This book explains uncertainty analysis for finite elements and general nonlinear problems. It starts with the fundamentals of the topic and progresses to complex methods through 9 chapters. Each chapter focuses on a specific, relevant topic and provides information in a structured reading format for advanced learners. The author explains different models relevant to the topic where applicable, in an effort to cover the diverse aspects of mathematical analysis.

Topics covered in the book include:

- Nonlinear stochastic finite element methods

- Reliability calculations

- Static analysis of interval finite element

- Linear and nonlinear vibration analysis

- Stochastic, random, fuzzy and mixed fields

- Mixed finite element analysis

Uncertainty Analysis in Finite Elements Models is an ideal reference for advanced courses in mathematical analysis and engineering that require students to understand the basics of uncertainty analysis and basic reliability calculations.


Is it possible to have a partnership consisting of one person, a partner without a partner? The question will arise when all but one of the members leaves a partnership. The Revised Uniform Partnership Act (RUPA) attempts to give greater stability to partnerships by narrowing the circumstances under which dissolutions occur, but it also fails to address the fundamental and important question of whether a partnership may be continued by a sole surviving partner. In this article, we explore the issues raised by a single person partnership. In particular, we address the central issue of whether the departure of the penultimate partner from a term partnership triggers a winding up of the business or whether the statutory buyout is called into play. We have structured much of the discussion as a dialog between the authors. This allows us both to focus on the precise issues under RUPA presented by a single person partnership and to probe the competing arguments on whether such a partnership may exist. Although we have differing views on whether a single person partnership is possible under RUPA, we conclude on common ground that the buyout is appropriate. We also unite in a call for statutory clarification.


Background Cancer of unknown primary (CUP) is a late-stage malignancy with poor prognosis, but we know little about what diagnostic tests and procedures people with CUP receive prior to diagnosis. The purpose of this study was to determine how health service utilisation prior to diagnosis for people with cancer-registry notified CUP differs from those notified with metastatic cancer of known primary. Methods We identified people with a cancer registry notification of CUP (n = 327) from the 45 and Up Study, a prospective cohort of 266,724 people ≥45 years in New South Wales, Australia, matched with up to three controls with a diagnosis of metastatic cancer of known primary (n = 977). Baseline questionnaire data were linked to population health data to identify all health service use, diagnostic tests, and procedures in the month of diagnosis and 3 months prior. We used conditional logistic regression to estimate adjusted odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Results After adjusting for age and educational attainment, people with a cancer-registry notified CUP diagnosis were more likely to be an aged care resident (OR = 2.78, 95%CI 1.37–5.63), have an emergency department visit (OR = 1.65, 95%CI 1.23–2.21), serum tumor marker tests (OR = 1.51, 95%CI 1.12–2.04), or a cytology test without immunohistochemistry (OR = 2.01, 95%CI 1.47–2.76), and less likely to have a histopathology test without immunohistochemistry (OR = 0.43, 95%CI 0.31–0.59). Neither general practitioner, specialist, allied health practitioner or nurse consultations, hospitalisations, nor imaging procedures were associated with a CUP diagnosis. Conclusions The health service and diagnostic pathway to diagnosis differs markedly for people notified with CUP compared to those with metastatic cancer of known primary. While these differences may indicate missed opportunities for earlier detection and appropriate management, for some patients they may be clinically appropriate.


BACKGROUND
Whether national physical activity recommendations are related to mortality benefit is incompletely understood.

METHODS
We prospectively examined physical activity guidelines in relation to mortality among 252,925 women and men aged 50 to 71 years in the National Institutes of Health-American Association of Retired Persons (NIH-AARP) Diet and Health Study. Physical activity was assessed using 2 self-administered baseline questionnaires.

RESULTS
During 1,265,347 person-years of follow-up, 7,900 participants died. Compared with being inactive, achievement of activity levels that approximate the recommendations for moderate activity (at least 30 minutes on most days of the week) or vigorous exercise (at least 20 minutes 3 times per week) was associated with a 27% (relative risk [RR], 0.73; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.68-0.78) and 32% (RR, 0.68; 95% CI, 0.64-0.73) decreased mortality risk, respectively. Physical activity reflective of meeting both recommendations was related to substantially decreased mortality risk overall (RR, 0.50; 95% CI, 0.46-0.54) and in subgroups, including smokers (RR, 0.48; 95% CI, 0.44-0.53) and nonsmokers (RR, 0.54; 95% CI, 0.45-0.64), normal weight (RR, 0.45; 95% CI, 0.39-0.52) and overweight or obese individuals (RR, 0.48; 95% CI, 0.44-0.54), and those with 2 h/d (RR, 0.53; 95% CI, 0.44-0.63) and more than 2 h/d of television or video watching (RR, 0.50; 95% CI, 0.45-0.55). Engaging in physical activity at less than recommended levels was also related to reduced mortality risk (RR, 0.81; 95% CI, 0.76-0.86).

CONCLUSIONS
Following physical activity guidelines is associated with lower risk of death. Mortality benefit may also be achieved by engaging in less than recommended activity levels.


Mobile computing is becoming increasingly important due to the rise in the number of portable computers and the desire to have continuous network connectivity to the Internet, irrespective of the physical location of the node. Mobile IP is an extension to IP that attempts to delineate the physical location of a mobile node with its assigned IP address. With the extension of mobility from a host to a network, the need to provide foreign agent services within a mobile network is gaining importance. Provision of foreign agent services within the mobile network is termed as nested mobility. With the use of normal Mobile IP, each level of nesting introduces additional overhead, thereby wasting network resources. In addition, nested mobility introduces routing issues known as "pinball routing". The authors propose a route optimization based solution to address the pinball routing problem and reduce the tunneling overhead over the Internet cloud. The proposed solution uses the concepts of port redirection to route traffic to a node within the mobile network. The proposed solution eliminates the need for tunneling between the nested mobile devices and their respective home network. Initial analysis carried out by the authors indicates a significant improvement in overall performance for the participating nodes.


Host-Guest chemistry based on mesoporous silica materials has attracted increasing attention in the past two decades. Potential applications for these functionalized materials are in the fields of controlled drug delivery, catalysis, separation or encapsulation of functional biomolecules.
The present work is focused on the synthesis of nanosized, mesoporous drug delivery devices, which are able to release a preloaded drug as a result of a certain trigger action, e.g. during the endocytosis in a cancer cell. For this purpose, several different synthesis strategies had to be developed in order to incorporate the different required functional groups within one mesoporous silica nanoparticle.
A spatial separation of two different functionalities was achieved by the development of a sequential co-condensation approach. With this approach, core-shell bifunctionalized colloidal mesoporous silica could be synthesized. The obtained particles are an important prerequisite for other systems presented in this work.
The applicability of the copper-(I)-catalyzed Huisgen reaction (click reaction) as mild synthetic tool for the immobilization of biomolecules in the channels of mesoporous silica was investigated. In this joint project between our group and the research group of Prof. Ernst Wagner (LMU), it was shown that a sensitive enzyme can be immobilized with this strategy in the pores of SBA-15. It was demonstrated that the recoverability and long-term stability of the active enzyme benefits from the encapsulation in the host.
The well-known strong biotin-avidin interaction was used for the construction of a protease-responsive cap system for controlling the release from colloidal mesoporous silica. Fluorescein was released from the nanoparticles as a model compound for small drug molecules. In order to monitor the release, a custom-made two-compartment fluorescence cuvette was designed. Thermoresponsive opening through protein denaturation was demonstrated for temperatures higher than 90 °C.
A programmable opening temperature for this concept became possible by using DNA-linkers between the silica surface and the avidin cap. It was demonstrated that the length of the double-stranded DNA controls the opening temperature of the avidin cap. This work was carried out as a join project between our group, the research group of Prof. Thomas Carell (LMU) and the baseclick GmbH.
Redox-responsive drug delivery was investigated in living cells. In this context, the release of disulfide-linked, dye-labeled cystein from the core of colloidal mesoporous silica was monitored by confocal fluorescence microscopy at a single cell level, in collaboration with the research group of Prof. Christoph Brauchle. It was shown by photoinduced endosomal rupture that the endosomal escape is a bottleneck in redox-based drug delivery.
This concept was extended through the synthesis of photosensitizer-functionalized, PEGylated colloidal mesoporous silica. It was demonstrated that particle-loaded endosomes collapse under irradiation with 405 nm light and release the particles into the cytosol.
In another joint project between the groups of Prof. Bein, Prof. Brauchle, Prof. Radler and Prof. Leonhardt together with Dr. Ulrich Rothbauer (all LMU), the novel photosensitizer-functionalized porous nanoparticles were used as carriers for the delivery of small GFP-binding antibodies from Camelidae sp. into GFP-tubulin expressing HuH7 cancer cells. Additionally, the particles were encapsulated by a supported lipid bilayer. The attached photosensitizer was shown to play a key role in the delivery mechanism. Light-irradiation was used to destroy both surrounding membranes (supported lipid bilayer and endosomal membrane).
Finally, the pH-responsive release of the membrane-intercalating peptide mellitin from a mesoporous SBA-15 host was demonstrated. This was possible through the use of pH-sensitive acetal linkers. The release of the peptide was shown by the lysis of mouse erythrocytes. This work was carried out in collaboration with the group of Prof. Ernst Wagner.
To summarize, mesoporous silica materials were functionalized with different biomolecules in order to generate novel materials for potential applications in drug delivery or other controlled release applications. The newly developed concepts provide a basis for future work on mesoporous silica as a powerful and versatile drug delivery platform.


Background Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium has established a long-term husbandry program for whale sharks since 1980. Currently, three individuals (1 male and 2 female) are housed in the 7,500 m3 capacity main exhibit tank. The male shark was caught by a set-net on March 11, 1995, and it measured a total length (TL) of 460 cm; a subsequent measurement in December 2015 revealed the TL had increased to 865 cm. The corresponding TLs of the female sharks that have been housed in this facility for nine and eight years were 762 cm and 787 cm, respectively. The growth rate, hormonal trends, quantity of food ingested, behaviors, and other physical changes along with maturation of these sharks are presently monitored. Approach The total length of each whale shark was estimated by measuring the length between the snout tip and the first dorsal fin using an equation formulated by us. Periodic measurements of the girth at the posterior margin of the pectoral fin have been recorded since May 2014. For measuring hormonal levels, blood was collected underwater from free-swimming individuals and plasma samples were extracted. The plasma concentration of steroid hormone was measured using time-resolved fluorescent antibody analysis. This data has been collected since May 2008. The quantity of food consumed and the feeding behavior of the whale sharks are recorded each day. Results The TL of the male whale shark increased from 460 cm to 744 cm by March 2005, at an average annual growth rate of 28 cm/year. Since 2005, there has been a decrease in the growth rate, to 12.5 cm/year. The two females have been growing at an annual rate of 33 cm/year (TL = 762 cm) and 37 cm/year (TL = 787 cm). Our data shows that the rate of change of girth appears to be associated with calorie intake. The plasma concentration of steroid hormone of the male shark increased from June 2011 to June 2012 (21.49 ng/ml; TL: 850 cm). This appears to be in synchrony with the rapid elongation of the claspers. Additionally, since April 2012, we have been observing the male shark rotating its entire body laterally crossing both claspers, which is a behavioral indication that the male has reached maturity. Conclusions From our long-term study on captive whale sharks, details on direct observations on the maturity process, growth rate, required food consumption, behavioral patterns, and proportional measurement changes are available. Based on these details, we expect that future attempts for reproduction in captivity would be successful and would allow us to unravel many mysteries of whale shark reproduction.


California's housing market has been severely affected by the foreclosure crisis. The state's high foreclosure rate has also contributed to neighborhood destabilization in many communities, resulting in negative spillover effects such as price declines and increased crime and blight. In light of these rapid changes in the housing landscape, this report provides a current "snapshot" of California's housing market in the wake of the foreclosure crisis. It presents historical trends as well as current data on foreclosures, home prices, and affordability, and also considers the state's future housing needs. Given the state's sheer size and dramatic regional variation, the report also digs down into conditions at the regional and county level. The study hopes to inform stakeholders from across the state and help in the development of a strategic response to the drastic changes that have taken place in California's housing market over the past few years.


Mechanical removal of dental plaque is regarded as an effective means of controlling the progression of dental caries and periodontal disease. The habitual use of chewing sticks (Miswak) as an oral hygiene method is still wildly spread throughout parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Thus, the World Health Organization recommends and encourages the use of chewing sticks as an effective oral hygiene tool in areas where it is customary. As Salvadora persica (Arak) is one of the most important species still used around the world, the main aim of this thesis was to test the hypothesis that Salvadora persica Miswak offers a unique combination of mechanical and chemical supragingival plaque control. This thesis was based on two parts. A clinical part (Papers I & IV) investigated the effect of rinsing with Miswak extract on plaque pH after acidogenic challenge, and the effect of fresh and deactivated Miswak sticks on dental plaque and gingival inflammation in patients with gingivitis. A laboratory part (Papers II & III) tested the antibacterial activity of Miswak pieces and Miswak essential oil obtained by steam distillation against some Gram positive/negative bacteria. Through Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry and Medium Pressure Liquid Chromatography the main antimicrobial component/s of Salvadora persica Miswak was specified and characterised. The main findings were both fresh Miswak and essential oil Miswak extract had a strong antibacterial activity against Gram negative bacteria including some oral pathogens such as Porphyromonas gingivalis and Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans. Benzyl isothiocyanate (BITC) was the main antimicrobial component of Miswak. Bacterial cell membrane exhibited protrusions upon treatment with Miswak oil and commercially available BITC. Rinsing with Miswak extract, compared with water rinsing, resulted in protracted elevation of plaque pH (>6.0). Both fresh and deactivated Miswak reduced dental plaque and gingival inflammation. The decrease was statistically significant with active Miswak but was not with deactivated Miswak. The positive clinical effects of Miswak on plaque pH, plaque and gingival indices, as well as the immediate strong antibacterial activity demonstrated in the laboratory experiments suggested that Miswak could be beneficial for oral health. Further laboratory and clinical investigations of antiviral and antifungal activities together with the effect on periodontal inflammation need to be performed. The cytotoxic activities of fresh Miswak and Miswak oil need to be evaluated before the development of oral applications becomes a future reality.


Abstract. The source strength and capability of aerosol particles in the Arctic to act as cloud condensation nuclei have important implications for understanding the indirect aerosol–cloud effect within the polar climate system. It has been shown in several Arctic regions that ultrafine particle (UFP) formation and growth is a key contributor to aerosol number concentrations during the summer. This study uses aerosol number size distribution measurements from shipboard expeditions aboard the research icebreaker CCGS Amundsen in the summers of 2014 and 2016 throughout the Canadian Arctic to gain a deeper understanding of the drivers of UFP formation and growth within this marine boundary layer. UFP number concentrations (diameter > 4 nm) in the range of 101–104 cm−3 were observed during the two seasons, with concentrations greater than 103 cm−3 occurring more frequently in 2016. Higher concentrations in 2016 were associated with UFP formation and growth, with events occurring on 41 % of days, while events were only observed on 6 % of days in 2014. Assessment of relevant parameters for aerosol nucleation showed that the median condensation sink in this region was approximately 1.2 h−1 in 2016 and 2.2 h−1 in 2014, which lie at the lower end of ranges observed at even the most remote stations reported in the literature. Apparent growth rates of all observed events in both expeditions averaged 4.3 ± 4.1 nm h−1, in general agreement with other recent studies at similar latitudes. Higher solar radiation, lower cloud fractions, and lower sea ice concentrations combined with differences in the developmental stage and activity of marine microbial communities within the Canadian Arctic were documented and help explain differences between the aerosol measurements made during the 2014 and 2016 expeditions. These findings help to motivate further studies of biosphere–atmosphere interactions within the Arctic marine environment to explain the production of UFP and their growth to sizes relevant for cloud droplet activation.


Affordable housing has always been a problem in the United States. Cities and towns originally engaged in forms of discrimination through exclusionary zoning to exclude low-income residents. While many of the social attitudes persist today, the question is how to encourage new affordable housing development. This Note introduces the concept of inclusionary zoning as a successful method for creating affordable housing. The Note examines the constitutional analyses used for land use ordinances. Then, the Note evaluates existing affordable housing programs, distinguishing between the eastern approach and the western approach. The eastern approach—represented by New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Montgomery County, Maryland—is based upon a "fair share" of affordable housing but lacks any planning requirement. The western approach, as illustrated by Oregon and California, is based upon community planning of all necessary elements including affordable housing, and have successfully required affordable housing development. Ultimately, the Note adopts a perspective that mandatory inclusionary zoning in all communities is the best option and should be valid under an impact fee-like analysis.


Background : In taekwondo (TKD), the incidence of concussion is four times greater than in American gridiron football. Biomechanical studies of concussion in taekwondo are scarce.
Research question : To assess the effect of head impact biomechanics as a result of taekwondo kicks.
Type of study : Between-groups design.
Methods : Two male (22.0±0.0 years, 184±0.0cm, 81.3±1.8 kg) and two female (0.0±2.8 years, 171.0±1.4 cm, 63.0±5.2 kg) elite taekwondo athletes participated in this study. Head linear acceleration (RLA) and head injury criterion (HIC) data were collected from five different head kicks randomly performed five times. A Hybrid II Crash Dummy head (H2D) was instrumented with a tri-axial accelerometer.
Results : Significant differences were found between kicks in RLA (eta2=3.8) and HIC (eta2=4.6) in the men and women (RLA, eta2=4.5 and HIC, eta2=4.7). Post-hoc analyses showed differences in RLA between the jump back kick (61.6±31.0 g) and clench axe kick (33.3±11.1 g) in males (ES=0.9). HIC analysis revealed differences between the jump back kick (556.8±679.2) and jump hook kick (191.0±37.2) (ES=0.7) and in head velocity between the turning kick (5.0±0.5 m.s-1) and jump hook kick (3.2±1.3 m.s-1, ES=1.1) in the males. In the females, there was a difference between the jump back (HIC: 236.8±104.3) and clench axe kicks (22.2±11.2) (ES=1.2) and in foot velocity between the turning (15.7±1.2 m.s-1) and clench axe kicks (9.1±2.3 m.s-1) (ES=1.2).
Conclusions : Previous research reported RLA values of 67.0 g (HIC=167) in boxing compared to 72.8 g (HIC=667) in TKD. These high magnitudes of injury-related measures highlight the need for the implementation of more safety precautions.


PURPOSE
The authors demonstrated that in vitro-generated alpha-melanocyte stimulated hormone (MSH)-induced Treg cells specific to ocular autoantigen suppress ocular autoimmune disease in vivo when adoptively transferred. They examined the possibility of using these ocular autoantigen-specific Treg cells to promote the survival of a retinal allograft placed in the mouse vitreous.

METHODS
Enhanced green fluorescent protein (eGFP)-C57BL/6 neonatal retinal microaggregates were injected into the vitreous of B10-RIII mice before the adoptive transfer of interphotoreceptor retinoid-binding protein (IRBP; an ocular antigen) or ovalbumin (OVA)-specific alpha-MSH-induced Treg cells. GFP transplants were imaged in vivo on days 7 and 12. In addition, on day 12, the eyes were cryosectioned and immunostained with a panel of neuronal and immune cell markers.

RESULTS
GFP allografts underwent no detectable changes in size on days 7 and 12 in the B10-RIII mice injected with IRBP-specific Treg cells; however, mice that received OVA-specific Treg cells or no Treg cells experienced remarkable reductions in graft size on day 12. Only one quarter of the original size was seen. Using neuronal-specific markers, immunohistochemistry showed that the architecture of the retinal allografts in the IRBP Treg cell-injected group had intact rosettes and neuronal cells on the outermost layer, whereas the allografts in the OVA Treg cell-injected mice were disorganized. Immune cell-specific markers demonstrated that Treg cells and activated microglial cells were found in the retinal allografts of the mice injected with IRBP Treg cells, but not in the retinal allografts of the OVA Treg-injected mice.

CONCLUSIONS
These results demonstrate that adoptive transfer of alpha-MSH-generated IRBP-specific Treg cells promotes retinal allograft survival and development.


The recent paper by Pokorny and Smith [J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 14, 2477 (1977)] describes psychophysical data that correlate well with the physiology of the magnocellular and the parvocellular pathways. One of the critical differences between cells in these two pathways is the contrast of the visual input for which the responses of these cells start to saturate. In the analysis of their data, Pokorny and Smith have to assume values for the saturation contrast of the putative pathways that mediate detection. Here I reanalyze their model and show that this assumption is unnecessary, since values of the saturation contrast follow directly from their data.


Can you believe that it's the end of the year? The shops are already playing Boney M and you can't take a step without bumping into some sort of tinselled display, so it seems that the festive season is definitely upon us. This is my first end-of-year issue of Graphix and I can definitely see the industry becoming more positive as next year draws closer. General consensus seems to be that things are gradually improving and that it's onward and upward from here. It does appear that pretty much everyone is pleased to put 2010 behind them.


I. INTRODUCTION For many companies, information is the most important resource available. Many executives only realize the value of their corporation's secrets when these secrets are stolen and disclosed to a competitor, resulting in huge economic losses.(1) Since the end of the Cold War, American companies have increasingly been targeted by spies funded by competitors or foreign nations, or both, in search of trade secrets.(2) The Economic Espionage Act of 1996 (EEA),(3) enacted to facilitate the criminal prosecution of industrial spies,(4) constitutes a new weapon against corporate spying. It makes the theft of proprietary economic information a felony and protects trade secrets at the federal level.(5) By discouraging improper trade conduct by both foreign governments and private parties, it reflects Congress's recognition of the need to protect U.S. technology from unethical business competitors. The EEA does so by providing severe criminal penalties for those prosecuted under its provisions.(6) The scope of this Article is to analyze the EEA. Part II describes the nature of international and domestic economic espionage(7) and why it is a threat to corporate success and national security. Part III looks at legislation in existence prior to the EEA and analyzes why that legislation failed to substantially curb the theft of trade secrets, particularly as it related to small businesses and information stolen by foreign participants. Part IV examines the EEA itself, its legislative history, and the case law that has emerged since its enactment. An analysis of the statute suggests that its provisions are very broad and that if not used selectively, it could potentially hamper the mobility of workers in the labor market, thereby reducing innovation and creativity in the U.S. economy. Part V considers the strategic implications of the Act for practitioners and corporations. This Article concludes, in Part VI, by suggesting a proactive plan allowing companies to protect their trade secrets from foreign spies and from their own employees who may sell that information to the highest bidder. Organizations that have implemented internal security programs are likely to be in the best position to protect their trade secrets from dishonest competitors while insulating themselves from a trade secrets prosecution. II. THE PROBLEMS OF INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE Innovation, a significant factor in economic growth, requires a substantial investment of time, money and human resources.(8) If companies lose valuable secrets to industrial espionage, they cannot profit by utilizing their competitive advantage.(9) In turn, if they are unable to recoup their investments in research and development, they lose their motivation to innovate and bring new products or services to consumers. The consequences include higher prices charged to consumers,(10) as well as a decrease in new technologies, creative inventions, and improvements.(11) Furthermore, the very concept of privacy "is threatened when industrial espionage is condoned or is made profitable."(12) Since the end of the Cold War, the focus of intelligence and counterintelligence efforts has shifted from military and political targets to technological and economic ones.(13) Nations have been reshaping their intelligence agencies and investigative resources to be more responsive to the competitive and global needs of businesses.(14) The Cold War has been replaced by the Economic War.(15) The increase in trade secret theft has placed the technologies of U.S. companies, ranging from simple textile formulas to complex defense technology, at great risk.(16) Pricing data, customer lists, information on product development, basic research, sales figures, and marketing plans appear to be the most coveted items.(17) In 1997, more than 1,100 documented incidents of economic espionage and at least 550 suspected incidents were reported by U.S. companies.(18) The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which is now devoting more resources to fight industrial espionage, has reported that its economic espionage caseload doubled from 400 in 1994 to 800 in 1995. …


Chronicling the history of science and health popularisation in the United States, John C. Burnham sees a decline from the Victorian "men of science" to a situation in the mid-1980s where what passed as the popularisation of science consisted of little more than a litany of unrelated facts. Burnham's contention is that these "scientific facts" will not travel as such (that is, as scientific facts) unless they are firmly embedded within a coherent scientific framework. It is this framework – a theory capable of organising the data – that he perceives to be lacking from the modern popularisation. Whilst this may have been the case at the time Burnham was writing (the mid-1980s), it is a position that is increasingly untenable today. Looking here at the popularisation of psychology, this paper demonstrates how those unifying theories have since returned. Through a close reading of Steven Pinker's 1997 How The Mind Works (in comparison with Cyril Burt's 1933 book of the same title), this paper illustrates the ways in which facts and theories are interpolated by the modern populariser in precisely the manner that Burnham feared had been abandoned forever.


We analyse time series of CDS spreads for a set of major US and European institutions in a period overlapping the recent financial crisis. We extend the existing methodology of -drawdowns to the one of joint -drawups, in order to estimate the conditional probabilities of spike-like co-movements among pairs of spreads. After correcting for randomness and finite size effects, we find that, depending on the period of time, 50% of the pairs or more exhibit high probabilities of joint drawups and the majority of spread series are trend-reinforced, i.e. drawups tend to be followed by drawups in the same series. We then carry out a network analysis by taking the probability of joint drawups as a proxy of financial dependencies among institutions. We introduce two novel centrality-like measures that offer insights on how both the systemic impact of each node as well as its vulnerability to other nodes' shocks evolve in time.


We present stochastic forecasts of the Social Security trust fund by modeling key demographic and economic variables as historical time series, and using the fitted models to generate computer simulations of future fund performance. We evaluate several plans for achieving long-term solvency by raising the normal retirement age (NRA), increasing taxes, or investing some portion of the fund in the stock market. Stochastic population trajectories by age and sex are generated using the Lee-Carter and Lee- Tuljapurkar mortality and fertility models. Interest rates, wage growth and equities returns are modeled as vector autoregressive processes. With the exception of mortality, central tendencies are constrained to the Intermediate assumptions of the 2002 Trustees Report. Combining population forecasts with forecasted per-capita tax and benefit profiles by age and sex, we obtain inflows to and outflows from the fund over time, resulting in stochastic fund trajectories and distributions. Under current legislation, we estimate the chance of insolvency by 2038 to be 50%, although the expected fund balance stays positive until 2041. An immediate 2% increase in the payroll tax rate from 12.4% to 14.4% sustains a positive expected fund balance until 2078, with a 50% chance of solvency through 2064. Investing 60% of the fund in the S&P 500 by 2015 keeps the expected fund balance positive until 2060, with a 50% chance of solvency through 2042. An increase in the NRA to age 69 by 2024 keeps the expected fund balance positive until 2047, with a 50% chance of solvency through 2041. A combination of raising the payroll tax to 13.4%, increasing the NRA to 69 by 2024, and investing 25% of the fund in equities by 2015 keeps the expected fund balance positive past 2101 with a 50% chance of solvency through 2077.


The mechanisms underlying the allocation of visual attention toward dynamic content are still largely unexplored. Due to the number of variables present during dynamic content, it is often difficult to confidently determine what components direct visual attention. In this study, we manipulated the presence of audio in an attempt to explore the contribution of audio in driving visual attention during dynamic content. Participants viewed a reel of non-global commercials while their eye movements were recorded. Participants were either exposed to content containing the original audio track or content in which the audio track was edited out. Dynamic heat maps were created for each ad in order to identify areas of high visual attention between the conditions. Fixation durations and fixation counts for each area of interest were then computed. Analyses showed that the presence of audio has an influence on the allocation of visual attention during dynamic content, most notably in regard to on-screen text. Understanding the influence of audio in directing visual attention may help future researchers control for the extraneous influence of audio in eye-tracking methodologies.


Continues growth of electrical energy demand is resulting in a corresponding increase in the short circuit in power system. Several solutions have been implemented, including the use of Fault Current Limiter (FCL), in order to reduce circuit breakers rated capacity and to limit the electromagnetics stress in associated equipment. This project presents a comprehensive study of the impact of fault current limiter in power system performance. The FCL use for this study is solid-state type because it has advantages in term of flexibility and control over superconducting type. In order to evaluate the impact of fault current limiter in power system performance, simulation model of power system performance with solid-state FCL are used. For simulation model development, MATLAB Simulation Tools: SIMULINK software is used. A distribution system fed from single source is used to assess the impact of FCL to power system performance. The FCL is evaluated in term of its performance in limiting fault current from about 50 kA to a lower value of 1.7 kA. Results show that the solid-state FCL is effective for reducing short circuit currents up to 98% and also can be used to protect busbars from voltage sag when the system is subjected to various types of faults.


Research findings from a longitudinal, classroom‐based study of Bachelor of Education students in Tasmania suggest that three dominant discourses of schooling are powerful shapers of pre‐service teachers' pedagogical decisions in relation to the teaching of SOSE (studies of society and environment). These discourses appear to inform teaching practices and contribute to uncritical SOSE learning experiences for children. The findings from this naturalistic research grounded in teacher education suggest that teacher preparation programs should encourage far greater critical reflection on curriculum documents. In particular, the findings highlight tensions for teacher educators in selecting between experiential and/or interdisciplinary, critical approaches to teacher education. These issues are illustrated in the teaching of SOSE as locality focused knowledge. What this means for the selection of fieldwork sites for children's learning and teacher education pedagogies is explored in this paper.


According to general relativistic theories, cosmological spacetime is dynamic. This prediction is in excellent agreement with the huge majority of astronomical observations on large cosmic scales, especially the observations of cosmological redshifts of distant galaxies. However, on scales of heliospheric distances, verifications of general relativistic effects are based on Schwarzschild metric tests or kinetical corrections, such as the perihelion motion of Mercury, photon deflection at the Sun and gravitational photon redshifts in central gravity fields. As we will show in this paper, there is, however, a chance to detect new cosmologically relevant features on heliospheric scales by careful study of photon propagations in the local spacetime metrics, based on red- or blueshifts as a clear, but up to now overlooked, signature of the local spacetime dynamics. Thus, we propose the challenging possibility of carrying out experiments of cosmological relevance by simply using high-precision radio tracking of heliospheric spaceprobes, as already practised in cases like Pioneer-10/11, Galileo and Ulysses.


This pocket book succinctly describes 318 errors commonly made by attendings, residents, interns, nurses, and nurse-anesthetists in the intensive care unit, and gives practical, easy-to-remember tips for avoiding these errors. The book can easily be read immediately before the start of a rotation or used for quick reference on call. Each error is described in a short, clinically relevant vignette, followed by a list of things that should always or never be done in that context and tips on how to avoid or ameliorate problems. Coverage includes all areas of ICU practice except the pediatric intensive care unit.


Merchants universally accept cash. Consumers widely hold cash but also carry debit and credit cards. The cost of using a method of payment has only a small influence on which method consumers use. Large merchants accept all payments, while only two-thirds of small and medium-sized businesses accept credit cards. Merchants report that credit cards are the costliest payment method compared with cash and debit cards. However, costs are not the only consideration. Merchant acceptance of credit accounts for the many con-sumers that want to use credit cards. This interaction between consumers and merchants is known as network externalities.


Worldwide, externally supported craft development initiatives aim to enhance the capability of local craft producers to succeed in globalized markets. However, the contribution that these organizations make towards the abilities of local actors remains unclear. Following a hermeneutic reflection on literature, empirical field experience derived from the African and South Pacific contexts and a multiple case study analysis of craft development organizations, the research investigates the pre-conceptions that lie behind approaches adopted in craft development initiatives. Two emerging elements of particular importance have been identified. Firstly, the Western ideological notion of craft, influenced particularly by the Arts and Crafts movement, and secondly the ethos of social design, built on the legacy of the appropriate technology movement. It is argued that both of these have a constraining impact on the development of indigenous design skills that underpin successful participation in global markets. Noting that craft covers a wide range of practices, the research at hand furthermore identifies a category of craft that has become the epitome of Non-Western craft. These decorative and exotic artifacts are labor-intensive to produce, making them only marginally profitable for the makers. Yet there is an apparent emphasis on the promotion of this category within international craft development initiatives. The research concludes that the current practice of craft development initiatives cannot fully contribute to the development of the response capability of the local craft producers. Enhancing the impact of these initiatives would require serious reconsideration of product strategies and a re-think of the premises under which initiatives are undertaken. A new approach is suggested, one that examines design within a framework of social, economic and ecological sustainability, taking into consideration such socio-cultural issues as the peoples right to economic freedoms and the use of capabilities, building on the work of the economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen.


Occupational drivers of terrain vehicles are exposed to several risk factors associated with musculoskeletal symptoms in the lower back as well as in the neck and upper limbs. Vibration has been suggested to be a main risk factor. These drivers are exposed to both whole-body vibration (WBV) and hand-arm vibration (HAV). Aim: This study establishes the association between driving terrain vehicles and musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) in the neck and upper limbs as well as hand-arm vibration syndrome (HAVS). In addition, this study examines the effect on muscles in the neck and upper limbs of the type of vibration exposure that occurs in occupational driving of terrain vehicles. Methods and results: In Paper I, a cross-sectional questionnaire study on occupational drivers of terrain vehicles, increased Prevalence Odds Ratios (POR) were found for numbness, sensation of cold and white fingers (POR 1.5-3.9) and for MSDs in the neck (POR 2.1-3.9), shoulder (POR 1.8-2.6) and wrist (POR 1.7-2.6). For the shoulders, neck and elbow, there appears to be a pattern of increased odds with increasing exposure time. In Paper II, an experimental study on the trapezius muscle, which included 20 men and 17 women, the mean frequency of the electromyography signal (EMGMNF) decreased significantly more in a three minute sub-maximal contraction without vibration (-3.71Hz and -4.37Hz) compared to with induced vibration (-3.54Hz and -1.48Hz). In Paper III, a higher initial increase of the mean of the root-mean-square of the electromyography signal (EMGRMS) was seen in a three minute sub-maximal contraction with vibration exposure compared to without vibration (0.096 per cent vs. 0.045 per cent). There was a larger mean EMGMNF decrease for NV compared to V in the total three minutes, and a larger decrease also in the first time period was seen for the NV compared to V. A small gender effect was also noticed. In Paper IV, the combination of HAV and WBV was studied in laboratory settings and resulted in a higher trapezius EMGRMS compared to the HAV and WBV separately. Conclusion: Occupational drivers of terrain vehicles are likely to experience symptoms related to HAVS and musculoskeletal symptoms in the neck and upper limbs. Local vibration does not seem to have any negative acute effects on trapezius muscle fatigue. Vibration exposure seems to cause an initial increase in muscle activity in the trapezius that could be related to recruitment on new motor-units. A combination of HAV and WBV causes a larger muscular demand on the trapezius muscle (A). Http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-1668.


When it appeared in 1950, this biography of Ferdinand 'Jelly Roll' Morton became an instant classic of jazz literature. Now back in print and updated with a new afterword by Lawrence Gushee, Mister Jelly Roll will enchant a new generation of readers with the fascinating story of one of the world's most influential composers of jazz. Jelly Roll's voice spins out his life in something close to song, each sentence rich with the sound and atmosphere of the period in which Morton, and jazz, exploded on the American and international scene. This edition includes scores of Jelly Roll's own arrangements, a discography and an updated bibliography, a chronology of his compositions, a new genealogical tree of Jelly Roll's forebears, and Alan Lomax's preface from the hard-to-find 1993 edition of this classic work. Lawrence Gushee's afterword provides new factual information and reasserts the importance of this work of African American biography to the study of jazz and American culture.


The purpose of this work was to improve the quality of jack pine TMP long fibers, particularly with respect to the strength properties, by alkaline peroxide treatment. This paper reports the chemical characteristics of the treated long fibers and the spent liquors originating from various treatments. It was observed that, in comparison with hydrogen peroxide, the alkalinity of the treatment solutions had a greater influence on most fibre characteristics and spent liquor properties.


One component in the generational experience strongly related to media is the intimate and often passionate relation that is developed towards media technologies and content from one's formative youth period: musical genres and stars, as well as reproduction technologies such as the vinyl record, music cassette tapes, comics and other now dead media forms. Passion, however, is a dialectic concept that not only refers to the joyful desire and intense emotional engagement of cherished objects but also includes its dialectic opposite in the form of pain and suffering. This passion, it is argued in the article, is activated by the nostalgic relationships to past media experiences, the bittersweet remembrances of media habits connected to earlier life phases of one's own. Taking its point of departure in generational theory of Mannheim and others, this article analyses a series of focus group interviews with Swedish and Estonian media users tentatively belonging to four different generations. Based on the analysis of these interviews, it is suggested that passion and nostalgia are produced, first, in relation to old technologies, second, in relation to childhood memories and, third, at the limits of shared intergenerational experience, that is, at the moment when one realises that one's own experiences of past media forms cannot be shared by younger generations, and especially one's own children.


This paper extends the literature on the earnings losses of displaced workers to provide a more comprehensive picture of the earnings and employment outcomes for workers who separate. First, we compare workers who separate from distressed employers (presumably displaced workers) and those who separate from stable or growing employers. Second, we distinguish between workers who do and do not experience a spell of joblessness. Third, we examine the full distribution of earnings outcomes from separations - not the impact on only the average worker. We find that earnings outcomes depend much less on whether a job separation is associated with a distressed employer than on whether the separator experienced a jobless spell after the separation. Moreover, we find that workers separating from distressed firms are faster to find jobs at new employers than are other separators.


I Latin America's Foreign Debt crisis of the 1980s has had profound repercussions that resulted in fundamental changes in the process of Economic Development and the economic structure of several Latin American countries. Asia's Foreign Debt crisis of the 1990s has resulted in comparable repercussions that changed the economic development process and economic structure of several Asian countries. This paper compares the Mexican 1980s crisis with the South Korean 1990s crisis. It focuses on the characteristics economic development strategies, international financial crisis, and the effects of the conditionality on their economic structures. Part II of the paper presents the economic development process and the strategies pursued by these two countries. Part III presents the genesis of the international liquidity crisis. Part IV presents the effects of the conditionality followed by our conclusions. II Mexico and Korea are amongst the few Developing countries to have attained the status of Newly Industrialized Countries (NIC's). Their drive towards industrialization had similarities during their early stages of development, however, they pursued different strategies to attain higher stages of economic development. Mexico's drive toward industrialization became a conscious government policy with the Amendment to Article 28 of the Liberal Constitution in 1938. This Article demarcated the areas of economic activity that government and private entrepreneurs could enter. Industries such as Petroleum, Mining, Electricity and Banking were designed "strategic", hence, they were reserved for the Government. What was considered nonstrategic was left to private entrepreneurship. The government pursued an Import substitution Industrialization policy. Domestic producers who could produce domestically goods so far imported were given protection from foreign competition in the form of tariffs and embargo; also, these producers had access to subsidized funds from the Government owned NAFINSA (Development Banks). As a result, Mexico, by the 1950s had largely completed the import substitution of consumption goods. It was perceived that the development process was stalling in the 1960s. Mexico could not export manufactured goods to the US because it could not overcome the US barriers that protected US producers. Consequently, an aggressive policy to move the import substitution of durable goods was implemented. The governments investment expanded into consumption, intermediate and durable goods industries producing goods such as sugar, steel, and trucks. Most of the output of government owned and private firms was for the domestic market. The import substitution of consumption goods had been financed mainly with the earnings of traditional exports such as minerals; however, the production of durable goods required foreign expertise as well as funds. Thus, Mexico borrowed from abroad; in the process, it acquired a foreign debt. The discovery of vast oil reserves in the 1970s allowed Mexico to continue the import substitution of durable goods with reinvigorated impetus, which was financed in part with a large increase of the foreign debt. Korea's economy had been linked to the Japanese economy since pre WWII. After the war, Korea in an effort to reactivate its economy, initiated a drive to industrialize via import substitution. Korea used tariff protection, multiple foreign exchange and controls. The import substitution of consumption goods had been financed mainly with the proceeds of traditional exports, such as minerals that had been developed during the Japanese occupation. When the import substitution of consumption goods was completed, it could not continue with this strategy. Korea, a natural resource poor country, could not finance it. The U.S. officials wanted to see Korea succeed in developing its economy. Korea was a product of the Cold War. The U.S. had soldiers stationed on Korean soil since the Korean War (1950-53). …


When implementing computation-intensive algorithms on fine-grained parallel architectures, adjustment of resource to performance tradeoff is a big challenge. This paper proposes a methodology for dealing with some of these performance tradeoffs by adjusting parallelism at different levels. In a case study, interpolation kernels are implemented on a fine-grained architecture (FPGA) using a high level language (Mitrion-C).
 For both cubic and bi-cubic interpolation, one single-kernel, one cross-kernel and two multi-kernel parallel implementations are designed and evaluated. Our results demonstrate that no single level of parallelism can be used for trade-off adjustment. Instead, the appropriate degree of parallelism on each level, according to available resources and the performance requirements of the application, needs to be found. Basing the design on high-level programming simplifies the trade-off process. This research is a step towards automation of the choice of parallelization based on a combination of parallelism levels.


The design and performance of an "expert system" signal interpretion application written in a concurrent object-based programming language, LAMINA, is described together with a synopsis of the programming model that forms the foundation of the language. The effects of load balancing and the limits imposed by task granularity and message transmission costs are studied and their consequences to application performance are measured over the range of one to 250 processors as simulated in SIMPLE/CARE, an extensively instrumented simulation system and computer array model.


This report examines the case law and statutory history of the terms "partner" and "partnership," including the seminal Supreme Court cases of the late 1940s, the 1951 amendments that added the language now codified at section 704(e)(1), and the check-the-box regulations added in 1996. The central conclusions are as follows: (1) The existence of a partnership and the identity of its partners should be jointly determined under a single test. (2) The test for partnership validity and partner status most consistent with the text of the code, the case law, and the regulations is easier to pass than the test the government has argued for in recent litigation, and it does not depend on taxpayer purpose. (3) There is a strong argument that the check-the-box regulations harmonized the rules for partnerships and corporations regarding the tests used to assess the validity of business entities and to identify their owners. (4) The economic substance doctrine should not make purpose relevant to the question of entity validity. Copyright 2011 Ethan Yale. All rights reserved.


Abstract : For a given robot, we would like to know its capabilities and limitations. The question of what tasks a robot is capable of executing has been asked with increasing frequency as researchers explore the central issues of robotics. I shall refer to the theory that would answer this question as Performability Theory. One approach to Performability Theory is to examine the mechanics of the robot and the task. However, a complete model of the mechanics of a real robot and its environment quickly becomes intractable. The Inverse Sliding Problem involves simple mechanics; it deals with a planar world in which objects are free to translate and rotate but are subject to the forces of Coulomb friction. The problem is to determine the initial translational and rotational velocities required for an object to slide to a given final configuration. In this paper, I present a solution to a portion of the Inverse Sliding Problem, which I propose as the basis for a physically realistic yet simple world in which we can start to formulate the basic ideas of Performability Theory


This article explores how the notion of "extreme speech" can advocate a context-specific, practice-oriented approach to alt-right digital culture while also foregrounding its imbrication in larger histories of racial formation. Designating the popular White-nationalist hashtag #whitegenocide as an alt-right structure of feeling, it uses a data-critical discourse on "digital traces" to support a form of social media ethnography that traces affective communication practices online. Bringing this framework to the analysis of top #whitegenocide retweets, it elaborates the functioning of alt-right affective economies of transgression, which, driven by reactionary irony and a sense of race-based threat, contribute to shaping civil discourse and defining Whiteness in digital spaces. Finally, it investigates how the locative and corporal traces left by individual #whitegenocide retweeters both shape and are shaped by larger affective economies of transgression.


International capital flows channel large volumes of funds across borders to both public and private sector borrowers. As they are critically important for economic growth and financial stability, understanding their main drivers is crucial for both policymakers and researchers. In this post, we explore the evolving impact of changes in U.S. monetary policy on global liquidity.


Objectives. The purpose of this study was to: identify the economic and sociodemographic factors that influence the decisions made by youth in poor urban areas in Mexico to consume tobacco and alcohol; test the hypothesis that both decisions are mutually related and; demonstrate the influence of social interactions within the household on the consumption of both substances. Material and Methods. This cross-sectional study analyzed information from the Urban Household Evaluation Survey (Encelurb 2002, per its acronym in Spanish), which constitutes the baseline measurement for a follow-up survey to evaluate the impact of a social program in urban areas of Mexico. The Encelurb 2002 is a multi-issue survey that collected information from 17 207 households, including data on alcohol and tobacco consumption from 15 181 youth ranging in age from 12 to 21 years old. The estimation method used was a bivariate probit model. The entire sample was analyzed as well as the subsample of youth 12 to 15 years old. Results. The joint estimation of the two propensities for consumption confirmed that both decisions are closely related. The presence of older youth who smoked or consumed alcohol was positively and significantly associated with the probability of tobacco and alcohol use among youth 12 to 15 years old. The probability of consuming both addictive substances increased with age, principally among men. On the other hand, youth who lived with both parents had lower probabilities of tobacco and alcohol consumption than those living without any parent. Conclusions. The results indicate that alcohol and tobacco consumption decisions are mutually related, which allows for better identification of family and


His haunting, impressionistic study of a man's slow corruption by jealousy, Emile Zola's "The Beast Within" (La Bete Humaine) is translated from the French with an introduction and notes by Roger Whitehouse in "Penguin Classics". Roubaud is consumed by a jealous rage when he discovers a sordid secret about his young wife's past. The only way he can rest is by forcing her to help him murder the man involved, but there is a witness - Jacques Lantier, a fellow railway employee. Jacques, meanwhile, must contend with his own terrible impulses, for every time he sees a woman he feels the overwhelming desire to kill. In the company of Roubaud's wife, Severine, he finds peace briefly, yet his feelings for her soon bring disasterous consequences. A key work in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, "The Beast Within" is one of Zola's most dark and violent works - a tense thriller of political corruption and a graphic exploration of the criminal mind. Roger Whitehouse's vivid translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing Zola's depiction of the railways, politics and the legal system and the influence of the studies of criminology and the Jack the Ripper murders on his novel. This edition also includes a chronology, suggestions for further reading and notes. Emile Zola (1840-1902) was the leading figure in the French school of naturalistic fiction. His principal work, Les Rougon-Macquart, is a panorama of mid-19th century French life, in a cycle of 20 novels which Zola wrote over a period of 22 years, including "Au Bonheur des Dames" (1883), "The Beast Within" (1890), "Nana" (1880), and "The Drinking Den" (1877). If you enjoyed "The Beast Within", you might like Zola's "The Drinking Den", also available in "Penguin Classics".


The influence of the location of a trophectoderm biopsy in human blastocysts on the development of those blastocysts has not yet been investigated. In our prospective study (n=92), our multivariate logistic regression analysis indicated that blastocoel development was influenced by the location of the trophectoderm biopsy (p=0.049) and by the type of human blastocyst used (fresh or thawed) (p=0.037), regardless of the patient's age (p=0.507) and the number of days for the human blastocyst in the pretrophectoderm biopsy (p=0.239). Therefore, when a trophectoderm biopsy is close to the inner cell mass (ICM) in human blastocysts, it improves the progress of blastocoel development. Clinical evidence suggests that the progress of blastocoel development is a predictor of clinical outcomes after single blastocyst transfer. Therefore, when the trophectoderm biopsy is done from near the ICM, improvement of clinical outcomes after single blastocyst transfer may be expected.


A leading expert in health inequalities has condemned the scale of poverty among families in England.

Michael Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity at University College London, said that in 2011-12 there were more people in poverty in households where at least one adult was working than in workless households. Meanwhile net disposable income per person had not recovered to its 2008 level.

He said, "Take the Daily Mail model family—one adult working outside the home for pay, one adult not working for pay staying home, and two children—51% are in poverty. Got that? The perfect, ideal family: 51% are below the poverty line."

He said that people on low pay were "not skivers or scroungers or feckless or irresponsible or the worthless poor," while very few people could be said to be "living the life of Riley" on welfare benefits. "They're not paid enough to have a life that people in Britain think that everyone in Britain should …


The transition from equilibrium to non-equilibrium models of ecosystems in the biological sciences during the past several decades parallels an evolution in the ways that anthropologists understand culture. Reconceptualizations of ecosystem processes (e.g., disturbance) and units (e.g., landscapes) are apparent in fire science where they have influenced a conversion from the belief that fire is a destructive artificial force to the belief that fire is a controllable natural element. What adjustments have fire scientists made in their understandings of people who ignite fires? Even though fire science literature is voluminous, the sociocultural and biophysical relationships surrounding fire are insufficiently understood. Ethnographic data on the fire-related knowledge and skills that indigenous peoples possess are especially sparse. This paper is a case study of everyday burning practices on Sumba, Indonesia. It approaches burning as a social activity with culturally-specific meanings, political and economic components, and with implications for human well-being. This paper also examines social constructions of savannas in the Dry Monsoonal Tropics and people who use fire to manage them. Ethnographic data combined with archival information will be used to explore the linkages and disconnects between studies of disturbance fires and 21 st century understandings of culture. How can we explain the scientific and development literature that differentially assesses indigenous and non-indigenous fire regimes, technical expertise, and burning authority in Eastern Indonesia and Northern Australia? The social, historical, geographical, political, and environmental dimensions of fire produce problematic understandings of fire and fire starters.


Excessive daytime somnolence (EDS) is defined as the inability to stay awake in daily life activities. Several scales have been used to diagnose excessive daytime sleepiness, the most widely used being the Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS). Sleep disorders and EDS are very common in the general population. It is therefore important to be able to screen patients for this symptom in order to obtain an accurate diagnosis of sleep disorders. Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) have been used in the field of affective computing and human interactions but up to now no software has been specifically designed to investigate sleep disorders. We created an ECA able to conduct an interview based on the ESS and compared it to an interview conducted by a sleep specialist. We recruited 32 consecutive patients and a group of 30 healthy volunteers free of any sleep complaints. The ESS is a self-administered questionnaire that asks the subject to rate (with a pen and paper paradigm) his or her probability of falling asleep. For the purpose of our study, the ECA or real-doctor questionnaire was modified as follows: Instead of the "I" formulate, questions were asked as "Do you." Our software is based on a common 3D game engine and several commercial software libraries. It can run on standard and affordable hardware products. The sensitivity and specificity of the interview conducted by the ECA were measured. The best results (sensibility and specificity >98%) were obtained to discriminate the sleepiest patients (ESS ≥16) but very good scores (sensibility and specificity >80%) were also obtained for alert subjects (ESS<8). ESS scores obtained in the interview conducted by the physician were significantly correlated with ESS scores obtained in the interview the ECA conducted. Most of the subjects had a positive perception of the virtual physician and considered the interview with the ECA as a good experience. Sixty-five percent of the participants felt that the virtual doctor could significantly help real physicians. Our results show that a virtual physician can conduct a very simple interview to evaluate EDS with very similar results to those obtained by a questionnaire administered by a real physician. The expected massive increase in sleep complaints in the near future likely means that more and more physicians will be looking for computerized systems to help them to diagnose their patients.


Satellite systems utilize bandpass filters with steep slopes at the edges of the passband, to maximize the usage of the available spectrum. This results in induced group delay and severe degradation in system performance. In this thesis, a DVB-S2 system model has been implemented in software. Simulations have been performed to investigate the potential performance degradation caused by satellite bandpass filters. Linear optimum and adaptive pre-equalizers have been implemented to assess the potential in correcting the induced group delay. The linear optimum pre-equalizer displayed good performance both in simulations with and without additive white Gaussian noise.


Practitioners in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for development have repeatedly relied on evaluations of past or present initiatives to advise and facilitate the design and implementation of other development initiatives. However, current quests for measures that demonstrate the developmental contribution of ICT call for new approaches to ICT4D evaluation. In response to this, the study presented in this paper provides a starting point in the development and evaluation of the appropriateness of a set of criteria – dimensions and indicators that can be applied to the appraisal of the ICT contribution to development. Development is defined as a multidimensional concept based on Sen's capability approach, particularly focusing on the outputs (opportunities) and outcomes (benefits) ICT can enable within a given context. Indicators are proposed for education and research, healthcare, economic opportunities and political freedom dimensions. Findings obtained through exploratory survey research show that the proposed indicators are appropriate for the evaluation of the contribution of ICT to social and economic development, especially in a developing country context. Additional indicators were also proposed for some of the dimensions. Participants further reiterated the need to combine both qualitative and quantitative indicators to supplement and balance each other in the appraisal of development initiatives. Subsequent studies will seek to devise means of how this can be addressed, as well as a process through which a combined analysis can be obtained. Such studies should seek to extensively evaluate the indicators as well as apply them for the evaluation of ICT4D initiatives.


Objective The beneficial effect of angiotensin(1–7) (Ang(1–7)), via the activation of its receptor, MAS-1, has been noted in diabetes treatment; however, how Ang(1–7) or MAS-1 affects insulin secretion remains elusive and whether the endogenous level of Ang(1–7) or MAS-1 is altered in diabetic individuals remains unexplored. We recently identified an important role of cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR), a cAMP-activated Cl− channel, in the regulation of insulin secretion. Here, we tested the possible involvement of CFTR in mediating Ang(1–7)'s effect on insulin secretion and measured the level of Ang(1–7), MAS-1 as well as CFTR in the blood of individuals with or without type 2 diabetes. Methods Ang(1–7)/MAS-1/CFTR pathway was determined by specific inhibitors, gene manipulation, Western blotting as well as insulin ELISA in a pancreatic β-cell line, RINm5F. Human blood samples were collected from 333 individuals with (n  = 197) and without (n  = 136) type 2 diabetes. Ang(1–7), MAS-1 and CFTR levels in the human blood were determined by ELISA. Results In RINm5F cells, Ang(1–7) induced intracellular cAMP increase, cAMP-response element binding protein (CREB) activation, enhanced CFTR expression and potentiated glucose-stimulated insulin secretion, which were abolished by a selective CFTR inhibitor, RNAi-knockdown of CFTR, or inhibition of MAS-1. In human subjects, the blood levels of MAS-1 and CFTR, but not Ang(1–7), were significantly higher in individuals with type 2 diabetes as compared to those in non-diabetic healthy subjects. In addition, blood levels of MAS-1 and CFTR were in significant positive correlation in type-2 diabetic but not non-diabetic subjects. Conclusion These results suggested that MAS-1 and CFTR as key players in mediating Ang(1–7)-promoted insulin secretion in pancreatic β-cells; MAS-1 and CFTR are positively correlated and both upregulated in type 2 diabetes.


Excavation of the cemetery of the medieval priory of St. Mary-without-Bishopsgate, Spitalfields, London from 1998–2001, recovered the remains of over 10,000 individuals. Following initial assessment, skeleton 19893 was found to have suffered three cranial injuries caused by a sharp edged implement. The remains were those of a middle aged adult male of around 172.4 cm in stature, truncated at the hips by a later feature. The remaining elements were well preserved. The cranial injuries were well healed, suggestive of some degree of post-traumatic care. Evidence of possible surgery was also found. Soft tissue complications would undoubtedly have followed the assault. Battle related trauma was considered, together with evidence of treatment. Whilst the demographic profile of the individual fitted a plausible one for a professional fighter of the medieval period, no firm evidence of occupation could be provided. The case study indicates both the ability of medieval people to survive major trauma and the wealth of information full analysis of the Spitalfields assemblage will provide the osteological community. Copyright 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Abstract. Several authors have reported diel oscillations in streamflow records and have hypothesized that these oscillations are linked to evapotranspiration cycles in the watershed. The timing of oscillations in rivers, however, lags behind those of temperature and evapotranspiration in hillslopes. Two hypotheses have been put forth to explain the magnitude and timing of diel streamflow oscillations during low-flow conditions. The first suggests that delays between the peaks and troughs of streamflow and daily evapotranspiration are due to processes occurring in the soil as water moves toward the channels in the river network. The second posits that they are due to the propagation of the signal through the channels as water makes its way to the outlet of the basin. In this paper, we design and implement a theoretical model to test these hypotheses. We impose a baseflow signal entering the river network and use a linear transport equation to represent flow along the network. We develop analytic streamflow solutions for the case of uniform velocities in space over all river links. We then use our analytic solution to simulate streamflows along a self-similar river network for different flow velocities. Our results show that the amplitude and time delay of the streamflow solution are heavily influenced by transport in the river network. Moreover, our equations show that the geomorphology and topology of the river network play important roles in determining how amplitude and signal delay are reflected in streamflow signals. Finally, we have tested our theoretical formulation in the Dry Creek Experimental Watershed, where oscillations are clearly observed in streamflow records. We find that our solution produces streamflow values and fluctuations that are similar to those observed in the summer of 2011.


Introduction: Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are among medications most commonly prescribed and used world wide mainly in the developed countries. Variation in terms of drug utilization pattern and adverse events may exist in different population and healthcare centres. The objective of the study was to determine consumption pattern of NSAIDs at the Klang health district primary healthcare clinics in Malaysia. Methods: A retrospective cohort study of medical records of patients prescribed with NSAIDs over a period of 12 months (January to December, 2013) was conducted at Klinik Kesihatan Anika, Bukit Kuda and Pandamaran, Klang Health distrct primary healthcare clinics, Malaysia. Results: Records of 852 eligible patients were included for the study. Based on the WHO Defined Daily Dose (DDD), the most commonly used NSAIDs were Diclofenac (1.5725), Mefenamic Acid (1.4108), Ibuprofen (0.0166) and Meloxicam (0.0016). Up to 17.6% of the NSAIDs users, had chronic diseases such as diabetes mellitus hypertension and other cardiovascular diseases. 1.8% to 22.9% of NSAIDs users were concurrently taking antihypertensive, whereas, 8.6% experienced potential drug-drug interaction with NSAIDs. Conclusion: The NSAIDs utilization pattern among the patients at the primary healthcare clinics is appropriate based on the symptoms presented. However, concomitant administration with other drugs and use in patient with chronic disease poses risks of adverse drug reactios and drug-drug interaction.


Primum non nocere is a principle proclaimed by Hippocrates and remains relevant throughout the history of medicine. Unfortunately, pharmacotherapy does not always correspond to it. Although modern oral antibacterial drugs generally have a favorable safety profile, there are still many side effects. Antibacterial, like all medicines, have side effects, some of the side effects can be serious and some are dire. The use of antibacterial drugs in all areas of medicine, often unreasonable indications for their use, free access for the potential consumer all this leads to irrational use of drugs, starting from an early age. More than 50% of diseases are infectious in nature. Infectious drugs account for 20% of all drugs currently used in medicine. The misuse of antibiotics is fraught with the development of antimicrobial resistance in the pathogen.


The findings of the present study show that healthier patients, older patients, males, those with a lower level of education, those who perceive system performance to be high and those with lower levels of system usage are more satisfied with both their healthcare and health plan than their opposite counterparts. Regarding the incremental effects of these variables, the most striking finding is the strong, pivotal role of physicians in influencing patient satisfaction with healthcare. In regard to satisfaction with health plan, the extent of the problems that members have had with their health plan has by far the largest statistical influence on their satisfaction with that plan. The effects of other independent variables including the three demographic variables, self‐stated health status, number of visits to doctor's office or clinic, and issues related to access, though significant, show relatively small statistical influences on overall satisfaction with healthcare and health plan.


An example of a unique project (in a nutshell) that presents the public library's function as a meeting and debating (both physically and digitally) centre in the local community. The Strong Women Project was set up in 2009 as part of the local Strong Women Project that was initiated by the municipality. The municipality asked all the cultural institutions to participate in this project. The library took its part very seriously and decided to start a network project for the women of Schiedam (a playful variation on the famous 'old boys networks'): the local project "Strong Women Team Schiedam" (in Dutch: Sterke Vrouwen Ploeg - SVP). We named it the Sterke Vrouwen Ploeg (Strong Women Team). Our female Mayor was the captain of the team, which gave it a certain added value. The Mayor, because it was a local theme, was enthusiastic about having been asked to be involved. She is a true ambassador for our town and, during the year, she used the SVP as her personal platform to get informed about the town and the opinions of its women. She participated in 50% of the meetings, showed her personal side when talking about the subjects, and by the end had truly adopted the formula.


After the Revolution of Dignity (2013–2014), the new Ukrainian government set out a number of reforms, one of which – and a successful one so far – was decentralisation, involving territorial amalgamation and re-allocation of public revenues and outlays in favour of the newly-established amalgamated territorial communities (ATCs). This study aims to analyse whether decentralisation is supported by the realisation of the budget transparency principle. We attempt to fill the gap still existing in the research of public sector transparency in Ukraine, concerning the basic administrative level, hereby being limited to big cities and regions. The authors carried out an assessment of budget transparency in newly-established ATCs in four Ukrainian regions by applying a simplified methodology ('snapshot assessment') involving 11 measures that could be easily located on the ATC websites. In order to understand the reasons for a particular level of transparency, a polling of ATC heads was undertaken. The findings of the study demonstrate that the overall budget transparency in the newly established ATCs is rather low and subject to significant interregional variation. We find that the local officials overstate the existing level of budget transparency in their communities and are not proactive in their efforts to raise it. The importance of this article lies in substantiating the need for making budget transparency a priority for local officials, as well as in detailing the activity of the state and the local community in this field


We address the problem of playing turn-based multiaction adversarial games, which include many strategy games with extremely high branching factors as players take multiple actions each turn. This leads to the breakdown of standard tree search methods, including Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS), as they become unable to reach a sufficient depth in the game tree. In this paper, we introduce online evolutionary planning (OEP) to address this challenge, which searches for combinations of actions to perform during a single turn guided by a fitness function that evaluates the quality of a particular state. We compare OEP to different MCTS variations that constrain the exploration to deal with the high branching factor in the turn-based multiaction game Hero Academy. While the constrained MCTS variations outperform the vanilla MCTS implementation by a large margin, OEP is able to search the space of plans more efficiently than any of the tested tree search methods as it has a relative advantage when the number of actions per turn increases.


Watching his third-graders struggle every year with New Hampshire's state test made Mr. Gould wonder whether the problem might lie in the test items themselves -- and in the very idea of testing children at such a young age. MY THIRD-GRADE class was in the final day of taking New Hampshire's state test. The students were working on the mathematics section, and most didn't seem to be having much trouble filling in the multiple-choice boxes. Then I noticed that one student was looking around. She would look down at her paper, then look toward her neighbor on the left. Look down again, then look toward her neighbor on the right. I headed for her desk. This was not her style. She was a highly capable student. What was compelling her to look at her neighbors' work? Was she cheating? As I approached her desk, I realized that she was crying. I knelt beside her. "What's the trouble?" I asked softly. "I don't know how to do this problem," she whispered through her tears. She had read the open-response question and couldn't even start trying to figure out an answer. In desperation, she had looked around and discovered that everyone else was already beyond her question. She knew she was one of the smartest students in the class; everyone else did too. Shaken, she'd asked herself, "Why can't I do a problem everyone else has finished?" Of course, what she didn't realize was that the other students didn't have a clue that they didn't know how to do the problem. They had simply written an answer and moved on. Penelope Leach writes in her book about raising stable children, "Middle childhood [third grade] calls on the adult world to account for itself, and much of what it sees and hears will remain in conscious memory, or easily available to it, through adolescence and into adulthood."1 Would this 8-year- old carry this trauma with her into adulthood? My own school experience suggested that she might. So, contrary to the testing rules, I pointed her in the right direction. And I began to look at this assessment with new concerns. Ten years earlier, I had served on the committee that wrote the New Hampshire Curriculum Frameworks for Third-Grade Language Arts. A separate committee wrote frameworks for mathematics at the same time. One of the purposes of these frameworks was to provide a base from which to create statewide assessment instruments. At the time, we were pleased when educational leaders considered our frameworks "state of the art." Once the frameworks were adopted, the state department hired a testing firm to develop the assessment package, which became the New Hampshire Educational Improvement and Assessment Program (NHEIAP). Also innovative at the time, the test included multiple-choice and open-response items and a writing sample. New questions are added each year, so some test items can be released to the public. Part of the continuing process of test development involves a committee of volunteer educators meeting several times a year to choose passages, write test questions, and revise material for the next year's test. Until I retired from the classroom in 2001, I served as a member of the committee that worked on the third-grade language arts test. For a number of years, New Hampshire students in grades 3, 6, and 10 have been tested in the spring, with test results released the following fall. At the time of my retirement, these tests were not attached to "high stakes" in the sense that the allocation of state education funding did not depend on their results. However, a recent mandate from the New Hampshire Supreme Court requires the legislature to find an equitable, statewide method to fund an adequate public education.2 When the legislature meets that responsibility and provides state tax money -- instead of mostly local taxes -- to pay for education, an accounting will also be demanded. That and the dictates of the new No Child Left Behind Act will mean that high-stakes testing will come to New Hampshire. …


This Article offers an examination of the federal role in land use planning and regulation set in the context of varying theories of federalism by presenting a historical and modern overview of the increasing federal influence in local land use planning and regulation, specifically highlighting how federal statutes and programs impact local municipal decision making in the area of land use planning. Part II provides a brief introduction into theories of federalism and their application to local land use regulation in the United States. Part III provides a brief overview of federal legislation in the United States which affected local land use across three time periods: first, that which existed before the publication of THE QUIET REVOLUTION; second, legislation that emerged a quarter century after the publication of THE QUIET REVOLUTION; and third, more recent federal programmatic and legislative approaches. Part IV provides analysis of the future of federalism in land use regulation, noting the increasing trend of the federal programmatic influence and the potential future influence on local land use controls. The Article concludes with a warning to local governments to be vigilant and to rethink the paradigm of land use regulation to regain control in certain areas to prevent further encroachment by the federal government into matters of local concern.


Children continue to experience unrelieved moderate to severe pain post-operatively. Previous studies have suggested several factors to explain this. However, the impact of these factors on practice has not been explored. Nor have children's nurses clinical decision-making strategies been examined.
This case study set out to explore the influence of various factors on individual nurses' post-operative pain management practices, and to answer the following questions:
• How does the perceived importance of a pain management task impact on
practice?
• How does theoretical knowledge and its application impact on practice?
• How does what nurses say they do compare to what they actually did?
• How do nurses make decisions when managing pain in children?
The case study used qualitative (participant observation and the think aloud technique) and quantitative methods (questionnaires) to obtain an in-depth picture of children's nurses' post-operative pain management practices. As well as examining some aspects of pain management for the first time, such as nurses' pain-related clinical decision-making, new perspectives were explored in relation to other well researched issues, including whether theoretical knowledge about pain management is applied in practice.
The perceived importance of a pain management task did not affect the likelihood of it being undertaken. A good level of theoretical knowledge appeared not to affect the quality of a nurse's pain management practices. A lack of congruence was found between what the nurses said they do and what the nurses actually did. Observational data indicated that nurses generally did not follow current recommendations fully when managing pain. In several areas, the practices of the ward sisters appeared to be of a lower standard than more junior nurses. Nurses appeared to use non-expert decisionmaking
strategies regardless of their years of experience or level of academic attainment. A hypothetico-deductive (analytical) model of decision-making seemed to be used.
Several strategies, which might facilitate the application of theoretical knowledge in clinical decision-making and practice are considered, including the use of teaching rounds and clinical scenarios. These need evaluating, and further research is needed to identify other factors that affect pain management practices and decision-making strategies. How children's nurses make clinical decisions also needs further exploration.
A revised conceptual framework is presented which suggests that, for post-operative pain management practices to be effective, nurses need to have not only the right attitude and the right knowledge but also the ability to make the right decision. However, it is probable that other factors, both individual and collective, are also involved, including ward culture, role-modelling and lack of motivation to change. The revised conceptual framework provides a basis for future research.


In the last two decades Power Quality increasingly has been focused attention on power companies and subscribers. This phrase (power quality) as an inclusive concept is raised for a variety of power system disturbances. In recent years, new methods offered for improving power quality including the use of active filters, passive or hybrid. Due to the advantages and the growing use of renewable energy sources connected to the distribution grids, in the proposed system its aim is using renewable energy sources for power quality improvement in this study, the solar arrays have been used as sources for renewable energy. In this paper, we studied conducted researches in the field, a fuzzy controller is provided to control the converter signals connected to the PCC and DC link. The purpose of controller design is supplying unbalanced flow for non-linear loads on the grid that they have caused streaming on the grid to exit from the sine. This controller not only as an active power filter works pretty well, but current harmonic network, will improve by applying renewable energy sources.


This study implements a new land-cover classification and surface albedo from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) in the fifth-generation Pennsylvania State University–National Center for Atmospheric Research (PSU–NCAR) Mesoscale Model (MM5) and investigates its effects on regional near-surface atmospheric state variables as well as the planetary boundary layer evolution for two dissimilar U.S. regions. Surface parameter datasets are determined by translating the 17-category MODIS classes into the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and Simple Biosphere (SiB) categories available for use in MM5. Changes in land-cover specification or associated parameters affected surface wind, temperature, and humidity fields, which, in turn, resulted in perceivable alterations in the evolving structure of the planetary boundary layer. Inclusion of the MODIS albedo into the simulations enhanced these impacts further. Area-averaged comparisons with ground measurements showed remarkable improvements in near-surface temperature and humidity at both study areas when MM5 is initialized with MODIS land-cover and albedo data. Influence of both MODIS surface datasets is more significant at a semiarid location in the southwest of the United States than it is in a humid location in the mid-Atlantic region. Intense summertime surface heating at the semiarid location creates favorable conditions for strong land surface forcing. For example, when the simulations include MODIS land cover and MODIS albedo, respective error reduction rates were 6% and 11% in temperature and 2% and 2.5% in humidity in the southwest of the United States. Error reduction rates in near-surface atmospheric fields are considered important in the design of mesoscale weather simulations.


Purpose : This study aimed to explain creative thinking patterns, including imaginative thinking, divergent thinking, and lateral thinking of students in scientific work. The scientific work studied was in the form of the Student Creativity Program at Malang State University, Indonesia. Research Methods: This study use d a qualitative approach with content analysis method. The data were in the form of sentences, sentence groups, paragraphs, paragraph clusters, and whole text. The data source of this research was the writing of student scientific work. The data were collected through surveys, documentation studies, and interviews.  The process of data analysis wa s grouped into three stages, namely data reduction, data presentation, and conclusion drawing. Findings : The findings of this study indicate d that (1) the pattern of imaginative thinking in student scientific work appear ed in the diversity of ideas based on experience and use of metaphorical language. Ideas were born through simple propositions in paragraph form. (2) Divergent thinking patterns in student scientific work c ould be seen from the diversity of ideas and techniques for problem solving. Criteria for markers of divergent thinking patterns were characterized by originality, flexibility or elaboration. (3) Lateral thinking patterns in student scientific work c ould be seen from the use of a variety of unique ideas according to the complexity of problem solving. Implications for Research and Practice : B ased on the results of the study, it can be concluded that creative thinking patterns of students in scientific work show ed the use of various forms of ideas in accordance with the complexity of problem solving. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of the importance of using creative thinking patterns in scientific writing. However, for further research it is recommended that we examine creative thinking patterns with different levels of objects so that the findings of this study appear more widely in various levels.


Zoning in America attained its 100th year in 2016, but no celebration was observed. From the very beginning the authority of zoning authorities to grant variances to accommodate exceptional circumstances faced by land owners on the ground has been a key part of the zoning system. For many years, local citizen Boards of Adjustment readily granted variances for many types of problematic land uses in zoning districts where they were not permitted under applicable zoning regulations. When it became widely accepted that granting too many use variances threatened the very integrity of the zoning system, state courts almost uniformly tightened up the rules for granting variances. State after state adopted New York's interpretation of the omnipresent "unnecessary hardship" requirement of the typical zoning ordinance to insist that variances could only be granted if the landowner could prove there was "no reasonable use or no reasonable return possible" under the applicable zoning restrictions. As use variances receded dramatically after this judicial ratcheting up variance requirements, a different type of variance came to the fore – the area variance, which required only the relaxation of one or more technical or dimensional requirements affecting the site of a proposed development. In the beginning, in the absence of statutory language dealing separately with area variances, most state courts subjected them to the same rigorous requirements as use variances. Over time through legislative intervention or judicial recognition that area variances did not pose the same danger to the zoning system as use variances, nearly one-half of the states came to accord area variances some version of a "practical difficulty" standard of review. Iowa is among the states that do not differentiate between use variances and area variances, and Iowa law still applies the strict interpretation of the "unnecessary hardship" standard to area variances. This article argues that Iowa law should be reformed to adopt the less demanding "practical difficulties" standard for area variances, and presents proposals for achieving this result through both judicial reform and legislative change.


The disorders of voice and speech in Parkinson's disease (PD) result from involvements in several subsystems including respiration, phonation, articulation, and prosody. We investigated the feasibility of acoustic measures for the identification of voice and speech disorders in PD, using a quick vocal test consisting of sustained phonation, diadochokinetic task, and running speech. Various traditional and novel acoustic measurements have been designed in order to be gender independent, represent all speech subsystems, reduce the time required for voice investigation, and provide a reliable automated assessment in practice.


Despite strong growth performance in transition economies in the last decade, residents of transition countries report abnormally low levels of life satisfaction. Using data from the World Values Survey and other sources, we study various explanations of this phenomenon. First, we document that the disparity in life satisfaction between residents of transition and non-transition countries is much larger among the elderly. Second, we find that deterioration in public goods provision, an increase in macroeconomic volatility, and a mismatch of human capital of residents educated before transition which disproportionately affected the aged population explain a great deal of the difference in life satisfaction between transition countries and other countries with similar income and other macroeconomic conditions. The rest of the gap is explained by the difference in the quality of the samples. As in other countries, life satisfaction in transition countries is strongly related to income; but, due to a higher non-response of high-income individuals in transition countries, the survey-data estimates of the recent increase in life satisfaction, driven by 10-year sustained economic growth in transition region, are biased downwards. The evidence suggests that if the region keeps growing at current rates, life satisfaction in transition countries will catch up with the "normal" level in the near future.