Ecologically sound fisheries management and improving future food security require that small fish by‐catch in tropical shrimp trawl fisheries is maintained at, or reduced to, sustainable levels; restricting trawling in particular places, or at particular times, has been suggested as a means for achieving this goal. The purpose of our research was to compare patterns in occurrence, density and body size across depth, latitude and time for four small fish taxa caught as by‐catch in the southern Gulf of California shrimp trawl fishery: Diplectrum spp., Prionotus stephanophrys, Pseudupeneus grandisquamis and Stellifer illecebrosus. We then used these results to explore the potential for trawler impacts on these taxa, and the possible placement and timing of fishing restrictions to mitigate potential impacts. Our results confirmed, however, the difficulties of regulating such fisheries for multiple by‐catch species, in that their distribution patterns varied in a way that precludes a 'one size fits all' solution. The four taxa analysed – only four of the hundreds obtained as by‐catch in this fishery – exhibited distribution patterns at odds with one another. Observed intra‐ and inter‐taxon variations in the relative importance of different spatial and temporal variables in determining occurrence, density and size argues that several permanent trawl closures covering a range of depths and latitudes, and not temporal ones, might be required to mitigate potential trawl impacts on these fishes. Our results also suggested a higher potential for impact on S. illecebrosus than the other taxa: occurrence and density of the former declined, whereas occurrence or density of the others increased across the study area as the fishing season progressed.


The local public administration is one of the key social actors in the sustainable development and transformation of the community, assuming its constant adaptation to new conditions at the economic, political and social level. The present paper aims to analysis the connections between the development of administrative capacity and modernization of local communities in Romania. Assumptions main research are the need to develop the administrative capacity to support the modernization of local communities and the mutual influence between this two processes. It also takes into consideration to use the analyses for improving administrative capacity made by international bodies like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Commission. This paper aims to contribute to the development of literature in the field considering the specificity of the modernization process in rural communities in Central and Eastern Europe, which is based on the transformation of public administration and connecting it to the needs of citizens. The target group of readers is represented by researchers, who have the opportunity to develop new mechanisms for the improvement of the administrative capacity but also by practitioners in the field who can implement new development strategies for the local public administration. Quantitative and qualitative tools will be used for the theoretical and practical examination of the way in which Romania can develop by contributing to the general welfare of the citizens. The originality of the paper is the rationale, description and operationalize a framework of reference for highlighting the impact of modernization on local administrative capacity development. To this we add an empirical analysis conducted for a local community in Romania.


The Group Capability Model (GCM) is a software tool that allows an organization, from first line management to senior executive, to monitor and track the health (capability) of various groups in performing their contractual obligations. GCM calculates a Group Capability Index (GCI) by comparing actual head counts, certifications, and/or skills within a group. The model can also be used to simulate the effects of employee usage, training, and attrition on the GCI. A universal tool and common method was required due to the high risk of losing skills necessary to complete the Space Shuttle Program and meet the needs of the Constellation Program. During this transition from one space vehicle to another, the uncertainty among the critical skilled workforce is high and attrition has the potential to be unmanageable. GCM allows managers to establish requirements for their group in the form of head counts, certification requirements, or skills requirements. GCM then calculates a Group Capability Index (GCI), where a score of 1 indicates that the group is at the appropriate level; anything less than 1 indicates a potential for improvement. This shows the health of a group, both currently and over time. GCM accepts as input head count, certification needs, critical needs, competency needs, and competency critical needs. In addition, team members are categorized by years of experience, percentage of contribution, ex-members and their skills, availability, function, and in-work requirements. Outputs are several reports, including actual vs. required head count, actual vs. required certificates, CGI change over time (by month), and more. The program stores historical data for summary and historical reporting, which is done via an Excel spreadsheet that is color-coded to show health statistics at a glance. GCM has provided the Shuttle Ground Processing team with a quantifiable, repeatable approach to assessing and managing the skills in their organization. They now have a common frame of reference across NASA/contractor lines to communicate and mitigate any critical skills concerns.


RNA modification plays an important role in modulating host-pathogen interaction. Flavivirus NS5 protein encodes N-7 and 2′-O methyltransferase activities that are required for the formation of 5′ type I cap (m7GpppAm) of viral RNA genome. Here we reported, for the first time, that flavivirus NS5 has a novel internal RNA methylation activity. Recombinant NS5 proteins of West Nile virus and Dengue virus (serotype 4; DENV-4) specifically methylates polyA, but not polyG, polyC, or polyU, indicating that the methylation occurs at adenosine residue. RNAs with internal adenosines substituted with 2′-O-methyladenosines are not active substrates for internal methylation, whereas RNAs with adenosines substituted with N6-methyladenosines can be efficiently methylated, suggesting that the internal methylation occurs at the 2′-OH position of adenosine. Mass spectroscopic analysis further demonstrated that the internal methylation product is 2′-O-methyladenosine. Importantly, genomic RNA purified from DENV virion contains 2′-O-methyladenosine. The 2′-O methylation of internal adenosine does not require specific RNA sequence since recombinant methyltransferase of DENV-4 can efficiently methylate RNAs spanning different regions of viral genome, host ribosomal RNAs, and polyA. Structure-based mutagenesis results indicate that K61-D146-K181-E217 tetrad of DENV-4 methyltransferase forms the active site of internal methylation activity; in addition, distinct residues within the methyl donor (S-adenosyl-L-methionine) pocket, GTP pocket, and RNA-binding site are critical for the internal methylation activity. Functional analysis using flavivirus replicon and genome-length RNAs showed that internal methylation attenuated viral RNA translation and replication. Polymerase assay revealed that internal 2′-O-methyladenosine reduces the efficiency of RNA elongation. Collectively, our results demonstrate that flavivirus NS5 performs 2′-O methylation of internal adenosine of viral RNA in vivo and host ribosomal RNAs in vitro.


Working-class literature, not unnaturally, is primarily investigated from political, ideological, and sociological points of view, while literary and aesthetic perspectives have been played down. Admirable efforts have been made, indeed, but they have been oriented towards modern and modernistic concepts of the literary, that have not always been compatible with the peculiarities of working-class literature - autodidactic and developed at the margins of canonized literary tradition as it often is. Therefore working-class literature often has been conceived as "artistically immature" or "aesthetically defective". But no thing is made for the sake of its defects but for the sake of its merits, as already the wise critic Thomas Thorild maintained. And each thing should be taken for what it is and never for what it is not (as he also maintained). The overarching issue of this paper is therefore: what kind of literature is working-class literature, and what are the particular merits of it? Since my space is restricted my discussion will focus on narrative prose. A case in point is a narrative by Maria Sandel, belonging to the first generation of Swedish working-class prose c. 1910-25. This prose is interesting, since in time it coincides with the most explosive phase of the Modernization process, a peak of industrialization, urbanization, proletarization, secularization, democratization, massmedialization, and the like. At the continent the various modernist movements are rising, but in Sweden we have fusty idealism and a new bourgeois realism, at the same time as popular mass literature, folk-high schools and above all popular movements. What kind of proletarian literature could grow from such circumstances? How does it relate to the literary, and how should it be described? I want to try the possibility of a new sensuous and pragmatic concept of literature, based on hybridity: concrete vivid depiction marked by mixture of style and genre and a strong address. The depiction presents the allegedly well known in a recognizable way, but - I imagine - simultaneously defamiliarizes it by displaying it in hybrid forms. This way the depiction also has a rhetorical function, a dimension of address aiming at internalizing ideas, conjuring up change of vision and founding pragmatic attitudes - rather than realizing Kantian principles of disinterested pleasure and literary autonomy. The theoretical perspectives that I want to try are mainly derived from Peter Widdowson (the concept of the literary), and Sara Danius/ Jacques Ranciere (the concept of the sensuous).


The progress in imaging techniques have allowed the study of various aspect of cellular mechanisms. To isolate individual cells in live imaging data, we introduce an elegant image segmentation framework that effectively extracts cell boundaries, even in the presence of poor edge details. Our approach works in two stages. First, we estimate pixel interior/border/exterior class probabilities using random ferns. Then, we use an energy minimization framework to compute boundaries whose localization is compliant with the pixel class probabilities. We validate our approach on a manually annotated dataset.


Web-based malware equipped with stealthy cloaking and obfuscation techniques is becoming more sophisticated nowadays. In this paper, we propose J-FORCE, a crash-free forced JavaScript execution engine to systematically explore possible execution paths and reveal malicious behaviors in such malware. In particular, J-FORCE records branch outcomes and mutates them for further explorations. J-FORCE inspects function parameter values that may reveal malicious intentions and expose suspicious DOM injections. We addressed a number of technical challenges encountered. For instance, we keep track of missing objects and DOM elements, and create them on demand. To verify the efficacy of our techniques, we apply J-FORCE to detect Exploit Kit (EK) attacks and malicious Chrome extensions. We observe that J-FORCE is more effective compared to the existing tools.


The block diagonalization (BD) scheme is a low-complexity suboptimal precoding technique for multiuser multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) downlink channels, which completely precancels the multiuser interference. Accordingly, the precoder of each user lies in the null space of other users' channel matrices. In this paper, we propose an iterative algorithm using QR decompositions (QRDs) to compute the precoders. Specifically, to avoid dealing with a large concatenated matrix, we apply the QRD to a sequence of matrices of lower dimensions. One problem of BD schemes is that the number of users that can be simultaneously supported is limited due to zero interference constraints. When the number of users is large, a set of users must be selected, and selection algorithms should be designed to exploit the multiuser diversity gain. Finding the optimal set of users requires an exhaustive search, which has too high computational complexity to be practically useful. Based on the iterative precoder design, this paper proposes a low-complexity user selection algorithm using a greedy method, in which the precoders of selected users are recursively updated after each selection step. The selection metric of the proposed scheduling algorithm relies on the product of the squared row norms of the effective channel matrices, which is related to the eigenvalues by the Hadamard and Schur inequalities. An asymptotic analysis is provided to show that the proposed algorithm can achieve the optimal sum rate scaling of the MIMO broadcast channel. The numerical results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a good trade-off between sum rate performance and computational complexity. When users suffer different channel conditions, providing fairness among users is of critical importance. To address this problem, we also propose two fair scheduling (FS) algorithms, one imposing fairness in the approximation of the data rate, and another directly imposing fairness in the product of the squared row norms of the effective channel matrices.


The term 'Sustainability' is one of the critical issues that caused multiple repercussions in the global arena. The concept focuses economic, social and environment well
being of a whole nation and there is an identical link between construction activities and the environment. Construction products and processes create considerable impact on the environment and it is significant to protect the environment for our future generations too. Construction site waste is one of the big issues that diminishes the environment soundness. Therefore minimization of site waste is becoming extremely attractive to management as a strategy to save costs while improving overall sustainability. The success in site waste reduction usually depends upon worker awareness and the commitment of the management. Most of the construction firms are not aware of waste minimization strategies at all. Therefore
it is inevitable to suggest some ways or strategies for construction firms to reduce construction site waste. Identification of types and sources of waste would lead to suggesting ways and strategies to reduce construction site waste. Further, it was identified that poor performance of
workers directly contributes to the generation of waste in construction. This paper is focused on how environment sustainability could be achieved through minimizing site waste and the factors that affected the generation of site waste in the Sri Lankan context. A comprehensive literature survey and a structured questionnaire survey were carried out to achieve the research aim of this study.

Keywords - Construction Materials, Labour, Site Waste, Sri Lanka, Sustainable Construction.


Adverse selection induces economic limits to market substitution. If quality uncertainty persists in both Internet and traditional marketplaces, a second-best equilibrium with parallel market segments may arise. The information cost advantage of one marketplace is exactly offset by a more severe adverse selection problem associated with non-observable quality variables. The electronic marketplace providing dominant search means contains all segments, while the traditional market may lack some segments. These missing segments are characterized by low quality expectations given the set of advertised quality signals. The analytic results are confirmed by an empirical investigation of used-car trade. Thus the study also provides an estimate of the price differential between the electronic and the traditional marketplace.


In order to share risk, protection buyers trade derivatives with protection sellers. Protection sellers' actions affect the riskiness of their assets, which can create counterparty risk. Because these actions are unobservable, moral hazard limits risk sharing. To mitigate this problem, privately optimal derivative contracts involve variation margins. When margins are called, protection sellers must liquidate some assets, depressing asset prices. This tightens the incentive constraints of other protection sellers and reduces their ability to provide insurance. Despite this fire-sale externality, equilibrium is information-constrained efficient. Investors, who benefit from buying assets at fire-sale prices, optimally supply insurance against the risk of fire sales.


In image categorization the goal is to decide if an image belongs to a certain category or not. A binary classifier can be learned from manually labeled images; while using more labeled examples improves performance, obtaining the image labels is a time consuming process. We are interested in how other sources of information can aid the learning process given a fixed amount of labeled images. In particular, we consider a scenario where keywords are associated with the training images, e.g. as found on photo sharing websites. The goal is to learn a classifier for images alone, but we will use the keywords associated with labeled and unlabeled images to improve the classifier using semi-supervised learning. We first learn a strong Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) classifier using both the image content and keywords, and use it to score unlabeled images. We then learn classifiers on visual features only, either support vector machines (SVM) or least-squares regression (LSR), from the MKL output values on both the labeled and unlabeled images. In our experiments on 20 classes from the PASCAL VOC'07 set and 38 from the MIR Flickr set, we demonstrate the benefit of our semi-supervised approach over only using the labeled images. We also present results for a scenario where we do not use any manual labeling but directly learn classifiers from the image tags. The semi-supervised approach also improves classification accuracy in this case.


Liplappen and nonna's : presentation of a comparative study to be conducted
This is an abstract of the paper I gave on 13 September 2013, the day on which the Elisabeth Eybers bursary was awarded to me. This award gives me the opportunity to conduct a comparative and transnational study on the representations of interraciality in South African and Dutch-Indies narratives written between1900 and 1950. The concept of "interracial representation" encompasses images of "mixed race" as well as of meetings and contacts, including intimate and domestic relationships between characters of different racial backgrounds. The aim is to show a part of the similarities and cultural interactions and affiliations between the Netherlands and South Africa.
Earlier, I have investigated the representations of "Indo's" and "mixed race" in (post)colonial Dutch films and literature, that is to say, the narratives written about the former Dutch East Indies (nowadays the Republic of Indonesia) both in the colonial and postcolonial era. This research as well as my introductory readings of Afrikaans literature have convinced me, in accordance with V.A. February's remarks in Mind your Colour (1981), that there is a fascinating relation between Afrikaans and Dutch literature in terms of representations of "coloured" and "Indo" people:... it would be interesting to see to what extent the image of the Indo, that is, the Dutch Indonesian half-breed, shows any comparison with that of the 'Cape coloured' in South Africa [...] In fact, reading through novels dealing with the Indo, at times one is forcibly reminded of the South African literary scene, and left with just a sneaking suspicion that the inhabitants at the Cape and the Afrikaner in particular, may have unconsciously inherited a Dutch literary tradition via the East Indies. (February 1981:55)
In my comparative study I focus on the first half of the twentieth century when ideas on "racial purity" and "racial mixture" changed drastically and became much more harsh than before, both in South Africa and the Dutch East Indies.
Authors of fiction in those years modelled their work according to European examples of literature, particularly to styles of naturalism and realism, as well as British class novels in which the complexity of colonial power, desires and intimacies come to the fore. In order to counter the stereotypes in literary accounts which were mostly written by white authors I also plan to analyse family photographs, taken by "coloured" and "Indo" people themselves to take into account the performance of (desired) identities and self images.


Ever since establishment of portfolio selection theory by Markowitz (1952), the use of Standard deviation as a measure of risk has heavily been criticized. The aim of this thesis is to refine classical portfolio selection and asset pricing theory by using a downside deviation risk measure. It is defined as below-target semideviation and referred to as downside risk.
Downside efficient portfolios maximize expected payoff given a prescribed upper bound for downside risk and, thus, are analogs to mean-variance efficient portfolios in the sense of Markowitz. The present thesis provides an alternative proof of existence of downside efficient portfolios and identifies a sufficient criterion for their uniqueness. A specific representation of their form brings structural similarity to mean-variance efficient portfolios to light. Eventually, a separation theorem for the existence and uniqueness of portfolios that maximize the trade-off between downside risk and return is established.
The notion of a downside risk asset market equilibrium (DRAME) in an asset market with finitely many investors is introduced. This thesis addresses the existence and uniqueness Problem of such equilibria and specifies a DRAME pricing formula. In contrast to prices obtained from the mean-variance CAPM pricing formula, DRAME prices are arbitrage-free and strictly positive.
The final part of this thesis addresses practical issues. An algorithm that allows for an effective computation of downside efficient portfolios from simulated or historical financial data is outlined. In a simulation study, it is revealed in which scenarios downside efficient portfolios
outperform mean-variance efficient portfolios.


The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine what prospective mathematics teachers noticed with respect to the student roles underlined in the elementary mathematics program when video-case based pedagogy was employed in teacher education. The theoretical framework employed in this study was Learning to Notice framework developed by van Es and Sherin (2002). The data was collected through reflection papers and interviews from 15 senior prospective teachers enrolled at a large state university. The findings indicated that prospective teachers could notice several issues related to student roles underlined in the elementary mathematics program when they were provided with a learning environment to analyze real mathematics classrooms.


Copyright owners who are affirmatively engaged in diminishing the scope of educational fair use are overwhelmingly publishers, rather than authors. These publishers attack educational fair use in several different, somewhat internally inconsistent ways. First, they argue that fair use reduces the profitability of their publications, and thereby reduces monetary incentives to undertake the publication of new works. In this way they characterize educational fair use as a threat to the creation and dissemination of future works of scholarship, rather than an escape valve through which current knowledge embodied in prohibitively expensive books and periodicals can leak to the impoverished. Publishers make this argument despite clear evidence that academic writers do not require monetary incentives to produce scholarly works. In fact, many academic writers prefer a broad definition of fair use, which makes others' works available to them, and perpetuates wide dissemination of their writings, even if it costs them royalty payments. Secondly, publishers like to cloak their self-interest by regularly and hypocritically raising the specter of the impoverished author, starving in a garret because educational fair use deprives her of the royalties she needs to live on. However, if authors are underpaid, it is usually because publishers use their strong bargaining positions to negotiate publishing contracts that are unfavorable to authors. Publishers have not demonstrated that the photocopy royalties they collect brighten the financial picture of individual authors in any significant way. Third, publishers like to characterize their profits as rewards for risk taking. Whether publishers actually take a lot of risks in the field of academic publishing is questionable. Nonprofit academic publishers are often subsidized. Commercial publishers are free to undertake only projects that are likely to be profitable. They can recruit name scholars to author or co-author textbooks; they can reissue popular textbooks in new edition formats to prevent competition from used book sales. They can heavily market a tome, or decline to do so. The same work that is marginal with respect to book sales is likely to be similarly marginal with respect to permission fees. Books that sell a lot of copies are the books that are most likely to generate significant permission fees, unless a publisher chooses to deny permission to photocopy excerpts in order to maximize the number of students who are required to purchase the entire book. An author who has devoted two years of her life to a manuscript has arguably invested a lot more in a book than her publisher, even though her time does not intuitively convert into high dollar figures. Yet, any preference she may have with respect to maximizing dissemination of her work, rather than its profitability, will largely be ignored, or even contravened. Over the past decade the scope of educational fair use has been dramatically compressed by judges who ignore the external benefits of fair use, and respond only to the lost dollars publishers ascribe to the doctrine. Publishers in turn have used favorable court decisions and the threat of expensive litigation to coerce commercial photocopiers to pay permission fees for the privilege of making any copies at all, whether or not the use might be a fair one, and in some cases even when the work is not eligible for copyright protection. Fearful and litigation averse educational institutions attempt to simultaneously mollify publishers and protect themselves by adopting copyright policies that define a minimal scope of educational fair use, and make individual faculty members liable for any infringing photocopying activity outside of this petite orbit. The incredible shrinking affirmative defense of educational fair use is being compacted into ineffectuality by profit minded copyright owners, whose neutral desire to maximize revenues fosters intense opposition to the doctrine of fair use. Diminution of educational fair use renders educators susceptible to liability for copyright infringement for engaging in unremarkable acts of duplication and distribution of idea-bearing materials for educational purposes. The ability of educators to use and disperse information, and to expose students to a wide range of perspectives on any given subject, is threatened by the ongoing contraction of the scope of educational fair use. However, decompression of the doctrine will likely only be effectuated by appropriate Supreme Court action.


The CubeSat community has begun to develop and implement propulsion systems. This movement represents a new capability which may satisfy mission needs such as orbital and constellation maintenance, formation flight, de-orbit, and even interplanetary travel. With the freedom and capability granted by propulsion systems, CubeSat providers must accept new responsibilities in proportion to the potential hazards that propulsion systems may present. The Cal Poly CubeSat program publishes and maintains the CubeSat Design Specification (CDS). They wish to help the CubeSat community to safety and responsibly expand its capabilities to include propulsive designs. For this reason, the author embarked on the task of developing a draft of safety standards CubeSat propulsion systems. Wherever possible, the standards are based on existing documents. The author provides an overview of certain concepts in systems safety with respect to the classification of hazards, determination of required fault tolerances, and the use of inhibits to satisfy fault tolerance requirements. The author discusses hazards that could exist during ground operations and through launch with respect to hazardous materials and pressure systems. Most of the standards related to Range Safety are drawn from AFSPCMAN 91-710. Having reviewed a range of hypothetical propulsion system architectures with an engineer from Range Safety at Vandenberg Air Force Base, the author compiled a case study. The author discusses many aspects of orbital safety. The author discusses the risk of collision with the host vehicle and with third party satellites along with the trackability of CubeSats using propulsion systems. Some recommendations are given for working with the Joint Functional Component Command for Space (JFCC SPACE), thanks to the input of two engineers who work with the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC). Command Security is discussed as an important aspect of a mission which implements a propulsion system. The author also discusses End-of-Life procedures such as safing and de-orbit operations. The orbital safety standards are intended to promote "good citizenship." The author steps through each proposed standard and offers justification. The author is confident that these standards will set the stage for a dialogue in the CubeSat community which will lead to the formulation of a reasonable and comprehensive set of standards. The author hopes that the discussions given throughout this document will help CubeSat developers to visualize the path to flight readiness so that they can get started on the right foot.


Although faculty members are regarded as one of the main agents of internationalization in higher education (IHE), research has focused on the upper levels of analysis (e.g. country or educational institution) rather than the individual. The purpose of this paper is to draw from social exchange theory (SET) to examine how the perceptions of costs and expected rewards affect faculty members' choices of international activities.,This qualitative study adopted as main methods a review of the literature on IHE and in-depth interviews based on a semi-structured script with an international sample. A sample of 16 researches was selected for interview using the snowball technique of sample selection.,The authors verified that faculty may seek internationalization in search of job opportunities, greater social approval, greater autonomy and greater security. On the other hand, temporal, monetary, psychological and physical costs discourage faculty members from seeking international insertion. Based on these tradeoffs, our findings suggest that although the basic tenets of SET do apply, the theory does not explicitly address two issues: the fact that costs and rewards are intricately related, and the apparent mismatch between (short-term) costs and (long-term) expected rewards.,This study contributes to the IHE literature by highlighting the crucial role of faculty – that is, the level of analysis of the individual – which has been under-researched and by setting out the reasoning that supports the decision of faculty members to seek (higher) international insertion. Furthermore, this study extends SET as a plausible explanation for the self-internationalization decision by scholars.


The school history textbook is gaining critical scholarly attention globally as a contested medium of conflicting ideologies and interests. At issue are the roles and
the consequences of education and textbooks in influencing the ethos of future citizens. The Russian Federation and Japan are two nations that continue to receive strong criticism over their history textbooks from international and domestic critics for using them to legitimise the ruling government, rather than to foster critical understanding of the past. At the same time, both nations equally face criticism from rightist groups in their own countries for not using history textbooks well enough to
legitimise the ruling elites, state power and to promote patriotism. This article provides comparative analyses of narrative strategies and ideologies used in 44 history textbooks, 22 from each country, approved by Russian and Japanese Ministries of Education between 1997 and 2010. Under scrutiny are the causes, the course and the consequences of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), the first military conflict of the 20th century where interests of major political players, the United States, Britain, France, Russia and Japan collided. The aim is to reveal the historical perspectives promoted either overtly or covertly in respective textbooks' narratives. By choosing a topic that is pertinent to both nations' representation of the direct military conflict between them, this study may help us to better appreciate the legacy of the ambivalent relations between Japan and Russia.


Burroughs' first novel, a largely autobiographical account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures and relapses, remains the most unflinching, unsentimental account of addiction ever written. Through junk neighbourhoods in New York, New Orleans and Mexico City, through time spent kicking, time spent dealing and time rolling drunks for money, through junk sickness and a sanatorium, "Junky" is a field report (by a writer trained in anthropology at Harvard) from the American post-war drug underground. A cult classic, it has influenced generations of writers with its raw, sparse and unapologetic tone. This definitive edition painstakingly recreates the author's original text word for word.


Information, like other economic assets, is a precious asset for an enterprise so it must be properly protected. The basic solution to protect is to provide "information security". To understand information technology security, it is fundamental to understand the importance of IT management and governance concepts. In this study, the most widely practised and popular information technology security, management and governance standards, ISO 27001 standard, COBIT (Control Objectives for Information Technology) and ITIL (Information Technologies Infrastructure Library), will be investigated and compared.


Regulatory T cells (Tregs) play a critical role in maintaining immune tolerance and preventing autoimmune disease. Tregs express the transcription factor Foxp3, which acts as a master regulator of their differentiation and controls their capacity to suppress T cell responses. Tregs have an intrinsically anergic phenotype and do not produce IL-2 or proliferate upon stimulation ex vivo. Recent studies identified that Helios, a member of the Ikaros family of transcription factors, is expressed in Tregs. However, its specific function is not fully understood. In this study, we show that Helios regulates IL-2 production in Tregs by suppressing Il2 gene transcription. Loss of Helios in Tregs breaks their anergic phenotype and results in derepression of the Il2 locus, allowing Tregs to display increased baseline proliferation and to produce IL-2 following stimulation. Conversely, forced expression of Helios in CD4+Foxp3− T cells results in a loss of their normal ability to produce IL-2. Helios acts by binding to the Il2 promoter and inducing epigenetic modifications that include histone deacetylation. We also show that loss of Helios in Tregs results in decreased Foxp3 binding to the Il2 promoter, indicating that Helios promotes binding of Foxp3 to the Il2 promoter. Interestingly, the loss of Helios in Tregs also causes a decrease in suppressive capacity. Our results identify Helios as a key regulator of Il2 expression in Tregs, contributing to the maintenance of the anergic phenotype.


Biodiesel, defined as the alkyl esters (usually methyl esters) of vegetable oils, is miscible with conventional petroleum diesel fuel at all blend levels. Blends of biodiesel with conventional petroleum diesel fuel represent a common utilization of biodiesel. The Malaysian Government has initiated the implementation of palm biodiesel since 2007 and the proposed blend is B5. Accordingly, there is interest and need for the development of methods for determining or verifying the blend level of biodiesel in petroleum diesel. To date, the most widely used and acceptable method for determination of biodiesel blend levels is using IR spectroscopy.
The present study investigated the determination of blend level of palm biodiesel in petroleum diesel fuel in accordance to European Standard EN 14078:2003. The method was established for the determination of fatty acid methyl esters (FAME) in middle distillates—Infrared spectroscopy method. Principal component analysis of the region 1670 cm-1 to 1820 cm–1 and maximum carbonyl (C=O) absorption peak at 1745 cm-1 ± 5 cm-1 could distinguish blends of petroleum diesel fuel with palm biodiesel. The calibration model was built by following the parameters specified in EN 14078:2003. The peak height was correlated against the FAME concentration in g/L, and the calibration is reported. In the present study, the linearity over the selected range is very good, as evidenced by the R2 value of 0.9999. By using the data from the calibration function, the blend level of palm biodiesel in petroleum diesel was determined easily.
Up to 0.2 % error occurs between the measured and an estimated value when used this method to determining the FAME contents in the palm biodiesel-petroleum diesel fuel blend.
The adulteration of biodiesel/petroleum diesel blends by palm cooking oil was also successful traced by using thin layer chromatography (TLC) method. Good separation between methyl ester and glycerol was traced using TLC silica gel plate and solvent system chloroform : hexane (1:1 v/v). The amount of acylglycerols adulteration as low as 0.05% can be detected. The detection of adulterant such as acylglycerols in palm biodiesel and petroleum diesel fuel blends via TLC method is a useful and rapid method. It is highly recommended for enforcement exercise during implementation of palm biodiesel blend as there is a high possibility that acylglycerols may be used as an adulterant due to the fact it is cheaper than FAME and it cannot be differentiated from FAME due to the presence of carbonyl functional group.


For many children, the circumstances of their birth and earliest years have lifelong consequences. Where and to whom a child is born can predict her economic and social outcomes later in life. Children born to parents who invest emotional and economic resources in their development tend to become healthy and productive adults, passing on the advantages that such investments bring to their own children. Children born in adverse circumstances, where poverty and stress limit possibilities and aspirations, fare less well. The odds are stacked against them from the beginning. Chances are that neither school nor any life experience will level the playing field.


Recent attention to education in the United States represents the merger of concern about efficiency of the educational system and concern about the distribution of educational services, particularly along racial and ethnic lines. However, there is very little guidance on how to satisfy any efficiency or distributional goals through public policy because extremely little is known about the relationship between inputs-particularly inputs available for public policy--and outputs of the educational process. Educational research has been slow in providing definitive answers to public policy questions for several understandable reasons: the subject of the educational process is extremely complex, especially as regards the physiological and psychological aspects; any theoretical development of a learning theory amenable to analysis for policy purposes is absent; and the required data traditionally have not been collected. Previous analyses have yielded some suggestive beginnings, and have provided insights into how the analysis should proceed. This analysis represents a next step of statistical inquiry into the educational process from a public policy point of view. Three fundamental educational policy questions are addressed: (1) do teachers count? (2) are schools operated efficiently now? (3) what characteristics of teachers and classrooms are important? Past studies have given ambiguous answers to these questions, largely due to inadequate data. Specifically, no data set which supplies accurate historical information on educational inputs at an individual level has been available. This study attempts to provide more conclusive answers by remedying the most glaring data problems for a set of students (third graders) in one school district.


In this paper we analyze the temporal profile of crime in the urban context of Barcelona (Spain) for the period 2007–2011 using a unique micro dataset with police reported crime. Additionally, we assess the temporal effect that a leisure activity clearly bounded in time, namely the matches played by Football Club Barcelona (FCB), exert on criminal activities. We obtain a detailed time profile for the crime recorded in the city of Barcelona and the displacement effect attributable to the football matches. The latter was found to be notable in the case of thefts, criminal damage, robberies and gender violence. Instances of gender violence were more prevalent after a FCB home defeat.


Blastocystis spp. are widely prevalent extra cellular, non-motile anerobic protists that inhabit the gastrointestinal tract. Although Blastocystis spp. have been associated with gastrointestinal symptoms, irritable bowel syndrome and urticaria, their clinical significance has remained controversial. We established an ex vivo mouse explant model to characterize adhesion in the context of tissue architecture and presence of the mucin layer. Using confocal microscopy with tissue whole mounts and two axenic isolates of Blastocystis spp., subtype 7 with notable differences in adhesion to intestinal epithelial cells (IEC), isolate B (ST7-B) and isolate H (more adhesive, ST7-H), we showed that adhesion is both isolate dependent and tissue trophic. The more adhesive isolate, ST7-H was found to bind preferentially to the colon tissue than caecum and terminal ileum. Both isolates were also found to have mucinolytic effects. We then adapted a DSS colitis mouse model as a susceptible model to study colonization and acute infection by intra-caecal inoculation of trophic Blastocystis spp.cells. We found that the more adhesive isolate ST7-H was also a better colonizer with more mice shedding parasites and for a longer duration than ST7-B. Adhesion and colonization was also associated with increased virulence as ST7-H infected mice showed greater tissue damage than ST7-B. Both the ex vivo and in vivo models used in this study showed that Blastocystis spp. remain luminal and predominantly associated with mucin. This was further confirmed using colonic loop experiments. We were also successfully able to re-infect a second batch of mice with ST7-H isolates obtained from fecal cultures and demonstrated similar histopathological findings and tissue damage thereby coming closer to proving Koch's postulates for this parasite.


The purpose of this study was to develop the 'Nursing Home/Hostel: Quality of Life Index' (NH/H:QLI}. This was to be a tool which would indicate the 'quality of life' of elderly residents in geriatric carE institutions, such as nursing homes and hostels. Several means were employed to establish the validity of the tool. These were: consultation with experienced geriatric nurses, an examination of similar types of tools and correlation with another already established tool; Bigot's Life Satisfaction Index. The reliability of the NH/H:QLI was established by determining how well the scores correlated on a test re-test format. Kendall's Tau was used for this purpose. Alpha had been set at 0.05. The tool itself consisted of two parts. Part one examined seven major categories. These were; autonomy, life satisfaction, self-esteem, recreation, health, interpersonal relationships and the care institution. Each category had four items related to it. This resulted in there being twenty eight items in part one. Part two consisted of only three items. These were general in nature. The study was conducted in a single hostel for the aged. There ~ a small pilot study. Nine subjects took part in the study itself; 1 male and 8 females. Their ages ranged from 81 to 98 years. The length of stay varied from 1 to 13 years. Care was taken to exclude subjects suffering from any intellectual impairment as they would ~nvalidate the data. The results proved to be encouraging, but l\Ot conclusive. With· the exception of one group, the various correlations of the test and re-test were significant at the 0.05 level. However, the results of the NH/H:QLI did not correlate with the Bigot's Life Satisfaction Index. Of the two sub-problems; the NH/H: QLI was able to indicate how the general quality of life of those in the sample population fared. The NH/H:QLI was also able to indicate which of the seven major categories were acting to improve the quality of life and which were acting to decrease it.


It is well known that natural language models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which are mostly input-specific in nature. Recently, it has been shown that there also exist input-agnostic attacks in NLP models, called universal adversarial triggers. However, existing methods to craft universal triggers are data intensive. They require large amounts of data samples to generate adversarial triggers, which are typically inaccessible by attackers. For instance, previous works take 3000 data samples per class for the SNLI dataset to generate adversarial triggers. In this paper, we present a novel data-free approach, MINIMAL, to mine input-agnostic adversarial triggers from models. Using the triggers produced with our data-free algorithm, we reduce the accuracy of Stanford Sentiment Treebank's positive class from 93.6% to 9.6%. Similarly, for the Stanford Natural LanguageInference (SNLI), our single-word trigger reduces the accuracy of the entailment class from 90.95% to less than 0.6%. Despite being completely data-free, we get equivalent accuracy drops as data-dependent methods


Leaf extract of 12 medicinal plants were obtained by using 10mM sodium phosphate buffer and studied for their antibacterial activity against 6 cariogenic pathogens. Among them, the extract from Streblus asper showed the most intensive activity. Antibacterial activity of Streblus asper was investigated by the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) test and the viable cell count method. MIC of Streblus asper against Candida albicans causing dental caries was determined to be 2.5 μg/ml. The kinetic study showed that Streblus asper completely inactivated C. albicans at the concentration 50μg/ml in 15hours.Hemolytic study of the Streblus asper plant leaf protein gives HC50 value at a very high range than that of the MIC values against C. albicans of the organisms and thus flourish its application as successful pharmaceutical drug in practice.


This paper proposes an analytical framework describing a triangle relationship between tourism development (TD), quality of life (QoL) of residents, and shocks or disturbances (SoD). The impacts of TD on QoL have been studied extensively in the literature, but the possible effects of QoL on TD have only been implicitly considered in some studies. Moreover, the influence of SoD on both TD and QoL has only rarely been covered in the literature, and, consequently, the overall relation between these three constructs has remained unstructured and incompletely formulated. The proposed framework contributes to a better understanding of both TD and QoL, thereby providing opportunities for improving both. Additionally, understanding the possible implications of SoD for both TD and QoL provides prospects for improving the preparedness and responsiveness of actors, while potentially speeding up the recovery after unexpected events.


The Australian eastern seaboard is a distinct climate entity from the interior of the continent, with different climatic influences on each side of the Great Dividing Range. Therefore, it is plausible that downscaling of global climate models could reveal meaningful regional detail, or 'added value', in the climate change signal of mean rainfall change in eastern Australia un-der future scenarios. However, because downscaling is typically done using a limited set of global climate models and downscaling methods, the results from a downscaling study may not represent the range of uncertainty in plausible projected change for a region suggested by the ensemble of host global climate models. A complete and unbiased representation of the plausible changes in the climate is essential in producing climate projections useful for future planning. As part of this aim it is important to quantify any differences in the change signal between global climate models and downscaling, and understand the cause of these differ-ences in terms of plausible added regional detail in the climate change signal, the impact of sub-sampling global climate models and the effect of the downscaling models themselves. Here we examine rainfall projections in eastern Australia under a high emissions scenario by late in the century from ensembles of global climate models, two dynamical downscaling models and one statistical downscaling model. We find no cases where all three downscaling methods show the same clear regional spatial detail in the change signal that is distinct from the host models. However, some downscaled projections suggest that the eastern seaboard could see little change in spring rainfall, in contrast to the substantial rainfall decrease inland. The change signal in the downscaled outputs is broadly similar at the large scale in the various model outputs, with a few notable exceptions. For example, the model median from dynamical downscaling projects a rainfall increase over the entirety of eastern Australia in autumn that is greater than the global models. Also, there are some instances where a downscaling method produces changes outside the range of host models over eastern Australia as a whole, thus ex-panding the projected range of uncertainty. Results are particularly uncertain for summer, where no two downscaling studies clearly agree. There are also some confounding factors from the model configuration used in downscaling, where the particular zones used for statis-tical models and the model components used in dynamical models have an influence on results and produce additional uncertainty.


The most dramatic progress in the restoration of hearing takes place in the first months after cochlear implantation. To map the brain activity underlying this process, we used positron emission tomography at three time points: within 14 days, three months, and six months after switch-on. Fifteen recently implanted adult implant recipients listened to running speech or speech-like noise in four sequential PET sessions at each milestone. CI listeners with postlingual hearing loss showed differential activation of left superior temporal gyrus during speech and speech-like stimuli, unlike CI listeners with prelingual hearing loss. Furthermore, Broca's area was activated as an effect of time, but only in CI listeners with postlingual hearing loss. The study demonstrates that adaptation to the cochlear implant is highly related to the history of hearing loss. Speech processing in patients whose hearing loss occurred after the acquisition of language involves brain areas associated with speech comprehension, which is not the case for patients whose hearing loss occurred before the acquisition of language. Finally, the findings confirm the key role of Broca's area in restoration of speech perception, but only in individuals in whom Broca's area has been active prior to the loss of hearing.


Cuticle, the outermost layer covering all primary aerial surfaces of vascular land plants, is essential for the protection and normal development of the plant and has as main components cutin and wax. Although numerous genes are involved in the biosynthesis and regulation of cuticular components, only few have a known function. To contribute to the understanding of regulatory mechanisms involved in cuticle development, two approaches have been taken in this project. These involved on the one hand mapping and characterizing a locus involved in wax regulation and metabolism and on the other hand, identifying putative interactors for three proteins involved in cuticular pathways. The first approach concerns the mapping and characterization of eceriferum13 (cer13) mutant Arabidopsis thaliana. Obtained in Ler-0 background by fast neutron treatment, the cer13 mutant has less epicuticular wax and its semi-dwarf phenotype, as well as its responsiveness to photoperiod indicate a possible implication in regulatory mechanisms. After fine mapping to a region of 46 candidate genes, RESURRECTION1 (RST1, AT3G27670) was selected as candidate for CER13, due to the fact that its mutation causes altered epicuticular wax phenotype. Sequence analysis of RST1, encoding a putative transmembrane protein of unknown function, revealed a 950 bp deletion resulting in a frame shift and a premature STOP codon in CER13 cDNA. The allelism test performed by crossing cer13 to rst1-3 was positive, indicating a single locus. To investigate the mechanism responsible for the reduced wax levels in cer13, we performed a wholegenome ATH1 microarray analysis. Previously, the biochemical pattern of wax composition was found to be highly similar between cer13, cer3 and cer7. Interestingly, CER3 is down-regulated in both cer13 and cer7 transcriptomes, indicating that the three genes could be involved in the same pathway. We also compared cer13-misregulated genes to a MASTA (MicroArray overlap Search Tool and Analysis) database of more than 600 microarray datasets. This analysis suggested that CER13 provides a link between wax biosynthesis and salicylic acidmediated signaling, as well as similar expression patterns to cold and drought stress. The second approach undertaken in this study consists in using three cuticular genes as baits in a Y2H cDNA library screening. All three genes that were selected for this screening are involved in the cuticle development in an unusual manner. The putative interactors found for the subtilisin-like serine protease ALE1, which is required for the proper formation of epidermis and cuticle around the embryo(Tanaka et al., 2001), are subunits a and b of the CSN5, a component of the COP9 signalosome. The putative acyl transferase CER2 is particular in that it localizes to the nucleus. A porin and two immunophilins were identified as putative interactors. The PALMITOYL PROTEIN THIOESTERASE (PPT) is a gene up-regulated in three independent cuticular mutants and an ATP-dependent helicase as well as an ADPribosilation factor were isolated as putative interactors. These results highlight the complexity of the regulatory mechanisms behind the formation and the function of the cuticle and contribute to the understanding of plant defenses.


Introduction: Fitness and skill are considered key components of basketball game play and eventual team success, with tests related to key performance indicators (KPI) validated through their ability to discriminate between levels of performance. Purpose: To compare
group performance on sport specific fitness tests and KPI-related skill tests in elite male youth basketball players from one high ranked and one low ranked basketball nation. Method: Thirty three male U16-year-old elite and/or national representative players from a high ranked basketball nation (in top five of Division A at the 2005 World Championships, n=16) and a low ranked basketball nation (between 6-10th place in Division B at the 2005 World Championships, n=17) completed four sport specific fitness tests: 20 metre sprint (Sprint); countermovement standing vertical jump (CMJ); standing vertical jump from 90 degree squat (SVJ); Abalakov jump (AJ); and three KPIrelated skill tests: ball dribbling (BD); jump shot (JS); and free throws (FT) using protocols adapted from Balciunas et al., (2006). The best score or time from three attempts was used for group comparison using paired samples t-tests (p<.05). Results: There were no significant
group differences found between the Division A and Division B teams for height (1.92±.07m vs 1.86±.09m, p=.07), weight (72.6±5.4kg; Div B 74.2±9.1kg, p=.55), 20m sprint time (3.13±.20secs vs 3.15±.09secs, p=.66), CMJ (40.4±3.1cm vs 40.5±4.8cm, p=.93), SVJ (38.5±3.3cm vs 38.9±4.7cm, p=.79) and BD (7.79±.49secs vs 7.82±.51secs). Significant group differences between the Division A and Division B nations
were apparent for BMI (19.8±1.2 kg.m2 vs 21.3±1.3kg.m2, t=3.32, p<.01, eta2=.26), AJ (50.4±3.7cms vs 45.1±5.0cms, t=3.42, p<.01, eta2=.27), JS (12.2±2.7 vs 8.5±3.6, t=3.31, p<.01, eta2=.26) and FT (22.8±3.4 vs 18.8±6.6, t=2.25, p<.05, eta2=.14). Conclusions: As a group, and being similar in positional representation, the higher ranked nation demonstrated a lower weight to height ratio, suggesting a taller and leaner player profile, although more accurate body composition measurement is recommended in future studies. The higher-ranking nation were also found to perform better at arguably the most game specific vertical jump (the Abalakov jump) and the two most 'score-outcome related' skill tests. Relative body composition and these three tests may therefore be the most useful for discrimination between levels of performance in elite male youth basketball. Without suggestion of causality, specific physical training and technique/skill practice are recommended for less successful basketball teams in order to improve these seemingly performance related fitness and skill attributes.


Time and motion study sets to be the target of any industry to improvise the plant efficiency. The actual time consumed for machining a valve time controller is been captured and comparative is studied with a predetermined motion study called MOST viz., Maynard Operation Sequence Technique. The sequence of machining is considered as the optimized sequence and operator motion, plant layout arrangement with time consumptions are evaluated for comparison.


The performance and strategies used in electron reconstruction and selection at CMS are presented based on data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb−1, collected in proton-proton collisions at √s = 8 TeV at the CERN LHC. The paper focuses on prompt isolated electrons with transverse momenta ranging from about 5 to a few 100 GeV. A detailed description is given of the algorithms used to cluster energy in the electromagnetic calorimeter and to reconstruct electron trajectories in the tracker. The electron momentum is estimated by combining the energy measurement in the calorimeter with the momentum measurement in the tracker. Benchmark selection criteria are presented, and their performances assessed using Z, Υ, and J/ψ decays into e+ + e− pairs. The spectra of the observables relevant to electron reconstruction and selection as well as their global efficiencies are well reproduced by Monte Carlo simulations. The momentum scale is calibrated with an uncertainty smaller than 0.3%. The momentum resolution for electrons produced in Z boson decays ranges from 1.7 to 4.5%, depending on electron pseudorapidity and energy loss through bremsstrahlung in the detector material.


This article demonstrates historically and statistically that conversionary Protestants (CPs) heavily influenced the rise and spread of stable democracy around the world. It argues that CPs were a crucial catalyst initiating the development and spread of religious liberty, mass education, mass printing, newspapers, voluntary organizations, and colonial reforms, thereby creating the conditions that made stable democracy more likely. Statistically, the historic prevalence of Protestant missionaries explains about half the variation in democracy in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania and removes the impact of most variables that dominate current statistical research about democracy. The association between Protestant missions and democracy is consistent in different continents and subsamples, and it is robust to more than 50 controls and to instrumental variable analyses.


Web 2.0 technologies, characterized by user-generated content, raise new challenges for copyright law. Online interactions involving reproductions of copyrighted works in blogs, online fan fiction, and online social networks do not comfortably fit existing copyright paradigms. It is unclear whether participants in Web 2.0 forums are creating derivative works, making legitimate fair uses of copyright works, or engaging in acts of digital copyright piracy and plagiarism. As online conduct becomes more interactive, copyright laws are less effective in creating clear signals about proscribed conduct. This article examines the application of copyright law to Web 2.0 technologies. It suggests that social norms must take on greater significance because of the community-oriented nature of much of today's online conduct. Social norms are significant both as a form of social regulation and because they can guide law and policy makers about appropriate new directions for copyright law reform. This article focuses on four case studies involving the popular Twilight book and movie franchise. These case studies illuminate the relationship between copyright norms and laws in the Web 2.0 context. The author draws lessons from the case studies that might inform future developments in copyright law and policy that would better align laws with expectations of Web 2.0 participants. Twilight is chosen as the focal point because of the complex online relationships that have developed in recent years between the various copyright stakeholders: the book author; movie directors; producers and distributors of the books and movies; actors and production crews; and, the fans.


Superbroadband emission from 1.0 to 1.7 μm wavelength was observed in thulium-bismuth (Tm-Bi) codoped sodium-germanium-gallate (NGG) glasses under 793 nm excitation. Efficient energy transfer process from Bi to Tm ions, with value as high as 67.7%, was achieved which is beneficial in achieving flat broadband lineshape. The large stimulated emission cross-section and measured lifetime confirm the potentials of Tm-Bi codopants as luminescence sources for superbroadband near-infrared (NIR) optical amplifiers and tunable lasers. Planar optical waveguides were fabricated successfully in the codoped NGG glasses using K(+)-Na(+) ion-exchange process.


Deep learning techniques lie at the heart of several significant AI advances in recent years including object recognition and detection, image captioning, machine translation, speech recognition and synthesis, and playing the game of Go.Automated first-order theorem provers can aid in the formalization and verification of mathematical theorems and play a crucial role in program analysis, theory reasoning, security, interpolation, and system verification.Here we suggest deep learning based guidance in the proof search of the theorem prover E. We train and compare several deep neural network models on the traces of existing ATP proofs of Mizar statements and use them to select processed clauses during proof search. We give experimental evidence that with a hybrid, two-phase approach, deep learning based guidance can significantly reduce the average number of proof search steps while increasing the number of theorems proved.Using a few proof guidance strategies that leverage deep neural networks, we have found first-order proofs of 7.36% of the first-order logic translations of the Mizar Mathematical Library theorems that did not previously have ATP generated proofs. This increases the ratio of statements in the corpus with ATP generated proofs from 56% to 59%.


Dr Adlington1 recently drew attention to the uncritical promotion of antidepressant drugs by various key opinion leaders and news outlets following the publication of a large meta-analysis by Cipriani and colleagues.2 She also pointed out that the small effect sizes were largely neglected and that most news report did not differentiate mild depression from severe depression. The crucial issues thus are whether the effects of antidepressants are clinically relevant and whether these drugs also work in mild to moderate depression.

A leading psychiatric journal recently published a meta-analysis, coauthored by Dr Cipriani, in which the authors purport that their findings demonstrate efficacy of newer generation antidepressants in both mild to moderate and severe depression.3 This article was accompanied by an editorial entitled, 'The alleged lack of efficacy of antidepressants in non-severe depression: a myth debunked'.4 Obviously, commentators and authors want to disseminate the message that antidepressants are an effective treatment for mild to moderate depression and that practice guidelines should incorporate these findings. However, neither the original paper3 nor the editorial4 does in fact provide evidence that the drugs are clinically effective for any form of depression. Instead, their conclusion appears to rely exclusively on the fact that there is a statistically significant drug-placebo difference in mean symptom change. The same misinterpretation of statistical significance also appears to have fuelled the simplistic and overoptimistic conclusions drawn from the Lancet meta-analysis by Cipriani et al .2

In the following, I will summarise the most recent meta-analytic findings and ponder on the reported average treatment effect. Equating statistical significance with a proof of drug efficacy is a scientific fallacy and I propose that a drug-placebo difference of this magnitude is evidence of a lack of efficacy.

The recent meta-analysis by Furukawa et al 3 …


Frequency-domain full-waveform inversion (FWI) is suitable for long-offset stationary-recording acquisition, since reliable subsurface models can be reconstructed with a few frequencies and attenuation is easily implemented without computational overhead. In the frequency domain, wave modeling is a Helmholtz-type boundary-value problem which requires to solve a large and sparse system of linear equations per frequency with multiple right-hand sides (sources). This system can be solved with direct or iterative methods. While the former are suitable for FWI application on 3D dense OBC acquisitions covering spatial domains of moderate size, the later should be the approach of choice for sparse node acquisitions covering large domains (more than 50 millions of unknowns). Fast convergence of iterative solvers for Helmholtz problems remains however challenging in high frequency regime due to the non definiteness of the Helmholtz operator, on one side and on the discretization constraints in order to minimize the dispersion error for a given frequency, on the other side, hence requiring efficient preconditioners. In this study, we use the Krylov subspace GMRES iterative solver combined with a two-level domain-decomposition preconditioner. Discretization relies on continuous Lagrange finite elements of order 3 on unstructured tetrahedral meshes to comply with complex geometries and adapt the size of the elements to the local wavelength ($h$-adaptivity). We assess the accuracy, the convergence and the scalability of our method with the acoustic 3D SEG/EAGE Overthrust model up to a frequency of 20~Hz.


ABSTRACT Research on grit indicates that perseverance positively predicts academic achievement. Yet, the mechanisms through which perseverance might lead to academic success remain less explored, particularly in cross-cultural research. The current study investigated such mechanisms by examining possible mediating effects of students' use of self-regulated learning strategies (control, memorisation, and elaboration) on the predictive relation of students' perseverance on their academic achievement, in students from East Asian and Anglo-Saxon English speaking Western countries. The sample came from the OECD PISA study and included 24,352 population-representative 15-year-old students from Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, and the US. Results revealed that perseverance had a more positive association with achievement in East Asian cultures than Western cultures. Control strategy was stronger positive mediators of achievement in Western countries, whereas memorisation and elaboration strategy use and instrumental motivation more negatively mediated the effect of perseverance on achievement in Western countries.


"Far China Station" was the first work to put nineteenth century American naval and diplomatic affairs in the Far East into clear perspective. Johnson examines the origins of the East India Squadron, defines its import role in the implementation of foreign policy and describes the dangers routinely faced by the squadron's ships and sailors. Great and gallant ships move through the pages from the famous "Olympia" and the majestic "Columbus" to the plodding "Palos." Naval heroes and the not-so-great, angry mobs, Japanese rebels, leaky boilers, imperious officials and infirm admirals are set against a background of uncertain anchorages, storms at sea, and the ravages of disease in the last years of the Old Navy.


"The World Economy and National Finance in Historical Perspective" is a collection of essays and lectures by the distinguished economist, Charles P. Kindleberger. The main topic is the world economy of the past, present, and future, but the author also turns his deep historical understanding on a cluster of national financial problems faced by the United States and Germany.The essays deal with the world economy and the place within it of the United States and Europe. Other topics treated include the succession of world economic leaders, and the spread of booms and crashes from one country to another, the quality of debt, financial intermediation and disintermediation, and the German inflation of 1919-23. In an important discussion of the United States' role in the world economy, the author places special emphasis on the responsibility that a country with such a leading economic role has of bringing about and maintaining economic stability.This will appeal to economists, especially economic historians, and will also be of interest to the financial community.Among the many books written by Kindleberger are "The World in Depression 1929-1939"; "Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises," and "A Financial History of Western Europe." In addition, he has published several previous collections of essays including "Europe and the Dollar"; "Economic Response, Comparative Studies in Trade, Finance and Growth; International Money"; "Multinational Excursions"; "Keynesianism vs Monetarism and Other Essays in Financial History"; "Marshall Plan Days"; "The International Economic Order: Essays on Financial Crisis" and "International Public Goods; and Historical Economics: Art or Science?"


Ethnic minorities, such as Latinx people of Hispanic or Latino origin, and women earn fewer engineering degrees than Caucasians and men. With shifting population dynamics and high demands for a technically qualified workforce, it is important to achieve broad participation in the engineering workforce by all ethnicities and both genders. Previous research has examined the knowledge of and interest in engineering among students in grades five and higher. In contrast, the present study examined elementary school students in grades K–5. The study found that older students in grades 4 and 5 had both greater knowledge of engineering occupational activities and greater interest in engineering than younger students in grades K–3. Moreover, Caucasian students had greater knowledge and interest levels than Latinx students. There were no significant differences between boys and girls, nor any significant interactions among gender, grade level, and ethnicity. A significant positive correlation between knowledge of engineering occupational activities and interest in engineering was also found. The findings suggest that early engineering outreach interventions are important. Such early interventions could potentially contribute to preserving the equivalent interest levels of males and females for engineering as students grow older. Also, ethnic disparities in engineering knowledge and interest could potentially be mitigated through early interventions.


Tracked medical ultrasound allows for cost-effective and radiation-free imaging of anatomy featuring a very high spatial resolution. To overcome the limitations of the small field-of-view, sonographers can acquire multiple adjacent sweeps and compound them into a single volumetric representation. However, due to the inherent local and non-uniform compression of the underlying anatomy (caused by the ultrasound probe) the adjacent sweeps often exhibit poor alignment and discontinuities. We propose a novel decompression model to compensate for probe pressure related artifacts. It incorporates domain knowledge of the global acquisition pattern for regularization and allows for seamless stitching of multiple overlapping 3D freehand sweeps into one volume. The resulting extended field-of-view visualization provides the clinician with spatial context so that the relationship between individual features are easier to understand. Our experiments show that the resulting extended field-of-view reconstructions have a superior image quality in terms of alignment and continuity of the visible anatomy compared to the original acquisitions. Comparison to ground truth MRI data demonstrates the plausibility of our non-rigid decompression model.


Abstract : This paper presents a holistic vision of the risk-based methodologies for Software Risk Management (SRM) developed at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). SRM methodologies address the entire life cycle of software acquisition, development, and maintenance. This paper is driven by the premise that the ultimate efficacy of the developed methodologies and tools for software engineering is to buy smarter, manage more effectively, identify opportunities for continuous improvement, use available information and databases more efficiently, improve industry, raise the community's playing field, and review and evaluate progress. The methodologies are based on seven management principles: shared product vision, teamwork, global perspective, forward-looking view, open communication, integrated management, and continuous process.


Software-Defined Networking (SDN) refers to a new approach for network
programmability, that is, the capacity to initialize, control, change,
and manage network behavior dynamically via open interfaces. SDN
emphasizes the role of software in running networks through the
introduction of an abstraction for the data forwarding plane and, by
doing so, separates it from the control plane. This separation allows
faster innovation cycles at both planes as experience has already
shown. However, there is increasing confusion as to what exactly SDN
is, what the layer structure is in an SDN architecture, and how layers
interface with each other. This document, a product of the IRTF
Software-Defined Networking Research Group (SDNRG), addresses these
questions and provides a concise reference for the SDN research
community based on relevant peer-reviewed literature, the RFC series,
and relevant documents by other standards organizations.


This paper explores three issues in the reconstruction of syntactic borrowing. First, I discuss the scholarly traditions which have shaped historical phonology and historical syntax. I point out some of the incompatible assumptions which the two fields make, and examine the role of speakers' individual grammars in language change, along with the effects that traditions within generative syntax have had on framing historical syntactic questions. I then move to an investigation of calquing and the reconstruction of syntactic borrowing, and a discussion of the work of Minimalism in historical syntactic research (in particular, Longobardi (2003)). I argue that any detailed account of language change (no matter what the framework) must address the role of language contact. I argue that real progress in syntactic reconstruction requires a theory of borrowing that does not treat loan constructions as simply 'noise' in the data.


The US Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program collects data on a wealth of variables related to trees and understory species in forests. Some of these trees and plants produce non-timber forest products (NTFPs; e.g., seeds, fruit, bark, sap, roots) that are harvested for their culinary and medicinal values. As example, the cones of Pinus edulis and P. monophylla are collected for the edible pine nuts. The bark of more than a dozen tree species that are inventoried by FIA is collected for medicinal, decorative, and construction purposes. Slippery elm (Ulmus rubra) bark has been used for its medicinal values for more than a generation. However, despite widespread use of non-timber forest products, little quantitative information about abundance, distribution, and harvest is available to support sustainable management of NTFPs. This project examines the use of the FIA inventory database to assess the effectiveness of plot data to monitor and explain the situation regarding selected non-timber forest products. The focus is on using FIA data to assess for: (1) geographic distribution, (2) abundance (numbers of live trees), (3) applicable metrics (e.g., square feet of bark for trees from which bark is harvested), and (4) trends in abundance and spatial distribution over time. An in-depth analysis of slippery elm bark will be presented along with examples of metrics for quantifying other types of products including sap, nuts/fruit, and understory species.


The fertility rate in Southeast and South Asia is relatively high compared to other region in the world, but the trend tends to decrease rapidly. This paper aims to quantitatively explore the factors influencing fertility rate in Southeast and South Asia by applying econometric model of the panel data. Applying the fixed effect estimation method on the 2003-2008 panel data, this study found that the infant mortality rate is an important factor influencing the high fertility rate in this area. The high elasticity of infant mortality rate implies that parents cover their risk from losing children by producing more children. Surprisingly, the demand for children (fertility rate) follows the demand of normal goods in which one digit increase in log income per capita will increase the fertility rate by 0.334 births per woman.


Optimal status and performance of the used parts can often make the difference between successful and unsuccessful remanufacturing for construction machinery. However, a used parts is remanufactured at an unreasonable time, there is a greater degree of resource waste and diseconomy. In this paper, a new method for determining the optimum active remanufacturing time is proposed, which considers both environmental and economic indicators. As an example, the life cycle assessment method was adopted for assessing the environmental impact of an oil cylinder over its entire service life, and an average annual cost model was established. Considering both the environmental index and the cost index, an optimization process was performed and the optimum active remanufacturing time for the oil cylinder was determined to be after 6.58 years of operation.


At odds in 1987 were the philosophies of a United States grounded in political liberalism and a Soviet Union grounded in economic redistribution. While these principles may have defined these two nations' domestic policies and official international stances, Mazrui argues that the United States did little to propagate liberalism and the Soviet Union did little to encourage economic redistribution. Moreover, his critique seeks to reveal that each superpower's actions ultimately supported the other's philosophy. From this twist of intent and effect, Mazrui turns to the proclivity toward violence that the United States and the Soviet Union displayed in international affairs. Consequently, he calls into question the ethical justification of the means by which the superpowers repeatedly failed to accomplish their intended ends.


A previous study found that drinking water was becoming contaminated in households and there was a general lack of understanding surrounding household water contamination. It was felt that if this information was returned to the community it could be used to build capacity, so people can make informed choices regarding their drinking water practices. Participatory methods were explored and Ketso® a pre-packaged tool was thought to be the most appropriate for this community. Ketso was used to develop workshops with the focus being household drinking water contamination, which were delivered to 35 participants. The workshops provided an enjoyable forum for participants to exchange ideas on household water contamination. It was felt that capacity was built during the process through the participants' exchange of ideas, and it gave participants a space to question their own practices. The aim of this paper is to describe, discuss and evaluate the process used.


The aim of the project was to analyze the behavior of military communication networks based on work with real data collected continuously since 2005. With regard to the nature and amount of the data, data mining methods were selected for the purpose of analyses and experiments. The quality of real data is often insufficient for an immediate analysis. The article presents the data cleaning operations which have been carried out with the aim to improve the input data sample to obtain reliable models. Gradually, by means of properly chosen SW, network models were developed to verify generally valid patterns of network behavior as a bulk service. Furthermore, unlike the commercially available communication networks simulators, the models designed allowed us to capture non-standard models of network behavior under an increased load, verify the correct sizing of the network to the increased load, and thus test its reliability. Finally, based on previous experience, the models enabled us to predict emergency situations with a reasonable accuracy.


We describe the architecture and functionalities of a C++ software framework, coined PARTONS, dedicated to the phenomenology of Generalized Parton Distributions. These distributions describe the three-dimensional structure of hadrons in terms of quarks and gluons, and can be accessed in deeply exclusive lepto- or photo-production of mesons or photons. PARTONS provides a necessary bridge between models of Generalized Parton Distributions and experimental data collected in various exclusive production channels. We outline the specification of the PARTONS framework in terms of practical needs, physical content and numerical capacity. This framework will be useful for physicists - theorists or experimentalists - not only to develop new models, but also to interpret existing measurements and even design new experiments.


ii I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. Abstract Recent developments in material joining, specifically arc-welding, have increased in scope and extended into the aerospace, nuclear, and underwater industries where complex geometry and hazardous environments necessitate fully automated systems. Even traditional applications of arc welding such as off-highway and automotive manufacturing have increased their demand in quality, accuracy, and volume to stay competitive. These requirements often exceed both skill and endurance capacities of human welders. As a result, improvements in process parameter feedback and sensing are necessary to successfully achieve a closed-loop control of such processes. One such feedback parameter in gas-metal arc welding (GMAW) is acoustic emissions. Although there have been relatively few studies performed in this area, it is agreed amongst professional welders that the sound from an arc is critical to their ability to control the process. Investigations that have been performed however, have been met with mixed success due to extraneous background noises or inadequate evaluation of the signal spectral content. However, if it were possible to identify the salient or characterizing aspects of the signal, these drawbacks may be overcome. The goal of this thesis is to develop methods which characterize the arc-acoustic signal such that a relationship can be drawn between welding parameters and acoustic spectral characteristics. Three methods were attempted including: Taguchi experiments to reveal trends between weld process parameters and the acoustic signal; psycho-acoustic experiments that investigate expert welder reliance on arc-sounds, and implementation of an artificial neural network (ANN) for mapping arc-acoustic spectral characteristics to process parameters. iv Together, these investigations revealed strong correlation between welding voltage and arc-acoustics. The psycho-acoustic experiments confirm the suspicion of welder reliance on arc-acoustics as well as potential spectral candidates necessary to spray-transfer control during GMA welding. ANN performance shows promise in the approach and confirmation of the ANN's ability to learn. Further experimentation and data gathering to enrich the learning database will be necessary to apply artificial intelligence such as artificial neural networks to such a stochastic and non-linear relationship between arc-sound and GMA parameters.


This introduction to the symposium on Empirical Scholarship in Contract Law, sponsored in January 2006 by the Contracts Section of the Association of American Law Schools and published in the Tulane Law Review, pushes for an increased focus on the real world and argues that highly quantitative statistical analyses of published judicial opinions are no more empirical than simple case notes. While this short essay argues for increased rigor in empirical research, it also recognizes the limits of scientific methods for legal analysis and suggests that the seduction of scientific appearances, now as in the days of Langdell's legal science, should be viewed with a mixture of hope and caution. Although it points out the limits of scientific aspiration in the law, the piece also applauds the role of empiricism in the field of contracts, and especially in bringing a more rigorous form of experience to both scholarship and teaching. Finally, the essay introduces the symposium papers: Stephen Choi and Mitu Gulati's study of disclosures in sovereign debt contracts; George Geis's computerized experiment using marketing data to assess the optimal precision of contract default rules; Stewart Macaulay's article on the new legal realism; and Debora Threedy's analysis and exposition of legal archaeology.


Notwithstanding the substantial development of sponsorship investigations, relationships between the sponsor and cosponsees and fan's responses (i.e., cognitive, affective and conative) have not been investigated yet in a multiple sponsorship sport event context. Hence, the purpose of this study was to analyze the impact of commercial sponsorships on the intention to purchase sponsor products in relation to brand image and brand attachment. Furthermore, this researcher analyzed the relationships between a sponsor (adidas), an event (2006 FIFA Soccer World Cup Germany), a team (French National Soccer Team) and a top player (Zinedine Zidane). Structural equation modeling was used to conduct this research. The crucial results revealed that a multiple sponsorship arrangement creates interactions between the sponsor and the sponsees brands cognitive and affective stages. Secondly, the model demonstrated that multiple sponsorship activates brand behavioral dimensions (i.e., cognitive, affective and conative) ac...


If you are predicting the label $y$ of a new object with $\hat y$, how confident are you that $y = \hat y$? Conformal prediction methods provide an elegant framework for answering such question by building a $100 (1 - \alpha)\%$ confidence region without assumptions on the distribution of the data. It is based on a refitting procedure that parses all the possibilities for $y$ to select the most likely ones. Although providing strong coverage guarantees, conformal set is impractical to compute exactly for many regression problems. We propose efficient algorithms to compute conformal prediction set using approximated solution of (convex) regularized empirical risk minimization. Our approaches rely on a new homotopy continuation technique for tracking the solution path with respect to sequential changes of the observations. We also provide a detailed analysis quantifying its complexity.


ABSTRACT The development of an effective preerythrocytic vaccine againstPlasmodium falciparum malaria is likely to require inclusion of components from several preerythrocytic antigens. The association of HLA-B53 with resistance to severe malaria in West Africa provided evidence that HLA class I-restricted CD8+ T-cell responses play a role in protective immunity in African children, supporting data from rodent models of malaria. Previously, a single epitope from liver-stage-specific antigen 1 (LSA-1) has been shown to be recognized by HLA-B53-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL), but HLA-B53 epitopes were not found in four other antigens. In this study we measured CTL responses to peptides from the recently sequenced antigen liver-stage antigen 3 (LSA-3) and identified in it a new epitope restricted by HLA-B53. Several CTL epitopes restricted by other class I types were also identified within LSA-3 in studies in The Gambia and Tanzania. CTL were also identified to an additional P. falciparum antigen, exported protein 1 (Exp-1), the homologue of which is a protective antigen in a rodent model of malaria. These findings emphasize the diversity of P. falciparum antigens recognized by CD8+ T cells in humans and support the inclusion of components from several antigens in new CTL-inducing vaccines against malaria.


Functioning, healthy groundwater ecosystems are essential for high quality drinking water, and they minimize costs of processing groundwater for drinking purposes.
 GroundCare is a multidisciplinary project, which is led by the Helmholz Institute in Munich, Germany and funded by the BMBF (German federal Ministry of education and Research). The aim is to parametrize and to quantify groundwater ecosystem services as a basis for sustainable water management and water pollution control by biomonitoring. In other words: the development of biological assessment techniques.
 Multiple parameters are evaluated (physico-chemical parameters, microbial and fauna community composition, ecotoxicological effects). Invertebrate fauna is investigated at five sites all across Germany. During the project, molecular identification through DNA Barcoding and Metabarcoding of groundwater invertebrates is being implemented and compared to traditional morphological bio-assessment. The subterranean fauna can be used as bio-indicators to validate groundwater conditions, in particular surface water intrusion. For the water suppliers, surface water intrusion means an increased risk of contamination. The discrimination of epigean from stygobiotic fauna is the simple and basic idea of this approach.
 A very specific kind of water treatment is used by the water works in Würzburg (Bavaria), one of the fife study sites, which is located directly along the Main river bank. Uncommonly, they use part time river bank filtration if land-side groundwater levels are low. Another possibility is the extraction of Main River water by near-bank wells, followed by intensive water treatment and then the water is infiltrated again.
 The question asked was, whether the fauna indicates this specific situation or not. In the area, three types of subsurface waters can be distinguished, which are land-side groundwater, riverbank water and artificially infiltrated Main river water. Representative bores were sampled four times over one year for invertebrates. First results clearly show that the faunal patterns reflect these different hydrological situations.


Children with myelomeningocele (MMC) usually have problems with daily life activities, but the background to their problems is not altogether obvious. An understanding of the possible causes of activity problems is a prerequisite for the effectiveness of physical therapy. The overall aim of the present studies was to identify impairments above the cele level, which might influence mobility in children with MMC (study I) and to analyse sitting posture (study II) and the movement characteristics of reaching movements (study III and IV). In total, 41 children and young adults with MMC and without mental retardation were investigated. Study I comprised 32 children, 6-11 years. Mobility and the caregiver assistance required for mobility were quantified according to the Paediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory (PEDI) and correlation between mobility and neurological impairment, hand function and cognitive function were calculated. The results showed that nine children achieved independent mobility and that there was a moderate and significant correlation between the need for physical assistance and high cele level, impaired hand function and impaired cognitive function. In those children who used a wheelchair, only poor hand strength was significantly correlated with the need for caregiver assistance.Study II comprised 11 children, 10-13 years, and a control group of 20 healthy children. Sitting posture was investigated by using a force plate and analysed from the frequency and the amplitude of the postural sway. The reaction forces before and during rapid arm lift were also analysed. The result showed that children with MMC had significantly lower sway frequency compared to the controls. In both groups, the ground reaction forces were registered before the children lifted their arms. Study III and IV comprised 31 children and young adults, 9-19 years and 31 matched controls. Reaching movements were investigated with a digitising tablet, linked to a computer. The ability to program and execute reaching movements was analysed and also the ability to adapt reaching to new visuomotor conditions. The results showed that the MMC group had poorer precision, less straight movements and shorter deceleration phases as compared to the controls. In both groups the movements were pre-programmed. In addition, adaptation of reaching to new visuomotor conditions was poor in the MMC group as compared to the controls. In conclusion we found that impairments above the cele level influenced mobility and the control of sitting posture in children with MMC. Reduced precision and co-ordination of reaching, and also difficulties with motor adaptation, could partly explain thier problems with hand activities. These findings need to be considered in therapy programs for children and young adults with MMC.


The effectiveness of policies has always been debated worldwide. In a broad perspective, there are two main types of policies, the preventive and the punitive. While some policies take a certain type, there is no conclusive evidence to support their effectiveness. The potentials and pitfalls of policies largely lie in the level of policy-making, where the analysis studied in how policy makers define problems and embed them in public policies. These include the gap in the knowledge of the nature and the extent of the problem between what is assumed to be correct by policy makers and the real nature of the situation, the level of awareness of the policies between its stakeholders, the level of acceptance and belongingness towards these policies and the level of implementation and execution of the policies. All these aspects can be summarised by the lack of interaction between policy makers and the stakeholders, which happen in most cases due to the top-down adoption in policy-making strategies. The policies in Malaysia to retain its original setting of its rural tourist destinations are widely available. The state and federal lawmakers have enacted a range of laws and policies intended to mitigate the societal and environmental risks presented by tourists. However, a similar observation of the problems in public policy is seen in the Malaysian rural tourism context, where the lack of interaction between policy makers and its stakeholders, and the flaw in the system have led to the lack of these policies being intertwined with each other. Therefore, a multi-layered adoption should be used to encourage actors` participation and interaction. The purpose of this paper is to scope the potentials and pitfalls of rural tourism policies from a constructivist perspective. The model employed to assist this study is the actor-network theory approach, where the problem is addressed using constructivism as a theoretical lens. This approach uses a qualitative design to enable the exploration of the current policy structure and the perception of the stakeholders.