A new apparatus has been designed for standardized measurements of the strength of human trunk muscles utilizing the isokinetic (constant movement velocity) technique (Cybex). It is possible to measure the produced torque during maximal voluntary isometric and isokinetic contractions in the whole range of motion during flexion, extension and lateral flexion of the trunk. Effects of gravity are eliminated since the movements are performed in the horizontal plane. Torque can be measured around different centres of rotation of the body. With this experimental set-up the strength of the trunk muscles has been characterized in a group of 14 normal male subjects (18-31 yrs). The torque produced by the trunk muscles varied with movement velocity and trunk position in the arc of motion. Peak torque occurred in a position where the muscles involved were stretched. The strength of the trunk extensors exceeded that of the flexors, but the degree (ratio) varied with trunk position. The relative contribution of the hip muscles to the total torque produced with the centre of rotation at the hip joint was larger for flexors than for extensors and varied with velocity and position. It is concluded that the present technique is useful to characterize the human trunk muscles.


Machine learning is increasingly becoming a powerful tool to make decisions in a wide variety of applications, such as medical diagnosis and autonomous driving. Privacy concerns related to the training data and unfair behaviors of some decisions with regard to certain attributes (e.g., sex, race) are becoming more critical. Thus, constructing a fair machine learning model while simultaneously providing privacy protection becomes a challenging problem. In this paper, we focus on the design of classification model with fairness and differential privacy guarantees by jointly combining functional mechanism and decision boundary fairness. In order to enforce ϵ-differential privacy and fairness, we leverage the functional mechanism to add different amounts of Laplace noise regarding different attributes to the polynomial coefficients of the objective function in consideration of fairness constraint. We further propose an utility-enhancement scheme, called relaxed functional mechanism by adding Gaussian noise instead of Laplace noise, hence achieving (ϵ, δ)-differential privacy. Based on the relaxed functional mechanism, we can design (ϵ, δ)-differentially private and fair classification model. Moreover, our theoretical analysis and empirical results demonstrate that our two approaches achieve both fairness and differential privacy while preserving good utility and outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms.


Data-parallel programs are both growing in importance and increasing in diversity, resulting in specialized processors targeted at specific classes of these programs. This paper presents a classification scheme for data-parallel program attributes, and proposes micro-architectural mechanisms to support applications with diverse behavior for using a single reconfigurable architecture. We focus on the following four broad kinds of data-parallel programs - DSP/multimedia, scientific, networking, and real-time graphics workloads. While all of these programs exhibit high computational intensity, coarse-grain regular control behavior, and some regular memory access behavior, they show wide variance in the computation requirements, fine grain control behavior, and the frequency of other types of memory accesses. Based on this study of application attributes, this paper proposes a set of general micro-architectural mechanisms that enable a baseline architecture to be dynamically tailored to the demands of a particular application. These mechanisms provide efficient execution across a spectrum of data-parallel application and can be applied to diverse architectures ranging from vector cores to conventional superscalar cores. Our results using a baseline TRIPS processor show that the configurability of the architecture to the application demands provides harmonic mean performance improvement of 5%-55% over scalable yet less flexible architectures, and performs competitively against specialized architectures.


Amateur sleuth Isabel Dalhousie is a philosopher who also uses her training to solve unusual mysteries. Isabel is Editor of the Review of Applied Ethics - which addresses such questions as 'Truth telling in sexual relationships' - and she also hosts The Sunday Philosophy Club at her house in Edinburgh. Behind the city's Georgian facades its moral compasses are spinning with greed, dishonesty and murderous intent. Instinct tells Isabel that the young man who tumbled to his death in front of her eyes at a concert in the Usher Hall didn't fall. He was pushed. With Isabel Dalhousie Alexander McCall Smith introduces a new and pneumatic female sleuth to tackle murder, mayhem - and the mysteries of life. As her hero WH Auden maintained, classic detective fiction stems from a desire for an uncorrupted Eden which the detective, as an agent of God, can return to us. But then Isabel, being a philosopher, has a thing or two to say about God as well.


The clinical significance of low serum vitamin B12 levels in elderly people is controversial. We aimed to document the prevalence of a low serum vitamin B12 (<175pmol/l) in patients referred to a geriatric medical unit, and to determine whether haemopoiesis is commonly affected in elderly patients with low serum vitamin B12. We studied prospectively 472 consecutive referrals to a geriatric medical unit; fifty-six (13%) had a low serum vitamin B12 level, of whom nineteen (34%) of the fifty-six also had evidence of Fe deficiency (serum ferritin<45ng/ml). Low vitamin B12 was associated with a raised mean erythrocyte volume (MCV; mean 96·0 (SD 6·7) fl), compared with a control group (91·7 (SD 6·0) fl; P=0·001). However, only thirteen (23%) of the fifty-six patients with a low vitamin Blz had an MCV≥100 fl. Mean haemoglobin (Hb) levels were not significantly reduced in those with a low vitamin B12. In a subsequent study the haematological response to intramuscular hydroxocobalamin was examined in thirty-four patients with a low serum vitamin B12. Treatment resulted in a significant fall in MCV and rise in Hb; these effects could be detected both in those patients with an initially normal full blood count (change in MCV -1·2 (SD 1·2); Hb + 0·5 (SD 0·6); P<0·01) and in those with macrocytosis and/or anaemia (-9·1 (SD 11·8); + 0·8 (SD 1·2); P<0·05). A low serum vitamin B12 is common in geriatric medical patients. This is usually associated with an upset in erythropoiesis, although the abnormalities are often subtle and may not be apparent on inspection of the full blood count. Elderly patients with serum vitamin B12<175pmol/l should be assumed to have vitamin deficiency even if their full blood count is normal.


This prospective, naturalistic study examined the relationship between different exercise dimensions (i.e., frequency, intensity, duration, and omissions of planned exercise) and psychological well-being among community adults participating in self-selected exercise. For at least 2 months, participants kept daily exercise diaries and provided weekly ratings for depressed mood, anxiety, sleep quality, concentration, alertness, confidence, weight satisfaction, physical fitness, appetite, satisfaction with physical shape and appearance, and stress experienced. Linear mixed model analyses revealed positive associations between exercise frequency, intensity, and duration across a broad range of psychological and mood-related outcomes. In contrast, omissions of planned exercise were associated with a global and detrimental effect on psychological health. A main effect of age and a moderating effect of gender was observed in many of the models. This work contributes to literature on exercise dimensions and psych...


ABSTRACT John Parr Snyder claimed that patenting a map projection was largely pointless because essentially similar transformations are readily available in the public domain. Map projection patents are rare, many patentees did not attempt to develop their patents, and none who did seems to have made much money. An explanation for their decision to patent lies in recognition that the patent system and peer-reviewed scientific journals are parallel literatures, either of which can satisfy an innovator's need for attention, as suggested by achievement motivation theory. Moreover, no single factor can account for the invention of a map projection that was patented: not mathematical expertise; not work experience as a draftsman, map publisher, or professional geographer; and not prior experience with the patents system. But for all but one of the 17 inventors for whom microdata research tools yielded basic details about their lives, at least one of these factors was present.


The BAT reference document entitled 'Production of Pulp, Paper and Board' forms part of a series presenting the results of an exchange of information between EU Member States, the industries concerned, non-governmental organisations promoting environmental protection, and the Commission, to draw up, review and, where necessary, update BAT reference documents as required by Article 13(1) of the Directive 2010/75/EU on industrial emissions. This document is published by the European Commission pursuant to Article 13(6) of the Directive. This BREF for the production of pulp, paper and board covers the activities specified in Sections 6.1(a) and 6.1(b) of Annex I to Directive 2010/75/EU, i.e. the integrated and non-integrated production in industrial installations of: (a) pulp from timber or other fibrous materials; (b) paper or cardboard with a production capacity exceeding 20 tonnes per day. In particular, this document covers the following processes and activities: chemical pulping: (a) kraft (sulphate) pulping process (b) sulphite pulping process mechanical and chemimechanical pulping processing paper for recycling with and without deinking papermaking and related processes all recovery boilers and lime kilns operated in pulp and paper mills. Important issues for the implementation of Directive 2010/75/EU in the pulp, paper and board industry are the emissions to air of nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides, dust, total reduced sulphur and ammonia; emissions to water of organic carbon, suspended solids, nitrogen, phosphorus and adsorbable organically bound halogens. The BREF contains nine chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 provide general information on the pulp, paper and board industry and on the common industrial processes and techniques used within the whole sector. Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 correspond to the following specific sectors: kraft (sulphate) pulping process, sulphite pulping process, mechanical and chemimechanical pulping, processing of paper for recycling with and without deinking, and papermaking and related processes. For each sector, these five chapters provide information and data concerning the applied processes and techniques; the environmental performance of installations in terms of current emissions, consumption of raw materials, water and energy, and generation of waste; the techniques to prevent or reduce the environmental impact of installations; and the emerging techniques. In Chapter 8 the BAT conclusions, as defined in Article 3(12) of the Directive, are presented for the pulp, paper and board industry. Chapter 9 is dedicated to concluding remarks and recommendations for future work regarding the sector. Best Available Techniques (BAT) Reference Document for the Production of Pulp, Paper and Board Industrial Emissions Directive 2010/75/EU Integrated Pollution Prevention and control


Supporting learning across different contexts can be challenging. Defining formal, informal and nonformal learning is the subject of continuing debate as each can be difficult to describe. We report on a study that evaluated the effectiveness of a Personal Inquiry toolkit on supporting personal inquiries into the sustainability of the food cycle, carried out across the contexts of home and an after school club in a UK secondary school. The toolkit consisted of a web-based Sustainability Investigator that could be accessed from any location, together with a selection of data-gathering tools such as environmental sensors (e.g. temperature probes) and cameras. It was designed to support students through the process of carrying out inquiries within the club and between the club and their home. Our main focus here is on describing how the Sustainability Investigator supported students' inquiries that were conceived and designed within the club and conducted at home. The 30 students (aged 12-14 years) chose to investigate home food storage, packaging and preservation. Our focus is on exploring the nature of the semi-formal club context and how this mediated students' use of the Sustainability Investigator. Analysis of our field notes, log files of students' use of the Sustainability Investigator, together with video and audio recordings of club sessions and interviews with teachers and pupils, suggest that while the pupils' use of the toolkit across contexts was sporadic and varied between students, they successfully completed personally relevant inquiries and developed positive attitudes to the process. This was different to the predictable, sustained and consistent use of the toolkit identified in our previous studies when the students used it (again successfully) to support their inquiries in a formal classroom setting (see e.g. Scanlon et al. 2009). Three main features of the
school club context that mediated the ways in which the Sustainability Investigator was used by the students across contexts were: 1) the students' aims and priorities, 2) affordances and constraints of the technology, and 3) institutional priorities. We use this example of a study of learning across contexts to suggest implications of the work for the potential of a Personal Inquiry toolkit to support learning across the life course.


In this paper, we address the problem of scrambling regions of interest in a video sequence for the purpose of preserving privacy in video surveillance. We propose an efficient solution based on transform-domain scrambling. More specifically, the sign of selected transform coefficients is pseudo-randomly flipped during encoding. We address more specifically the two cases of MPEG-4 and Motion JPEG 2000. Simulation results show that the technique can be successfully applied to conceal information in regions of interest in the scene while providing with a good level of security. Furthermore, the scrambling is flexible and allows adjusting the amount of distortion introduced. Finally, this is achieved with a small impact on coding performance and negligible computational complexity increase.


Globally linked virtual organizations (VOs) hold the promise of successfully tackling complex problems and designs which lead social, industrial and technological innovation. Yet these cross-cultural virtual organizations (CCVOs) appear to be hampered by problems of communication, conflict and productivity. One approach to mitigating these problems is to ask how such CCVOs can pattern the so-called co-located VOs or face-to-face work groups. This article proposes a different approach. A learning systems approach to CCVOs has the potential for successfully addressing such issues and does so in a manner that is continuously adaptive (organic). Further, a learning system approach can turn seeming problems of CCVOs into resources for diverse thinking and creative design. The article outlines this approach and proposes not only the strengths of such an approach but also the challenges it presents.


Background: Evaluating academic production and researchers' impact has become a common practice in many areas of academic life. Researchers are being evaluated for many purposes such as getting employment, promotion, tenure and winning grants. Achieving full objectivity of the evaluation is a rather difficult, if not the impossible task. The goal of the present paper was to evaluate research performance of scholars from Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH and to propose a single number that captures several scientometric indices. Methods: We took data from 303 scholars from 4 public universities in BiH on their number of citations and h-indexes derived from four databases/services: Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar and Research Gate. In addition to this, we performed a Principal Component Analysis of number of citations and h-indexes from these indices to come up with a single number that best captures the scientific impact of the researchers. Results: The results of this study indicate a strong relationship between all indices of scholarly achievement as measured through citations and h-indexes. Principal component analysis has shown that it is possible to obtain a single number that captures researchers' scientific impact. Conclusion: Many metrics can be useful in evaluating researchers' scientific impact. As the researchers in BiH have a low scientific production, universities in BiH need to adapt a strategy to stimulate the increase in their scientific productivity.


This paper explores the historical background of the political and economic relations between the Republic of Moldova and the European Union, presenting an overview of relevant documents such as the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement and the Association Agreement. Special emphasis is put on the development of competition law in Moldova as one of the main instruments for ensuring the function of a market economy. In this context, the paper also addresses the process of adjustment of Moldova's relevant legislation to the European Union competition law, describing the range of legal instruments and institutions involved in this process and the monitoring thereof by the European Union.


In 2010, the Gulf Coast experienced the largest oil spill, the greatest mobilization of spill response resources, and the first Gulf-wide deepwater drilling moratorium in U.S. history. Taking advantage of the unexpected nature of the spill and drilling moratorium, I estimate the net effects of these events on Gulf Coast employment and wages. Despite predictions of major job losses in Louisiana -- resulting from the spill and the drilling moratorium -- I find that Louisiana coastal parishes, and oil-intensive parishes in particular, experienced a net increase in employment and wages. In contrast, Gulf Coast Florida counties, especially those south of the Panhandle, experienced a decline in employment. Analysis of accommodation industry employment and wage, business establishment count, sales tax, and commercial air arrival data likewise show positive economic activity impacts in the oil-intensive coastal parishes of Louisiana and reduced economic activity along the Non-Panhandle Florida Gulf Coast.


Summary: Polyamide 6 (PA6)/multiwall carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) nanocomposites have been prepared by an extrusion process assisted by ultrasounds. The ultrasounds system has been incorporated at the extrusion die, when the material is flowing through the exit channel. The application of an ultrasound field to a polymer melt has been shown a very efficient method to improve productivity of the process. When ultrasounds are applied, the extrudate flow is highly enhanced maintaining the same processing conditions. In addition, the ultrasounds contribute to the deagglomeration of CNTs into the matrix, as can be conclude from the drop in the electrical resistivity values of the nanocomposites observed when ultrasounds are applied. For the system PA6/MWCNT 7wt%., the electrical resistivity increases three orders of magnitude when ultrasounds are employed during the extrusion. In addition, a high reduction in the electrical percolation index is obtained for nanocomposites extrudated by the assistance of ultrasounds.


This article addresses the challenges and possibilities of social media to help generate and support outreach work with young LGBTQ people in the context of youth services. This involves among other things looking at how commercial, mainstream social media platforms are utilized in pragmatic and sometimes dissident ways to fit the needs of marginalized youth, highlighting in particular the praxis of making, sharing and caring online. Thus the article is of interest both for academics working in social media and youth research, as well as outreach support workers in the public and private sectors. Based on our collaborative research project with a community partner, the Brighton/UK based LGBTU [Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans and Unsure] youth project Allsorts, we examine the ways in which social media are currently utilized by a youth service provider to reach and engage with isolated, marginalized, vulnerable and at risk LGBTQ youth in their everyday campaign work and service provision.


This essay explores how contemporary speculative fiction can offer new ways of imagining the refugee experience. Looking at Omar El Akkad's American War (2017) and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017), it argues that the cognitive estrangement effect, or the way in which each text encourages the reader to distance themselves from reality, can help the reader build a bridge between the world of the refugee and that of the reader. Central to the discussion will be the genre's use of the term novum, with reference to concepts of time and space. Not only do these elements contribute to achieving cognitive estrangement, they also have a fundamental role to play in the lives of refugees. Drawing a parallel between the novum as speculative fiction's most important trope and the role of the real novum in refugee lives shows how the genre reflects the disruptive changes brought about by the displacement of refugee populations. In addition, the flexible use of time in each text has proven to be a useful tool for helping the reader imagine how being a refugee impacts on one's sense of time and, subsequently, one's agency—an element which will be explored through an analysis of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the habitus, as well as insights from David Hoy's reading of Martin Heidegger's prioritisation of the future. As speculative fiction's main task is to imagine alternative realities, a third central element of the discussion will be ways in which the genre utilises space. Ultimately, it is argued that refugee narratives do not have to be strictly realist, as fantastical elements help readers to transcend the personal imagination— and sometimes that is what is needed to envisage the unthinkable.


Many NLP tasks such as tagging and machine reading comprehension are faced with the severe data imbalance issue: negative examples significantly outnumber positive examples, and the huge number of easy-negative examples overwhelms the training. The most commonly used cross entropy (CE) criteria is actually an accuracy-oriented objective, and thus creates a discrepancy between training and test: at training time, each training instance contributes equally to the objective function, while at test time F1 score concerns more about positive examples. In this paper, we propose to use dice loss in replacement of the standard cross-entropy objective for data-imbalanced NLP tasks. Dice loss is based on the Sørensen--Dice coefficient or Tversky index , which attaches similar importance to false positives and false negatives, and is more immune to the data-imbalance issue. To further alleviate the dominating influence from easy-negative examples in training, we propose to associate training examples with dynamically adjusted weights to deemphasize easy-negative examples. Theoretical analysis shows that this strategy narrows down the gap between the F1 score in evaluation and the dice loss in training. With the proposed training objective, we observe significant performance boost on a wide range of data imbalanced NLP tasks. Notably, we are able to achieve SOTA results on CTB5, CTB6 and UD1.4 for the part of speech tagging task; SOTA results on CoNLL03, OntoNotes5.0, MSRA and OntoNotes4.0 for the named entity recognition task; along with competitive results on the tasks of machine reading comprehension and paraphrase identification.


In order to correlate rheological and filtration parameters of clay-aqueous suspensions, the effect of acidic pH and ionic strength have been investigated. Two clays, a bentonite and a palygorskite were used to emphasize the contribution of the nature of the clay. Rheological results show that at a given bentonite percentage, when the pH of the suspension decreases, the yield stress and dynamic viscosity increase and reach a maximum at weakly acidic media before decreasing again in highly acidic medium where the structure of the clay is probably attacked. The NaCl addition to palygorskite suspensions causes an abrupt increase in viscosity at the critical flocculation concentration (CFC) revealing the beginning of the flocculation. When the ionic strength increases further, the viscosity reaches a maximumthen decreases when the suspension becomes unstable. The effect of the pH on the filtration properties for the bentonite appears to be the same as on the rheological properties. When the pH decreases, the thickness (e), the weight (m) and the water retention (WR) of the cake increase, reach a maximum for weakly acidic pH before decreasing again. The permeability of the cake increases below the pH corresponding to the observedmaximumfor the other filtration parameters.However, the addition of NaCl and the flocculation phenomenon seem to have no effect on the filtration properties of the palygorskite. There is no correlation between rheological and filtration parameters for the non swelling and fibrous clay.


First published in 1927. John Macdonald (1741-96) was born, and died, a Scottish Highlander. First published at the time of the French Revolution, these memoirs of his days in service provide a rich panorama of life in the company of blind fiddlers, maid-servants, the Scottish aristocracy, soldiers, historians, Oriental Princes, servants of the East India Company and men of great wealth, including James Coutts the banker. In 1768 - as the result of an errand - it fell to Macdonald to witness the death of Laurence Sterne. 'Simply packed with interest' Sunday Times '..a model of genuine writing' Evening Standard 'Deserves a high place among autobiographies.' Nation


Information is nowadays a key resource: machine learning and data mining techniques have been developed to extract high-level information from great amounts of data. As most data comes in form of unstructured text in natural languages, research on text mining is currently very active and dealing with practical problems.
Among these, text categorization deals with the automatic organization of large quantities of documents in priorly defined taxonomies of topic categories, possibly arranged in large hierarchies. In commonly proposed machine learning approaches, classifiers are automatically trained from pre-labeled documents: they can perform very accurate classification, but often require a consistent training set and notable computational effort.
Methods for cross-domain text categorization have been proposed, allowing to leverage a set of labeled documents of one domain to classify those of another one. Most methods use advanced statistical techniques, usually involving tuning of parameters. A first contribution presented here is a method based on nearest centroid classification, where profiles of categories are generated from the known domain and then iteratively adapted to the unknown one. Despite being conceptually simple and having easily tuned parameters, this method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in most benchmark datasets with fast running times.
A second, deeper contribution involves the design of a domain-independent model to distinguish the degree and type of relatedness between arbitrary documents and topics, inferred from the different types of semantic relationships between respective representative words, identified by specific search algorithms. The application of this model is tested on both flat and hierarchical text categorization, where it potentially allows the efficient addition of new categories during classification. Results show that classification accuracy still requires improvements, but models generated from one domain are shown to be effectively able to be reused in a different one.


Where can religions find sources of legitimacy for human rights? How do, and how should, religious leaders and communities respond to human rights as defined in modern International Law? When religious precepts contradict human rights standards for example in relation to freedom of expression or in relation to punishments which should trump the other, and why? Can human rights and religious teachings be interpreted in a manner which brings reconciliation closer? Do the modern concept and system of human rights undermine the very vision of society that religions aim to impart? Is a reference to God in the discussion of human rights misplaced? Do human fallibilities with respect to interpretation, judicial reasoning and the understanding of human oneness and dignity provide the key to the undeniable and sometimes devastating conflicts that have arisen between, and within, religions and the human rights movement? In this volume, academics and lawyers tackle these most difficult questions head-on, with candour and creativity, and the collection is rendered unique by the further contributions of a remarkable range of other professionals, including senior religious leaders and representatives, journalists, diplomats and civil servants, both national and international. Most notably, the contributors do not shy away from the boldest question of all summed up in the book's title. The thoroughly edited and revised papers which make up this collection were originally prepared for a ground-breaking conference organised by the Clemens Nathan Research Centre, the University of London Institute of Commonwealth Studies and Martinus Nijhoff/Brill.


Book synopsis: The first thorough, archive-based comparison of all four occupation zones and regimes at the end of the Second World War
Uses the public health problem as a powerful lens to reflect on the post-war period
Includes many diaries, letters, and other experiential accounts to bring the post-war period to life
At the end of the war in 1945 Germany was a country with no government, little functioning infrastructure, millions of refugees and homeless people, and huge foreign armies living largely off the land. Large parts of the country were covered in rubble with no clean drinking water, electricity, or gas. Hospitals overflowed with patients but were short of beds, medicines, and medical personnel. In these conditions the potential for epidemics and public health disasters was severe.

In The Perils of Peace Jessica Reinisch considers how the four occupiers - Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States - attempted to keep their own troops and the ex-enemy population alive. While the war was still being fought, German public health was a secondary consideration for them: an unaffordable and undeserved luxury. But once fighting ceased and the occupation began, it rapidly turned into an urgent priority. Public health was then recognized as an indispensable component of creating order, keeping the population governable, and facilitating the reconstruction of German society.

But they faced a number of problems in the process. Which Germans could be trusted to work with the occupiers and how were they to be identified? Who could be tolerated because of a lack of alternatives? How, if at all, could former Nazis be reformed and reintegrated into German society? What was the purpose of the occupation in the first place?

This is the first carefully researched comparison of the four occupation zones which looks at the occupation through the prism of public health, an essential service fundamentally shaped by political and economic criteria, and which in turn was to determine the success or failure of the occupation.


A plasma regime is a distinct type of plasma confinement, which can be identified from several conventional plasma diagnostic signals. An accurate and general regime identifier is considered an important tool for future real time applications in Joint European Torus (JET). In this perspective, a traditional approach based on Discriminant Analysis was tested, using various sets of JET real time signals. Unfortunately, no combination of signals managed to provide a success rate higher than 90%. To improve the performance and increase the generalization capability, an identifier based on Fuzzy Logic was developed, which allowed inclusion of the time evolution of the Dalpha, a quantity normally not exploited by more traditional solutions. With this technique a success rate of 95% was achieved using only Dalpha  and the derivative of betaN diamagnetic as inputs. A support vector machines approach, based again on a suitably defined distance like discriminant analysis, provided slightly inferior results with exactly the same inputs but matched the fuzzy logic method with the inclusion of the absolute value of betaN diamagnetic. This comparative performance assessment of the various methods is an important first step on the route to identify the best solution for a regime identifier for JET and in due course for ITER


We present a novel method, canonical adiabatic free energy sampling (CAFES) that allows for the efficient exploration of the free energy surface of a subsystem (S) embedded in an environment (E) using mol. dynamics simulations. The dynamics of S is decoupled from the environment by introducing fictitious masses that ensure that S evolves slowly and adiabatically on the potential of mean force generated by E. In addn., the decoupling enables the use of different temps. for the two parts of the system without introducing an irreversible heat flow. Using a higher temp. for the subsystem, a high efficiency for the sampling of rare events on the phys. free energy surface is obtained. The performance of this approach is demonstrated with a conformational anal. of a Gly-Ala dipeptide in aq. soln. Rare conformational transitions, which naturally occur on a millisecond time scale, are obsd. within a few nanoseconds of a classical mol. dynamics simulation. The same method has also been applied in a hybrid Car-Parrinello/classical mol. dynamics investigation of the proton-catalyzed conversion of 2-bromoethanol to dibromoethane in water. Using CAFES, the anchimeric assistance of the bromine atom and the occurrence of a bromonium ion intermediate, a process which involves a barrier of ca. 23 kcal/mol, is obsd. spontaneously on the subnanosecond time scale. [on SciFinder (R)]


In this paper, we propose a design framework based on Brand & Rocchi's (2011) four economic paradigms: the industrial, experience, knowledge and transformation economies. As design moves from one paradigm to another, its role changes with respect to the user, society, business and manufacturing. The industrial and experience economies are well-established, the knowledge economy is unfolding and the transformation economy is still in its infancy. Each of these paradigms calls for different design processes, methods and tools, as well as new breeds of designers with different competencies. We argue that if a company continues to use processes, methods, tools and competencies from an older paradigm, it can only come to solutions that fit that older paradigm. By contrast, adapting to a new paradigm will allow companies to extract more value from the marketplace. Companies that wish to enter Paradigms 3 and 4 will need to adopt new approaches to design innovation, for which we include recommendations. Developing this framework has helped us to chart implications for our own capability development; we publish it here because we believe that future innovation will require intensive collaboration between stakeholders, and so shared understanding of methodologies is crucial. We illustrate the framework with early signs in the area of durable consumer goods and with examples from other parties as well as our own.


Configuration has become ever so complex and error-prone in today's server software. To mitigate this problem, software vendors provide user manuals to guide system admins on configuring their systems. Usually, manuals describe not only the meaning of configuration parameters but also good practice recommendations on how to configure certain parameters. Unfortunately, manuals usually also have a large number of pages, which are time-consuming for humans to read and understand. Therefore, system admins often do not refer to manuals but rely on their own guesswork or unreliable sources when setting up systems, which can lead to configuration errors and system failures. To understand the characteristics of configuration recommendations in user manuals, this paper first collected and studied 261 recommendations from the manuals of six large open-source systems. Our study shows that 60% of the studied recommendations describe specific and checkable specifications instead of merely general guidance. Moreover, almost all (97%) of such specifications have not been checked in the systems' source code, and 61% of them are not equivalent to the default settings. This implies that additional checking is needed to ensure the recommendations are correctly applied. Based on our characteristic study, we build a tool called PracExtractor, which employs Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to automatically extract configuration recommendations from software manuals, converts them into specifications, and then uses the generated specifications to detect violations in system admins' configuration settings. We evaluate PracExtractor with twelve widely-deployed software systems, including one large commercial system from a public company. In total, PracExtractor automatically extracts 338 recommendations and generates 173 specifications with reasonable accuracy. With these generated specifications, PracExtractor detects 1423 good practice violations from open-source docker images. To this day, we have reported 325 violations and have got 47 of them confirmed as real configuration issues by admins from different organizations.


The aim of this thesis is to analyze different forms of North-South development assistance with regard to its widespread critique and to examine whether the field of international research capacity building holds alternative development cooperation strategies that have the potential to reconcile some of the criticisms. The focus is on the International Science Programme (ISP) and the empirical research carried out in Bangladesh and Sweden on the ISP-Bangladesh collaboration in the form of semi-structured interviews constitutes the core case study evidence. Three theoretical perspectives – realism, interdependence liberalism and constructivism – provide the framework of the case study and serve as guiding tools to understand the ISP's role and motivations as an actor in international relations. The main goal is to investigate whether the ISP can be best perceived as an instance of self-interest, interconnectedness or social empowerment.


Domain Translation is the problem of finding a meaningful correspondence between two domains. Since in a majority of settings paired supervision is not available, much work focuses on Unsupervised Domain Translation (UDT) where data samples from each domain are unpaired. Following the seminal work of CycleGAN for UDT, many variants and extensions of this model have been proposed. However, there is still little theoretical understanding behind their success. We observe that these methods yield solutions which are approximately minimal w.r.t. a given transportation cost, leading us to reformulate the problem in the Optimal Transport (OT) framework. This viewpoint gives us a new perspective on Unsupervised Domain Translation and allows us to prove the existence and uniqueness of the retrieved mapping, given a large family of transport costs. We then propose a novel framework to efficiently compute optimal mappings in a dynamical setting. We show that it generalizes previous methods and enables a more explicit control over the computed optimal mapping. It also provides smooth interpolations between the two domains. Experiments on toy and real world datasets illustrate the behavior of our method.


Cities are contemporary metropolises that concentrate human and social activity; engineered to support and develop the physical environment and the people within it, Smart cities, we are led to believe, are the immediate future, where smartness is perceived as a characterisation of advancements or digitalisation, in government, mobility and sustainability. Therefore it is not surprising that many organisations are marketing their smart solutions and products, often to a ubiquitous extent and so called smart cities are striving to outperform each other. But how are smart cities actually being defined and how is performance being measured in an era where there is increasing access to unprecedented amounts of foreseen data? This paper identifies the plethora of the smart city definitions and categories evidenced from the literature and shows that 'Smart cities' lacks a robust coherent definition, with many contradicting facts within what constitutes a smart vision. Notably, almost every attempt from organisations, the European Union or cities themselves has failed to define 'smart' in objective terms that can be accepted globally. Certainly, they all are negotiating with a range of descriptors and smart ways to improve the city. Even the UK's attempts to develop a clear definition and set of standards for smart cities (i.e. PAS 180 and PAS 182) appears to suffer from fundamental differences in how the semantic content of a 'smart' city is defined. This paper demonstrates the necessity for a single 'Smart Cities' definition that deals with both the physical and digital using shared parameter value(s) that can be adopted and scaled amongst different localities and within a range of urban contexts adjusting according to existing city condition(s) and vision(s) setting the paradigm for further innovative research in this area.


Three commercial clays: Cloisite Na+
, Cloisite 30B and Cloisite 15A were used to
melt compound with a number of polymer matrices, including polypropylene (PP),
poly(butylene terephthalate) (PBT) and polyamides (PA). X-ray diffraction (XRD),
contact angle measurement and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) showed small
interlayer space, poor compatibility and low thermal stability of these
nanocomposites, resulting in poor mechanical properties in composites. A number of
modifications of commercial clays were carried out, including silylation and
introduction of thermally stable surfactants, e.g. alkyl quaternary phosphonium
cations and polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane (POSS). It was found that poor
compatibility between polymer matrices and organically modified clays, especially
in those POSS modified clays, again restricted the formation of exfoliated structure
in polymer matrices. A mode of dual-surfactant modification for clay was developed,
and large interlayer spacing (>3.2 nm), good thermal stability (decomposed at
~300oC) and improved surface properties for those dual-surfactant modified clays
promoted a better dispersion of clays in polymer matrices and consequently better
mechanical properties. For example, the tensile moduli of PP, PBT and PA 12 were
improved from 515 MPa, 1065 MPa and 490 MPa to 1020 MPa, 1470 MPa and 800
MPa of their nanocomposites containing 3 wt% dual-surfactant modified clays,
respectively. However, the dispersion of these organoclays varied in different
polymer matrices, due to the different compatibility and the existence of polar type
interactions between organoclays and polymer matrices. In order to further address
the effect of polymer matrix on clay dispersion, three polyamide matrices (PA 6, PA
11 and PA 12) were employed, and PA 6 based nanocomposites showed the most
effective exfoliation and mechanical enhancements due to the strong polar type
interactions between the polymer and the organoclays.


We study a fingerprinting game in which the number of colluders and the collusion channel are unknown. The encoder embeds fingerprints into a host sequence and provides the decoder with the capability to trace back pirated copies to the colluders. Fingerprinting capacity has recently been derived as the limit value of a sequence of maximin games with mutual information as their payoff functions. However, these games generally do not admit saddle-point solutions and are very hard to solve numerically. Here under the so-called Boneh-Shaw marking assumption, we reformulate the capacity as the value of a single two-person zero-sum game, and show that it is achieved by a saddle-point solution. If the maximal coalition size is k and the fingerprinting alphabet is binary, we show that the capacity is in Θ(1/k). Furthermore, we prove rigorously that the asymptotic capacity is 1/(k2 ln 2) and we confirm our earlier conjecture that Tardos' choice of the arcsine distribution asymptotically maximizes the mutual information payoff function while the interleaving attack minimizes it. Along with the asymptotic behavior, numerical solutions to the game for small k are also presented.


Catalase and superoxide dismutase activities have been explored in the yeast  Saccharomyces cerevisiae during batchwise growth experiment. During the diauxic growth in YPD medium high Ys values were obtained (0.415 - 0.423) and correlation between the total activities of both enzymes has been found. A mitochondrial fraction from three type strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been isolated. The purity of this fraction was proved through different enzyme assays: hexokinase, glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase, D-amino acid oxidase, isocitric lyase, succinate dehydrogenase. Then the catalase, peroxidase, Mn and Cu/Zn superoxide dismutase activities were evaluated in the mitochondrial fraction. Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis separations allowed to identify a mitochondrial catalase as a band of 0.239 Rm value. It differed from the two catalase specific bands with Rm values 0.218 and 0.257 obtained from the crude extract. It was proved that the three catalase proteins are charge isomers. A positive correlation between the activity of mitochondrial catalase and Mn superoxide dismutase also takes place. Molecular weight of mitochonrial catalase protein has been determined as 240 kD.


As we near the end of the century, there can be no doubt that the increasingly global political economy has affected the ways in which universities are governed; the daily lives of academics have been altered as well. In this new volume, editors Jan Currie and Janice Newson consider globalization as combining a market ideology with a corresponding material set of practices drawn from the world of business. Issues of managerialism, privatization, and accountability all central values in business have become primary for universities and their administrators as well. The selections in this book help illustrate the editors contentions that globalization presents clear disadvantages as well as benefits to all citizens. Globalizations effects on higher education are not likely to be uniform nor are the outcomes an inevitable process. The future of the university as a place where society can examine itself critically is at stake and this volume will be a strong contributor to the debate. Universities and Globalization will be of great interest to those interested in higher education, the role of the university, and global institutions and practices.


Robotic guidance has been employed with limited effectiveness in neurologically intact and patient populations. For example, our lab has effectively used robotic guidance to acutely improve movement smoothness of a discrete trajectory without influencing movement endpoint distributions (Manson et al., 2014). The purpose of the current study was to investigate the efficacy of combining robotic guidance and unassisted trials in the learning of a golf putting task. Participants completed a pre-test, an acquisition phase, and an immediate and delayed (24-hour) post-test. During the pre-test, kinematic data from the putter was converted into highly accurate, consistent, and smooth trajectories delivered by a robot arm. During acquisition, 3 groups performed putts towards 3 different targets with robotic guidance on either 0%, 50% or 100% of acquisition trials. Only the 50% guidance group statistically reduced both the ball endpoint distance and variability between the pre-test and the immediate or 24-hr post-test. The results of the 50% guidance group yielded seminal evidence that combining both unassisted and robotic guidance trials (i.e., mixed practice) could facilitate at least short-term motor learning for a golf putting task. Such work is relevant to incorporating robotic guidance for sport skills in and other practical areas (e.g., rehabilitation).


Recently, the nutritional requirements of marine finfish larvae have received considerable attention, and studies have shown that docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and arachidonic acid (ARA) affects the growth and survival of marine finfish larvae. This study investigated the effects of different Artemia enrichments containing variable amounts of DHA and EPA on the growth and survival of larval Persian sturgeon (Acipenser persicus ). Four different Artemia enrichments ICES30/4 (with 20.90mg/g DW DHA and 6.29mg/g DW EPA), Sturgeon Ovary Oil (SOO) (with 2.76mg/g DW DHA and 7.55mg/g DW EPA), Cod Liver Oil (CLO) (with 7.64mg/g DW DHA and 11.39mg/g DW EPA) and Linseed Oil (LO) (with 0.00mg/g DW DHA and 0.03mg/g DW EPA) in seventy five aquaria (each 45 liter, with three replicates per treatment) were used. The resultant Artemia contained a different concentration of DHA (0.00-5.99mg/g DW) and EPA (0.694.97mg/g DW). Larvae were fed with Artemia from 3 to 20 days after active feeding at 250 prey l -1 . Results showed that there were significant differences between treatments regarding to the total length and wet weight but no significant differences were found in dry weight between the larvae reared on different treatments. However, larvae reared on LO were significantly higher (in weight) than larvae reared on ICES30/4 and SOO. Larval survival on the SOO enriched Artemia (93.3±1.6) at 20 th day was significantly higher than other treatments. Our results showed a positive effect of Artemia DHA proportions on growth and survival of the Persian sturgeon, and demonstrated that larvae of this species require a high ratio of dietary DHA to EPA.


We consider the general problem known as job shop scheduling, in which multiple jobs consist of sequential operations that need to be executed or served by appropriate machines having limited capacities. For example, train journeys (jobs) consist of moves and stops (operations) to be served by rail tracks and stations (machines). A schedule is an assignment of the job operations to machines and times where and when they will be executed. The developers of computational methods for job scheduling need tools enabling them to explore how their methods work. At a high level of generality, we define the system of pertinent exploration tasks and a combination of visualizations capable of supporting the tasks. We provide general descriptions of the purposes, contents, visual encoding, properties, and interactive facilities of the visualizations and illustrate them with images from an example implementation in air traffic management. We justify the design of the visualizations based on the tasks, principles of creating visualizations for pattern discovery, and scalability requirements. The outcomes of our research are sufficiently general to be of use in a variety of applications.


Simple, fast and reliable spectrophotometric methods were developed for determination of Oxcarbazepine in bulk and pharmaceutical dosage forms. The solutions of standard and the sample were prepared in Distilled Water. The quantitative determination of the drug was carried out using the zero order derivative values measured at 256 nm and the area under the curve method values measured at 252-258 nm (n=2). Calibration graphs constructed at their wavelengths of determination were linear in the concentration range of Oxcarbazepine using 5-25 μg/ml (r²=0.998 and r²=0.9986) for zero order and area under the curve spectrophotometric method. All the proposed methods have been extensively validated as per ICH guidelines. There was no significant difference between the performance of the proposed methods regarding the mean values and standard deviations. Developed spectrophotometric methods in this study are simple, accurate, precise and sensitive to assay of Oxcarbazepine in tablets.


A supramolecular nanovehicle, denoted as ICG-DOX/Gd-LDH, was synthesized by the co-intercalation of indocyanine green (ICG) and doxorubicin hydrochloride (DOX) into a gallery of Gd3+-doped-layered double hydroxide (Gd-LDH) such that to achieve a chemo-photothermal synergistic therapeutic agent. The unique structure of Gd-LDH can not only stabilize the photothermal agent ICG to enhance the photothermal efficiency, but also hamper the recombination between electron and holes, leading to the generation of more reactive oxygen species (ROS) under irradiation in the NIR range. Together with the loading capacity of DOX, ICG-DOX/Gd-LDH exhibited excellent combinatorial effects on tumor growth inhibition in both in vitro studies on HeLa cell line and in vivo tests over tumor-bearing mouse models. Moreover, it showed ideal ability for long-term tracing of the carrier distribution via either MRI or fluorescence imaging. Thus, this study indicates that Gd-LDH is a promising platform for the construction of multifunctional formulations, especially theranostic nano-systems for cancer treatment.


This project explores the reasons why food spoilage indicators are not yet sold in grocery stores for consumer use. Food spoilage indicators, or time-temperature indicators as they are more widely known, are used to determine whether or not products are safe for consumption. There are several potential barriers to the wide market usage of packaging containing indicators including lack of consumer interest, additional cost, and manufacturing difficulties. However, the benefits that the product offers in the way of consumer safety cannot be overlooked. Extensive research was augmented by a survey of 119 shoppers at local grocery stores in the central California Area to gauge consumer interest in the product. Additional research was conducted by way of a case study in which a professor at Cal Poly was interviewed on his knowledge of the smart packaging industry and the feasibility of wide market release of food spoilage indicators.


Despite the fact that multiproduct firms constitute a considerable share of firms and account for an even greater share of production, virtually all production function estimates are based on the assumption that firms are single-product producers. The single-product assumption is made due to lack of data on input allocation across the various product lines multiproduct firms operate. I provide a method to estimate product-level production functions without observable input allocations. The empirical application and Monte Carlo simulations show that the single-product firm assumption leads to biased parameter and productivity estimates and overestimated productivity differences between firms.


The architecture of Delay or Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTN) is particularly intended for scenarios in which it is difficult to build infrastructure and for networks characterized by one or more of i)lack of end-to-end connectivity, ii)frequent channel errors, ii)limited transmission opportunities, iv)highly asymmetric links, v)low data rates(high delivery delay), vi)heterogeneous network environments and vii)high RTT.DTN architecture is assumed to be implemented in any data network type from legacy connected to challenged intermittently connected mobile adhoc networks (IC-MANETs), from underwater to deep space communication via its adaption layer called Convergence Layer(CL). Despite the genericity of DTN architecture, DTN lacks well defined generic routing protocol. There are some papers on routing approaches, especially on georouting, in DTN.These proposed georouting approaches, however, have one or more of the following limitations: simulation based, lack details, genericity, practical applicability and conformance to standard frameworks, and/or are packet based. This paper discusses an approach to a routing based on information given by geographic receivers.Although implementation scope of this paper is DTN, the author assumes its possible adaptability to other MANETs and future adaptability to other types of data networks.Especially, Sensor networks, vehicular communications, Intelligent Transport Systems(ITS), etc. benefit much from this approach.


Abstract This paper aims to broaden the circular economy discussion by emphasizing the role of people. The paper combines core circular economy literature and user-centred design seed literature with illustrative case studies, to consider the positioning of design within a circular economy. The article observes that design is considered predominantly in positivist terms within a field dominated by management, engineering, ecological and environmental science literature. Conceptualizing the designer's opportunity within the circular economy would benefit from integration of knowledge from the social sciences (sociology of consumption, consumer psychology, cultural studies, inter alia). The current orientation overlooks design as a 'radical humanist' paradigm and this has implications for how people are considered (from 'users-as-subjects' to 'people-as-participants') raising ethical questions about design practice within divergent circular economy framings. The article lays a basis for further research and theory-building for a fuller conceptualization of the designer's opportunity within the circular economy.


The huge volume of digital information collected automatically by internet technology has caused problems in information retrieval. Finding the right information from a large collection is very difficult. The difficulty in most search engines are caused by a string matching algorithm that return a match whenever an exact occurrence of the search term is found. To address this problem and considering that the document collection is not only a collection of words but also a collection of concepts, we promote a new technique of information retrieval that is based on concepts. The difference between word-based and concept-based technique are indexing and retrieval. During indexing, this technique classifies documents into concepts extracted from the collection via clustering technique to construct concept indexing besides term indexing. During retrieval, this techniques ranks document base on a combination of term and conceptual similarity, in the formulation of doc-score = β * conceptScore + (1-β)*TermScore where β is the weight of concept score. The clustering algorithm is chosen from partitional model that linear in complexity, that is Bisecting K-Means. Two kinds of test collections, i.e. text document of news (1000 and 3000 news documents), and text document of academic articles (1000 academic abstract in information technology) were used to conduct the experiment. Performance evaluation was measured using average precision and R-precision. The results of the research showed that by setting β =0.5 to β =0.9 would improve significantly the precision of concept-based approach over the word-based only (β =0). The improvements are about 5.2% to 8,3% for average precision and 16.9% to 31.5% for R-precision.


Abstract The objective of this study is to determine the incidence and risk factors of postoperative dysphagia and to evaluate short- and long-term clinical outcomes in patients with this complication. Four hundred seventy patients undergoing an anterior or a 2-stage surgery were enrolled in the prospective AOSpine CSM-North America or International study at 26 global sites. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to determine important clinical and surgical predictors of dysphagia. Preoperatively and at each follow-up, patients were evaluated using the modified Japanese Orthopedic Association scale (mJOA), Nurick score, Neck Disability Index (NDI), and the SF-36. A mixed model analytic approach was used to evaluate differences in outcomes at 6 and 24 months between patients with and without dysphagia, while controlling for relevant baseline characteristics and surgical factors. The overall incidence of dysphagia was 6.17%. Univariately, the major risk factors for perioperative dysphagia were a higher comorbidity score (odds ratio [OR]: 1.289, P = .002), the presence of cardiovascular (OR: 2.584, P = .016) and endocrine (OR: 4.234, P = .001) disorders, a 2-stage surgery (OR (ref = 1-stage): 6.506, P = .0003) and a greater number of decompressed levels (OR: 1.816, P = .002). Based on multivariate analysis, patients were at an increased risk of perioperative dysphagia if they had diabetes mellitus (OR (ref = absence): 3.686, P = .001), a greater number of decompressed segments (OR: 1.522, P = .049), and a 2-stage surgery (OR (ref = 1-stage): 3.423, P = .037). Clinical improvements, as evaluated by the Nurick and mJOA, were comparable between patients with and without dysphagia at both short- and long-term follow-up. In contrast, patients with dysphagia had significantly worse scores on the NDI at 6 months postoperatively than patients without dysphagia; however, at 24 months postoperatively, there were no differences between groups. The most important predictors of dysphagia are diabetes mellitus, a greater number of decompressed levels, and a 2-stage surgery. Patients with postoperative dysphagia have reduced disability and quality-of-life improvements in the short term but not in the long term.


The environmental assessment for the Azerbaijan Highway Project, which improves a section of the Baku-Alyat-Astara highway to reduce costs and increase access, discusses potential environmental risks and proposes measures to mitigate them. Risks include impeding movement of Persian gazelles, safety risks for road users, increased traffic during construction, threats to worker safety and health, soil stripping, soil pollution, groundwater contamination, disease spread, ecosystem disturbance, asphalt dust and fumes, water quality alteration, air pollution from malfunctioning equipment, and archaeological chance finds. Recommended mitigations include: Providing and landscaping 3 game underpasses, building protective fences alongside park boundaries, planting local species of shrubs, regulating the traffic flow around construction areas, using traffic safety signs and barriers to control traffic, appropriate lighting to aid traffic flow, issuing emergency procedures to contain fire and chemical spills, reusing stripped topsoil in the median and along embankments, protecting stockpiled topsoil to prevent erosion or fertility loss, informing local authorities of fuel storage plan location, securing chemicals and oils in an impermeable container at a distance from surface waters, setting up a waste management plan to include separately collecting and disposing of toxic and harmful waste at a pre-designated site, fueling and servicing machinery and equipment at designated areas to contain spills, banning vehicle washing near streams or ponds, providing first aid equipment and protective gear to workers, assuring good drainage at the site, regularly clearing septic tanks and other mobile toilets to prevent disease outbreak, providing clean potable water, educating workers on disease prevention and spread, having the contractor obtain a valid operating license for the asphalt plant, protecting bitumen storage area and mixing area from spills, carefully handling petroleum products to prevent spills, gaining approval of plan for each borrow site, wetting or covering truck loads, preventing earthworks from impeding the flow of water bodies and restricting wastes from entering water drains, and notifying authorities if discovering archaeological objects.


OBJECTIVE
The National Pediatric Cardiology Quality Improvement Collaborative (NPC-QIC) is the first quality improvement collaborative in pediatric cardiology, and its registry captures information on interstage care and outcomes of infants after the Norwood procedure. The purpose of this study was to evaluate variation in interstage outpatient clinical care practices for infants discharged home after the Norwood procedure.

DESIGN
Data for the first 100 infants enrolled in the NPC-QIC registry were evaluated. The care domains assessed for variation included: (1) discharge communication with outpatient cardiologist and primary care physician (PCP); (2) nutrition plan at hospital discharge; and (3) planned use of home surveillance strategies.

RESULTS
One hundred infants were discharged home between July 2008 and February 2010, from 21 participating US pediatric cardiac programs. Median age at discharge was 29 (11-188) days. Interstage outpatient care was provided at the Norwood center for 62 infants, at other centers for 25, and at a combination of centers for 13. Complete discharge communication (defined as written communication of medication list, nutrition plan, and red flag checklist) was relayed to only 45 outpatient cardiologists and to 26 PCPs. Nutrition route at discharge was exclusively oral in 49, combined oral and nasogastric (NG)/nasojejunal (NJ) in 38, exclusively NG/NJ in six, combined oral and gastrostomy tube (GT) in six, and exclusively GT in one infant. Home surveillance strategies were utilized for 81 infants (oximetry and weight monitoring in 77, oximetry alone in four), with no home surveillance in 19 infants.

CONCLUSIONS
Considerable variation exists in interstage outpatient care after the Norwood procedure in the care domains of discharge communication, nutrition, and home surveillance. Standardizing care around evidence-based practices may improve the outcomes for these very high-risk children.


A major challenge for monetary policy has been predicting how exchange rate movements will impact inflation. We propose a new focus: incorporating the underlying shocks that cause exchange rate fluctuations when evaluating how these fluctuations 'pass through' into import and consumer prices. We show that in a standard open-economy model the relationship between exchange rates and prices depends on the shocks which cause the exchange rate to move. Then we develop an SVAR framework for a small open economy that relies on both short-run and long-run identification restrictions consistent with our theoretical model. Applying this framework to the United Kingdom, we find that the response of both import and consumer prices to exchange rate fluctuations depends on what caused the fluctuations. For example, exchange rate pass-through is relatively large in response to domestic monetary policy shocks, but smaller in response to domestic demand shocks. This framework helps explain why pass-through can change over time, including why sterling's post-crisis depreciation caused a sharper increase in prices than expected and sterling's recent appreciation has had a more muted effect.


The project 'Community-based Fish Culture in Seasonal Floodplains' (henceforward the community-based fish culture project), CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food, aims to enhance fish production in seasonal floodplains to improve and sustain rural livelihoods in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Mali and Vietnam. Based on the premise that production from these water bodies could be enhanced by stocking locally important fish species, the community-based fish culture project seeks to develop technologies and institutional arrangements to support collective fish culture in the flood season. The current report provides a landscape level characterization of seasonal floodplains in two of these areas. We compare the Ganges seasonal floodplain agro-ecology in Bangladesh to that in the Mekong Delta of Cambodia and Vietnam. In both areas the project has been under implementation since the outset, but has met with contrasting results


The overall metamorphic reaction in an impure calcite marble from the ultra-high pressure (UH P ) zone at Changpu, eastern Dabie Shan, China, is partitioned into local reaction domains defined by isolated grains of omphacite, garnet, epidote, quartz and ilmenite within the calcite matrix. These reaction domains witness different stages of the metamorphic evolution. Chemically homogeneous omphacite in some instances has partial or complete coronas of quartz which are interpreted as a prograde phenomenon, i.e . caused by replacement of a plagioclase precursor by omphacite with increasing pressure. Rare relics of talc in epidote indicate that the first breakdown reaction during exhumation was talc + omphacite + garnet = amphibole + epidote ± quartz (still within the eclogite facies). During this early retrogression stage, omphacite was partially or completely rimmed by chemically heterogeneous amphibole. Most garnets developed a thick corona of epidote plus some quartz and calcite during this early retrogression or are completely pseudo-morphed. Where garnet occurs near or next to omphacite, this corona consists partly or entirely of amphibole. The second retrograde stage is commonly characterized by the breakdown of omphacite + quartz to albite + diopside + amphibole, often in the form of symplectite. Localized reactions become evident as omphacite at its site can decompose to three distinct types of symplectite (albite + diopside, albite + amphibole, albite + diopside + amphibole). Matrix quartz grains develop rims of individual diopside crystals at distances up to 2–3 millimetres from symplectites; additional outer rims of albite develop adjacent to garnet or corona epidote. Matrix quartz remote from omphacite sites is locally transformed into albite, where an Al-bearing mineral (mostly epidote) is found nearby. Epidote in contact with quartz develops albite coronas as it decomposes into albite + minute grains of Ce-rich epidote (allanite). Primary epidote and corona epidote remote from any quartz develop a complex compositional zoning with enrichment of mainly Ce 3+ at the outer rim, indicating exposure to a fluid undersaturated in alumina. Finally, large ilmenite grains in the matrix develop thick overgrowths of titanite, but in several instances an intermediate step of rutile formation is preserved. All these features indicate a direct correlation of textures with transport distances of dissolved chemical species in a non-pervasively infiltrating pore fluid. Simplified open-system reactions were derived for each site at each metamorphic stage and show that Al must have been quite mobile during prograde quartz corona formation, whereas both Si and Al were relatively immobile during the two retrograde stages – the relative sequence of mobility being Na + > Mg 2+ , Ca 2+ , Fe 2+ >> Si 4+ > Al 3+ , Ti 4+ . Mass-balance between sites is consistent and no significant gain or loss of cations is indicated.


This memoiristic essay is a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium titled "Fuzzy Studies: On the consequence of blur." While probing his personal memories and making a case for devaluing our intellectual constructs, the author, an anthropologist, examines paintings by Paul Cézanne and Pieter Bruegel, poems by Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden. The essay argues that each self-deluding "reality" we construct is only temporary, destined to fall back into the elusive, undifferentiated zone of overlap and ambiguity from which it has emerged. Therefore, the author urges, we should temper the intellectual "rage for order" with an openness to chaos and contingency, along with sustained and careful attention to creative works and religious practices in which the mind appears to grasp its limits. In this way, we may substitute what Stevens called "ghostlier demarcations" for our clear, exact, and self-deceptive certainties.


This thesis examines the building projects undertaken under the auspices of the emperors within the limits of the city of Rome, from the beginning of the Principate under Augustus and then on through the following principes until the death of Hadrian in A. D. 138. The thesis focuses
upon a particular aspect of these imperial building projects, namely the use of the urban environment as a primary means by which individual emperors could define and promote publicly their conception of the role of the institution that their building activities were helping to create.

To achieve this aim, a large and diverse body of evidence is addressed, including archaeological, literary, inscriptional, and numismatic evidence. In addition the thesis examines a broad, though selective, contribution from the body of modern scholarship that has concerned
itself with both this evidence, and with the broader thematic concerns to which the thesis is addressed.

Following a brief introductory chapter the thesis examines and outlines the building programme of Octavian/ Augustus. The major thematic concerns are identified in order to reveal the behavioural and ideological template that the first princeps created. The thesis then proceeds to
examine in chronological order the building activities of the succeeding principes. Against the backdrop of the Augustan example the individualised and idiosyncratic nature of the Julio-Claudian conception of the role of the princeps is revealed. Then follows the reaction of the
Flavian dynasty, largely conservative in nature, though evolving over time to incorporate some of the concepts first experimented with under the later Julio-Claudians. An examination of the Trajanic building programme follows, and is revealed as having been conservative in its
forms, though idiosyncratic in its aims. In the final chapter concerning Hadrian, the competing traits of all the previous principes are found to have been resolved and consolidated, to provide a new template for
imperial building behaviours.

The thesis concludes with the finding that the individual conceptions of the Principate by its incumbents is able to be traced in their building programmes. Moreover it is shown that through a process of actively incorporating or rejecting the examples of predecessors, an acceptable
compromise between the ideal and the reality of the role and public profile of the Principate was finally achieved and found form in the urban environment of the city of Rome.


The study examines how the remote associates test (RAT) has been used to examine theories of creativity through a review of recent studies on creativity. Creativity-related studies published between 2000 and 2019 were retrieved from the SCOPUS database. A total of 172 papers were chosen for further analysis. Content analysis shows that research on creativity using RAT mainly concerns remote association, insight problem-solving, general creative process, test development, individual difference, effect of treatment, clinical case, social interaction effect, and predictor or criterion. The study constructs a theoretical framework based on the 4P (Product–Person–Process–Place) model and demonstrates how empirical studies using the RAT explore the individual differences, internal processes, and external influences of creative thinking. In addition, the most commonly used version of the RAT is the Compound Remote Associates Problems (Bowden and Jung-Beeman, 2003a). Current research shows a trend whereby the creative thinking process has been receiving greater attention. In particular, a growing number of studies in this field have been carried out using cognitive neuroscience technologies. These findings suggest that the RAT provides researchers with a way to deepen their understanding of different levels of creativity.


[1] A Gulf of Mexico performance evaluation and comparison of coastal circulation and wave models was executed through harmonic analyses of tidal simulations, hindcasts of Hurricane Ike (2008) and Rita (2005), and a benchmarking study. Three unstructured coastal circulation models (ADCIRC, FVCOM, and SELFE) validated with similar skill on a new common Gulf scale mesh (ULLR) with identical frictional parameterization and forcing for the tidal validation and hurricane hindcasts. Coupled circulation and wave models, SWAN+ADCIRC and WWMII+SELFE, along with FVCOM loosely coupled with SWAN, also validated with similar skill. NOAA's official operational forecast storm surge model (SLOSH) was implemented on local and Gulf scale meshes with the same wind stress and pressure forcing used by the unstructured models for hindcasts of Ike and Rita. SLOSH's local meshes failed to capture regional processes such as Ike's forerunner and the results from the Gulf scale mesh further suggest shortcomings may be due to a combination of poor mesh resolution, missing internal physics such as tides and nonlinear advection, and SLOSH's internal frictional parameterization. In addition, these models were benchmarked to assess and compare execution speed and scalability for a prototypical operational simulation. It was apparent that a higher number of computational cores are needed for the unstructured models to meet similar operational implementation requirements to SLOSH, and that some of them could benefit from improved parallelization and faster execution speed.


Objectives: This study investigated the effects of a national early retirement reform, which was implemented in 2006 and penalized early retirement, on paid employment and different exit pathways and examined whether these effects differ by gender, income level and health status. Methods: This study included all Dutch individuals in paid employment born six months before (control group) and six months after (intervention group) the cut-off date of the reform (1 January 1950) that fiscally penalized early retirement. A regression discontinuity design combined with restricted mean survival time analysis was applied to evaluate the effect of penalizing early retirement on labor force participation from age 60 until workers reached the retirement age of 65 years, while accounting for secular trends around the threshold. Results: The intervention group postponed early retirement by 7.41 months [95% confidence interval (CI) 6.11–8.72], and partly replaced this by remaining 4.87 months (95% CI 3.60–6.24) longer in paid employment. Workers born after the threshold, annually earning €25 000–40 000, spent 1.24 months (95% CI 0.31–2.18) more in economic inactivity than those born before. The working months lost to unemployment increased by 1.50 months (95% CI 0.30–2.71) for female workers and 1.99 months (95% CI 0.06–3.92) for workers reporting multiple chronic diseases. Conclusions: The national reform successfully prolonged working lives of older workers. However, workers with a middle income, female workers, and workers with chronic diseases were more vulnerable to premature exit from the labor market through unemployment or being without any income or benefit.


This paper presents a complete formal verification of a proof that the evaluation of the Riemann zeta function at 3 is irrational, using the Coq proof assistant. This result was first presented by Apery in 1978, and the proof we have formalized essentially follows the path of his original presentation. The crux of this proof is to establish that some sequences satisfy a common recurrence. We formally prove this result by an a posteriori verification of calculations performed by computer algebra algorithms in a Maple session. The rest of the proof combines arithmetical ingredients and asymptotic analysis, which we conduct by extending the Mathematical Components libraries.


Tarmoola is a structurally controlled Archean orogenic gold deposit hosted in greenschist facies metamorphosed komatiite and trondhjemite in the Leonora district of the Eastern Goldfields province, Yilgarn craton. High-grade (>1 g/t Au) orebodies are located in komatiite wall rock adjacent to the eastern and northeastern margins of the asymmetrical, north-south–striking, Tarmoola trondhjemite intrusion. Gold-bearing veins postdate trondhjemite emplacement (ca. 2700 Ma), quartz diorite dikes (ca. 2667 Ma), and regional greenschist facies metamorphism.

Textures and crosscutting relationships in gold-bearing veins indicate two stages of hydrothermal fluid infiltration associated with a single gold-related hydrothermal event: a volumetrically dominant, but gold-poor, stage I fluid and a gold-rich stage II fluid. Gold-bearing veins contain stage I milky quartz and pyrite that are overprinted by stage II quartz-ankerite-muscovite-chalcopyrite-sphalerite-galena-gold-tellurides ± albite ± chlorite ± fuchsite ± epidote ± scheelite. Stage I hydrothermal alteration assemblages are different in trondhjemite and komatiite due to contrasting reactions between a common ore fluid and disparate wall-rock chemistry. Stage II fluid-wall rock interaction was minor compared to stage I and is indicated by the overprinting of stage I mineral assemblages by stage II microveins. Wall-rock alteration proximal to veins in trondhjemite is characterized by replacement of igneous plagioclase, amphibole, biotite, and metamorphic chlorite by hydrothermal quartz, muscovite, ankerite, calcite, pyrite, chalcopyrite, sphalerite, galena, tellurides, and gold, whereas in proximal alteration in komatiite, metamorphic chlorite and talc are replaced by ankerite, quartz, muscovite, albite, chlorite, fuchsite, pyrite, chalcopyrite, sphalerite, galena, tellurides, and gold. The stage II fluid was enriched in H2O, CO2, Si, Ca, K, Na, S, Au, Ag, Cu, Pb, W, Bi, As, Mo, Zn, and Te.

Based on fluid inclusion studies and stage II mineral equilibria, gold deposited from a homogeneous, neutral to slightly alkaline (pH 5.1–5.5), reduced, low-salinity (<5.5 wt % NaCl equiv) fluid that had a bulk composition of 78 mole percent H2O and 21 mole percent CO2, and trace amounts of CH4, C2H6, H2, Ar, H2S, and He. Gold deposition occurred at 300° ± 50°C and 0.5 to 3.0 kbars. Assuming lithostatic fluid pressures, gold precipitated at a 2- to 10-km depth. Stage II gray quartz δ 18Ofluid values range from 5.9 to 7.5 per mil, whereas δ Dfluid values calculated from the dehydration of muscovite grains and measured directly from bulk fluid inclusion analyses of stage II gray quartz have ranges of –9 to –35 and –27 to –28 per mil, respectively.

Hydrothermal ore fluids were transported from greater crustal depths to the site of gold deposition during the district-scale D3 event by shallowly W dipping, reverse brittle-ductile shear zones in supracrustal rock and along the steeply east dipping trondhjemite contact. Associated subhorizontal east-west shortening caused the reactivation of the eastern trondhjemite margin and subparallel foliation, which facilitated the transport of hydrothermal fluids and the generation of gold-bearing veins and hydrothermal alteration zones in komatiite. East-west–striking fractures in trondhjemite aided the lateral migration of ore fluids away from trondhjemite margins and the formation of east-west–striking gold-bearing veins and broad alteration zones. Gold was most likely transported in the stage II fluid as bisulfide complexes. The sulfidation of trondhjemite and komatiite wall rock by the stage II fluid caused the destabilization of Au bisulfide complexes and gold deposition. Potassium, Ca, and CO2 metasomatism of komatiite wall rock may have enhanced gold deposition via the acidification of the stage II fluid.

The physicochemical characteristics of the Tarmoola ore fluid and relative timing of gold mineralization are consistent with the Yilgarn-wide, 2650 to 2630 Ma gold event. The host-rock chemistry, vein, and proximal wall-rock alteration mineral assemblages, and fluid temperature and pressures during gold deposition are also similar to that of earlier (ca. 2755 Ma) gold deposits in the Leonora district.


In the past two decades, there has been increasing use of semantic networks in engineering design for supporting various activities, such as knowledge extraction, prior art search, idea generation and evaluation. Leveraging large-scale pre-trained graph knowledge databases to support engineering design-related natural language processing (NLP) tasks has attracted a growing interest in the engineering design research community. Therefore, this paper aims to provide a survey of the state-of-the-art semantic networks for engineering design and propositions of future research to build and utilize large-scale semantic networks as knowledge bases to support engineering design research and practice. The survey shows that WordNet, ConceptNet and other semantic networks, which contain common-sense knowledge or are trained on non-engineering data sources, are primarily used by engineering design researchers to develop methods and tools. Meanwhile, there are emerging efforts in constructing engineering and technical-contextualized semantic network databases, such as B-Link and TechNet, through retrieving data from technical data sources and employing unsupervised machine learning approaches. On this basis, we recommend six strategic future research directions to advance the development and uses of large-scale semantic networks for artificial intelligence applications in engineering design.


This paper investigates regional start-up rates in the knowledge intensive services and high-tech industries. Integrating insights from economic geography and population ecology into the literature on entrepreneurship, we develop a theoretical framework which captures how both supply- and demand-side factors mold the regional bedrock for start-ups in knowledge intensive industries. Using multi-level data of all knowledge intensive start-ups across 286 Swedish municipalities between 1994 and 2002 we demonstrate how characteristics of the economic and political milieu within each region influence the ratio of firm births. We find that economically affluent regions dominate entrepreneurial activity in terms of firm births, yet a number of much smaller rural regions also revealed high levels of start-ups. Knowledge spillovers from universities and firm R&D strongly affect the start-up rates for both knowledge intensive manufacturing and knowledge intensive services firms. However, the start-up rate of knowledge-intensive service firms is tied more strongly to the supply of highly educated individuals and the political regulatory regime within the municipality. This suggests that knowledge intensive service-start-ups are more susceptible to both demand-side and supply-side context than manufacturing start-ups. Our study contributes to the growing stream of research that explains entrepreneurial activity as shaped by contextual factors, most notably educational institutions that contribute to technology startups.


The study examined the availability of specified activities for teachers and students in the recommended Economics textbooks and also examined the level of appropriateness of graphical illustrations in the recommended Economics textbooks. The study adopted a descriptive survey research design. The population for the study comprised the 14 recommended Economics textbooks by the Ministry of Education in Ogun State senior secondary schools. Four Economics textbooks among those recommended were selected for the study using simple random sampling technique. One research instrument titled Economics "Textbook Assessment Checklist (ETAC)" was used to elicit information on the availability of activities and appropriateness of graphical illustrations in Economics textbooks. The data were analyzed using frequency count and percentages. The result showed that among the recommended textbooks, only Textbook B (New Approach Economics) had the specified activities for teachers and students. The result further showed the level of appropriateness of Textbook D (78%), Textbook B (67%), Textbook C (64%) to be high while Textbook A (42%) was moderate. The study concluded that the specified learning activities were not available in all the textbooks and that the appropriateness of the graphical illustrations in the textbooks were between high and moderate level.


To store, update and retrieve data from database management systems (DBMS), software architects use tools, like call-level interfaces (CLI), which provide standard functionalities to interact with DBMS. However, the emerging of NoSQL paradigm, and particularly new NoSQL DBMS providers, lead to situations where some of the standard functionalities provided by CLI are not supported, very often due to their distance from the relational model or due to design constraints. As such, when a system architect needs to evolve, namely from a relational DBMS to a NoSQL DBMS, he must overcome the difficulties conveyed by the features not provided by NoSQL DBMS. Choosing the wrong NoSQL DBMS risks major issues with components requesting non-supported features. This paper focuses on how to deploy features that are not so commonly supported by NoSQL DBMS (like Stored Procedures, Transactions, Save Points and interactions with local memory structures) by implementing them in standard CLI.


Healthcare professionals are required to make daily decisions about patient care. Moreover, determinations about a specific clinical pathway can have profound impacts on patients' quality of life and long-term outcomes. The decisions made on behalf of a patient often involve practices for which consensus among practitioners is lacking. The divide between clinical science and practice can be bridged by integrating a Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) into patient care. A CDSS keeps professionals updated with current knowledge and standards of practice in their respective disciplines. This mini review addresses the gap between knowledge and best practice and offers recommendations to bridge the divide accordingly.


Despite the Supreme Court ruling in the Johnson Controls case that fetal protection policies that exclude women from workplaces deemed hazardous to the fetus are in clear violation of the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Amendment, the issue of fetal health remains on the policy agenda. This article summarizes the rationale behind fetal protection policies and the current scientific evidence over workplace hazards. It also discusses the disparate court response to these policies before Johnson Controls and the confusing regulatory framework. Finally, it makes a case for including consideration of the paternal contribution to fetal injury in the workplace and calls for a balanced approach to accommodate both women's rights to employment and society's interest in healthy children.


Finite‐element modeling is used for the study of structures with piezoelectric actuators and sensors augmented by viscoelastic passive dampers. The structure is excited by a transient force; the response of the structure as determined by the computed voltage response of the sensor is used to construct a feedback loop that excites the actuator. A constant gain P–D (proportional and derivative) controller is used. The controller changes the effective stiffness of the structure and the derivative feedback also introduces the desired damping. The increased stiffness also lowers the vibration amplitude. Active vibration damping is compared and contrasted with passive damping provided by a viscoelastic dampers. A BMG model is used for the viscoelastic phase. A hybrid approach using modal superposition in conjunction with time integration is used for solving the matrix equations in space and time in an efficient manner. A parametric set of results is presented showing the contribution of active and passive damping for the transient response of a clamped plate structure.


Previous studies investigating task based search often take the form of lab studies or large scale log analysis. In lab studies, users typically perform a designed task under a controlled environment, which may not reflect their natural behaviour. While log analysis allows the observation of users' natural search behaviour, often strong assumptions need to be made in order to associate the unobserved underlying user tasks with log signals. We describe a field study during which we log participants' daily search and browsing activities for 5 days, and users are asked to self-annotate their search logs with the tasks they conducted as well as to describe the task characteristics according to a conceptual task classification scheme. This provides us with a more realistic and comprehensive view on how user tasks are associated with logged interactions than seen in previous log- or lab-based studies; and allows us to explore the complex interactions between task characteristics and their presence in naturalistic tasks which has not been studied previously. We find a higher number of queries, longer timespan, as well as more task switches than reported in previous log based studies; and 41% of our tasks are zero-query tasks implying that large amounts of user task activities remain unobserved when only focused on query logs. Further, tasks sharing similar descriptions can vary greatly in their characteristics, suggesting that when supporting users with their tasks, it is important to know not only the task they are engaged with but also the context of the user in the task.


In this paper I examine the argument by H. Beebee and N. Sabbarton-Leary that Brian Ellis's scientific essentialism is based on the "abuse" of the necessary a posteriori. I will first briefly survey various attempts to resist what I will call the "Kripkean essentialist argument" to locate Beebee's and Sabbarton-Leary's position properly. After that I will argue that Beebee's and Sabbarton-Leary's argument is not successful; in particular, I will argue that under the most natural interpretation of their position it is not internally coherent, and that their argument is based on a superficial understanding of Kripkean necessity a posteriori.


Ikkyu, who lived from 1394-1481, was known as one of Japan's most irreverent and iconoclastic Zen masters. He spent much of his life as a vagrant monk, wandering here and there, and mingling with people both high- and low-born. On occasion, Ikkyu played Robin Hood, taking money given by the rich and spending it on the homeless. Interspersing his travels with retreats deep in the mountains, he eventually became head abbot at the most important Zen temple in Japan. Much of his verse rants against the pervasive hypocrisy of the Buddhist establishment and the corruption of the imperial court, but his writing is at its finest when centering around what he loved most: the unfettered Zen life and the joys of sexual intimacy.


Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are general purpose optimization techniques based on principles inspired fi"om biological neurons in the brain which consists of a number of simple and highly interconnected processors (neurons). ANN has proved to be able to solve optimization problems in power system. One of the areas in power system operation that requires optimal solution is the Unit Commitment (UC) problem. The UC problem involves determination of start-up and shut-down schedule of generating units, and indirectly determines the optimum power should be generated by each unit committed over a period of time to meet the forecasted load demand at minimum cost. Besides that, the commitment schedule must satisfy other constraints in order to minimize the total production cost. Therefore, this constitutes a problem to the operators, where they find it difBcult to make the decision manually on which unit to keep online, and which unit to switch to offline, in order to minimize the production cost. The ANN approach has proved to be able to solve the UC problem but involve several problems such as divergence, excessive computation time, too much iteration for solving small task and so on. In order to improve the implementation of ANN for solving UC problem in power systems, this paper presents a comparison study between standard backpropagation algorithm, extended backpropagation algorithms and hybrid approach. The ANN used to forecast the power of four generating units in a small power system consists of multilayer neural network which consists of three input nodes, several hidden nodes and five output nodes. Besides that, input parameters involve are current stage of load demand (first stage to sixth stage), current load demand (megawatt) and previous load demand (megawatt), while the outputs of the neural netwoiic are power generated by four thermal units at current stage and total cost.


If part of the project of a feminist media studies is to explore the various ways in which sexism operates through the media, then how might this be achieved? Any answer to this question will depend upon how the concept of "sexism" is understood. Much existing research has tended to approach sexism as an etic, analyst-driven phenomenon; that is, as something to be defined by the analyst during the study of media representations that may be sexist, but that are very rarely about sexism. In this article, however, attention is given to the hitherto largely unexplored idea of sexism as an emic, participant-driven phenomenon that gets defined within media representations that are, very directly, about incidents of sexism. Newspaper reports of an incident of sexist behaviour in the world of English Premier League football are analysed for the ways in which they re-presented complaints about that behaviour. Developing the concept of "irrelevant precision," this article shows that and how those re-presentations worked to undermine the legitimacy of the complaints and, by implication, the idea that anything sexist had taken place. The article concludes with a discussion of how this concept contributes to the project of a feminist media studies.