Abstract This article explores factors which predispose students from single- and two-parent families to pursue postsecondary education and identify implications for enrollment managers and researchers. The results of this study indicate that while parents play the most pivotal role for each group of students, mothers are of primary importance for students from single-parent families. Introduction Enrollment managers and admissions personnel are under continuous pressure to increase the quality, and in many cases the quantity, of matriculants to their institutions. This pressure has led administrators and policymakers to develop programs that draw matriculants from historically untapped areas of the applicant pool of prospective students. For example, the search for African-American students led to policy development at several levels (including state, federal, and institutional), assisting colleges and universities in the recruitment of this segment of the population. However, there continue to be student groups in the applicant pool that need attention if institutions are to fully explore, recruit, and retain potential students. A particularly important group to address are those students from singleparent families. The lack of attention given to these students has left policymakers and administrators with little information to develop effective and efficient strategies to recruit and retain this important and growing segment of the applicant pool. According to census data, 25 percent of children in the United States are under the age of 18 and growing up in singleparent homes headed by women-a total of 17 million children (Bureau of the Census 1997). Rawlings and Hernandez (1990) traced the dramatic rise in the number of families headed by single-parent females from 1970 and expect the trend to continue. Research has indicated that these children tend to have lower economic attainment in adulthood than those from two-parent families (Krein 1986). Additionally, students from single-parent families have comparatively low levels of educational attainment and are more likely to experience academic failure and leave school prematurely than is true of children from two-parent families (Hauser and Featherman 1976). In fact, single-parent, female-headed families are often included among lists of disadvantageous traits which put students "at-risk" for a host of negative outcomes (Sartain 1989). According to Krein (1986), living in a single-parent family has a direct negative effect on educational level. In addition, Keith and Finley (1988) found parental divorce was associated with lower levels of educational attainment. Despite the well documented growth of students from single-parent femaleheaded families and inclusion of these students as at-risk, there is a dearth of literature and research on the postsecondary educational plans of these students. Interestingly, although college choice research has identified parents as critical to the decision making process (Hossler and Stage 1992), students from singleparent families have not been studied. The trends regarding students from single-parent families combined with the role parents play in the college choice process provide the basis for research on the development of educational aspirations of students from single-parent families. Such research will aid enrollment managers in developing effective and efficient policies designed to recruit this growing portion of potential students. Theoretical Framework The theoretical framework for this study is drawn from two sources, a model of college choice developed by Hossler and Gallagher (1987), and research by Hossler and Stage (1992). Research on college choice has been grounded in economic, sociological, and combined models (Kohn, Manski, and Mundel 1976; Litten 1982; Chapman 1984). This study utilized the Three Stage Model of College Choice by Hossler and Gallagher (1987). …


All languages of the world provide their speakers with linguistic means to express existential relations, but such means may vary from language to language. For instance, the existential construction in English is usually introduced by the so-called dummy word there whereas such a construction in Mandarin Chinese directly begins with a locative phrase. From the perspective of Cognitive Grammar, we propose that the Mandarin existential construction (MEC) is a reference-point construction. As such, the initial locative phrase (PLOC) serves as the dominion and the reference point (D/R) to make mental contact with the final nominal phrase which indicates the existence of an entity (Existent) in the spatial region singled out by the PLOC. In the process of the conceptualizer's construing an entity's existence in a spatial location, it is the location that gets activated and profiled as salient first, and this location subsequently recedes into the background to serve as the reference point to locate an entity as the target which is finally profiled as salient. Therefore, a reference-point relation is formed between the PLOC and the Existent, the former of which functions as the reference point and the latter as the target. Due to this particular cognitive property of MEC, it is also a presentational construction at the discourse level in that it performs a discursive function of introducing new participants into a discourse. This discursive function of MEC plays a vital role in enabling a discourse to unfold smoothly, thus making the discourse into a cohesive and coherent semantic whole. In addition, when a couple of MECs occur together in a discourse successively, a kind of reference-point chain may be developed.


Abstract In an experimental setup we investigate the effect of two different choice architectures on donation decisions. In the treatment group, subjects can either specify a charity of their choice, or select one from a list of five well-known charities; in the control group we do not provide a list. In a sample of 869 subjects we find a large treatment effect: Offering a list of default charities doubles the fraction of donors, as well as the revenue for charities. We find that the treatment intervention particularly affects subjects who tend to make intuitive choices.


This work reviews an eco-friendly process for producing TiO2 via colloidal aqueous sol– gel synthesis, resulting in crystalline materials without a calcination step. Three types of colloidal aqueous TiO2 are reviewed: the as-synthesized type obtained directly after synthesis, without any specific treatment; the calcined, obtained after a subsequent calcination step; and the hydrothermal, obtained after a specific autoclave treatment. This eco-friendly process is based on the hydrolysis of a Ti precursor in excess of water, followed by the peptization of the precipitated TiO2. Compared to classical TiO2 synthesis, this method results in crystalline TiO2 nanoparticles without any thermal treatment and uses only small amounts of organic chemicals. Depending on the synthesis parameters, the three crystalline phases of TiO2 (anatase, brookite, and rutile) can be obtained. The morphology of the nanoparticles can also be tailored by the synthesis parameters. The most important parameter is the peptizing agent. Indeed, depending on its acidic or basic character and also on its amount, it can modulate the crystallinity and morphology of TiO2. Colloidal aqueous TiO2 photocatalysts are mainly being used in various photocatalytic reactions for organic pollutant degradation. The as-synthesized materials seem to have equivalent photocatalytic efficiency to the photocatalysts post-treated with thermal treatments and the commercial Evonik Aeroxide P25, which is produced by a high-temperature process. Indeed, as-prepared, the TiO2 photocatalysts present a high specific surface area and crystalline phases. Emerging applications are also referenced, such as elaborating catalysts for fuel cells, nanocomposite drug delivery systems, or the inkjet printing of microstructures. Only a few works have explored these new properties, giving a lot of potential avenues for studying this eco-friendly TiO2 synthesis method for innovative implementations.


We examine the impact of family income during childhood on the type of secondary school that German children attend, a good indicator of their lifetime socioeconomic attainment. By contrast with several US child outcome studies, we find that late-childhood income is a more important determinant of outcomes than early-childhood income, and income effects are not greater for poor households compared to rich households, other things equal. The income effects are small for native-born German children and non-existent for children from guestworker households. Income effects are also small relative to the impact of differences in parental educational qualifications or institutional factors related to the federal state of residence.


The writing of student theses is an important activity at universities and is expected to demonstrate the students' academic skills. In the teacher-education programme, examiners from different academic disciplines are involved in supervising and examining student theses. Moreover, different subject disciplines have different traditions concerning what is seen as knowledge and the way research is performed, which could result in different assessment practices and judgements. Earlier studies demonstrate a fragmented picture concerning the importance of the examiners' academic discipline in judging theses. The purpose of this article is to investigate whether examiners from different academic subject disciplines emphasise similar or different criteria when assessing student theses. A total of 66 examiners from six universities with teacher education programmes in Sweden have answered an online Q-survey where they compared different criteria and rank-ordered them. The results demonstrate minor differences between individuals from different academic disciplines: Only two out of the 45 criteria had significant differences between academic discipline groups. Thus, the results indicate that teacher education is a boundary-crossing, multi-disciplinary field which
primarily uses generic criteria.


Abstract. Applying erroneous roughness lengths can have a large impact on the estimated performance of wind turbines, particularly in forested areas. In this study, a new method called the objective roughness approach (ORA), which converts tree height maps created using airborne lidar scans to roughness maps suitable for wind modelling, is evaluated via cross predictions among different anemometers at a complex forested site with seven tall meteorological masts using the Wind Atlas Analysis and Application Program (WAsP). The cross predictions were made using ORA maps created at four spatial resolutions and from four freely available roughness maps based on land use classifications. The validation showed that the use of ORA maps resulted in a closer agreement with observational data for all investigated resolutions compared to the land use maps. Further, when using the ORA maps, the risk of making large errors (> 25 %) in predicted power density was reduced by 40–50 % compared to satellite-based products with the same resolution. The results could be further improved for high-resolution ORA maps by adding the displacement height. The improvements when using the ORA maps were both due to a higher roughness length and due to the higher resolution.


This volume of Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing contains accepted papers presented at WSC17, the 17th Online World Conference on Soft Computing in Industrial Applications, held from December 2012 to January 2013 on the Internet. WSC17 continues a successful series of scientific events started over a decade ago by the World Federation of Soft Computing. It brought together researchers from over the world interested in the ever advancing state of the art in the field. Continuous technological improvements make this online forum a viable gathering format for a world class conference. The aim of WSC17 was to disseminate excellent research results and contribute to building a global network of scientists interested in both theoretical foundations and practical applications of soft computing. The 2012 edition of the Online World Conference on Soft Computing in Industrial Applications consisted of general track and special session on Continuous Features Discretizationfor Anomaly Intrusion Detectors Generation and special session on Emerging Theories and Applications in Transportation Science. A total of 33 high quality research papers were accepted after a rigorous review process and are provided in this book.


The purpose of this study is to trace the origin and development of emergency regimes in Cameroon, to address their negative impact on the current structure of the political system and to highlight the need for change in the country. Emergency regimes are generally brought into being in exceptional circumstances and allow states to (legally) suspend law and infringe human rights when confronted by threats to their existence. They generally include a state of emergency, a state of exception, a state of siege and martial rule. In the case of Cameroon, these regimes are a legacy of French colonialism, and were introduced into the country's legal system to sustain harsh imperialist policies. Traditionally it is believed that a state of emergency and a state of exception are declared in response to circumstances threatening the state's existence (such as natural cataclysms, invasions, and general insurrections), but the peculiarity of these regimes in Cameroon is that they have been and still are used as a political device. Indeed, in the context of colonialism and war of independence between French colonial authorities, their local acolytes and indigenous Cameroonians, emergency regimes played a key role in eliminating political challengers, increasing the powers of the executive, and absolving it of any accountability and responsibility. However, in the process, these measures ended up losing their exceptional character as they entered the sphere of normalcy. The current hypertrophy of the powers of the executive entity in Cameroon dates back to that period, and it is consequently difficult to distinguish between a Cameroon society in crisis and one in peacetime.


The carbonate–evaporite depositional combination of Late Jurassic age, incorporates the most prolific oil-producing intervals in the world and forms many giant fields. The succession is the top member of four upwards-shoaling carbonate–anhydrite cycles of Upper Kimmeridgian age, and is overlain by the impermeable anhydrite in northern Arabia. The weak depositional contrasts in carbonate ramp settings make the lateral seal configurations subtle and tough to recognize. Multiple attribute analyses based on an artificial neural network (ANN) can delineate the internal character of the reservoir and seal in a consistent way. In order to recognize the sedimentary facies and characterize stratigraphic traps within this reservoir interval, multiple seismic attributes were input to an unsupervised ANN. Unsupervised ANN offers a powerful means of classification, implemented here using a single-layer perceptron network. The network is trained by comparing the neurons to the input vectors using competitive-learning techniques. Once a neuron migrates to the centre of a class, the network stabilizes, training is finished and the neuron is assigned to a representative class. Without prior information, the unlabelled class is calibrated and analysed by lithofacies generated from log and core data. Further sedimentary facies are recognized by integrating local geological knowledge. The depositional environments in the study area are well characterized by the unsupervised ANN, and the recognized sedimentary facies are consistent with the drilled wells and the resulting geological model. Lagoonal deposits of the inner-ramp, ramp-crest shoal and proximal deposits of the middle ramp are recognized within the study area. The widespread ramp crest with peloid and oolitic grainstones provides good reservoirs, whereas the lagoonal deposits distributed between the shoals have a greater abundance of tight limestone with low porosity and permeability, thereby forming a good lateral seal. The selected study area, covering the Rimthan Arch is considered a favorable area for the presence of stratigraphic traps. The sedimentary facies recognition helps to define potential areas for favourable prospect definition and hence prospect ranking.


In this article we draw on the life histories of farm workers living in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. Subjectively interpreting their realities, the farm labourers narrated their experiences of living in the era before, during and after apartheid. The impacts of apartheid, carrying identification papers, for example, were experienced as peripheral with the most significant changes being the disruptions in their personal lives, such as a new farm owner who came to embody repression, authority, exploitation, but also paternalism and benevolence. The farm represented the space and place where complex interactions and unequal relationships between the worker and the farmer played out. The workers' narratives revealed deep-rooted connections to the land on which they lived, a land which did not belong to them. Land was for our research participants particularly important for animal husbandry, as a source of food and as a spiritual space of power where links and relationships to their ancestors were maintained and cultural practices took place. Subjugated knowledge, no formal education and farmers' paternalistic practices contributed to farm labourers' dependence on agrarian work and life on the farm. URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1502308


The DNAs of 3* vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium isolates from five hospitals in three states were analyzed by contour-clamped homogeneous electric field electrophoresis and plasmid analysis. There were 22 strain types. One strain type was common to patients in three hospitals in two states. These results suggest the apparent intra- and interhospital spread of vancomycin-resistant E. faecium.


Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the production function of firms based on the use of intellectual capital. The authors come up with this problem since believe that the new economy conditions require an adjustment and a development of classical firm theory. Design/methodology/approach – The research question addressed in this study is mainly related to the empirical validation of the function based on companies' intangibles in the Cobb-Douglas framework. This model enables the authors to advocate the idea of the complementarity of intellectual resources as well as simplifies the analysis of intellectual capital features. To accomplish the purpose of the research, the authors design a log-linear model and estimate it on a sample of more than 400 European and American companies. Findings – Application of Cobb-Douglas framework allowed designing a production function based on intellectual capital. The complementarity of intellectual capital components is justified on the empirical results obtained in this research. The increasing return to scale for intellectual capital was established for the sample examined in this study. Research limitations/implications – The main shortcoming of the approach implemented in this study is related to the proxy indicators of intellectual capital. Nevertheless, the authors statistically validate the chosen indicators applying hedonic approach. Practical implications – Practical accomplishment of this research is mainly associated with the conclusion about an increasing return to scale of intellectual capital. This phenomenon appears to be of a particular importance for investment decisions. Originality/value – The findings of this paper provide a new insight into intellectual resources interrelation that enhances companies' value creation. The authors also hope to assist future research attempts in application of the theory of company's growth driven by its intangible capital.


One of the canards all too widely accepted in our national debate about a multicultural curriculum is that Hispanic culture has somehow been denigrated or ignored in our schools. That's not how Mr. Janko remembers it. Back in 1945 my high school Spanish teacher for third term was Miss Haessler. For starters, she let everyone know that she was an ex-WAC, just out of uniform. The war might be over, she said, but she never took any nonsense from recruits, and she certainly wasn't going to take any from lowly sophomores like us. I was duly impressed. One day she began the class by announcing that the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral had just won the Nobel Prize for literature. It never occurred to me back then that there was anything incongruous about a former drill sergeant caring about poetry. I've thought of that moment on and off in recent years because one of the canards all too widely accepted in our national debate about a multicultural curriculum is that Hispanic culture has somehow been denigrated or ignored in our schools. One Mexican American writer has gone so far as to label the usual classroom fare the Anglo "kiss of death" - "monolingual, monocultural, and colorless." That's not how I remember it. Back in the mid-1940s, in my neighborhood at least, college was rarely a realistic aspiration and certainly was not the God-given, quasi-Constitutional right it has since become. Back then, if you wanted to go on to higher education in New York State, you had to have what was called an "academic diploma" from high school. Among the requirements were at least two years of a foreign language. Like most other kids, I picked Spanish because the conventional wisdom on the street comer was that Spanish was "easier" than German or French. Perhaps that was true, but my eyes nevertheless glazed over when it came to grammar. I never did entirely understand "a condition contrary to fact," and whenever I confronted a sentence beginning with a "si" clause, I knew that morphological quicksand lay just ahead. "Ethnic identity," according to our history books, was something only Woodrow Wilson had been interested in after World War I, and a lot of good it did him when he bucked the isolationist U.S. Senate. It certainly had nothing to do with the USA. Our student body was almost entirely white, made up mostly of second- and third-generation German and Italian Americans, though none of us would have thought of linking nationalities in that way. Living through the war had made us all red, white, and blue to the bone. …


There is growing interest in the role of policy reforms to promote gender equality and empower women, two key objectives of development policy. From a policy perspective, it would be ideal for reforms undertaken in different policy areas to be consistent, so that they reinforce each other in improving gender equity. We use data from the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey (ERHS) to show how two seemingly unrelated reforms—community-based land registration, undertaken since 2003, and changes in the Family Code implemented in 2000—may have created conditions for mutually reinforcing gender-sensitive reforms. Our analysis confirms previous studies' findings of gender gaps in awareness and information about the land registration process. Male-headed households are, on average, more likely to have heard about the process, to have attended meetings (and a greater number of meetings), and to have received some written material with information about the process. Having female members in the Land Administration Committee (LAC) has a positive impact on attendance at meetings relating to land registration. In our analysis of the changes in the family law, we find that awareness about the land registration process is positively correlated with the shift in perceptions toward equal division of land and livestock upon divorce. The presence of female members in the LAC also has a positive effect on the shift in perceptions toward a more equal division of assets upon divorce. Taken together, these findings suggest that the land registration process and the reform of the Family Code may have mutually reinforcing effects on women's rights and welfare. While this example is obviously rooted in the Ethiopian context, it raises the possibility that similar reform efforts may be complementary in other countries as well.


Background: αB-crystallin and HSP27 are mammalian intracellular small heat shock proteins. Results: These proteins exchange subunits in a rapid and temperature-dependent manner. Conclusion: This facile subunit exchange suggests that differential expression could be used by the cell to regulate the response to stress. Significance: A robust technique defines parameters for the dynamic interaction between the major mammalian small heat shock proteins. Small heat shock proteins (sHSPs) exist as large polydisperse species in which there is constant dynamic subunit exchange between oligomeric and dissociated forms. Their primary role in vivo is to bind destabilized proteins and prevent their misfolding and aggregation. αB-Crystallin (αB) and HSP27 are the two most widely distributed and most studied sHSPs in the human body. They are coexpressed in different tissues, where they are known to associate with each other to form hetero-oligomeric complexes. In this study, we aimed to determine how these two sHSPs interact to form hetero-oligomers in vitro and whether, by doing so, there is an increase in their chaperone activity and stability compared with their homo-oligomeric forms. Our results demonstrate that HSP27 and αB formed polydisperse hetero-oligomers in vitro, which had an average molecular mass that was intermediate of each of the homo-oligomers and which were more thermostable than αB, but less so than HSP27. The hetero-oligomer chaperone function was found to be equivalent to that of αB, with each being significantly better in preventing the amorphous aggregation of α-lactalbumin and the amyloid fibril formation of α-synuclein in comparison with HSP27. Using mass spectrometry to monitor subunit exchange over time, we found that HSP27 and αB exchanged subunits 23% faster than the reported rate for HSP27 and αA and almost twice that for αA and αB. This represents the first quantitative evaluation of αB/HSP27 subunit exchange, and the results are discussed in the broader context of regulation of function and cellular proteostasis.


In a democratic system, policy makers have to take the preferences of the citizens into account. Since we live in a world with scarce resources, one is asked to make choices regarding the use and management of these resources. In this context, if policy makers decide to invest in the protection of marine ecosystems, less financial resources will be available for other policy areas, for example national health. Moreover, the investment in the protection of marine ecosystems brings along with it the provision of a wide range of benefits to humans though most are not priced in the existing markets – for example climate regulation and provision of habitat for biodiversity. Given that most human activities are priced in one way or other, in some decision contexts, the temptation exists to downplay or ignore these important marine ecosystem benefits on the basis of the non-existence of prices. The simple and simplistic idea in the minds of many policymakers is that a lack of prices is equivalent to a lack of values. Clearly, this is a biased perspective. Against this background, this paper explores the motivation for an economic valuation of this complex resource. The state-of-the-art economic valuation methodologies follow the guidelines proposed by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, taking into account the existing scientific knowledge on the functioning of marine ecosystems, marine ecosystem goods and services and its impacts on human welfare. Finally, we critically review some economic valuation studies, arguing that the economic valuation of marine ecosystem services and biodiversity can make sense if and only if important guidelines are observed.


In fast-developing regions like Southeast Asia monitoring urban areas presents a challenge given the lack of publicly available data. This is an issue that precludes the nuances of a city's growth and undermines the way land use is considered with respect to planning. The issue of data availability is very much present in the small nation of Brunei. Little is still known about the spatiotemporal evolution of its urban realm in particular, with regard to its national development planning. The country presents an interesting case-study given the pursuit of two highly opposing master-plans within the last 40 years. Its first master plan advocated polycentric growth away from the capital city, Bandar Seri Begawan. Its latest plan, however, currently promotes compact growth within a predefined urban footprint as a development control mechanism. This paper looks at remotely-sensed satellite data to examine the way in which the two implemented master-plan strategies have translated into actual land-use thus far. It employs a supervised classification procedure and characterises urban land into three typologies: urban infill, edge growth, and leapfrog growth. The paper's findings suggest that residential developments play a stronger role in driving urban growth in Brunei. This is particularly true for public housing, which has typically persisted in isolated pockets of low density at the city fringe. This study has produced a novel dataset of urban land use and land cover in Brunei; and, its quantification may prove useful in understanding the impacts of master planning and the formulation of development policies both within Brunei, and the wider Southeast Asian region.


There is considerable investment in construction industry in Qatar for civil infrastructures and taking into account the severe environmental conditions, they would entail for proper maintenance, repair and strengthening for safe, continuous, uninterrupted, and efficient functionality. Reinforced concrete (RC) structural members, which constitute majority of construction works in Qatar, can be easily deteriorated by the deleterious effect of seawater exposure in the form of humidity or direct splashing for sea-level and offshore structures. Such deterioration can also be due to the exposure to extreme high temperatures, severe humidity and high chloride. All such environmental effect can significantly reduce the life-span of RC structures by up to 10-15 years. The cost of rehabilitation and strengthening is usually estimated in millions of dollars. Traditional methods of strengthening corrosion-damaged structures involve the replacement of the corroded bars and the substitution of deteriorated concrete layers with new concrete. Our study proposes an "optimum strengthening technique" for RC structures to mitigate the prevailing conditions of Qatar. This relatively new technique utilizes "textile-reinforced mortar (TRM)" to strengthen concrete beams. TRM systems consist of one or more layers of textiles made of carbon, glass, or Polyparaphenylene benzobisoxazole (PBO) grids that are sandwiched between layers of associated cementitious mortars. The cement-based mortar used in TRM acts as a barrier against chloride ions penetration thus protecting the main reinforcing bars from corrosion attack. Textiles' lightweight, high tensile strength, corrosion resistance, and ease of application make the strengthening system appealing. The potential of TRM for the repair and strengthening of concrete structures is not just the result of its physio-mechanical performance but also the ease and simplicity of installation that does not require any sophisticated equipment or retraining of the construction work. In addition, the compatibility between the mortar used and the concrete substrate is inherited since both materials have the cement as a common "base". TRM systems, with their innovative features, ensure the endurance of the rehabilitation process and consequently the sustainability of the strengthened structure. Recently in the last few years, several research works in the USA and Europe in the field of TRM strengthening technique have been reported for masonry and concrete structural members. Majority of these works is limited to single type of textile (either carbon, PBO or glass) and on limited types of reinforcement levels. The work presented here compares two different types of TRM systems in the same domain, performed on three different levels of reinforcement ratios representing flexural deficient, lightly reinforced and typical under-reinforced beams. Experimental works were done to state the efficiency and effectiveness of textile reinforced mortar (TRM) in increasing the ductility and the flexural capacity of reinforced concrete (RC) beams. The aim of the experimental work was to investigate the parameters that contribute to the increase in the load carrying capacity of beams strengthened with TRM system. Eighteen medium-scale rectangular RC beam specimens, 2500 mm long, 150 mm wide and 260 mm deep, were prepared at three different reinforcement ratios of " "ρ" _"s" ^"1" " = 0.5%;" o "ρ" _"s" ^"2" " = 0.72%;" f: "ρ" _"s" ^"1" " = 0.5%; " "ρ" _"s" ^"2" " = 0.72%; " "ρ" _"s" ^"3" " = 1.27%." The strengthened beams utilized two TRM types namely carbon and Polyparaphenylene benzobisoxazole (PBO) TRM systems respectively. The RC beam specimens were tested in flexure under four point loading until failure with a clear span of 2.2 m. The strengthening technique was applied to the soffit of the beam (flat type) altering the number of layers of textile. Three beams (of three different reinforcement ratios) without TRM strengthening were used as control specimens. Nine beams were externally reinforced by one ("ρ" _"T-c" ^"1" " = 0.014%"), two ("ρ" _"T-c" ^"2" " = 0.028%") and three ("ρ" _"T-c" ^"3" " = 0.041%") layers of carbon TRM system. Six beams were strengthened with one ("ρ" _"T-PBO" ^"1" " = 0.009%") and two ("ρ" _"T-PBO" ^"2" " = 0.018%") layers of PBO TRM system. From Based on the experimental observations, a reasonable gain in flexural strength and energy absorption was achieved for both the TRM systems. An increase of the initial stiffness was achieved for strengthened specimens; however, an apparent decrease in the overall ductility was observed with TRM strengthening. Results showed that the flexural capacity of strengthened beams increased to an average of 38% for carbon TRM system and an average of 26.7% for PBO TRM system over that of their control (un-strengthened) specimens. The highest increase in the load carrying capacity was 77.51% for a specimen having with the main reinforcement ratio of D12 ("ρ" _"s" ^"2" " = 0.72%)" and was strengthened with carbon TRM system using three layers of carbon textile. Ductility index (ΔI) and energy absorption (Ψ) values were also calculated in order to know the behavior of ductility and flexural capacity in each of the beam specimen. The term ductility index (ΔI) is defined as the ratio between the deflection at the ultimate load and that at yield load, representing its ability to stretch/deform under sustained load before fracture. During experimentation, it was observed that the average values of ductility indices of using carbon as strengthening material were 1.1 × , 1.2 × and 0.5 × for "ρ" _"s" ^"1" " = 0.5%," "ρ" _"s" ^"2" " = 0.72% and " "ρ" _"s" ^"3" " = 1.27%" beam specimens respectively to that of their control specimen. Similarly the average values of ductility indices of using PBO as strengthening material were 2.42 × , 0.75 × and 0.56 × for "ρ" _"s" ^"1" " = 0.5%," "ρ" _"s" ^"2" " = 0.72% and " "ρ" _"s" ^"3" " = 1.27%" specimens respectively to that of the control specimen. Also the term energy absorption (Ψ) is defined as the area under the load- deflection curve up to the ultimate load, representing the amount of energy absorbed by the specimen before complete failure. The average values of energy absorption for using carbon as strengthening material were 1.8 × , 1.2 × and 1.6 × for "ρ" _"s" ^"1" " = 0.5%," "ρ" _"s" ^"2" " = 0.72% and " "ρ" _"s" ^"3" " = 1.27%" beam specimens respectively to that of the control specimen. Similarly the average values of energy absorption for using PBO as strengthening material were 2.0 × , 1.0 × and 1.5 × for "ρ" _"s" ^"1" " = 0.5%," "ρ" _"s" ^"2" " = 0.72% and" "ρ" _"s" ^"3" " = 1.27%" specimens respectively to that of the control specimen. Therefore, both the adopted TRM systems performed exceptionally well within the scope of the work, with carbon TRM system showing a relatively higher increase in the capacity of strengthened specimens and PBO TRM systems exhibiting relatively more ductile failure with higher bond strength between the TRM surface and concrete substrate. Moreover, crack patterns for the strengthened beam showed effective distribution of cracks/damage over the length of beam as compared to severe and concentrated damage in the associated control un-strengthened beams. Further, during the experimentation, it was seen that the technique of applying the TRM system also considers the contractor's ease where the construction workers (although not very skilled) can easily implement the technique after being given simple demonstrations. The study puts forth proper procedures and standards to the construction industry on the rehabilitation and strengthening of the existing concrete structures using innovative TRM strengthening technique. Successful implementation of the project will result in "state-of-the-art recommendations for design and construction specifications", which will place Qatar and research at Qatar University in a leadership position not only limited to the Gulf region. Furthermore, this can potentially act as an "important initiation for the development of new industrial opportunities" in the country. Keywords Reinforced concrete beams, textile reinforced mortar, flexural strengthening, ductility index, energy absorption.


Carbon‐concentration feedbacks and carbon‐climate feedbacks constitute one of the largest sources of uncertainty in future climate. Since the beginning of the modern atmospheric CO2 record, seasonal variations in CO2 have been recognized as a signal of the metabolism of land ecosystems, and quantitative attribution of changes in the seasonal cycle amplitude (SCA) of CO2 to ecosystem processes is critical for understanding and projecting carbon‐climate feedbacks far into the 21st Century. Here the impact of surface carbon fluxes on the SCA of CO2 throughout the Northern Hemisphere troposphere is investigated, paying particular attention to isentropic transport across latitudes. The analysis includes both a chemical transport model GOES‐Chem and an idealized tracer in a gray‐radiation aquaplanet. The results of the study can be summarized by two main conclusions: (1) the SCA of CO2 roughly follows surfaces of constant potential temperature, which can explain the observed increase in SCA with latitude along pressure surfaces and (2) increasing seasonal fluxes in lower latitudes have a larger impact on the SCA of CO2 throughout most of the troposphere compared to increasing seasonal fluxes in higher latitudes. These results provide strong evidence that recently observed changes in the SCA of CO2 at high northern latitudes (poleward of 60°N) are likely driven by changes in midlatitude surface fluxes, rather than changes in Arctic fluxes.


Social Media Monitoring and Analysis are the new trends in technology business. The challenge is to extract correct information from free-form texts of social media communication. Natural Language Processing methods are sometimes used in social media monitoring to improve accuracy in extracting information. This paper discusses a web mining system that is based on Natural Language Processing to analyze social media information. In that process, this research examines Natural Language methods that are important for such analysis. Then the traditional web mining steps are discussed along with proposed use of Natural Language Processing methods.


This study uses dialogic theory to understand teacher-writers' practices across in- and out-of school contexts. Using case study methods to closely observe and interview a middle school teacher and a high school teacher, as well as analyze their writing, the study identified similarities in the teachers' appropriations of language, textual practices, and ideologies across contexts. However, each teacher appropriated distinct practices in discipline-specific ways, with one focused on the literate practices of creative writers and the other focused on the literate practices of online, networked writers. These contrastive examples highlight ways in which teacher-writers' literate and instructional activities dialogically inform each other in both similar and distinct ways.
Ultimately, I make the argument that dialogic perspectives that attend to teachers' out-of-school practices provide richer, more complex understandings of instructional practice than currentlypopular conceptions of "best practices" and "value-added" teaching.


Purpose: This study aims to investigate the relationship between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), Domestic Investment (DI), Employment (EMP), and Number of Tourists to real Gross Regional Domestic Product (real GRDP) of the Special Region of Yogyakarta or Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta (DIY). Design/methodology/approach: This research uses panel data modeling for the period of 2007-2019. Findings: The results show that partially DI and the number of tourists have significant positive effects on real GRDP in the region. On the other hand, EMP has significant and negative effect on real GRDP while FDI has not significant effect on real GRDP. Practical implications: Policy recommendation for government as an implication of this study to improve real GRDP of the Special Region of Yogyakarta is (a) improving the quality of education and skill of labor; (b) improving domestic investment incentive policies for local investors; (c) improving the investment climate to encourage the entry of right FDI on productive economic sectors; and (d) increasing the number of tourists arrivals in DIY through promotion and improving services in all sectors for tourists. Originality/value: Domestic Investment and number of tourists have an important role in pushing for the improvement on the real Gross Regional Domestic Product of the Special Region of Yogyakarta. Synergizing economic factors and tourism in deciding for policies can accelerate economic growth.


From the Publisher:
In January 1999, Sarah Flannery, a sports-loving teenager from Blarney in County Cork, Ireland, was awarded Ireland's Young Scientist of the Year for her extraordinary research and discoveries in Internet cryptography. The following day, her story began appearing in Irish papers and soon after was splashed across the front page of the London Times, complete with a photo of Sarah and a caption calling her "brilliant." Just sixteen, she was a mathematician with an international reputation.
In Code is a heartwarming story that will have readers cheering Sarah on. Originally published in England and cowritten with her mathematician father, David Flannery, In Code is "a wonderfully moving story about the thrill of the mathematical chase" (Nature) and "a paean to intellectual adventure" (Times Educational Supplement). A memoir in mathematics, it is all about how a girl next door, nurtured by her family, moved from the simple math puzzles that were the staple of dinnertime conversation to prime numbers, the Sieve of Eratosthenes, Fermat's Little Theorem, googols--and finally into her breathtaking algorithm. Parallel with each step is a modest girl's own self-discovery--her values, her burning curiosity, the joy of persistence, and, above all, her love for her family.


We analyze the impact of news (information shocks) in economies where liquidity plays a role. While we also consider news about real factors, like productivity, one motivation is that central bank announcements evidently affect markets, as taken for granted by advocates of forward guidance policy. The dynamic effects can be complicated, with information about monetary policy or real factors affecting markets for goods, equity, housing, credit and foreign exchange. Even news about neutral policy can induce cyclic or boom-bust responses. More generally, we show that central bank announcements can induce rather than reduce volatility, and might increase or decrease welfare.


British Library Cotton Caligula A.II preserves a short poem on good behavior entitled "Urbanitatis" (fols. 88-89v). (1) This poem is also preserved in National Library Scotland Advocates 19.3.1 (the "Heege manuscript"), where it is given the title "Stans puer ad mensam," possibly because it was confused (intentionally or not) with Lydgate's poem for boys of that title. Advocates 19.3.1 is a family anthology compiled mostly by Richard Heege for the Sherbrooks, a family with connections to Nottinghamshire. (2) It also includes "The lyttyl childrens book," (3) another courtesy poem addressed specifically to boys. The presence of this poem and the Latin title for "Urbanitatis" in the Heege manuscript suggest that "Urbanitatis" was copied into that book to be read by young boys in the Sherbrook household. "Urbanitatis" also survives in British Library Royal MS 17.A.I (the "Regius manuscript"), which Lisa H. Cooper reads as a textual project to create a sense of community among a group of stonemasons in Shropshire. (4) This manuscript consists of thirty-three folios, thirty-two of which preserve 794 lines of untitled verse copied by a single scribe. Although in the manuscript these lines appear to be a single long poem, they are a composite of three texts found independently in other manuscripts. (5) The first group of verses (ll. 1-592) comprises a history of stonemasons and stonemasonry in Europe and England and an outline of fifteen articles and fifteen points on the proper and improper practices of stonemasons and their apprentices. (6) A prose analogue of this text is found in British Library Additional 23198 (the "Cooke manuscript"). The second group of verses (ll. 593-694) is an adapted version of John Mirk's Instructions for Parish Priests. The text has been heavily truncated and revised in the Regius manuscript for its lay readership. For example, the couplet "whenne be gospelle I-red be schalle,/Teache hem benne to stonde vp alle" found in other manuscripts (7) becomes the following in the Regius manuscript: "And when be gospel me rede schal/Fayre bou stonde vp fro be wal" (ll. 629-530). Mirk's advice to the parish priest has been altered in Regius to become an imperative to a lay churchgoing audience, implying that the Regius compiler envisioned the same audience for this text as for the verses on stonemasonry to which Mirk's Treatise is attached in the manuscript. (8) The third group of verses in Regius' composite poem (ll. 695-794) is an adaptation of "Urbanitatis," which is for the most part similar to the versions found in Caligula and Heege except for two significant variations. The introductory couplet of the poem in Caligula ("Who-so wylle of nurtur lere / Herken to me & 3e shalle here"), which is absent in Heege, is rendered in Regius as: Forbur-more 3et y wol 3ow preche To 3owre felows hyt forto teche (ll. 693-694) This address to the reader and his "felows" suggests that the text's advice applies to the adult masons and apprentices addressed in the rest of the composite poem and not to the general boy-reader implied by the Latin title in Heege. Similarly, it lacks the implications of Caligula's title for the poem, "Urbanitatis." This word, with its implication of refinement (cf. Cicero, Pro M. Caelio Oratio 6.25) (9) and its echoes of the Latin for "city" (urbs) and the Old French for "city government" (urbanite), implicitly confirms the poem's relevance to the realms of the burgesses, aristocracy, and monarchy of London and Westminster while giving it a cosmopolitan air. (10) The untitled and incorporated Regius text suggests none of this. We also find two added couplets near the end of the Regius text that are not found in Caligula or Heege. These lines extend the applicability of the text's advice to a broader social setting: When bou metyst a worby mon Cappe & hod bou holde not on Yn churche yn chepyns or yn be gate Do hym reuerans aftur hys state (ll. …


Educational podcasts are developed specifically for learning purposes. Preliminary research suggests that many college courses and practitioners regularly use educational podcasts and that this medium is a beneficial tool to use to supplement the learning process. However, there is limited scholarly work examining the use of educational podcasts within kinesiology fields. Thus, the purpose of this study was to conduct a scoping review of the literature on the use of educational podcasts in the field of kinesiology. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews extension for Scoping Reviews Checklist guided this investigation. Six databases were searched. Fourteen articles met the full inclusion criteria. Of these, 11 were data-driven research articles, and three were practitioner articles. Much of the research identified lacked critical information related to research design, instrument development, and findings. Thus, the authors recommend that more rigorous research in this area be conducted to discern the impact of educational podcasts within the field of kinesiology.


Distributed software development is pervasive in the software industry as companies vie to leverage global resources. However popular quality and process frameworks do not specifically address the key processes needed for managing distributed software development. We develop an evolutionary process maturity framework for globally distributed software development that incorporates 24 new key process areas essential for managing distributed software product development We test the validity of our process framework using data collected from more than sixty large, distributed enterprise product development projects. We believe we have laid new ground for software process research by extending generic quality process frameworks to address the distributed development scenario.


In the early modern period the world economy gravitated around the expansion of long distance commerce. Together with navigation improvements silver was the prime commodity which moved the sails of such trade. The disparate availability of, and the particular demand for silver across the globe determined the participation of producers, consumers and intermediaries in a growing global economy. American endowments of silver are a known feature of this process; however, the fact that the supply of silver was in the form of specie is a less known aspect of the integration of the global economy. This chapter surveys the production and export of silver specie out of Spanish America, its intermediation by Europeans and the re-export to Asia. It describes how the sheer volume produced and the quality and consistency of the coin provided familiarity with, and reliability to the Spanish American peso which made it current in most world markets. By the 18th century it has become a currency standard for the international economy which grew together with the production and coinage of silver. Implications varied according to the institutional settings to deal with specie and foreign exchange in each intervening economy. Generalized warfare in late 18th century Europe brought down governance in Spanish America and coinage fragmented along with the political fragmentation of the empire. The emergence of new sovereign republics and the end of minting as known meant the cessation of the silver standard that had contributed to the early modern globalization.


Summary: Ambulatory surgery is common in plastic surgery, where many aesthetic and reconstructive procedures can be performed in hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, or office-based surgery facilities. Outpatient surgery offers advantages to both the patient and the surgeon by increasing accessibility, flexibility, and convenience; lowering cost; and maintaining high-quality care. To optimize a patient's experience and comfort, postoperative nausea and vomiting (PONV) should be prevented. However, in those patients who develop PONV, it must be appropriately managed and treated. The incidence of PONV is variable. It is often difficult to accurately predict those patients who will develop PONV or how they will manifest symptoms. There are a variety of recommended "cocktails" for PONV prophylaxis and treatments that are potentially effective. The decision regarding the type of treatment given is often more related to provider preference and determination of side-effect profile, rather than targeted to specific patient characteristics, because of the absence of large volumes of reliable data to support specific practices over others. Fortunately, there are several tenets for the successful prevention and treatment of PONV we have extracted from the literature and summarize here. The following is a summary for the practicing plastic surgeon of the current state of the literature regarding PONV cause, risk factors, prophylaxis, and treatment that may serve as a guide for further study and practice management.


This report covers a project in the course Computer Engineering Project, DVAE08, at Karlstad University. The aim of the project was to modify an already existing solution for selecting the most fitting path for known traffic online, with a proactive approach instead of a reactive, called Socket Intents. The purpose of the modified version is to make the previous solution compatible with the transport protocol SCTP. This solution consists of three new implemented components; a header parser, a sniffer, and a query manager. The header parser and sniffer receive packets from the traffic and send them to one another. The query manager handles queries from the policies to the sniffer, as well as the response. Together, these components will gather information about the state of the network, and select the most fitting path that fulfill application needs. The results achieved from the modification are good work for the SCTP one-to-one type.


Abstract The microwave spectrometer on the Nimbus 5 earth observatory satellite has been used to measure thermal radiation in five frequency bands between 22.235 and 58.8 GHz. Clouds were observed to affect less than 0.5% of the temperature profile soundings. Most such effects occur in the intertropical convergence zone and alter the inferred temperature profile by less than a few degrees Centigrade. These effects are evident as cold spots at 53.65 GHz and can be identified by virtue of their small spatial extent, in contrast to smooth variations characteristic of normal atmospheric temperature fields. These effects at 53.65 GHz are sufficiently well correlated with inferred liquid water abundances that they can be used for detecting major storm systems over both land and sea.


We report a new environmentally-benign, convenient and facile methodology for the synthesis of non-genotoxic Chalcones using Alum (KAI (SO4)2.12H2O) as catalyst. The reaction of 2-hydroxy acetophenone with aldehydes in aqueous ethanol at ambient temperature has been studied. The reaction has yielded chalcones in one step. Furthermore, a series of compounds were synthesized and characterized by melting point, Electron Ionization-Mass Spectrometry (EI-MS), Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and Infra-Red (IR) tools. The formation of desired product was confirmed by comparing them with reference compounds. Utilization of aqueous medium, easy reaction conditions, isolation and purification makes this manipulation very interesting from an environmental and economic perspective. Synthesized chalcones are non-genotoxic compounds as there is no functional group those are known as a genotoxic as (1) Aromatic compounds such as N-hydroxyaryls, N-acelated aminoaryls, Az-aryl-N-oxides and amino aryls, (2) Alkyl and aryl groups: N-methylols, N-antirasoamines, carbamates, nitro compounds, (3) Heteroaromatic groups such as Michel reactive acceptors, alkyl ester of phosphonates, sulphonates, halo-alkenes, halo-alkanes.


Background: The low incidence of sarcomas in the general population makes heritable contribution to disease risk difficult to discern beyond highly penetrant Mendelian syndromes. Methods: The Utah Cancer Registry (UCR) and Utah Population Database were interrogated for sarcoma diagnostic codes grouped by genetic type, either complex genotype/karyotype sarcoma or balanced translocation-associated sarcoma. The genealogic index of familiality (GIF) was calculated and relative risks (RR) of disease estimated for first-, second-, and third-degree relatives of sarcoma probands. Cancer patterns in pedigrees of sarcoma probands were examined to rule out known hereditary cancer syndromes. Results: A total of 229 balanced translocation type and 1,161 complex genotype type sarcomas with at least three generations of ancestral genealogy data were identified in the UCR. There was no evidence for excess relatedness for the balanced translocation group by using the GIF test (P = 0.657) and no significantly elevated RRs. In the complex genotype group, we observed significantly elevated GIF (P = 0.03). Modest RRs corroborated the GIF analysis, in which excess relatedness existed in distant relationships. No recognized cancer syndromes were identified among high-risk pedigrees. Discussion: We identified strong familiality among complex genotype sarcomas, independent from known cancer predisposition syndromes. In the absence of significantly elevated RRs for close relatives, the high GIF argues for a strong genetic—rather than environmental—component to complex genotype sarcoma risk. We observed no significant familial risk of developing balanced translocation-associated sarcomas, but the sample was small. Impact: There exists yet to be deciphered heritable risk for developing complex genotype sarcomas. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 20(5); 751–7. ©2011 AACR.


Purpose
This paper aims to examine the extent to which Business Intelligence and Big Data feature within academic research in hospitality and tourism published until 2016, by identifying research gaps and future developments and designing an agenda for future research.

Design/methodology/approach
The study consists of a systematic quantitative literature review of academic articles indexed on the Scopus and Web of Science databases. The articles were reviewed based on the following features: research topic; conceptual and theoretical characterization; sources of data; type of data and size; data collection methods; data analysis techniques; and data reporting and visualization.

Findings
Findings indicate an increase in hospitality and tourism management literature applying analytical techniques to large quantities of data. However, this research field is fairly fragmented in scope and limited in methodologies and displays several gaps. A conceptual framework that helps to identify critical business problems and links the domains of business intelligence and big data to tourism and hospitality management and development is missing. Moreover, epistemological dilemmas and consequences for theory development of big data-driven knowledge are still a terra incognita. Last, despite calls for more integration of management and data science, cross-disciplinary collaborations with computer and data scientists are rather episodic and related to specific types of work and research.

Research limitations/implications
This work is based on academic articles published before 2017; hence, scientific outputs published after the moment of writing have not been included. A rich research agenda is designed.

Originality/value
This study contributes to explore in depth and systematically to what extent hospitality and tourism scholars are aware of and working intendedly on business intelligence and big data. To the best of the authors' knowledge, it is the first systematic literature review within hospitality and tourism research dealing with business intelligence and big data.


Incorporating additional guidance information, e.g., landmark/contour correspondence, in deformable image registration is often desirable and is typically done by adding constraints or cost terms to the optimization function. Commonly, deciding between a "hard" constraint and a "soft" additional cost term as well as the weighting of cost terms in the optimization function is done on a trial-and-error basis. The aim of this study is to investigate the advantages of exploiting guidance information by taking a multi-objective optimization perspective. Hereto, next to objectives related to match quality and amount of deformation, we define a third objective related to guidance information. Multi-objective optimization eliminates the need to a-priori tune a weighting of objectives in a single optimization function or the strict requirement of fulfilling hard guidance constraints. Instead, Pareto-efficient trade-offs between all objectives are found, effectively making the introduction of guidance information straightforward, independent of its type or scale. Further, since complete Pareto fronts also contain less interesting parts (i.e., solutions with near-zero deformation effort), we study how adaptive steering mechanisms can be incorporated to automatically focus more on solutions of interest. We performed experiments on artificial and real clinical data with large differences, including disappearing structures. Results show the substantial benefit of using additional guidance information. Moreover, compared to the 2-objective case, additional computational cost is negligible. Finally, with the same computational budget, use of the adaptive steering mechanism provides superior solutions in the area of interest.


This paper draws together emerging literature within Geography, and from across the broader social sciences, around contemporary mission and missionaries. It argues for the importance of recognising mission organisations and missionaries not just as historic relics, but as important, active, and geographically far ranging actors in the modern world. In mapping out the little work that has been conducted, three themes are addressed, missionary geopolitics; mission, welfare and development; and transnational migration, religion and cosmopolitanism. The article highlights the potential contributions that a (re)examination of missionary lives, beliefs and praxis can make to these disparate bodies of literature, and calls for further research in these directions within geographical scholarship.


There is an ever-growing amount of opinionated data available on the Web, in form of reviews, discussions and blogs. This data can potentially provide a lot of information through sentiment analysis and data mining in general. However, most research in the field of sentiment analysis has been locked to a single language and a single domain. Thus, the main objective of this thesis is to answer the question: "How can a sentiment analysis tool that is independent of domain and language be developed?" The aim of this thesis is to show the possibilities of a sentiment analysis program independent of languages and domain, capable of being used in different languages and domains without added effort. A sentiment analysis program was developed to test the feasibility of sentiment analysis across different domains or in languages other than English. Three main methods of sentiment analysis were implemented into the program, with tests being run on three different datasets. These three methods are a single weight analysis method where a documents sentiment equals the sum of its words sentiment, a sentence analyzer where a document is analyzed sentence by sentence, and a co-occurrence analyzer operating on the assumption that words occurring together often share the same sentiment value. The results shown are not able to achieve the same quality as those shown in other published articles, and in the case of the non-English analysis, are inconclusive. However the possible viability of a completely resourceless sentiment analysis program is shown. Further research and improvement is needed to achieve better results.


This paper presents a multiple reference frame method to reduce torque ripple in permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs) regarding non-sinusoidal back emf. It has been proved that back emf 3rd harmonic component does not interfere in torque characteristic of the motor with Y-connected windings with floating neutral point. Considering this fact, currents are optimized through a new approach, eliminating back-emf third harmonic component effect. Optimized current components are regulated through PI controllers which guaranty the desired convergence. Results have been investigated through simulations in Matlab/Simulink.


There is a consensus that decentralization by devolution leads to improved service delivery, but debate on the appropriate type of personnel arrangements for delivering decentralized services is far from over. Put differently, the discourse on whether civil service management should be decentralized or devolved still rages on. Little wonder that countries which started off with decentralized civil service management models in the 1990s are currently centralizing some aspects of personnel management while others are having centralized and decentralized personnel arrangements operating side by side in sub-national governments. The paper argues that civil service management should be decentralized whenever a country chooses the path of decentralization by devolution. Using Uganda's example, the paper highlights two major challenges of managing the civil service under separate personnel arrangements: civil service appointments devoid of merit, and the perennial failure to attract and retain qualified human resource. The paper presents proposals on how to ensure meritocracy in appointments and how to bolster attraction and retention of human capital in local governments.


In Brown v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court invalidated state and local school segregation laws as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. That same day, in Bolling v. Sharpe, the Court held unconstitutional de jure segregation in Washington, D.C.'s public schools under the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause. Fifty years after it was decided, Bolling remains one of the Warren Court's most controversial decisions.The controversy reflects the widespread belief that the outcome in Bolling reflected the Justices' political preferences and was not a sound interpretation of the Due Process Clause. The Bolling Court stands accused of inventing the idea that due process includes a guarantee of equal protection equivalent to that of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.A careful analysis of Bolling v. Sharpe, however, reveals some surprises. First, the almost universal portrayal of Bolling as an opinion relying on an equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause is incorrect. In fact, Bolling was a substantive due process opinion with roots in Lochner era cases such as Buchanan v. Warley, Meyer v. Nebraska, and Pierce v. Society of Sisters. The Court, however, chose to rely explicitly only on Buchanan because the other cases were too closely associated with Lochner.Another surprise is that the proposition that Bolling has come to stand for, that the Fifth Amendment prohibits discrimination by the Federal Government, was not simply made up by the Supreme Court, but has a basis in longstanding precedent.Finally, Bolling is an important example of the distorting effect of Lochnerphobia on Supreme Court jurisprudence. Bolling would have been a much stronger opinion had it been willing to explicitly rely on Lochner era precedents such as Meyer, and to employ a more explicitly Lochnerian view of the Due Process Clause.


This thesis reports on the results of case studies in four commercial banks in Nigeria. The study focuses how management accounting and control systems (MCS) operate in the four banks. The study is motivated by the dearth of literature on management accounting practices in the developing world in general and in Nigeria in specific. The case study approach adopted in conducting the research was useful in exploring the dynamics of the MCS in the organisations. Data was gathered from two sources. First, semi-structured interviews were conducted with managers at the head office, regional office and branches of each bank. The participants were selected from different backgrounds and managerial levels to provide broader understanding of the operations of the MCS. Second, various internal and external documents were reviewed to provide supporting evidence for the interview results. New institutional sociology (NIS) provided the theoretical framework to understand the results. NIS provided explanations for how the MCS in the four banks were shaped by diverse external and internal factors. The key factors identified as shaping the operations of the MCS were the need to comply with the regulatory environment (coercive isomorphism), the need to maintain social and cultural support (normative isomorphism) and the need to imitate successful organisations in order to appear legitimate (mimetic isomorphism). The study also examines the interplay between the institutional forces, market forces and infra-organisational power relations. This analysis is necessary to overcome the criticism of NIS that it downplays the role of market forces, agency and intra-organisational relations. The findings of the study have implications for understanding the operations of MCS in the developing world.


The minimalist notion of a phase has often been investigated with a view to the interfaces. 'Phases' provides a strictly syntax-internal perspective.If phases are fundamental, they should provide the grounds for a unifying treatment of different syntactic phenomena. Concentrating on displacement, the book argues that this expectation is borne out: there is an empirical clustering of properties, whereby the phrases that undergo pied-piping are also the phrases that host intermediate traces of cyclic movement. The same phrases also host partial and secondary movement. Finally, the immediate complements within these phrases never strand the embedding heads. The phrases that show this behaviour are the phases (CP, vP, DP, and PP). To account for the cluster of properties, phases are claimed to have two special properties: their complement is inaccessible to operations outside, the Phase Impenetrability Condition; their heads may be endowed with unvalued features that are neither connected to the categorical status of the phase nor interpreted on it. It is shown how the cluster of empirical properties flows naturally from these two assumptions, supporting the idea that phases are indeed a fundamental construct in syntax.


Background: Obesity is a worldwide epidemic that is expected to grow exponentially in the future. Obese patients are at risk of developing serious complications including acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Prone positioning (PP) has been shown to increase survival rates in patients with ARDS, but few studies have focused on the effect of PP on obese patients. This systematic review seeks to explore the research performed on the question: in obese adults with ARDS, can prone positioning increase the likelihood of morbidity or mortality when compared to supine positioning? Methods: A comprehensive search of available medical literature was performed using MEDLINE-Ovid, CINAHL, and Web of Science using the following search terms: acute respiratory distress syndrome, prone position, and obesity. Quality of all relevant articles were assessed using the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation criteria (GRADE). Results: Two articles met the inclusion criteria and provided original data regarding the clinical question. These articles included two retrospective observational studies. An observational case-control clinical study with 66 patients demonstrated that length of mechanical ventilation, intensive care unit (ICU) stay, and nosocomial infections did not differ significantly between obese and non-obese patients in PP, but mortality was significantly lower in obese patients. A retrospective observational study found that there was no significant difference in overall ICU mortality. However, it was found that obese patients developed renal and hepatic failure more often. Conclusion: Prone positioning has been shown to reduce the rate of mortality in patients with ARDS. Current studies show that PP can also reduce mortality in obese patients, however studies conflict on their results regarding morbidity. Therefore more quality studies must be performed to determine the safety of PP in obese patients.


Abstract While the trade effect of free trade agreements (FTAs) is a global issue, little research has examined the economic effects of trade liberalization on agricultural products with robust empirical methods. In this study, propensity score matching for controlling selection bias is used to examine and analyze the effect of FTAs on the trade of South Korea's agricultural products. To enhance the robustness of the estimated results, differences between the FTA treatment effects in 2010 and 2012 are analyzed. The results reveal that the effect of FTAs on agricultural trade varies slightly, depending on the matching approach used; however, the signs of all estimated average treatment effects on the treated (ATT) values are positive. Analysis of the difference between selection bias controlled through matching and uncontrolled selection bias shows that the value of the average treatment effect (ATE) with uncontrolled bias is greater than the ATT estimate calculated through matching. This implies that controlled versus uncontrolled selection bias can result in different ATE and ATT estimates, and that previous studies on FTA trade effects have overestimated the effect, because selection bias was not fully addressed.


Short Rotation Forestry (SRF) has been introduced to the UK as a method to increase biomass production. However, some SRF species have raised concerns about potential impacts on the environment. A largely unknown aspect of SRF is the quality and quantity of leaf litter, and its impact on soil fauna, of which the earthworm community is a major component. Earthworms have direct impacts on the soil biogeochemistry of SRF systems, and the tree species can impact on the associated earthworm community. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of SRF species and litter quality on earthworm communities, their diversity and activity. In addition, the effects of earthworms on SRF litter decomposition, carbon-nutrient cycling and tree growth were assessed. Field surveys, laboratory experiments and field experiments were utilised. Survey results suggested that SRF species, tree age, land-used history and soil type exhibited an interactive effect on overall earthworm community development. Further, growth of eucalyptus, as SRF on marginal-arable or reclaimed sites, led to relatively rapid earthworm colonisation and community development. SRF litter quality showed a direct effect on earthworm food selection, growth and reproduction. The native Alnus glutinosa, Betula pendula and Fraxinus excelsior litter supported earthworms and their activities over non-native Acer pseudoplatanus, Castaneas sativa and Eucalyptus nitens. Native British earthworms indicated a significant preference (p < 0.05) for E. nitens litter over A. pseudoplatanus and C. sativa. Earthworms showed a significant contribution (p < 0.05) to SRF litter decomposition, carbon and nutrient release within SRF systems and the degree of contribution varied with SRF species, earthworm density and diversity. Field studies demonstrated that a mixed earthworm community utilised non-native species but favoured particular native trees. Earthworm influence on nutrient uptake, tree growth and biomass production varied with SRF species. A one year field experiment showed that rapidly growing E. nitens benefited more from earthworm activity than relatively slow growing B. pendula. Overall, the current work supports the production of SRF, as with only one exception (C. sativa), results tended to show that SRF-earthworm interactions were positive. It is perhaps most interesting that non-native E. nitens showed a positive interaction with native British earthworms.


A climatological analysis of snowstorms across the contiguous United States, based on data from 1222 weather stations with data during 1901–2001, defined the spatial and temporal features. The average annual incidence of events creating 15.2 cm or more in 1 or 2 days, which are termed as snowstorms, exhibits great spatial variability. The pattern is latitudinal across most of the eastern half of the United States, averaging 0.1 storm (1 storm per 10 years) in the Deep South, increasing to 2 storms along the Canadian border. This pattern is interrupted by higher averages downwind of the Great Lakes and in the Appalachian Mountains. In the western third of the United States where snow falls, lower-elevation sites average 0.1–2 storms per year, but averages are much higher in the Cascade Range and Rocky Mountains, where 5–30 storms occur per year. Most areas of the United States have had years without snowstorms, but the annual minima are 1 or more storms in high-elevation areas of the West and Northeast. The pattern of annual maxima of storms is similar to the average pattern. The temporal distribution of snowstorms exhibited wide fluctuations during 1901–2000, with downward 100-yr trends in the lower Midwest, South, and West Coast. Upward trends occurred in the upper Midwest, East, and Northeast, and the national trend for 1901–2000 was upward, corresponding to trends in strong cyclonic activity. The peak periods of storm activity in the United States occurred during 1911–20 and 1971–80, and the lowest frequency was in 1931–40. Snowstorms first occur in September in the Rockies, in October in the high plains, in November across most of the United States, and in December in the Deep South. The month with the season's last storms is December in the South and then shifts northward, with April the last month of snowstorms across most of the United States. Storms occur as late as May and June in the Rockies and Cascades. Snowstorms are most frequent in December downwind of the Great Lakes, with the peak of activity in January for most other areas of the United States.


Oxfam's Global Leaders Empowered to Alleviate Poverty (LEAP) program ran for four years from 2011, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its main purpose was to promote political leadership for global development. The global reach and the range of partnerships involved in the LEAP project enabled Oxfam to identify and demonstrate improvements in practice across six areas: How to influence policy Effective tactics The global balance in practice The role of Civil Society in global development policy Public support for global development issues How the project developed - identity, strategy and priorities The external and independent evaluation of the first three years of LEAP focussed on two main areas of work: Oxfam's relative contributions to policy advocacy outcomes; and how, and how far, Oxfam's linking of global, national and local advocacy for policy change can show measurable added value. The evaluation concludes that LEAP offered Oxfam and its partners increased influence on policy processes and outcomes, as well as increased advocacy capacity across a range of issues. It identifies three strands from the project for future action: Improving and making the case for aid to fight hunger and poverty Increasing G20 and BRICSAM leadership on global poverty Making the US a global development leader For each strand the report outlines internal and external issues: Which factors facilitated and hindered the success of the project? What strategies were most and least effective? Did 'linking to global' add value and amplify voices in and from the Global South? How far did the project encourage staff from Oxfam and external stakeholders to reflect on the development and management of the project? What were challenges of coordinating staff, partners, governments, policies and projects? The LEAP Final Evaluation research was carried out in Brazil, France, Haiti, India, Mexico, Spain, South Africa, the United States and in Pan African (AU) and European (EU) institutions. The Management Response to LEAP Evaluation paper offers specific feedback on the Global LEAP project (as of February 2015) from the LEAP Project Director and from Oxfam America's Vice-President of Policy and Campaigns. For a full list of LEAP Evaluation files and translations, scroll down below this record and click on the file.


The Web is rapidly moving towards a platform for mass collaboration in content production and consumption. Fresh content on a variety of topics, people, and places is being created and made available on the Web at breathtaking speed. Navigating the content effectively not only requires techniques such as aggregating various RSS-enabled feeds, but it also demands a new browsing paradigm. In this paper, we present novel geospatial and temporal browsing techniques that provide users with the capability of aggregating and navigating RSS-enabled content in a timely, personalized and automatic manner. In particular, we describe a system called GeoTracker that utilizes both a geospatial representation and a temporal (chronological) presentation to help users spot the most relevant updates quickly. Within the context of this work, we provide a middleware engine that supports intelligent aggregation and dissemination of RSS feeds with personalization to desktops and mobile devices. We study the navigation capabilities of this system on two kinds of data sets, namely, 2006 World Cup soccer data collected over two months and breaking news items that occur every day. We also demonstrate that the application of such technologies to the video search results returned by YouTube and Google greatly enhances a user.s ability in locating and browsing videos based on his or her geographical interests. Finally, we demonstrate that the location inference performance of GeoTracker compares well against machine learning techniques used in the natural language processing/information retrieval community. Despite its algorithm simplicity, it preserves high recall percentages.


The poles and zeros of the scattering operator of a corrugated waveguide and of a bare grating are studied mathematically and numerically. An initial tutorial section recalls how their use can explain grating anomalies and other curious phenomena in linear optics. This approach is then used in nonlinear optics to understand and predict curious efficiency-curve shapes observed in the study of second-harmonic generation and optical bistability enhanced by a corrugated surface.


MATLAB Automated Test Tool, version 3.0 (MATT 3.0) is a software package that provides automated tools that reduce the time needed for extensive testing of simulation models that have been constructed in the MATLAB programming language by use of the Simulink and Real-Time Workshop programs. MATT 3.0 runs on top of the MATLAB engine application-program interface to communicate with the Simulink engine. MATT 3.0 automatically generates source code from the models, generates custom input data for testing both the models and the source code, and generates graphs and other presentations that facilitate comparison of the outputs of the models and the source code for the same input data. Context-sensitive and fully searchable help is provided in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) format.


I-BLOCKS are an innovative concept of building blocks allowing users to manipulate conceptual structures and compose atomic actions while building physical constructions. They represent an example of enabling technologies for tangible interfaces since they emphasise physicality of interaction through the use of spatial and kinaesthetic knowledge. The technology presented in this paper is integrated in physical building blocks augmented with embedded and invisible microprocessors. Connectivity and behaviour of such structures are defined by the physical connectivity between the blocks. These are general purpose, constructive, tangible user interface devices that can have a variety of applications. Unlike other approaches, I-BLOCKS do not only specify a computation that is performed by the target system but perform at the same time the computation and the associated action/functionality. Manipulating I-BLOCKS do not only mean constructing physical or conceptual structures but also composing atomic actions into complex behaviours. To illustrate this concept, the paper presents different scenarios in which the technology has been applied: storytelling performed through the construction of physical characters exhibiting emotional states, and learning activities for speech therapy in cases of dyslexia and aphasia. The scenarios are presented; discussing both the features of the technology used and the related interaction design issues. The paper concludes by reporting about informal trials that have been conducted with children. It should be noted that, even if both trials represent application scenarios for children, the I-BLOCKS technology is in principle open to different kinds of applications and target users like, for example, games for adults or brainstorming activities.


ABSTRACT Educational technology research has moved through several stages or "ages", focusing at the beginning on the content to be learned, then on the format of instructional messages and, finally on the interaction between computers and students. The present paper reviews the research in technology-based learning environments in order to give both a historical perspective on educational technology research and a view of the current state of this discipline. We conclude that: 1) trends in educational technology research were forged by the evolution of learning theories and the technological changes, 2) a clear shift from the design of instruction to the design of learning environments can be noticed; 3) there is a positive effect of educational technology on learning, but the size of the effect varies considerably; 4) learning is much more dependent on the activity of the learner than on the quantity of information and processing opportunities provided by the environment. KEYWORDS: educational technology, computer- based learning, learning environments, research methods, virtual reality. Computer technology and the tremendous development of information technologies over the last few years have transformed the way education is conducted nowadays (Lou et al., 2001). Although computer technology has the potential of a powerful and flexible tool (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1996), the previous experiences with the integration of early technologies in schools (e.g., radio, television, early computer-assisted instruction) underline the fact that the mere installing of hardware does not lead to desired results (Clark, 1983). Thus, the main question, research tried to find an answer for, was and still remains whether computer technology is benefic for the learning process and if yes, in which conditions? The "proper research of educational technology" has represented the subject of a debate for more than a decade (Lagemann, 2000; Levin & O'Donnell, 1999; Shavelson & Towne, 2002; Slavin, 2002). Despite of the accumulated experience in conducting research and publishing results in specialized journals, there is no consensus regarding methods that are used, or results and interpretations that are given to them (Hannafin, 2006). Reeves (1993) claimed that an important part of the research in the educational technology field is "pseudoscience", because it fails in meeting the high level of theoretical, conceptual, methodological and/or analytical requests of the paradigm that it is based upon. The purpose of this article is to review the research performed in the educational technology field in order to understand the nature of questions and problems that researchers had to face in this field over the years, and also to place the current research in the context of educational technology research. THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH IN EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY The field of educational technology found its origins in the discovery made by researchers and practitioners of the fact that the instruction can be planned, projected, evaluated and revised before being applied on students. In other words it can be treated as an object on which a set of procedures, (i.e., technologies) can be applied (Winn, 2002). Educational technology is, according to the definition of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT), "...the theory and practice of design, development, utilization, management and evaluation of processes and resources for learning" (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 231). Another definition is the one offered by Reisser (1987), who states that educational technology is the systematic way of designing, utilization and evaluation of the teaching/learning process, in terms of specific objectives, based on research in human learning and communication fields and on combining human and technical resources. The research made in the educational technology field, according to Winn (2002) has moved through four stages or "ages", each being built on the previous one and each of them being characterized by a specific focus, specific theoretical assumptions and practical implications. …


Both metamathematics and physics are posited to emerge from samplings by observers of the unique ruliad structure that corresponds to the entangled limit of all possible computations. The possibility of higher-level mathematics accessible to humans is posited to be the analog for mathematical observers of the perception of physical space for physical observers. A physicalized analysis is given of the bulk limit of traditional axiomatic approaches to the foundations of mathematics, together with explicit empirical metamathematics of some examples of formalized mathematics. General physicalized laws of mathematics are discussed, associated with concepts such as metamathematical motion, inevitable dualities, proof topology and metamathematical singularities. It is argued that mathematics as currently practiced can be viewed as derived from the ruliad in a direct Platonic fashion analogous to our experience of the physical world, and that axiomatic formulation, while often convenient, does not capture the ultimate character of mathematics. Among the implications of this view is that only certain collections of axioms may be consistent with inevitable features of human mathematical observers. A discussion is included of historical and philosophical connections, as well as of foundational implications for the future of mathematics.


The analysis of Stirling Cryocooler is very important while designing a particular machine for specific application. The actual and ideal Stirling cycle differs substantially and the performance prediction of the actual cycle is also an important task for the scientists. The analysis of the Stirling Cryocooler is a complicated one as it involves both dynamic and thermodynamic aspects. The cyclic analysis is used for designing Stirling Cryocooler for desired capacity by considering dead volumes in the system, property changes of the matrix and working fluid, pressure and temperature changes in the system, speed and different losses like shuttle heat conduction, temperature swing, pumping loss, instantaneous pressure drop, conduction through various solid parts and the regenerator loss. The loss analysis also considers the flow rates at different intervals. Thus the cyclic analysis is more realistic in approach. The cyclic analysis of the Stirling cycle Cryocooler for performance evaluation of a 0.5 W at 80 K has been attempted.


The concept of human security has emerged in the post-Cold War world of the 1990s. It is a concept which, ever since its first appearance, has provoked a lot of criticism with regard to its analytical ambiguity and its political appropriateness. This article examines the historical and theoretical evolution of different security concepts (traditional, extended, common, comprehensive, societal and human) as well as the way in which they relate to one another. In particular, it shows how the different generations of security concepts broaden the relevant issues at stake and finally the reference object when changing the perspective. The conclusion that is reached in the article is that a narrow understanding of human security offers more and easier analytical value, while a broad conception serves better as a political leitmotif for concerted foreign policy-projects.


The study of intellectual humility is still in its early stages and issues of definition and measurement are only now being explored. To inform and guide the process of defining and measuring this important intellectual virtue, we conducted a series of studies into the implicit theory – or 'folk' understanding – of an intellectually humble person, a wise person, and an intellectually arrogant person. In Study 1, 350 adults used a free-listing procedure to generate a list of descriptors, one for each person-concept. In Study 2, 335 adults rated the previously generated descriptors by how characteristic each was of the target person-concept. In Study 3, 344 adults sorted the descriptors by similarity for each person-concept. By comparing and contrasting the three person-concepts, a complex portrait of an intellectually humble person emerges with particular epistemic, self-oriented, and other-oriented dimensions.


In the context of unfitted finite element discretizations the realization of high order methods is challenging due to the fact that the geometry approximation has to be sufficiently accurate. Recently a new unfitted finite element method was introduced which achieves a high order approximation of the geometry for domains which are implicitly described by smooth level set functions. This method is based on a parametric mapping which transforms a piecewise planar interface (or surface) reconstruction to a high order approximation. In the paper [C. Lehrenfeld, A. Reusken, Analysis of a High Order Finite Element Method for Elliptic Interface Problems, arXiv 1602.02970, submitted] an a priori error analysis of the method applied to an interface problem is presented. The analysis reveals optimal order discretization error bounds in the $H^1$-norm. In this paper we extend this analysis and derive optimal $L^2$-error bounds.


This paper seeks to unpack and explain the relationship between the emergency rhetoric used by Italian politicians and the policies implemented in Italy in response to the influx of irregular migrants from North Africa during 2011. It analyses how the language relates to the policies adopted and considers the impact on relations between Italy and the European Union (EU) in the area of migration. Accordingly, I address two main questions. How can we understand the emergency lexicon in relation to the policies adopted by Italy in response to irregular arrivals from North Africa in 2011? Secondly, what are the implications for EU-Italian engagement? In other words, how has the vehement and popularized emergency-centred debate in Italy affected interaction between Italy and the EU?To tackle these questions, the analysis is divided into five sections. The first section introduces the academic discussion on migration in Italy and focuses on three themes central to this paper: emergency, ambiguities in migration policies, and the EU as vincolo esterno (external constraint). The second section illustrates briefly the methodology employed and explains the selection of the case-study. Thirdly, I outline and examine the policies implemented by Italy between January and December 2011 and investigate the shifting language along the crisis-normality continuum. The fourth section turns to the international level and chronicles the relations between Italy and the European Union concerning irregular arrivals from North Africa. With regard to the latter, attention is given to the implications of the agreement between Tunisia and Italy. The domestic and international strands are brought together in the fifth section, which probes the reliance on discourses of emergency in the way that migration and asylum policies are presented vis-à-vis the European Union. Fear, I argue, remains a key factor in the shaping of ideas and policies across both the domestic and international domains. However, not all the policies adopted can be ascribed to the logic of fear alone, and indeed some actually run counter to the emergency rationale that shapes the wider political debate.


Now with updated ACLS algorithms An Introduction to Clinical Emergency Medicine is a much-needed resource for individuals practicing in this challenging field. It takes a novel approach, describing in detail the best and most current methods including initial patient evaluation, generation of differential diagnoses, problem-solving and management of challenging conditions based on presenting symptoms. Unlike other textbooks, in which the diagnosis is known, this textbook approaches clinical problems as clinicians approach patients - without full knowledge of the final diagnosis. It provides an understanding of how to approach patients with undifferentiated conditions, ask the right questions, gather historical data, utilize physical examination skills and order and interpret laboratory and radiographic tests. It provides current management and disposition strategies with controversies presented, including pearls and summary points for each topic covered. The book is multi-author, each contributor chosen because of a track record in teaching as well as being internationally recognised experts in the specialty.