In 1971, activist-author Wendell Berry, writing about the Red River Gorge in his beloved Kentucky, invoked the trope of a natural world not granted by our forebears but on loan from our descendants—the biosphere held in trust, as it were, for generations to come (Unforeseen Wilderness 26). The re-publication of part of Berry's work in Audubon magazine soon after (Berry, 'One-Inch Journey' 4) led to a mis-attribution of them to John James Audubon, and, in 1973, when Dennis Hall, an official at Michigan's Office of Land Use, adapted them without citation, he was erroneously credited also. Similarly, Australian Environment Minister Moses Cass's use of it in a speech to the OECD in 1974 (qtd. in O'Toole) meant that the adage has sometimes been ascribed to him. From the 1980s onwards, the phrase was quoted in speeches and reprinted on book-jackets and in report by-lines—by, among others, representatives of the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Wildlife Fund (Talbot 495). Paul and Anne Erhlich attributed it to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (26) and an article in the Christian Science Monitor (Jones 23) assigned it to environmentalist Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute. The Los Angeles Times asserted that it was an Amish saying (Riley 5), United States Secretary of State James Baker named Ralph Waldo Emerson as its author (qtd. in Keyes L10), and the United States Council on Environmental Quality claimed the source to be Chief Seattle (qtd. in Keyes L10). 2 I have described these mis-attributions in detail not simply to offer an object lesson in the portability of provenance, but to suggest that this pithy aphorism has been so durable, so willingly and wishfully assigned to a range of wise and venerable sources, because it strikes a deep and resonant chord. The idea that our relationship with the biosphere is automatically a matter of posterity is a powerful one, and this quotation in particular achieves several important rhetorical tricks. It collapses a web of obligations—the interspecial and the intergenerational—into a single immemorial and apparently unthinkable strand of time. We are not simply construed as guardians of the environment for the environment's sake; we are explicitly called on to steward it for this vastly distant future, while being reminded of our debt to those in the past. We are thus placed in a grand historical chain of obligations. This is a different version of posterity from John Passmore's 'chain of love', which reads, rather, as a kind of pass-the-parcel conception of intergenerational concern: Men do not love their grand-children's grand-children. They cannot love what they do not know. But in loving those grand-children—a love which already carries them a not inconsiderable distance into the future—they hope that those grand-children too will have grand-children to love. By this means there is established a chain of love and concern running throughout the remote future. (88) For Passmore, we 'cannot love' what we 'do not know', and thus future generations are cared for vicariously, since it is the receipt by a given generation of the love and care of immediately preceding generations that positions and motivates it to care for the next. Unlike the chain imagined by Passmore, the rhetoric of environmentalist posterity brings those future generations into the immediate purview of parental love. The call to stewardship seems to trail off into the reaches of time, but its use of synecdoche—the modelling of our attitude to future generations on our responsibilities to our offspring—replaces the terror of sublime infinity with the intimacy of parental caring, sheltering, and nurturing. From Berry's original 3 expression of it through its many incarnations, the primal, emotional punchline is that the (every)man loves his children. In this essay, I first consider the prevalence of the notion of posterity in popular climate change discourse, scrutinising its appeal to ideas of parenthood, which leads to a consideration of this discourse's appropriation of the figure of the child. I argue that not just this preoccupation with posterity but the use of the child as a particularly emotive shorthand conceal a collective angst about the cumulative effect of human activity on the planet. In a time of dire destruction of the biosphere at large, this anxiety is exacerbated by the intractable ethical dilemmas that underlie our obligations not just to future humans but to nonhuman species. In the final analysis, the climate change novel emerges as a space in which this angst is aired, shared, and—most importantly—queried, as countless such novels place parent-child relationships under emotional and intellectual scrutiny. Ultimately, I contend that many climate change novels' use of apparently sentimental parent-child imagery is, paradoxically, part of a vital critique of the human exceptionalism that underwrites such imagery.


This thesis comprises five chapters that together offer some contribution to the economics of unemployment, earnings and absence. Chapter One: Unemployment Stigma investigates the implications of an occupational hierarchy on labour market behaviour. The ideas developed are applied, firstly, to a model of the wage curve where it is shown that the relationship between unemployment and pay may be upward slopping over some range; and secondly, to a non-shirking model of efficiency wages where the potential for multiple labour market equilibria is highlighted. Chapter Two: The Economics of Absence investigates the relatively neglected issue of worker absence. The Chapter reviews and offers some perspective to existing studies of absence, develops a theoretical model of absence that incorporates both the supply and demand aspects of the employment relation, and sets out an empirical analysis of the relationship between absence and labour supply. Chapter Three: Absence and Profit Sharing explores the relationship between employee sharing and worker absence using data from a panel of 127 French firms over the period 1981-1991. The results suggest that both profit sharing and employee share ownership schemes are associated with significantly lower absence, the extent of the decline depending crucially upon whether or not the schemes operate exclusively of one another. An interesting question also emerges concerning the relationship between contractual flexibility and absence behaviour, the empirical analysis suggesting that a more widespread use of part-time contracts may act to reduce the incidence of absence in firms operating profit sharing schemes. Chapter Four: U.K. Unemployment profiles the incidence of unemployment in the U.K. over the period 1985-91 by quantifying the differential probabilities of unemployment faced by particular groups within the population. The results indicate that, even after controlling for a plethora of demographic characteristics, regional disparities in unemployment risk are prevalent. Chapter Five: Trade and Trade Unions examines the effects of international trade on the employment and earnings prospects of a sample of U.K. workers. The Chapter develops a model of international oligopoly with generally unionised labour markets which suggests that an increased exposure to trade is more likely to impact negatively upon the wage (employment) prospects of workers the greater (lesser) the degree of union bargaining power to which they are subservient. The empirical analysis in the Chapter offers substantive support for this proposition.


Bogoliubov quasiparticle interference (QPI) spectroscopy has emerged as an important tool to understand the pairing symmetry in unconventional and high Tc superconductors. This method is based on scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and essentially involves investigating how the local density of states (LDOS) is modulated due to the presence of impurities. In recent years, QPI been used to determine the gap symmetry of unconventional superconductors, e.g. CeCoIn5. It has also been developed for non-centrosymmetric (NCS) superconductors with mixed singlet-triplet gap function. Qualitatively new effects in the QPI pattern originate from Rashba spin-orbit coupling and its associated coherence factors. This is discussed for a gap model with accidental node lines due to its composite singlet-triplet nature. Also, the QPI method is suggested as criteria to discriminate between the two most investigated models of hidden order (HO) in URu2Si2. Furthermore, the signature of proposed chiral d-wave superconducting (SC) orders parameter in QPI of the coexisting HO+SC phase is investigated.


Monetary policy shocks affect interest rates at long horizons (10 years or more). Furthermore, the private sector's real GDP forecasts are revised upward in response to a monetary tightening. These facts challenge the prevailing theories in academic and policy circles. In this paper, I propose a micro-founded model to rationalize those facts, based on the signaling channel of monetary policy. I consider a framework where the central bank has private information about future economic conditions. Agents update their beliefs according to Bayes' theorem. Policy actions play a signaling role, and may therefore rationalize the above empirical findings.


markdownabstract__Abstract__

Business model innovation (BMI) is an emergent area of research with the potential to re-structure the pillars of strategy research. Despite the growing interest, the process of how business models change is not clearly described. In fact, only a few empirical studies explain the antecedents of BMI and we do not have a clear understanding of how companies combine external knowledge with internal capabilities for innovating. Moreover, scholars have not been able to describe the steps that managers undertake to innovate their business models. This Dissertation is aimed at addressing these gaps.
I find that networks in which companies are embedded function as learning environment for stimulating BMI. At the same time, I highlight specific network dynamics, characterizing BMI as a different phenomenon in respect to other innovation processes. Moreover, I address the analysis of the BMI process, showing the relevance of managers' attention. Finally, I also show the importance of managers' goal orientation, looking at how they are influenced by environmental and organizational contingencies. These findings derive from qualitative and quantitative studies conducted in the field of creative industries.
This Dissertation has the potential to contribute to research along three dimensions: (1) shedding light on the process of BMI, (2) exploring the relevance of managers' attention for business model innovation, (3) exploring the effectiveness of different BMI strategies.


BACKGROUND
Pagetoid reticulosis is a rare variant of mycosis fungoides. This rare condition typically presents as a solitary plaque located on the extremities with an indolent clinical course (Woringer-Kolopp disease) or as a more generalized presentation with diffuse cutaneous involvement and a more aggressive clinical course (Ketron-Goodman disease).

PURPOSE
To review the cutaneous manifestations, pathology, and treatment of localized pagetoid reticulosis.

METHODS
The authors describe a 24-year-old woman with a slowly enlarging, localized plaque of seven months duration, representing the localized form of pagetoid reticulosis with CD8+ immunophenotype.

RESULTS
The histological, immunohistochemical, and clinical features of the patient's skin lesion were characteristic for a diagnosis of Woringer-Kolopp disease. Systemic work-up for lymphoma was negative.

CONCLUSION
Woringer-Kolopp disease is most commonly seen in middle-aged men as a solitary lesion of the extremities, and it should always be considered in the differential diagnosis when a patient presents with such a lesion. A histological analysis demonstrated atypical lymphocytes preferentially localized to the epidermis with a CD4+, CD8+, or CD4-/CD8- phenotype. The treatment of choice for a solitary lesion may be localized radiation therapy, but newer therapies, such as bexarotene, may warrant further investigation.


Exposure to solar ultraviolet (UV) radiation is a known cause of skin cancer. Sunbed use represents an increasingly frequent source of artificial UV exposure in light‐skinned populations. To assess the available evidence of the association between sunbed use and cutaneous malignant melanoma (melanoma) and other skin cancers, a systematic review of the literature till March 2006 on epidemiological and biological studies on sunbed use was performed in Pubmed, ISI Web of Science, Embase, Pascal, Cochrane library, Lilacs and Medcarib. Search for keywords in the title and in the abstract was done systematically and supplemented by manual searches. Only case–control, cohort or cross‐sectional studies were selected. Data were abstracted by means of a standardized data‐collection protocol. Based on 19 informative studies, ever‐use of sunbeds was positively associated with melanoma (summary relative risk, 1.15; 95% CI, 1.00–1.31), although there was no consistent evidence of a dose–response relationship. First exposure to sunbeds before 35 years of age significantly increased the risk of melanoma, based on 7 informative studies (summary relative risk, 1.75; 95% CI, 1.35–2.26). The summary relative risk of 3 studies of squamous cell carcinoma showed an increased risk. For basal cell carcinoma, the studies did not support an association. The evidence does not support a protective effect of the use of sunbeds against damage to the skin from subsequent sun exposure. Young adults should be discouraged from using indoor tanning equipment and restricted access to sunbeds by minors should be strongly considered. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.


One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, "Do you have any controls?" Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, "Do you mean did I not operate on half of the patients?" The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, "Yes, that's what I had in mind." Then the visitor's fist really came down as he thundered, "Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death." God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, "Which half?" Erle E. Peacock Jr


Under the assumption of a flat ΛCDM cosmology, recent data from the Planck satellite point toward a Hubble constant that is in tension with that measured by gravitational lens time delays and by the local distance ladder. Prosaically, this difference could arise from unknown systematic uncertainties in some of the measurements. More interestingly—if systematics were ruled out—resolving the tension would require a departure from the flat ΛCDM cosmology, introducing, for example, a modest amount of spatial curvature, or a non-trivial dark energy equation of state. To begin to address these issues, we present an analysis of the gravitational lens RXJ1131−1231 that is improved in one particular regard: we examine the issue of systematic error introduced by an assumed lens model density profile. We use more flexible gravitational lens models with baryonic and dark matter components, and find that the exquisite Hubble Space Telescope image with thousands of intensity pixels in the Einstein ring and the stellar velocity dispersion of the lens contain sufficient information to constrain these more flexible models. The total uncertainty on the time-delay distance is 6.6% for a single system. We proceed to combine our improved time-delay distance measurement with the WMAP9 and Planck posteriors. In an open ΛCDM model, the data for RXJ1131−1231 in combination with Planck favor a flat universe with (68% credible interval (CI)). In a flat wCDM model, the combination of RXJ1131−1231 and Planck yields (68% CI).


The elevated layers of absorbing smoke aerosols from western African (e.g., Gabon and Congo) biomass burning activities have been frequently observed above low‐level stratocumulus clouds off the African coast, which presents an excellent natural laboratory for studying the effects of aerosols above clouds (AAC) on regional energy balance in tropical and subtropical environments. Using spatially and temporally collocated Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI), and Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System data sets, the top‐of‐atmosphere shortwave aerosol direct shortwave radiative effects (ARE) of absorbing aerosols above low‐level water clouds in the southeast Atlantic Ocean was examined in this study. The regional averaged instantaneous ARE has been estimated to be 36.7 ± 20.5 Wm−2 (regional mean ± standard deviation) along with a mean positive OMI Aerosol Index at 1.3 in August 2006 based on multisensors measurements. The highest magnitude of instantaneous ARE can even reach 138.2 Wm−2. We assess that the 660 nm cloud optical depth (COD) values of 8–12 is the critical value above (below) which aerosol absorption (scattering) effect dominates and further produces positive (negative) ARE values. The results further show that ARE values are more sensitive to aerosols above lower COD values than cases for higher COD values. This is among the first studies to provide quantitative estimates of shortwave ARE due to AAC events from an observational perspective.


BACKGROUND
Fungal contamination of kidney allograft preservative fluid can lead to renal arteritis and arterial wall rupture.

METHODS
We have evaluated a conservative management strategy based onearly antifungal therapy, rigorous morphological monitoring of the graft artery and surgical second look (SSL). Since November 2004, preservative fluid was routinely cultured on specific media for all kidney transplant recipients.

RESULTS
In 8/474 cases, results were positive for Candida (albicans 5, glabrata 2, tropicalis 1). Two patients also had candida infection of drainage fluid leading to the diagnosis of operative site infection. Radiological and surgical examinations of the renal graft artery were normal in all cases and nephrectomy was not required. At 12 months, all patients were alive with a functioning allograft.

CONCLUSION
Early antifungal therapy with microbiological and morphological follow-up should be recommended as soon as contamination is detected, but SSL is advised only in patients with risk factors for arterial anomalies.


Much of the rhetoric around the excruciatingly slow climate change negotiations gives the impression that the process is stuck in perpetual stasis. While there is some truth in this notion, caused largely by the fact that the negotiations are primarily driven by national rather than global interest, it is also true that the imperative to keep country parties at the negotiation table, and the compromises that this entails when the table seats virtually all of the world's nations, has resulted in the development and/or elaboration of certain of the principles of international environmental law.


The
relationship between death anxiety and religion/s explored, it was assumed that the role of religion could be
associated with death anxiety in a fixed manner or it could vary. Following
tests were used Death Anxiety Scale, Daily
Experience Spirituality Scale and Centrality of Religiosity Scale. 100
subjects falling between 40-60 years of age belonging to similar area and
followers of two different religions, 50 belonging to religion one in Group-A
and 50 belonging to religion two in Group-B were tested. The results reflected that
religiosity was significantly and positively correlated with faith (p < .01),
negatively associated with death anxiety (p < .01) and negatively correlated
with death anxiety (p < .01). The revealing finding that came in light was
the significant differences of religiosity, faith and death anxiety
between Religion-A and Religion-B. It was
also observed that faith was
significantly higher among Religion-A
respondents as compared to Religion-B respondents.
Finding suggests further explorations in the direction to explore and address
an inevitable part of human presence.


Abstract. In this work we have quantitatively measured the degradation of 4-phenoxyphenol adsorbed on silica particles following oxidative processing by gas-phase ozone. This was performed under dark conditions and in the presence of 4-carboxybenzophenone under simulated sunlight irradiation of the particles surface. At the mixing ratio of 60 ppb which corresponds to strongly polluted ozone areas, the first order of decay of 4-phenoxyphenol is k1=9.95×10−6 s−1. At a very high ozone mixing ratio of 6 ppm the first order rate constants for 4-phenoxyphenol degradation were the following: k1=2.86×10−5 s−1 under dark conditions and k1=5.58×10−5 s−1 in the presence of photosensitizer (4-carboxybenzophenone) under light illumination of the particles surface. In both cases, the experimental data follow the modified Langmuir-Hinshelwood equation for surface reactions. The Langmuir-Hinshelwood and Langmuir-Rideal mechanisms for bimolecular surface reactions are also discussed along with the experimental results. Most importantly, the quantities of the oligomers such as 2-(4-Phenoxyphenoxy)-4-phenoxyphenol and 4-[4-(4-Phenoxyphenoxy)phenoxy]phenol formed during the heterogeneous ozonolysis of adsorbed 4-phenoxyphenol were much higher under solar light irradiation of the surface in comparison to the dark conditions.


ABSTRACT Reparative measures for conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) attend to the practical needs of victims while also addressing the long-term structural conditions that led to the violence and often endure after conflict. Over the last decade, transitional justice has sought to address high levels of impunity for SGBV, while also addressing the long-term structural conditions causing and exacerbating it. In this article we study the case of Sri Lanka, where crimes have been committed during and after the civil war (1983–2009) but a transitional justice mechanism to redress them is unlikely to be established. The article considers whether in such a situation of impunity gender-sensitive approaches to SGBV prevention can still be promoted to ensure its non-recurrence. We closely examine post-conflict Sri Lanka and women's ongoing experiences of multiple forms of insecurity and violence to highlight the relationship between enduring structural gender inequalities and reparative justice. Bridging human rights and political economy approaches, we argue that addressing gender inequalities in access to resources and public space is essential to prevent further gender-based violence and structural harms in conflict-affected countries like Sri Lanka.


A New York Times best-seller when it was first published, Rice's biography is the gripping story of a fierce, magnetic, and brilliant man whose real-life accomplishments are the stuff of legend. Rice retraces Burton's steps as the first European adventurer to search for the source of the Nile; to enter, disguised, the forbidden cities of Mecca and Medina; and to travel through remote stretches of India, the Near East, and Africa. From his spying exploits to his startling literary accomplishments (the discovery and translation of the Kama Sutra and his seventeen-volume translation of Arabian Nights), Burton was an engrossing, larger-than-life Victorian figure, and Rice's splendid biography lays open a portrayal as dramatic, complicated, and compelling as the man himself.


The present paper provides an analysis of stress acquisition in Spanish, within the framework of Optimality Theory, focusing on the earliest utterances by two monolingual Spanish children. The Spanish stress algorithm exhibits right-headedness both at word and phrase level. Leaving aside some peripheral cases which call for moraic trochees, we assume that the main core of the Spanish system relies on the syllabic trochee as the basic prosodic pattern. The children's first twenty one-word utterances made up of trochaic patterns were phonetically analyzed for the values of amplitude, pitch, and duration. The same analysis was carried out for word combinations comprising two trochaic-shaped words, as well as for some multisyllabic words present in our corpus. All vowels were analyzed with Pitchworks . Our results show that Spanish children master the constraint hierarchy responsible for word and phrasal stress assignment from very early on; however, they may produce prominence in a non-standard fashion, because their command of the acoustic parameters responsible for an adult-like phonetic implementation is not yet under control. Moreover, they tend to overgeneralize the trochaic pattern to some iambic-shaped words. We suggest that all these phenomena are to be construed in terms of constraint ranking.


This article surveys social movements in San Francisco that have resisted and blocked various development schemes from the 1960s to the beginning of the 21st century. Notable examples include fights against redevelopment in the Fillmore and South of Market, gentrification in the Mission District, the campaign to save the International Hotel, the fight against "Manhattanization" of San Francisco through high rises downtown, the rise of community-based nonprofit housing developers alongside the establishment of rent control, and the contentious battles over space during the dot-com boom and bust from 1999 to 2000.


We present simultaneous generation and mapping (SGAM), a novel 3D scene generation algorithm. Our goal is to produce a realistic, globally consistent 3D world on a large scale. Achieving this goal is challenging and goes beyond the capacities of existing 3D generation or video generation approaches, which fail to scale up to create large, globally consistent 3D scene structures. Towards tackling the challenges, we take a hybrid approach that integrates generative sensor modeling with 3D reconstruction. Our proposed approach is an autoregressive generative framework that simultaneously generates sensor data at novel viewpoints and builds a 3D map at each timestamp. Given an arbitrary camera trajectory, our method repeatedly applies this generation-and-mapping process for thousands of steps, allowing us to create a gigantic virtual world. Our model can be trained from RGB-D sequences without having access to the complete 3D scene structure. The generated scenes are readily compatible with various interactive environments and rendering engines. Experiments on CLEVER and GoogleEarth datasets demonstrates ours can generate consistent, realistic, and geometrically-plausible scenes that compare favorably to existing view synthesis methods. Our project page is available at https://yshen47.github.io/sgam/.


The increased price variability of the EU farm gate milk price in recent times makes it necessary for farmers as well as policy makers to analyze which factors attribute to this variability. In this study the EU, German and Irish farm gate milk price is therefore decomposed into its trend, seasonal and cyclical components using state space models. The decomposition results are used to analyze which components attribute to the huge price variability observed in recent times and how the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) changed the price dynamics. They show that the dynamics of the EU, German and Irish series converged after the CAP 2003 reform. The dynamics are also compared to the US market. Another main result is that most of the observed price volatility in recent times is attributed to the cyclical component. Price volatility is therefore to some degree predictable and intrinsic to the dairy industry.


This paper aims at obtaining basic knowledge about characteristics of observation models for human tracking method as a stochastic process. As human tracking in actual cases are complicated, we cannot always use the same observation models for every situation. Thus in most cases observation models are set empirically so far. In order to achieve an efficient choice of models and parameters, understanding some advantages and disadvantages of such models regarding to observation conditions is important. In this paper we conduct a sensitive analysis on some types of observation models. In particular, we obtain both colour and range information at a railway station. We prepare six predictive distributions as well as six models and parameters for both colour and range observation models. We calculate posterior distributions of each pattern, namely 36 patterns for both colour and range models. As a sensitive analysis we compare a value of a ground truth and an expected value of posteriors. We also compare variances of predictive and posterior distributions. Through this experimental results, we confirm our analysis method is efficient to obtain information about observation models. In fact, all models analysed are good in whole. One suggestive result is that colour models can deal with a predictive error in mean values, while range models in variances. Another is that under occlusions range models show a good performance.


With increasing hyper competition, information systems have become the main driver for sustaining innovation and competitive advantages. At the same time, many companies use various quality management standards and process models to increase business process efficiency and improve quality. How these process models and quality standards influence organizational cultures that enhance creativity and innovation is, however, under-researched within the field. Using a software analysis tool built on the competing values framework, we set out to investigate how commonly used process models and quality standards promote cultures of creativity and innovation. Our findings are overwhelmingly negative as the analyzed models and standards clearly promote an organizational culture emphasizing stability and control rather than creativity and innovation. To reconcile our findings with the nature of these models and standards, we suggest a new way forward by providing managers with theory-based guidelines to cope with cultural challenges of process improvement and quality management.


Architect Preston Scott Cohen combines the use of the most advanced digital modeling technologies with a fascination for 17th century descriptive geometry. He uses familiar forms distorted by oblique projections and similar devices to create complex designs that challenge our preconceptions about the nature of order in architecture."Contested Symmetries and Other Predicaments in Architecture" features Cohen's intricate abstract geometries and lucidly describes both the mechanics and the theory behind their application. A wealth of projects, including the widely acclaimed Torus House, are represented through drawings, models, and computer-generated images.


The pathogenesis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) likely involves genetic and environmental factors, impacting the complex neurodevelopmental and behavioral abnormalities of the disorder. Scientific research studies emerging within the past two decades suggest that immune dysfunction and inflammation have pathogenic influences through different mechanisms, all leading to both a chronic state of low grade inflammation, and alterations in the central nervous system and immune response, respectively. The high mobility group box-1 protein (HMGB1) is an inflammatory marker which has been shown to play a role in inducing and influencing neuroinflammation. Current evidences suggest a possible role in the multiple pathogenic mechanisms of ASD. The aim of this manuscript is to review the major hypothesis for ASD pathogenesis, with specific regards to the immunological ones, and to provide a comprehensive review of the current data about the association between HMGB1 and ASD. A systematic search has been carried out through Medline via Pubmed to identify all original articles published in English, on the basis of the following keywords: "HMGB1", "autism", "autism spectrum disorder", "neuroinflammation", and "child".


The calibration of hydrological models without streamflow observations is problematic, and the simultaneous, combined use of remotely sensed products for this purpose has not been exhaustively tested thus far. Our hypothesis is that the combined use of products can (1) reduce the parameter search space and (2) improve the representation of internal model dynamics and hydrological signatures. Five different conceptual hydrological models were applied to 27 catchments across Europe. A parameter selection process, similar to a likelihood weighting procedure, was applied for 1,023 possible combinations of 10 different data sources, ranging from using 1 to all 10 of these products. Distances between the two empirical distributions of model performance metrics with and without using a specific product were determined to assess the added value of a specific product. In a similar way, the performance of the models to reproduce 27 hydrological signatures was evaluated relative to the unconstrained model. Significant reductions in the parameter space were obtained when combinations included Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer ‐ Earth Observing System and Advanced Scatterometer soil moisture, Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment total water storage anomalies, and, in snow‐dominated catchments, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer snow cover products. The evaporation products of Land Surface Analysis ‐ Satellite Application Facility and MOD16 were less effective for deriving meaningful, well‐constrained posterior parameter distributions. The hydrological signature analysis indicated that most models profited from constraining with an increasing number of data sources. Concluding, constraining models with multiple data sources simultaneously was shown to be valuable for at least four of the five hydrological models to determine model parameters in absence of streamflow.


Background: We previously demonstrated the existence of two distinct subsets of T cell receptor (TCR)αβ+CD8αβ+ single positive (SP) cells in human postnatal thymus which express the chemokine receptor CCR7 or CXCR3 and migrate in vitro in response to their specific ligands. Aim: To investigate whether these two CD8+ thymocyte subsets had distinct peripheral colonisation. Methods: TCRαβ+CD8+ SP cells were obtained from normal postnatal thymus, mesenteric lymph node (LNs), small bowel, and peripheral blood (PB) specimens. Cells were then evaluated for expression of surface molecules, cytolytic potential, telomere length, and profile of cytokine production. Results: CD8+CCR7+CXCR3− thymocytes exhibited CD62L, in common with those which localise to LNs. In contrast, CD8+CCR7−CXCR3+ thymocytes lacked CD62L but exhibited CD103, similar to intraepithelial lymphocytes (IELs) present in the gut mucosa where the CXCR3 ligand, CXCL10, and the CD103 ligand, E-cadherin, are highly and consistently expressed. In addition, thymocytes and gut CD8+CXCR3+CD103+ cells showed comparable telomere length, which was higher than that of PB CXCR3+CD8+ T cells. However, both of these populations contained perforin and granzyme A, and displayed the ability to produce interferon γ and interleukin 2. Of note, CXCR3 deficient, in comparison with wild-type C57Black/6, mice showed decreased proportions of CD3+CD8αβ+ and increased proportions of CD3+CD8αα+ lymphocytes at gut level. Moreover, adoptive transfer of CD3+CD8αβ+ thymocytes from wild-type into CXCR3 deficient mice resulted in a significant increase in CD3+CD8αβ+ T cells in the gut mucosa but not in other tissues. Conclusions: The results of this study demonstrate the existence of a previously unrecognised subset of TCRαβ+CD8αβ+ SP CXCR3+CD103+ thymocytes which share phenotypic and functional features with CD8+ IELs, thus suggesting the possibility of their direct colonisation of the gut mucosa.


Background: Preclinical evidence indicates that increased insulin-like growth factor receptor-1 (IGF1R) signaling interferes with the action of trastuzumab suggesting a possible mechanism of trastuzumab resistance. Thus, we evaluated IGF1R prevalence, relationship with demographic data, and association with disease-free survival (DFS) of patients randomized to chemotherapy alone (Arm A) or chemotherapy with sequential (Arm B) or concurrent trastuzumab (Arm C) in the prospective phase III HER2+ adjuvant N9831 trial. Experimental Design: IGF1R protein expression was determined in tissue microarray sections (three cores per block; N = 1,197) or in whole tissue sections (WS; N = 537) using IHC (rabbit polyclonal antibody against IGF1R β-subunit). A tumor was considered positive (IGF1R+) if any core or WS had ≥1+ membrane staining in >0% invasive cells. Median follow-up was 8.5 years. Results: Of 1,734 patients, 708 (41%) had IGF1R+ breast tumors. IGF1R+ was associated with younger age (median 48 vs. 51, P = 0.007), estrogen receptor/progesterone receptor positivity (78% vs. 35%, P < 0.001), nodal positivity (89% vs. 83%, P < 0.001), well/intermediate grade (34% vs. 24%, P < 0.001), tumors ≥2 cm (72% vs. 67%, P = 0.02) but not associated with race or tumor histology. IGF1R did not affect DFS within arms. Between Arms A and C, patients with IGF1R+ and IGF1R− tumors had DFS HRs of 0.48 (P ≤ 0.001) and 0.68 (P = 0.009), respectively (Pinteraction = 0.17). Between Arms A and B, patients with IGF1R+ and IGF1R− tumors had DFS HRs of 0.83 (P = 0.25) and 0.69 (P = 0.01), respectively (Pinteraction = 0.42). Conclusions: In contrast to preclinical studies that suggest a decrease in trastuzumab sensitivity in IGF1R+ tumors, our adjuvant data show benefit of adding trastuzumab for patients with either IGF1R+ and IGF1R− breast tumors. Clin Cancer Res; 23(15); 4203–11. ©2016 AACR.


Concrete filled double skin tubular (CFDST) members consist of two concentric steel tubes with concrete sandwiched between them. This paper presents an experimental investigation on the concrete filled double skin tubular beam-columns subjected to reversed lateral loading. The specimens consist of cold formed steel square tube as it's outer and inner tube with fly ash concrete infilled in between the two tubes. The behaviour of the fly ash infilled CFDST beam-columns with bolted connections under constant axial load and reversed lateral loading were examined. The results are compared with the concrete filled steel tubular beam-column (CFST) specimens, which were considered as the control specimen. The specimens with square cross-section exhibited better load carrying capacity than the control specimen.


British Columbia's electricity grid is comprised primarily of hydroelectric generating assets. The ability to store water in reservoirs is a significant advantage for the province allowing it to import from Alberta when prices are favourable. Alberta, has a heavily fossil-fuel based electricity portfolio, but has seen substantial growth in its wind energy capacity. However this variable energy technology impacts the province's grid operations. Wind energy is both variable and uncertainty. However, wind energy in Alberta can be stored via BC's reservoir systems. In this paper, we examine the extent that drought impacts the both overall operating costs as well as the cost of reducing CO2 emissions. We model the Alberta and BC interconnected grids varying both the impact of the drought and the transmission capacity between the provinces. We determine that storing wind energy leads to an overall cost reduction and that emission costs are between $20 and $60 per tonne of CO2.


Collective human knowledge has clearly benefited from the fact that innovations by individuals are taught to others through communication. Similar to human social groups, agents in distributed learning systems would likely benefit from communication to share knowledge and teach skills. The problem of teaching to improve agent learning has been investigated by prior works, but these approaches make assumptions that prevent application of teaching to general multiagent problems, or require domain expertise for problems they can apply to. This learning to teach problem has inherent complexities related to measuring long-term impacts of teaching that compound the standard multiagent coordination challenges. In contrast to existing works, this paper presents the first general framework and algorithm for intelligent agents to learn to teach in a multiagent environment. Our algorithm, Learning to Coordinate and Teach Reinforcement (LeCTR), addresses peer-to-peer teaching in cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning. Each agent in our approach learns both when and what to advise, then uses the received advice to improve local learning. Importantly, these roles are not fixed; these agents learn to assume the role of student and/or teacher at the appropriate moments, requesting and providing advice in order to improve teamwide performance and learning. Empirical comparisons against state-of-the-art teaching methods show that our teaching agents not only learn significantly faster, but also learn to coordinate in tasks where existing methods fail.


Ad hoc networks usually refer to networks created for a special purpose. They can be established every time and everywhere, and they are usually comprised of a group of workstations or other wireless devices that communicate directly with each other to exchange information. Usually there is no central management available. The topology in ad hoc networks may change rapidly due to the unpredictable mobility of individual devices. A wireless mesh network (WMN) come under the category of Ad hoc networks that is a collection of self configuring, self-healing stationary mesh routers and mobile clients. In the dissertation deploy multiple applications in the WMN scenario that was not done in the previous research work and also to provide Internet in the network scenario used in this report. TCP Reno protocol has been used to improve the performance of symmetric networks. This protocol providing end to end link connection maintained on the network devices. It tries to detect impending congestion by tracking the average queue size in the recent past and then informs the receiver to dynamically decrease the frequency of acks so that each ack effectively acknowledges several packets. From the proposed work, first analyze the benefits of asymmetric links and second perform a simulation study in which measure the performance of the Network scenario. All experimental results are based on OPNET base simulator implementation. We also implement a model especially designed asymmetric networks that is used to monitor network conditions and gather relevant metrics and factor values. Experimental results show that the proposed modeling technique is able to overcome the problems like Response time and throughput.


We consider a multi-pair relay channel where multiple sources simultaneously communicate with destinations using a relay. Each source or destination has only a single antenna, while the relay is equipped with a very large antenna array. We investigate the power efficiency of this system when maximum ratio combining/maximal ratio transmission (MRC/MRT) or zero-forcing (ZF) processing is used at the relay. Using a very large array, the transmit power of each source or relay (or both) can be made inversely proportional to the number of relay antennas while maintaining a given quality-of-service. At the same time, the achievable sum rate can be increased by a factor of the number of source-destination pairs. We show that when the number of antennas grows to infinity, the asymptotic achievable rates of MRC/MRT and ZF are the same if we scale the power at the sources. Depending on the large scale fading effect, MRC/MRT can outperform ZF or vice versa if we scale the power at the relay.


The Noe-Nygaard Intrusion is a 4 × 2.5 km stock composed of layered gabbros and wehrlites within the Precambrian basement of the coastal mountains west of the Kialineq Plutonic Complex. Transgressive relationships to Tertiary mafic dykes and the occurrence of abundant metabasaltic xenoliths signify a Tertiary age for the intrusion. The intrusion is characterized by alternating zones of gabbro and wehrlite; gabbro is both intruded and replaced by wehrlite, and the wehrlite zones are characterized by abundant metabasaltic xenoliths. Based on 87Sr/86Sr ratios, mica, olivine and oxide gabbros are all cumulates, crystallized at different differentiation stages from a common parental magma. Field relations, together with similarities in strontium isotope ratios, and in the major and rare earth element (REE) mineral chemistry between gabbros and wehrlites, indicate that the wehrlite bodies were formed by the dissolution of plagioclase from a gabbro cumulate mush by H2O derived from dehydration and the partial assimilation of metabasaltic xenoliths. In terms of their REE characteristics, melts from which the Noe-Nygaard Intrusion crystallized are within the compositional range of melts for other early Tertiary mafic/ultramafic complexes of East Greenland. However, they were generated at a greater mean melting pressure, and have less radiogenic strontium isotope ratios than the nearby Imilik mafic/ultramafic complex, supporting existing models for mantle heterogeneity at the time of continental break-up. The abundance of metabasaltic xenoliths in the Noe-Nygaard Intrusion provides further evidence for the lateral extent of the North Atlantic flood basalt province, which onshore has been mostly removed by glacial erosion south of 68° N in Greenland.


Renewable power systems are becoming more affordable and provide better options than fossil-fuel generation, for not only the environment, but a benefit of a reduced cost of operation. Methods to optimize charging batteries from renewable technologies is an important subject for off-grid and micro-grids, and is becoming more relevant for larger installations. Overcharging or undercharging the battery can result in failure and reduction of battery life. The Arduino hybrid MPPT controller takes the advantage of solar and wind energy sources by controlling two systems simultaneously. The ability to manage two systems with one controller is better for an overall production of energy, cost, and manageability, at a minor expense of efficiency. The hybrid MPPT uses two synchronous buck DC-DC converters to control both wind and solar. The hybrid MPPT performed at a maximum of 93.6% efficiency, while the individual controller operated at a maximum 97.1% efficiency when working on the bench test. When designing the controller to manage power production from a larger generator, the inductor size was too large due to the frequency provided by the Arduino. A larger inductor means less allowable current to flow before the inductor becomes over saturated, reducing the efficiency of the controller. Utilizing a different microcontroller like the PIC16C63A produces a much faster frequency, which will reduce the inductor size needed and allow more current before over saturation.


In this article we argue that research into children's drawings should consider the context in which drawing occurs and that it is crucial to investigate the attitudes and practices of teachers, parents and children themselves that shape children's drawing experience and the drawings which they produce. We review the findings of seven empirical studies reporting data collected through direct observations, interviews and questionnaires from the three main players (teachers, parents and children) on the attitudes and practices shaping children's drawing. Issues covered include teachers' perceptions of the purposes and importance of drawing, support offered by teachers, parents and children for children's drawing endeavours, and possible factors that may lead to an age-related decline in the amount of drawing children choose to do. We end the review by reporting some preliminary findings from our own large-scale interview and survey study of 270 5-14 year old children, their parents and teachers, that provides a comprehensive assessment of attitudes and practices influencing children's drawing experience at home and at school. The findings provide further insight into the aforementioned issues, particularly children's, teachers' and parent's explanations of why children's drawing behaviour might decline with age. It is hoped that by reporting these preliminary findings some additional understanding of the context in which children produce their drawings can be gained and new areas for debate opened up.


The long residence time of carbon in forests and soils means that both the current state and future behavior of the terrestrial biosphere are influenced by past variability in climate and anthropogenic land use. Over the last half‐millennium, European terrestrial ecosystems were affected by the cool temperatures of the Little Ice Age, rising CO2 concentrations, and human induced deforestation and land abandonment. To quantify the importance of these processes, we performed a series of simulations with the LPJ dynamic vegetation model driven by reconstructed climate, land use, and CO2 concentrations. Although land use change was the major control on the carbon inventory of Europe over the last 500 years, the current state of the terrestrial biosphere is largely controlled by land use change during the past century. Between 1500 and 2000, climate variability led to temporary sequestration events of up to 3 Pg, whereas increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations during the 20th century led to an increase in carbon storage of up to 15 Pg. Anthropogenic land use caused between 25 Pg of carbon emissions and 5 Pg of uptake over the same time period, depending on the historical and spatial pattern of past land use and the timing of the reversal from deforestation to afforestation during the last two centuries. None of the currently existing anthropogenic land use change datasets adequately capture the timing of the forest transition in most European countries as recorded in historical observations. Despite considerable uncertainty, our scenarios indicate that with limited management, extant European forests have the potential to absorb between 5 and 12 Pg of carbon at the present day.


This essay looks into the past of criminology as a way to think about its future. I take a philological approach to the word criminology, looking at the etymology and history of that word, to argue for a new definition of the field: criminology is the systematic study of crime, criminals, criminal law, criminal justice, and criminalization. I expand and explain this definition with respect to some common and (I argue) misguided dictates of criminology as it is traditionally understood. Specifically, I argue that criminology is usually but not necessarily academic and scientific, which means that criminology can be public and/or humanistic. I arrive at these thoughts by presenting some early English instances of the word criminology which predate the attempt to theorize a field of criminology in Italy and France in the 1880s, and I offer some new readings of those Italian and French texts. These philological analyses then come into conversation with some twentieth-century attempts to define the field and some twenty-first-century innovations in an effort to generate a definition of criminology that is responsive to the diversity of criminology in both its original formation and its ongoing transformations. Thus, the virtue of this new understanding of criminology is its inclusiveness: It normalizes unorthodox criminological research, which opens up new possibilities for jobs and funding in the name of criminology, which holds the promise of new perspectives on crime, new theories of criminology, and new policies for prevention and treatment.


We revisit the idea of using deep neural networks for one-shot decoding of random and structured codes, such as polar codes. Although it is possible to achieve maximum a posteriori (MAP) bit error rate (BER) performance for both code families and for short codeword lengths, we observe that (i) structured codes are easier to learn and (ii) the neural network is able to generalize to codewords that it has never seen during training for structured, but not for random codes. These results provide some evidence that neural networks can learn a form of decoding algorithm, rather than only a simple classifier. We introduce the metric normalized validation error (NVE) in order to further investigate the potential and limitations of deep learning-based decoding with respect to performance and complexity.


Islamist groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere have sought to remove females from public life. This paper uses data from Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement and the Global Terrorism Database to examine the impact of the Pakistani Taliban's terror campaign in the north-western province of Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa aimed at removing girls from school from the age of 10. Using a difference-in-difference-indifference approach, we show that low levels of exposure to terrorism had little effect on school enrolment. High levels of exposure reduced the enrolment rate for boys by about 5.5 percent and girls by about 10.5 percent. This decline in enrolment, although strongly significant, is far smaller than has commonly been portrayed in the media. Finally, although the Taliban warned students to enrol in madrassas rather than secular schools, we find no evidence that this led to increased madrassa enrolment in the affected regions.


We investigate the possibility of using directional antennas for medium access control in wireless ad hoc networks. Previous research in ad hoc networks typically assumes the use of omnidirectional antennas at all nodes. With omnidirectional antennas, while two nodes are communicating using a given channel, MAC protocols such as IEEE 802.11 require all other nodes in the vicinity to remain silent. With directional antennas, two pairs of nodes located in each other's vicinity may potentially communicate simultaneously, increasing spatial reuse of the wireless channel. Range extension due to higher gain of directional antennas can also be useful in discovering fewer hop routes. However, new problems arise when using directional beams that simple modifications to 802.11 may not be able to mitigate. This paper identifies these problems and evaluates the tradeoffs associated with them. We also design a directional MAC protocol (MMAC) that uses multihop RTSs to establish links between distant nodes and then transmits CTS, DATA, and ACK over a single hop. While MMAC does not address all the problems identified with directional communication, it is an attempt to exploit the primary benefits of beamforming in the presence of some of these problems. Results show that MMAC can perform better than IEEE 802.11, although we find that the performance is dependent on the topology and flow patterns in the system.


The effect of temperature variation on Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectrometer response stability is investigated for wavenumbers from 10,000 to 100 cm−1 with the use of a temperature measurement and data acquisition system on the spectrometer optical bench. Spectrometer response instability is correlated with local temperature variation for two FT-IR spectrometer systems, with the use of various infrared source, beamsplitter, and detector combinations. The data obtained show that detector responsivity variation and beamsplitter misalignment associated with thermal instability of the spectrometer optical bench are responsible for the observed response instability. Response variation of up to 4% per °C temperature variation is observed. Variations of the laboratory environment and spectrometer purge gas supply temperatures are shown to affect spectrometer thermal stability directly.


In this study the relationship between corporate governance and corporate valuation, ownership structure and need of external financing for the Karachi Stock Market is examined for the period 2003 to 2008. To measure the firm- level governance a rating system is used to evaluate the stringency of a set of governance practices and cover various governance categories : such as board composition, ownership and shareholdings and transparency, disclosure and auditing. The sample consists of 60 non-financial firms listed on Karachi Stock Exchange and comprises more than 80 percent of market capitalization at Karachi Stock Market in 2007. The results confirms the theoretical notion that firms with better investment opportunities and larger in size adopt better corporate governance practice. The proposition that ownership concentration is a response to poor legal protection is also validated by the results. The more investment opportunities lead to more concentration of ownership and the ownership concentration is significantly diluted as the firm size expands. The findings are consistent with theoretical argument claiming that family owners, foreign owners and bring better governance and monitoring practices which is consistent with agency theory. The results suggest that firms which need more equity financing practice good governance. The results show that firms with high growth and large in size are in more need of external finance. The relationship between external financing and ownership concentration is negative. The results reveal that the firms which practice good governance, with concentrated ownership, need more external finance which have more profitable investment opportunities and are larger in size are valued higher. The interaction term of any variable with law enforcement term are not significant in any model suggesting that firm performance is not affected by rule of law in countries where legal environment is weak. These results adds an important link to the explanation of the consequences weak legal environment for external financing, corporate valuation and corporate governance. The results show that Corporate Governance Code 2002 potentially improves the governance and decision making process of firms listed at KSE.


Dr Laura Kahn has produced a useful book that provides a brief historical background on public health and terrorism, followed by interesting examples of leadership during outbreaks and events that escalated to public health crises. The roles of astute clinicians, public health professionals, appointed public health leaders, and elected officials are described by the players themselves. These insights provide important perspectives and are fascinating reading, but each event includes the voices of only a few of many participants. This omission may leave the reader hungry for a wider variety of viewpoints.

Kahn takes the reader through a thought-provoking overview of the complexity of leadership and some early milestones in public health. Kahn makes it clear that politics, economics, communications, and interpersonal relations are as central to today's public health crises as they were in the past.

Persuasive examples support Kahn's main thesis that political leadership is critical during a public health crisis, whether the crisis results from natural causes or from bioterrorism. Kahn says, "Questions about leaders and leadership have intrigued scholars in both Western and Eastern civilizations for centuries. Plato, Confucius, and Machiavelli all speculated about leaders… and the qualities of leadership." Kahn concludes that 1) informed, engaged, and prepared elected officials are essential to effective response; 2) because crisis response decisions inevitably will be made in the absence of perfect information, leaders require judgment and common sense; 3) elected and appointed leaders must be effective; and 4) dual leadership during a crisis can cause confusion.

The author provides a convincing case for her conclusions with lively examples and first-hand accounts and offers several concrete suggestions to prepare elected officials for leadership roles. The same compelling case is not made for Kahn's assertion of a "legal conundrum when dealing with the bioterrorism attack." She suggests that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) should lead the public health response to such episodes but alleges that legal and organizational impediments hinder CDC from fulfilling that lead role.

Unquestionably, CDC must and does play a lead role during large-scale, multistate public health events. The legal and organizational impediments to fulfilling that role are not obvious to this reviewer, especially given CDC's success in addressing many such crises. Kahn may be referring to impediments within the federal structure and chain of command. However, current law specifies the roles of CDC and the departments of Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security. CDC has ample legal authority to supplement its technical and scientific leadership during an emergency, especially when state and local capacities are outstripped.

Kahn suggests federalizing and centralizing the national response system through changes in the legal framework and organizational structures of the public health system, arguing that if CDC were organized for response as the Environmental Protection Agency or the Federal Bureau of Investigation is, delays, leadership confusion, and communication issues would be resolved. She identifies some leadership problems but fails to acknowledge the strong collegial relationship between state public health authorities and CDC that has produced innumerable successful responses to crises. Restructuring the traditional relationship between states and the federal government seems unnecessary.

This problem does not overshadow an otherwise informative and engrossing book. In an era of emerging infectious diseases, bioterrorism, and large-scale natural disasters, we will continue to have to address the types of events Dr. Kahn describes. Those involved in responding to such events would benefit from studying the lessons of the past to better manage future emergencies.


A fundamental limitation to the quality of wavefront reconstruction images is noise generated by the granular structure of the recording medium. Predictions of the signal-to-noise ratios that can be achieved in wavefront-reconstruction imaging are based on the checkerboard and overlapping circular-grain models of the recording medium. When the object consists of a multitude of resolvable point sources, the signal-to-noise ratio is found to be proportional to the space-bandwidth product of the recording medium; when the object is a diffuse surface, the signal-to-noise ratio is found to be independent of that space-bandwidth product. The quantum limit to signal-to-noise ratio is approachable only with a judicious choice of reference exposure and a recording medium free of other classical noise sources.


Previous work in software product lines showed an increment of up to 10 times in productivity and product quality [SEI Prod_Line]; because of this, the software product line approach is critical for the success of a development project including a common platform. There are several differences between the traditional development techniques and the software product line approach. This initiative differs in scope and approach that is the reason why new areas of study were created, namely Domain Engineering and Software Product Line Architecture. For the development of a software platform in GSG Argentina we took the software product line approach and combined different known practices of Domain Engineering and Software Architecture in order to adapt them to our project's context. This paper describes lessons learned during the development of this project, such as the tailorization of the application of FORM (Feature-Oriented Reuse Method), the use of existing standards and cases of study to extract and infer knowledge of the problem domain, how we interact with marketing and system engineering areas in order to gather relevant functional and quality features of the platform, documentation practices, challenges we found and the approaches we took to solve them.


In this study, a two dimensional model of receding contact problem has been analyzed using finite element method
(FEM) based software ANSYS and ABAQUS. For this aim finite element modeling of elastic layer and two homogeneous,
isotropic and symmetrical elastic quarter planes pressed by means of a rigid circular punch has been presented. Mass forces and friction are neglected in the solution. Since the problem is examined for the plane state, the thickness along the z-axis direction is taken as a unit. In order to check the accuracy of the present models, the obtained results are compared with the available results of the open literature as well as the results of two software are compared using Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and good
agreements are found. Numerical analyses are performed considering different values of the external load, rigid circular radius, quarter planes span length and material properties. The contact lengths and contact stresses of these values are examined, and their results are presented. Consequently, it is concluded that the considered non-dimensional quantities have noteworthy influence on the contact lengths and contact stress distributions, additionally if FEM analysis is used correctly, it can be an
efficient alternative method to the analytical solutions that need time.


A better understanding of cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) epidemiology will lead to improved intervention methods to combat CL outbreaks and prevent disease re-emergence. CL is endemic throughout the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), and new disease control tools are needed. In this thesis, I studied various aspects essential to the design of a new CL control strategy, including parasite species identification, patient response to anti-leishmanial drug treatment, sandfly species identification, assessment of sandfly biting exposure and risk of disease transmission, implementation of an integrated control strategy, and development of a potential new CL diagnostic tool for use in CL endemic setting.

It was found that Leishmania major (responsible for zoonotic CL) and Leishmania tropica (responsible for anthroponotic CL) are the main causative agents of CL in KSA, with over 75% of all human cases caused by the former. The current national CL treatment regimen consists of application of topical clotrimazole/fucidine cream followed by 1-2 courses of intralesional sodium stibogluconate; however, treatment efficacy is highly variable and the reasons for this are not well understood. As part of this PhD study, tests to determine the efficacy of this standard CL treatment regime in several endemic regions of KSA were performed. Most L. major patients responded favourably to drug treatment, although treatment success varied greatly depending on geographical location. In contrast, 60% of L. tropica cases proved completely unresponsive to the same treatment protocol. Furthermore, the development of secondary infections (SI) around or within the CL lesion significantly favoured the treatment response of L. major patients, but had no effect on L. tropica cases. These findings indicate that there is an urgent need to implement alternative CL treatment protocols based on these parameters, and also indicate a possible increase in drug-resistant parasites.

In this epidemiological study, the potential correlation between the type of immunity generated after exposure to sandfly bites and disease outcome was monitored by measuring anti-SP32 antibody levels. Constant exposure of the local residents to sandflies may help prevent development of severe CL disease outcomes. Notably, comparison of the levels of anti-saliva antibodies of local individuals with migrant labour indicated that the latter had significantly higher levels of anti-saliva marker and also developed a more severe pathology. This implies that the corresponding governmental sectors need to assess all transmission risk areas, as well as greatly improve housing conditions to minimize the risk of non-local construction workers contracting CL. This is essential as CL drug treatment is costly and currently non-local workers comprise around one third of the KSA population.

Additionally, a disease control strategy based on a combination of vector and reservoir control methods was designed to combat zoonotic CL outbreaks. Construction sites at Al-Ahsa, known to be highly endemic for zoonotic CL, were monitored by a vector control team between 2012 and 2014. The control strategy was applied following the outbreak using mechanical, reservoir and vector control methods. No CL cases were reported after the control team's intervention. This case study suggests that implementation of a health impact assessment should be carried out, as well as a control strategy, in areas that share a similar CL ecology and environment in order to minimize incidence cases.

As part of my PhD, I developed a potential new diagnostic tool by using an ELISA assay method to measure the levels of anti-α-galactosyl antibodies in human sera using synthetic neoglycoproteins (NGPs). The assay sensitivity was 96% for L. major (95% CI 94%–98%) and 91% for L. tropica (95% CI 86%–98%). In addition, the assay had higher sensitivity than microscopy analysis, which only detected 68% and 45% of L. major and L. tropica infections, respectively. Furthermore, improvement of the selectivity in recognizing different α-galactosylated NGPs suggests that this assay could potentially be developed into a rapid diagnostic test for use in resource-poor settings.

Overall, this thesis should help set a basis for designing a national strategy for CL elimination in KSA.


This project examines the utility of vertebral osteophyte development to estimate age at death. Skeletal joint degeneration is a common method for estimating individuals' age at death, however studies regarding vertebral degeneration and age estimation are lacking. My study follows the work of Stewart (1958) in comparing stages of osteophytic lipping of vertebral bodies to age at death. I examined the seventh cervical (C7), seventh thoracic (T7), and fourth lumbar (L4) vertebrae in 100 individuals of known ancestry, sex, and age at death from the Hamann-Todd skeletal collection. Degenerative stages and composite scores were analyzed through descriptive statistics and chi square analysis. Results of the study are similar to those of Stewart (1958). High degrees of lipping are typical of middle and older aged individuals, while lower stages of lipping are too widespread among age groups for accurate age assessment. In comparisons between males and females, and between Afro-Americans and Euro-Americans, there were no great differences between these groups. Overall, vertebral degenerative rates are not good indicators of age, although accuracy for estimating age is greater in individuals with the highest levels of osteophyte development.


Abstract.
 Fossil eggs of clam shrimps (Spinicaudata) are rare and little attention has been paid to the study of their shape and microstructures. Here, we report the discovery of exceptionally preserved three-dimensional eggs from numerous specimens of Eosestheria elliptica Chen, 1976 from the lacustrine Early Cretaceous Yixian Formation in western Liaoning, China. These three-dimensionally preserved fossil eggs display a spherical shape with smooth surface, part of the tertiary envelope, and possibly the first embryonic cuticle, which were previously unknown or ambiguous. The eggs are abundant and assumed to be attached to the exopod as in extant Spinicaudata. Moreover, the exceptional three-dimensional preservation and delicate preparation of slices of the eggs allowed us to document the microstructures and elemental composition of fossil eggs of clam shrimps from the Jehol Biota. Energy dispersive spectroscopy of the fossilized envelope revealed a calcium phosphate composition. However, the egg contents display two completely different elemental compositions. Some exhibit the same elemental composition as the envelope, whereas others has been replaced by alumino-silicate. The taphonomic process is also briefly discussed in this paper.


The European Union's ongoing "Convention on the Future of Europe" must tackle a fundamental issue offederalism: the balance between central authority and Member State autonomy. In this Article, Ernest Young explores two strategies for protecting federalism in America-imposing substantive limits on central power and relying on political and procedural safeguards-and considers their prospects in Europe. American experience suggests that European attempts to limit central power by enumerating substantive "competences" for Union institutions are unlikely to hold up, and that other substantive strategies such as the concept of "subsidiarity" tend to work best as political imperatives rather than judicially enforceable doctrines. Professor Young then examines the "political safeguards" of Member State autonomy in the EU as currently constituted. He argues that the balance between the center and the periphery is likely to be affected by how the EU resolves basic separation-of-powers questions at the center. Efforts to address perceived deficiencies of the Union government in its resource base, lawmaking efficiency, and democratic legitimacy likewise will have a fundamental impact on federalism. Finally, Professor Young touches on two broader themes. He first asks whether Europeans, given their cultural distinctiveness, would prefer a stronger form of federalism than America has been able to maintain; if so, the American experience is relevant primarily as a cautionary tale. He then considers how Europe's institutional experience and current debate can inform the American discourse on federalism by helping Americans break free of ideological and historical preconceptions and offering insights into emerging issues at the intersection of domestic constitutions and supranational institutions.


The following list arranged alphabetically provides names and addresses of those persons contributing to this issue of the Journal of Palliative Care. Note that affiliations and current addresses may differ.


This paper analyzes the main forces related to the declining agricultural employment in the Brazilian economy, and its contribution to country s economic growth for the period 1970-2015. We employ a novel three sector growth accounting exercise, and a multisector growth model to estimate the various economic forces that serve to pull and push labor out of agriculture. Our results supports the conclusion that agriculture, whose rate of TFP growth tends to dominate that of the industrial and service sector, has had two roles on recent economic growth: the first is associated to TFP growth, and second is the labor transference to other sectors, and more specifically to the service sector. We also find evidence of sectoral TFP correlation suggesting technological spill over between sectors. Acknowledgement :


The relationship between the degree of obesity and the incidence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) was reexamined in the 5209 men and women of the original Framingham cohort. Recent observations of disease occurrence over 26 years indicate that obesity, measured by Metropolitan Relative Weight, was a significant independent predictor of CVD, particularly among women. Multiple logistic regression analyses showed that Metropolitan Relative Weight, or percentage of desirable weight, on initial examination predicted 26-year incidence of coronary disease (both angina and coronary disease other than angina), coronary death and congestive heart failure in men independent of age, cholesterol, systolic blood pressure, cigarettes, left ventricular hypertrophy and glucose intolerance. Relative weight in women was also positively and independently associated with coronary disease, stroke, congestive failure, and coronary and CVD death. These data further show that weight gain after the young adult years conveyed an increased risk of CVD in both sexes that could not be attributed either to the initial weight or the levels of the risk factors that may have resulted from weight gain. Intervention in obesity, in addition to the well established risk factors, appears to be an advisable goal in the primary prevention of CVD.


We used a finite‐difference modeling method to investigate the sensitivity of the ground‐motion simulation results to the main input parameters, including the source model, regional path properties, and local site conditions. We used a spectral frequency range of 0.1–1 Hz for the Kinburn bedrock topographic basin, Ottawa, Canada, for the Ladysmith earthquake (Mw 4.7).
 Some findings are known facts; however, the unique geophysical conditions in the Ottawa area, such as the high contrast between the shear‐wave velocities of the bedrock and the shear‐wave velocity of the soil, were the reason for a comprehensive sensitivity analysis. Using a Gaussian source function with a short half‐duration increased the peak ground velocities (PGVs) and the amplitude of the velocity Fourier spectrum. Relaxation times and relaxation coefficients for the viscoelastic simulation significantly increased the amplitude of later arrivals at the soil site, which, consequently, led to an increase in PGV, the amplitude of the pseudospectral acceleration (PSA) ratio, and the velocity Fourier spectrum for a small earthquake. Employing a small soil Q model damped a significant amount of energy of the waves in the basin; thus, PGV, the PSA of soil to rock ratios, and the velocity Fourier spectrum were dependent on the soil Q model. Also, using a high‐velocity contrast between soil and rock increased PGVs and the amplitude of the PSA of the soil to rock ratios, whereas the frequency content of the waves shifted toward lower frequencies. Using a finite‐fault source model for a scenario large earthquake (Mw 7) significantly reduced the PGV values relative to a point‐source model. Using nonlinear‐viscoelastic simulation for a large earthquake (Mw 7) reduced the amplitude of the later arrivals and the amplitude of the PSA of the soil to rock ratios, and shifted the frequency content of waves toward lower frequency.


An Augmented AI approach has been developed to optimize completion design parameters and access the full potential of unconventional assets by leveraging big data sculpting, domain-induced feature engineering, and robust and explainable machine learning models with quantified uncertainty. This method unlocks the full potential of a well using completion design parameters optimization that considers all the factors that impact well performance, geological characteristics, well trajectory, spacing, etc.
 By leveraging basin-level knowledge captured by big data sculpting with the use of uncertainty quantification, Augmented AI can provide quick and science-based answers for completion optimization, and also assess the full potential of an asset in unconventional reservoirs.
 By leveraging computer vision and natural language processing techniques, unstructured data from various sources were deciphered, combined and organized into a structured database. Imputation techniques were used to fill the gaps of missing data. With the Augmented AI approach, the median accuracies of IP and EUR predictions for new drills is around 90%, which often outperforms industry-standard type curving methods. With the explainable machine learning (ML) model, the direct impact of completion design parameters on well performance is deconvoluted among other parameters, such as engineering and geological attributes. The prediction also comes with an 80% confidence interval to quantify the prediction uncertainties, which allows for better risk management and confident business decision making. With the ML model and given economic inputs and metrics, many sensitivity analyses are performed to evaluate optimized completion design parameters. The proposed Augmented AI approach has been deployed to Eagle Ford wells.


AbstractThe so-called Islamic State (IS) has increasingly used water as a weapon in order to further its political and military aims in Syria and Iraq. In this water-scarce region, IS has retained water and cut off crucial supplies, flooded large areas as well as contaminated resources. The capture of large dams in the Euphrates and Tigris basin has made it possible to deploy the water weapon even more effectively and in a frequent, systematic, consistent and flexible manner. Measures to counter this weaponisation effectively have been limited to military means. However, several internal constraints create a dilemma for IS as its state-building ambitions conflict with the consequences of the weaponisation of water. The rebirth of using the water weapon in Syria and Iraq raises questions about protecting water infrastructures in conflict and post-conflict settings.


Economic research of the last decade linking macroeconomic fundamentals to asset prices has revealed evidence that standard intertemporal asset pricing theory is not successful in explaining (unconditional) first moments of asset market characteristics such as the risk-free interest rate, equity premium and the Sharpe-ratio. Subsequent empirical research has pursued the question whether those characteristics of asset markets are time varying and, in particular, varying over the business cycle. Recently intertemporal asset pricing models have been employed to replicate those time varying characteristics. The aim of our contribution is (1) to relax some of the assumptions that previous work has imposed on underlying economic and financial variables, (2) to extend the solution technique of Marcet and Den Haan (1990) for those models by nonparametric expectations and (3) to propose a new estimation procedure based on the above solution technique. To allow fornnonparametric expectations in the expectations approach for numerically solving the intertemporal economic model we employ the Local Linear Mapsn(LLMs) of Ritter, Martinetz and Schulten (1992) to approximate conditional expectations in the Euler equation. In our estimation approach based on non-parametric expectations we are able to use full structural information and,nconsequently, Monte Carlo simulations show that our estimations are less biased than the widely applied GMM procedure. Based on quarterly U.S. data we also empirically estimate structural parameters of the model and explore its time varying asset price characteristics for two types of preferences, power utility and habit persistence. We in particular focus on the Sharpe-ratio and find indication that the model is able to capture the time variation of thenSharpe-ratio.


The aim of the dissertation is to study the organized professional process and the spontaneous integrating and unifying process after the discotheque fire in Gothenburg 1998, when 63 young people died. Over a hundred crisis groups and duty centres were opened for the affected people. These groups are composed of representatives of the social services, psychiatry, the churches and voluntary organizations. The theoretical foundation of the study is Emile Durkheim's (1912/1995) sociological theory of rites and grief and the significance of the collective in connection with grief and crisis. The professions are analysed with the aid of Andrew Abbott's (1988) theory of their jurisdiction. Theories of social networks, of organizations (Lipsky 1980) and of social responsivity are also used in the analysis of the interviews with 21 persons affected by the disaster and with 29 representatives of the crisis groups.

The affected people could obtain both emotional support and practical help from the social network. The work of the crisis groups consisted of practical support. For social workers, this meant that some low status tasks became meaningful. There was plenty of scope for other tasks than conversation. After a few weeks the crisis groups were closed down and the affected people were referred to the social services. The people then became dependent on the discretion of the street level bureaucracy, with different assessment of the entitlement to benefits in the different parts of the city. The professionals used the abstraction and knowledge of the psychiatrists as a major element in their jurisdiction when they described the situation of the affected people. An interesting finding is that many of the professionals toned down their professional role in connection with the disaster.

Emergent groups, or spontaneous crisis groups, also grew up as a response to the fire. The great significance of the spontaneous groups was that they could arrange meetings between representatives of the authorities and the afflicted immigrant families. This was crucial in an situation where most of the immigrant families were suspicious of the authorities. The leaders were also able, albeit temporarily, to bridge over the differences that they had seen to exist between Swedes in the prosperous suburbs and immigrants in segregated estates.

The spontaneous and organized professional processes are interwoven. The spontaneous crisis groups arranged important contacts between the affected families and the authorities, and the social network is a self evident support. The weakness of spontaneous support is that it declines after a time, when friends no longer have the energy to listen. The strength of professional support is its endurance. With the aid of the resources in the organizations where the professionals work, the support can be developed over a long time, provided that the street level bureaucracy does not hinder, for example, the continuity of contacts.


The present study describes a novel approach to the identification of the motivational processes in text data extracted from an Internet support group (ISG) for smoking cessation. Based on the previous findings that a " prevention " focus might be more relevant for maintaining behavior change, it was hypothesized that 1) language use (ie, the use of emotional words) signaling a " promotion " focus would be dominant in the initiating stages of the ISG, and 2) that the proportion of words signaling a prevention focus would increase over time. The data were collected from the ISG site, spanning 4 years of forum activity. The data were analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count application. The first hypothesis – of promotion focus dominance in the initiating stages – was not supported during year 1. However, for all the other years measured, the data showed that a prevention failure was more dominant compared with a promotion failure. The results indicate that content analysis could be used to investigate motivational and language-driven processes in ISGs. Understanding the interplay between self-regulation, lifestyle change, and modern communication channels could be of vital importance in providing the public with better health care services and interventions.


Tape casting is widely used in industrial scale for production of multilayer ceramic capacitors or substrates for different applications. In 2009, it was successfully introduced as standard shaping technology for 3 (BSCF) are shown. The entire scope from the preparation of the used powders, the different manufacturing steps and their optimization potential up to the final tape-cast product will be discussed. The influence of the use of pore forming agents, heat treatment or other parameters during processing will be described in detail. Finally, the option of sequential tape casting of different materials for graded structures as a future step in shaping technology will be presented for different applications.


Objective. To measure the daily energy expenditure in employees previously identified as having ≥2 risk factors for chronic disease, and to identify potential risk-reducing interventions for implementation within or outside the workplace.
Design. A total of 122 employees with ≥2 risk factors for chronic disease identified in an in-house screening programme were invited to participate in a 6-month health management programme. Physical assessments included anthropometric measurements,
blood pressure, blood glucose and cholesterol estimations, and bicycle ergometry. Participants were invited to wear a 'metabolic armband' (Body Media SenseWear Pro Armband®) for 6 days. Metabolic measures included active and total energy expenditure (AEE, TEE), and daily MET levels (metabolic equivalents expressed as kcal/kg/hour). Differences were explored between genders, and relationships sought between energy expenditure, lifestyle and anthropometric data.
Setting. A corporate working environment. All measures and assessments were carried out in the in-house fitness facility.
Interventions. The health management programme involved physical assessments and personalised weight and activity management plans.
Main outcome measures. TEE per day, duration and quantification of physical activity, METS, AEE, number of steps per day and body position recording. Relationships were explored between the latter and anthropometric measures such as body mass index (BMI) and percentage body fat.
Result. Altogether 53 (43%) of the eligible subjects volunteered for the 6-month programme and 49 enrolled for the metabolic armband study. The males were more active than the females, but both had BMI and body fat estimates that categorised them as overweight to obese. METS and AEE were positively correlated with duration of exercise rather than intensity, and negatively correlated with BMI. In a stepwise regression analysis for the
total group 77% of the variance in MET levels was accounted for by per cent body fat and steps per day. Multivariate analysis by gender (with per cent body fat as the dependent variable) suggested that males would have to increase the duration of vigorous exercise in order to reduce body fat, while females would benefit from sitting less, sleeping more, and increasing the duration of moderate exercise.
Conclusion and clinical relevance. In a self-selected sample involving motivated individuals, the SenseWear® armband provided information that would be useful in directing further research in women, focusing on sleeping pattern and moderately increasing activity levels. South African Journal of Sports Medicine Vol. 20 (2) 2008: pp. 40-43


In this article we examine the influence of board control on innovation in small technology-based firms. An analysis of 135 Swedish technology-based firms suggests that board involvement in the control over strategig decisions and outcomes can have a significant influence on innovation. The empirical results suggest that board strategic control involvement is positively associated with process innovation, while board involvement in financial control is positively associated with organizational innovation. No association is found between board control and product innovation. In all, our findings contribute to a better understanding of how bords may contribute to value creation in small technology-based firms and also suggest some areas where further scholarly inquiry is highly warranted.


The inositol pyrophosphates (PP-InsPs) are a unique group of intracellular messengers that represent some of the most highly phosphorylated molecules in nature. Genetic perturbation of the PP-InsP biosynthetic network indicates a central role for these metabolites in maintaining cellular energy homeostasis and in controlling signal transduction networks. However, despite their discovery over two decades ago, elucidating their physiologically relevant isomers, the biochemical pathways connecting these molecules to their associated phenotypes, and their modes of signal transduction has often been stymied by technical challenges. Many of the advances in understanding these molecules to date have been facilitated by the total synthesis of the various PP-InsP isomers and by the development of new methods that are capable of identifying their downstream signalling partners. Chemical tools have also been developed to distinguish between the proposed PP-InsP signal transduction mechanisms: protein binding, and a covalent modification of proteins termed protein pyrophosphorylation. In this article, we review these recent developments, discuss how they have helped to illuminate PP-InsP structure and function, and highlight opportunities for future discovery.


Ever since their introduction, zero-knowledge proofs have become an important tool for addressing privacy and scalability concerns in a variety of applications. In many systems each client downloads and verifies every new proof, and so proofs must be small and cheap to verify. The most practical schemes require either a trusted setup, as in (pre-processing) zk-SNARKs, or verification complexity that scales linearly with the complexity of the relation, as in Bulletproofs. The structured reference strings required by most zk-SNARK schemes can be constructed with multi-party computation protocols, but the resulting parameters are specific to an individual relation. Groth et al. discovered a zk-SNARK protocol with a universal structured reference string that is also updatable, but the string scales quadratically in the size of the supported relations. Here we describe a zero-knowledge SNARK, Sonic, which supports a universal and continually updatable structured reference string that scales linearly in size. We also describe a generally useful technique in which untrusted "helpers" can compute advice that allows batches of proofs to be verified more efficiently. Sonic proofs are constant size, and in the "helped" batch verification context the marginal cost of verification is comparable with the most efficient SNARKs in the literature.


This thesis analyses the development of provincial Toryism during the period from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the passage of the Reform Acts in 1832, examining the beliefs, organisations, and actions of local Tories particularly in some large British towns. In the early nineteenth century, the existence of two parties, Tory and Whig, became a major feature of parliamentary politics, and local political associations supporting each of them were gradually organised and became powerful and influential in urban centres. Local Tories expressed their opinions and acted together in order to support the Tory party in Parliament. They found support in different regions, and developed a recognisable network and identity in various British towns. Like parliamentary Tories, however, they were not completely coherent in their ideology nor entirely agreed in what policies to pursue. They were 'issue-oriented' associations, which were loosely connected with each other. They sometimes acted independently and flexibly, lacked complete unity, and were not controlled by the national party at Westminster. Taking these circumstances into consideration, this thesis attempts to reveal how national and local politics were connected, and some of the most important aspects of local Tory politics particularly in terms of identity and organisation Chapter One examines the political ideology of local Tories, by looking at the provincial Tory press published in Bristol, Colchester, and Edinburgh in particular. Chapter Two investigates Tory clubs and societies, such as the Pitt Clubs, the True Blue Clubs, the King and Constitution Clubs, the Brunswick Clubs, and the Orange Lodges, which were widely and deeply entrenched in British urban communities. Chapter Three examines Tory electoral politics in three large, open, freeman boroughs: Liverpool, Bristol, and Colchester. It analyses the political opinions and actions of the electors and non-electors and investigates the extent and the ways in which national issues impacted on these urban constituencies. Chapter Four also examines the impact of national issues on local Tory politics, but does so by presenting a case study of the involvement of local Liverpool Tories in such significant provincial political arenas as Corporation politics, mayoral elections, and public meetings. The Conclusion stresses the importance of the diverse and flexible reactions of provincial Tories to various political events occurring in the localities as well as at Westminster.