Light plays a major signaling role in plant growth and development, which
directly involves plant photoreceptors. UV-B radiation (280-320nm) is also an integral
component of sunlight that may cause damage to macromolecules or activate adaptive
responses. Using genes known to be UV-inducible from previous microarray
experiments, I measured gene expression after UV-B exposure using real-time PCR in
wild-type Arabidopsis seedlings, and then compared wild-type gene expression to
expression in a putative UV-B photoreceptor mutant. I also monitored the effect of UV-B
on growth, which was measured by leaf rosette diameter. In two experimental settings,
there were significant differences between treatments (Mylar and cellulose diacetate),
genotypes (mutant and wild-type), and their interaction. Based on these results, I
conclude that the candidate gene fits the phenotype of a UV-B photoreceptor and confers
increased growth in the greenhouse when the photoreceptor is present in plants exposed
to UV-B radiation.


This paper proposes a technique to build the data structure for finding the second simple shortest paths on a model of associative parallel processors (the STAR-machine). It includes three associative parallel algorithms represented on the STAR-machine as the corresponding procedures. We prove the correctness of these procedures and evaluate their time complexity. Among these algorithms, the new version of the Dijkstra algorithm and the associative parallel algorithm for finding the matrix of tree paths can be used to solve other graph problems on the STAR-machine.


In the wake of burgeoning international activities and collaborative venues in S&T, rich industrial countries have taken to science diplomacy to strengthen their innovative capacities or to foster cross-border civil relations. Apart from some theoretical considerations and empirical case studies, however, we still know little about its different objectives or the strategies, administrative procedures and resources deployed at this fuzzy intersection of S&T policy and foreign affairs. Presenting findings of a comparative study of six countries' science diplomacy, this article puts forward some simple heuristics to account for different programmatic styles and organizational patterns in this emerging field. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.


After being told their current series Perfect Crime Party will not be turned into an anime, Moritaka and Akito start planning on ways to create a second series. Their best chance might be to do well in a new contest where they will compete with their rivals over who can create the best romance story.


1. Introduction: A tale of two cities - auto plant closures and policy responses in Birmingham and Adelaide Andrew Beer and Holli Thomas 2. Supply chains and locational adjustment in the global automotive industry Ho-Yeon Kim and Philip McCann 3. Rover and out? Globalisation, the West Midlands auto cluster, and the end of MG Rover David Bailey, Seiji Kobayashi and Stewart MacNeill 4. Birmingham: whose urban renaissance? Regeneration as a response to economic restructuring Austin Barber and Stephen Hall 5. The housing and neighbourhood impacts of knowledge-based economic development following industrial closure Alex Burfitt and Ed Ferrari 6. The impact of factory closure on local communities and economies: the case of the MG Rover Longbridge closure in Birmingham Caroline Chapain and Alan Murie 7. Risk and return: housing tenure and labour market adjustment after employment loss in the automotive sector in southern Adelaide Andrew Beer 8. Closure of an automotive plant: transformation of a work-based 'community' Fiona Verity and Gwyn Jolley 9. Auto plant closures, policy responses and labour market outcomes: a comparison of MG Rover in the UK and Mitsubishi in Australia Kathy Armstrong, David Bailey, Alex de Ruyter, Michelle Mahdon and Holli Thomas 10. A tale of two regions: comparative versus competitive approaches to economic restructuring Holli Thomas, Andrew Beer and David Bailey


In this meticulously researched book, Oliver Hilmes paints a fascinating and revealing picture of the extraordinary Cosima Wagner-illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt, wife of the conductor Hans von Bulow, then mistress and subsequently wife of Richard Wagner. After Wagner's death in 1883 Cosima played a crucial role in the promulgation and politicization of his works, assuming control of the Bayreuth Festival and transforming it into a shrine to German nationalism. The High Priestess of the Wagnerian cult, Cosima lived on for almost fifty years, crafting the image of Richard Wagner through her organizational ability and ideological tenacity. The first book to make use of the available documentation at Bayreuth, this biography explores the achievements of this remarkable and obsessive woman while illuminating a still-hidden chapter of European cultural history.


Ignition delay times of tetraethoxysilane (TEOS) mixtures diluted with dry and humid synthetic air were measured behind reflected shock waves by monitoring the chemiluminescence emission of the CH* radical near 431 nm. The measurements were carried out for temperatures ranging from 1150 to 1350 K and an average pressure of 8 bar. The ignition-delay times of TEOS were determined as a function of water concentration. Additionally, TEOS stability in presence of humid air was investigated by means of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) to insure that the mixture does not react prior to shock-wave heating. The results show that the stability of TEOS is not affected under the experimental conditions but that the presence of moisture in the TEOS/air mixture increases the ignition-delay times systematically.


Sierra/SolidMechanics (Sierra/SM) is a Lagrangian, three-dimensional code for the analysis of solids and structures. It provides capabilities for explicit dynamic and implicit quasistatic and dynamic analyses. The explicit dynamics capabilities allow for the efficient and robust solution of models subjected to large, suddenly applied loads. For implicit problems, Sierra/SM uses a multi-level iterative solver, which enables it to effectively solve problems with large deformations, nonlinear material behavior, and contact. Sierra/SM has a versatile library of continuum and structural elements, and an extensive library of material models. The code is written for parallel computing environments, and it allows for scalable solutions of very large problems for both implicit and explicit analyses. It is built on the SIERRA Framework, which allows for coupling with other SIERRA mechanics codes. This document describes the functionality and input structure for Sierra/SM.


Online social networking technologies enable individuals to simultaneously share information with any number of peers. Quantifying the causal effect of these mediums on the dissemination of information requires not only identification of who influences whom, but also of whether individuals would still propagate information in the absence of social signals about that information. We examine the role of social networks in online information diffusion with a large-scale field experiment that randomizes exposure to signals about friends' information sharing among 253 million subjects in situ. Those who are exposed are significantly more likely to spread information, and do so sooner than those who are not exposed. We further examine the relative role of strong and weak ties in information propagation. We show that, although stronger ties are individually more influential, it is the more abundant weak ties who are responsible for the propagation of novel information. This suggests that weak ties may play a more dominant role in the dissemination of information online than currently believed.


Concentration of chlorophyll is an adequate parameter for assessing the trophic state of lagoon ecosystems. Objectives of this study are: selection of a system of bioindicators to enable a good qualitative evaluation of the trophic state of the lagoons and their dynamics; evaluation of seasonal water quality variability and comparison between lagoons. The trophic state of the lagoons is analysed every month over the year. Water samples are retrieved at four different sites (exact coordinates) each month, sites that are representative of different water circulation systems at each lagoon. The trophic level in the respective lagoons is thus assessed through selection of an adequate system of bioindicators, in order to observe the oscillations of the amount of chlorophyll and therefore to determine the level of eutrophication. Based on the above parameters, the comparison of the trophic state in these two lagoons has shown that they have different trophic states.


Understanding how political attention is divided and over what subjects is crucial for research on areas such as agenda setting, framing, and political rhetoric. Existing methods for measuring attention, such as manual labeling according to established codebooks, are expensive and can be restrictive. We describe two computational models that automatically distinguish topics in politicians' social media content. Our models—one supervised classifier and one unsupervised topic model—provide different benefits. The supervised classifier reduces the labor required to classify content according to pre-determined topic list. However, tweets do more than communicate policy positions. Our unsupervised model uncovers both political topics and other Twitter uses (e.g., constituent service). These models are effective, inexpensive computational tools for political communication and social media research. We demonstrate their utility and discuss the different analyses they afford by applying both models to the tweets posted by members of the 115th U.S. Congress.


Sustainable architectural design is still in its early stages in many developing countries. There are many pressures that can reduce application of sustainable design; for instance over one billion people worldwide still lack adequate shelter and suffer from poverty. Algeria is an example of a country facing a pressing housing shortage which takes precedence over such features as energy efficient design. There is currently an inability of the government to effectively respond to housing needs in both qualitative and quantitative scales. The problem threatens cities with a large spread of informal settlements and slums around many Algerian cities.

The main aim of this research is to investigate the Algerian housing sector and the housing policy adopted by the government, and to examine potential for future more sustainable outcomes. The problems and obstacles facing the sector are addressed with a particular focus on the city of Jijel. This research also aims to assess the professionals' awareness of the sustainability issues and investigates the aspects of traditional and contemporary architecture in Algeria which are suitable for the planning of sustainable settlements.

The research methodology involved carrying out quantitative and qualitative analysis (mixed method) of the housing sector in Algeria using comparative analysis for different types of houses: collective apartments; traditional courtyard houses; and self-build houses. This involved descriptive, qualitative, and spatial analysis of case studies and the use of survey questionnaire. The survey questionnaire helped to assess the inhabitants' satisfaction with their houses and was initially used with residents of 30 collective apartments from three different estates in the city of Jijel. Later, residents of 10 selected self-build family houses were interviewed. Finally, the survey was carried out with residents of traditional courtyard houses in the city of Constantine.

This study found that despite being sustainable at the time of building, traditional courtyard houses can no longer be considered as an example of sustainable housing due to the degradation of the houses caused by age and poor maintenance. In addition, overcrowding and the occupation of a number of houses by non-relatives have caused a lack of comfort and privacy. The study also found that there is a wide neglect in all types of house of climatic design principles required to help achieve thermal comfort. Occupants are more concerned for spatial comfort and believe they can deal with thermal comfort using energy consuming appliances. However, the continual increase in fossil fuel use and energy costs in Algeria could make these houses either very expensive to run or even unusable in the future. In addition, the poor quality of the exterior environment and the lack of certain necessary amenities and services needed in daily life, have affected the satisfaction of residents. Most of the interviewed residents would prefer to participate in the design of their houses; a process that would enable them to improve use of space and thermal comfort.

It was concluded that many problems facing the housing sector in Algeria cannot be solved by either state-led projects or by self-build informal construction. The research highlighted that the most important issue is the serious imbalance between housing supply and demand and unless lessons from the failures of previous policies are learned and new effective measures enacted by the government, the housing policy in Algeria is likely to fail again. This would further compromise provision of adequate housing and potential for future urban sustainability.

Some suggestions are made for stakeholders and planners to aid in developing strategies to create new sustainable cities that can achieve both residents' satisfaction and reduce negative impact on the environment.


Expanded exploration of our Solar System will require more sophisticated autonomous assets to be developed and deployed. Model based autonomous control systems are a primary technology solution to this problem. A critical factor in the successful operations of these systems is to ensure that the models behave correctly. The Kennedy Space Center (KSC) has been pursing in conjunction with Ames Research Center the application of model-checking techniques for an Intelligent Systems Software for an In -Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) plant for future manned Mars missions. Model checking is a formal technique which can exhaustively evaluate a finite state model for satisfiability of a logical property. The main goal of our current model checking effort is to develop tools and methodologies for efficient evaluation and certification of future Livingstone modeling applications which are declarative in form. As a result of this investigation a potential new re-usable specification pattern was derived which allows one to check a model for the existence of correct variable dependencies within the model.


The taxation of the mining industry varies considerably from nation to nation. This paper reflects on the evolving use of various taxation approaches applied by governments to the mining sector. It includes a description of the principal tax types and investment tax incentives and briefly describes the main policy issues pertaining to mineral sector taxation. The author concludes that governments when devising mineral sector fiscal systems should carefully assess their fiscal options in a holistic approach that anticipates commodity price cycles, and that mining companies should anticipate fiscal system changes that reflect the evolution of the political economy in which they operate.


Stylistic practices in e-mail reflect an amalgam of social presuppositions about usage conventions and individual strategies for handling a new language medium. To understand how contemporary e-mail patterns have been forged and where they might be heading, this study examines the ways in which newly enfranchised language users in the past have balanced externally generated prescriptions for linguistic style with user-generated coping strategies in constructing spoken and written messages. Popular letter writing, the early telegraph, and early telephone behavior offer useful precedents for thinking about both e-mail messages themselves and the potential effects of language technology on broader language change.


Currently, two therapeutic strategies are applied for preventing the development of CMV end-organ disease in transplant recipients: universal prophylaxis and preemptive antiviral therapy. Both are potentially optimable. As for the former strategy, precisely identifying patients at greatest risk of viremia would allow for a targeted prophylaxis. In this sense several genotypic, immunological and biological markers have been described that could be ancillary to that purpose. As for the latter strategy, combined monitoring of plasma CMV DNA load and peripheral levels of CMV-specific CD8 + and CD4 + IFN-γ producing T cells would permit a more rationale use of antivirals, thus avoiding overtreatment and derived toxicity.


Theories of predictive processing propose that prediction error responses are modulated by the certainty of the predictive model or precision. While there is some evidence for this phenomenon in the visual and, to a lesser extent, the auditory modality, little is known about whether it operates in the complex auditory contexts of daily life. Here, we examined how prediction error responses behave in a more complex and ecologically valid auditory context than those typically studied. We created musical tone sequences with different degrees of pitch uncertainty to manipulate the precision of participants' auditory expectations. Magnetoencephalography was used to measure the magnetic counterpart of the mismatch negativity (MMNm) as a neural marker of prediction error in a multi-feature paradigm. Pitch, slide, intensity and timbre deviants were included. We compared high-entropy stimuli, consisting of a set of non-repetitive melodies, with low-entropy stimuli consisting of a simple, repetitive pitch pattern. Pitch entropy was quantitatively assessed with an information-theoretic model of auditory expectation. We found a reduction in pitch and slide MMNm amplitudes in the high-entropy as compared to the low-entropy context. No significant differences were found for intensity and timbre MMNm amplitudes. Furthermore, in a separate behavioral experiment investigating the detection of pitch deviants, similar decreases were found for accuracy measures in response to more fine-grained increases in pitch entropy. Our results are consistent with a precision modulation of auditory prediction error in a musical context, and suggest that this effect is specific to features that depend on the manipulated dimension—pitch information, in this case. Highlights The mismatch negativity (MMNm) is reduced in musical contexts with high pitch uncertainty The MMNm reduction is restricted to pitch-related features Accuracy during deviance detection is reduced in contexts with higher uncertainty The results suggest a feature-selective precision modulation of prediction error


MikovA, A., P. AlexAndrovA and i. diMitrov, 2013. Maize grain yield response to n fertilization, climate and hybrids. Bulg. J. Agric. Sci., 19: 454-460 the relationship between soil-climate conditions, rate of nitrogen application, two maize hybrids and maize grain yield under continuous corn production and irrigation was investigated during 17 years period in eight soil climatic regions in Bulgaria. the experiment was monofactorial with four levels of n fertilization. Maize hybrids from two FAo groups (400 and 700) cultivated under irrigation as a monoculture were used. Statistical analyses were performed in order to describe some relations between maize yield and variables, connected with maize growth. According to the results from AnovA analysis factor "n rate" had the highest effect on the variability of maize yield (72.03 %). The influence of "Hybrid" and "Station" – environmental conditions (soils and climate) was quite low – 9.51% and 2.01% respectively. Multiple regression analyses showed that n rate, temperature sum and total water use could be successfuly used as yield predictors.


Even though free software has achieved great popularity and success in recent years, there are a number of product quality challenges facing the open source development model. There is significant room for further quality improvement and one area that deserves special attention is release management. This research will identify problems w ith current release practices, verify possible advantages of a n increasingly popular release model, and develop intervent ions to improve release management in free software projects. Th e research also aims to answer the fundamental question as to how volunteer projects can deliver predictable and high quality software.


ABSTRACT In light of growing concerns about the acculturation prospects of Europe's ethnic minorities, this study explores the role of religious affiliation and religiosity in the formation of attitudes towards cohabitation among young people with an immigrant background and majority populations in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and England. Evidence from the cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of the CILS4EU data largely shows that ethnic minority Muslims and Christians, from both majority and minority ethnic groups, who are (or become) more religious reject sexual liberalisation to a greater extent. Less religious adolescents – including Muslims – are just as tolerant of sexual liberalisation as religiously unaffiliated youths. These patterns remain stable independent of ethnic origin, migration status and socio-economic background in the cross-sectional models and when controlling for structural transitions, cultural and social influences in the longitudinal analyses. These and related findings are discussed in the context of the immigrant integration scholarship, the literature on religion and value orientations, as well as youth transition research.


The transcription factor sex-determining region of the Y chromosome (SRY) plays a key role in human sex determination, because mutations in SRY cause disorders of sex development in XY individuals. During gonadal development, Sry in pre-Sertoli cells activates Sox9 gene transcription, committing the fate of the bipotential gonad to become a testis rather than an ovary. The high-mobility group domain of human SRY contains two independent nuclear localization signals, one bound by calmodulin (CaM) and the other by importin-β. Although XY females carry SRY mutations in these nuclear localization signals that affect SRY nuclear import in transfected cells, it is not known whether these transport mechanisms are essential for gonadal development and sex determination. Here, we show that mouse Sry protein binds CaM and that a CaM antagonist reduces CaM binding, nuclear accumulation, and transcriptional activity of Sry in transfected cells. CaM antagonist treatment of cultured, sexually indifferent XY mouse fetal gonads led to reduced expression of the Sry target gene Sox9, defects in testicular cord formation, and ectopic expression of the ovarian markers Rspondin1 and forkhead box L2. These results indicate the importance of CaM for SRY nuclear import, transcriptional activity, testis differentiation, and sex determination.


The yeast AGC kinase orthologs Ypk1 and Ypk2 control several important cellular processes, including actin polarization, endocytosis, and sphingolipid metabolism. Activation of Ypk1/2 requires phosphorylation by kinases localized at the plasma membrane (PM), including the 3-phosphoinositide-dependent kinase 1 orthologs Pkh1/Pkh2 and the target of rapamycin complex 2 (TORC2). Unlike their mammalian counterparts SGK and Akt, Ypk1 and Ypk2 lack an identifiable lipid-targeting motif; therefore, how these proteins are recruited to the PM has remained elusive. To explore Ypk1/2 function, we constructed ATP analog-sensitive alleles of both kinases and monitored global changes in gene expression following their inhibition, where we observed increased expression of stress-responsive target genes controlled by Ca2+-dependent phosphatase calcineurin. TORC2 has been shown previously to negatively regulate calcineurin in part by phosphorylating two related proteins, Slm1 and Slm2, which associate with the PM via plextrin homology domains. We therefore investigated the relationship between Slm1 and Ypk1 and discovered that these proteins interact physically and that Slm1 recruits Ypk1 to the PM for phosphorylation by TORC2. We observed further that these steps facilitate subsequent phosphorylation of Ypk1 by Pkh1/2. Remarkably, a requirement for Slm1, can be bypassed by fusing the plextrin homology domain of Slm1 alone onto Ypk1, demonstrating that the essential function of Slm1 is largely attributable to its role in Ypk1 activation. These findings both extend the scope of cellular processes regulated by Ypk1/2 to include negative regulation of calcineurin and broaden the repertoire of mechanisms for membrane recruitment and activation of a protein kinase.


The successful bail-in of creditors in African Bank, a small South African monoline lender, provides an opportunity to evaluate the intended and unintended consequences of new resolution tools. Using a dataset that matches quarterly, daily, and financial-instrument level data, I show that the bail-in led to money-market funds "breaking the buck", triggering significant redemptions and some financial contagion. To limit potential systemic effects, the authorities used complementary interventions, including imposing discretionary liquidity restrictions on mutual funds and market-making facilities for affected financial instruments. This supported a sustainable restructuring of the bank and reduced financial spillovers. The lesson is that future interventions using these new resolution tools should take into account the potential unintended systemic implications, particularly in smaller jurisdictions where there is a high degree of interconnectedness between bank and nonbank financial institutions.


The purpose of this paper is to provide a historical overview of midwifery education in Jordan during the past fifty years with an emphasis on the first bachelor of midwifery program in Jordan. Nine challenges of midwifery education that include expanding midwifery educational needs accreditation of programs recruiting qualified faculty members clinical training midwifery preceptorship exit examinations continuing midwifery education recognition of midwifery graduates and lack of graduate midwifery programs are presented. Proposed solutions for these challenges are discussed. (authors)


— As the global generation of waste (i) is of the order of > 2 billion tons per year and is expected to reach ~ 3.5 billion tons annually by 2050 and (ii) has a critical bearing on the worldwide problems of pollution control (PC), global warming (GW) and climate change (CC), a government-aided and monitored, and people-participated waste management (WM) is desirable for a hygienic, healthy and sustainable society. Aiming this and targetting for zero-waste, the WM has been undertaken in India ̶ from the collection of waste at source to its minimal, safe and monitored disposal in a landfill, with intermediate stages of transportation, segregation and recycling for value-added products ̶ , under the Swatchh Bharat Ayojan (Clean India Mission) programme. All the above stages of WM have been adopted in various ways in both the urban and rural areas. Based on a yearly evaluation of the WM, some cities and states have been designated as "clean". An account of the presently followed methods of WM and their results in some of these clean places as well as generation of many value-added products by recycling different types of waste material is presented in this article. In the light of the above information and data, and aiming zero- waste in the country's WM, the following aspects are discussed: role of decentralised and centralised WM; integration of WM with PC, GW and CC; effluent and sewage treatment plants WM; public awareness-commitment-participation for a monitored, efficient WM; reduce as an important tool for WM, especially to minimise the large-scale generation of food-waste, and its relevance, as per the Indian concept of Aparigraha (take only what one needs); and WM as a widely distributed, micro- to small-scale industry for generation of both wealth


Robert P. Geraci and Michael Khodarovsky, eds. Of Religion and Empire. Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. vi, 356 pp. Map, Index. $49.95, cloth; $21.95, paper. As the editors of this interesting collection note, historians have largely neglected the religious diversity of the Russian Empire. That diversity was immense, and the essays in this volume touch on only a few of the faiths and sects with which the Tsars' subjects identified. The aim of the authors is to reconnoitre the terrain of religious identities in imperial Russia rather than to form firm conclusions. They variously explore the attitudes to human identity in Russia and the place of religious ideologies in social integration, measure the success of Orthodox conversion efforts, assess the ways in which various groups experienced incorporation into the empire, and examine how religious diversity shaped Orthodoxy and Russian-ness. Wide-- ranging as they are, the essays collectively succeed in delineating the major issues related to religious diversity and identity in the empire of the tsars. George Michels looks at the campaign of Archbishop Afanasii of Kholmogory against the Old Belief in his northern see. Afanasii took little interest in converting natives but ruthlessly punished those who flirted with the Old Believers. He realized that the weaknesses of Orthodoxy were in part responsible for Old Believer successes and sought to strengthen the administration of the Church and to increase its physical presence among parishioners. Eugene Clay argues that the progressive rationalization and institutionalization of Orthodox theology left room within the Church by the second half the nineteenth century for various pietistic heresies that found truth in direct spiritual experience and not in rational discourse. The clergy were poorly prepared by their training to cope with this spiritual challenge. Clay notes that the Church largely failed to build on the popular piety that animated village life. Theodore Weeks finds that the forced "reunions" of Uniates with Orthodoxy of 1839 and 1875 were the result not of an overreaching plan on the part of central authorities but, rather, of largely local initiative. He notes that the Uniate "converts" to Orthodoxy returned to the Uniate Church en masse when the opportunity arose in 1905. John Klier similarly concludes that the Russian state had no "continuous, consistent policy of conversion directed at the Jews" (p. 93). On the contrary, both Church and state were highly suspicious about the sincerity of Jewish converts, who gained civil benefits in return for conversion. In any event, few Jews converted. Later in the collection, Firouzeh Mostashari sees little consistency in Russian religious policy in the Caucasus. Benign neglect alternated with conversion campaigns and both gave way to failed attempts to impose bureaucratic controls over Muslim clerics. Michael Khodarovsky fills out the picture of the efforts of the Church to convert non-Christians up to 1800. Most converts were pagans and their conversions were mostly nominal. Two of the more interesting essays are by Paul Werth and Agnes Kefeli. …


In this paper, we show how participants learn to control a simple dynamic stocks and flows task with repeated inflow and outflow decisions. We present the effect that environmental inflow functions of different slopes (positive and negative) have on our ability to control the simple dynamic system. We investigate this slope effect in two experiments with two kinds of functions (linear and non-linear), and we formalize the decision-making process through a System Dynamics model. A process of human and model data fitting common in the Cognitive Sciences helped explain the reasons for the differences found in a system in which the slope of the inflow function is positive in contrast to one in which the slope inflow function is negative (although the total system net flow is the same).


[Excerpt] Independent Living is a philosophy and a movement of people with disabilities that works for equal opportunities, self-respect and self-determination. "Independent Living" does not mean that we do not need anybody, that we want to live in isolation. "Independent Living" means that we want the same control and the same choices in every-day life that our non-disabled brothers and sisters, neighbors and friends take for granted. We want to grow up in our families, go to the neighborhood school, use the same bus, work in jobs that are in line with our education and abilities. Most importantly, just like everybody else, we need to be in charge of our own lives, think and speak for ourselves. In my contribution to this congress I will address three topics that are intimately linked to the concept of Independent Living: society's present view of disability and sexuality; the tendency to place persons with disabilities in institutions; and, thirdly, ways to support disabled people to live in the community rather than in institutions.


Improvement of artificial groundwater recharge via slow sand filtration combined with different in-site barrier-layers (activated carbons, anthracite, lignite coke) was tested. The micropollutant control of the systems achieve significant different pesticides reductions. Operation time depends on the micropore structure and site properties of the activated carbons (Sorption reactor) and reaches a calculated slow sand filter operation time of nearly 6 years (GAC). No distinct improvement of pesticide removal was observed by anthracite (biological reactor). Lignite coke was not used in pilot plant, because of its high pH-value during first 100 bed volumes.


Graduate unemployment has repeatedly hit the headlines since the start of the recession. Yet it is the 50 per cent of young people who do not go to university that are the least protected in the labour market. Even those who manage to find work are at greater risk of future unemployment, have little opportunity for career progression and face static wages. This report explores the school to work transitions of these young people. It finds the educational offer is severely lacking and makes recommendations for how to provide the employment premiums that will give this forgotten half of young people a fair shot at the labour market. These can be achieved in a variety of ways: through technical education such as apprenticeships, cultivation of soft skills, improved literacy and numeracy, and through work itself. Within schools, providing access to these premiums means a professionalised careers service and a move away from a focus on academic skills. But schools can't go it alone. Instead, this report suggests that schools open up to local community involvement and asks what can be done by charities, businesses, schools and government to support them.


BACKGROUND
Cognitive decline among seniors is a pressing health care issue. Specific exercise training may combat cognitive decline. We compared the effect of once-weekly and twice-weekly resistance training with that of twice-weekly balance and tone exercise training on the performance of executive cognitive functions in senior women.

METHODS
In this single-blinded randomized trial, 155 community-dwelling women aged 65 to 75 years living in Vancouver were randomly allocated to once-weekly (n = 54) or twice-weekly (n = 52) resistance training or twice-weekly balance and tone training (control group) (n = 49). The primary outcome measure was performance on the Stroop test, an executive cognitive test of selective attention and conflict resolution. Secondary outcomes of executive cognitive functions included set shifting as measured by the Trail Making Tests (parts A and B) and working memory as assessed by verbal digit span forward and backward tests. Gait speed, muscular function, and whole-brain volume were also secondary outcome measures.

RESULTS
Both resistance training groups significantly improved their performance on the Stroop test compared with those in the balance and tone group (P < or = .03). Task performance improved by 12.6% and 10.9% in the once-weekly and twice-weekly resistance training groups, respectively; it deteriorated by 0.5% in the balance and tone group. Enhanced selective attention and conflict resolution was significantly associated with increased gait speed. Both resistance training groups demonstrated reductions in whole-brain volume compared with the balance and tone group at the end of the study (P < or = .03).

CONCLUSION
Twelve months of once-weekly or twice-weekly resistance training benefited the executive cognitive function of selective attention and conflict resolution among senior women.

TRIAL REGISTRATION
clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00426881.


The occurrence of or ganic-rich levels in the turbiditic sediments of the Vallfogona Fm (Cadi thrust sheet) in
the South-Eastern Pyrenees allowed us the determination of organic matter types, richness and oil potential,
and highlighted the importance of organic matter sedimentation in turbiditic environments. Two types of
samples were differentiated based on or ganic geochemistr y and organic petrography. Type A samples were
deposited in a carbonated environment (even/odd n-alkanes predominance and Pr/Ph<1), under hypersaline
conditions (presence of gammacerane, Ts/Tm >1). Type B samples suggest a more shaly marine environment,
which is corroborated by the predominance of odd n-alkanes, Pr/Phe»1, Ts/Tm<1, the absence of
gammacerane and the similar content of the C27 and C29. Therefore, turbidite facies can be regarded as an
environment where organic sedimentation occurs although with heterogeneities in type and amount of
organic matter. Thus, in turbidite systems reser voir and source could exist simultaneously.


Aim

The concept of burnout has been examined in the literature for over 35 years, and has been historically associated with those professions that deal with particularly complex cases. Although dietitians have received less attention, they face similar pressures and must cope with an environment that may not support dietetics processes. The aim of the present study was to examine the burnout level among public hospital dietitians in New South Wales (NSW) and to determine the variables associated with burnout and to compare these findings to other studies among health-care professionals.

Methods

The Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services Survey and a demographic questionnaire were distributed to hospital dietitians employed within the NSW public hospital system during a six-week period from April to May 2011.

Results

The dietitians surveyed had low to moderate burnout levels, r = 0.201 (P = 0.003). The three domains of the burnout measure, emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and personal accomplishment, were investigated separately. The level/grading of the dietitian was associated with higher levels of emotional exhaustion with r = 0.192 (P = 0.004). Depersonalisation was negatively associated with number of children, r = −0.147 (P = 0.02), and positively associated with the number of hours worked, r = 0.154 (P = 0.021). Personal achievement was positively associated with number of children, r = 0.304 (P = 0.006), and negatively associated with the hours of work, r = −0.198 (P = 0.021).

Conclusions

The main findings were the following. The career stage, the size of the hospital and hours of work were the variables significantly associated with the levels of burnout experienced by NSW public hospital dietitians. It also appeared that those dietitians with children and who work part-time experienced far less emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation than their full-time counterparts and, interestingly, part-time workers had higher levels of personal accomplishment.


Erbium-doped transparent glass ceramics can produce copious upconversion fluorescence originating from both the glassy and nanocrystalline phases. From the optical spectroscopic data, we conclude that erbium ions in the glassy phase produce upconversion via excited state absorption, and those in the nanocrystalline phase undergo upconversion by energy transfer.


ABSTRACT Among the many applications in social science for the entry and management of data, there are only a few software packages that apply natural language processing to identify semantic concepts such as issue categories or political statements by actors. Although these procedures usually allow efficient data collection, most have difficulty in achieving sufficient accuracy because of the high complexity and mutual relationships of the variables used in the social sciences. To address these flaws, we suggest a (semi-) automatic annotation approach that implements an innovative coding method (Core Sentence Analysis) by computational linguistic techniques (mainly entity recognition, concept identification, and dependency parsing). Although such computational linguistic tools have been readily available for quite a long time, social scientists have made astonishingly little use of them. The principal aim of this article is to gather data on party-issue relationships from newspaper articles. In the first stage, we try to recognize relations between parties and issues with a fully automated system. This recognition is extensively tested against manually annotated data of the coverage in the boulevard newspaper Blick of the Swiss national parliamentary elections of 2003 and 2007. In the second stage, we discuss possibilities for extending our approach, such as by enriching these relations with directional measures indicating their polarity.


Sensor location information is a prerequisite to the utility of most sensor networks. In this paper we present a robust and low-complexity algorithm to self-localize and orient sensors in a network based on angle-of-arrival (AOA) information. The proposed non-iterative subspace-based method is robust to missing and noisy measurements and works for cases when sensor orientations are either known or unknown. We show that the computational complexity of the algorithm is O(mn2), where m is the number of measurements and n is the total number of sensors. Simulation results demonstrate that the error of the proposed subspace algorithm is only marginally greater than an iterative maximum-likelihood estimator (MLE), while the computational complexity is two orders of magnitude less. Additionally, the iterative MLE is prone to converge to local maxima in the likelihood function without accurate initialization. We illustrate that the proposed subspace method can be used to initialize the MLE and obtain near-Cramer-Rao performance for sensor localization. Finally, the scalability of the subspace algorithm is illustrated by demonstrating how clusters within a large network may be individually localized and then merged.


ABSTRACT Copyright laws have been criticized for regarding translations as derivatives of an original text, to the disadvantage of translators. This study examines this criticism by analyzing South Korean court rulings on translation copyright disputes. The results show that the courts clearly did see translations as containing original elements, although they distinguished the creative elements comprising the originality of source texts from those of translated texts. They also ruled that a translator's economic rights are unaffected unaffected by whether he/she has registered a translation right, or completed revisions or other procedures demanded by the author and/or the commissioner. Finally, court rulings for at least one case show that translators' moral rights are seen as being violated when an existing translation is modified without producing new originality and under the name of a person other than the original translator. The study concludes that the infringement of translators' copyright is attributable not to translations' derivative status, but to a lack of standards regarding the forms of reproduction of translation and corresponding licenses. The introduction of a tiered-reproduction license for translation could curb the plagiarism of translated texts and facilitate the reuse of translations, benefiting both translators and society as a whole.


"Barbed Wire Fence: Stories of Displacement from the Barak Valley of Assam" is a collection of seventeen short stories that express the myriad facets of the immigrant experience of people from present-day Bangladesh who were forced to leave their native land during and after India's independence and settle, amongst other places, in the Barak valley of Assam. Some stories explore the anguished sorrow of alienation while others speak of the turmoil of fractured identities. The stories lend a voice to those Bengalis for whom the painful memory of their beloved homeland is further exacerbated by the fact they are unwanted in Assam. They try to capture the terrifying essence of the brutal struggle for survival; the elemental fight against extreme depravation, social exploitation and political oppression. "Barbed Wire Fence" is a tract of unapologetic social realism which engages the reader's sympathy and perhaps more importantly creates awareness of the plight and sufferings of these people.


Based on the field theoretical approach developed by physical mesomechanics and recent analysis on the associated gauge field, deformation of solid‐state materials is formulated as a linear transformation of infinitesimal line elements in a deforming object. This formalism is capable of describing all stages of deformation including fracture on the same theoretical basis. The elastic and plastic stages are differentiated by whether the transformation is global or local. From the gauge invariance of the transformation and the least action principle applied to the gauge field, dynamics of plastic deformation is obtained being characterized as decaying, transverse wave behavior of the displacement field. Fracture is characterized as the final stage of deformation where the material becomes totally dissipative and the displacement wave decays completely. Optical interferometric experiment has been carried out to analyze in‐plane displacement of a metal specimen under tensile loading. The result of analysis in...


In this article, I examine the anti-capitalist and antidevelopment politics that Diné resisters espouse in their critiques of resource extraction in the Navajo Nation. I argue that existing anthropological and historical studies about Diné resistance minimize the specifically anti-capitalist character of this resistance by erasing the capitalist underpinnings of development. I draw from Indigenous feminists, Native studies scholars, and Diné land defenders to argue that development in the form of resource extraction is a violent modality of capitalism that seeks to kill Diné life. In response to this death drive, Diné resisters have created a politics of relational life to challenge and oppose development. I examine the historical and material conditions that have given rise to this politics of relational life and suggest its central role in invigorating anticapitalist decolonization struggles.


Two biological experiments were conducted to determine apparent Metabolizable Energy (AME) of rich unsaturated fatty acids dry-fat (Polyfat as an example, PF) using corn or corn-soybean meal diets with ® different inclusion levels of PF in adult cockerel diets. The biological experiments designed to follo w procedures of excreta total collection method (TCM). The chemical evaluation of PF included determination of peroxide No., acid No., fatty acid profile and gross energy. Then different mathematical equations were applied to calculate AME of PF based on the chemical evaluation. The determined values of AME of PF using chemical methods were 7160 and 7188 kcal/kg for PF. Among biological experiments, using restricted quantity of corn diet with high levels of PF (25 or 50% of diet) resulted in lower AME values (4724 and 3992kcal/kg PF). While applying ad libitium consumption of corn-soybean practical diet containing 3% soybean oil (as reference oil), 3.8% of PF or 50:50 mixture of both (1.5% SO+1.9% PF), gave more realistic value of 6973 kcal/kg for PF. Mixing PF with soybean oil showed clear synergism effect and added caloric value of 9.6% (737 kcal) to the mixture above the expected value. Applying simple regression procedures on results of chemical and biological evaluations showed highly significant (p<0.001) relationships between AME of PF and either digestible fat, dietary saturated fatty acids (%) or supplemental stearic acid (%) in diet. These relationships have been presented as high confidant prediction equations with r values ranged 2


This paper draws on James Ferguson's concept of 'anti-politics machine' and Pierre Bourdieu's concept of illusio to explore the nature of the international development cooperation programmes financed by the Czech government. It argues that its character as an 'anti-politics machine' turns development into a highly technical issue and dismisses essential political questions of global equity and policy coherence from the public debate. Moreover, the actors in the field of development cooperation are held in an illusio: they are required to appear as altruistic, which obscures their particular interests. This instrumentalization of development aid contributes to further isolation of the Czech development constituency and raises fundamental questions for the democratic legitimacy of development cooperation.


We consider secret-key agreement with public discussion over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) Rayleigh fast-fading channels under correlated environment. We assume that transmit, legitimate receiver, and eavesdropper antennas are correlated. The legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper are assumed to have perfect channel knowledge while the transmitter has only knowledge of the correlation matrices. First, we derive the expression of the secret-key capacity under the considered setup. We prove that the optimal transmit strategy achieving the secret-key capacity consists in transmitting independent Gaussian signals along the eingenvectors of the transmit correlation matrix. The powers allocated to each channel mode are determined as the solution to a numerical optimization problem. A necessary and sufficient condition for beamforming (i.e., transmitting along the strongest channel mode) to be capacity-achieving is derived. Moreover, we analyze the impact of correlation matrices on the system performance. Finally, we study the system's performance in the two extreme power regimes. In the high-power regime, we provide closed-form expressions of the gain/loss due to correlation. In the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, we investigate the energy efficiency of the system by determining the minimum energy required for sharing a secret-key bit and the wideband slope while highlighting the impact of correlation matrices.


Introduction: COPD is interrupted by exacerbations which vary in severity and frequency during the course of illness. Aim: Investigate the possible link between the etiology of respiratory infections in patients with acute exacerbation of COPD with various clinical and analytical parameters used routinely in COPD. Methods: We included 98 consecutive patients admitted with Exacerbation of COPD over a period of 1 year. The etiology of the respiratory infection was studied by conventional sputum culture and viral diagnostic techniques (rt-PCR). Patient9s clinical characteristics, hematological, biochemical tests including ABG, S.Uric acid, S.IgE were done. Patients were put into three groups based on the pathogens isolated (bacterial, viral, unknown). Results: A pathogen was identified in 32 patients out of which bacteria was isolated in 20 patients (Acinetobacter spp (12), E.coli (6), Pseudomonas spp (2)). Viruses were detected in 12 patients (6-Adenovirus, 2-Influenza A virus and 4-Respiratory syncytial Virus). Compared with bacterial etiologies, patients with viral etiology had more severe hypoxemia, hypercarbia on ABG, greater hospital stay, higher frequency of exacerbations and lower Total Leucocyte counts(TLC), p Conclusion: Clinical and analytical parameters can be useful for the etiological identification and prognosis of COPD exacerbations. More studies are required to accurately identify analytical parameters useful to identify the etiology of new AE-COPD cases without the present diagnostic techniques.


Complex disorders are common in the human population and are caused by interplay between genetic and environmental factors. Therefore the quest for the genetic basis of such disorders has much similarity to deciphering the genetic basis of macro-evolutionary processes, such as speciation. Here I discuss conceptual connections between the principles underlying and processes occurring in disease and evolution. Special focus is given to the tremendous mitochondrial genetic variability in the population and within individuals and the impact of both types of variability on evolutionary processes and diseases.


In this Article, I argue that economic dependence is a critical factor in violence prevention. For many victims of domestic violence, the economic entanglement with an abusive partner is too strong to sever contact without another source of economic support. This Article is a thought experiment in economic justice; it asks the question: is there a way to provide outside economic support for a victim of violence fleeing a battering partner? In this Article, I examine existing systems such as Social Security, unemployment assistance, work-readiness programs, crowd sourcing, and others to evaluate how these sources could provide emergency economic support for victims. I discuss the feasibility of using these systems to provide such support. From there, I provide a safety and security analysis with an eye towards economic freedom.


The topic for this article is quality improvement in service operations. Quality improvement is used as a collective expression for quality assurance, quality management and quality control. Service operations refer to private as well as to public service operations and to services in manufacturing companies. Although services play a predominant role as regards GDP and employment in the OECD countries, we still know very little about quality management in service operations. Concepts and models in organization theories, marketing and other fields are, to a great extent, based on studies of and experience from manufacturing companies. Quality is no exception, even though it has received some attention during the past 15 years, especially from researchers in Scandinavia.


Models that can predict the occurrence of events ahead of time with low false-alarm rates are critical to the acceptance of decision support systems in the medical community. This challenging task is typically treated as a simple binary classification, ignoring temporal dependencies between samples, whereas we propose to exploit this structure. We first introduce a common theoretical framework unifying dynamic survival analysis and early event prediction. Following an analysis of objectives from both fields, we propose Temporal Label Smoothing (TLS), a simpler, yet best-performing method that preserves prediction monotonicity over time. By focusing the objective on areas with a stronger predictive signal, TLS improves performance over all baselines on two large-scale benchmark tasks. Gains are particularly notable along clinically relevant measures, such as event recall at low false-alarm rates. TLS reduces the number of missed events by up to a factor of two over previously used approaches in early event prediction.


In the preface to his book on Hegel, Charles Taylor recognized two ways that every Hegel commentator can go wrong: "Either one can end up being terribly clear and sounding very reasonable at the cost of distorting, even bowdlerizing Hegel. Or one can remain faithful but impenetrable, so that in the end readers will turn with relief to the text in order to understand the commentary." While it is hard to imagine ever turning to the Phenomenology with relief, Taylor's cautionary remark draws attention to the indirect relationship between the form and content of Hegel critique: either one attains formal clarity at the expense of material complexity or material complexity at the expense of clarity. The task of the critic, according to Taylor, is to find a balance between these two extremes. The various "Hegel revivals" of the past century, like that of Lukács and the Marxist humanists in the interwar years or Kojève and the existentialists in postwar France, have all struggled to find this balance. The latest Hegel revival is no exception, but both Rebecca Comay's Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution and Susan Buck-Morss's Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History remind us that insight also comes from the extremes.


Abstract The purpose of this study was to investigate how ordinary Japanese people perceive and understand data sensitivity and sensitive data. Although the concept of sensitive data is described in an article of Japan's revised personal data act, following the EU Data Protection Directive and the new data protection rule, there has been little research on whether this legally defined concept conforms to the general public's perception of sensitive data in Japan and, if not, what differences exist between them. Using empirical data acquired through a questionnaire survey and appropriate statistical methods, we sought to clarify empirically the features of data sensitivity as perceived by ordinary Japanese people. This exploratory research revealed that ordinary Japanese tended to feel relatively low sensitivity to personal data related to their civic activities, which are typically mentioned in the official explanation of sensitive data, but they tended to feel a higher degree of sensitivity regarding financial-related personal data, which were not ordinarily considered sensitive data.


Given a large spatio-temporal database of events, where each event consists of the fields event ID, time, location, and event type, mining spatio-temporal sequential patterns identifies significant event-type sequences. Such spatio-temporal sequential patterns are crucial to the investigation of spatial and temporal evolutions of phenomena in many application domains. Recent research literature has explored the sequential patterns on transaction data and trajectory analysis on moving objects. However, these methods cannot be directly applied to mining sequential patterns from a large number of spatio-temporal events. Two major research challenges still remain: 1) the definition of significance measures for spatio-temporal sequential patterns to avoid spurious ones and 2) the algorithmic design under the significance measures, which may not guarantee the downward closure property. In this paper, we propose a sequence index as the significance measure for spatio-temporal sequential patterns, which is meaningful due to its interpretability using spatial statistics. We propose a novel algorithm called Slicing-STS-miner to tackle the algorithmic design challenge using the spatial sequence index, which does not preserve the downward closure property. We compare the proposed algorithm with a simple algorithm called STS-miner that utilizes the weak monotone property of the sequence index. Performance evaluations using both synthetic and real-world data sets show that the slicing-STS-miner is an order of magnitude faster than STS-Miner for large data sets.


The problems of cooperation efficiency are analyzed. The definition of the cooperation efficiency is described. The main principle of efficiency of cooperation is framed. The indicators and criteria of estimating of the cooperation efficiency are highlighted. One of cooperation model – net model – is described much more detailed. The factors of efficiency of net cooperation model are determined and the draft of estimating of the efficiency of the cooperation methodology is presented. Exclusive attention is put to the cooperation quality of the cooperation plan. The indicators and criteria of quality of cooperation plan are settled. It is proposed how to join all indicators into one integral criterion. The procedures of setting the weights of different cooperation indicators and mentioned criterion values are determined.


The Gospel of John is usually singled out as the chief culprit of the antisemitism which undoubtedly exists in the New Testament. This controversial book argues that Luke is just as much to blame. Professor Sanders shows how, for example, by separating the speeches in the Gospels and Acts, including the words of Jesus, from the narrative, which Luke was less free to manipulate, the Jews are shown as obstreperous, hostile to Jesus and the church, and foreknown to reject the gospel. Moreover, while Luke has reduced the amount of Pharisaic hostility from that in Mark and Matthew, he has added scenes of conflict that do not appear in the other two, so that the conflict between Jesus and the Jews is a monolithic one over behaviour. Other antisemitic features are brought out in a thorough study of Luke's writings. The last chapter reviews several theories that seek to explain why Luke portrays the Jews as he does and concludes that we have to let Luke, not speculation about what was going on in his time and place between church and synagogue, provide the answer. 'This important book exposes in clear and forthright style the antisemitism of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. The author's meticulous scholarship and analytical power enable him to solve many difficult problems and to reach the heart of the matter. This book is essential reading not only for New Testament scholars, but for all concerned with Jewish-Christian relations.' Hyam Maccoby


The Honolulu Police Department conducted an experimental diversion project for first time juvenile offenders in the City and County of Honolulu. Juveniles were diverted to restorative justice conferences instead of traditional diversion programs. Conferences are based on the assumption that crime damages relationships between people. Conferencing is a group reconciliation process that is best used when someone who has caused harm admits wrongdoing. Offenders and those most hurt by the wrongdoing, gather in a circle at conferences to discuss how they have been affected, and collectively decide how to repair the harm. This study analyzed the effects of conferencing on participant satisfaction, offender agreement compliance, and recidivism. Results show that victims were highly satisfied with the process and conferenced juveniles arrested for nonviolent offenses did not escalate to arrests for violent crimes, while juveniles who participated in traditional programs had a significantly higher arrest rate for subsequent violent crimes.


Background: The use of abacavir, a potent HIV nucleoside analogue reverse transcriptase inhibitor, is complicated by a potentially life-threatening hypersensitivity syndrome in approximately 5% of cases. Genetic factors influencing the immune response to abacavir may confer susceptibility.

Methods: Major histocompatibility complex region typing was performed in the first 200 Western Australian HIV Cohort Study participants exposed to abacavir. Definite abacavir hypersensitivity was identified in 18 cases and was excluded in 167 individuals with >6 weeks exposure (abacavir tolerant). 15 individuals experienced some symptoms but did not meet criteria for abacavir hypersensitivity.
Results: HLA-B*5701 was present in 78% of patients with abacavir hypersensitivity, and 2.3% of abacavir-tolerant patients (OR = 117, p<0.0001), whilst the HLA-DRB1*0701 and -DQ3 combination was found in 72% of hypersensitive and 3.0% of tolerant patients (OR = 72, p< 0.0001). HLA-B*5701 and HLA-DRB1*0701+DQ3 were present in combination in 72% hypersensitive and 0% tolerant patients (OR = 822, p<0.0001). Other MHC markers also present on the 57.1 ancestral haplotype (D6S1014*137, C4A6, D6S273*135, TNF -238A, MICA*194, MIB*344) confirmed the presence of haplotype-specific linkage disequilibrium, and mapped potential susceptibility loci to a region bounded by C4A6 and HLA-C. Within the entire abacavir-exposed cohort (n=200), presence of HLA-B*5701 and DRB1*0701+DQ3 had a positive predictive value for hypersensitivity of 100% and a negative predictive value of 97.3%.

Conclusions: Genetic susceptibility to abacavir hypersensitivity is carried on the 57.1 ancestral haplotype. In our population, withholding abacavir in those with HLA-B*5701, -DRB1*0701, and -DQ3 should reduce the prevalence of hypersensitivity from 9% to 2.5% without inappropriately denying abacavir to any patient. These findings need to be confirmed in other populations before such a practice could be generalised. Furthermore, testing for the haplotype is not 100% sensitive and therefore, cannot be considered a screening test, and current clinical practices should continue to underpin the management of abacavir hypersensitivity.


Abstract Part 10 of the UK Companies Act 2006 codifies the fiduciary and common law duties of directors as a means of addressing the key policy considerations which underpinned the company law reform project launched by the Labour Government in 1998. Focusing on the core fiduciary duty of loyalty and its corporate law manifestation in the form of the 'corporate opportunity doctrine', the article critically examines whether the statutory language adequately captures the totality of the duty as developed in the case law. It concludes that the formalistic language of the relevant provisions neither encompasses the breadth of the pre-existing jurisprudence nor addresses the policy objectives of the reform exercise.


The growing popularity of the internet, accompanied by falling access costs, is provoking an increase in the number of users and buyers in the net and in the appearance of new organisations that commercialise their products and services exclusively on the internet. At present, this type of firms, known as dotcoms or cybertraders, is playing a crucial role in the internet and in the renewal of the economic system and has begun to account for a substantial share of new jobs created in developed countries. However, cyberentrepreneurs and venture creation in internet is still in its emergent phase and further research is needed on this subject. The purpose of this research is twofold. First, we describe and compare the background of the dotcom entrepreneur with the one obtained from the former research. Second, we analyse the entrepreneurial process of the new firm's creation in the cyberspace in Catalonia, Spain.


The condition known as myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is an illness of unknown aetiology which affects over 150 000 persons in the UK. Whilst the cause of the condition is the subject of intense medical debate, the official view is that it is a form of atypical depression or somatisation disorder. This view is at odds with the views of many sufferers who claim that ME/CFS is a pathological disease that renders them severely incapacitated. Sufferers' maintain that, because their condition is regarded as a minor, psychological illness, its' severity is not recognised. Thus, rather than being granted assistance, their appeals for help are often met with accusations of malingering or hypochondriasis. This, they argue, results in significant marginalisation. In short, sufferers' state that they experience bodily change that is profound and disabling, however, their claims to be `really ill', are ignored. ME/CFS is one of a number of conditions whose meanings are contested. Other such conditions include Gulf war syndrome, repetitive strain injury, organophosphate poisoning, and multiple chemical sensitivity. These conditions are worthy of sociological study because they `make visible' the way that social definitions of illness impact on the experience of illness. The data for this thesis is derived from an empirical study of sufferers' experiences of ME/CFS. Using both qualitative and quantitative research methods, the study explores the embodied experience of ME/CFS and the illness careers of sufferers. The findings of the study are analysed in the light of the sociological literature on `the cultural expectations surrounding illness', `embodiment' and `the experience of illness'. Whilst the past literature has either focused on `the cultural expectations surrounding illness' or `the experience of illness', this thesis brings together the two areas and uncovers the complex set of relations and pathways that emerge when ideas about illness clash. The findings have implications for the sociological understanding of the illness experience. They are particularly relevant because, as the chronically ill population expands, there is an increasing emphasis on individual responsibility for illness. Thus, whilst contested illnesses are a blatant example of what happens when sufferers' are held accountable for being ill, the findings have implications for the experience of all chronic illness.


We explore predictors of participation in additional treatment within one year after termination of 39 sessions of psychodynamic group therapy (n=130). The sample was biased due to a 33% dropout at the one-year follow-up of symptomatic less improved treatment completers (N=194). Outcome predictors were the Symptom Check List 90 Revised (SCL-90-R), Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory II (MCMI-II), non-symptomatic Psychodynamic Focus, retrospective outcome evaluations, and socio-demographic and psychiatric variables.At follow-up, 57.6% of the patients had been seeking additional treatment for psychological or psychiatric problems; the percentage was 41.6%, when further treatment was defined as participating in more than 5 sessions. The majority (94.8%) was treated within the public health services.Participation in additional treatment was predicted by improvement on the MCMI Antisocial personality disorder scale and a higher SCL-90-R Somatization end-state score. When additional treatment was defined as receiving more than 5 sessions, lack of paid work before treatment (odds ratio 8.0), lack of social network support (odds ratio 2.9), and the Antisocial pre- post difference score (odds ratio 1.6) were significant predictors explaining a total of 26.4% variance. Neither SCL-90-R Global Severity Index (GSI) reliable and clinically significant improvement, therapist recommendations of further therapy, nor socio-demographic, psychiatric and treatment outcome variables were significantly associated with seeking additional treatment.Even though we identified only a small number of predictors for participation in further treatment, our study nevertheless points to the importance of employing reliable and validated methods in the evaluation of treatment outcome and further treatment planning.


"Holes in the Whole: Introduction to the Urban Revolutions." Krzysztof Nawratek. Zero Books. --- Holes in The Whole seeks meaning and reasons for the existence of the city. Krzysztof Nawratek discusses the urgent need to expand the sphere of urban activity – to define the city not only as a territory of exploitation, but as space of human existence in its fullest dimension. Treating the city as primarily a political entity to be re-invented offers a welcome contrast to much urban analysis that takes for granted and fails to challenge dominant forms of political economy, writes Karl Baker.


The performance of current graphics engines makes it possible to incorporate subliminal cues within virtual environments (VEs), providing an additional way of communication, fully integrated with the exploration of a virtual scene. In order to advance the application of subliminal information in this area, it is necessary to explore in the psychological literature how techniques previously reported as rendering information subliminal can be successfully implemented in VEs. Previous literature has also described the effects of subliminal cues as quantitatively modest, which raises the issue of their inclusion in practical tasks. We used a 3D rendering engine (Unity3D) to implement a masking paradigm within the context of a realistic scene and a familiar (kitchen) environment. We report significant effects of subliminal cueing on the selection of objects in a virtual scene, demonstrating the feasibility of subliminal cueing in VEs. Furthermore, we show that multiple iterations of masked objects within a trial, as well as the speeding of selection choices, can substantially reinforce the impact of subliminal cues. This is consistent with previous findings suggesting that the effect of subliminal stimuli fades rapidly. We conclude by proposing, as part of further work, possible mechanisms for the inclusion of subliminal cueing in intelligent interfaces to maximize their effects.


With the large amount of FDI inflows into China since the 1990s and particularly since China's accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001, there has been an increasing concern that China has attracted excessive FDI inflows from the world, thus crowding out FDI inflows into other developing countries. This study, using a gravity model with panel data (including 50 developing countries over the period of 1992 to 2008), finds that, after controlling its huge market size, increasing per capita income, fast economic growth, low labour costs and good creditworthiness, China's performance in attracting FDI inflows was at a level only moderately above its potential, and China received only its fair share of FDI inflows from the world for the last three decades. However, since 2005 China has been below its potential in attracting FDI inflows. Apart from the current global financial and economic crisis which severely affected the global FDI flows, the low level of FDI inflows into China from the developed countries is one of the most important causes for China's under-performance in attracting FDI inflows.


We examine the angular momentum of an electric charge e placed at rest outside a dilaton black hole with magnetic charge Q. The electromagnetic angular momentum which is stored in the electromagnetic field outside the black hole shows several common features regardless of the dilaton coupling strength, though the dilaton black holes are drastically different in their spacetime structure depending on it. First, the electromagnetic angular momentum depends on the separation distance between the two objects and changes monotonically from eQ to 0 as the charge goes down from infinity to the horizon, if rotational effects of the black hole are discarded. Next, as the black hole approaches extremality, however, the electromagnetic angular momentum tends to be independent of the distance between the two objects. It is then precisely eQ as in the electric charge and monopole system in flat spacetime. We discuss why these effects are exhibited and argue that the above features are to hold in widely generic settings including black hole solutions in theories with more complicated field contents, by addressing the no hair theorem for black holes and the phenomenon of field expulsion exhibited by extremal black holes.


The omission bias has been much discussed in both the legal scholarship and the behavioral scholarship. Scholars have noted that a harm stemming from an omission is preferred over equivalent or lesser harm stemming from action. In this article I would like to highlight a neglected form of omission — a beneficial omission. I argue that an omission bias causes us to downplay social contributions stemming from omissions, even at the policy level. The environmental field is the central arena for beneficial omissions. The legal mechanism I suggest for encouraging beneficial omissions in the environmental field is the negative consumption tax. The negative consumption tax provides a refundable credit to individuals who abstain from a polluting consumption pattern, in contrast to the standard green tax which applies to polluting individuals. In this Article I argue that recognizing and increasing the salience of a contributive omission through a negative consumption tax may have three advantages. First, it may be a more effective mechanism both for internalizing externalities and for enhancing the welfare of the worst-off individuals. Second, it would transform individuals of low socio-economic backgrounds into recognized contributing citizens. Third, it is more likely to gain political currency by passing political-economy barriers.This Article provides three possible applications of the negative consumption tax in the realm of environmental policy: car ownership, air travel, and residential consumption of electricity.


With the development of economy, the traditional model of personnel training in colleges and universities can no longer meet the needs of social development. Therefore, the cultivation of new diversified talents has become the goal and development direction for colleges and universities. By analyzing the problems in traditional teaching mode in colleges and universities, this essay further elaborates the necessity of establishing the new teaching model under the multiculturalism. Colleges are expected to respect different characteristic of different students and develop their potentials, which is the requirement of multicultural social development, and the need of students' adjustment to the society.


In response to reports of frequent criminal misconduct, aggressive behavior, and human rights abuses committed with impunity by private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, some have argued that private military and security companies (?PMSCs?) are no more than modern mercenaries, and that they should therefore be banned under the standing international prohibition on mercenarism. However, the existing instruments prohibiting mercenarism would be difficult to apply to most PMSCs, making it easy for states that want to continue to use these companies to evade such a ban. In contrast, given market forces pushing PMSCs to be more compliant and emerging state practices that favor regulation, coordinated international regulation of PMSCs might feasibly be enforced. This article proposes that many of the issues with private military and security companies could be addressed by creating an international humanitarian law (?IHL?) principle that recognizes state use of PMSCs as a means of warfare. The availability of advanced, independent security and military capabilities-for-hire enables states or nonstate actors to get around political or resource constraints that otherwise might limit the use of force, and may undermine IHL enforcement. These threats might be addressed if IHL established a stronger state responsibility link between states and the PMSCs they hire. International humanitarian law should provide that states who outsource government security or military functions in support of any combat or humanitarian operations that would otherwise trigger IHL must establish internal oversight, accountability, and liability mechanisms to ensure that these actors comply with international and domestic legal norms and regulations.


Our current era is sleepwalking. Most of us, who live in Western societies, have practically everything our parents and grandparents have ever dreamed of except for one thing: sustainability. We would need at least two planets if the world population were given the model of European consumption and of four other planets if everyone consumed as a typical American. We are simply living on this planet as if we had another one on which we can go. Something has to change and the best place to make that change is through waste, because we all produce waste - every day. Every time we produce waste, we are part of an unsustainable way of life on the planet, but with the right leadership we could all be part of an important first step towards sustainability. We can no longer support "a disposable society" on a finite planet. I started to approach the topic of waste when in my city, Turin, we began to discuss whether or not to build the waste-to-energy plant. The construction of these large plants brings with it many controversies related to their social, environmental and health impacts on the population. Those are mainly political discussions: on the one hand who says that burning waste is an obsolete technique and the result of combustion, exhaust fumes, are carcinogenic to the population surrounding the plant. For this faction, data on the production of harmful agents - which are transparent and public, easily accessible on a daily basis on the site of each waste-to-energy plant and are always below the limits permitted by law - are not true and in the case of bad maintenance of the plant, these harmful agents could turn into an ecological bomb. On the other side of the political arena there are those who say that the high levels of consumption of the current society no longer allow burying waste in saturated landfills. The best solution is to burn them and the heat produced by combustion uses it to heat the houses with thermo heating. This movement affirms that filters to purify exhaust fumes always comply with the law, and since these rules are imposed at European level they can not harm the citizen. All these discussions, in my opinion, are more influenced by politics than by scientific data. To get a concrete idea on which of the two choices was correct I had to ask myself a few questions: - How many methods do we know to dispose of waste? - Are there any concrete alternatives to waste-to-energy? - What degree of consciousness does our society have on the subject of waste?


Abstract. For more than 10 years now the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, has contributed to the UNECE (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe) ICP Materials (International Co-operative Programme on Effects on Materials including Historic and Cultural Monuments) programme for monitoring the corrosion/soiling levels of different kinds of materials due to environmental air-quality parameters. In this paper we present the results obtained from the analysis of observational data that were collected in Athens during the period 2003–2012. According to these results, the corrosion/soiling of the particular exposed materials tends to decrease over the years, except for the case of copper. Based on this long experimental database that is applicable to the multi-pollutant situation in the Athens basin, we present dose–response functions (DRFs) considering that dose stands for the air pollutant concentration, response for the material mass loss (normally per annum) and function , the relationship derived by the best statistical fit to the data.


We conducted an online survey using a set of factual science questions that are commonly administered to assess fact-based scientific literacy. We report that the online population performed substantially better on this standard assessment than the traditional survey population. For example, it has been widely reported that 1 in 4 Americans does not know that the Earth revolves around the Sun, whereas among the online population, this ratio is reduced to 1 in 25. While new online platforms provide researchers with unprecedented ease of access to a large sample population for studying trends in public knowledge and attitudes, generalizing from online population samples to the US population at large poses a considerable challenge. We discuss the potential reasons for this discrepancy and the implications for conducting research online.


In this paper, we propose a method we call MEMEography for HCI research to understand people and their interactional contexts from the remixed internet memes they post in internet communities. While memes might not be the most obvious choice of a research subject, they allow us to investigate unfamiliar domains even when access to the field is beyond reach. We describe an initial approach of data selection, collection, prioritization and analysis. In addition, we demonstrate the kinds of insights we can gain through MEMEographies by analyzing a corpus of memes in the intensive care unit (ICU) context posted 2020 on Instagram. ICU memes open up insights into the environment, work practices, challenges, emotions and familiarized us with ICU practitioners' language, even though access to an actual ICU was completely impossible during 2020.


Future multi-constellation Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) will offer the possibility to fulfill stringent navigation integrity requirements using Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (RAIM). This paper presents a detailed comparison of residual-based (RB) and solution separation (SS) RAIM. A complete step-by-step derivation of the two methods, which is currently missing in the literature, is given for the detection of single and multi-measurement faults, starting from common definitions of the integrity and continuity risks. In addition, a parity-space representation of SS RAIM is developed. It is shown that the integrity monitoring performance of SS RAIM can be superior to RB RAIM because SS test statistics are tailored to the fault hypotheses, and to the state of interest. However, for practical reasons of computational efficiency in conventional SS implementations, which are fully detailed in the paper, RB RAIM ultimately provides tighter bounds on integrity risk. Copyright © 2014 Institute of Navigation.


Nowadays, many of the modern embedded applications such as vehicles and robots, interact with the environment and receive huge amount of data through various sensors such as cameras and radars. The challenge of processing large amount of data, within an acceptable performance, is solved by employing embedded systems that incorporate complementary attributes of CPUs and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), i.e., sequential and parallel execution models. Component-based development (CBD) is a software engineering methodology that augments the applications development through reuse of software blocks known as components. In developing a CPU-GPU embedded application using CBD, allocation of components to different processing units of the platform is an important activity which can affect the overall performance of the system. In this context, there is also often the need to support and achieve run-time component allocation due to various factors and situations that can happen during system execution, such as switching off parts of the system for energy saving. In this paper, we provide a solution that dynamically allocates components using various system information such as the available resources (e.g., available GPU memory) and the software behavior (e.g., in terms of GPU memory usage). The novelty of our work is a formal allocation model that considers GPU system characteristics computed on-the-fly through software monitoring solutions. For the presentation and validation of our solution, we utilize an existing underwater robot demonstrator.


Next generation manufacturing companies have to become highly responsive in order to succeed in an ever more rapidly changing global market. The ability to effectively develop and adapt their assembly facilities (systems) to changing requirements on demand plays a crucial role in achieving high responsiveness since the assembly process has to deal with the full inherent complexity of increasingly mass-customised products.

This work was motivated by the current lack of a holistic assembly system design theory that would enable design environments to address the need for rapid system development and adaptation. The challenge is to create a common environment where domain experts can effectively collaborate while taking advantage of the best practices of their diverse domains.

This thesis investigates how a domain ontology can help to overcome those challenges. The approach is taking advantage of the higher levels of standardisation inherent in the modular assembly system paradigm which is considered to be one of the fundamental enabling factors to achieve a high level of adaptation.

A new ontology framework has been developed to support the design and adaptation of modular assembly systems (ONTOMAS). The ONTOMAS framework is based on engineering ontology principles structuring the domain using formalisms for aggregation, topology, taxonomies, and system theory principles.

A number of design patterns have been identified and formalised to support key design decision-making tasks during the design of modular assembly systems. Furthermore, the function-behaviour-structure paradigm has been applied to capture the characteristics of modular assembly equipment at different levels of abstraction that reflect the specific needs of the engineering design process.
The proposed ONTOMAS framework provides a sound foundation for computer based support tools to reduce the assembly system design effort and time while maintaining a high level of quality. An integrated design framework for the requirements driven specification of assembly processes and configuration of modular assembly system has been developed. The design approach applies the new formalisms of ONTOMAS to support the design decision-making activities.

The developed ONTOMAS framework has been applied in several industrial and synthetic use cases to verify its applicability and appropriateness. Furthermore, the new ontology and design framework have been used as foundation for the development of a prototype collaborative design environment which allows different domain experts to participate in the design of modular assembly systems.


Abstract. Atmospheric aerosol composition was measured using a Single Particle Soot Photometer (SP2) in the Finnish Arctic during winter 2011–2012. The Sammaltunturi measurement site at the Pallas GAW (Global Atmosphere Watch) station receives air masses from different source regions including the Arctic Ocean and continental Europe. The SP2 provides detailed information about mass distributions and mixing state of refractory black carbon (rBC). The measurements showed widely varying rBC mass concentrations (0–120 ng m−3), which were related to varying contributions of different source regions and aerosol removal processes. The rBC mass was log-normally distributed showing a relatively constant rBC core mass mean diameter with an average of 194 nm (75–655 nm sizing range). On average, the number fraction of particles containing rBC was 0.24 (integrated over 350–450 nm particle diameter range) and the average particle diameter to rBC core volume equivalent diameter ratio was 2.0 (averaged over particles with 150–200 nm rBC core volume equivalent diameters). These average numbers mean that the observed rBC core mass mean diameter is similar to those of aged particles, but the observed particles seem to have unusually high particle to rBC core diameter ratios. Comparison of the measured rBC mass concentration with that of the optically detected equivalent black carbon (eBC) using an Aethalometer and a MAAP showed that eBC was larger by a factor of five. The difference could not be fully explained without assuming that only a part of the optically detected light absorbing material is refractory and absorbs light at the wavelength used by the SP2. Finally, climate implications of five different black carbon mixing state representations were compared using the Mie approximation and simple direct radiative forcing efficiency calculations. These calculations showed that the observed mixing state means significantly lower warming effect or even a net cooling effect when compared with that of a homogenous aerosol containing the same amounts of black carbon and non-absorbing material.


Typical floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) compression applications are presented, including drivers and auxiliary equipment, and typical compressor operating conditions. Base packages consisting of centrifugal compressor(s), gear, motor or gas turbine driver, lube oil tank, and auxiliary equipment require extensive analyses to validate design requirements for service on FPSO vessels. Finite element analyses (FEA) are performed to insure that stress and displacement criteria are met. This paper discusses loading conditions that are evaluated including package lifting, transportation loads, short circuit torque, and upset loads. Operating load cases are also analyzed, which include dead weight, FPSO motion, rotor unbalance, torque, nozzle, and wind loads. Modal analyses are performed to ensure that predominant package modes do not lie in the run speed range. Rotor unbalance forced response analyses can be performed to ensure that amplitudes at key locations remain within allowable vibration criteria. Typical FEA models and analytical procedures are presented. The use of the analytical results to assist in selecting design modifications is discussed. The paper emphasizes the importance of gathering information early in the design cycle. This includes ship structural stiffness at the anti-vibration mount (AVM) locations, AVM stiffness, and load specifications including wind, wave, upset, and transport loading, and coupling capability. Finally, the paper presents a design change that allows for significant footprint reduction of the overall package.


Object recognition memory is the ability to identify previously seen objects and is an adaptive mechanism that increases survival for many species throughout the animal kingdom. Previously believed to be possessed by only the highest order mammals, it is now becoming clear that fish are also capable of this type of memory formation. Similar to the mammalian hippocampus, the dorsolateral pallium regulates distinct memory processes and is modulated by neurotransmitters such as dopamine. Caribbean bicolour damselfish (Stegastes partitus) live in complex environments dominated by coral reef structures and thus likely possess many types of complex memory abilities including object recognition. This study used a novel object recognition test in which fish were first presented two identical objects, then after a retention interval of 10 min with no objects, the fish were presented with a novel object and one of the objects they had previously encountered in the first trial. We demonstrate that the dopamine D1-receptor agonist (SKF 38393) induces the formation of object recognition memories in these fish. Thus, our results suggest that dopamine-receptor mediated enhancement of spatial memory formation in fish represents an evolutionarily conserved mechanism in vertebrates.


Theory tells us that the lawyers who draft standard-form contracts will respond to an erroneous court interpretation of a boilerplate contract term by revising the standard formulation of the clause or otherwise clarifying the ambiguity. This is so because lawyers, it is assumed, have the incentive to protect clients from the risk that other courts may adopt the disfavored interpretation or that the apparent ambiguity will, in any event, produce future costly litigation. As many scholars have observed, the reality is often different. Boilerplate terms in standard contracts are sticky. Many of the theories explaining why standard contract terms are resistant to innovation focus on the efficiency benefits of market-wide standardization. Others look to economic or psychological factors that deter the production of innovative terms. In this book, we use both qualitative and quantitative data to explore the reasons for the phenomenon of stickiness in sovereign bond contracts. We focus on a novel judicial interpretation of an obscure clause in cross-border financial contracts – the pari passu clause – that rattled the chandeliers of international finance. One might have expected the practicing bar to quickly clarify their forms before the heresy could spread and gain traction. But that didn't happen. In over 90% of the contracts subsequently issued, no attempt was made to clarify the imprecise language of the clause. None of the extant theories of stickiness explain what we find. Rather, the story that emerges is about the modern big law firm: the financial pressure on big firms to maintain a high volume of transactions contributes to an array of conflicts that that deter innovation and are largely hidden from the individual lawyers charged with drafting responsibility – conflicts that are hidden in part by the myths that the members of this legal community collectively tell themselves about the origins of boilerplate terms whose meaning has been lost in time.