosis (odds ratio [OR] 2.10 for a 7-mEq/L increase in base deficit [95% CI 1.93–2.28]), renal impairment (OR 1.71 for a 2-fold increase in blood urea nitrogen [95% CI 1.58, 1.86]), coma (OR 3.59 [95% CI 3.07–4.21]), seizures (OR 1.40 [95% CI 1.16–1.68]), shock (OR 1.51 [95% CI 1.14–1.99]), and presumed pulmonary oedema (OR 1.58 [95% CI 1.04–2.39]). Lower in-hospital mortality was associated with moderate anaemia (OR 0.87 for a decrease of 10 percentage points in haematocrit [95% CI 0.80–0.95]). Circulating parasite density was not associated with mortality (OR 1.02 for a 6-fold increase [95% CI 0.94–1.11]), so the pathological effects of parasitaemia appear to be mediated entirely by the downstream effects of sequestration. Treatment with an artemisinin derivative decreased mortality compared with quinine (OR 0.64 [95% CI 0.56–0.74]). These estimates were consistent across children and adults (mainly representing African and Asian patients, respectively). Using inverse probability weighting, transfusion was not estimated to be beneficial in children with admission haematocrit values between 15% and 25% (OR 0.99 [95% CI 0.97–1.02]). Except for the effects of artemisinin treatment and transfusion, causal interpretations of these estimates could be biased by unmeasured confounding from severe bacterial sepsis, immunity, and duration of illness. Conclusion These data suggest that moderate anaemia is associated with a reduced risk of death in severe falciparum malaria. This is possibly a direct causal association. The severe anaemia threshold criteria for a definition of severe falciparum malaria should be reconsidered.


Do you have a kids menu? investigates the availability of healthy food options in restaurants and other caterers on the island of Ireland. The report summarises the feedback from 180 caterers, 192 parents and 90 children.
Childhood obesity is a growing worldwide public health issue, the prevalence of which has increased by 2.5% between 1990 and 2010. The island of Ireland (IOI) is no exception, where almost one in four children and young people are carrying excess weight.
The aim of this research was to investigate the range of food available for children while eating outside the home, and to identify barriers to and opportunities for the provision of healthier food options in this environment.
Specific study objectives included:

To assess what nutritional guidelines are available nationally and internationally with respect to eating outside the home
To investigate the range of children's meals available outside the home across the IOI and explore the perspective of caterers in the provision of healthier meal options
To assess attitudes and experiences of parents and guardians of children aged 5-12 years when eating outside the home
To assess children's (aged 5-12 years) attitudes with regards to food and eating occasions outside the home.

The target groups involved in the research included:

Caterers
Parents and guardians of children aged 5-12 years
Children aged 5-12 years.

In order to achieve the study objectives, a mixed methods study using both quantitative and qualitative research methods was conducted.
Key findings included sausages, beef burgers and chicken nuggets are the top three most widely available main courses. Only 42% of eating establishments surveyed listed vegetables on any part of the children's menu. The report finds that two thirds (64%) of caterers provide healthier options for kids but less than 27% actively promote these.


The purpose of this article is to chronicle the views of eight prominent professors of supervision regarding the state of instructional supervision. A confluence of factors has influenced the evolution of supervision as a practice and incipient field. Issues involving its very definition, its scope and methods, its status as a field, and its future have been varied, and at times have been controversial. Surveying several developments in the field of supervision, this qualitative study, based on oral testimonies of eight prominent figures including four senior scholars and four more recent scholars, raises questions for supervisory practices and the future of supervision as a field. In this article, I first provide a brief historical context for the theory and practice of supervision, along with a theoretical background serving as a literature review that reflects supervision as instructional leadership. Second, I share three themes that emerged from my interviews and analyses. Third, I discuss these themes and draw three conclusions that reflect on the state of supervision as a field.


The combined phenomena of intra-crystalline adsorption, diffusion and reversible chemical reactions inside microporous crystalline zeolite catalyst particles are described by combining the Langmuir–Hinshelwood kinetics with the Maxwell–Stefan (M–S) diffusion formulation. Simulations of transient diffusion and reaction inside catalyst crystallites are performed for a variety of reactions including: alkane isomerization, xylene isomerization, ethylation of benzene and dehydrogenation of ethane. For all reaction systems, the transient diffusion/reaction process exhibits overshoots in the loading of the more mobile guest molecules within the zeolite pores; such overshoots imply the attainment of supra-equilibrium conversions for a limited time span. The origin of the transient overshoots is traceable to the use of chemical potential gradients as the proper driving forces in the M–S formulation; this leads to coupling effects induced by mixture adsorption thermodynamics. Use of the simplified Fick's law for intra-crystalline diffusion, ignoring thermodynamic coupling, does not result in overshoots. Simulations of fixed zeolite bed reactors are performed to demonstrate the significant differences in the productivity predicted by the M–S and Fick models for intra-crystalline diffusion.


This article draws on research conducted over two years in the North West of England and is located in the context of workforce remodelling. It examines how the higher level teaching assistant (HLTA) role has developed and is appraised and suggests that the anomalous nature of the role, which often relies on the enactment of observed teacher performance, and the ambiguous, localised, niche roles which have developed, render measurement of impact problematic. The performance of HLTAs is assessed using a vocational model which relies on retrospective self-assessment of competence and the article draws on Foucault's (1988) concept of 'technologies of the self' to examine the implications of using this approach. The article also suggests that the use of predominantly self-assessment to measure competence is problematic and applies Kruger & Dunning's (1999: 1122) notion of the 'unskilled and unaware' to argue that lack of contextualised and specialised knowledge can lead to 'inflated self-appraisals'.