Summary During the 1990s, recurrent crises linked to abrupt changes in the direction of international financial flows have been observed. Both the Mexican crisis of 1994-1995 and the Asian crisis of 1997-1998 had important propagation effects and exhibited high levels of contagion that were underestimated. Observers have tried to identify the ex-ante sources of vulnerability and policy mismanagement. Once more, economists have increased the volume of knowledge arising from traumatic episodes. Among other implications, the profession is now concerned about the optimal exchange rate regime, the sustainability of large current account deficits, the vulnerability of malfunctioning financial systems, the propagation effects of highly leveraged hedge funds, and risks linked to currency mismatches and to the term structure of external liabilities. The purpose of this article is to emphasize the links between external vulnerability and excess domestic expenditure explained by private sector behaviour. The motivation is based on the feature that at the eve of their respective crises, Mexico and most of the Southeast Asian economies in which the last crisis detonated exhibited significant current account deficits while their fiscal accounts were under control. This was also the case of Chile in 1996-1997, prior to its own recession. The mix of large current account deficits and fiscal balance or fiscal surplus implies that the origin of excess domestic expenditure –and of vulnerability– was non-fiscal.What are the macroeconomic consequences of an excess of non-fiscal expenditure? What are the consequences of inconsistent policy targets? Which should be the consistent policy responses? These are the main questions tackled in this paper by means of a formal analytical model. In section A we develop the case of an open economy with no voluntary financial flows, and analyse the effects of inconsistent policy targets. Two relevant and intuitive conclusions are that fiscal policy crowds out private expenditure, and that inflation is the natural outcome of inconsistent policy targets. In section B we develop the case with an open capital account, where the conclusions are that inconsistent policy targets generate external vulnerability rather than inflation, and that private expenditure crowds out fiscal policy. Moreover, in the context of consistent targets, fiscal policy needs to accommodate any excess of private expenditure to avoid external vulnerability. That is to say, the larger the level of private expenditure funded by external financing, the larger the requirement of fiscal effort to adjust to a consistent equilibrium. In section C we argue that if fiscal policy cannot be crowded out beyond a politically feasible level of fiscal surplus, a consistent equilibrium needs additional policy instruments. We analyse the case of a Tobin tax and the case of a flexible tax as alternatives to an adaptive fiscal policy. Finally, we present a number of special cases in the Appendix which prove the robustness of our conclusions.


Frustration has been present throughout gaming history and is often considered to be negative. However, there's been a lack of significant studies focusing on frustration and how it affects the game experience. This lead us to a qualitative study, based on nine semi-structured interviews with game developers, focusing on the effect of frustration in games. Results indicate that frustration encompass both positive and negative aspects that differ from each other in how they appear in game. Positive frustration is desirable for developers due to it improving the immersion and motivation in games and comes from players learning through frustration whereas negative frustration is undesirable and affects the game experience negatively and comes from aspects, such as technical issues, outside of the players influence.


After disinfection of ballast water, it is crucial to detect organisms and determine their vitality to assess the performance of the chosen treatment technique. Ultraviolet (UV) irradiation is a treatment technology commonly used for water disinfection. In this study, the phytoplankter Tetraselmis suecica was UV irradiated and subsequently stained with both 5-carboxyfluorescein diacetate acetoxymethyl ester (CFDA-AM) and SYTOX Blue, staining metabolically active and membrane-permeable cells, respectively. This dual staining protocol can be used to assess samples during type approval of UV-based treatment systems. Non-irradiated and UV-irradiated samples were incubated in darkness, to simulate a ballast water transport, after which the vitality and viability T. suecica were monitored regularly over a period of 15 d. Flow cytometry (FCM) analysis separated the cells into 4 FCM populations (=single cells grouped together based on their fluorescence signals) according to differences in esterase activity and membrane integrity. UV-irradiated samples followed a different staining pattern compared to non-irradiated samples, where 1 specific FCM population of cells expressed esterase activity, but at the same time gave signals for disrupted membranes. This is useful as a sign of future death and is interpreted as an 'early warning' FCM population. FCM results were also compared to corresponding plate count results, differentiating vital, viable cells from vital, non-viable cells. We argue that dual staining with SYTOX Blue and CFDA-AM facilitates and improves FCM analysis when evaluating the performance of UV-based water treatment systems.


Grinding is one of the most complex manufacturing processes in industry and understanding its physics is difficult due to the stochastic nature of the process. In this thesis, the influence of the abrasive grit's shape and size on the grinding process is considered. A number of parameters are investigated to set a classification of the abrasives based on the grit's shape and size. These parameters are determined according to image analyses of a large number of abrasive grits. Based on this investigation, the shapes of the abrasive grits could be classified into 21 groups. Typical grit shapes will fall into only few categories dominating the shape population. These dominant shapes are ellipsoid, sphere, quadrilateral frustrum, quadrilateral pyramid and tetrahedron pyramid. After the abrasives are assessed, a test rig for multiple grit scratching and wire saw cutting rig were developped and a series of multiple grit grinding tests are performed. For this purpose, series of scratching tests have been conducted with five different diamond abrasives. The cutting forces and the acoustic emission were used to characterize the grinding mechanism during this experiment. The machining performances of the abrasive grits are evaluated in consideration of the effect of different grit shapes on the grinding process outputs including force and acoustic emission. The experimental results show a high influence of the proportion of different grit shapes on grinding force: abrasive grits with rounded shape imply high cutting forces, while grits with pyramidal shape generate low cutting forces. Furthermore, based on the proportion of the dominant shapes in an abrasive sample a force model of the cutting force and the shape proportion of the abrasives was established. The force model and the experimental results emphasised the importance of taking into consideration the abrasive's shape as a significant parameter that influences the grinding process. The online grinding surface creation monitoring was carried out by processing the acoustic emission signals. The acoustic emission signals are analysed in both the time and frequency domains. The results show that the signal feature extraction in the frequency domain gives excellent indication in correlation to the surface creation with different abrasive geometrical characteristics.


This paper synthesizes a set of twelve case studies of real-world governance structures. Together with the underlying case studies, it is the result of a globally coordinated, independent academic research pilot project by the Global Network of Interdisciplinary Internet & Society Research Centers (NoC). Facilitated by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, this study examines existing multistakeholder governance groups with the goal of informing the evolution of — and current debate around — the future evolution of the Internet governance ecosystem in light of the NETmundial Principles and Roadmap, discussions at the Internet Governance Forum, and the NETmundial Initiative, as well as other forums, panels, and committees.Internet governance is an increasingly complex concept that operates at multiple levels and in different dimensions, making it necessary to have a better understanding of both how multistakeholder governance groups operate and how they best achieve their goals. With this need in mind, at a point where the future of Internet governance is being re-envisioned, this project aims to deepen our understanding of the formation, operation, and critical success factors of governance groups (and even challenge conventional thinking) by studying a geographically diverse set of local, national, and international governance models, components, and mechanisms from within and outside of the sphere of Internet governance, with a focus on lessons learned.The research effort is grounded in a diversity of global perspectives and collaborative research techniques. Adhering to objective and independent academic standards, it aspires to be useful, actionable, and timely for policymakers and stakeholders. More broadly, the Network of Centers seeks to contribute to a more generalized vision and longer-term strategy for academia regarding its roles in research, facilitation and convening, and education in and communication about the Internet age.


Bacteria from the family Flavobacteriaceae often show low susceptibility to antibiotics. With the exception of two Chryseobacterium spp. isolates that were positive for the florfenicol resistance gene floR, no clinical resistance genes were identified by microarray in 36 Flavobacteriaceae isolates from salmonid fish that could grow in ≥ 4 mg/L florfenicol. Whole genome sequence analysis of the floR positive isolates revealed the presence of a region that contained the antimicrobial resistance genes floR, a tet(X) tetracycline resistance gene, a streptothricin resistance gene and a chloramphenicol acetyltransferase gene. In silico analysis of 377 published genomes for Flavobacteriaceae isolates from a range of sources confirmed that well-characterised resistance gene cassettes were not widely distributed in bacteria from this group. Efflux pump-mediated decreased susceptibility to a range of antimicrobials was confirmed in both floR positive isolates using an efflux pump inhibitor (phenylalanine-arginine β-naphthylamide) assay. The floR isolates possessed putative virulence factors, including production of siderophores and haemolysins, and were mildly pathogenic in rainbow trout. Results support the suggestion that, despite the detection of floR, susceptibility to antimicrobials in Flavobacteriaceae is mostly mediated via intrinsic mechanisms rather than the horizontally acquired resistance genes more normally associated with Gram-negative bacterial pathogens such as Enterobacteriaceae.


In the U.S. redistricting is deeply politicized and often synonymous with gerrymandering -- the manipulation of boundaries to promote the goals of parties, incumbents, and racial groups. In contrast, Mexico's federal redistricting has been implemented nationwide since 1996 through automated algorithms devised by the electoral management body (EMB) in consultation with political parties. In this setting, parties interact strategically and generate counterproposals to the algorithmically generated plans in a closed-door process that is not revealed outside the bureaucracy. Applying geospatial statistics and large-scale optimization to a novel dataset that has never been available outside of the EMB, we analyze the effects of automated redistricting and partisan strategic interaction on representation. Our dataset comprises the entire set of plans generated by the automated algorithm, as well as all the counterproposals made by each political party during the 2013 redistricting process. Additionally, we inspect the 2006 map with new data and two proposals to replace it towards 2015 in search for partisan effects and political distortions. Our analysis offers a unique insight into the internal workings of a purportedly autonomous EMB and the partisan effects of automated redistricting on representation.


The increasing issues of drug-resistant bacteria has quickly become a global concern as infections spread from healthcare settings to the wider community. The rapid spread of these infections is partly facilitated by a decrease in the development of new drugs.
Because of their antimicrobial properties, ferrocenyl chalcones, which are organometallic chalcone derivatives, have gained attention from researchers. Early classes of ferrocenyl chalcones were reportedly cytotoxic, which encouraged the need to develop next-generation ferrocenyl chalcone compounds that are less toxic.
One-to-one dilutions of stock ferrocenyl chalcone solution and MHB, resulting in the formation of small, brown particles, was suggested to arise from iron ion chelation of casein hydrolysate, a component of MHB. After solubilisation in DMSO, each of the iodine-containing ferrocenyl chalcone compounds, changed from deep red to dark brown. There was no evidence that iodine was displaced when diethyl ether was used.
Using 2-fold broth microdilution, results demonstrated that five of the ten methylated ferrocenyl chalcones, possessed greater antimicrobial activity against resistant and non-resistant Gram-positive organisms than Gram-negative organisms. These compounds contain increasing alkyl chain lengths from pentyl to decyl on ring 'B' of the compounds.
The results of MTT assays of Gram-positive bacteria indicated that there were no viable cells, where the mean (± SD) percentage of actively respiring cells were observed.
SEM images of bacterial cells, which were treated with an active ferrocenyl chalcone, exhibited significant cell membrane damage as ultrastructurally observed.
Key findings of this research indicate that further investigations into these compounds are required so that the inhibition of biofilm formation and the cytotoxicity towards mammalian cells are clearly defined. Additionally, the results advance the possibility that these newly developed ferrocenyl chalcone compounds could be important antimicrobial agents in the treatment of infections from clinically resistant bacteria in an environment where current treatments are failing.


Two fundamental tenants of scientific research are that it can be scrutinized and built-upon. Both require that the collected data and supporting materials be shared, so others can examine, reuse, and extend them. Assessing the accessibility of these components and the paper itself can serve as a proxy for the reliability, replicability, and applicability of a field's research. In this paper, I describe the current state of openness in visualization research and provide suggestions for authors, reviewers, and editors to improve open practices in the field. A free copy of this paper, the collected data, and the source code are available at https://osf.io/qf9na/


Reported near-death experiences (NDEs) have been associated with various extraordinary phenomena, including profound psychological, physiological, and spiritual aftereffects. One specific phenomenon involves electromagnetic aftereffects (EMEs) where technological and electrical equipment malfunctions for no apparent reason. This qualitative pilot study explored EMEs in those reporting NDEs. Ten NDErs were screened with the Near-Death Experience Scale (NDE Scale), and administered the Electromagnetic Effect Questionnaire (EMEQ) to assess EME depth and the Electromagnetic Phenomena Questionnaire (EPQ) to explore the phenomenological experience of EMEs. EME rates found among these NDErs (70%) were congruent with rates reported in previous studies. A preliminary analysis of a second study that is currently under way is also overviewed, highlighting that of 136 NDErs, 71% are reporting EMEs. While quantitative data have not been formally analyzed yet, three case studies are highlighted, and differences between NDErs with and without EMEs are explored.


The quest for sustainable, low-cost and environmental friendly engineering materials has increased the application of natural fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composite. This paper experimentally investigates the effects of variable mean hemp fiber (HF) aspect ratios (ARs) of 00 (neat), aspect ratios AR_19, AR_26, AR_30 and AR_38 on nano-mechanical (hardness, modulus, elasticity and plasticity), surface and thermal properties of hemp fiber/polycaprolactone (HF/PCL) biocomposites. These biocomposites were characterized by nanoindentation, contact angle, surface energy, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), thermal conductivity and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) techniques. After nanoindentation and thermal conductivity tests, the results obtained evidently show that the HF/PCL sample with aspect ratio (AR_26) recorded optimal values. These values include maximum hardness of approximately 0.107 GPa, elastic modulus of 1.094 GPa, and plastic and elastic works of 1.580 and 1.210 nJ, respectively as well as maximum thermal conductivity of 0.2957 W/mK, when compared with other samples. Similarly, the optimal sample exhibits highest main degradable temperature and degree of crystallinity of 432 ℃ and 60.6%, respectively. Further results obtained for the total surface energies and contact angles of these samples with glycerol and distilled water are significant for their materials selection, design, manufacturing and various applications.


Gender is one of the most pervasive and insidious forms of inequality. For example, English-language Wikipedia contains more than 1.5 million biographies about notable writers, inventors, and academics, but less than 19% of these biographies are about women. To try and improve these statistics, activists host "edit-a-thons" to increase the visibility of notable women. While this strategy helps create several biographies previously inexistent, it fails to address a more inconspicuous form of gender exclusion. Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and quantitative analysis of web-scraped metadata, this article demonstrates that biographies about women who meet Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion are more frequently considered non-notable and nominated for deletion compared to men's biographies. This disproportionate rate is another dimension of gender inequality previously unexplored by social scientists and provides broader insights into how women's achievements are (under)valued.


We examined the adenomatous polyposis coli (APC) gene for disease‐causing mutations in 51 unrelated Argentinean probands affected by familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP). Using a combination of the protein truncation test, the single strand conformation polymorphism technique, DNA sequencing and quantitative PCR analysis, we identified the specific mutation in 39 (average age: 28.4 years) of the 51 probands (detection rate: 76.47%); 13 are novel germline mutations and one is a novel sequence variant. There were 27 small deletions, four small duplications, five nonsense mutations in exon 15, three nonsense mutations in exons 6, 11, and 12, and one sequence variant in exon 3 identified in a patient bearing a truncating mutation in exon 15. The most common mutation (found in 10 cases) was at codon 1309. All patients negative for APC mutations were also negative for the MutY homolog (MYH) gene mutation, as expected because of fully penetrant FAP cases. This study enlarges the spectrum of APC gene mutations, and reinforces the concept of mutation heterogeneity. It also sheds light on correlations between the site of APC germline mutations and the clinical manifestations of FAP. Our data indicate that the genotype/phenotype correlations in Argentinean patients are similar to those observed in other populations. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.


Adroid Application Testing Guide is a highly detailed book which gives step-by-step examples for a great variety of real-world cases, providing professional guidelines and recommendations that will be extremely valuable for optimizing your development time and resources. In the chapters you will find an introduction to specific testing techniques, and tools for specific situations. If you are an Android developer looking to test your applications or optimize your application development process, then this book is for you. No previous experience in application testing is required.


1,2-Aromatic diesters can be transformed into strained bridged polycyclic structures by a two-step procedure consisting of an initial reductive alkylation promoted by alkaline metals, followed by a reaction of the resulting unsaturated diesters with Me3SnLi. We propose that a stanna-Brook rearrangement plays a fundamental role in the formation of the polycyclic organotin acetals obtained. These unusual compounds could be further functionalized by tin-lithium exchange followed by alkylation of the newly formed tertiary carbanion. Alternatively, dialkylated aromatic hydrocarbons have been prepared via a decarbonilation reaction promoted by Me3SnLi. 1,4-Aromatic diesters were reductively dialkylated and then transformed into norbornadienone derivatives by reaction with Me3SnLi. Several stable dibenzonorbornadienones 41 have been prepared in just two steps starting from anthracene 38. The corresponding naphthalene analogues gave 1,4-dialkylnaphthalenes. The synthetic protocols described provide access to structures that are not easily obtained through existing synthetic methodologies.


The 3D kinematic evolution of thrust systems, in which vergence changes along strike, is poorly understood. This study uses 3D seismic data from Big Piney-LaBarge field, Wyoming, to examine the geometry and kinematics of two faults at the leading edge of the Hogsback thrust sheet, the frontal thrust of the Late Cretaceous Sevier fold-thrust belt. These thrusts lie along strike of each another and share an east-vergent detachment within the Cretaceous Baxter Shale. The two thrusts verge in opposite directions: The southern thrust verges eastward forming a frontal ramp consistent with major thrusts of the Sevier belt, whereas the northern thrust verges westward to form a type 1 triangle zone with the Hogsback thrust. The thrusts have strike lengths of 5 km (3.1 mi) and 8 km (5.0 mi), respectively, and they are separated by a transfer zone of less than 0.5 km (0.3 mi) wide. Strata in the transfer zone appear to be relatively undeformed, but reflections are less coherent here, which suggests small offsets unresolved by the seismic survey. Retrodeformable cross sections and a structure contour map on the Cretaceous Mesaverde Group indicate that shortening varies along strike, with a pronounced minimum at the transfer zone and greater shortening across the northern, west-vergent thrust (610 m [2000 ft]) than across the southern, east-vergent thrust (230 m [755 ft]). Mapping of these thrusts suggests that they propagated laterally toward each other to form a type 1 antithetic fault linkage in the transfer zone. Spatial patterns expressed in seismic attributes in and near the detachment horizon, which include waveform classification and spectral decomposition, suggest that stratigraphic variations may have pinned the detachment, thus localizing the transfer zone. Thickness variations in the thrust sheet also may have influenced the thrust geometry. Our study provides an analog for analysis of similar complex contractional belts around the world.


Introduction: This in vitro study aimed to compare the antimicrobial effect of lavandula 0fficinalis extract, with sodium hypochlorite (NaOCL) and chlorhexidine gluconate (CHX), as root canal irrigants, on Enterococcus faecalis (EF). Materials &Methods: Seventy five extracted single-rooted premolars were selected. Root canals were prepared using rotary ProTaper system and were infected with the culture of E. faecalis. Specimens were randomly divided into five groups (n = 15), Group 1, 2: lavandula extracts (0.26 and 0.52 mg/mL), Group 3: 2.5%NaOCL, Group 4: 2%CHX, Group 5: Normal Saline. Irrigation was performed for each group for 5, 10 and 15 min. The viable bacteria obtained by collecting the canal dentin chips. Data analysis was performed with Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney u tests. Results: The mean number of viable bacteria was significantly reduced after 5 min exposure to lavandula solutions (p<0.05). A significant difference also existed between different times in the NaOCL group, being significant between 5 and 15 min (p<0.05), but there was no significant difference between different times in the CHX group. Comparison of the mean number of viable bacteria between different groups at different exposure times revealed that the difference between lavandula and NaOCL solutions with CHX was significant at 5 and 10 min (p<0.05), however, no statistically significant difference was observed between lavandula solutions and NaOCL. Conclusion: lavandula extract was effective in killing of EF. Further studies are necessary to fully understand its other properties such as tissue solubility, removal of smear layer and impact on dentin structure.


A global assessment of fishing patterns and fishing pressure from 110 different Ecopath models, representing marine ecosystems throughout the world and covering the period 1970–2007, show that human exploitation across trophic levels (TLs) is highly unbalanced and skewed towards low productive species at high TLs, which are around two TLs higher than the animal protein we get from terrestrial farming. Overall, exploitation levels from low trophic species were 40% of their production. Generally, well-managed fisheries from temperate ecosystems were more selectively harvested at higher exploitation rates than tropical and upwelling (tropical and temperate) fisheries, resulting in potentially larger long-term changes to the ecosystem structure and functioning. The results indicate a very inefficient utilization of the food energy value of marine production. Rebuilding overfished components of the ecosystem and changing focus to balancing exploitation across a wider range of TLs, i.e. balanced harvesting, has the potential to significantly increase overall catches from global marine fisheries.


Green formulae for elliptic cone differential operators are established. This is achieved by an accurate description of the maximal domain of an elliptic cone differential operator and its formal adjoint; thereby utilizing the concept of a discrete asymptotic type. From this description, the singular coefficients replacing the boundary traces in classical Green formulas are deduced.


A series of novel chalcone tethered sulphonamide hybrids 3a-5f were fabricated by condensing appropriate sulphonamide scaffold with methoxy and/or hydroxy substituted chalcones as a multi-target drug for therapeutic treatment. Chalcones were prepared by Claisen-Schmidt condensation of a substituted aldehyde with para aminoacetophenone. The synthesized chalconesulphonamide hybrids were screened by means of their antibacterial activity by NCCLS method. Among all these compounds, 5e and 5c were observed to displaying more potent growth inhibitory activity against bacterial strain and hybrid 5a shows more obvious antifungal activity. FT-IR, NMR and HR-LCMS spectral study assert the structures of synthesized sulphonamide chalcone hybrids.


Objectives: In this study, the effect of shoe degradation on running biomechanics by comparing the kinetics and kinematics of running in new and worn shoes was investigated. Three types of footwear using different cushioning technologies were compared. Design: Longitudinal study. Setting: Pre- and post-tests on overground running at 4.5 m s−1 on a 20-m laboratory runway; performance measured using a force platform and a motion capture system. Participants: 24 runners (14 men and 10 women) Interventions: 200 miles of road running in the same pair of shoes. Within-group factor: shoe condition (new/worn); between-group factor: footwear type (air/gel/spring). Main outcome measurements: Stance time was calculated from force data. External loads were measured by maximum vertical force and loading rate. Kinematic changes were indicated by sagittal plane angles of the torso, hip, knee and ankle at critical events during the stance phase. Results: Stance time increased (p = 0.035) in worn shoes. The torso displayed less maximum forward lean (p<0.001) and less forward lean at toe-off (p<0.001), while the ankle displayed reduced maximum dorsiflexion (p = 0.013) and increased plantar flexion at toe-off (p<0.001) in worn shoes. No changes in the hip and knee angles. No between-group difference among the three footwear groups or condition by type interaction was found in any measured variables. Conclusions: As shoe cushioning capability decreases, runners modify their patterns to maintain constant external loads. The adaptation strategies to shoe degradation were unaffected by different cushioning technologies, suggesting runners should choose shoes for reasons other than cushioning technology.


Quality of service is one of the important steps in creating customer satisfaction. In the past, the quality of service was important for only companies that produce just goods, now it has become important for companies that produce goods and services. Therefore, the aim of this study is to measure the service quality perceptions of university students. Accordingly, the questions were asked by using questionnaire technique to students of tourism department at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University. A total of 300 questionnaires were distributed with a return rate of 240. According to the results of the research and the perception of tourism students according to their classes, it is found that 4th grade students have more positive perceptions of teaching quality than the 2nd grade students. It was also found that students with a high GPA were more positive than low GPA students. According to the results of the regression analysis, participants' perception of teaching quality shows that they are satisfied with 41%. A unit increase in the variables of "good education" and "general skills" from the independent a variable was found to have a positive effect on satisfaction.


Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are increasingly investigated with regard to their potential to create and update (cadastral) maps. UAVs provide a flexible and low-cost platform for high-resolution data, from which object outlines can be accurately delineated. This delineation could be automated with image analysis methods to improve existing mapping procedures that are cost, time and labor intensive and of little reproducibility. This study investigates a superpixel approach, namely simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC), in terms of its applicability to UAV data. The approach is investigated in terms of its applicability to high-resolution UAV orthoimages and in terms of its ability to delineate object outlines of roads and roofs. Results show that the approach is applicable to UAV orthoimages of 0.05 m GSD and extents of 100 million and 400 million pixels. Further, the approach delineates the objects with the high accuracy provided by the UAV orthoimages at completeness rates of up to 64 %. The approach is not suitable as a standalone approach for object delineation. However, it shows high potential for a combination with further methods that delineate objects at higher correctness rates in exchange of a lower localization quality. This study provides a basis for future work that will focus on the incorporation of multiple methods for an interactive, comprehensive and accurate object delineation from UAV data. This aims to support numerous application fields such as topographic and cadastral mapping.


Neuroscientists have long struggled with the conundrum that the same receptor can mediate opposing changes in synaptic efficacy, sometimes producing long-term potentiation (LTP) and sometimes producing long-term depression (LTD). Liu et al. (see the Perspective by Bliss and Schoepfer) found evidence in hippocampal brain slices for the presence of two mechanistically distinct plasticity mechanisms involving N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) subtype glutamate receptors with different subunit compositions. LTP requires NMDA receptors that contain the NR2A subunit, whereas LTD requires NMDA receptors containing NR2B. The results provide a rationale for regional differences in plasticity and for developmental changes in the polarity of synaptic change. L. Liu, T. P. Wong, M. F. Pozza, K. Lingenhoehl, Y. Wang, M. Sheng, Y. P. Auberson, Y. T. Wang, Role of NMDA receptor subtypes in governing the direction of hippocampal synaptic plasticity. Science 304, 1021-1024 (2004). [Abstract] [Full Text] T. Bliss, R. Schoepfer, Controlling the ups and downs of synaptic strength. Science 304, 973-974 (2004). [Summary] [Full Text]


Ayurveda is the most ancient system of medicine practised in India. While treating a patient Ayurveda considers both the disease and diseased person too. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune and inflammatory disorder of multiple joint pain & swelling. It has also systemic effect. During the course of disease some inflammatory markers are elevated in the blood like rheumatoid factor (RF), anti cyclic citrullinated peptide antibody (anti CCPab), C-reactive protein (CRP), and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR). In Ayurveda amavata is a similar disease which keeps clinical correlation with RA. Madhava Nidana, a text of 7 th AD first described this disease. Present clinical trial was carried out on 17 patients selected from the Sir Sundar Lal Hospital, IMS, BHU, Varanasi.For this study Eranda Taila (castor oil), Ajmodadi churna (polyherbal compound) and dry fomentation (Ruksha sweda) were used which are mentioned in Chakradutta. There was quite improvement in clinical symptoms and elevated blood levels of inflammatory mediators of the disease.


Epidemic-based communications, or 'gossiping', provides a robust and scalable method for maintaining a knowledge base in a sensor network faced with an unpredictable network environment. Since sensed information is often periodic in time, protocols should be able to manage multiple messages in an efficient way. We describe a mathematical model of gossiping dealing with multiple messages. We present simulation results that suggest the model can provide insights into the design and optimisation of sensor networks in the case of dissemination of periodically generated data. We show that it is possible to control data freshness without increasing overhead, and quantify the importance of topology in achieving timely dissemination.


Consumer-grade imaging sensors have become ubiquitous in the past decade. Images and videos, collected from such sensors are used by many entities for public and private communications, including publicity, advocacy, disinformation, and deception. In this thesis, we present tools to be able to extract knowledge from and understand this imagery and its provenance. Many images and videos are modified and/or manipulated prior to their public release. We also propose a set of forensics and counter-forensic techniques to determine the integrity of this multimedia content and modify it in specific ways to deceive adversaries. The presented tools are evaluated using publicly available datasets and independently organized challenges.


We present preliminary trigonometric parallaxes and proper motions for 22 L dwarfs and 18 T dwarfs measured using the ASTROCAM infrared imager on the US Naval Observatory (USNO) 1.55 m Strand Astrometric Reflector. The results presented here are based on observations obtained between 2000 September and 2002 November; about half of the objects have an observational time baseline of Δt = 1.3 yr and half Δt = 2.0 yr. Despite these short time baselines, the astrometric quality is sufficient to produce significant new results, especially for the nearer T dwarfs. Seven objects are in common with the USNO optical CCD parallax program for quality control and seven in common with the European Southern Observatory 3.5 m New Technology Telescope parallax program. We compare astrometric quality with both of these programs. Relative to absolute parallax corrections are made by employing Two Micron All Sky Survey and/or Sloan Digital Sky Survey photometry for reference-frame stars. We combine USNO infrared and optical parallaxes with the best available California Institute of Technology (CIT) system photometry to determine MJ, MH, and MK values for 37 L dwarfs between spectral types L0 and L8 and 19 T dwarfs between spectral types T0.5 and T8 and present selected absolute magnitude versus spectral type and color diagrams, based on these results. Luminosities and temperatures are estimated for these objects. Of special interest are the distances of several objects that are at or near the L-T dwarf boundary so that this important transition can be better understood. The previously reported early to mid T dwarf luminosity excess is clearly confirmed and found to be present at J, H, and K. The large number of objects that populate this luminosity-excess region indicate that it cannot be due entirely to selection effects. The T dwarf sequence is extended to MJ ≈ 16.9 by 2MASS J041519-0935, which, at d = 5.74 pc, is found to be the least luminous [log(L/L⊙) = -5.58] and coldest (Teff ≈ 760 K) brown dwarf known. Combining results from this paper with earlier USNO CCD results we find that, in contrast to the L dwarfs, there are no examples of low-velocity (Vtan < 20 km s-1) T dwarfs. This is consistent with the T dwarfs in this study being generally older than the L dwarfs. We briefly discuss future directions for the USNO infrared astrometry program.


This thesis is devoted to the modeling and simulation of Asymmetric Flow Field Flow Fractionation, which is a technique for separating particles of submicron scale. This process is a part of large family of Field Flow Fractionation techniques and has a very broad range of industrial applications, e. g. in microbiology, chemistry, pharmaceutics, environmental analysis.
Mathematical modeling is crucial for this process, as due to the own nature of the process, lab ex- periments are difficult and expensive to perform. On the other hand, there are several challenges for the mathematical modeling: huge dominance (up to 106 times) of the flow over the diffusion, highly stretched geometry of the device. This work is devoted to developing fast and efficient algorithms, which take into the account the challenges, posed by the application, and provide reliable approximations for the quantities of interest.
We present a new Multilevel Monte Carlo method for estimating the distribution functions on a compact interval, which are of the main interest for Asymmetric Flow Field Flow Fractionation. Error estimates for this method in terms of computational cost are also derived.
We optimize the flow control at the Focusing stage under the given constraints on the flow and present an important ingredients for the further optimization, such as two-grid Reduced Basis method, specially adapted for the Finite Volume discretization approach.


We report on experiments on three new methods to improve text contrast for carbon ink ostraca. These are (1) Raman imaging, (2) Micro-focus XRF scanning and (3) exogenous contrast agents either to enhance the X-ray signal or create an optical fl uorescence signal. We tested all three methods with modern 'stunt' ostraca, made using a variety of carbonbased inks. In each imaging modality, the inks are clearly differentiated from the clay background. The exogenous contrast enhancement, in particular, suggests a variety of approaches to improving text legibility.


Ideology is the framework in which all consumer decisions are made and as such, an understanding of ideology is important for marketers. There is however, little research which conceptualises either what ideology actually is, or the role that it plays in a marketing context. One of the most obvious problems is the tendency for scholars to treat ideology as static, rather than exploring its dynamic nature. This thesis exammes ideological change in the context of a consumer activist movement. The Slow Food movement is a contempor~ry example of such a movement and provides an interesting research case for investigating ideology. The research is guided in that it uses a framework provided by new social movement theorist Alberto Melucci to study ideological change. A number of research propositions are derived from this framework about the form, content and role of ideology and how these vary over time. The histories of the Slow Food movement members are therefore 'told' in this thesis through the eyes of Melucci's criteria. A historical methodology is used to search for evidence based on these research propositions. The data is collected at two different levels of analysis: at an organisational level and an individual activist level. The thesis makes a number of significant theoretical and practical contributions: • The research provides a comprehensive historical narrative of the Slow Food movement. This includes insights into food activists' thoughts and behaviours and how these have changed over time. • The research extends on current marketing conceptualisations of ideology by investigating how it is operationalised in a marketing context. This includes an understanding of how it is co-produced, how it changes over time and how it is used strategically by a consumer activist movement to reach its objectives. In achieving these ends, the research has also extended on several well known marketing concepts and theories by applying them to the research context of ideology. )/ • The research overviews the work done in marketing to date on consumer activist movements and suggests the new title 'consumer activist movement theory' for this body of literature. Building on this, the research then shows how consumer activist movements can be conceptualised as a subset of social movements and how these can be differentiated from other types of collective actions that occur in the marketplace. A systematically logical and simple way of differentiating between different types of consumer activist movements is identified. • The research emphasises the importance of ideology as a leadership resource and provides consumer activist movement leaders with the knowledge of how to approach and assess their movement's ideology. The major finding of this thesis is that Melucci's framework for evaluating ideology when used in conjunction with a number of marketing theories such as tribal marketingis useful in helping marketers understand ideological change in the context of contemporary consumer activist movements. Future research could investigate if this framework can be extended into other contexts such as understanding the ideologies of political parties.


The success of a movie is uncertain but it is no secret that it is dependent to a large extent upon the level of promotion and also upon the ratings received by the major movie critics. Time and money are valuable to the general audience and hence, they refer to the leading critics when making a decision about whether to watch a particular movie or not. Over 1000 movies on an average are produced per year. Therefore, in order to make the movie profitable, it becomes a matter of concern that the movie succeeds. Due to the low success rate, models and mechanisms to predict reliably the ranking and or box office collections of a movie can risk the business significantly. The current predictive models that are available are based on various factors for assessment of the movie. These include the typical factors such as cast, producer, director etc. or the social factors in form of response of the society on various online platforms. Various stakeholders such as actors, financiers, directors etc. can use these predictions to make more informed decisions.


Boundary and edge cues are highly beneficial in improving a wide variety of vision tasks such as semantic segmentation, object recognition, stereo, and object proposal generation. Recently, the problem of edge detection has been revisited and significant progress has been made with deep learning. While classical edge detection is a challenging binary problem in itself, the category-aware semantic edge detection by nature is an even more challenging multi-label problem. We model the problem such that each edge pixel can be associated with more than one class as they appear in contours or junctions belonging to two or more semantic classes. To this end, we propose a novel end-to-end deep semantic edge learning architecture based on ResNet and a new skip-layer architecture where category-wise edge activations at the top convolution layer share and are fused with the same set of bottom layer features. We then propose a multi-label loss function to supervise the fused activations. We show that our proposed architecture benefits this problem with better performance, and we outperform the current state-of-the-art semantic edge detection methods by a large margin on standard data sets such as SBD and Cityscapes.


Background—DNA methylation leaves a long-term signature of smoking exposure and is one potential mechanism by which tobacco exposure predisposes to adverse health outcomes, such as cancers, osteoporosis, lung, and cardiovascular disorders. Methods and Results—To comprehensively determine the association between cigarette smoking and DNA methylation, we conducted a meta-analysis of genome-wide DNA methylation assessed using the Illumina BeadChip 450K array on 15 907 blood-derived DNA samples from participants in 16 cohorts (including 2433 current, 6518 former, and 6956 never smokers). Comparing current versus never smokers, 2623 cytosine–phosphate–guanine sites (CpGs), annotated to 1405 genes, were statistically significantly differentially methylated at Bonferroni threshold of P<1×10−7 (18 760 CpGs at false discovery rate <0.05). Genes annotated to these CpGs were enriched for associations with several smoking-related traits in genome-wide studies including pulmonary function, cancers, inflammatory diseases, and heart disease. Comparing former versus never smokers, 185 of the CpGs that differed between current and never smokers were significant P<1×10−7 (2623 CpGs at false discovery rate <0.05), indicating a pattern of persistent altered methylation, with attenuation, after smoking cessation. Transcriptomic integration identified effects on gene expression at many differentially methylated CpGs. Conclusions—Cigarette smoking has a broad impact on genome-wide methylation that, at many loci, persists many years after smoking cessation. Many of the differentially methylated genes were novel genes with respect to biological effects of smoking and might represent therapeutic targets for prevention or treatment of tobacco-related diseases. Methylation at these sites could also serve as sensitive and stable biomarkers of lifetime exposure to tobacco smoke.


Horizon sensing is an effective way to determine the pitch and roll of a LEO satellite and Earth horizon sensors that operate in the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum are commonly used. These sensors have the disadvantage that they cannot operate when the satellite is in eclipse. Earth horizon sensors that operate in the infrared spectral range are a solution to take attitude measurements when the satellite is in eclipse. Until recently infrared detectors could only operate at very low temperatures and needed to be cryogenically cooled. The result was that their power consumption and physical characteristics (like dimensions and mass) were such that they were not suitable for use in small and medium LEO satellites. As a result of technology expansion in the field of infrared imagers the past few years, infrared imagers were developed which do not require cooling. The scope of this project was to develop and implement an Earth horizon sensor by using a low-cost, uncooled infrared imager. The performance and physical characteristics of various imager were evaluated and it was decided to select a low resolution thermopile imager mainly as a result of the cost limitations of the project. Software algorithms were then evaluated and selected for horizon detection and attitude determination. The Earth horizon sensor that was developed did not comply with the accuracy requirement (3σ < 0.1o) that was set for the project because of the low resolution of the sensor. Methods to improve the accuracy were investigated and finally a sub-pixel edge estimation algorithm was developed and implemented which resulted in an improvement of 69% in the pitch accuracy and 49% in roll accuracy.


In thiswork, an investigation of the steady-state electron transport and transient electron transport at high electric field and low-field electron mobility characteristics ofwurtzite ZnO and Zn1_xMgxO are examined using the ensembleMonte Carlo model. TheMonte Carlo calculations are carried out using a three-valley model for the systems under consideration. The following scattering mechanisms, i.e, impurity, polar optical phonon and acoustic phonon are included in the calculation. Themaximumelectron drift velocity that is obtained at room temperature for 1023 m-3 donor concentrations is 2.36×107 cms-1 for ZnOin threshold field 461 kV/cm.While the maximum electron drifts velocity is 1.65×107 cms-1 for Zn0.95Mg0.05O in threshold field 861 kV/cm. Themaximumelectronmobility for ZnO886 cm2/ V.s and for Zn1_xMgxO in variuos amount x=0.05, 0.1 and 0.2 is 304, 132 and 33 cm2/V.s respectively. It can be seen the peak drift velocity for bulk ZnO is 2.36×107 cms-1, while for Zn1_xMgxO the peak drift velocity decreases due to increasing electron effective mass. The electron mobility of Zno is more than ZnMgo alloysat all temperatures becauseelectron mobility behavior dependence on effective mass and ionized impurity concentration.


Objectives: Developed countries are becoming more multi-ethnic, with consequent problems of maintaining invariance of health questionnaires. We aimed to explore commonalities in the structure of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) completed for young children in a multi-ethnic English cohort while examining potential method effects and misfitting items. The secondary aim was to demonstrate the usefulness of bifactor modelling and exploratory structural equation modelling (ESEM) for kinanthropological research. Methods: We used SDQ data from 3,290 children enrolled in the Born in Bradford cohort, completed by parents (usually the mother) at child age 3 and 4 and teachers at age 5. The factor structure for 11 potential configurations was assessed in each age group using confirmatory factor analysis. ESEM was used to assess misfitting items under the best fitting configuration. Results: The best fitting configuration was a bifactor model of the 2 broader scales and a methods factor, using the 20 difficulties items. Generally, factor loadings increased between age 3 and age 5. Several items contributed to misfit. Conclusions: There was less support for the robustness and hypothesised structure of the SDQ in this sample. Bifactor scores that account for measurement error could be useful if carefully applied in epidemiological and kinanthropological studies in multi-ethnic and/or younger age samples .


Because obligate corallivorous butterflyfish feed exclusively on coral polyps, they are particularly sensitive to changes in coral cover and its spatial distribution. To understand how such differences in coral cover influence obligate corallivores, we examined the densities and foraging behavior of Melon butterflyfish Chaetodon trifasciatus across three reefs in the Lakshadweep archipelago. These reefs suffered differential bleaching mortality after the 2010 El Nino Southern Oscillation, resulting in wide variation in coral cover and community composition. Despite these differences, C. trifasciatus were able to persist at similar densities across reefs. However, our analysis of high-resolution video recordings of multiple focal fish revealed that time budgets, bite rates, and diet selectivity differed significantly. Fish in resource-poor reefs spent more time moving between coral patches and less time foraging than ones in relatively resource-rich reefs. We also found that fish in resource-poor reefs had higher bite rates and were less selective in their foraging. Our results provide novel insights into how obligate corallivores cope with even large differences in resource availability. At a time when we are rapidly losing corals to repeated climate-induced bleaching events, this flexibility may represent a critical mechanism that enables persistence of obligate corallivores in resource-poor reefs, even if it does not guarantee longer-term survival.


The paper presents a signalling exercise with a view to trace emerging dynamics in the development of the services economy in Europe. These dynamics have a direct influence and will trigger off service innovation. Firstly, the drivers of the service economy are presented, many of them fostering service innovation as a way to face new societal and business challenges. Secondly, emerging developments are discussed to identify the most promising service innovation dynamics. Finally, foresight scenarios demonstrate possible future trends of the new service economy. These scenarios are based on a methodology developed and applied in the context of an EC-funded project on Sectoral Innovation Systems. This exercise is performed for the overall set of services activities although a particular focus is given on activities such as knowledge intensive business services and distributive trade services. Results indicate that emerging developments are those related to the reconciliation between industrialisation and customisation associated with ICT, ageing population, sustainable development and service regression and extension dynamics. The cases of knowledge intensive services and distributive trades have shown how different drivers and emerging developments are interrelated and establish different scenarios for future development.


While artificial intelligence (AI) holds promise for addressing societal challenges, issues of exactly which tasks to automate and to what extent to do so remain understudied. We approach this problem of task delegability from a human-centered perspective by developing a framework on human perception of task delegation to AI. We consider four high-level factors that can contribute to a delegation decision: motivation, difficulty, risk, and trust. To obtain an empirical understanding of human preferences in different tasks, we build a dataset of 100 tasks from academic papers, popular media portrayal of AI, and everyday life, and administer a survey based on our proposed framework. We find little preference for full AI control and a strong preference for machine-in-the-loop designs, in which humans play the leading role. Among the four factors, trust is the most correlated with human preferences of optimal human-machine delegation. This framework represents a first step towards characterizing human preferences of AI automation across tasks. We hope this work encourages future efforts towards understanding such individual attitudes; our goal is to inform the public and the AI research community rather than dictating any direction in technology development.


textabstractIn this paper a framework is constructed to hypothesize if and how smart city technologies and urban big data produce privacy concerns among the people in these cities (as inhabitants, workers, visitors, and otherwise). The framework is built on the basis of two recurring dimensions in research about people's concerns about privacy: one dimensions represents that people perceive particular data as more personal and sensitive than others, the other dimension represents that people's privacy concerns differ according to the purpose for which data is collected, with the contrast between service and surveillance purposes most paramount. These two dimensions produce a 2 × 2 framework that hypothesizes which technologies and data-applications in smart cities are likely to raise people's privacy concerns, distinguishing between raising hardly any concern (impersonal data, service purpose), to raising controversy (personal data, surveillance purpose). Specific examples from the city of Rotterdam are used to further explore and illustrate the academic and practical usefulness of the framework. It is argued that the general hypothesis of the framework offers clear directions for further empirical research and theory building about privacy concerns in smart cities, and that it provides a sensitizing instrument for local governments to identify the absence, presence, or emergence of privacy concerns among their citizens.


Sudden unexpected death is a catastrophic complication of acute myocardial infarction. Every unexpected death has an actual or potential medico-legal significance, and in most countries such deaths come under the purview of a medico-legal investigative system. A forensic expert has the responsibility of establishing the cause of death in these unexpected fatalities. Sudden deaths in adults from presumably natural causes occur more frequently than is commonly thought of. Numerically they constitute a significant fraction of the total mortality in any sizeable community. Here in we report a case of a twenty two year old young male who was apparently healthy suddenly developed chest pain and was declared dead on arrival to the hospital. This created suspicion in the minds of the family members, who insisted on an autopsy. External examination did not reveal any significant findings except for bluish discoloration of nails. Gross examination of the heart revealed near total occlusion of the coronaries and a hyperaemic area over the heart due to congested epicardial capillaries. The heart was subjected for histopathological examination which revealed infarction changes thereby aiding the determination of cause of death.


Judge Bryson recently asserted in Association for Molecular Pathology v. US Patent and Trademark Office (dissenting-in-part) that human gene patents "present a significant obstacle to the next generation of innovation in genetic medicine — multiplex tests and whole-genome sequencing." His concern over the impact of gene patents on genetic testing, which coincides with his position that certain gene patents should be declared patent ineligible, reflects a widely held misperception that 20% of human genes are patented in a manner that would necessarily result in infringement by whole genome sequencing and other forms of genetic testing. In fact, the myth that 20% of human genes are patented is based on a gross misreading of a single "Policy Perspective" article published in Science in 2005, and an unfortunate tendency among many commentators to consider gene patents in abstract terms that disregard the critical role of patent claims in limiting the scope of a patent owner's right to exclude. Analysis of the claims of 533 of the of the patents identified in the Science article as "covering" human genes reveals that most do not include a single claim that would be infringed by whole genome sequencing and other forms of genetic testing. In fact, it seems quite likely that, were they to be litigated, few if any of these gene patents would be found to cover genetic testing or whole genome sequencing. Furthermore, a variety of practical limitations on enforcement and remedies appear to render it unlikely that the owners of these patents would be motivated to assert them against providers of whole genome sequencing and other next-generation diagnostic technologies in a manner that would impede progress in this area. There have been numerous instances in which fears that patents would harm biomedical research and medicine have proven in retrospect to have been greatly exaggerated, and history counsels against overreacting to the current controversy over gene patents. Ironically, it might be the case that the next generation of genetic diagnostic testing innovation will be adversely impacted not by too many patents, but by a lack of adequate patent protection.


Primary language impairment (PLI) affects approximately one in 20 young children, who may have difficulties with language in later life. The importance of parent-child interaction (PCI) for language development has been well established. Many early speech and language therapy interventions have focused on modifying characteristics of PCI to enhance opportunities for language learning. However, the success of such programmes is mixed. Furthermore, there is a dearth of literature examining the developmental nature of the relationship between parent and child language with children who have PLI. Using a case study methodology, the present study aimed to understand the dynamics of the relationship between PCI and the trajectories of vocabulary growth of children with PLI.

Four case studies were developed using data from preschool children and their families. Following baseline assessments, data were collected at four time points across 9-10 months. Vocabulary development was examined using MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. Children wore a LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis) recorder at home, which collected naturalistic all-day audio, used to sample PCI for transcription and analysis. The LENA audio was coded to examine how talk varied across everyday activities. In addition, mother-child dyads were video-recorded looking at a picture-book to examine parent teaching behaviours. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with parents to get their perspectives on having a child with PLI.

The findings demonstrated cross-case differences in the trajectories of children's vocabulary growth, which were consistent with differences in maternal talk. Across cases, mothers were generally found to dominate interactions. There was no clear pattern in maternal responsiveness that suggested change over time. However, there was a trend for increased responsiveness during picture-book sharing compared to the naturalistic PCI samples. Mother-child play was infrequent during the LENA recordings. These findings challenge previous research that observed PCI in single, researcher-defined settings such as toy play and its representativeness for understanding PCI more broadly. Further research is discussed, including evaluation of PCI interventions in naturalistic settings to assess integration of strategies. The interviews with parents identified factors to improve engagement and satisfaction with interventions. Understanding individual differences in response to interventions is essential for improving the effectiveness of support for children.


The emergence of Wireless Sensor Networks brought many benefits in different application domains such as collaborative tasks, lower costs, equipment's autonomy and higher tolerance to failures. These advantages made the number of applications that use this kind of network grow in the past few years. Meanwhile, the possibility of employing these systems to trace the movement of an object, which can be part of the network itself, is of great utility. The present work aims at the study and development of a localization system of mobile nodes for Wireless Sensor Networks. Different methods to obtain the distances between network nodes are studied and received signal strength algorithms are developed to synthesize the data and to show the location of the nodes. Finally, simulations and experiments are presented in order to analyze the viability of the developed proposal.


Radical Design Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany 4 June–13 November 2016

Radical Design was the latest in a number of shows, including a special exhibition at the 1996 Architecture Biennale in Venice, devoted to the "radicals" of the 1960s and 1970s.1 That exhibition made clear that the "radical" approach did not concentrate on objects exclusively, but was in fact rather expansive: "from the spoon to the city."2

In the beginning, Radical Design was an informal network, consisting primarily of young Italian architects who had forged friendships over their shared interests.3 Lacking building contracts, they began experimenting on a 1:1 scale, producing objects in practices that straddled the lines between design, art, and theory. This plainly adhered to the Italian tradition of architects who are active as designers and intellectuals as well. But in contrast to the representatives of earlier generations, these new Italian radicals came of age during a period of crisis. Graduates of architecture schools were extremely hard-pressed to secure building contracts in the 1960s.4 Their predicament was exacerbated by an increasing disillusionment with the "great masters" of modernism. Additionally, consumerism and mass production had become facts of life. The young Italians could not tolerate the idea of simply producing attractive objects that would then be absorbed by the systems of unfettered capitalism. Instead, they endeavored to develop designs that would resist mass consumption. Groups …


The topic of executive compensation elicits strong emotions among corporate stakeholders and practitioners. On the one hand are those who believe that chief executive officers in the United States are overpaid. On the other hand are those who believe that CEOs are simply paid the going fair-market rate.Much less effort, however, is put into determining whether total compensation is commensurate with the value of services rendered. We examine the issue and explain how such a calculation might be performed. We ask: How much value creation should be attributable to the efforts of the CEO? What percentage of this value should be fairly offered as compensation? Can the board actually perform this calculation? If not, how does it make rational decisions about pay levels?Topics, Issues and Controversies in Corporate Governance and Leadership: The Closer Look series is a collection of short case studies through which we explore topics, issues, and controversies in corporate governance. In each study, we take a targeted look at a specific issue that is relevant to the current debate on governance and explain why it is so important. Larcker and Tayan are co-authors of the book Corporate Governance Matters, and A Real Look at Real World Corporate Governance.


Capillary electrophoresis (CE) and fluorescence spectroscopy have been used in natural organic matter (NOM) studies. In this study, we characterized five fulvic acids (FAs), six humic acids (HAs), and two unprocessed NOM samples obtained from the International Humic Substances Society (IHSS) using these two analytical methods. The electropherograms of all samples revealed three peak features. The first and third peaks were sharp. The second peak had a broad, hump-shaped feature. The pattern and shapes of these peaks were different among the FA, HA, and unprocessed NOM samples. Excitation-emission matrix (EEM) fluorescence spectroscopic analysis revealed that each of the 13 investigated samples contained four components. However, the relative amounts of the four components varied with sample origin. Autoclaving these samples for 1 h (heat decomposition) produced additional CE peaks and changed portions of the four fluorophore components, indicating that both methods can be used to investigate the dynamics of NOM decomposition. Although four fluorophore components were present in each of the three CE fractions, their relative abundances varied among the three CE fractions. Specifically, Fraction 1 and 2 were rich in Component 1 and 4, but sparse in Component 2, compared with their original samples. Fraction 2 also contained less Component 3. The distribution of the four components in Fraction 3 was similar to that of the original samples. The mutual relevance of data collected from each of the two methods provided novel insight into the correlation of complex NOM fluorescence spectra to specific NOM fractions.


A thorough knowledge of the lateral extent of individual prehistoric ruptures along a fault is necessary to assess the locations and geologic characteristics of boundaries between independent faultrupture segments. Paleoseismic studies employing only trenching may yield insufficient data to evaluate the lateral extent of individual rupture events. Systematic mapping of fault scarps and degradation-equation modeling of relative scarp ages on the Lemhi fault, a range-bounding normal fault in east-central Idaho, provide a method to assess rupture extent and boundaries between rupture segments. The youngest latest Quaternary surface ruptures occurred at distinctly different times on adjacent segments of the fault. The boundaries between rupture segments differ in characteristics, although most are at intersections of the currently active range-bounding fault and mid-Tertiary normal faults. Several major structural and tectonic discontinuities did not form segment boundaries in the most recent rupture cycle or (probably) in the previous cycle. The Lemhi fault illustrates both the importance of preexisting structures in controlling extent of ruptures and the need for detailed analysis along an entire fault zone.


Background/Aims: Sensitive skin (SS), a frequently reported condition in the Western world, has been suggested to be underlined by an impaired skin barrier. The aim of this study was to investigate the skin barrier molecular composition in SS subjects using confocal Raman microspectroscopy (CRS), and to compare it with that of non-SS (NSS) individuals as well as atopic dermatitis (AD) and allergic rhinoconjunctivitis (AR) subjects, who frequently report SS. Methods: Subjects with SS (n = 29), NSS (n = 30), AD (n = 11), and AR (n = 27) were included. Stratum corneum (SC) thickness, water, ceramides/fatty acids, and natural moisturizing factor (NMF) were measured by CRS along with transepidermal water loss and capacitance on the ventral forearm, thenar, and cheek. Sebum levels were additionally measured on the forearm and cheek. Results: No differences between SS and NSS subjects were found regarding SC thickness, water, and NMF content, yet a trend towards lower ceramides/fatty acids was observed in the cheek. Compared to AD subjects, the SS group showed higher ceramides/fatty acid content in the forearm, whereas no differences emerged with AR. The correlation of macroscopic biophysical techniques and CRS was weak, yet CRS confirmed the well-known lower content of NMF and water, and thinner SC in subjects with filaggrin mutations. Conclusion: The skin barrier in SS is not impaired in terms of SC thickness, water, NMF, and ceramides/fatty acid content. The failure of biophysical techniques to follow alterations in the molecular composition of the skin barrier revealed by CRS emphasizes a strong need in sensitive and specific tools for in vivo skin barrier analysis.


Migration, whether freely chosen or forcibly imposed, has been a defining feature of twentieth-century modernity--and much of twentieth-century art. Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers examines life-changing journeys that transplanted artists and intellectuals from one cultural context to another, making clear the critical and creative role that migration, exile, and displacement have played in shaping the story of modern art. Whether manifested in the striking architectural innovations of Nigerian modernism in the 1920s or postmodern works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and black British filmmakers in the 1980s, the multidirectional appropriation and borrowing described in these essays give us new perspectives on twentieth-century art and modernity. Distinguishing between exile and diaspora, emigration and immigration, and "the stranger" and "the other," the book examines the different conditions that structure the artist's experience and aesthetic strategies. From indigenous artists and the question of authorship to the influence of migr art historians on art history, from the aesthetics of the African diaspora to Adrian Piper's metaphorical exile between philosophy and art, these connections and disconnections in a network of traveling cultures continue art history's efforts to come to terms with the postcolonial turn. Kobena Mercer is a writer and critic living in London. He is the editor of Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, Cosmopolitan Modernisms and Discrepant Abstraction, (all published by The MIT Press and inIVA), author of Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, and an inaugural recipient of the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing, presented by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.


A framing premise of this paper is that the sustainability dilemma is not merely an ecological or technical or economic crisis as is usually assumed, but rather it is a crisis rooted in fundamental human nature. More specifically, it is a crisis of human evolutionary success--indeed, we have reached the point where our success is killing us! This interpretation is not part of the conventional sustainability debate for a very simple reason. We human beings--for all that we suppose ourselves to be evidence of intelligent life on earth--really fail to understand who we are. We have a very limited understanding of what motivates us, why it is we do certain things that we do. Little wonder that human nature is hardly on the sustainability radar. At the heart of this problem is the fact that people today rarely think of themselves as biological beings. It comes to mind from time to time if one has heart palpitations or some other illness but, on the whole, we modems don't like to think of ourselves as biological entities. But indeed we are--we are products of evolution, and our behaviour both as individuals and as society represents a delicate dialectic between self-conscious reasoning and deeper and sometimes darker unconscious urges and predispositions. The fact is that we humans have a long evolutionary history and many of the traits that we've acquired along the way, traits that were adaptive 50,000 years ago, are with us still. But now some of these once-desirable qualities may threaten humanity's future prospects. That is, some characteristic human qualities and behaviours may well now be maladaptive. I will try to make the case that these ancient traits are such that techno-industrial society in particular is inherently unsustainable. The world is ecologically full--but evolution has not provided us with inhibitions against extinguishing other species, against eliminating competing human groups or, indeed, against destroying our earthly habitat(s). In these circumstances, prospects for building civil society, and maintaining the conditions necessary for civilized existence on Earth depend mainly on our capacity to devise mutually beneficial cultural constraints on social behaviour that has become maladaptive on a crowded planet. Of course, if we're going to "fix" ourselves in this way, we need to know more about ourselves. The notion that we are not sufficiently conscious of our own nature has been a persistent theme in the literature of many countries. Listen to Anton Chekhov: "Man will become better only when you make him see what he is like." Or perhaps you prefer W.H. Auden: "We are lived by forces we can scarcely understand." I believe that coming to understand these forces will give us a chance to take a great evolutionary step forward to the point where sound intelligence incorporated into our cultural "programming" holds sway over more well-tested, biologically-determined, but increasingly dangerous behavioural patterns. My second major premise should already be obvious, namely that if humans are the product of evolution, we are also the product of Darwinian natural selection. Uniquely, however, human evolution is as much determined by socio-cultural as by biological factors. This means, of course, that both cultural and biological "mutations" are subject to natural selection. Everyone recognizes that maladaptive physical mutations will be "selected out" in an environment for which they are unsuitable. It is less well appreciated that, like biological mutations, ill-suited socio-cultural patterns can also be selected out. To reiterate this central idea, culture now as much determines the human future as biology but, like disadvantageous physical characteristics, unfit cultural traits will be eliminated by evolutionary forces. We can find support for this assertion in both ancient and more recent history. …


My work in the 1970s and 1980s was developed with the evolving body of work now loosely called 'c e theory'. It centred on notions of authorship, spectatorship and art cinema with specific reference to the films of Carl Dreyer. In my research and writing on Dreyer's film Vampyr I applied the literary concept of the fantastigue to cinema, one of the first substantial theoretical contributions to a
now established area of publication and research. According to one writer' this work was "probably the most ambitious attempt to apply Todorov's approach to cinema", a "notable exception" in the theoretical writing of that time. This was
part of the wider movement associated with SEFT and Screen to interrogate the uncritical realism which dominated 1970s film studies.
In my subsequent writing on Dreyer I explored a structuralist but more psychoanalytically informed discussion of genre, developing the concept of the "Dreyer text" as a way of bringing psychoanalytic concepts to compliment and complicate structuralist notions of authorship and genre.
I was part of a loose group at Screen which was passionate both about cinema and ideas. While polemically defending the new concepts we were bringing to bear on cinema, we were equally concerned with their institutional placing. Our work concentrated both on regimes of looking allowed to the spectator by texts and their institutional placing. We focussed on political and discursive structures of the
cinematic institution and developed a concept of `cinema as social practice'. In particular I pushed for a cultural critique of British Independent cinema and its institutions, which was continued in my work on screen acting. I was also instrumental in extending Screen theory to other visual arts. I felt that the sometime parochialism of film studies lay in part in its separation from analysis of other forms of visual culture.
In my full context statement I wish to explore limitations in the political, semiotic and psychoanalytic models which I (as did many others) adopted at the time. What I now see as Screen theory's 'blind spots' in relation to issues of sexual orientation and race can be traced back to the problematic of this period. My own subsequent research on gay and lesbian cinema as well as film and television projects on screen acting (Acting Tapes) psychoanalysis (Between Two Worlds) and Frantz Fanon (Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask) came out of dissatisfaction with
that earlier project as it was then conceived. The form chosen - the essay and review - reflects the difficulty of thinking through these issues.
[James Donald (ed), 'Fantasy and the Cinema', British Film Institute, London 1989]
In essence my proposal involves looking back at my work around Dreyer and what one could broadly call my `film culture' work, and arguing that what was sometimes felt and described as a theory: practice division between these two
domains could be more usefully thought of in retrospect in terms of two overlapping modes of theoretical production involving different notions of institution, conjuncture, subject etc. In looking again at the strengths and
weaknesses of the work I am submitting here, however, I still expect key terms of subject and history, discourse and institution, to remain in place, modified and nuanced by the substantial range of work in psychoanalysis, cultural studies and queer theory that Screen in part engendered and which my work participated in.


Robert M. Gonyea, Ed.D. Indiana University, Bloomington Abstract The concept of effect size plays a crucial role in assessment, institutional research, and scholarly inquiry, where it is common with large sample sizes to find small relationships that are statistically significant. This study examines the distribution of effect sizes from institutions that participated in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and empirically derives recommendations for their interpretation. The aim is to provide guidelines for researchers, policymakers, and assessment professionals to judge the importance of an effect from student engagement results. The authors argue for the adoption of the recommendations for interpreting effect sizes from statistical comparisons of NSSE data.


Popular microblogging sites such as Tumblr have attracted hundreds of millions of users as a content sharing platform, where users can create rich content in the form of posts that are shared with other users who follow them. Due to the sheer amount of posts created on such services, an important task is to make quality recommendations of blogs for users to follow. Apart from traditional recommender system settings where the follower graph is the main data source, additional side-information of users and blogs such as user activity (e.g., like and reblog) and rich content (e.g., text and images) are also available to be exploited for enhanced recommendation performance. In this paper, we propose a novel boosted inductive matrix completion method (BIMC) for blog recommendation. BIMC is an additive low-rank model for user-blog preferences consisting of two components; one component captures the low-rank structure of follow relationships and the other captures the latent structure using side-information. Our model formulation combines the power of the recently proposed inductive matrix completion (IMC) model (for side-information) together with a standard matrix completion (MC) model (for low-rank structure). Furthermore, we utilize recently developed deep learning techniques to obtain semantically rich feature representations of text and images that are incorporated in BIMC. Experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset from Tumblr illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed BIMC method.


This comparison of the effects of calcium, phosphorus, magnesium and vitamin D on cardiovascular (CV) calcification and bone has shown that in general the micronutrients that promote bone health also protect the arteries. We have shown that adequate amounts of all three minerals should be ingested, paying particular attention to supplementing calcium to bind high phosphorus and to ensure the maximum benefit from supplementing vitamin D. It appears that the optimum intake for bone is >800 mg/d calcium, with postmenopausal women possibly requiring a total intake of >1100mg/d. Both CV and bone studies suggest achieving a serum 25(OH)D level of >75nmol/l. These relationships are valid for a Caucasian population, however, and may not hold in African Americans and Asians. The recent concerns that calcium supplementation may increase CV disease risk has largely proved groundless, with higher calcium intake improving dyslipidaemia, hypertension and mortality. With respect to higher serum phosphate, there is an association with CV calcification and CVD risk even within the normal range, suggesting that the reference ranges may need to be redefined for 'at risk' patients. CV calcification was reduced in CKD patients with magnesium intake in the range 384 669mg/d. When considering the complex interplay of the action of the minerals together with their regulators vitamin D, PTH and FGF23, it is clear that this is a very sophisticated system which attempts to maintain calcium homeostasis to the possible detriment of bone and arteries. This reinforces the need to ensure adequate calcium intake before supplementing vitamin D.


Industry 4.0 has emerged as the perfect scenario for boosting the application of novel artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions to industrial process monitoring and optimization. One of the key elements on this new industrial revolution is the hatching of massive process monitoring data, enabled by the cyber-physical systems (CPS) distributed along the manufacturing processes, the proliferation of hybrid Internet of Things (IoT) architectures supported by polyglot data repositories, and big (small) data analytics capabilities. Industry 4.0 paradigm is data-driven, where the smart exploitation of data is providing a large set of competitive advantages impacting productivity, quality, and efficiency key performance indicators (KPIs). Overall equipment efficiency (OEE) has emerged as the target KPI for most manufacturing industries due to the fact that considers three key indicators: availability, quality, and performance. This chapter describes how different AI and ML solutions can enable a big step forward in industrial process control, focusing on OEE impact illustrated by means of real use cases and research project results.


In many professions daily demand for different shifts varies during the week. The rotating workforce scheduling problem deals with the creation of repeating schedules for such de- mand and is therefore of high practical relevance. This paper investigates solving this real-life problem with several new practically relevant features. This includes early recognition of certain infeasibility criteria, complex rest time constraints regarding weekly rest time, and optimization goals to deal with optimal assignments of free weekends. We introduce a state-of-the-art constraint model and evaluate it with different extensions. The evaluation shows that many real-life in- stances can be solved to optimality using a constraint solver. Our approach is under deployment in a state-of-the-art com- mercial solver for rotating workforce scheduling.


Is government forbidden to assist all religions equally, as the Supreme Court has held? Or does the First Amendment merely ban exclusive aid to one religion, as critics of the Court assert? After years of debate the controversy still rages on, with both positions now more solidified but neither side victorious. The First Freedoms studies the Church-State context of colonial and revolutionary America to provide a bold new reading of the historical meaning of the religion clauses of the First Amendment. Synthesizing and interpreting a wealth of evidence from the founding of Virginia to the passage of the Bill of Rights, including everything published in America before 1791, Thomas Curry traces America's developing ideas on religious liberty and offers the most extensive investigation ever of the historical origins and background of the First Amendment religion clauses. While recognizing that history cannot resolve all modern Church-State issues, Thomas Curry does show that historians can make some definitive statements about what early Americans understood by establishment and the free exercise of religion. This pathbreaking study has been adopted by the History Book Club.


Aeon mall is company from Japan, and joint venture with Sinarmas Land for PT.AMSL Indonesia. Aeon mall grand opening in BSD, Tangerang 30 May 2015, after two years from the opening Aeon Mall has already many visitors from area in Jabodetabek.  Marketing mix approach is used from Morrison (2002) product, price, place, promotion, people, packaging and programming, also partnership. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of marketing mix based on Morrison theories to visitor decision of visiting Aeon Mall. This research used descriptive method approach. The population in this study is Aeon Mall visitors. The respondent was chosen by random sampling. The numbers of respondents are 218 people. The data was collected by distributing questionnaires. The analysis technique used validity and reliability, frequencies, mean, the classical assumption test, t-test, f-test, regression analysis, hypothesis test and coefficient of determination by using SPSS for windows 20.0. The study found that there was a positive and significant impact of product, promotion, and partnership to visitor's decision of visiting Aeon Mall. But there wasn't a positive and significant effect of price, place, people, packaging and programing to the visitor's decision of visiting Aeon Mall.


The Vector Space Model (VSM) of text representation suffers a number of limitations for text classification. Firstly, the VSM is based on the Bag-Of-Words (BOW) assumption where terms from the indexing vocabulary are treated independently of one another. However, the expressiveness of natural language means that lexically different terms often have related or even identical meanings. Thus, failure to take into account the semantic relatedness between terms means that document similarity is not properly captured in the VSM. To address this problem, semantic indexing approaches have been proposed for modelling the semantic relatedness between terms in document representations. Accordingly, in this thesis, we empirically review the impact of semantic indexing on text classification. This empirical review allows us to answer one important question: how beneficial is semantic indexing to text classification performance. We also carry out a detailed analysis of the semantic indexing process which allows us to identify reasons why semantic indexing may lead to poor text classification performance. Based on our findings, we propose a semantic indexing framework called Relevance Weighted Semantic Indexing (RWSI) that addresses the limitations identified in our analysis. RWSI uses relevance weights of terms to improve the semantic indexing of documents. A second problem with the VSM is the lack of supervision in the process of creating document representations. This arises from the fact that the VSM was originally designed for unsupervised document retrieval. An important feature of effective document representations is the ability to discriminate between relevant and non-relevant documents. For text classification, relevance information is explicitly available in the form of document class labels. Thus, more effective document vectors can be derived in a supervised manner by taking advantage of available class knowledge. Accordingly, we investigate approaches for utilising class knowledge for supervised indexing of documents. Firstly, we demonstrate how the RWSI framework can be utilised for assigning supervised weights to terms for supervised document indexing. Secondly, we present an approach called Supervised Sub-Spacing (S3) for supervised semantic indexing of documents. A further limitation of the standard VSM is that an indexing vocabulary that consists only of terms from the document collection is used for document representation. This is based on the assumption that terms alone are sufficient to model the meaning of text documents. However for certain classification tasks, terms are insufficient to adequately model the semantics needed for accurate document classification. A solution is to index documents using semantically rich concepts. Accordingly, we present an event extraction framework called Rule-Based Event Extractor (RUBEE) for identifying and utilising event information for concept-based indexing of incident reports. We also demonstrate how certain attributes of these events e.g. negation, can be taken into consideration to distinguish between documents that describe the occurrence of an event, and those that mention the non-occurrence of that event.


We study the relationship between school organizational contexts, teacher turnover, and student achievement in New York City (NYC) middle schools. Using factor analysis, we construct measures of four distinct dimensions of school climate captured on the annual NYC School Survey. We identify credible estimates by isolating variation in organizational contexts within schools over time. We find that improvements in school leadership especially, as well as in academic expectations, teacher relationships, and school safety are all independently associated with corresponding reductions in teacher turnover. Increases in school safety and academic expectations also correspond with student achievement gains. These results are robust to a range of threats to validity suggesting that our findings are consistent with an underlying causal relationship.


We introduce a technique for simultaneously measuring the time-dependent intensity and phase of two independent and arbitrary ultrashort laser pulses from a single measured spectrogram. This two-pulse method is mathematically equivalent to the problem of blind deconvolution, and we use an algorithm analogous to those used for deblurring two-dimensional images to recover the two pulses. We demonstrate the method by simultaneously retrieving the intensity and the phase of two different pulses from a Ti:sapphire laser, one of which is chirped by propagation through glass.


A multiphoton-ionization apparatus utilizing a time-of-flight mass spectrometer as a detector of parent and fragment ions is described. Results for the multiphoton resonant ionization and the fragmentation of benzene are presented together with an accurate numerical evaluation of the photoionization probability. The comparison between our experimental and numerical results offers the possibility of estimating the value of the two-photon ionization cross section from the 1B2u excited state of benzene, which is not yet established.


This text sets out dispute resolution techniques for international business. It explains how both international commercial arbitration and the relevant alternative techniques actually work in practice, and discusses ways in which they can be combined in effective and efficient conflict management. Based on a comprehensive empirical analysis of the process of international arbitration, the text uncovers a fundamental conflict between the effectiveness of any mediation attempts by the arbitrator and the integrity of the arbitration process. The author proposes the insertion of neatly separated "mediation windows" into ongoing arbitration proceedings, thus combining the benefits of arbitration and mediation in a way that allows mediation to be effective without compromising the arbitration procedure.


China's Unequal Treaties: Narrating National History, by Dong Wang. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005. x + 179 pp. US$60.00 (hardcover). In China's Unequal Treaties, Dong Wang examines the linguistic development and polemical uses of the term "unequal treaties" in relation to the nationbuilding process experienced by modern China. She investigates the effects of the management of collective memory on the narration and interpretation of China's recent past and the resultant manipulation of patriotism by rulers and political parties competing for authority and legitimacy. Her arguments are spread over 5 chapters. The first examines the changing perception and behavior of the Qing rulers and scholars managing the treaty system. Although the term "unequal treaties" had not yet gained currency, some related concepts were brewing. The second chapter casts light on the dual policy employed by the Foreign Ministry of the Beijing government. The Ministry made efforts to implement the treaty regulations at the local level while contesting the legal validity of unequal treaties at the diplomatic one. The next three chapters make this book outstanding. The third chapter teases out the influential work done by the KMT and the CCP during the 1920s to delineate the parameter of unequal treaties rhetoric as a newly invented political lexicon. Catchphrases like "national humiliations" and "imperialists' oppression" permeated the discourse of this period. Both parties made use of such rhetoric to awaken society, despite the rhetoric itself being ambiguous and legally undefined in essence. The fourth chapter further analyzes the rivalry of the parties over the unequal treaties during the next two decades when the discourse was utilized in an intense political struggle. During this period both parties criticized the unequal treaties in chorus, but differed widely over who deserved the crown of legitimated redeemer and genuine savior of the nation. The final success of the CCP, to a certain extent, hinges on having employed aggressive and effective propaganda tactics to discredit the misconduct of the KMT government. After unveiling the politics of unequal treaties discourse, the last chapter concludes with a focus on China's particular experience of indigenizing international law in turbulent socio-political circumstances. It emphasizes that the context of China's own culture and history at a specific period of time should be considered seriously when exploring the entangled relationship of unequal treaties rhetoric, nationalism and the interpretation of the past. Nowadays, unequal treaties rhetoric has become a fixed paradigm in the Chinese mindset. The framework of this book connects to the well-known "China-centered approach" stressed by the eminent Sinologist Paul A. …


Human mucosal associated invariant T (MAIT) CD8(+) and Tc17 cells are important tissue-homing cell populations, characterized by high expression of CD161 ((++)) and type-17 differentiation, but their origins and relationships remain poorly defined. By transcriptional and functional analyses, we demonstrate that a pool of polyclonal, precommitted type-17 CD161(++)CD8αβ(+) T cells exist in cord blood, from which a prominent MAIT cell (TCR Vα7.2(+)) population emerges post-natally. During this expansion, CD8αα T cells appear exclusively within a CD161(++)CD8(+)/MAIT subset, sharing cytokine production, chemokine-receptor expression, TCR-usage, and transcriptional profiles with their CD161(++)CD8αβ(+) counterparts. Our data demonstrate the origin and differentiation pathway of MAIT-cells from a naive type-17 precommitted CD161(++)CD8(+) T-cell pool and the distinct phenotype and function of CD8αα cells in man.