The potential effects of future climate change on grain production of a winter durum wheat cropping system were investigated. Based on future climate change projections, derived from a statistical downscaling process applied to the HadCM3 general circulation model and referred to two IPCC scenarios (A2 and B1), the response on yield and aboveground biomass (AGB) and the variation in total organic carbon (TOC) were explored. The software used in this work is an hybrid dynamic simulation model able to simulate, under different pedoclimatic conditions, the processes involved in cropping system such as crop growth and development, water and nitrogen balance. It implements different approaches in order to ensure accurate simulation of the mainprocess related to soil-crop-atmosphere continuum.The model was calibrated using soil data, crop yield, AGB and phenology coming from a long-term experiment, located in Apulia region. The calibration was performed using data collected in the period 1978–1990; validation was carried out on the 1991–2009 data. Phenology simulation was sufficiently accurate, showing some limitation only in predicting the physiological maturity. Yields and AGBs were predicted with an acceptable accuracy during both calibration and validation. CRM resulted always close to optimum value, EF in every case scored positive value, the value of index r2 was good, although in some cases values lower than 0.6 were calculated. Slope of the linear regression equation between measured and simulated values was always close to 1, indicating an overall good performance of the model. Both future climate scenarios led to a general increase in yields but a slightly decrease in AGB values. Data showed variations in the total production and yield among the different periods due to the climate variation. TOC evolution suggests that the combination of temperature and precipitation is the main factor affecting TOC variation under future scenarios. Incorporation of crop residues had a positive effect, in the first 35 cm the amount of carbon increase with both the future scenarios.


Climate change poses unprecedented challenges to agricultural production globally and in the United States; it is both vulnerable to the impacts of a changing climate and a contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Because farmers need to quickly adapt to reduce their risks and emissions, there is a pressing need to better understand the process by which they make decisions. This complex decision‐making process includes many factors, such as farmers' beliefs; knowledge and capacity to make changes; the information they receive from Extension, industry, and social networks (e.g., family and peers); economics and regulations; and farm‐scale and environmental issues (including personal experience with extreme weather). This study assesses the published literature on U.S. agricultural stakeholder views and decisions on climate change, focusing on farmers and ranchers from different regions. We identify key themes that emerge from the literature on how stakeholder views about extreme weather and climate change relate to decisions about adaptation and mitigation practices. This review finds that although the majority of U.S. farmers believe the climate is changing, many remain skeptical of the issue and uncertain about the anthropogenic causes of climate change. Farmers' climate change mitigation and adaptation decisions also vary widely and are often correlated with belief or other factors such as personal experience with extreme weather, costs of change, or fear of regulation. We conclude with the implications of the research, including the importance of understanding farmers' view and actions and issue framing, and implications for researchers, Extension and policy makers, both nationally and globally. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e469. doi: 10.1002/wcc.469


Laminitis is a severe and painful disease in the horse that may lead to loosening of the attachment of the distal phalanx to the horny hoof capsule. Although a large variety of treatment options has come and gone since the first descriptions of laminitis, there is certainly a thus far unmet need for therapies that are successful in preventing dislodging of the distal phalanx or in creating favourable conditions for healing. Clostridium botulinum toxin has been successfully used in equine medicine to reduce the activity of several skeletal muscles. It was therefore hypothesised that the toxin, when used to reduce the muscle tone of the deep digital flexor, could have potential to reduce the traction of the deep digital flexor on the distal phalanx which might be a useful supportive therapy in case of laminitis. First, the effectiveness and safety had to be tested in the healthy horse: Clostridium botulinum toxin injections proved to reduce the muscle tone of the deep digital flexor muscle significantly without severe side-effects or inducing lameness in the healthy horse. Therefore, further research into the clinical application of the substance was justified. It has been suggested that laminitis may result in increased muscle tone or even contracture of the deep digital flexor. This suggestion was investigated, as the outcome could further substantiate the hypothesis.The increased firing rate of the deep digital flexor muscle in laminitic horses, as evidenced by EMG interference pattern analysis, suggests an increased muscle force which provides some support for the claim that reduction of the muscle tone by use of Clostridium botulinum toxin might be a successful supportive therapy. However, further in-depth research into this item is warranted, as two other parameters, the number of turns/second and amplitude/turn, were not dissimilar, indicating that larger motor units with larger-amplitude motor unit potentials were not recruited. It proved possible to determine the muscle volume of the deep digital flexor in the living animal quite accurately. This way of determining muscle volume can be used in future clinical studies to estimate individual Clostridium botulinum toxin dosages as precise as possible. Not only for efficacy and safety reasons, but also taking into account the high costs involved, this is beneficial. Realization of a large-scale clinical study into the application of Clostridium botulinum toxin in cases of naturally occurring acute laminitis proved difficult. The main reason is that recruitment of a sufficiently large population of acutely laminitic horses and ponies without distal phalanx displacement and complying with strict inclusion criteria is problematic. However, the beneficial outcome as seen in two animals suggests that putting effort in the design and execution of such a (multi-centre and probably multinational) trial using a uniform and objective evaluation protocol is justified. As further research into the application of Clostridium botulinum toxin in acute and chronic laminitis seems justified, suggestions for future research include i.a. its use in chronic laminitis and in the prevention of supporting limb laminitis.


The growth of executive coaching has continued to increase despite difficult economic circumstances post-2008 and belief in the process appears to be at an all-time high with annual revenue reaching $2 billion globally (ICF, 2012). The realisation that professional life can be both mentally and psychologically challenging, particularly at executive level, has placed coaching practice under the spotlight.

Organisations are becoming increasingly intrigued by what executive coaching can offer yet they require tangible evidence of what influences the process and what contributes to success. Much of the literature has focused on outcome from the perspective of the executive and on coaching theory which is noted as being somewhat limited up to the year 2000 (Grant, et al., 2010). From 2000 to 2009 there was a 4.5 fold increase in research (CIPD, 2012) but focus has generally remained within the confines of coaching theory and the self-evaluation of the executive. While self-evaluation studies are relevant, they can be considered somewhat unreliable and in addition, little attention has been paid to the underlying influences that lead to these outcomes. There has also been a 'burgeoning of new ideas in the coaching orbit' (Ives, 2008) when it comes to coaching models which has created a need for these approaches to be analysed and challenged. Even more importantly, little attention has been paid to the third side of the 'coaching triangle' Freas & Sherman (2004), the coach, who could be considered the driving force of the process. The views of the coach could provide insights that may be supplemented to existing findings in order to create a more holistic view of executive coaching and what impacts success.

This study will first attempt to establish where exactly current research lies on the subject of what influences success in executive coaching. In addition to this, a qualitative study on the views of six executive coaches on the impact of coach-oriented factors such as knowledge of psychotherapy, business knowledge, coaching methods and coach attributes will be conducted. Comparisons will then be drawn between themes identified in existing literature and the findings of this study in order to draw conclusions and make recommendations on where research should focus its attention in the future.


This study aims at fractionation of arsenic according to its polarity into water-soluble arsenic fractions, polar and non-polar arsenolipids in herring, capelin and blue whiting fish meal and edible seaweed dulse. Changing the sequential extraction order showed a significant labile fraction of the non-polar arsenolipids (AsLps) where species transformation is considered a more likely explanation than a partitioning problem in the compounds. The majority of non-polar AsLps were not stable through water extraction for three types of fish meal (71–93% for herring, capelin and blue whiting). The non-polar AsLp fraction was minor for dulse. In 27 samples of herring and blue whiting fish meal, arsenic was mainly present in the water phase: 71% (2.8 ± 0.8 mg kg−1) and 93% (17.2 ± 1.9 mg kg−1) for herring and blue whiting on average, respectively. The polar arsenolipids in the MeOH/DCM fraction accounted for 15% and 5% (0.5–1.2 mg kg−1 As) for both herring and blue whiting, respectively. Speciation analysis of arsenolipids was undertaken for herring meal, capelin meal and dulse (red seaweed) using simultaneous HPLC-ICPMS/ESIMS for quantification and identification. Among the known arsenohydrocarbons (AsHCs), arseno fatty acids (AsFAs) and arsenosugarphospholipids (AsPLs), a novel AsFA374 was identified in dulse by arsenic detection via simultaneous protonated mass, accurate mass as well as MSMS fragmentation. Additionally, recently reported AsLp groups, arsenic containing phosphatidylcholines (AsPCs) and arseno fatty alcohols (TMAsFOHs), have been reconfirmed to occur in marine samples.


This study analysed the effect of level of nutrition and date of birth (age) on the onset of puberty in Payoya she-kids born in autumn (November) or in winter (February). Two experiments were conducted to examine pubertal events at the onset of puberty. For each date of birth (age), two experimental groups were used, differing on the level of nutrition. Groups were balanced for live weight (LW) and body condition score (BCS). For the first experiment (goat kids born in autumn), 27 Payoya she-kids were used: high-nutrition group (H1, n = 13) and control group (C1, n = 14). For the second experiment (goat kids born in winter), 25 Payoya she-kids were used: high-nutrition group (H2, n = 13) and control group (C2, n = 12). In both experiments, the level of feeding was adjusted weekly according to LW so that the animals would gain about 50 and 100 g per day for C and H groups, respectively. Oestrus was tested daily using young aproned bucks. Ovulation rate was assessed by laparoscopy 7 days after identification of oestrus. Plasma samples were obtained weekly for progesterone assay. LW and BCS were recorded weekly. No effect of nutrition level or birth date (Experiment 1 v. 2) on the date of the first ovarian activity or the first detected oestrus was observed. No effect of nutrition on LW or BCS at the first detected oestrus was observed. Birth date influenced significantly the LW of the animals at the onset of ovarian activity or first oestrus (P < 0.001). Irregular sexual activity was frequently observed before the first oestrus (74.7% and 48.0% of the first reproductive activity was irregular for Experiments 1 and 2, respectively). No effect of nutrition level or birth date on ovulation rate was observed. Ovulation rate at first oestrus was influenced by LW in November-born goat kids (1.06 ± 0.06 v. 1.67 ± 0.21 corpora lutea for LW < 30 and 30 kg, respectively, P < 0.01). These results demonstrate that the age at puberty was very dependent upon the season of birth in Payoya goat kids, and that there could be some benefit in breeding November-born goat kids at a higher LW to obtain a higher prolificacy at the first kidding as a consequence of a higher ovulation rate at puberty.


Nairobi National Park (NNP) is unable to incorporate the spatial and temporal dynamics of many migratory mammals that rely on the area as a dry season refuge because of its small size. During the wet season, wildlife must be able to migrate to the south into the Kitengela dispersal area. This area is privately owned and rapidly undergoing land-use change, which affects the structure and function of the dispersal corridors, jeopardising the ecological sustainability of the park. Private landholders in Kitengela incur most of the costs of keeping the dispersal areas open, but do not receive any compensation or revenue from benefits derived from tourism in the park. Here we present an analysis of the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for Nairobi and Kitengela residents for a new land management scheme in the dispersal area, in which local pastoralists leave their land open to wildlife and, by not engaging in fencing, land subdivision or poaching activities, receive monetary compensation for the incremental costs derived from use of their properties as a wildlife dispersal area. The results suggest that the aggregated financial support of urban residents might represent around $1.2 million per year for 5 years. This amount exceeds the economic losses caused by wildlife in the dispersal area, and different financial schemes of fund investment and the prioritisation of conservation regions could be implemented to ensure payments and keep the dispersal corridors open in perpetuity.


We apply two independent data analysis methodologies to locate stable climate states in an intermediate complexity climate model. First, drawing from the theory of quasipotentials, and viewing the state space as an energy landscape with valleys and mountain ridges, we infer the relative likelihood of the identified multistable climate states, and investigate the most likely transition trajectories as well as the expected transition times between them. Second, harnessing techniques from data science, specifically manifold learning, we characterize the data landscape of the simulation data to find climate states and basin boundaries within a fully agnostic and unsupervised framework. Both approaches show remarkable agreement, and reveal, apart from the well known warm and snowball earth states, a third intermediate stable state in one of the two climate models we consider. The combination of our approaches allows to identify how the negative feedback of ocean heat transport and entropy production via the hydrological cycle drastically change the topography of the dynamical landscape of Earth's climate.


The thesis analyses Czechoslovak-Jewish relations in the twentieth century using the case study of the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile in London and its activities during the Second World War. In order to present the research in a wider perspective, it covers the period between the Munich Agreement, when the first politicians left Czechoslovakia, and the Communist Coup in February 1948. Hence the thesis evaluates the political activities and plans of the Czechoslovak exiles, as well as the implementation of the plans in liberated Czechoslovakia after 1945. In comparison with previous contributions to the theme, this thesis is based on extensive archival research. It examines how the Czechoslovak treatment of the Jews was shaped by resurgent Czech and Slovak nationalism/s caused by the war and the experience of the occupation by the German army. Simultaneously, the thesis enquires into the role played in the Czechoslovak exiles' decision making by their efforts to maintain the image of a democratic country in the heart of Europe. An adherence to western liberal democracies was a key political asset used by Czechoslovakia since her creation in 1918. Fair treatment of minorities, in particular the Jews, became part of this 'myth'. However, the Second World War brought to the fore Czechoslovak efforts to nationally homogenize the post-war Republic and rid it of its 'disloyal' minorities. Consequently, the thesis evaluates how the Jews as a minority were perceived and constructed. The thesis is divided into five chapters, following the developments in chronological, as well as thematic order. The first chapter analyses the influence of people in occupied Czechoslovakia on the exiles' policy towards the Jews. Chapter two and three document the exiles' policy towards the Jews during the war, including the government's responses to the Holocaust. Chapter four enquires into the wartime origins of the post-war Czechoslovak policy towards the Jews. Finally, the last chapter analyses the influence of public opinion abroad on the Czechoslovak policy towards the Jews during and after the war.


Quaking or trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx.) is a foundational tree species, which is native, common, and broadly distributed in North America. The ecology of aspen has been extensively studied throughout its range, but both research and forest management practices have focused primarily on its ability to regenerate asexually via root suckering. The seed-based reproductive ecology of aspen has received comparatively little attention, and information on the underlying processes, mechanisms, and requirements of seed regeneration tends to be scattered, somewhat anecdotal, or based only on localized research efforts. Here we review and explore some of the variables that influence the sexual reproduction and early establishment of aspen. We focus this review on western North America, where trembling aspen plays a dominant ecological role and may be disproportionately impacted by climate change. This synthesis presents existing information and identifies critical knowledge gaps in our understanding of seed –based aspen regeneration, in particular as it relates to flowering and seed production, as well as germination, first year growth, and survival of aspen seedlings. This information is discussed further in the context of aspen ecology and its application in both passive and active management approaches to aspen seedling regeneration and restoration.


During the past two and half decades digital telecommunication technology and digital signal processing models have seen accelerated development and implementation to support the electronic infrastructure of the communication industry. The digital IIR (Infinite Impulse Response) filter has been the focus as the primary component within this area with dramatic progress in term of design, precision, fast operation and easy implementation. Our paper here systematically orders the significance of the digital IIR filter design approach based on Butterworth filtering and bilinear transformation for both statistical and simulation models computation. First, the magnitude response and the phase response of the transfer function of the analog filter are computed by Butterworth filtering approach. Next, the magnitude response and the phase response of the transfer function of the digital filter are computed by bilinear transformation. The simulation results of the analog filter and the digital filter are computationally analyzed in term of performance.


BACKGROUND
There is concern about lack of consistency in the design of case definitions used to measure work-related stress in national workforce surveys and the implications of this for the reliability and validity of prevalence estimates as well as for developments in policy and practice on tackling work-related stress.

AIMS
To examine associations between case definitions used for the measurement of work-related stress in nationally representative workforce surveys and the prevalence rates generated.

METHODS
The study focused on 18 nationally representative workforce surveys conducted between 1995 and 2008 that involved British samples. The published report from each survey was scrutinized for evidence of the case definition used to measure work-related stress and the associated prevalence rate.

RESULTS
Several types of case definition were identified that differed in terms of their theoretical basis, structure, and content. Each was associated with a unique range of prevalence rates.

CONCLUSIONS
The results illustrate the challenge presented to the production of valid and reliable estimates of the scale of work-related stress by inconsistent case definition design. The imperative for theory-based consistency in the design of case definitions used for the measurement of work-related stress in national workforce surveys is highlighted.


We present a measurement of the volumetric rate of superluminous supernovae (SLSNe) at z ? 1.0, measured using archival data from the first four years of the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS). We develop a method for the photometric classification of SLSNe to construct our sample. Our sample includes two previously spectroscopically identified objects, and a further new candidate selected using our classification technique. We use the point-source recovery efficiencies from Perrett et al. and a Monte Carlo approach to calculate the rate based on our SLSN sample. We find that the three identified SLSNe from SNLS give a rate of 91+76?36 SNe yr?1 Gpc?3 at a volume-weighted redshift of z = 1.13. This is equivalent to 2.2+1.8?0.9×10?4 of the volumetric core-collapse supernova rate at the same redshift. When combined with other rate measurements from the literature, we show that the rate of SLSNe increases with redshift in a manner consistent with that of the cosmic star formation history. We also estimate the rate of ultra-long gamma-ray bursts based on the events discovered by the Swift satellite, and show that it is comparable to the rate of SLSNe, providing further evidence of a possible connection between these two classes of events. We also examine the host galaxies of the SLSNe discovered in SNLS, and find them to be consistent with the stellar-mass distribution of other published samples of SLSNe.


This thesis presents the results of an experimental study on two-dimensional, planar propagating edge flames. The results were generated using a new apparatus in which a thin stream of gaseous fuel is injected into a low-speed laminar wind tunnel thereby forming a flammable layer along the centerline. The fuel injector consists of aluminum airfoil with a thin slot in its trailing edge, from which fuel is injected. After the initial stratified fuel/air layer is developed, a flame is ignited near the tunnel outlet, and the flame spreads against the incoming air, toward the fuel source. Experiments were conducted with methane and ethane, with the apparatus mounted vertically such that air and fuel flow is upward while the flame spread is downward. Experiments were conducted with air velocity of 25 to 60 cm/s and fuel flows of 967 to 3036 ccm, resulting in centerline equivalence ratios between 0.5 and 2.0. Experiments results showed that the measured flame speed exceeds the laminar flame spread rate and is a function of the gradient of the equivalence ratio perpendicular to the direction of the flame spread. Prior to conducting the combustion experiments, the apparatus was characterized using a steady-state numerical model of the non-reacting flow developed using the COSMOSFloWorks commercial computational fluid dynamics code. The model provided insights into the behavior of the fuel distribution in the gallery prior to ignition. The COSMOSFloWorks model agreed well with detailed measurements of velocity profiles in the gallery, which were conducted to ensure that the flow field was laminar prior to ignition. The practical extension of this work would be in fire safety in normal and microgravity. Non-uniform mixtures can form in normal gravity at crash sites, along ceiling in mining operations, and fuel spills. Non-uniform mixtures can also form in microgravity and knowing the conditions and possible flame spread phenomenon would be beneficial when designing spacecraft components or terrestrial environments.


The engineering internship is designed to expose the final year student to the real world of engineering. This is done over a period of workplace employment in an area of relevant focus. The internship placement was undertaken at Motherwell Automation; a firm based in Perth, Western Australia. Motherwell specialise in the design and supply of industrial control systems. The affect and direction of staff within the company was absolutely pivotal to the success of the experience. Guidance was given on many aspects and focussed around a main project which was the Teras Barge Pumping System.

The Teras barge is permanently moored at Barrow Island primarily to supply a construction site with fresh water. Currently the water is pumped from the barge to standpipes on land, and this task is handled by construction personnel who operate the existing pumps and pipe work manually. The internship project was to fully automate this operation. The solution is a solar powered PLC installation, designed to sit on the barge in a suitable enclosure. This controller will operate the pumps relative to a pressure reading from the pipes supplying the standpipes. This solution was derived for our client Theiss, to assist with their construction efforts on the Gorgon project for Chevron.

The full design and construction phases were completed successfully. At the time of publication, the built system is located in the Motherwell workshop awaiting Factory Acceptance Testing (FAT) with the client representative. Once approved, the system will be transported to site where it will be installed and commissioned by Motherwell staff.

Although the project is not fully complete, it has still allowed for suitable experience in engineering style problem solving in a real-world work environment. The theory for the whole internship has been fulfilled with the realisation of personal and work related goals.


Compromised computers have been a menace to both personal and business computing. In this paper, we tackle the problem of automated detection of break-ins of new unknown threats such as worms, spyware and adware on personal computers. We propose Break-IN DEtectoR (BINDER), a host-based break-in detection system. Our key observation is that many break-ins make extrusions, stealthy malicious outgoing network connections. BINDER exploits a unique characteristic of personal computers, that most network activities are directly or indirectly triggered by user input. Since threats tend to run as background precesses and thus do not receive any user input, the intuition behind BINDER is that only threats generate connections without user input. By correlating outgoing network connections and processing information with user activities, BINDER can capture extrusions and thus break-ins.


The Knowledge Interfaces Project is divided into three interrelated research clusters, Understanding Health , Changing Communication , and Shaping Technologies . Abstract "Work-life balance (WLB) refers to a range of flexible working arrangements that go beyond employees' statutory leave entitlements. WLB assists employees to combine employment with their family life, caring responsibilities and with personal life outside the workplace" (The National Framework Committee for Work-Life Balance Policies, 2010 ). Work-family conflict has been shown to result in job dissatisfaction, depression, absenteeism and an overall loss of health and sense of well-being (Thomas & Ganster, 1995; Poelmans and Sahibzada, 2004, Lapierre & Allen, 2006, Beauregard & Lesley 2009). Avgar et al. (2010) states that balancing work and family is considered important to employees in most work settings, but the healthcare arena is one in which the tensions between work and family are dramatic. The type of work involved in health service delivery is particularly unique to this sector due to its intensive human capital dependency, emotional labour and the 24/7 nature of the work. Avgar et al. (2010) argue that WLB practices enhance the ability of employees and their managers to provide high quality care to their patients. Through their examination of the effects of WLB practices their results indicate that greater use of WLB practices enhances outcomes for hospitals, their employees and patients. Specifically, WLB practices were shown to positively influence hospital financial performance, reduce employee turnover intentions, and decrease errors that could harm patients and staff. Avgar et al. (2010) further highlight that while many studies have looked at work-life balance issues for physicians, less attention has been given to WLB practices for other healthcare frontline staff. The Integrated Employee and Well-being strategy 2009-2014 signals the recognition that the well-being and welfare of employees is central to delivering quality health services (HSE: 2009). 35% of health employees are in the nursing category in Ireland (Department of Health and Children 2009). Little research, apart from a few studies has been carried out in relation to the experiences of nurses and their working environment in Ireland. Studies by McCarthy et al.,


Andersen, Morten Skumsrud. (2012) Legitimacy in State-Building: A Review of the IR Literature. International Political Sociology, doi: 10.1111/j.1749-5687.2012.00159.x © 2012 International Studies Association

In this article, which focuses on different concepts of state-building and legitimacy as used in the mainstream International Relations (IR) literature, I suggest that recent debates may be categorized in a two-by-two matrix. The axes concern the choice between a normative or a sociological perspective on the one hand, and a focus on state institutions or on society on the other. The article identifies an empiricist-sociological approach. Still, the almost exclusive reliance on an ontology of entities and their attributes hampers foci on relations as constituting both "insides" and "outsides" in state-building, and on legitimacy as important in its own right as ongoing public contestations. In a concluding section, I explore the purchase of a relational sociology for future studies of legitimacy in state-building.


Cross-cultural management research is a valuable but complex and error-prone endeavor. The main challenges the authors encountered in conducting a multinational research project included nonequivalence of key concepts, cultural stereotypes, assumptions of universality, and difficulties in comparative analysis. The authors identified crucial questions that need to be asked at each stage of the research for it to be both reliable and valid. These questions address such pitfalls as the importance of focusing on culture as an independent variable, the cultural dynamics of the research team, and the importance of translation and of finding culturally equivalent definitions of key concepts.


As issues of history and memory collide in our society and in the classroom, the time is ripe to rethink the place of history in our schools. Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History represents a unique effort by an international group of scholars to understand the future of teaching and learning about the past. It will challenge the ways in which historians, teachers, and students think about teaching history. The book concerns itself first and foremost with the question, "How do students develop sophisticated historical understandings and how can teachers best encourage this process?" Recent developments in psychology, education, and historiography inform the debates that take place within Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History. This four-part volume identifies the current issues and problems in history education, then works towards a deep and considered understanding of this evolving field. The contributors to this volume link theory to practice, making crucial connections with those who teach history. Published in conjunction with the American Historical Association.


Shipwreck in the first half of the nineteenth century had been an on-going national tragedy. It was not officially quantified until the 185O's when it was found that 1025 ships a year on average were lost, the consequent destruction of life averaged 830 persons a year, with an annual loss to the country representing some 1.5m. There had been a devastating loss to the maritime strength of Britain since the close of the Napoleonic Wars. The response to this on-going national disaster was slow but eventually emerged principally in three areas: humanitarian, technical and political. The humanitarian driven reform came from amongst other sources by way of incentives to inventors from the Royal Humane Society, the formation and establishment of a lifeboat service and a general up-swelling of opinion by exposure to pamphlets and newspapers against the evils of shipwreck. The technical response came as inventors and builders sought to find new forms of construction in ships, lifeboats, life-saving equipment and safety equipment amongst others. Politically, the increasing use of the select committee to bring facts before the public and parliament served as the basis of much reform in nineteenth century England, the 1836 Inquiry into the causes of shipwreck, the 1839 Inquiry into the losses of timber-laden ships and the 1843 Inquiry into the causes of shipwreck being the major exposers of malpractice. The object of this thesis and the major research question is to assess the principal strengths and directions of these responses as the climate of opinion changed and reforms albeit piecemeal came about. The work begins with an outline of the situation as it affected different parts of the coast and some of the localised responses to shipwreck. Using the 1836 Inquiry as the basis for establishing the causes of the problems, itself a new datum point in maritime history as it was the instigating basis for change, the nature of shipwreck and course of reform is traced through the following two decades up until the unifying 'great' Merchant Shipping Act of 1854.


In order to run and manage resource-intensive high-performance applications, large-scale computing and storage platforms have been evolving rapidly in various domains in both academia and industry. The energy expenditure consumed to operate and maintain these cloud computing infrastructures is a major factor to influence the overall profit and efficiency for most cloud service providers. Moreover, considering the mitigation of environmental damage from excessive carbon dioxide emission, the amount of power consumed by enterprise-scale data centers should be constrained for protection of the environment.Generally speaking, there exists a trade-off between power consumption and application performance in large-scale computing systems and how to balance these two factors has become an important topic for researchers and engineers in cloud and HPC communities. Therefore, minimizing the power usage while satisfying the Service Level Agreements have become one of the most desirable objectives in cloud computing research and implementation. Since the fundamental feature of the cloud computing platform is hosting workloads with a variety of characteristics in a consolidated and on-demand manner, it is demanding to explore the inherent relationship between power usage and machine configurations. Subsequently, with an understanding of these inherent relationships, researchers are able to develop effective power management policies to optimize productivity by balancing power usage and system performance. In this dissertation, we develop an autonomic power-aware system management framework for large-scale computer systems. We propose a series of techniques including coarse-grain power profiling, VM power modelling, power-aware resource auto-configuration and full-system power usage simulator. These techniques help us to understand the characteristics of power consumption of various system components. Based on these techniques, we are able to test various job scheduling strategies and develop resource management approaches to enhance the systems' power efficiency.


Class action lawyers are some of the most frequently derided players in our system of civil litigation. It is often asserted that class action lawyers take too much from class judgments as fees, that class actions are little more than a device for the lawyers to enrich themselves at the expense of the class. In this Article, I argue that some of this criticism of class action lawyers is misguided. In particular, I perform a normative examination of fee percentages in class action litigation using the social-welfarist utilitarian account of litigation known as deterrence-insurance theory. I argue that in perhaps the most common class action – the so-called "small stakes" class action – class action lawyers not only do not make too much, but actually make too little. Indeed, I argue that it is hard to see as a theoretical matter why lawyers should not receive 100% of class judgments in small-stakes cases. Of course, it is unlikely that judges in the current political climate will feel comfortable awarding class action lawyers fees equal to 100% of judgments in any type of class action, small stakes or otherwise. Moreover, it is not entirely clear that judges have the legal authority to award fees at such a level. Nonetheless, even if judges cannot award 100% of small-stakes judgments to class action lawyers due to political or legal constraints, deterrence-insurance theory suggests that they should award fee percentages as high as they can in small-stakes cases, which, by any measure, are much higher than the percentages they tend to award now. Unfortunately, deterrence-insurance theory is unable to provide judges with as much guidance in large-stakes and mixed-stakes class actions.


Psychologists, with their long-standing tradition of studying mechanistic processes, can make important contributions to further characterizing the risk associated with genes identified as influencing risk for psychiatric disorders. We report one such effort with respect to CHRM2, which codes for the cholinergic muscarinic 2 receptor and was of interest originally for its association with alcohol dependence. We tested for association between CHRM2 and prospectively measured externalizing behavior in a longitudinal, community-based sample of adolescents, as well as for moderation of this association by parental monitoring. We found evidence for an interaction in which the association between the genotype and externalizing behavior was stronger in environments with lower parental monitoring. There was also suggestion of a crossover effect, in which the genotype associated with the highest levels of externalizing behavior under low parental monitoring had the lowest levels of externalizing behavior at the extreme high end of parental monitoring. The difficulties involved in distinguishing mechanisms of gene-environment interaction are discussed.


OBJECTIVE To determine whether an intervention at both the provider and patient level can increase the utilization of diabetic retinal examination among diabetic patients and to compare the results from a comparable study conducted on the East Coast. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS For the regional intervention study, all diabetic patients 18 years or older who enrolled in a large network-based health maintenance organization (HMO) in California were identified (n = 19,397). The identified diabetic patients received educational materials and a notification of their prior diabetic retinal examination status. Also, their primary care physicians received the current American Diabetes Association (ADA) guidelines for dilated retinal examinations and a list of patients due for diabetic retinal examination. RESULTS There were 25 and 27% increases in the percentage of diabetic patients who received diabetic retinal examinations in 1995 compared with the percentages in 1993 and 1994, respectively. The increase in diabetic retinal examinations was most significant after the intervention (odds ratio = 1.4). Furthermore, the improvements in compliance after the intervention were almost identical between the studies implemented on the East and West Coasts. CONCLUSIONS This study and the prior study demonstrate that such a "reminder" intervention can improve compliance with diabetic retinal screening recommendations. A generalizable intervention, such as this, may be applicable on a national level. For these programs to be successful, however, HMOs and physicians must have a collaborative relationship.


A reconnaissance drainage geochemical survey was carried
out at a density of about 2 samples per km2 of the
Llanclrindod Wells/ Builth Wells Ordovician inlier in
Powys. The rocks of the area comprise a sequence of
mudstones and shales ranging in age from the Llan\.irn to
the Caradoc containing volcanic horizons and a lrolcanic
complex of acid/intermediate composition overlain in the
south by a further volcanic sequence of more basic composition.
An area of about 65 km2 was sampled and from
each site a wet screened minus BSI 100 mesh (< 150
micrometres) fraction and panned heavy mineral concentratc
samples were obtained. Sie\rcd sediment and concentratc
samples were analysed for B, V, Cr, Mn, Fe,
Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, As, Zr, MO, Ag, Sn, Ba and Pb and Ca,
Ti, Mn, Fe. Ni, Cu, Zn, Sr, Zr, MO, Sn, Sb,Ba, Ce, Pb
and U respecti\.ely. Several Pb and Zn anomalies were
apparent many of which appeared to be associated with
the outcrop of the main volcanic unit of the area and 4 of
these were confirmed by further grab stream sediment
and bank sampling. Drainage sampling was supplemented
by 27 reconnaissance soil tra\rerscs mostl)
across the main outcrops of the \.olcanic- rocks which tencled
to form the most ele\rated ground. The soil samples
were sie\.ed to give a minus 85 BSI mesh (< 180
micrometres) sample for analysis for Cu, Pb, Zn, Ni and
either Mn and Fe or Ag and Co. Samples collected from
an art's of'old lcaci workings in the west of the inlier failed
to pro\ridc c\icience of further vein mineralisation beyond
the limits of the workings. Elswhere the biggest concentration
of' Pb and Zn anomalies and the greatest
amplitude of anonlaly (2000 ppm Pb) wcrc located over
the northern outcrop of the the main unit of tuffaceous
volcanic rocks, particularly in the \.icinity of the farm Pen
Rhiw Frank.
A clctailccl geological, geochemical and geophysical
survey of the Pen Rhiw Frank area was carried out using
photogeological interpretation, further soil sampling and
a combination of IP/resistivity, VLF, SP and magnetic
surveys. Geological interpretation indicated that the area
was divided into fault blocks and the geophysical work
re\realecl a zone' of high resistivity with roughly coincident
low amplitude chargeability maxima and a VLF crosso\.
t'r o\c'r part of the zone. There was also a general
association of this zone with lead in soil anomalies and the
presence of significant amounts of weathered pyrite in the
limited outcrops. The lead in soil anomalies when contoured
in the light of the photogeological interpretation
can by sc'cbn as broadly following the local strike of the
rocks. Four holes were drilled to in\restiage the source ot
the> geochemical anomalies and to investiage any association
bt~tn~ecn this and the obser\red geophysical
anonlalies. Thy holes wcrc sited to test the down dip extension
of' apparently stratabound surface soil anomalies.
l'uff~accous rocks of andcsitic composition with a horizon
of clacitic. tuffs and minor lrcsicular andcsitic 1aL.a wt'rc intcrsccted
in the holes. Mineralisation occurs in the for-m of
secondary lc~ad minerals within a poorly rcco\rcred soft
clay-rich section 5.8 m thick near the top of ant' of the
holes. 1~~1 lc\.els up to 0.52 %I o\'t'r 3.4 m were found in
the zone which is located at the interface between a dacitic
tuff unit chcn~icnlly distinct from the rest of the \.olcanic
scqucrlcXX and an andesitic la\,a probably of linlitcd c\;-
tent .'I'hc (h-ill holes suggest that thcl dip of the strata is
around 5 dcgrccs rather than the 30 degrees d~cluc~d from
th t,xisting gc,ological map of the arca and so the holes
wcr(' not sitccl at locations which wc'rc' likcsly to iI1tc'rsc'c.t
any stratabound mineralisation at depth below the zone of
surface Lveathcring. A further consequence of the flat dip
of strata is that by accidents of topography extensive overburden
anomalies could be produced from relatively
minor statabound base-metal enrichments on the hill
tops.


At SMORN 8, a new web-based diagnostic system – web4diagnostics – was presented (Kunze, 2002). During the last two years, this system became the standard diagnostic system infrastructure for internal use in Siemens Power Generation, which integrates a large data archive of measured data and capabilities for data analysis and evaluation. Besides this internal use, today some 15 power plants worldwide use web4diagnostics in their companies communication network. Essential features are: monitoring and diagnostic information are provided in HTML page format; diagnosis can be performed on any suitable machine in the computer network; a 'central diagnostic laboratory' can be configured as a virtual facility using the existing IT infrastructure; analysis results can be accessed from any computer in the information network, only a web browser is required. The system employs well-known standard diagnostic modules and also owns tools such as operational based limit surveillance, automatic report generation and automatic information in case of deviations.


This article examines the recent commercialisation of the programme-making activities at the BBC in the United Kingdom as a major instance of a wider tendency that sees a market logic becoming increasingly embedded in public service media (PSM) organisations. Drawing on ideational approaches to policy analysis, this article seeks to explain how and why the BBC came to conceive of BBC Studios, a new commercial subsidiary bringing together the majority of BBC's in-house production units and free to compete in the wider market for programme commissions, as serving its long-term interests. It considers how BBC strategists engaged with dominant ideas in UK broadcasting policy on the economic value of the creative industries and the benefits of competition for creativity in television programme-making. It shows how changes to the institutional context over the past three decades, predicated on these very ideas, have constrained BBC's room for manoeuvre. The main arguments put forward – the BBC's growing reliance on economic arguments to justify its value and the path-dependent effects at work pushing the BBC towards advocating an institutional solution entailing the further hollowing out of its publicly funded structures – are relevant to wider debates on the future role and organisational forms of PSM.


We calculate the distance-dependent performance of a few representative terrestrial neutrino detectors in detecting and measuring the properties of the νe breakout burst light curve in a Galactic core-collapse supernova. The breakout burst is a signature phenomenon of core collapse and offers a probe into the stellar core through collapse and bounce. We examine cases of no neutrino oscillations and oscillations due to normal and inverted neutrino-mass hierarchies. For the normal hierarchy, other neutrino flavors emitted by the supernova overwhelm the νe signal, making a detection of the breakout burst difficult. For the inverted hierarchy (IH), some detectors at some distances should be able to see the νe breakout burst peak and measure its properties. For the IH, the maximum luminosity of the breakout burst can be measured at 10 kpc to accuracies of ∼30% for Hyper-Kamiokande (Hyper-K) and ∼60% for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). Super-Kamiokande (Super-K) and Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) lack the mass needed to make an accurate measurement. For the IH, the time of the maximum luminosity of the breakout burst can be measured in Hyper-K to an accuracy of ∼3 ms at 7 kpc, in DUNE to ∼2 ms at 4 kpc, and JUNO and Super-K can measure the time of maximum luminosity to an accuracy of ∼2 ms at 1 kpc. Detector backgrounds in IceCube render a measurement of the νe breakout burst unlikely. For the IH, a measurement of the maximum luminosity of the breakout burst could be used to differentiate between nuclear equations of state.


This study links evolution in organizational structure to ambiguity in the definition of performance in the context of organizations formed to develop long-lived infrastructure: so-called 'mega-projects'. Based on a longitudinal, inductive analysis of three mega-projects in London, we argue that a mega-project is a meta-organization with two symbiotically-related constituent structures. The core, led by a coalition, is a mutable collective that shares control over the goal of the project and corresponding high-level design choices. The periphery is a supply chain selected to design and build the infrastructure, but lacks the authority to change the high-level choices. As the mega-project structure evolves over time, we show that the founders and new comers renegotiate the high-level choices and slippages in performance targets ensue. The conflation of committals to different baselines, differing preferences for efficiency and effectiveness, and rivalry in high-level choices gives rise to competing performance narratives which cannot be reconciled. Thus, we argue, the disappointing and controversial (under) performance of mega-projects may be a result of how their organizational structure develops, rather than due to any agency or competence related failure per se.


An n-thread parallel program p is large-grained if in every parallel step the computations on each of the threads are complex procedures requiring numerous processor instructions. This practically relevant style of programs differs from PRAM programs in its large granularity and the possibility that within a parallel step the computations on different threads may considerably vary in size. Let M be an n-processor asynchronous parallel system, with no restriction on the degree of asynchrony and without any specialized synchronization mechanisms. It is a challenging theoretical as well as practically important problem to ensure correct execution of P on such a parallel machine. Let P be a large-grained program requiring total work W for its execution on a synchronous a-processor parallel system. We present a transformation (compilation) of P into a program C(P) which correctly and efficiently effects the computation of P on the asynchronous machine M. Under moderate assumptions on the granularity of threads and the size of the program variables, execution of C(P) requires just O(Wlog* n) expected total work, and the memory space overhead is a small multiplicative constant.<<ETX>>


Most conservation challenges are complex and possess all the characteristics of so called "wicked" problems. Despite widespread recognition of this complexity conservationists possess a legacy of institutional structures, tools and practices better suited to simpler systems. We highlight two specific challenges posed by this mismatch: the difficulty of adaptive management where success is ambiguous and the tension between "best practice" and creativity. Drawing on research in other disciplines (including psychology, information systems, business management, and military strategy) we suggest practices that conservation could consider to better respond to complexity. These practices include, defining clear objectives, the use of scenarios, emphasis on pattern analysis, and ensuring greater scope for creative and decentralized decision making. To help illustrate these challenges and solutions, we point to parallels between conservation and military operations.


Research indicates that video self-modeling is an effective means for improving academic skills and behaviors. Nearly 200 video self-modeling studies or applications have been reported over the past three decades. The purpose of this review was to examine studies in which video self-modeling was applied in school-based settings. Eighteen studies met strict criteria for inclusion in this review. Descriptive summaries and analyses of outcomes are provided for each study, as well as suggestions and resources for educators to implement video self-modeling interventions. These school-based studies verify the functional control of targeted academic skills and behavior(s) and support the efficacy of video self-modeling to improve student outcomes. Evidence for generalization across settings and maintenance over time is also presented.


Improvements in DNA sequencing technologies (which determine the order of the four constituent bases – A, G, C and T – in which the genetic code is written) have the potential to transform how we detect and respond to infectious disease. Defense against pathogens, whether naturally occurring diseases or intentional biological attacks, depends critically on our ability to detect and identify pathogens, in order to accurately diagnose, properly triage and treat those infected, and gauge the extent and dynamics of an outbreak. We review here the progression of DNA sequencing technologies since the 1970's, the potential impact of sequencing on detecting and managing epidemics, and other applications that will support and expand innovations in sequencing technology.


Wheeled vehicles are often incapable of transporting heavy materials over rough terrain or up staircases. Lower extremity exoskeletons supplement human intelligence with the strength and endurance of a pair of wearable robotic legs that support a payload. This paper summarizes the design and analysis of the Berkeley lower extremity exoskeleton (BLEEX). The anthropomorphically based BLEEX has 7 DOF per leg, four of which are powered by linear hydraulic actuators. The selection of the DOF, critical hardware design aspects, and initial performance measurements of BLEEX are discussed.


DNA double-strand break (DSB) repair by nonhomologous end joining (NHEJ) requires the assembly of several proteins on DNA ends. Although biochemical studies have elucidated several aspects of the NHEJ reaction mechanism, much less is known about NHEJ in living cells, mainly because of the inability to visualize NHEJ repair proteins at DNA damage. Here we provide evidence that a pulsed near IR laser can produce DSBs without any visible alterations in the nucleus, and we show that NHEJ proteins accumulate in the irradiated areas. The levels of DSBs and Ku accumulation diminished in time, showing that this approach allows us to study DNA repair kinetics in vivo. Remarkably, the Ku heterodimers on DNA ends were in dynamic equilibrium with Ku70/80 in solution, showing that NHEJ complex assembly is reversible. Accumulation of XRCC4/ligase IV on DSBs depended on the presence of Ku70/80, but not DNA-PKCS. We detected a direct interaction between Ku70 and XRCC4 that could explain these requirements. Our results suggest that this assembly constitutes the core of the NHEJ reaction and that XRCC4 may serve as a flexible tether between Ku70/80 and ligase IV.


Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are typically deployed to learn a specific, concrete task based on a pre-defined reward function. However, in some cases an agent may be able to gain experience in the domain prior to being given a task. In such cases, intrinsic motivation can be used to enable the agent to learn a useful model of the environment that is likely to help it learn its eventual tasks more efficiently. This paper presents the TEXPLORE with Variance-And-Novelty-Intrinsic-Rewards algorithm (TEXPLORE-VANIR), an intrinsically motivated model-based RL algorithm. The algorithm learns models of the transition dynamics of a domain using random forests. It calculates two different intrinsic motivations from this model: one to explore where the model is uncertain, and one to acquire novel experiences that the model has not yet been trained on. This paper presents experiments demonstrating that the combination of these two intrinsic rewards enables the algorithm to learn an accurate model of a domain with no external rewards and that the learned model can be used afterward to perform tasks in the domain. While learning the model, the agent explores the domain in a developing and curious way, progressively learning more complex skills. In addition, the experiments show that combining the agent's intrinsic rewards with external task rewards enables the agent to learn faster than using external rewards alone.


A process-based carbon gas flux model was developed to calculate total macrophyte and microalgal production, and community and belowground respiration, for a Peltandra virginica dominated tidal freshwater marsh in Virginia. The model was based on measured field fluxes of CO 2 and CH 4 , scaled to monthly and annual rates using empirically derived photosynthesis versus irradiance, and respiration versus temperature relationships. Because the gas exchange technique measures whole system gas fluxes and therefore includes turnover and seasonal translocation, estimates of total macrophyte production will be more accurate than those calculated from biomass harvests. One limitation of the gas flux method is that gaseous carbon fluxes out of the sediment may underestimate true belowground respiration if sediment-produced gases are transported through plant tissues to the atmosphere. Therefore we measured gross nitrogen mineralization (converted to carbon units using sediment C/N ratios and estimates of bacterial growth efficiency) as a proxy for belowground carbon respiration. We estimated a total net macrophyte production of 536 to 715 g C m -2 yr -1 , with an additional 59 g C m -2 yr -1 fixed by sediment microalgae. Belowground respiration calculated from nitrogen mineralization was estimated to range from 516 to 723 g C m -2 yr -1 versus 75 g C m -2 yr -1 measured directly with sediment chambers. Methane flux (72 g C m -2 yr -1 ) accounted for 11 to 13 % of total belowground respiration. Gas flux results were combined with biomass harvest and literature data to create a conceptual mass balance model of macrophyte-influenced carbon cycling. Spring and autumn translocation and re-translocation are critical in controlling observed seasonal patterns of above and belowground biomass accumulation. Annually, a total of 270 to 477 g C m -2 of macrophyte tissue is available for deposition on the marsh surface as detritus or export from the marsh as particulate or dissolved carbon.


Faced with expanding collections and a rise in student population, Jackson Library, the main library of the University Libraries at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, made the decision to hire a space consultant in order to repurpose existing library space in front of an addition still 710 years away. In order to provide information useful to this project for both the consultant hired and decision- making administrators, the library developed a program and conducted an assessment of space usage. The three-part assessment program included surveys, observation studies and focus group discussions that generated evidence and data useful to influence the work of the space consultant. In addition, the assessment information gathered provided library administration with a list of service enhancements that could be implemented immediately without a large capital outlay. The final recommendations that came from the space consultant's work is supported by evidence gained from the library's assessment activities as well as feedback and suggestions from library faculty and staff. This process also became a first step in the development of an ongoing culture of assessment activities to improve library services and promote the learning value of the libraries as a place.


The contemporary world is characterized by quick changes and the propagation of knowledge-based economies, and consequently, the necessity to constantly introduce innovations by the enterprise. However, this process involves numerous dangers, as the features of innovative processes are high costs and high level of risk. While implementing innovations, enterprises set goals which are to be achieved thanks to them. In the case of small entities it seems that the essential aim for the introduction of changes is the reduction of costs connected with the activity, which is often indicated as the factor for the formation of the competitive position. Therefore, the primary goal of the compilation was the identification of changes in the area of determining the aim of innovation introduction by small enterprises functioning in the Southern Region of Poland. The analysis included the level of innovativeness and competitiveness of the examined companies. The conclusions were based on the results of two original studies concerning innovativeness and competitiveness of small enterprises, conducted in years 2006/07 and 2013. Keywords : competitiveness factor, small enterprises, innovation, competition


The effect of stitches/cm, number of assembly layers and fabric thickness on the sewing thread consumption values has been studied using the lockstitch type 301 and chainstitch type 401. Experimental, regressive and geometrical consumption values are compared and discussed to select the best predictive modelling technique to objectively estimate the thread amount required to seam garments. Compared to lockstitch, the thread consumption using chainstitch includes higher lengths of sewing threads. Moreover, in chainstitch type 401, the results depict that fabric sample thickness does not have the same influence rate as in the lockstitch case. Therefore, among all tested inputs, the stitch type remains the most important parameter in the case of chainstitch. Regarding regressive and geometrical methods, the regressive technique is found more effective than the geometrical method and fitted the experimental results widely. This difference can be explained by the hypothesis used to simplify the determination of an approximate consumption value. The developed multi-linear models allow a fruitful prediction of the consumed thread amount for the experimental design of interest.


String matching is the core algorithm and the most time consuming operation of almost every modern Network Intrusion Management System (NIMS). In this paper we aim at integrating string matching with multi-thread parallelism to dramatically improve the performance of NIMS. The string matching procedure under multi-thread parallelism situation is modeled and researched. The results are utilized to instruct the design of an improved Aho-Corasick (AC) algorithm, named as AC_MT, for network processor (NP) based NIMS. A simplified NIMS prototype and both the AC and AC_MT algorithms are implemented on Intel's NP platform IXDP2850. The evaluation results tested with SmartBits 600 reveals that the performance of the NIMS prototype is improved by 44.7%~148.8% depending on the different lengths of the input packets and different number of threads, under both algorithms using the same number of threads situation.


In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the city government of Augsburg, Germany, struggled to maintain religious peace as the confessional boundaries between its Catholic and Protestant communities
 hardened. As tensions gradually rose, city officials feared and scrutinized the disruptive potential of the psalms and chorales sung by Augsburg9s Protestant majority. Those suspected of owning, singing,
 or distributing inflammatory songs were subject to imprisonment, interrogation, torture, and exile. When an Imperial decree established a fully Catholic city government in March 1629, the authorities tightened
 this scrutiny, banning Protestant singing entirely in public and private and using a network of informants to catch violators. A remarkably well-preserved collection of criminal interrogation records
 in Augsburg dramatizes city officials9 concern about religious song and their attempts to restrict its cultivation through coercive measures. These records, which preserve the testimony of suspects and
 witnesses as well as original evidence (such as manuscript or printed songs), show the ways in which local authorities tried to control singing that they felt threatened the public peace. At the same time,
 these sources give us unparalleled insight into the production, performance, and circulation of religious songs. Although the interrogations reveal much about how and where songs——often contrafacta
 of well-known psalms or chorales——were written and performed, the authorities were especially intent on finding out how they originated, who bought, sold, and sang them, and why. These exchanges between
 interrogators and suspects provide a starting point for an analysis of the relationship between singing, religion, and criminality in an early modern urban environment.


During a trawl for sea creatures on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean last month, scientists on the RV Helmer Hansson in Rijpfjorden on the island of Spitsbergen, Norway, retrieved a 7-meter-long log infested with living shipworms on the sea floor under 250 meters of water. Previous studies have suggested that shipworms may be moving from warmer waters into the high latitudes as the ocean temperature rises. The discovery raises the possibility that a new species of the wood-chomping mollusks is loose in the Arctic, where it could devour shipwrecks. Now, scientists are analyzing the worms' DNA and the wood for more clues.


Our aim was to test cell and trabecular responses to mechanical loading in vitro in a tissue bone explant culture model. We used a new three-dimensional culture model, the ZetOS system, which provides the ability to exert cyclic compression on cancellous bone cylinders (bovine sternum) cultured in forced flow circumfusion chambers, and allows to assess mechanical parameters of the cultivated samples. We evaluated bone cellular parameters through osteocyte viability test, gene and protein expression, and histomorphometric bone formation rate, in nonloaded versus loaded samples. The microarchitecture of bone cores was appraised by in vivo micro-CT imaging. After 3 weeks, the samples receiving daily cyclic compression exhibited increased osteoblast differentiation and activity associated with thicker, more plate-like-shaped trabeculae and higher Young's modulus and ultimate force as compared to unloaded samples. Osteoclast activity was not affected by mechanical strain, although it was responsive to drug treatments (retinoic acid and bisphosphonate) during the first 2 weeks of culture. Thus, in the ZetOS apparatus, we reproduce in vitro the osteogenic effects of mechanical strain known in vivo, making this system a unique and an essential laboratory aid for ex vivo testing of lamellar bone remodeling.


Variational mutual information (MI) estimators are widely used in unsupervised representation learning methods such as contrastive predictive coding (CPC). A lower bound on MI can be obtained from a multi-class classification problem, where a critic attempts to distinguish a positive sample drawn from the underlying joint distribution from $(m-1)$ negative samples drawn from a suitable proposal distribution. Using this approach, MI estimates are bounded above by $\log m$, and could thus severely underestimate unless $m$ is very large. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel estimator based on a multi-label classification problem, where the critic needs to jointly identify multiple positive samples at the same time. We show that using the same amount of negative samples, multi-label CPC is able to exceed the $\log m$ bound, while still being a valid lower bound of mutual information. We demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to lead to better mutual information estimation, gain empirical improvements in unsupervised representation learning, and beat a current state-of-the-art knowledge distillation method over 10 out of 13 tasks.


Traditional cell culture models have limitations in extrapolating functional mechanisms that underlie strategies of microbial virulence. Indeed during the infection the pathogens adapt to different tissue-specific environmental factors. The development of in vitro models resembling human tissue physiology might allow the replacement of inaccurate or aberrant animal models. Three-dimensional (3D) cell culture systems are more reliable and more predictive models that can be used for the meaningful dissection of host–pathogen interactions. The lung and gut mucosae often represent the first site of exposure to pathogens and provide a physical barrier against their entry. Within this context, the tracheobronchial and small intestine tract were modelled by tissue engineering approach. The main work was focused on the development and the extensive characterization of a human organotypic airway model, based on a mechanically supported co-culture of normal primary cells. The regained morphological features, the retrieved environmental factors and the presence of specific epithelial subsets resembled the native tissue organization. In addition, the respiratory model enabled the modular insertion of interesting cell types, such as innate immune cells or multipotent stromal cells, showing a functional ability to release pertinent cytokines differentially. Furthermore this model responded imitating known events occurring during the infection by Non-typeable H. influenzae. Epithelial organoid models, mimicking the small intestine tract, were used for a different explorative analysis of tissue-toxicity. Further experiments led to detection of a cell population targeted by C. difficile Toxin A and suggested a role in the impairment of the epithelial homeostasis by the bacterial virulence machinery. The described cell-centered strategy can afford critical insights in the evaluation of the host defence and pathogenic mechanisms. The application of these two models may provide an informing step that more coherently defines relevant molecular interactions happening during the infection.


Group II introns are a class of mobile ribozymes found in bacteria and eukaryotic organelles that self-splice from precursor RNAs. The resulting lariat intron RNA can then insert into new genomic DNA sites through a reverse splicing reaction. Collectively, this process of intron mobility is termed "retrohoming." Mobile group II introns encode a reverse transcriptase (RT) that stabilizes the catalytically active form of the intron RNA for both the forward and reverse splicing reactions and also converts the integrated intron RNA into DNA. This work aims to elucidate the structure of bacterial group II intron-encoded RTs and ultimately determine how they function in intron mobility. Although efforts to crystallize group II introns RTs have been unsuccessful, small angle X-ray scattering studies in conjunction with homology modeling have provided new insights into the structure and function of these enzymes. OH


This report presents the results of a large-scale online survey experiment designed to test several versions of disclosures to support understanding of time-barred debt and revival. This survey experiment was conducted by ICF International, Inc., on behalf of the CFPB between May 2019 and September 2019.

The survey experiment tested disclosures in the context of a debt collection validation notice. Respondents were randomly assigned to different versions of a notice and asked to answer a series of questions principally designed to test their understanding of the notice and the time-barred debt and revival disclosures. Respondents were also asked about their attitudes towards paying debts and debt collectors, and their own experiences with debt collection.


Implementing cryptography requires integers of significant magnitude to resist cryptanalytic attacks. Modern programming languages only provide support for integers which are relatively small and single precision. The purpose of this text is to instruct the reader regarding how to implement efficient multiple precision algorithms.

 Bignum math is the backbone of modern computer security algorithms. It is the ability to work with hundred-digit numbers efficiently using techniques that are both elegant and occasionally bizarre. This book introduces the reader to the concept of bignum algorithms and proceeds to build an entire library of functionality from the ground up. Through the use of theory, pseudo-code and actual fielded C source code the book explains each and every algorithm that goes into a modern bignum library. Excellent for the student as a learning tool and practitioner as a reference alike BigNum Math is for anyone with a background in computer science who has taken introductory level mathematic courses. The text is for students learning mathematics and cryptography as well as the practioner who needs a reference for any of the algorithms documented within.

 * Complete coverage of Karatsuba Multiplication, the Barrett Algorithm, Toom-Cook 3-Way Multiplication, and More

 * Tom St Denis is the developer of the industry standard cryptographic suite of tools called LibTom.

 * This book provides step-by-step exercises to enforce concepts


In spite of large number of financial crises, often depicted as episodes of financial panic, the notion of panic in financial markets is not very well understood. Many have argued that in order to understand financial crises, and in particular panic events, we need to go beyond classic economic arguments. This paper is an effort in that direction, in which we attempt to give a psychological account of panic and of panic in financial markets in particular, by discussing uncertainty, the desire for predictability and control, the illusion of control, and confidence. We suggest how one might incorporate these psychological insights into existing economic models.


Good governance is an area of increasing concern and interest in both the private and the public and nonprofit sectors. Over the last decade, in the wake of a series of major corporate scandals of which the likes of Enron and Worldcom are only two of the latest, there has been a growing concern to make board stewardship of public companies more effective. During this period in the UK there have been a string of major reports and reforms aimed at improving the self-regulation of companies by their boards (e.g. Cadbury, 1992; Greenbury, 1995; Hampel, 1998). The most recent (Higgs, 2002) proposes a number of changes to strengthen the role of non-executive directors in the interests of increased effectiveness and accountability. Similar concerns exist about the effectiveness of nonprofit boards. Successive British governments, in their attempts to modernize and improve the provision of services have put public and non-profit organizations under pressure to improve their effectiveness through the imposition of performance measures, quality checks and audits, and through reforms to governance structures. It has become the practice of the government to compose 'league tables' of performance and to publicize the performance of all. This has created new kinds of pressures for organizations and their governing bodies – being 'named and shamed'. Schools for example if deemed to be failing will be put into what is known as 'special measures' where the threat of having a 'superhead' brought in to sort it out will hang over the governing body for up to two years. Similar procedures have now been introduced for 'failing hospitals'. At the same time government has increasingly drawn the voluntary sector into the role of providing public services and there are moves towards greater quality checks and performance measurement for their work too. The recent UK central government Strategy Unit report (2002) Private Action, Public Benefit for example proposes more stringent requirements on larger charities (income over £1m) to complete a standard information return that will focus attention on the measurement of impact, achievement, stakeholder involvement, governance and trustee selection and abilities. But at the same time, running alongside this concern for increased effectiveness, is a concern on the part of government for wider public involvement and participation. Recruitment to many public bodies emphasizes the need for these to be representative of the communities or stakeholders they serve and in the voluntary and nonprofit sectors values of service user participation and involvement in governance are strongly held by many organizations. It seems to us that these concerns sit in tension with one another and may lead to particular challenges when problems arise in the organization. For example in one of our cases, a large disability charity, the organizational recovery process was rendered more complex by the concerns of members of the governing body about the impact of the changes on their children or themselves. (XXXXXXXXX 2002). In another case the lack of development of a board, composed of largely of local residents, contributed directly to the difficulties that arose, when an organization's funding increased suddenly and dramatically in the wake of the urban regeneration agenda of a Regional Development Authority. This paper is one of a series exploring issues of crisis, failure and recovery in public and nonprofit organisations (XXXXX2002, XXXXXX 2002. XXXXX 2003). However, little is known about the dynamics of non-profit boards during crises, which is the main focus of this paper. We are interested in what happens in boards and other governing bodies when things go wrong. What do boards do that help or hinder organisational recovery? What are the dynamics of the process and what skills and competences do board members need to lead or assist the process of recovery? One issue that is under-researched is whether different types of boards experience different kinds of crises. One factor that differentiates nonprofit governance from corporate governance is the emphasis in many of the former of representativeness and on issues of social inclusion and diversity. How are these issues likely to impact on the way the board members approach their roles? What impact does the agenda of diversity and social inclusion have on board performance when serious problems arise? The paper is theoretical and exploratory in orientation. We will review the literature and use evidence from some pilot research interviews giving accounts of a variety of crises and failures in the public and nonprofit fields to build theory about what may be the challenges in achieving recovery for different types of boards, particularly those with an emphasis on community and service user participation. It aims to develop a theoretical framework for trying to understand how different types of non-profit boards react to crises and to generate a number of research questions to guide further research.


This study develops a comparable Human Development Index for subnational government in Nigeria. While built on the UNDP approach, we extend the generic framework to address challenges at the subnational level such as comparable indicator, data unavailability and estimation technique. The result shows wide disparity across states in their human development, with states within the southern region recording more impressive performance. We further examine the key economic and political drivers of the observed variations across state and found fiscal sustainability and geopolitical zoning as the key determinants.


In this haunting poem from the latter part of the nineteenth century, Scots-born writer James Thomson anticipated the modern age's nightmare vision of the city as a place of loneliness, alienation and spiritual despair. In contrast to the late Victorian confidence all around him, Thomson dared to face the possibility that the universe was utterly indifferent to human affairs. The strange and dark images in The City of Dreadful Night have become a landmark of modern literature, for the tomb-like streets and empty squares in this memorable poem preceded T.S Eliot's The Waste Land, and the darker visions of expressionism and surrealism by over forty-five years. Published in instalments in 1874 and then in book form in 1880, The City of Dreadful Night has long been unavailable as a complete text. This exciting new edition is introduced and annotated by Edwin Morgan, long an admirer of Thomson's work, and a leading modern poet in his own right.


The need for sustainable urban planning and development reached an important point in 2007, when half of the world's population was defined as living in cities. This need is especially true for a country like China, where an unprecedented urban-rural migration has been taking place since 1978. Such a mass movement has posed many sustainability challenges for Chinese cities; for example, China is home to 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world. Now China's leaders are attempting to use the country's transition to a market economy and integration into the global economy to advance environmental and social issues, also on an urban level. One way the country is confronting urban growth and sustainability challenges is through an eco-city development approach. The eco-city concept is relatively new in China, and is being used in cities such as Tianjin and Dongtan near Shanghai. Whether eco-cities address the main problems associated with urban development and sustainability, however, rests on a broader, more fundamental planning approach that would streamline the goals and priorities of a large number of stakeholders, focus on existing city problems and look at small-scale ecoinitiatives for answers, and thus remains in question.


Coreference resolution is the task of determining different expressions of a text that refer to the same entity. The resolution of coreferring expressions is an essential step for automatic interpretation of the text. While coreference information is beneficial for various NLP tasks like summarization, question answering, and information extraction, state-of-the-art coreference resolvers are barely used in any of these tasks. The problem is the lack of robustness in coreference resolution systems. A coreference resolver that gets higher scores on the standard
evaluation set does not necessarily perform better than the others on a new test set.
In this thesis, we introduce robustness in coreference resolution by (1) introducing a reliable evaluation framework for recognizing robust improvements, and (2) proposing a solution that results in robust coreference resolvers.
As the first step of setting up the evaluation framework, we introduce a reliable evaluation metric, called LEA, that overcomes the drawbacks of the existing metrics. We analyze LEA based on various types of errors in coreference outputs and show that it results in reliable scores. In addition to an evaluation metric, we also introduce an evaluation setting in which we disentangle coreference evaluations from parsing complexities. Coreference resolution is affected by parsing complexities for detecting the boundaries of expressions that have complex syntactic structures. We reduce the effect of parsing errors in coreference evaluation by automatically extracting a minimum span for each expression. We then emphasize the importance of out-of-domain evaluations and generalization in coreference resolution and discuss the reasons behind the poor generalization of state-of-the-art coreference resolvers.
Finally, we show that enhancing state-of-the-art coreference resolvers with linguistic features is a promising approach for making coreference resolvers robust across domains. The
incorporation of linguistic features with all their values does not improve the performance.
However, we introduce an efficient pattern mining approach, called EPM, that mines all feature-value combinations that are discriminative for coreference relations. We then only
incorporate feature-values that are discriminative for coreference relations. By employing EPM feature-values, performance improves significantly across various domains.


This volume presents eighty-nine letters exchanged between John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte between 1841 and 1847. They address important issues of the mid-nineteenth century in philosophy, science, economics, and politics. Cumulatively, these letters provide a humanistic view of Western Europe and its social problems. They add valuable perspective to what we know about the work of Mill and Comte, in a critical period of English and French thought. The correspondence begins with an admiring letter from Mill who considers himself a positivist at the tune and writes to Comte as to an elder colleague. A close friendship developed, in the course of which they discussed matters of common concern. Their understanding extends to personal experiences, including their respective mental crises at an early age. The opinions expressed about their contemporaries are significant and include comments on Thomas Carlyle, John and Sarah Austin, and Alexander Bain, on philosophers and major authors in France, Germany, and Italy. Mill and Comte eventually encountered issues on which they could not come to consensus, especially the equality of women. While Mill was an ardent defender of women's rights, Comte supported the traditional hierarchy that endowed men with social and political superiority. According to Jerome H. Buckley, Gurner Professor of English Literature Emeritus at Harvard University, "The correspondence of Mill and Comte, now available for the first time in English translation, is a remarkable intellectual exchange, a dialogue of real significance in the history of ideas." This volume will be of great interest to philosophers, historians, economists, women's studies scholars, and political scientists.


Loss of the genetic diversity of some of the world's crops has accelerated in recent decades, with many crops becoming increasingly susceptible to diseases, pests, and environmental stresses. A global network of gene banks has therefore been established to provide plant breeders with the genetic resources necessary for developing more resistant crops that will enable farmers to maintain high yields. Most of these gene banks now store the germplasm of only the major crops such as cereals, potatoes, and grain legumes. Cultivated varieties of these crops are conserved as well as wild species that might otherwise become extinct. Tropical cash crops such as bananas and coconuts are also important food crops in many Third World countries, and more effort needs to be made to conserve the germplasm of these crops as well as of other important plants such as plantation crops, medicinal herbs, and fruit and timber trees.


Haemocytes, the main type of circulating defence cell in invertebrates, functionally resemble mammalian macrophages, and are responsible for phagocytosis, endocytosis and other innate immune functions. In mammalian macrophages, the extracellular-signal regulated kinase (ERK) pathway has been shown to modulate immune responses. It was therefore hypothesised that this pathway may play a similar role in haemocytes of the gastropod mollusc, 'Lymnaea stagnalis', and intermediate host of the schistosome, 'Trichobilharzia ocellata'. Two ERK-like proteins were detected by Western blotting usmg antibodies that recognise non-phosphorylated and phosphorylated forms of mammalian ERK 1/2; these proteins had approximate molecular weights of 44 and 43kDa respectively. In addition, the upstream regulator of ERK, MEK, was detected in haemocytes as well as the transcription factor downstream of activated ERK, Elk-1. By employing a mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase assay kit, the identified ERK-like proteins were found to possess kinase activity. When haemocytes were challenged with 'E. coli' lipopolysaccharide (LPS), the activity of the ERK pathway was found to be significantly upregulated after 5 min challenge and perinuclear migration of phosphorylated ERK was observed by immunocytochemistry. Other compounds, including Zymosan A, adrenocorticotropin hormone, noradrenaline and challenge with heat-killed 'E. coli' did not modulate haemocyte ERK pathway activity. Pharmacological inhibitors used to block signalling to the ERK pathway demonstrated that MEK, PKC, PI-3K and Ras activity are vital for phagocytosis by haemocytes. In addition, the integrin subunits [alpha]V[beta]3 and [beta]l were found to be present on the haemocyte surface and integrin engagement was found to be necessary for phagocytosis. Monosaccharides found on the surface coat of 'T. ocellata', fucose and galactose, were applied to haemocytes in the presence and absence of haemolymph. These sugars proved to have important immunomodulatory effects, since ERK, PKC and phagocytic activity were all affected by these sugars, and differences in experiments with and without haemolymph suggest an important role for serum proteins in the molluscan immune response. In conclusion, this study provided an insight into the signalling machinery involved in the molluscan defence response, and the results should stimulate further research in snail defence responses, particularly following challenge by parasites.


The disharmonic outcrop-scale folds and associated structures in a 300-m-thick Cretaceous limestone formation in the Pindos Group exposed on Mount Lykaion (Arcadia, Greece) can be understood only in the context of superposed pre-tectonic and tectonic mass-transfer dissolution creep. Though the structures described may seem unusual, they are undoubtedly abundant in strongly deformed pseudo-bedded limestone formations. In this example the Thick White Limestone Beds (TWLB) formation displays pervasive "flaggy" pseudo-bedding, which is a diagenetic stylolitic layering resulting from pressure dissolution. The mass-transfer dissolution creep that produced the diagenetic stylolitic surfaces was achieved during gravitational loading accompanying burial, compaction, and lithification, and was driven by high stress concentrations at grain contacts. The diagenetic stylolitic surfaces are lined with insoluble residue and commonly are marked by interlocking stylolite teeth oriented perpendicular to the pseudo-bedding. At the outcrop scale, individual pseudo-beds display significant thickness variability. Moreover, the individual pseudo-beds not uncommonly wedge out and disappear laterally over very short distances. Along with all the Pindos Group strata, the TWLB formation was profoundly shortened in the Late Cretaceous and early Tertiary as a result of inversion tectonics. The Pindos Group limestone-dominated formations underlying and overlying TWLB readily accommodated flexural-slip folding, for these formations are marked by optimum mechanical stratigraphy, ubiquitous thin bedding, and pervasive bedding-plane slip surfaces. For the TWLB formation, however, strain accommodation by flexural-slip kinematics was spotty and inefficient, primarily because individual diagenetic stylolite surfaces are by no means planar or smoothly curviplanar; they tip out over short distances; and their interlocking stylolite teeth create elevated frictional resistance to layer-parallel slip. These factors, plus the apparent ease with which the limestone pseudo-beds deform by tectonically induced mass-transfer dissolution creep, were responsible for the distinctive structures observed in outcrop. These include indentation structures, where a part of one fold limb indents into the other, or where the hanging wall of a small thrust indents into its footwall, or where the limbs of a common anticline or syncline migrate toward one another by pressure dissolution removal of the axial-trace region. In terms of the overall progressive deformation, tectonically driven layer-parallel shortening of pseudo-beds first resulted in tectonic stylolites perpendicular to pseudo-bedding, with teeth parallel to pseudo-bedding. This was superseded at the mesoscopic scale by a layer-parallel shortening achieved by buckling of pseudo-beds, with loci of buckling and incipient buckling geometries influenced primarily by pseudo-bed thickness (and variations in same), wedge-outs of pseudo-beds, and the mechanical properties of the pseudo-beds. In some cases shortening and tightening of buckle folds involved flexural-slip kinematics, accommodated in part by slip or shear along clayey insoluble residue at pseudo-bed contacts. Where diagenetic stylolite surfaces abruptly tipped out, or where friction along them was excessively high, the slip deficit (and thus shortening deficit) was replaced by mass interpenetration of pseudo-beds, stylo-faulting, stylo-duplexing, and other forms of mass-transfer dissolution creep. Slip toward the tip lines of wedge-outs even may have produced end loading that, in turn, generated adjacent localized buckle folds. The properties of the folds and associated structures in the TWLB formation are introduced here as a new category of quasi-flexural folds in the Donath and Parker (1964) classification.


Cross regulation is the main technical challenge of a single-inductor multiple-output (SIMO) dc-dc converter. This paper proposes a multivariable digital controller to suppress the cross regulation of a single-inductor dual-output (SIDO) buck converter in continuous conduction mode (CCM) operation. The controller design methodology originates from the open-loop shaping of the multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems. The control design procedure includes: 1) determination of a family of nonparametric models of the SIDO converter at operating points of interest, 2) determination of the class of the controller, and 3) system open-loop shaping by the convex minimization of the summation of the square second norm of the errors between the system open-loop transfer function matrices and a desired open-loop transfer function matrix. The proposed controller minimizes the coupling between the outputs of the SIDO converter and provides satisfactory dynamic performance in CCM operation. This paper describes the theoretical aspects involved in the design procedure of the controller and evaluates the performance of the controller based on simulation studies and experiments.


BACKGROUND
Critically ill patients who require mechanical ventilation are at increased risk for gastrointestinal bleeding from stress ulcers. There are conflicting data on the effect of histamine H2-receptor antagonists and the cytoprotective agent sucralfate on rates of gastrointestinal bleeding, ventilator-associated pneumonia, and mortality.

METHODS
In a multicenter, randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled trial, we compared sucralfate with the H2-receptor antagonist ranitidine for the prevention of upper gastrointestinal bleeding in 1200 patients who required mechanical ventilation. Patients received either nasogastric sucralfate suspension (1 g every six hours) and an intravenous placebo or intravenous ranitidine (50 mg every eight hours) and a nasogastric placebo.

RESULTS
The patients in the two groups had similar base-line characteristics. Clinically important gastrointestinal bleeding developed in 10 of 596 (1.7 percent) of the patients receiving ranitidine, as compared with 23 of 604 (3.8 percent) of those receiving sucralfate (relative risk, 0.44; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.21 to 0.92; P=0.02). In the ranitidine group, 114 of 596 patients (19.1 percent) had ventilator-associated pneumonia, as compared with 98 of 604 (16.2 percent) in the sucralfate group (relative risk, 1.18; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.92 to 1.51; P=0.19). There was no significant difference between the groups in mortality in the intensive care unit (ICU) (23.5 percent in the ranitidine group and 22.9 percent in the sucralfate group) or the duration of the stay in the ICU (median, nine days in both groups).

CONCLUSIONS
Among critically ill patients requiring mechanical ventilation, those receiving ranitidine had a significantly lower rate of clinically important gastrointestinal bleeding than those treated with sucralfate. There were no significant differences in the rates of ventilator-associated pneumonia, the duration of the stay in the ICU, or mortality.


Wetlands are important ecological niches in High Arctic environments, providing
habitats for northern fauna and flora. Generally, these wetland complexes are
composed of a series of ponds, wet meadows, and areas of wet and dry ground (Woo
and Young 2006) and possess linkages to surrounding terrain (e.g. hillslope streams,
late-lying snowbeds). These connections have the ability to transfer water and
nutrients into wetlands, but as yet, little is known about the importance of these
contributions or the mechanisms which control them.
A large number of ponds exist at Polar Bear Pass, Bathurst Island and are connected to
their surrounding watersheds through various linkages and thus receive different
hydrological and nutrient inputs. Since, ponds are numerous in this wetland and form
the dominant land-use of this wetland-complex, the objective of this study was to
understand the snowmelt hydrology, carbon dynamics (DOC, DIC, CO2, CH4) and
carbon balance in a series of shallow tundra ponds comprising an extensive wetland
system.