The primary aim of the paper was to examine the role of climate forecasts information as a potential tool to reduce impact of climate change in the Vhembe District in Limpopo province. A representative sample of 90 farmers participated in the study. The study involved the Vhembe District with Tshakhuma, Rabali and Tshiombo as study sites. Vhembe district is located in a semi-arid area that is frequently troubled by dry spells, often escalating into severe drought. Such situations have compelled regular assistance from the Limpopo Province in the form of drought relief. Such reactive measures are, however, costly and alternative risk-reduction measures should be sought. One alternative measure to enhance adaptive capacity and possibly improve local decision-making is seasonal climate forecasts. A tool is needed to measure how farmers have responded to past events, what techniques and methods are being used, including forecasts, and a range of other coping and adaptive mechanisms. Many recent efforts to reduce vulnerability to such events include improved adaptation and risk reduction. Farmers in the Vhembe district in Limpopo Province, South Africa (including Tshakhuma, Rabali and Tshiombo study sites) have developed their own local climate forecast strategies and adaptation practices during times of climate risks. For many years the importance of local knowledge in small-scale farmer practices was overlooked. These farmers have developed their own indicators for monitoring climate conditions such as observing the behaviour of birds, behaviour of insects and the characteristics of plants. This paper shows how local knowledge forecasting and external knowledge forecasting can be used as a way to reduce impact of climate change. The following findings were found: (1) Local knowledge forecasting is useful to local farmers, (2) Young farmers, however, prefer to use or rely on external forecasting information, (3) Some farmers within Tshakhuma, Rabali and Tshiombo prefer to integrate both local knowledge and other types of forecasting, (4) Some farmers within the three areas use crop diversification as security measures during uncertain periods.


An investigation of behavioural patterns that form a basis for termite control in the Australasian region was undertaken using laboratory colonies of the subterranean termite Reticulitermes santonensis (Feytaud). The study attempted to build a picture of the behavioural elements of individuals in a colony and based on this, trophallaxis, aggression and cannibalism were investigated in detail. Preliminary study of food transmission showed that 'workers' played a major role in the distribution of food. It was found, that among factors responsible for release of trophallactic behaviour the presence of 'right odour' between participants was important. It also appeared that the role taken by individuals depended on whether they were hungry or fully fed. Antennal palpation was shown by donors and acceptors alike and this seemed to be excitatory in function. Introduction of aliens into nests elicited aggression and these aliens were often killed. Factors eliciting aggression were investigated and colony odour was found to be important. Further investigations revealed that development of colony odour was governed by genetical and environmental mechanisms. Termite response to injury and death was also governed by odour. In the case of injury either the fresh haemolymph from the wound or some component of the haemolymph evoked cannibalism. Necrophagic behaviour was found to be released by fatty acids found in the corpses. Finally, the response of colonies to nestmates carrying arsenic trioxide was investigated. It was found that living and freshly dead arsenic-carrying nestmates were treated like normal nestmates, resulting in high initial mortality. However, poisoned cadavers soon became repellant and were buried thus preventing further spread of the poison to the rest of the colony. This suggested that complete control of subterranean termites by arsenic trioxide is unlikely to be fully effective, especially in those species which are capable of developing secondary reproductives from survivors and thus rebuilding the community.


Monuments have the ability to reconstruction. Authorities must carry out basic follow-up in order to communicate with the owners, maintain, restore, the connection loop between the owner, the municipality, the cultural heritage and the private sector investors in a coherent way and take constructive steps in this direction.As long as the preservation of monuments as a cultural component is not concerned with all offices and people, we will see more destruction of this precious deposit every day. It is necessary to undertake integrated planning and the attention of senior managers and officials to ensure that these values are removed from the slogans stage.The effective economic use of this historical heritage and attention to tourism industry constitutes an opportunity for development and economic growth. The most important of these approaches is the creation of an integrated and integrated approach to the context. Shariati street in Hamedan is the subject of our research, which has valuable historic buildings such as the iran's House, the Naraqi's house, the Bijan's House (Iranian Studies Foundation), the Tabatabai's House, the building of the forming Kargosha bank and Bank Sepah Placing in the first ride is prone to regeneration but handles bump like traffic congestion and traffic jams and Abandoned and inappropriate use as well as crowds of handicapped people. The aim of this study is the centrality of historical monuments and the open approach of creating and improving the street and creating a cultural path for tourism. Our research methodology is "swot" technique.


Countries in the Caribbean region, including Belize, are vulnerable to coastal erosion. Experts and scholars have assessed the effects of coastal erosion in the region in physical and economic terms, most often from a sectoral perspective. However, less attention has been directed to the localized and nonquantifiable effects of coastal erosion in the region. We address this research gap by presenting an empirical study of a village in southern Belize that has experienced significant coastal erosion since the mid-1980s. Drawing on interviews, a mapping exercise, and a literature review, we analyze how villagers are experiencing the impacts of coastal change, and what the resulting risks and losses mean for the socioeconomic stability of the village. We identify five categories of local values affected by coastal erosion, ranging from alteration of social activities to the loss of properties. We demonstrate that the totality of impacts bear consequences to the village's continued viability, which adds uncertainty to the lives of local residents.


Objective:To explore relationships between patterns of smoking uptake and social context and attitudinal variables. Design:Cross sectional survey. Setting:Public schools in Tucson, Arizona and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Participants:982 children in grades 6–9 (ages 11–15 years). Main outcome measures:Items measuring smoking history, nicotine dependence and quit attempts, susceptibility to smoking in the future, smoking norms, use of other tobacco products, attitudes toward smoking, and demographic characteristics. Results:Overall, 43% of children had smoked a cigarette and 57% had never used them. Ever smokers lived in social contexts with more smoking and where smoking was normative. Among never users, 25% are susceptible to smoking; these children have positive attitudes toward smoking, do not feel social pressure to stay off cigarettes, and had more friends who smoked. Among ever users, 36% were currently smoking in the past 30 days. Current users also lived in social context with more smoking and had positive attitudes toward smoking. Most users had tried to stop smoking. Only 9% of current users smoked daily; 29% had not smoked a whole cigarette. Greater cigarette consumption was associated with more favourable attitudes toward smoking. Most of past users were in early uptake: 95% had smoked less than 100 cigarettes but 49% were susceptible to smoking again. Conclusions:There is promise in differentiating subgroups among the never, past and current use of cigarettes. Susceptibility within each of these groups was associated with similar patterns of attitudes and social context. These patterns in smoking uptake need to be confirmed prospectively.


The tomato Bs4 disease resistance gene mediates recognition of avrBs4-expressing strains of the bacterial spot pathogen Xanthomonas campestris pv. vesicatoria to give a hypersensitive response (HR). Here, we present the characterization of the Bs4 promoter and its application for low-level expression of bacterial type III effector proteins in planta. Real-time polymerase chain reaction showed that Bs4 is constitutively expressed at low levels and that transcript abundance does not change significantly upon infection with avrBs4-containing xanthomonads. A 302-bp promoter fragment was found to be sufficient to promote Bs4 gene function. Previous studies have shown that high, constitutive in planta expression of avrBs3 (AvrBs3 and AvrBs4 proteins are 96.6% identical) via the Cauliflower mosaic virus 35S (35S) promoter triggers a Bs4-dependent HR whereas X. campestris pv. vesicatoria-mediated delivery of AvrBs3 into the plant cytoplasm does not. Here, we demonstrate that, when expressed under control of the weak Bs4 promoter, avrBs3 does not trigger a Bs4-dependent HR whereas avrBs4 does. In contrast, the pepper Bs3 gene, which mediates recognition of AvrBs3- but not AvrBs4-delivering xanthomonads, retains its recognition specificity even if avrBs4 was expressed in planta from the strong 35S promoter. Importantly, Bs4 promoter-driven expression of hax3, hax4 (two recently isolated avrBs3-like genes), avrBs3, and avrBs4 resulted in identical reactions as observed upon infection with X. campestris pv. vesicatoria strains that express the respective avr gene, suggesting that the protein levels expressed under control of the Bs4 promoter are similar to those that are translocated by the bacterial type III secretion system.


Aim: The purpose of this study was to seek the acute effects of coffee intake on glucose metabolism and some hormones.
Materials and Methods: The participants were asked to drink a cup of instant coffee (2 g). Three hours later, the glucose, insulin, glucagon, leptin, cortisol, total cholesterol, triglyceride, HDL, LDL, CRP, TSH and free T4 tests were repeated. The participants did not consume any other drink or food between 0 and 3 h. The participants were called back one week later. In 0 h, the glucose, insulin, glucagon, leptin, cortisol, total cholesterol, triglyceride, HDL, LDL, CRP, TSH and free T4 tests were performed. This time, the participants were asked to drink a glass of hot water. Three hours later, same tests were repeated.
Results: There weren't any significant changes in the levels of insulin, glucagon, cortisol, lipid levels, CRP, TSH and free T4 tests after coffee intake but we found significant changes in the leptin and plasma glucose values.
Conclusions: In conclusion, acute coffee intake does not have an acute impact on glucagon, cortisol, and TSH levels but affects leptin levels which can be one of the mechanisms of type diabetes mellitus reduction with coffee intake.


Nuclear matter is an ideal theoretical system that provides key insights into the physics of different length scales. While recent ab initio calculations of medium-mass to heavy nuclei have demonstrated that realistic saturation properties in infinite matter are crucial for reproducing experimental binding energies and charge radii, the nuclear-matter equation of state allows tight constraints on key quantities of neutron stars. In the present thesis we take advantage of both aspects.

Chiral effective field theory (EFT) with pion and nucleon degrees of freedom has become the modern low-energy approach to nuclear forces based on the symmetries of quantum chromodynamics, the fundamental theory of strong interactions. The systematic chiral expansion enables improvable calculations associated with theoretical uncertainty estimates. In recent years, chiral many-body forces were derived up to high orders, allowing consistent calculations including all many-body contributions at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N$^3$LO). Many further advances have driven the construction of novel chiral potentials with different regularization schemes.

Here, we develop advanced methods for microscopic calculations of the equation of state of homogeneous nuclear matter with arbitrary proton-to-neutron ratio at zero temperature. Specifically, we push the limits of many-body perturbation theory (MBPT) considerations to high orders in the chiral and in the many-body expansion. To address the challenging inclusion of three-body forces, we introduce a new partial-wave method for normal ordering that generalizes the treatment of these contributions. We show improved predictions for the neutron-matter equation of state with consistent N$^3$LO nucleon-nucleon (NN) plus three-nucleon (3N) potentials using MBPT up to third order and self-consistent Green's function theory. The latter also provides nonperturbative benchmarks for the many-body convergence. In addition, we extend the normal-ordering method to finite temperatures.

Calculations of asymmetric matter require in addition reliable fit values for the low-energy couplings that contribute to the 3N forces. This was not the case for N$^3$LO calculations. We present a novel Monte-Carlo framework for perturbative calculations with two-, three-, and four-nucleon interactions, which, including automatic code generation, allows to compute successive orders in MBPT as well as chiral EFT in an efficient way. The performance is such that it can be used for optimizing next-generation chiral potentials with respect to saturation properties. As a first step in this direction, we study nuclear matter based on chiral low-momentum interactions, exhibiting a very good many-body convergence up to fourth order. We then explore new chiral interactions up to N$^3$LO, where simultaneous fits to the triton and to saturation properties can be achieved with natural 3N low-energy couplings.

We perform a comprehensive Weinberg eigenvalue analysis of a representative set of modern local, semilocal, and nonlocal chiral NN potentials. Our detailed comparison of Weinberg eigenvalues provides various insights into idiosyncrasies of chiral potentials for different orders and partial waves. We demonstrate that a direct comparison of numerical cutoff values of different interactions is in general misleading due to the different analytic form of regulators. This shows that Weinberg eigenvalues also can be used as a helpful monitoring scheme when constructing new interactions.

Furthermore, we present solutions of the BCS gap equation in the channels ${}^1S_0$ and ${}^3P_2-{}^3F_2$ in neutron matter. Our studies are based on nonlocal NN plus 3N interactions up to N$^3$LO as well as the aforementioned local and semilocal chiral NN interactions up to N$^2$LO and N$^4$LO, respectively. In particular, we investigate the impact of N$^3$LO 3N forces on pairing gaps and also derive uncertainty estimates by taking into account results at different orders in the chiral expansion. In addition, different methods for obtaining self-consistent solutions of the gap equation are discussed. Besides the widely-used quasilinear method we demonstrate that the modified Broyden method is well applicable and exhibits a robust convergence behavior.


The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System establishes initial margin requirements under Regulations T, U, and X. Recent margin loan increases, both in aggregate value and relative to market capitalization, have rekindled the debate about using margin requirements as an instrument to affect the prices of common stocks. Proponents of a more active margin requirement policy see the regulations as instruments for affecting the level and volatility of stock prices by influencing investors' demand for common stocks. Others believe that the announcement effects of increased margin requirements would have a stabilizing effect on the stock market and on the economy. ; This article discusses the historical background, accounting mechanics, regulation, and economic principles of margin lending. The author analyzes the data on the volume of margin loans, and he describes the history and practice of margin requirements as well the accounting framework. He assesses the extent to which initial margin requirements restrict the amount of margin lending, and he reviews the economics of margin loans, focusing on margin loans to the customers of broker-dealers. The author also develops a model of the link between the value of the put option embedded in margin loans and the margin loan rate, which he applies to determine the characteristics that should explain the high margin loan rates that typically prevail.


The brain exhibits a wide variety of spatiotemporal patterns of neuronal activity recorded using functional magnetic resonance imaging as the so-called blood-oxygenated-level–dependent (BOLD) signal. An active area of work includes efforts to best describe the plethora of these patterns evolving continuously in the brain. Here we explore the third-moment statistics of the brain BOLD signals in the resting state as a proxy to capture extreme BOLD events. We find that the brain signal exhibits typically nonzero skewness, with positive values for cortical regions and negative values for subcortical regions. Furthermore, the combined analysis of structural and functional connectivity demonstrates that relatively more connected regions exhibit activity with high negative skewness. Overall, these results highlight the relevance of recent results emphasizing that the spatiotemporal location of the relatively large-amplitude events in the BOLD time series contains relevant information to reproduce a number of features of the brain dynamics during resting state in health and disease.


This thesis analyzes challenges to agricultural production in China, which could impair the country's ability to maintain or to increase its output of important food commodities. By means of three empirical studies, issues regarding the effects of climate change and the development of total factor productivity are studied, which have so far received insufficient attention.
In the first study, the effects of climate change on Chinese inland aquaculture production are analyzed. For this purpose, the method proposed by Just and Pope (1978, 1979) is adapted and applied to determine the marginal effects of changing temperatures and precipitation levels on both the expected yield (i.e. mean yield) and the yield risk (i.e. yield variance) in the inland aquaculture sector.
In the second study, this method is applied to analyze the marginal effects of changing temperatures and precipitation levels as well as of changes in climatic variability on the expected yield and the level of yield risk in Chinese grain farming.
An important additional feature of the flexible non-linear production models, which are employed for these two studies, is that they also control for the influences of the regular input factors of production.
In the third study, total factor productivity change and its determinants (i.e. technical change, technical efficiency change and scale change) in the Chinese inland aquaculture sector are analyzed based on a parametric stochastic frontier model assuming time-varying technical inefficiency. Special emphasis is placed on studying the development, geographical distribution and determinants of provincial technical efficiency scores.
The results of the first climate change impact study indicate that China's inland aquaculture sector can be expected to become a beneficiary of the projected increases in both the country's annual average temperature and its total annual precipitation. This stems from the positive marginal effects of both climate factors on the sector's mean yield, even though the marginal effect of temperature increases turns out to be diminishing over time. Moreover, rising annual average temperatures are found to reduce yield risk at the margin.
Based on the second climate change impact study, it can be concluded that the Chinese grain sector as whole could suffer net losses as a result of the projected changes in Chinese climate. In particular, both North and South China would suffer from reductions in mean grain yields following marginal increases in annual average temperatures. The effect would, however, be stronger in the water-scarce northern provinces, which would benefit substantially from increasing levels of total annual precipitation and would suffer from an increasing variability in precipitation. South China, however, would experience additional reductions in its mean yield as a result of increasing precipitation levels. With respect to yield risks, the results indicate that increasing temperatures and precipitation levels would reduce the yield variance in South China.
The analysis of total factor productivity and its determinants in Chinese inland aquaculture production indicates that the sector has benefited particularly from improvements in technology, while technical efficiency has followed a negative trend. The decreasing capacity of the agricultural extension system to offer services to aquaculture producers is identified as an important determinant of the latter development. Nevertheless, total factor productivity has nearly doubled between 1993 and 2009. Moreover, technical efficiency in inland aquaculture production turns out to be quite heterogeneous across the Chinese provinces and to be highest in the southeast and east of China.


Heavy-metal-free semiconductor material like Silicon Nanoparticle (Si-NPs) is attracting scientists because of their diverse applications in biomedical field. In this work, pulsed laser ablation of silicon in aqueous solution is employed to generate Si-NPs in one step avoiding use of chemical precursors. Characterization by absorption, electron and photoluminescence analysis proves the generation of luminescent Si-NPs. The productivity rate of Si-NPs is investigated by Inductively Coupled Plasma Spectrometry. Furthermore, Si-NPs quantum yield and confocal microscopy studies corroborate the potential use of these biocompatible Si-NPs for imaging applications.


I. INTRODUCTION For all practical purposes, Massachusetts does not have an explicit procedure for expediting the appellate process. Although the state's rules of procedure allow either the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (1) or the Massachusetts Appeals Court to order an expedited appeal, and to develop a procedure for then processing that appeal, this option is rarely used. Massachusetts does, however, have two other processes that may expedite review on appeal--direct review by the supreme judicial court, which enables the parties to bypass the appeals court, and the single-justice proceeding, which can provide the equivalent of expedited appellate review in some cases--both of which are used more often than the alternate procedure. This article will address all three means of expediting review in Massachusetts. II. THE RULE 2 PROCEDURE Appellate Rule 2, entitled "Suspension of the Rules," states: In the interest of expediting decision, or for other good cause shown, the appellate court or a single justice may, except as otherwise provided in Rule 14(b), suspend the requirements or provisions of any of these rules in a particular case on application of a party or on its own motion and may order proceedings in accordance with its direction. Such suspension may be on reasonable terms. (2) This rule provides flexibility in the appellate process, and allows the court or a single justice to relax or suspend the rules when necessary. (3) Note, however, that trial judges are not similarly empowered, and even appellate judges are without authority to extend the time for filing an appeal beyond the one-year limitations period. (4) Now firmly engrained in Massachusetts practice, this rule was part of a series of new rules that went into effect in 1974. (5) One of the purposes behind their enactment was simplifying the appellate process; the rules were intended to eliminate "many of the previous rigid statutory time limitations which often served as fatal or near-fatal booby traps for inexperienced or unwary practitioners taking a case from the trial court to the appellate court." (6) As a result, the supreme judicial court has pointed out that the rules should be construed to meet the goals of simplifying procedure and eliminating rigid statutory time limits. (7) Thus, Rule 2 can be used to expedite an appeal, (8) although it is rarely used for that purpose. (9) Another appellate rule similarly permits the appeals court to decide an appeal on the briefs, without oral argument. (10) This process, known as summary disposition, expedites an appeal to the extent that the parties do not have to wait for oral argument. When invoked by the court, however, it results in the parties' losing the opportunity to present their cases at oral argument. (11) Although Rule 1:28 applies by its terms to all cases, the standard for its application is that there be "no substantial question of law ... presented by the appeal or that some clear error of law has been committed which has injuriously affected the substantial rights of an appellant." (12) That language substantially limits the range of cases to which the rule will apply, so it can in theory be invoked in fewer cases than can Appellate Rule 2. III. DIRECT REVIEW BY THE SUPREME JUDICIAL COURT Under both statutory and rule authority, cases may be appealed directly to the supreme judicial court, bypassing the appeals court. (13) The applicable statute provides that the supreme judicial court and the appeals court have concurrent jurisdiction over most appeals. (14) Subject to the approval of two justices of the supreme judicial court, the court can order direct review of any case on appeal, as long as the issue to be decided is: (1) a question of first impression or a novel question of law; (2) a question of law concerning either the Constitution of the United States or that of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; or (3) a question of such public interest that justice requires a final determination by the supreme judicial court. …


Working memory, the system that enables us to hold information temporarily for processing purposes, is thought to be stored primarily in the form of elevated, persistent neuronal firing rates. Mongillo et al. (see the Perspective by Fusi) now suggest that working memory may instead be stored in the short-term facilitation caused by a temporary calcium increase in synapses from neurons that code for a particular memory. Short-term facilitation on the necessary time scale has recently been observed in prefrontal cortex, lending itself to memory maintenance on the scale of seconds. During the memory span, and also during recall, neuronal activity then shows population spikes. If memory is indeed stored in the form of synaptic facilitation, few spikes need to be expended in maintaining it, which would reduce the metabolic cost of working memory. G. Mongillo, O. Barak, M. Tsodyks, Synaptic theory of working memory. Science 319, 1543-1546 (2008). [Abstract] [Full Text] S. Fusi, A quiescent working memory. Science 319, 1495-1496 (2008). [Summary] [Full Text]


Lattice methods are essential theoretical tools for performing calculations in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). To make theoretical predictions (or postdictions) of properties of hadrons, we must solve the theory of QCD which describes their constituent quarks — and conversely, to further our knowledge of quarks, which are fundamental constituents of matter, we must examine the properties of their hadronic bound states, since free quarks are not observed due to the phenomenon known as quark confinement. It is not possible to solve QCD analytically, and so we must turn to numerical methods such as lattice QCD.

Despite being a well-established and mature formalism, lattice QCD has only really come into fruition over the last decade or so, developing in parallel with the advent of high-performance computing facilities. The available computing power is now sufficient to perform calculations on very fine lattices, with lattice spacings of about 0.06fm or less. These are beneficial for two reasons: firstly, they are closer to the continuum limit, meaning that continuum extrapolations are better controlled; and secondly, it is only on finer and finer lattices that we are able to accurately simulate heavier and heavier quarks, such as charm and bottom.

We use very fine lattices from the MILC collaboration to determine multiple properties of heavyonium systems, in each case using the HISQ action for heavy valence quarks. Correlator fitting, and continuum and chiral extrapolations, are performed via Bayesian least-squares fitting methods.
The first calculation simulates charmonium via charm quarks at their physical mass, as well as bottomonium, via multiple intermediate heavy quark masses and an extrapolation in this heavy mass. Notably, this is a fully relativistic method of calculating the bottom quark, and is complementary to effective-action methods such as NRQCD. We perform this calculation on gauge configurations with 2+1 flavours of quarks in the sea, and are able to accurately determine properties of the ground-state pseudoscalar and vector mesons in each system, including their decay constants, the hyperfine mass splitting, and the temporal moments of the vector correlators — which we also make use of to renormalise the vector current. To fully investigate some small anomalies in some of the vector results, we also repeat a subset of these calculations using a one-link instead of a local vector current.

The second calculation represents an in-depth study of charmonium, including radial and orbital excitations as well as the ground states. We again simulate charm quarks at their physical mass, but this time on gauge configurations with 2+1+1 flavours of quarks in the sea, including those with light sea quarks at their physical masses. We also include a set of well-constructed smearing functions designed to increase the overlap of our correlators with the ground state, and therefore allow us to extract data on charmonium excited states more accurately.

Specifically, we concentrate on conventional low-lying excited states in the charmonium system, and accurately extract various mass splittings in the spectrum (including the 1S hyperfine splitting, and the spin-averaged 2S − 1S splitting) as well as temporal moments of the vector correlator (which we again utilise in a renormalisation procedure), and decay constants of the ground-state pseudoscalar and vector. We also use the calculated mass splittings to accurately reconstruct a selected portion of the charmonium spectrum.

This is the first time that we have used smeared operators with staggered quarks for this purpose, and so this calculation acts as a strong base upon which to build future work on excited states.


Modeling and computations in electromagnetics is a quite novel and growing discipline, expanding as a result of the steadily increasing demand for designing electrical devices, modeling electromagnetic materials, and simulating electromagnetic fields in nanoscale structures. The aim of this volume is to bring together prominent worldwide experts to review state-of-the-art developments and future trends of modeling and computations in electromagnetics. This volume is devoted to merging the expertise of scientists working in this dynamic discipline, and to raising interest for challenging issues. The most significant advances in computational techniques have been made only in the last few years, and several challenging technological applications are presented in this volume.


This paper presents a formulation of the optical-drop wavelength assignment problem (ODWAP) and its heuristic algorithm for WDM ring networks. The wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technology has been popular in communication societies for providing very large communication bands by multiple lightpaths with different wavelengths on a single optical fiber. Particularly, a double-ring optical network architecture based on the packet-over-WDM technology such as the HORNET architecture has been studied as a next generation platform for metropolitan area networks (MANs). Each node in this architecture is equipped with a wavelength-fixed optical-drop and a tunable transmitter so that a lightpath can be established between any pair of nodes without wavelength conversions. In this paper, we formulate ODWAP for efficient wavelength reuse under heterogeneous traffic in this network. Then, we propose a simple heuristic algorithm for ODWAP. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in reducing waiting times for packet transmissions when a small number of wavelengths are available to retain the network cost for MANs.


Abstract. Marine cold air outbreaks (CAOs) commonly form overcast cloud decks
that transition into broken cloud fields downwind, dramatically
altering the local radiation budget. In this study, we investigate
the impact of frozen hydrometeors on these transitions. We
focus on a CAO case in the NW Atlantic, the location of the multi-year
flight campaign ACTIVATE (Aerosol Cloud meTeorology Interactions oVer the western ATlantic Experiment). We use MERRA-2 (Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, version 2) reanalysis fields to drive large eddy simulations with mixed-phase two-moment microphysics in a
Lagrangian framework. We find that transitions are triggered by
substantial rain (rainwater paths >25 g m−2), and only
simulations that allow for aerosol depletion result in sustained
breakups, as observed. Using a range of diagnostic ice nucleating particle
concentrations, Ninp, we find that increasing ice progressively
accelerates transitions, thus abbreviating the overcast state. Ice
particles affect the cloud-topped boundary layer evolution, primarily
through riming-related processes prior to substantial rain, leading to
(1) a reduction in cloud liquid water, (2) early consumption of
cloud condensation nuclei, and (3) early and light precipitation
cooling and moistening below cloud. We refer to these three effects
collectively as "preconditioning by riming". Greater boundary layer aerosol concentrations available as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) delay the onset of substantial rain. However, cloud breakup and low CCN concentration final
stages are found to be inevitable in this case, due, primarily, to liquid water path buildup. An ice-modulated cloud transition speed suggests the possibility of a negative cloud–climate feedback. To address prevailing uncertainties in the model representation of mixed-phase processes, the magnitude of ice formation and riming impacts and, thereby, the strength of an associated negative cloud–climate feedback process, requires further
observational evaluation by targeting riming hot spots with in situ imaging probes that allow for both the characterization of ice particles and abundance of supercooled droplets.


Termitophily—the symbiosis of organisms with termite societies—has evolved a disproportionate number of times within the rove beetle subfamily Aleocharinae (Staphylinidae). Among aleocharine termitophiles, defensive (limuloid) and mimetic (physogastric & physothoracic) body forms have evolved convergently, but due to lack of a comprehensive aleocharine phylogeny, the context in which termitophily and associated adaptations evolve is unknown. We present the first example of a robust, morphology-based phylogenetic placement of an exclusively termitophilous tribe, the Termitohospitini. Termitohospitini is recovered to be nested within Myllaenini sensu nov, and sister to Myllaena (new synonymy). Furthermore, we also recovered the small tribe Masuriini nested within Myllaenini sensu nov (new status). Reconstructing ecological transitions within this clade, we present evidence that the stem lineage of Myllaenini sensu nov invaded intertidal marine habitats, the common ancestor for Myllaena + Termitohospitini then transitioned to freshwater riparian habitats, with Termitohospitini alone subsequently shifting to termitophily. We conclude that: (1) Termitohospitini was ancestrally a limuloid-bodied riparian inhabitant; (2) a limuloid form may have been pre-adaptive for defense against host attack during the evolution of termitophily; (3) the strongly tapered abdomen of an ancestral limuloid body was a constraint on the evolution of physogastry, leading to the emergence of the unusual physothoracic body form observed in termitohospitines that likely integrates these obligate termitophiles to life inside termite colonies. "one of the most astonishing spectacles in all natural history." — Richard Dawkins


The Ahlfors-Bers Colloquia commemorate the mathematical legacy of Lars Ahlfors and Lipman Bers. The core of this legacy lies in the fields of geometric function theory, Teichmuller theory, hyperbolic geometry, and partial differential equations. However, the work of Ahlfors and Bers has impacted and created interactions with many other fields of mathematics, such as algebraic geometry, dynamical systems, topology, geometric group theory, mathematical physics, and number theory. Recent years have seen a flowering of this legacy with an increased interest in their work. This current volume contains articles on a wide variety of subjects that are central to this legacy. These include papers in Kleinian groups, classical Riemann surface theory, translation surfaces, algebraic geometry and dynamics. The majority of the papers present new research, but there are survey articles as well.


Respect for international humanitarian law (IHL) comes in many forms, one of which is through the practice of domestic courts in addressing IHL-related cases. This article takes a closer look at the structural conditions necessary for the effective enforcement of IHL by domestic courts, elaborates on the spectrum of options that are available to national judges when faced with IHL-related cases, and describes the functional roles of courts in adopting a particular posture. It is demonstrated that even if the structural conditions are fulfilled, this will not necessarily result in the normative application of the law. It appears that national judges are in the process of defining their own roles as independent organs for overseeing the State's acts during armed conflicts. In that regard, the article outlines a few suggestions for future research on the choices courts make and the conditions necessary for them to effectively handle IHL-related cases.


In this study the effect of processing parameters on different types of wood raw material in extrusion was examined. The study consisted of two parts: the first part was to break and separate individual fibers from wood chips during the extrusion process; in the second part the effect of chemical pre-treatment and screw elements on wood raw material was evaluated. Statistical analysis was performed to evaluate the most important factors affecting wood particle size in extrusion. The statistical analysis showed that the screw speed is the main factor affecting wood fiber length in twin-screw extrusion of wood chips. This study showed that a twin-screw extruder can be used to separate individual fibers from wood chips, and the separated fibers have higher aspect ratios than the wood flour particles typically used in wood-polymer composites. When more fibrous and chemically softened wood raw material was used, fibers with even higher aspect ratios were obtained.


Service marketing managers are being required to develop new services that succeed in the market and are valuable for customers. Services Marketing literature therefore stresses the need to innovate with customers and to integrate their view into the new service developed. However, consensus about the positive effects of customer involvement in new service development (NSD) has not been reached. Drawing on the theory of organisational knowledge creation and the concept of marketing orientation, we argue that customer involvement is not related to successful new services per se. However, we propose it contributes to the increase of a firm's customer knowledge stock, the tacit and explicit dimension. The study results demonstrate that the increase in a firm's tacit customer knowledge stock significantly affects market success, project success and sustainable competitive advantage, while the increase of explicit customer knowledge stock positively influences the acceptance of new service concept ideas initiated by customers. Both the explicit and tacit customer knowledge stock is positively influenced by the level of customer involvement.

Furthermore, the internal resource-based antecedents to customer involvement decisions are investigated. Our findings illustrate that a firm's prior tacit knowledge about customers inhibits integration of customers in NSD, whereas prior explicit customer knowledge positively affects customer involvement. As for market-driven NSD, customer orientation, and project innovativeness, the study shows different effects on stages of customer involvement.

Finally, the research reveals that service firms manage customer involvement differently related to the facets of the construct, namely (1) methods and (2) stages of customer
involvement. Distinct management approaches are compared and contrasted to unearth salient decision parameters.

The research is based on interviews, one expert survey and one main survey, incorporating 131 respondents of diverse service firms in nine countries. Responses have been analysed in two structural equation models by Partial Least Squares (PLS) and explored by cluster analysis.

We suggest that Service Marketing managers should be more attentive to the act of customer knowledge creation to manage customer integration in NSD effectively. Particularly, they should be aware of the role of tacit customer knowledge in order to develop successful new services. A tight customer orientation is not worthwhile throughout NSD, since new markets may be neglected when working too close with current customers. Furthermore, contrary to prevalent research, NSD executives should combine beneficial methods of customer involvement instead of focusing on one method. Using different methods helps managers to create divergent perspectives on customer preferences and needs, required to generate new ideas. Finally, we propose that customer involvement
in NSD should not be seen as a short-term investment.


We describe a low-threshold Cr(4+):forsterite laser which can be operated in continuous-wave as well as Kerr-lens mode-locked regimes at room temperature. To achieve low lasing thresholds, a 3-mm-long Cr(4+):forsterite crystal with a single-pass absorption of 41% was used to reduce the passive losses. Furthermore, a thin crystal was used to minimize the pump induced thermal gradients. During continuous-wave operation, absorbed threshold pump powers as low as 290 mW were obtained at 200C in single-pass pumping with a Yb fiber laser. To the best of our knowledge, this is the lowest pump threshold reported to date for Cr(4+):forsterite lasers. Furthermore, Kerr-lens mode locking could also be obtained using dispersion compensation with double-chirped mirrors. With an input pump power of 3 W, nearly transform-limited 89-fs pulses were obtained at a repetition rate of 200 MHz and with an average output power of 85 mW.


To investigate the characteristics of water-soluble inorganic ions (WSIIs) of PM_(2.5) and aerosol acidity in a coastal city, 352 samples were collected at four sites representing four functional zones (FJ: living town; XY: industrial area; TZ: scenery areas; HR: harbor) in Xiamen, China in 2015-2016. Mass concentrations of PM_(2.5), nine WSIIs, total acidity and in-situ acidity of aerosol/non-sea-salt aerosol were measured. Overall, the mean mass concentrations of PM_(2.5) in the study area in spring, summer, autumn and winter were 57.5 ± 22.3, 28.1 ± 12.6, 46.8 ± 18.3 and 62.4 ± 22.1 μg m^(-3), respectively. WSIIs accounted for 36%-56% of PM_(2.5) at four sites. Secondary ions (non-sea-salt SO_4 ^(2-), NO_3 ^- and NH_4 ^+) contributed more than 74% to total WSIIs. Neutralization degree distributions indicated that 79.5% of PM_(2.5) was acidic. Total acidity and in-situ acidity both showed obvious seasonal variations, exhibited the peak values of 193.20 and 130.17 nmol m^(-3) at HR site in summer. Sea-salt contributed 2.58%-17.74% to acidity in four seasons. The normalized ammonium concentration ([NH_4 ^+]/[SO_4 ^(2-)]) and normalized nitrate concentration ([NO_3 ^-]/[SO_4 ^(2-)]) showed greater correlation coefficients after eliminating the ammonium-poor data points (greater than 0.66), especially at HR site. NH_4HSO_4 was the major form of WSIIs in PM_(2.5) and the formation of aqueous HNO_3 could enhance aerosol acidity.


With its support for dynamic programming, C# 4.0 continues to evolve as a versatile language on its own. But when C# is used with .NET Framework 4, the combination is incredibly powerful. This bestselling tutorial shows you how to build web, desktop, and rich Internet applications using C# 4.0 with .NET's database capabilities, UI framework (WPF), extensive communication services (WCF), and more. In this sixth edition, .NET experts Ian Griffiths, Matthew Adams, and Jesse Liberty cover the latest enhancements to C#, as well as the fundamentals of both the language and framework. You'll learn concurrent programming with C# 4.0, and how to use .NET tools such as the Entity Framework for easier data access, and the Silverlight platform for browser-based RIA development. Learn C# fundamentals, such as variables, flow control, loops, and methods Build complex programs with object-oriented and functional programming techniques Process large collections of data with the native query features in LINQ Communicate across networks with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Learn the advantages of C# 4.0's dynamic language features Build interactive Windows applications with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Create rich web applications with Silverlight and ASP.NET


Abstract Liquid water in comets, once considered impossible, now appears to be almost certain. New evidence has come from the discovery of clay minerals in comet Tempel 1, which compliments the indirect evidence in aqueous alteration of carbonaceous chondrites. Infrared spectral indication of clay is confirmed by modelling data in the 8–40 μm and 8–12 μm wavebands on the basis of mixtures of clays and organics. Radiogenic heating producing liquid water cores in freshly formed comets appears more likely on current evidence for solar system formation. A second possibility investigated here is transient melting in comets in the inner solar system, where thin crusts of asphalt-like material, formed due to solar processing and becoming hot in the daytime, can cause melting of sub-surface icy material a few centimetres deep. Supposing comets were seeded with microbes at the time of their formation from pre-solar material, there would be plenty of time for exponential amplification and evolution within the liquid interior and in the transient ponds or lakes formed as the outer layers are stripped away via sublimation.


Recent studies suggest that the parahippocampal place area (PPA) responds to a broad spectrum of objects and scenes: big objects (Konkle & Oliva, 2011; Troiani et al., 2012), line drawings (Walther et al., 2011), and texture patches (Komblith et al., 2013; Cant & Goodale, 2011; Cant & Xu, 2012). Here, we test two hypotheses about texture representation in the PPA within the scene context. One hypothesis is that the PPA represents the texture ensemble (e.g., the kind of texture) as is, irrespective of the scene context. Another hypothesis is that the PPA represents the texture because it provides an important cue about the placeness of a scene. In the latter case, the PPA would be sensitive to not only the texture ensemble but also the location of texture within a scene (e.g., ceiling or wall) that can change the placeness perception. In Experiment 1 (n=11), participants saw images of synthetic rooms varied by 2 different textures x 2 texture location x 2 spatial layout. Using multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) and a regression with two hypothetical models, we found that the representation-similarity of the PPA activation patterns was explained by the change in texture ensemble but not by the change in placeness (p=0.015). In Experiment 2 (n=6) we asked the same question using the repetition suppression method. In contrast to MVPA results, two scenes with the same texture ensemble but different placeness did not show repetition suppression, suggesting PPA's sensitivity to the change in placeness perception. These results add to growing evidence in the field showing contrasting results from MVPA and repetition suppression methods (Drucker & Aguirre, 2009; Epstein & Morgan, 2011). We'll also discuss the results of other scene-selective areas (e.g., RSC and OPA) and the possibility of the PPA representing the texture in a scene in a hierarchical manner. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


We extend Q-learning to a noncooperative multiagent context, using the framework of general-sum stochastic games. A learning agent maintains Q-functions over joint actions, and performs updates based on assuming Nash equilibrium behavior over the current Q-values. This learning protocol provably converges given certain restrictions on the stage games (defined by Q-values) that arise during learning. Experiments with a pair of two-player grid games suggest that such restrictions on the game structure are not necessarily required. Stage games encountered during learning in both grid environments violate the conditions. However, learning consistently converges in the first grid game, which has a unique equilibrium Q-function, but sometimes fails to converge in the second, which has three different equilibrium Q-functions. In a comparison of offline learning performance in both games, we find agents are more likely to reach a joint optimal path with Nash Q-learning than with a single-agent Q-learning method. When at least one agent adopts Nash Q-learning, the performance of both agents is better than using single-agent Q-learning. We have also implemented an online version of Nash Q-learning that balances exploration with exploitation, yielding improved performance.


BACKGROUND
Civilian popliteal artery injuries are associated with significant amputation rates.

AIM
The aim of this study was to identify factors associated with limb loss in patients with popliteal artery injuries.

PATIENTS AND METHODS
We performed a retrospective chart review of prospectively collected data on patients with popliteal artery injuries presenting to the Trauma Centre at Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town, from 1 January 1999 to 31 December 2008. Demographic data, mechanism of injury, haemodynamic status, limb viability, special investigations, associated injuries, ischaemic time, surgical treatment and amputation rates were analysed.

RESULTS
One hundred and thirty-six patients with popliteal artery injuries were identified. Penetrating and blunt trauma accounted for 81 (59.6%) and 55 (40.4%) injuries, respectively. Associated injuries included fractures in 66 patients (48.6%), knee dislocations in 29 (21.3%) and popliteal vein injuries in 59 (43.4%). Fifty-seven patients (41.9%) presented with a compartment syndrome. Arterial injuries were treated with reversed vein grafting in 68 patients, primary anastomosis in 33, prosthetic graft insertion in 11, and primary amputation in 7. Thirty-two patients underwent delayed amputation, giving an overall amputation rate of 37.5%. A delay of more than 7 hours of ischaemic time between injury and definitive repair (p=0.0236) and the presence of a compartment syndrome (p=0.003) were significantly associated with an increased amputation rate.

CONCLUSION
The most significant factors associated with the high amputation rate of 37.5% were an ischaemic time longer than 7 hours, and the presence of a compartment syndrome.


Challenges face the geotechnical engineer in the ACG Field in the Caspian Sea, from data acquisition, through soil characterization, to foundation design and installation. This paper seeks to address some of these challenges and describes some case examples from the authors' experiences, particularly in the treatment of geohazards and their threat to foundation integrity. Limited guidance exists within industry codes and standards to address the interaction of geohazards with jackets and with subsea infrastructure. As such, quantified risk assessment becomes complex. This paper suggests some solutions to these problems, borne out of more than 20 years' operating experience in the Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) and the need to consider development in some of the more geohazardous areas. Unusual methods of geotechnical data acquisition are presented along with tools and novel analytical techniques specific to the needs of Caspian soils. Finally, the paper presents some approaches to quantify the impact of geohazards, including the influence of unusual soil conditions as they present themselves today.


This paper aims to review the impact of the various tariff legislations passed from 1998 to 2003 on the structure of protection in the Philippines. The paper finds that while the overall level of effective protection has declined, it has remained uneven as some selected sectors have continued to receive relatively high effective rates of protection. As such, the economic distortions that characterize our tariff structure have continued to prevail and have led to the inefficient use of resources. The tariff structure continues to favor the manufacture of highly protected import substitutes at the expense of exportables. Oftentimes, the favored sectors are intermediate goods like sugar, petrochemicals, float glass, and steel which are inputs to a lot of products. Since the tariffs on the inputs are higher than the outputs, the cost of production has remained high affecting the competitiveness of the user sectors. The large disparities in tariff protection has provided incentives for lobbying. Thus, sustaining the trade reforms and encouraging competition to promote efficiency and consumer welfare has been very difficult.


Both structural glasses and disordered crystals are known to exhibit anomalous thermal, vibrational, and acoustic properties at low temperatures or low energies, what is still a matter of lively debate. To shed light on this issue, we studied the halomethane family CBrnCl4-n (n = 0, 1, 2) at low temperature where, despite being perfectly translationally ordered stable monoclinic crystals, glassy dynamical features had been reported from experiments and molecular dynamics simulations. For n = 1, 2 dynamic disorder originates by the random occupancy of the same lattice sites by either Cl or Br atoms, but not for the ideal reference case of CCl4. Measurements of the low-temperature specific heat (Cp) for all these materials are here reported, which provide evidence of the presence of a broad peak in Debye-reduced Cp(T )/T 3 and in the reduced density of states (g(?)/?2) determined by means of neutron spectroscopy, as well as a linear term in Cp usually ascribed in glasses to two-level systems in addition to the cubic term expected for a fully ordered crystal. Being CCl4 a fully ordered crystal, we also performed density functional theory (DFT) calculations, which provide unprecedented detailed information about the microscopic nature of vibrations responsible for that broad peak, much alike the "'boson peak" of glasses, finding it to essentially arise from a piling up (at around 3–4 meV) of low-energy optical modes together with acoustic modes near the Brillouin-zone limits.


Nonivamide, a synthetic derivate of natural capsaicin, has an effective antifouling activity. However, the poor understanding of the toxicity mechanism limits the application of nonivamide in antifouling paints. The present study investigated the inhibitory effects and toxicity mechanism of nonivamide on Phaeodactylum tricornutum. Under a 1.5 × 105 cells/ml of initial algal density (IAD), the effective concentration causing 50% inhibition at 4‐ d (4 d‐EC50) value of nonivamide was 5.1 mg/L. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) level was significantly increased in nonivamide‐treated algae. Algal antioxidants, including catalases (CAT), peroxidases (POD), superoxide dismutases (SOD), and glutathione (GSH), were all stimulated by the ROS burst. The excessive ROS substances led to the loss of algal photosynthetic pigments and also damage to the integrity of the lipid membrane. Furthermore, ROS‐related genes, including psbA, psbD, psaB, rbcL, nad1, and cob, were found to be suppressed in the chloroplasts and mitochondria of nonivamide‐treated algae, and the concentration of cytoplasmic Ca2+, an important regulator of chloroplast and mitochondrion, was elevated. The present study demonstrates that nonivamide could cause peroxidative damages to P. tricornutum by inducing ROS overproduction, which may be initiated by the suppression of ROS‐related genes in algal chloroplasts and mitochondria. Environ. Toxicol. Chem. 2013;32:802–809. © 2013 SETAC


The purpose of this study was to engage practitioners in collaborative inquiry in order to examine the concept of flipped learning. At the core of this concept is the notion of flipping or reversing traditional instructional practice with traditional homework. Nine teachers across three grade spans, K-5, 6-8, and 9-12 and three non-instructional practitioners (one media coordinator, one instructional technology facilitator, and one assistant principal), participated in this process of examining flipped learning and creating a framework for practice and implementation. These teachers engaged in this collaborative inquiry as action researchers within a professional learning community (PLC). These participants not only examined flipped learning as described by others, but also examined their current practices as they challenged themselves to develop strategies for flipped learning, and to develop a framework for practice across three grade spans in our district: K-5, 6-8, and 9-12. The framework design within this study emerged from the analysis of the data: teacher reflections, surveys, observations, and interviews. The purpose of this study was not to determine any quantifiable effects of flipped learning, but further develop an understanding of this pedagogical approach to learning and the implications for practice within our own district and for others considering implementation.


We consider the classical polling model: queues served in cyclic order with either exhaustive or gated service, each with its own distinct Poisson arrival stream, service-time distribution, and switchover-time the server's travel time from that queue to the next distribution. Traditionally, models with zero switchover times the server travels at infinite speed and nonzero switchover times have been considered separately because of technical difficulties reflecting the fact that in the latter case the mean cycle time approaches zero as the travel speed approaches infinity. We argue that the zero-switchover-times model is the more fundamental model: the mean waiting times in the nonzero-switchover-times model decompose reminiscent of vacation models into a sum of two terms, one being a simple function of the sum of the mean switchover times, and the other the mean waiting time in a "corresponding" model obtained from the original by setting the switchover times to zero and modifying the service-time variances. This generalizes a recent result of S. W. Fuhrmann for the case of constant switchover times, where no variance modification is necessary. The effect of these studies is to reduce computation and to improve theoretical understanding of polling models.


In recent years, contamination of water in water distribution systems (WDS) has been recognized as a major cause of waterborne diseases. Owing to old and deteriorated pipes, and the presence of pollution sources in contact with the supply line, water boards often decide to replace the network in the interests of public health. This being a cost-intensive and time-consuming programme, decision makers need a basis for phase-wise investment planning. In view of this, Integrated Risk Assessment of Water Distribution System (IRA-WDS) for the supply network of Adikmet Subzone-I in Hyderabad, India, was undertaken. GIS maps were prepared for the water supply network, sewer network, open drains, soil and groundwater table at 1:2,200 scale and 'pipe condition assessment' and identification of 'contaminant ingress' locations were performed using IRA-WDS. Findings indicated 18 pipes in 'very bad' and 'bad' condition in the entire network. 'High risk' of contamination was exhibited in 20 locations, suggesting the need for rehabilitation of only 2 to 3% of pipes in the initial phase.


The Pacific Islands region is rapidly urbanising with mounting social and ecological pressures, as has been well covered in many earlier DPA publications. To date, regional attention to this significant development challenge has been sporadic at best and generally ineffective (Bryar and Keen 2018; Keen and Connell 2019). Despite four regional Pacific Urban Forums (PUFs) since 2003, urbanisation still fails to get traction (Kiddle et al. 2017). In July 2019, the fifth PUF (PUF5) took place in Nadi, Fiji with the aim of achieving sustainable urban development by: • increasing action in support of implementation and monitoring of the Pacific Urban Agenda (or PUA) endorsed at the previous PUF in 2015 • improving mechanisms for data collection and the exchange of knowledge in support of evidence-based policy • developing new partnerships for action. At PUF5, Pacific Island governments, non-government organisations and academic institutions were well represented with the geographic spread of representation and attendance numbers the highest yet. This In Brief provides an overview of the prominent issues at the PUF5 and an analysis of future prospects for sustainable urban development in the region.


Engineering and construction capability affects the cost and pace of post-disaster recovery. An organizational capability framework for effective earthquake recovery was developed after studying longitudinally 15 engineering and construction organizations following the 2010/11 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand. The longitudinal case studies, conducted from 2012 to 2015, revealed insights regarding the multitude of decisions that affected demands for engineering and construction post-earthquake, and thus the capability of organizations to meet demands. The framework presents five major challenges faced by organizations operating in an earthquake recovery environment and three core organizational capabilities required to address these challenges: disaster recovery know-how, organizational adaptive capacity to meet changing demands, and collective support among organizations. The findings offer real experience to help engineering and construction industries anticipate capability challenges and prepare for them as a business, as a sector, and as a partner with government agencies in a disaster management context.


The standard monopoly pricing problem is re-considered when the buyer can disclose his type (e.g. age, income, experience) at some cost. In the optimal sales mechanism with costly disclosure, the seller posts a price list, including a \sticker price" available to any buyer and a schedule of discounts available to those who disclose certain types. Unambiguous welfare implications of such a pricing policy are available in the limiting case when the buyer's type is fully informative: (i) The buyer is better o and the monopolist worse o when disclosure is more costly. (ii) When discounts are suciently rare, social welfare is strictly less than if the seller could not o er discounts.


It has been commonly assumed that nineteenth-century hospital patients were objectified, silenced, treated as the 'accident' of their disease, to use Michel Foucault's term, and also that as charity patients they were largely illiterate paupers, and consequently did not write accounts of their hospital experience. One such account has been known, however, since the 1970s, when W. B. Howie and S. A. B. Black published two articles in medical journals on Margaret Mathewson's 'Sketch of Eight Months a Patient, in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, A.D. 1877'. Martin Goldman subsequently published excerpts from the 'Sketch' in Lister Ward (1987). But Mathewson's account of her experience as a surgical patient of Joseph Lister has never been published in its entirety, nor has it been known that the two existing copies of the manuscript differ extensively, as Mathewson decided to leave out 'some insignificant items and put in others more interesting' in the later version. Admitted because Lister thought he could save her arm from amputation by excision of her tuberculous shoulder joint, her narrative vividly details what it was like to be a surgical patient in Scotland in 1877. Her revisions to that narrative provide clues as to what she thought prudent to exclude from her account, after friends had asked her to publish it. As a charity patient, she was subordinated to the hospital staff, expected to wait uncomplainingly and to accept whatever treatment was given. But her 'Sketch' reveals such unexpected and surprising information as the willingness of the staff, including Lister himself, to teach her and other patients about the nature of their disease and also how to care for themselves, especially how to change their own dressings. Even more startling, Mathewson's narrative documents her confrontation of a 'cruel dresser', a medical student whom she believed to be deliberately causing her pain when he changed her dressing and manipulated her arm, and Lister's corroboration that the patient had the right to report such maltreatment. Mathewson's 'Sketch' narrates her progress from identification as an 'interesting' case to 'successful' and even 'favourite' case; and her movement from one subordinated to medical authority to one who speaks - and acts - on her own behalf.


*1133 The debate between the Critical Legal Studies movement and its critics has often seemed little more than a collection of arbitrary dismissals from both sides. For this reason, few books can be more welcome than the philosopher Andrew Altman's recent study of the Critical Legal Studies movement. Altman discusses and critiques CLS writings from the standpoint of a scholar deeply committed to liberal political theory. But there is nothing dismissive about Altman's work; if Altman's is a criticism of CLS, it is a very sympathetic criticism. Altman is a liberal who nevertheless recognizes the potential failings of liberal legal theory. He agrees with Morton Horwitz that the Rule of Law is not an "unqualified human good," despite its obvious importance in preserving human liberty.1 He accepts the claim that social rules and practices affect the justice of the legal system as much as do legal rules, and argues that without a culture of tolerance and respect for freedom, legal guarantees of human rights will not be sufficient to prevent oppression.2 Thus, Altman has much in common with the CLS thinkers he purports to criticize. Nevertheless, he has an abiding faith in liberalism as a political theory that can adapt to changes in human affairs and reform itself in order better to protect human rights and human values.3 In his view, the soundest versions of liberalism have nothing to fear from CLS critiques,


Introduction - what drives the ocean currents? temperature, salinity, density and the oceanic pressure field the Coriolis force, geostropy, Rossby waves and the westwood intensification Ekman layer transports, Ekman pumping and the Sverdrup balance water mass formation, subduction and the oceanic heat budget Antarctic oceanography Arctic oceanography -the path of North Atlantic Deep Water the Pacific Ocean hydrology of the Pacific Ocean adjacent seas of the Pacific Ocean the Indian Ocean hydrology of the Indian Ocean adjacent seas of the Indian Ocean and the Australasian Mediterranean Sea the Atlantic Ocean hydrology of the Atlantic Ocean aspects of advanced regional oceanography the oceans and the world's mean climate El Nino and the Southern oscillation (ENSO) the ocean and climate change.


Humans and many other species sense visual information with varying spatial resolution across the visual field (foveated vision) and deploy eye movements to actively sample regions of interests in scenes. The advantage of such varying resolution architecture is a reduced computational, hence metabolic cost. But what are the performance costs of such processing strategy relative to a scheme that processes the visual field at high spatial resolution? Here we first focus on visual search and combine object detectors from computer vision with a recent model of peripheral pooling regions found at the V1 layer of the human visual system. We develop a foveated object detector that processes the entire scene with varying resolution, uses retino-specific object detection classifiers to guide eye movements, aligns its fovea with regions of interest in the input image and integrates observations across multiple fixations. We compared the foveated object detector against a non-foveated version of the same object detector which processes the entire image at homogeneous high spatial resolution. We evaluated the accuracy of the foveated and non-foveated object detectors identifying 20 different objects classes in scenes from a standard computer vision data set (the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset). We show that the foveated object detector can approximate the performance of the object detector with homogeneous high spatial resolution processing while bringing significant computational cost savings. Additionally, we assessed the impact of foveation on the computation of bottom-up saliency. An implementation of a simple foveated bottom-up saliency model with eye movements showed agreement in the selection of top salient regions of scenes with those selected by a non-foveated high resolution saliency model. Together, our results might help explain the evolution of foveated visual systems with eye movements as a solution that preserves perceptual performance in visual search while resulting in computational and metabolic savings to the brain.


The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine how communication preferences, learning preferences, and perceptions about online learning affect nontraditional African American students' participation in online world literature courses at a historically Black university (HBCU) in the southeastern United States. An instrumental case study was the research design used. Data were collected from individual interviews of participants and non-participatory observations of Blackboard course shells and analyzed through content analysis (Babbie, 2003). Chen's Learner-to-Learner Transactional Distance, Learner-to-Content Transactional Distance, and Learner-to-Interface Transactional Distance theory (2001), along with Moore's Theory of Transactional Distance (1996) informed the data analysis. Analysis occurred in two stages. Within-case analysis was used to understand the experiences of online learning with individual participants. Later, a cross-case analysis was used "to build abstractions across cases" (Merriam, 1998, p. 195) as well as to compare participants' experiences to ascertain a grander view of participation of African American nontraditional students in online world literature classes. The findings of the study explained nontraditional African American student preferences for frequent oral communication among students, preferably face-to-face. In addition, students wished to make oral contact with online instructors; however, they desired to have the instructor to communicate with them via email. In addition, findings also revealed how African American students could often be overwhelmed with long reading requirements. Their preferences were to have content condensed for learning. They also preferred to have study guides which highlighted key information to which one's focus should be placed. Furthermore, students preferred to work and learn in groups. In order to enhance their enjoyment and participation in the course, participants preferred to make connections with subject matter, topics, and peers. For the most part, participants were drawn to online learning for the convenience, though their learning preferences were not often met in the online learning environment. While many participants found learning to be accessible and convenient through online courses, many of them were frustrated by slow response and feedback by online instructors and technical problems which may have occurred due to lack of savvy with online learning or Blackboard technicalities. Implications for higher education administrators, university professors, and students as related to online learning are provided.


Section 1: What are Events: 1. Setting the context for event experiences 2. Overview of organisational processes This introductory section aims to establish the context within which event experiences take place. It is also the scene setting chapter, discussing(briefly) the event industry, terminology and definitions, market demand. Nearly all existing event based texts tend to provide an internal view of the process of organisation and management which confers upon the reader solid practical approaches. This chapter will also critically review that literature on event management in order to establish a context and platform from which a more meaningful understanding and analysis of the experience of consumers can be drawn. It will consider how event manuals approach the organisation and management of events with reference to the impact and experience of those events. For example the work on event organisation and marketing of Watt, Hoyle,Goldblatt, Sonder and Getz , the programming concepts identified in O'Toole, Allen, Shone, Torkildsen and Rossman will be explored. Practical material will be drawn from, amongst others, the event management section of Wembley Plc, London Borough of Ealing, Leapfrog Corporate Events, Catalyst Event Management, Union Cycliste International , British Cycling Federation. Section 2 : What is an event experience? 3. What are event experiences? 4. The dimensions of event experiences 5. Interaction between experience and participant 6. The flow of experiences 7. Providing for experiences This section will introduce and explain what event experiences are and provide a setting for the following sections. It will follow on from Chapter 1 by both explaining the nature and stages of experience and the emergence of the experience industry itself (including the marketing of experiences). It will seek to clarify the nature of an experience and how experiences are more than simply one-dimensional and uniform throughout the time an individual or group is in attendance utilising , for example, the work of Kelly & Godbey, Leitner, Gray, Hull and Csikszentmihalyi, O'Sullivan and Spangler. To illustrate how these points relate to the experience examples will be drawn from many areas such as Academic Conferences, Business Conventions, Graduation and Award Ceremonies, Olympic and Commonwealth Games, RAF Museum Exhibitions, Sport in Science Exhibition, DMS&S Show, London Fashion Week, Clothes Show Live, Proms, Ice-Skating, Nike Fun Run Section 3 - Designing Experiences 8. Understanding Design 9. The Design process 10. Creating themed environment 11. Event artistry This section provides an overview of design considerations. The chapter considers how design itself can impact upon the experience, in some cases fundamentally changing the nature of experience. It asks the question of how experiences are designed and equally importantly what do they signify, once complete, to the consumer. The chapter will seek to raise an awareness of how the design and creation of environments influences the experience in other words to establish the need and role of what might be called 'event artistry'. It will further explore the link with experience marketing. A design management perspective will be embraced that will elaborate on the design of experiences associated with experience infusers, enhancers and makers. Consideration here will be given to parameters of experiences. This will be linked with effective event design focusing on artistic concepts such as installation (site-specific, sensual, kinetic), conceptualisation (abstract, interpretative) assemblage (raw, unorthodox), pop art (larger-than-life) impressionism (suggestive, fluid) kitsch ( tongue-in-cheek) regionalism (urban, representative) realism (natural, true) surrealism (make-believe) traditionalism ( classic) narrative art ( literary, eternal). Practical material illustrating the above points will drawn from many sources but will include, for example, Academy Awards Board, Chef Master Class, Ideal Home Exhibition, London Transport Museum, MTV Awards, Halloween Party, Graduation Ceremony, Mitzvah Celebration, Music 100, London Fashion Week, Cincinnati Museum Centre, Science Museum, World Mountain Bike Series, MOMI, Metallica on Tour, the Bike Show. Section 4 -Analysing event experiences 12. Analysing of event experiences 13. Experience Perception and interpretation 14. Event contextualisation and representation The final section will offer a concluding analysis of the experience, considering how experiences can be analysed and evaluated and to consider the artificiality of the event and how this reflects in the experience of consumers. This will lead onto a review of the psychological processes of perception and interpretation and how meaning and experience can be analysed and how we may begin to unravel the meanings attributed to certain events. Finally the mode of attendance will be considered as participants construct their own experiences, not necessarily through the sole nature of the provision, but through the shared characteristics and behaviour patterns that groups and individuals bring with them to create and interpret experiences. The work of Tomlinson, Veal, Featherstone, Wearing, and Hall amongst others will be used to highlight these points. Examples will be drawn from participant research and assessment through site visits. Previous examples will be revisited to illustrate some analytical points as well as reflecting on the following events: Adrenalin 98, Beatles Walking Tour, London Cross Championships, Virgin Assault 3, Nike Fun Run, TiLE, CONFEX, The Event Show, Savoy Awards, Glastonbury. Summary & Conclusions


This dissertation analyzes the rhetorical situation of the peasant-driven land reform struggle in the country of Paraguay. While the term "Campesinos Sin Tierra" unites the many different groups participating in the struggle, this work specifically identifies the character of many peasant organizations at local and national levels of participation as well as exploring the attitudes and contributions of individual peasants. The struggle is situated within both historical and rhetorical contexts. The historical importance of land tenure practices is recognized and traced from pre-Columbian civilization to the present. The concept of land as a socio-political instrument as well as an economic resource is explored and related to the present politics of land reform. In addition, the nature of peasant organization, protest strategies, argumentation and success are thoroughly investigated and elucidated in this work. Through on-site research, interviews and translation of newspaper accounts and academic students of Paraguayan peasants, the dissertation develops a thick description of peasant perspectives in the struggle. Particular attention is devoted to unearthing argument strategies and the specific language employed by individual peasant protestors, peasant organizations and other groups. An analysis of these argument strategies constitutes the basis for evaluating the struggle as a new social movement in the context of social movement theory. Finally, the dissertation proposes that "rhetoripolitical" practices structure and constrain the argumentative and protest strategies employed in the struggle and serve to explain its failure as a new social movement. Rhetoripolitics functions as a hegemonic process of argumentative cooptation that both limits protest innovation and safeguards the social order from social protest activity. Rhetoripolitics is discussed as a historical and cultural phenomenon situated within the cultural milieu of Paraguay and the Paraguayan land reform struggle. The dissertation concludes by suggesting that rhetoripolitics could structure the nature of social struggles in other developing nations and place constraints upon the nature of social protest as it has in the Paraguayan case. Rhetoripolitics may function as an important limit to the ability of nations in the developing world to participate in the new social movement phenomenon.


Dendritic polyglycerol sulfate (dPGS) has originally been investigated as an anticoagulant to potentially substitute for the natural glycosaminoglycan heparin. Compared to unfractionated heparin, dPGS possesses lower anticoagulant activity but a much higher anticomplementary effect. Since coagulation, complement activation, and inflammation are often present in the pathophysiology of numerous diseases, dPGS polymers with both anticoagulant and anticomplementary activities represent promising candidates for the development of polymeric drugs of nanosized architecture. In this review, we describe the nanomedical applications of dPGS based on its anti-inflammatory activity. Furthermore, the application of dPGS as a carrier molecule for diagnostic molecules and therapeutic drugs is reviewed, based on the ability to target tumors and localize in tumor cells. Finally, the application of dPGS for inhibition of virus infections is described.


We have explored and implemented different approaches to named entity recognition in German, a difficult task in this language since both regular nouns and proper names are capitalized. Our goal is to identify and recognise person names, geographical names and company names in a computer magazine corpus. Our geographical name classifier works with precompiled lists but our company name classifier learns the names from the corpus. For the recognition of person names we work with a precompiled list of first names and the program learns the last names. For this classifier we suggest setting an activation value for the last name and subsequently depriming the value until OforgettingO the name. Our evaluation results show that our mixed approaches are as good as the recall and precision values reported for English. It is shown that a carefully tuned cascade of name classifiers can even distinguish between different interpretations of a name token within the same document.


CUDA by Example: An Introduction to General-Purpose GPU Programming Jason Sanders and Edward Kandrot ISBN-13: 978-0131387683 Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (July 29, 2010) Introduction This book is designed for readers who are interested in studying how to develop general parallel applications on graphics processing unit (GPU) by using CUDA C. CUDA C is a programming language, which combines industry standard programming C language and some more features which can exploit CUDA architecture. With proper introduction to NVIDA's CUDA architecture and in depth explanation for setting up development environment, this book is an easy to read, easy to understand, and hands on book. Readers of this book are assumed to have at least C language as background. Through this book, readers will not only gain experience in CUDA C development languages, but also will understand a lot of important underlying hardware knowledge, which in return can help software developers develop more efficient and effective applications. Outline of the Book This book is very well organized. Each chapter consists of general introduction, chapter objectives and Chapter Review. Both Sanders and Kandrot are senior software engineers in the CUDA Platform group and CUDA Algorithm team in NVIDIA Company, respectively. First chapter provide users background about history of GPU and CUDA architecture. Special features in CUDA architecture enable GPU to perform general purpose computation in addition to carry out traditional graphic computation. Readers can easily understand the benefit of CUDA architecture by reading though three different applications varying from medical field to environmental filed. In Chapter 2, Sanders and Kandrot equip users with complete lists of hardware and software support for running CUDA C applications. All software can be downloaded for free from websites suggested from authors. Then by a familiar Hello world program in Chapter 3, authors demystified that the CUDA C fundamentally is a standard C language with additional features which can allow application developer to specify which code can be run on device (GPU and its memory) or host (CPU and system memory). After setting all of proper background, the use of CUDA C to run parallel programs on GPU are discussed from Chapter 4 to Chapter 7. In Chapter 8, authors try to illustrate how to incorporate rendering and general purpose computation by using CUDA C. Readers without background in OpenGL or DirectX, can skip this chapter and go to the next. However, this chapter is a great addition to the book since it gives readers complete view of CUDA C. Even though CUDA C turns complicated application with single thread execution into easier case by parallel processing, there are some situation that special care should be taken when simple single thread application are tried to implement on massively parallel architecture; Chapter 9 discusses this topic. Compared to parallelism discussed in above chapters, which refers to parallel execution of a function on different sets of data, in Chapter 10, readers are exposed to a different class of parallelism on GPU, which refers to two or more completely independent tasks to be performed in parallel. Chapter 11 covers how to develop CUDA C application on Multiple GPUS. For further study, Chapter 12 shows more tools to aid CUDA C development and more resources to enhance reader's CUBA C development skills to another level. Summary Jason Sanders and Edward Kandrot wrote this book in such a way that is very easy to read and follow. Also, Sanders and Kandrot never forget the great sense of humor throughout the book. Reading this book is not only a discovery about CUDA C but also a joyful journal. It is highly recommended for students who are interested to learn CUDA C application development as Computer Science major. This book is recommended to be adopted as textbook for undergraduate students studying parallel programming. Jie Cheng, University of Hawaii Hilo


The starting point for this article is an artist-led practice developed by choreographer João Fiadeiro during the past two decades, which has been designated as "Composition in Real Time" (CTR). The interesting point about this methodology is that it has been applied in performance composition and in arts education by its author himself; but also in such diverse fields as anthropology, sociology, neurosciences, and economy by scientists and academics in collaboration with Fiadeiro. The authors of this article have conducted a long-lasting case study on the artistic process of Fiadeiro in the framework of an ERC-funded interdisciplinary arts and cognition project. We present our resulting novel approach to researching contemporary dance work through the creation and production of animated infographic films. Along with leading PaR theorists we argue that the utilization of adequate artistic techniques and methods in academic research can successfully reveal how unique creative ideas and conceptual structures come into being in the creative processes of today's contemporary artists. The article discusses specific excerpts of the provided animated infographic films to show how we digitally re-constructed Fiadeiro's conceptual and imaginative universe, and how our findings can address both an academic and interested lay audience.

SOLOS study: I am sitting in a different room you are in now from BlackBox Art&Cognition on Vimeo.

SOLOS study: I was here from BlackBox Art&Cognition on Vimeo.

Graphic models developed by João Fiadeiro from BlackBox Art&Cognition on Vimeo.


Reinforcement learning agents often forget details of the past, especially after delays or distractor tasks. Agents with common memory architectures struggle to recall and integrate across multiple timesteps of a past event, or even to recall the details of a single timestep that is followed by distractor tasks. To address these limitations, we propose a Hierarchical Chunk Attention Memory (HCAM), which helps agents to remember the past in detail. HCAM stores memories by dividing the past into chunks, and recalls by first performing high-level attention over coarse summaries of the chunks, and then performing detailed attention within only the most relevant chunks. An agent with HCAM can therefore"mentally time-travel"-- remember past events in detail without attending to all intervening events. We show that agents with HCAM substantially outperform agents with other memory architectures at tasks requiring long-term recall, retention, or reasoning over memory. These include recalling where an object is hidden in a 3D environment, rapidly learning to navigate efficiently in a new neighborhood, and rapidly learning and retaining new object names. Agents with HCAM can extrapolate to task sequences much longer than they were trained on, and can even generalize zero-shot from a meta-learning setting to maintaining knowledge across episodes. HCAM improves agent sample efficiency, generalization, and generality (by solving tasks that previously required specialized architectures). Our work is a step towards agents that can learn, interact, and adapt in complex and temporally-extended environments.


Mashups have emerged as a Web 2.0 phenomenon, connecting disjoint applications together to provide unified services. However, scalable access control for mashups is difficult. To enable a mashup to gather data from legacy applications and services, users must give the mashup their login names and passwords for those services. This all-or-nothing approach violates the principle of least privilege and leaves users vulnerable to misuse of their credentials by malicious mashups. In this paper, we introduce delegation permits - a stateless approach to access rights delegation in mashups - and describe our complete implementation of a permit-based authorization delegation service. Our protocol and implementation enable fine grained, flexible, and stateless access control and authorization for distributed delegated authorization in mashups, while minimizing attackers' ability to capture and exploit users' authentication credentials.


Study Design. Prospective inception cohort study. Objectives. To compare the clinical course of fear-avoidance beliefs in acute and chronic low back pain (LBP) and investigate the contribution of fear-avoidance beliefs to predict pain and disability after 1 year. Summary of Background Data. Fear-avoidance beliefs are involved in disability development. There is little knowledge on the development of fear-avoidance beliefs among different LBP subgroups. Methods. Patients with acute (n = 123) and chronic (n = 50) LBP completed a comprehensive assessment, including the Fear-Avoidance Beliefs Questionnaire (FABQ), and were followed at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months. Results. At baseline, patients with chronic LBP had significantly higher FABQ-scores for work (FABQ-Work) than patients with acute LBP (P < 0.001), and this difference remained unchanged over 1 year (P > 0.21). At baseline, there was no statistical significant difference in FABQ-scores for physical activity (FABQ-PA) between the two groups (P = 0.57). FABQ-PA scores decreased significantly over the first 4 weeks among patients with acute LBP during follow-up and remained unchanged thereafter, whereas in the chronic sample the FABQ-PA scores were unchanged throughout the first year (time effect, P < 0.001; and interaction effect, P < 0.001). In the acute sample, FABQ-Work predicted pain (P < 0.05) and disability at 12 months (P = 0.01). In the chronic sample, FABQ-PA predicted disability at 12 months (P = 0.03). The associations between the FABQ and pain/disability disappeared with distress included in the models. Conclusion. Patients with chronic LBP had more fear-avoidance beliefs for work than patients with acute LBP. There were small changes in fear-avoidance beliefs during the year of follow-up, except for a rapid decrease during the first month in the FABQ-PA in the acute sample. Fear-avoidance beliefs predicted pain and disability at 12 months after adjusting for socio-demographic and pain variables. Distress was a stronger predictor than fear-avoidance beliefs.


We show that unless the target density is particularly smooth, cross-validation applied directly to nonlinear wavelet estimators produces an empirical value of primary resolution which fails, by an order of magnitude, to give asymptotic optimality. We note, too, that in the same setting, but for different reasons, cross-validation of the linear component of a wavelet estimator fails to give asymptotic optimality, if the primary resolution level that it suggests is applied to the nonlinear form of the estimator. We propose an alternative technique, based on multiple cross-validation of the linear component. Our method involves dividing the region of interest into a number of subregions, choosing a resolution level by cross-validation of the linear part of the estimator in each subregion, and taking the final empirically chosen level to be the minimum of the subregion values. This approach exploits the relative resistance of wavelet methods to over-smoothing: the final resolution level is too small in some parts of the main region, but that has a relatively minor effect on performance of the final estimator. The fact that we use the same resolution level throughout the region, rather than a different level in each subregion, means that we do not need to splice together different estimates and remove artificial jumps where the subregions abut.


ADtrees, a data structure useful for caching sufficient statistics, have been successfully adapted to grow lazily when memory is limited and to update sequentially with an incrementally updated dataset. For low arity symbolic features, ADtrees trade a slight increase in query time for a reduction in overall tree size. Unfortunately, for high arity features, the same technique can often result in a very large increase in query time and a nearly negligible tree size reduction. In the dynamic (lazy) version of the tree, both query time and tree size can increase for some applications. Here we present two modifications to the ADtree which can be used separately or in combination to achieve the originally intended space-time tradeoff in the ADtree when applied to datasets containing very high arity features.


Nowadays, the web is frequently used as a platform for e-learning applications. These
applications vary from static lecture presentations to fully integrated, dynamic
multimedia applications that enabling interaction between student and lecturer.
Through E-learning students can adapt the lesson efficiently as they can hear, see,
and customize the lesson as they like. This thesis is about developing website training
for kids to learn the music theory. The music subject lesson has been chosen in this
project music education in Malaysia is not really emphasize. According to the
research, quality of music education in Malaysia is still in low level since most of
educators do not have enough knowledge. Furthermore, as music was only introduced
on a wider scale in school about 23 years ago, many children in Malaysia do not
received well music education. Moreover, the formal music educations are only
introduced in primary school thus the potential of students to learn music in depth is
very limited. Thus with this prototype hopefully could change the situation. Because
music education actually can give many benefits for student such as in learning
because they at the same time can practice using the left and the right brain .The
lesson is focus on the beginner especially for the child including Piano Key Lesson,
Piano Note Lesson and Line and Space Note Lesson. The scope of this project will
focus only on content and syllabus that will be a path to Music Year 1 KBSR that have
been provided by the Ministry of Education Malaysia. The main objectives from the
development of the system are, to develop web based training software for kids to
learn music theory, the prototype is produce by adapting the theory of constructivism in
order to enhance student learning ability toward music theory and also to develop an
interesting practice tools for kids to get familiar with the musical theory and concepts
via Internet.


Traditional computer graphics rendering pipeline is designed for procedurally generating 2D quality images from 3D shapes with high performance. The non-differentiability due to discrete operations such as visibility computation makes it hard to explicitly correlate rendering parameters and the resulting image, posing a significant challenge for inverse rendering tasks. Recent work on differentiable rendering achieves differentiability either by designing surrogate gradients for non-differentiable operations or via an approximate but differentiable renderer. These methods, however, are still limited when it comes to handling occlusion, and restricted to particular rendering effects. We present RenderNet, a differentiable rendering convolutional network with a novel projection unit that can render 2D images from 3D shapes. Spatial occlusion and shading calculation are automatically encoded in the network. Our experiments show that RenderNet can successfully learn to implement different shaders, and can be used in inverse rendering tasks to estimate shape, pose, lighting and texture from a single image.