As our daily lives become consumed with the World Wide Web and all it has to offer, I question how we view or engage the notion of intellectual property. Is there a better way to share our ideas in our current technological climate without misusing or breaking the laws of Copyright? Is Creative Commons licensing a solution? This paper will briefly look at the World Wide Web and how Copyright law, fair use, and the Creative Commons apply in the 21st century. Introduction The ways in which we communicate in the 21st century have drastically changed with the ease of access to the World Wide Web. We have quickly become a digital nation. In 1996 Koos & Smith-Shank stated, "When the World Wide Web first went mainstream in the mid-1990's people saw it primarily as a place to store and surf for information. Slow dial-up connections took forever to connect and once you finally got online, downloading files seemed to take an eternity. Still we flocked to the web by the millions." [1] Eleven years later, Sheryl NussbaumBeach stated, "Web 2.0 tools and services like blogs, wikis, podcasts, media sharing sites, micro blogging, social networks, and virtual worlds are now used daily by millions of people to connect, communicate, collaborate, create, and share with others." [2] Today I feel we live in a world where the Internet has become the latest and greatest quick fix and I am concerned that we have lost sight of how we find, create, and use information. I worry we have become a society of individuals that rely on databases such a Google for all our answers. I question whether we are a society that understands the impact creation has on the Intellectual Commons. Do we understand the laws of Copyright, and how to use and share information in our current technological climate? Are we aware that there are solutions such as Creative Commons licensing? In this paper I will briefly explain the notions of Copyright and the Creative Commons. My hope is that as the World Wide Web continues to prosper, that users of the web will recognize the importance of the Intellectual Commons and the benefits that creation and sharing can have on a society. Copyright I think Molly Kleinman, a librarian from the University of Michigan said it best: "Every librarian knows at least one thing about copyright: It's confusing. US Copyright law was written by lawyers for lawyers and that makes it difficult for regular humans to understand. This is particularly troublesome because millions of people deal with copyright every day with the movies we watch, the books we read, the music we listen to, and the web pages we surf, these are all Copyrighted." [3] One of the problems often faced in a library is educating patrons about the importance of copyright and intellectual property. I find individuals misreading the library as a place where information is free. Many patrons assume that whatever information or answers they find they may use in any manner they choose. What is often forgotten is that the library does not own any information per se. The library purchases rights to view information and loan out materials so that patrons may use resources in responsible ways. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the individual to know the laws of copyright and to use the laws properly. A few copyright basics can be helpful. "[Copyright] happens automatically and no registration or © is required. Almost everything is copyrighted unless it is very old or a US government document. It lasts a very long time, the life of the author plus 70 years. It comes with a set of exclusive rights that the copy-right holder can keep, give away, or share. There are some exceptions to those exclusive rights that allow for fair use and some education uses. It only protects creative expression. Facts, ideas, titles, and data are not subject of Copyright. Neither are useful objects or those protected by patent." [3] So if you own Copyright you can prevent: reproduction, distribution, prep derivative works (based on other works), public performance or public display (reading/watching film etc...). [4] When talking about Copyright we cannot forget about Fair Use. Fair use allows individuals to use certain Copyrighted materials without asking permission. Kleinman points out that "there are no hard and fast rules governing Fair Use and that many organizations release guidelines for their employees stating that a certain number of works or pages qualify as Fair Use, but those guidelines are not based in law, they're based on lawyers' assessment of risk." [3] Instead of clear rules, Copyright law provides four factors that must be considered in determining whether or not a use is fair: 1) The purpose and character of the use: is it commercial, or is it non-profit, educational, or a parody? [3] 2) The nature of the Copyrighted work: is it highly creative work, like a song, or mostly factual work like a news report? [3] 3) The amount and sustainability of the portion used in the relation to the Copyrighted work as a whole: will you be using a small fraction of the work, or do you want to use the whole thing? [3] 4) The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the Copyrighted work: is your use likely to damage sales of the original work (this can be hardest to determine) [3] An example of when fair use is permitted would be handing out photocopies in a classroom for educational purposes. However if you continually use the same article, or handouts, year after year, at what point does this become an infringement on Copyright law? [3] If you choose to post a link to a public website, suddenly the entire world has access to this information. However, linking to an article that your library has access to in a password-protected environment would more likely be considered fair use. [3] The important thing to remember is that fair use is not risk free; it's flexible. Whether you will take the risk and at what level really is the question. [4] I once heard it stated; think about how you would feel if your intellectual property were being misused. But the real issue that we have to keep coming back to is how we can assess damages in the Copyright world. If it's a rule written by lawyers, aren't they really the ones who decide what is fair and what is not? [4] Let's face it; doesn't this all only apply if you get caught? Creative Commons A good solution that I feel we have for dealing with intellectual property and issues of Copyright in the 21st century is Creative Commons licensing. "Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share." [5] The organization has released several Copyright licenses that are free to the public, and these licenses give creators of information the opportunity to express easily which rights they reserve and which rights they waive so that others may fairly use their information. [5] Although many individuals and organizations use Creative Commons licensing, Wikipedia is one of the most notable web-based projects. [5] Four major conditions of the Creative Commons are listed below: [6] Attribution (BY), requiring attribution to the original author; Share Alike (SA), allowing derivative works under the same or a similar license (later or jurisdiction version); Non-Commercial (NC), requiring the work is not used for commercial purposes; No Derivative Works (ND), allowing only the original work, without derivatives. When using these conditions of the Creative Commons, six major licenses may be properly used including: Attribution, Attribution ShareAlike, Attribution No Derivatives, Attribution Noncommercial, Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike, and Attribution Noncommercial No Derivatives. [7] The mission of the Creative Commons is to, "develop, support, and steward legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation." [6] As stated on their website, Creative Commons believes: "the idea of universal access to research, education, and culture is made possible by the Internet, but our legal and social systems don't always allow that idea to be realized. Copyright was created long before the emergence of the Internet, which can make it hard to legally perform actions we take for granted on the network: copy, paste, edit source, and post to the Web. The default setting of Copyright law requires all of these actions to have explicit permission, granted in advance, whether you're an artist, teacher, scientist, librarian, policymaker, or just a regular user. To achieve the vision of universal access, someone needed to provide a free, public, and standardized infrastructure that creates a balance between the reality of the Internet and the reality of Copyright laws". [6] There is plenty of criticism about the Creative Commons. Some critics support revision of the Copyright act and believe Creative Commons is merely a contractual quick fix that dissuades the public from mobilizing toward a real revision of the Copyright Act and Copyright term lengths. [8] In another critique Jeffrey Harrison believes the Creative Commons system to be too lax, and cautions against "allowing some of our most precious resources – the creativity of individuals – to be simply tossed into the commons to be exploited by whomever has spare time and a magic marker." [9] "But really Creative Commons works to counter what the organization considers to be a dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture. According to Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, it is a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past." [10] So in the 21st Century, what kind of rights do we have as creators and sharers of information, and should we be seeking out more solutions such as Creative Commons? CONCLUSION: As we continue to create and access information daily, we need to think more cr


The interaction of carbon monoxide (CO) with vapour-deposited water (H2O) ices has been studied using temperature programmed desorption (TPD) and Fourier transform reflection- absorption infrared spectroscopy (FT-RAIRS) over a range of astrophysically relevant temperatures. Such measurements have shown that CO desorption from amorphous H2O ices is a much more com- plex process than current astrochemical models suggest. Re-visiting previously reported laboratory experiments (Collings et al., 2003), a rate model has been constructed to explain, in a phenomeno- logical manner, the desorption of CO over astronomically relevant timescales. The model presented here can be widely applied to a range of astronomical environments where depletion of CO from the gas phase is relevant. The model accounts for the two competing processes of CO desorption and migration, and also enables the entrapment of some of the CO in the ice matrix and its subsequent release as the water ice crystallises and then desorbs. The astronomical implications of this model are discussed.


Recent research demonstrates that auditory and vibrotactile forward collision warnings presenting a motion signal (e.g., looming or apparent motion across the body surface) can facilitate speeded braking reaction times (BRTs). The purpose of the present study was to expand on this work by directly comparing warning signals in which the motion conveyed was constant across all collision events with signals in which the speed of motion was dependent on the closing velocity (CV). Two experiments were conducted using a simulated car-following task and BRTs were measured. In Experiment 1, increasing intensity (looming) vibrotactile signals were presented from a single tactor attached to the driver's waist. When the increase in intensity was CV-linked, BRTs were significantly faster as compared to a no-warning condition, however, they were not significantly different from constant intensity and CV-independent looming warnings. In Experiment 2, a vertical array of three tactors was used to create motion either towards (upwards) or away (downwards) from the driver's head. When the warning signal presented upwards motion that was CV-linked, BRTs were significantly faster than all other warning types. Downwards warnings led to a significantly higher number of brake activations in false alarm situations as compared to upwards moving warnings. The effectiveness of dynamic tactile collision warnings would therefore appear to depend on both the link between the warning and collision event and on the directionality of the warning signal.


This article problematizes the educational practice of action competence. This practice is said to be a way to empower students, making them willing and able to genuinely engage in environmental issues. The aim is to show how the notion of action competence culturally shapes certain kinds of desirable and undesirable subjects, i.e., defining who fits in as the child to entrust the future to, and who becomes the child at risk. The targets for analysis are five texts promoting teaching for action competence in environmental education. The article analyses responsibilization of the child; namely, how the notion of action competence inscribes what is to be acted on, experienced, and felt. The analysis focuses on how practices and emotions are cultivated and what kinds of subjects are made up as action competent. The results illuminate the ideal action-competent child as participating genuinely, having authentic experiences, and producing feelings as empowerment, empathy, and optimism, but s/he is also well planned and reasonable. This means that the abjected Other, the one in need of changing his/her way of living, is the powerless, pessimistic, and/or spontaneous subject. The article discusses how these standards for practical and emotional skills (re)produce social patterns in terms of race and social class.


This work focus on situation prediction in data fusion systems. A hypothesis evaluation algorithm based on artificial neural networks is introduced. It is evaluated and compared to an algorithm based on Bayesian networks which is commonly used. It is also compared to a simple "dummy" algorithm. For the tests, a computer based model of the environment, including protected objects and enemy objects, is implemented. The model handles the navigation of the enemy objects and situational data is extracted from the environment and provided for the hypothesis evaluation algorithms. It was the belief of the author that ANNs would be suitable for hypothesis evaluation if a suitable data representation of the environment were used. The representation requirements include pre processing of the situational data to eliminate the need for variable input size to the algorithm. This because ANNs poorly handles this; the whole network have to be retrained each time the amount of input data changes. The results show that ANNs performed best of the three and hence seems to be suitable for hypothesis evaluation.


This paper is concerned with observations on the preparation of phases which may exist in the system CaCO3-H20 in the presence o f 'additives', with a qualitative explanation of the appearance of unstable phases under such conditions. It has been found that the tendency for metastable phases of calcium carbonate to be precipitated from aqueous solutions is increased not only by raising the rate of precipitation but also by increasing the concentration of certain added substances. Thus in the presence of small amounts of Calgon* or magnesium-ion, and in saturated sodium chloride solution in the presence of magnesium-ion, a range of products is obtained according to the conditions of precipitation, particularly the stirring and the temperature. Calcite (the stable phase), aragonite, vaterite (/^-calcium carbonate) and calcium carbonate hexahydrate have been prepared In this way together with a new hydrate, CaCO3.H2O . By allowing reaction mixtures containing additive to stand until the first-formed gel has crystallized, metastable phases may be produced with considerable regularity. Metastable phase diagrams can be constructed which show the dependence of the phases on conditions of precipitation, e.g. sodium carbonate concentration and concentration of additive. By exploration using such diagrams, all the previously mentioned phases except vaterite have been prepared in the presence of magnesium-ion, and in the presence of Calgon all but aragonite have been identified. This suggests that to some extent the action of the additives is specific. In stirred conditions of reaction, calcium carbonate may be grown, without fresh nucleation, on seed crystals of calcite and vaterite at a much faster rate in the presence of limited amounts of Calgon than in its absence. At relatively high concentrations other phases may appear and growth of the calcite and vaterite ceases in spite of the presence of seed crystals. Compounds containing calcium carbonate formed in the presence of magnesium-ion or Calgon have been shown by analytical methods to contain magnesium or phosphorus in appreciable quantities. The presence of the additive leads to modification in the crystal habit of calcite and of the hexahydrate. It has also been noted that distortion of X-ray patterns of the crystalline species is common. This is consistent with absorption of the additive in the distorted phase. Absorption of additive seems, therefore, to be important in influencing nucleation and the formation of metastable phases. These observations are explained on the grounds that germs of the crystalline phases are subject to varying degrees of distortion depending on the constitution of the solution. The growth is therefore hindered to different degrees in different cases. In the limit the effect of distortion may be such that growth of nuclei of certain types may be inhibited, and there is a corresponding change in the conditions for the spontaneous crystallization from solution of the various phases.


This study assessed the professional variables of academic staff in African varsities and their readiness to Utilise Internet-Based Channels for Research Communication in an era of Covid-19. Drawing from Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, the study was guided by four null hypotheses. The quantitative research method based on the virtual cross-sectional survey design was adopted. A total of 8,591 academics in African universities were the targeted demographic of this study. However, data were collected from a virtual snowball sample of 1,977 respondents (males, N = 1347; females, N = 630) from 24 African countries. A validated electronic survey, with three major aspects, was employed for data collection. The e-survey was released on the Association of African Universities' Telegram forum, which includes 1,622 participants from diverse African nations and regions. Members of the forum, who are all academics, were invited to complete the survey and publish it on their universities' internet-based forums. Coded data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics such as the Kruskal Wallis Non-parametric test. The non-parametric test was used because the data failed to meet the normality assumptions required to perform a parametric test. Results indicated, amongst others, that there are considerable variances in staff preparedness to use internet-based channels for research communication based on their educational credentials, educational qualification, rank and areas of research interest. According to the survey, academics with a doctoral degree; grade II lecturers; staff with 3 to 6 years of service; and staff in the medical sciences demonstrated a higher propensity of readiness to use internet-based channels for research communication. Based on these findings key theoretical, practical and research implications are discussed.


Moustafa Hussein Aly A Simplified Analytical Technique for High Frequency Characterization of Resonant Tunneling Diode This paper proposes a simplified analytical technique for high frequency characterization of the resonant tunneling diode (RTD). An equivalent circuit of the RTD that consists of a parallel combination of conductance, G (V, f), and capacitance, C (V, f) is formulated. The proposed approach uses the measured DC current versus voltage characteristic of the RTD to extract the equivalent circuit elements parameters in the entire bias range. Using the proposed analytical technique, the frequency response including the high frequency range of many characteristic aspects of the RTD is investigated. Also, the maximum oscillation frequency of the RTD is calculated. The results obtained have been compared with those concluded and reported in the literature. The reported results in literature were obtained through simulation of the RTD at high frequency using either a computationally complicated quantum simulator through difficult RF measurements. A similar pattern of results and highly concordant conclusion are obtained. The proposed analytical technique is simple, correct, and appropriate to investigate the behavior of the RTD at high frequency. In addition, the proposed technique can be easily incorporated into SPICE program to simulate circuits containing RTD.


A coherent framework for building Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) is now emerging, but there are few examples of EBVs being produced at large extents. I describe the creation of a species distribution EBV for the United Kingdom, covering 5293 species from 1970-2015. The data product contains an annual occupancy estimate for every species in each year, each with a measure of uncertainty. I will describe the workflow to produce this data product. The data collation step bring togehter different sources of occurrence records; the data standardisation step harmonizes these records to a common spatio-temporal resolution. These data are then converted into a set of 'detection histories' for each species within each taxonomic group, before being passed to the occupancy-detection model. Outputs from this model are then summarised as 1000 samples from the postierior distribution of occupancy estimates for each species:year combination. I will also describe the infrastructure requirements to create the EBV and to update it annually. This endeavour has been made possible because the vast majority of the 34 million species records have been collated and curated by 31 taxon-oriented citizen science groups. I go on to describe the challenges of harmonizing and integrating these occurrence records with other data types, such as from systematic surveys, including count data. Such "integrated models" are statisitcally challenging, but now within reach, thanks to the development of new tools that make it possible to conceive of modelling everything, everywhere. However, a substantial and concerted effort is required to curate biodiversity data in a way that maximises their potential for the next generation of models, and for truly global EBVs.


Short-term rentals have facilitated the upraise trend in tourism growth in several cities around the world. However, concerns for the negative effects that such home-sharing platforms may have on the housing market and traditional markets have driven community groups and housing advocates to intensely react against them. Whether or not shortterm rentals increase housing prices and rents for local residents is an empirical question. We quantify the causal effects of Airbnb's short-term rentals on urban housing affordability in Portugal by estimating quarterly housing rents and prices as a function of Airbnb concentration. We take advantage of the 2014 regulatory reform and employ a difference-in-differences (DiD) empirical strategy. We estimate an overall increase in property values of 34% and 10.9% for rents due to the short-term lease regulatory reform. We also find that these effects are particularly localized to the historical centers and areas attractive to tourists in the cities of Lisbon and Porto. A better understanding of the effects of shortterm home rentals on housing markets and of the magnitude of its impact on residential property prices and rents are crucial information to determine whether it needs to be regulated and how proper regulation should be designed.


In India, sec. 3(k) of the Patents Act 1970 clearly excludes the patentability of computer programmes per se. For many years, the regime of computer-implemented inventions has been unclear, until the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks (the Indian homologous of the Intellectual Property Office) issued its Guidelines on the examination of computer-related inventions. Notably, this gave rise the civil society's protests; indeed, there was the fear that the government was surreptisciously allowing the patentability of computer programmes per se. Therefore, the guidelines have been withdrawn and recently a new version has been published. It openly reaffirms the exclusion of the software patents and introduces a three-step test to determine the applicability of sec. 3(k) of the Patents Act to computer-related inventions. This opinion focuses the new guidance, by placing it in the context of the leading role of India in the technological and social developments revolving around the Internet of Things.


THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE (DOD) executes humanitarian activities primarily through the Overseas Humanitarian, Disaster and Civic Aid (OHDACA) program. The OHDACA program includes three sub-activities: the Humanitarian Assistance (HA) program, the Humanitarian Mine Action program, and Foreign Disaster Relief and Emergency Response. Activities funded by the OHDACA appropriation are intended to mitigate the effects of natural and man-made disasters, to shape the environment in which DOD operates by providing access to critical areas and by influencing civilian populations, and to improve the capacity of vulnerable nations to better prepare for disasters. The ultimate beneficiary of OHDACA activities is the civilian population, and the activities should always have an appropriate and positive influence. For instance, renovating a school should positively impact primary education, and renovating a clinic should positively impact the civilian health sector. Civilian U.S. Government agencies evaluate the effectiveness of their programs through monitoring and evaluation (M&E), but equivalent analyses of DOD humanitarian assistance programs have been either ad hoc or entirely lacking.1 "Monitoring" is the ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, and use of data during the course of a project.2 "Evaluation" is the periodic review of program activity, outcome, and impact, with an emphasis on lessons learned.3 This article presents the case that DOD should institute both monitoring and evaluation of HA activities in order to assess their effectiveness. The "How" and "Why" of Measuring HA Every organization currently involved in humanitarian assistance faces the challenge of how to measure the impact of its work. Despite nearly 40 years of experience in M&E, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) still struggles to quantify, and demonstrate to decision-makers, the impact that its programs have. While DOD has extensive experience with battle damage assessment, its M&E methods for humanitarian assistance are in their infancy. The Pentagon has instituted "measures of effectiveness" (MOE) for virtually every DOD program but HA. The Defense Department need not develop monitoring and evaluation methods in a vacuum, however. USAID's several decades of experience is a great start point. Other agencies' experiences and lessons learned can likewise serve as a base for development of M&E techniques. Why should DOD measure the impact of HA programs? There are several important reasons. First, doing so can allow planners to make mid-course corrections on current projects, and it can provide them with information to improve the quality of future activities. By creating a feedback loop of lessons learned, the M&E process in HA would improve efficiency and ensure that projects contribute to operational objectives. Planners could then emphasize activities that are more cost-effective, which is especially important because every year the number of projects that combatant commands apply for exceeds the funds available. second, collecting and sharing data would increase planners' ability to deconflict activities with other agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Third, data analysis helps to showcase quantifiable results, thereby minimizing the chances of negative press surrounding HA activities.4 But most importantly, DOD should measure HA programs because transparency is a core strength of our democracy. Groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and even Al-Qaeda engage in prima facie humanitarian and social service activities, but ultimately their true motivations become apparent: the manipulation of people toward violent ends. In contrast, DOD's humanitarian programs should have a demonstrably quantifiable humanitarian impact.5 Since terrorist organizations will usually be able to act more quickly than DOD (because they are not impeded by bureaucracy, ethical norms, and legal restrictions), any demonstrable positive benefit to the civilian sector offers DOD the chance to prevail in the long term over extremist propaganda. …


Current transformations in the media landscape are challenging contemporary communication and media ethics in at least 2 ways. First, digitization of the media creates new ethical problems that stimulate calls for a redefinition of the norms and values of public communication. Second, new instruments of web-based media observation introduce new possibilities for media (self-)regulation and accountability, thus complementing the initiatives of traditional institutions like press councils. The article retraces those conflicting developments by reference to 2 comparative studies, representing the diverging traditions of conventional communication ethics and media accountability research. In bridging over the conceptual gap between the 2 forms of research, the article develops new perspectives for ethical reflection in the mediatized worlds of the digital age.


Abstract Despite the identification of acquired genetic mutations associated with Myeloproliferative Neoplasms (MPNs) there is a paucity of information relating to modifiable risk factors that may lead to these mutations. The MOSAICC Study was an exploratory case-control study of polycythemia vera (PV), essential thrombocythemia (ET), and Myelofibrosis (MF). MPN patients and population controls (identified by General Practitioners) and non-blood relative/friend controls were recruited from 2 large UK centers. Participants completed a telephone-based questionnaire analyzed by unconditional logistic regression analysis adjusting for potential confounders. Risk factors for MPNs identified included increasing childhood household density [odds ratio (OR) 2.55, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.16–5.62], low childhood socioeconomic status (OR 2.30, 95%CI 1.02–5.18) and high pack years smoking (OR 2.19, 95%CI 1.03–4.66) and current smoking restricted to JAK2 positive PV cases (OR 3.73, 95%CI 1.06–13.15). Obesity was linked with ET (OR 2.59, 95%CI 1.02–6.58) confirming results in previous cohort studies. Receipt of multiple CT scans was associated with a strongly increased risk of MPN although with wide confidence intervals (OR 5.38, 95%CI 1.67–17.3). Alcohol intake was inversely associated with risk of PV (OR 0.41, 95%CI 0.19–0.92) and ET (OR 0.48, 95%CI 0.24–0.98). The associations with childhood household density, high pack years smoking and alcohol were also seen in multivariate analysis. This is the largest case control study in MPNs to date and confirms the previously reported associations with obesity and cigarette smoking from cohort studies in addition to novel associations. In particular, the role of smoking and JAK2 mutation cases merits further evaluation.


Over the past century Buddhism has come to be seen as a world religion, exceeding Christianity in longevity and, according to many, philosophical wisdom. Buddhism has also increasingly been described as strongly ethical, devoted to nonviolence, and dedicated to bringing an end to human suffering. And because it places such a strong emphasis on rational analysis, Buddhism is considered more compatible with science than the other great religions. As such, Buddhism has been embraced in the West, both as an alternative religion and as an alternative to religion. This volume provides a unique introduction to Buddhism by examining categories essential for a nuanced understanding of its traditions. Each of the fifteen essays here shows students how a fundamental term - from art to word - illuminates the practice of Buddhism, both in traditional Buddhist societies and in the realms of modernity. Apart from Buddha, the list of terms in this collection deliberately includes none that are intrinsic to the religion. Instead, the contributors explore terms that are important for many fields and that invite interdisciplinary reflection. Through incisive discussions of topics ranging from practice, power, and pedagogy to ritual, history, sex, and death, the authors offer new directions for the understanding of Buddhism, taking constructive and sometimes polemical positions in an effort both to demonstrate the shortcomings of assumptions about the religion and the potential power of revisionary approaches. Following the tradition of Critical Terms for Religious Studies, this volume is not only an invaluable resource for the classroom but one that belongs on the short list of essential books for anyone seriously interested in Buddhism and Asian religions.


E-mail is a non-verbal text based communication tool that today is used widely in organizations and perhaps because of its familiarity seen as just a tool with no complications. Can other ingredients affect the communication except the obvious missing non-verbal cues? The main purpose of this thesis was to examine how leaders experience their communication between the different public administrations, but also to see if the text based communication, in particular e-mail, and was affected by organizational culture and emotions. Both a questionnaire, interviews and document analysis was used at a "Samordningsforbund" where the study was performed. The results indicated in general good communication between the individuals but also that emotions, personality and organizational culture can have an effect on communication and thus should be taken a more serious interest both in the actual "samordningsforbund" and also in further research, particularly e-mail in association with emotions and different personalities.


Context. Solar twins are objects of great interest in that they allow us to understand better how stellar evolution and structure are affected by variations of the stellar mass, age and chemical composition in the vicinity of the commonly accepted solar values. Aims. We aim to use the existing spectrophotometric, interferometric and asteroseismic data for the solar twin 18 Sco to constrain stellar evolution models. 18 Sco is the brightest solar twin and is a good benchmark for the study of solar twins. The goal is to obtain realistic estimates of its physical characteristics (mass, age, initial chemical composition, mixing-length parameter) and realistic associated uncertainties using stellar models. Methods. We set up a Bayesian model that relates the statistical properties of the data to the probability density of the stellar parameters. Special care is given to the modelling of the likelihood for the seismic data, using Gaussian mixture models. The probability densities of the stellar parameters are approximated numerically using an adaptive MCMC algorithm. From these approximate distributions we proceeded to a statistical analysis. We also performed the same exercise using local optimisation. Results. The precision on the mass is approximately 6%. The precision reached on X0 and Z0 and the mixing-length parameter are respectively 6%, 9%, and 35%. The posterior density for the age is bimodal, with modes at 4.67 Gyr and 6.95 Gyr, the first one being slightly more likely. We show that this bimodality is directly related to the structure of the seismic data. When asteroseismic data or interferometric data are excluded, we find significant losses of precision for the mass and the initial hydrogen-mass fraction. Our final estimates of the uncertainties from the Bayesian analysis are significantly larger than values inferred from local optimization. This also holds true for several estimates of the age encountered in the literature.


Annotating "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder" for the 2015 edition of the Green Bag Almanac & Reader was quite fun—enough fun that even before it was in print we'd decided to annotate another Sherlock Holmes story for the 2016 Almanac & Reader. We settled on one of the earlier stories, "The Reigate Puzzle" (aka "The Reigate Squire" and "The Reigate Squires"). And then we enlisted (as we did last year) an eminent Sherlockian to introduce the story and a gratifyingly diverse congregation of others to annotate it. What we present in the following pages is not, of course, the last word on anything about "The Reigate Puzzle." Indeed, one of the joys of Sherlockian studies (like legal studies) is that no one ever gets the last word, just the latest. We would like to think, however, that we have collected quite a few interesting and entertaining additions to Sherlockian scholarship - including several relating to the law and legal culture - and at least as many eloquent yet compact restatements of some of the best of preexisting scholarship.


It is now plain that decades of negotiation toward a binding global climate treaty have failed. Yet, at the same time, many nations are adopting a range of unilateral policies to address climate change. The existing literature on climate policy neglects these unilateral climate regulations because it focuses on the necessity and possible design of a multilateral climate treaty. But these domestic regulations present a unique puzzle: given that climate outcomes are determined by global emissions, and that unilateral regulations inevitably influence incentives to regulate elsewhere, how can domestic action achieve the greatest marginal reduction in global emissions? In other words, how can regulators encourage, rather than discourage, action in other countries?This Article answers this question by describing three ways that unilateral regulation influences incentives to regulate in other countries. First, domestic regulations can interact with other nations' regulations in a way that increases those countries' incentive to regulate. Second, unilateral regulation can support incentives to regulate elsewhere by limiting the incentive for polluters to move, or "leak," to countries with weaker regulation. Third, unilateral regulations that are modular and simple will serve as potential model rules in a wider swathe of countries. These considerations have important implications for regulators looking to maximize the global impact of their unilateral actions. They suggest that, contrary to the received wisdom in climate policy, regulators should prefer regulation with publicly transparent costs. They also suggest that, contrary to the current state and federal preference for cap-and-trade systems and energy-efficiency standards, unilateral regulators should prefer carbon taxes and funding for green technology.


For decades, cities have invested in decaying neighborhoods, leading to increases in home values and home equity. As a result, these neighborhoods have become ready targets for predatory lenders, who market their abusive loans to financially unsophisticated homeowners with home equity and no relationships with traditional lenders. Some borrowers lose their homes; others forsake home repairs to avoid default and foreclosure. Neighborhoods that once were stable become littered with abandoned and neglected homes, resulting in increased crime, falling home values, rising demands for social services, and lower tax revenues. In the wake of the devastation done by predatory lenders, the question for policymakers is: what can be done? This paper seeks to answer this question. The paper opens by defining predatory lending. Next, the paper describes how the rise of securitization, deregulation of price terms, affordable lending incentives, bank closings, and historical credit discrimination together fueled the rise and institutionalization of predatory lending in the 1990s. Lastly, the paper evaluates different possible approaches to redressing predatory lending, including industry self-regulation, consumer education and counseling, Community Reinvestment Act oversight, criminal enforcement, existing private causes of action, and a suitability proposal.


Sir Kenneth Murray—Ken to his friends—was held in high esteem and affection by all who knew him. In a remarkable career, which began after he left school at the age of 16 years, he played a prominent part, through his elegant and meticulous research, in the evolution of biotechnology; he trained and inspired generations of students entering this bright new discipline; he developed the means of diagnosing, preventing and treating a feared disease, thereby saving many thousands of lives; he was one of a small coterie that founded the first Europe-based biotechnology company; and he used the profits that this yielded to enrich his university and promote, through the charity that he founded, the careers of promising young scientists. He remained, throughout, modest, unassuming and ever willing to give of his time and knowledge to all who asked.


Efforts to build state capability often take the form of commonly used, highly designed and engineered best practice solutions that have worked in many other places and that we suspect (and hope) will work again in many contexts. Such interventions do sometimes work, especially when the treatment actually addresses problems that fester in the context. Where the contextual problems are different, however, the treatment is just isomorphic mimicry-it looks good but will not be a solution to problems that actually matter. Development organizations often cannot see this, however, and offer the same solution again and again-hoping for a different outcome but imposing a capability trap on the policy context, where a new diagnosis and prescription is actually needed. In some countries the treatment has an even worse impact, fostering premature load bearing-where the context cannot actually handle what is prescribed. How can development experts identify in advance where they will have such negative impacts, and how can they identify in advance where they need to do development differently? This paper addresses such questions, and introduces an approach to building state capability in the latter contexts (called 1804 contexts), called problem driven iterative adaptation.


Building on previous work for cataloging unique topological patterns in an integrated circuit physical design, a new process is defined in which a risk scoring methodology is used to rank patterns based on manufacturing risk. Patterns with high risk are then mapped to functionally equivalent patterns with lower risk. The higher risk patterns are then replaced in the design with their lower risk equivalents. The pattern selection and replacement is fully automated and suitable for use for full-chip designs. Results from 14nm product designs show that the approach can identify and replace risk patterns with quantifiable positive impact on the risk score distribution after replacement.


The present study deals with the optimization of the COCOMO Model parameters using Simulated Annealing algorithm so as to minimize the variance in software development effort. For this data is taken from the NASA projects. The data set that has been used consists of two independent variables, viz. Lines of Code (LOC) and Effort Adjustment Factor (EAF) and dependent variable as Development Effort (DE). The results so obtained have been compared with the earlier work done by the author on Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), along with COCOMO results. The developed SA based model was able to provide better estimation capabilities than COCOMO, ANN and ANFIS.


Author(s): Pilanci, Mert | Advisor(s): Wainwright, Martin J; El Ghaoui, Laurent | Abstract: With the advent of massive datasets, statistical learning and information processing techniques are expected to enable exceptional possibilities for engineering, data intensive sciences and better decision making. Unfortunately, existing algorithms for mathematical optimization, which is the core component in these techniques, often prove ineffective for scaling to the extent of all available data. In recent years, randomized dimension reduction has proven to be a very powerful tool for approximate computations over large datasets. In this thesis, we consider random projection methods in the context of general convex optimization problems on massive datasets. We explore many applications in machine learning, statistics and decision making and analyze various forms of randomization in detail. The central contributions of this thesis are as follows:(i) We develop random projection methods for convex optimization problems and establish fundamental trade-offs between the size of the projection and accuracy of solution in convex optimization.(ii) We characterize information-theoretic limitations of methods that are based on random projection, which surprisingly shows that the most widely used form of random projection is, in fact, statistically sub-optimal. (iii) We present novel methods, which iteratively refine the solutions to achieve statistical optimality and enable solving large scale optimization and statistical inference problems orders-of-magnitude faster than existing methods. (iv) We develop new randomized methodologies for relaxing cardinality constraints in order to obtain checkable and more accurate approximations than the state of the art approaches.


There are significant neural transmission and processing delays within the nervous system. How then are behaviours observed both in nature and high‐speed ball games, which require temporal accuracy to within several milliseconds, possible? Until recently, most investigators attributed the observed success in interceptive behaviours to learning or prediction built into motor programs that take these delays into account. Several investigators have proposed, however, that sensory mechanisms also contribute to compensation. Sensory compensation is particularly important when moving objects are the targets of interceptive behaviour, as in this case neural delays in the visual system could lead to errors in the communication of crucial position information of the object of interest. However, given the biological significance of visual motion the visual system could have evolved neural pathways optimized for the rapid transmission of motion signals. Alternatively, the visual system could take a sample of visual motion and compensate for the delays through prediction based on the sample. This mechanism is the visual analogue of the previously proposed "internal forward model" for motor control. We conducted four experiments using the flash‐lag effect to ask if the nervous system is naturally geared to processing moving items with a speed greater than stationary flashes. Our results show that the nervous system does not process moving items more quickly than stationary flashes.


This thesis was focussed on volunteering as a social legacy of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games (London 2012). The study identified a research gap with regard to the details on the processes through which the volunteering legacy can be achieved, for whom, in what circumstances and over which duration. Therefore, the overall purpose of this research was to explore the processes by which the London 2012 Volunteer Programme (the Games Maker Programme) was used to deliver a desired social legacy in the historical context of sport event volunteering in the UK, such as the XVII Commonwealth Games in Manchester (Manchester 2002), their Pre-Volunteer Programme (PVP) and Manchester Event Volunteers (MEV). This was done by means of examining volunteering experiences and volunteer management practices in the context of the Olympics as the least explored form of the Games-related legacy.

The uniqueness and strength of this research was in its empirically grounded and historically informed case study with an embedded single-case design with multiple units of analysis, where the case was the Games Maker Programme and units of analysis – different aspects of the Programme. The study employed critical realism and interpretative constructivism as the basis of its philosophical framework. It used a 'realist' approach drawing on the basis of realist evaluation: context + mechanism = outcome (Pawson and Tilley, 1997). Elements of the Programme became the mechanisms activated under certain conditions (contexts) to trigger certain outcomes. A two-layered theoretical framework was applied to help study volunteering in the context of the Olympics. The research utilised the Legacy Cube by Preuss (2007) as an outer layer of the framework to help identify positive and negative, planned and unplanned, tangible and intangible structures associated with a social legacy and analyse them at specific time and space. The Volunteer Process Model by Omoto and Snyder (2002) served as an inner-layer of the framework that helped explore more in-depth personal attributes of London 2012 volunteers (Individual level), processes, experiences and consequences of their involvement, as well as the ingrained nature of volunteering in the institutional and cultural environments (Organisational and Societal levels).

Longitudinal time horizon and mixed methods were used to collect a richer and stronger array of evidence to address the research aims and questions. Qualitative evidence included various documents, in-depth semi-structured interviews with volunteers (before and after London 2012) and managers (after London 2012), as well as participant observations carried out by the researcher before and during the Games. These qualitative elements were supplemented with an on-line survey of a broader cross section of volunteers. Thematic analysis was used to make sense of the large volume of data and provide foundations for the results and a subsequent discussion.

The findings revealed that the London 2012 Volunteering Strategy had multiple stakeholders and aims, from running an excellent Games-time Volunteer Programme to creating a sustainable social legacy. Competing demands, poor coordination, the confusion over who is responsible for what outcomes, the lack of specific plans on how to achieve these outcomes and external factors related to changes in political environment and worsened socio-economic conditions in the UK contributed to a legacy not being realised to the extent it was hoped for. Therefore, declared commitments to Excellence, Equality and Diversity, One Games, UK-Wide, Exchange, Legacy and Partnership were limited in their capacity. Ultimately, the need to deliver the Games took a priority. Although the Games Maker Programme appeared to achieve its target to recruit, train and manage 70,000 volunteers to work in 3,500 Games-time roles, organisers were not always effective in providing volunteers with the best experience, which largely depended on volunteer roles, placements and a management style of immediate managers and team leaders. It came across as a surprising outcome, given that the successful organisation of the Games was largely in hands of volunteers. Therefore, if the commitment is to have an exemplary Games-time Volunteer Programme, then a priority should be to make those who freely devote their time and effort feel valued and provide them with an array of opportunities and benefits that encourage positive experiences. This, potentially, can contribute to a sustainable volunteering legacy beyond the Games.


With the introduction of the peer-to-peer paradigm in the world of software, a lot of applications have been created in order to such architecture. Most of them are developed for providing a data sharing service among users connected to a network and programs such as Napster, Gnutella, eMule and BitTorrent have became the so called killer-applications. However some eorts have been spent in order to develop other solutions with the usage of peer-to-peer paradigm. In the case of databases some projects are started with the general purpose of sharing data sets with other databases. Generally they push on the idea of providing the data contained in their database schemes with other peers in the network showing concepts such schema matching, mapping tables and others which are necessary to establish connections and data sending. The thesis analyzes some of such projects in order to see which of them is the most dened and well-supported by concepts and deni- tions. Hyperion Project of the University of Torono in collaboration with the University of Trento is the most promising and it aims to be one of the rst Peer-to-Peer Database Management Systems. However the common idea of considering the peer-to-peer paradigm equal to data sharing - in the way presented by applications such as Napster or others - leads to a lot diculties, it is hard to handle the data sets, some operations must be done manually and there can be some cases where the peer-to-peer paradigm is not applied at all. For this reason the goal is to dene and show the concept of peer-to-peer database built from the scratch with a suitable DBMS for it. A real denition of peer-to-peer database has not been ever made and here for the rst time we tried to give one according to our vision. The denition depends on some precise concepts such global schema - which is the original design of the database -, sub-schema - a well logical dened sub-set of entities of the original schema - and binding tables - necessary to allow the creation of constraints and relations among the entities. Then to show the validity of such concepts and how a management system for peer-to-peer databases can be developed and used, a prototype (named Dionysius) has been realized by modifying HSQLDB - an ordinary DBMS developed in Java - and adding the peer-to-peer platform by using the JXTA libray set.


This thesis describes the developments of novel semiconductor devices based on epitaxial wide bandgap semiconductors GaN and ZnS. The number of interesting and exciting results in physics, electronics and materials science of these systems were found in studies motivated by these devices. This thesis consists of three major topics, structural characterization and kinetic growth modeling of the GaNAs/GaAs superlattices, structural and optical characterization and solid phase recrystallization of ZnS thin films grown on GaN and sapphire substrates, and design and fabrication of GaN high power devices as well as measurement of fundamental electronic properties of GaN, such as minority carrier diffusion lengths and lifetimes and critical field for electric breakdown.

The set of GaNAs/GaAs superlattices grown by molecular beam epitaxy was analyzed by high resolution X-ray diffraction and cross—sectional transmission electron microscopy. The nitrogen incorporation and GaNAs/GaAs interface sharpness were experimentally found to strongly depend on growth temperature. The activation energies for nitrogen desorption and nitrogen to arsenic segregation were found through simple kinetic model, which is in fine agreement with experimentally obtained results. These fundamental studies provide important insights into growth of GaN on GaAs substrates, which is of significant practical importance for all electronic GaN devices.

Zinc sulfide/Gallium nitride heterostructures are potentially interesting system for light emitters in blue and green part of visible spectrum, with DC low power consumption electroluminescent displays being one attractive application of these diodes. Zinc sulfide thin films grown on GaN (0001), GaAs (001) and sapphire (0001) substrates by MBE were characterized by variable temperature photoluminescence and high resolution X-ray diffraction. The structural properties of the films suffered from the large lattice mismatch between ZnS and various substrates which were used. The optical properties of the ZnS films were found to be in direct correlation with structural properties of the films. The ZnS films doped with Al and Ag grown on n and p-type GaN, and sapphire were characterized by low temperature photoluminescence and displayed bright blue luminescence. Fabricated N-ZnS/p-GaN heterostructures were characterized by current-voltage and electroluminescence. Electroluminescence was found to be centered around 390 nm, corresponding to high energy silver band, and it shifted to higher energies with increase in device voltage. Since as grown films suffered from crystalline imperfections, the ZnS thin films on sapphire were recrystallized, by annealing at temperatures above 900 °C at sulfur overpressure of 10 atm. The structural properties of samples significantly improved, indicating more than 10-fold reduction in tilting and excellent crystallinity. The role of sulfur was discussed, and it was found that sulfur is important in preventing film evaporation, increasing boundary migration and providing compliancy to sapphire substrate.

The minority carrier diffusion lengths and lifetimes were measured for electrons and holes in unintentionally doped, n and p-type GaN samples grown by several different growth techniques. The experimentally observed diffusion lengths were in the 0.2 — 0.3 µm range for Metal-Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD) and Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) grown samples, and 1 — 2 µm in the case of Halide Vapor Phase Epitaxy (HVPE) grown sample. In the case of MOCVD grown samples, the hole lifetime was estimated to approximately 7 ns, and electron lifetime to approximately 0.1 ns. The same samples were structurally characterized by AFM, and the size of the defect-free regions surrounded by linear dislocations is found to be of the order of measured diffusion length, in qualitative agreement with minority carrier recombination at linear dislocations. A simple model is presented which explains an increase in minority carrier lifetime and diffusion length with a decrease in the dislocation density or increase in the size of defect-free grains. A model which explains why linear dislocations might act as recombination sites is also presented.

The important advantage of nitrides and other wide band gap materials for high power devices is a smaller standoff layer thickness for the same standoff voltage, giving smaller ON-state voltage and resistance, smaller power dissipation and larger maximum current density, allowing physically smaller devices for the same power rating. The design rules for nitride based Schottky rectifiers and thyristors are presented. The critical field for electric breakdown and minority carrier recombination lifetimes are found to be important design parameters. Using modeling parameters which are well in the range currently available with GaN, and measured from fabricated devices, design results indicate the possibility of 18 µm thick GaN Schottky rectifiers and 12 µm thick A1GaN thyristors supporting 5 kV standoff voltage. The critical field for electric breakdown was found to be 5 MV/cm from the theoretical studies. The maximum current density for 5 kV thyristors is in the 200 — 400 A/cm^2 range depending on the hole lifetime, and is limited by thermal breakdown. The maximum operating frequency of 5 kV thyristors is in the 1-2 MHz range and also depends on the hole lifetime.

Two-terminal GaN Schottky rectifiers were fabricated. The Schottky rectifiers were fabricated on thick GaN layers grown by HVPE and had a standoff voltages in the 450 V to 750 V range, depending on the thickness of the GaN film and contact geometry. Best devices were characterized with reverse current density of 10^(-5)A/cm^2 at reverse bias of 100 V, and 4.2 V ON-state voltage at a forward current density of 100 A/cm^2. Various contact geometries were investigated. It was found that mesa geometry improves ON-state voltage, but causes increase in reverse current density, while that metal field plate geometry significantly reduces reverse current density. The measured critical field for electric breakdown in GaN was found to be (2.5 ± 0.5) MV/cm and it approaches the theoretical estimate of 5 MV/cm. The measured values of critical field are only a lower limit since the reverse breakdown voltage was limited by premature corner and edge breakdown.


The level of aggregation of reported data has limited the proper accounting of live animals in many livestock models, making the consistency of their underlying biologics suspect. The authors suggest an econometric methodology to decompose a wide range of aggregate data, and they apply this method to estimate a disaggregated average cattle slaughter weight for calves, cows, and other cattle from total beef production data in the European Union.


The dynamics and deformations of immersed flexible fibers are at the heart of important industrial and biological processes, induce peculiar mechanical and transport properties in the fluids that contain them, and are the basis for novel methods of flow control. Here we focus on the low–Reynolds number regime where advances in studying these fiber–fluid systems have been especially rapid. On the experimental side, this is due to new methods of fiber synthesis, microfluidic flow control, and microscope-based tracking measurement techniques. Likewise, there have been continuous improvements in the specialized mathematical modeling and numerical methods needed to capture the interactions of slender flexible fibers with flows, boundaries, and each other.


Hurricane-force wind speeds can have a large societal impact and in this paper microwave C-band cross-polarized (VH) signals are investigated to assess if they can be used to derive extreme wind-speed conditions. European satellite scatterometers have excellent hurricane penetration capability at C-band, but the vertically (VV) polarized signals become insensitive above 25 m s?1. VV and VH polarized backscatter signals from RADARSAT-2 SAR imagery acquired during severe hurricane events were compared to collocated SFMR wind measurements acquired by NOAA's hurricane-hunter aircraft. From this data set a geophysical model function (GMF) at strong-to-extreme/severe wind speeds (i.e., 20 m s?1 < U10 < 45 m s?1) is derived. Within this wind speed regime, cross-polarized data showed no distinguishable loss of sensitivity and as such, cross-polarized data can be considered a good candidate for the retrieval of strong-to-severe wind speeds from satellite instruments. The upper limit of 45 m s?1 is defined by the currently available collocated data. The validity of the derived relationship between wind speed and VH backscatter has been evaluated by comparing the cross-polarized signals to two independent wind-speed data sets (i.e., short-range ECMWF numerical weather prediction (NWP) model forecast winds and the NOAA best estimate 1-minute maximum sustained winds). Analysis of the three comparison data sets confirm that cross-polarized signals from satellites will enable the retrieval of strong-to-severe wind speeds where VV or horizontal (HH) polarization data has saturated. The VH backscatter increases exponentially with respect to wind speed (linear against VH [dB]) and a near-real-time assessment of maximum sustained wind speed is possible using VH measurements. VH measurements thus would be an extremely valuable complement on next-generation scatterometers for hurricane forecast warnings and hurricane model initialization.


A systematic study on obsidian tools in Calabria and Sicily carried out by the authors have revealed the uniqueness in the patterns of production, exchange and consumption of Lipari obsidian. The study has concentrated on the Middle Neolithic primarily, with other Neolithic and Bronze Age contexts recognised at a later stage in the research since many contexts, especially in Sicily, have been excavated by pioneering archaeologists, some over a century ago, or were mislabelled. The chronology is Early Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, with very few materials dating Middle Bronze Age. A review of chronological contexts is in progress, which spans from the 6th millennium BC to the end of the 2nd millennium BC. The typology of obsidian tools is very homogenous, the vast majority of used tools are small blades, bladelets and sharp flakes; there is negligible variance across time; and Lipari obsidian is preferred over other sources. The patterns of the exchanges are also unique, revealing two major types of redistribution of obsidian, one particularly intriguing because it is quite organized with a single source in Lipari, prominent and reminiscent for its stability and reach of Bronze Age redistribution dynamics associated with hierarchical societies. We present here some observations on patterns substantiated by the archaeological record, and consider possible scenarios that can explain them. This work provides an update on progressing research and reveals aspects that will need further investigation, focusing on the patterns identified so far and possible explanations. More work is certainly needed to produce a working model, but the unusual patterns deserve some attention on their own, unencumbered by an overarching explanatory model. In particular, we want to assess the Neolithic redistribution pattern suggestive as typical of hierarchical polities, and contextualize it to the specific situation of Neolithic Lipari.


TakashiMiyata at Kansai University and colleagues report in Nature Communications a temperature-responsive gel that absorbs moisture and, when heated, releases it in the form of water. Applications include energy-efficient materials for condensing moisture into water. Hydrogels are highly absorbent materials, and when they incorporate polymer chains that respond to external stimuli (such as pH or temperature) they that can display abrupt volume changes when the surrounding conditions change. Such stimuli-responsive hydrogels have a range of potential applications, for example in drug delivery systems, sensors, cell culture and so on. In particular, thermo-responsive hydrogels kept in an aqueous solution undergo a reversible phase transition above a critical temperature that causes a transition from a hydrated to a dehydrated state, which results in a drastic shrinking of the gel. Many studies exist on hydrogels that respond to changes in temperature while in solution, but the behavior of the dried gels in air has not been studied yet. Now, Takashi Miyata at Kansai University and colleagues present in a study published in Nature Communications a temperature-responsive gel that absorbs moisture and, when heated, releases it in the form of water. The gel contains a thermo-responsive polymer and a hydrophilic component (sodium alginate) that boosts water absorption. The transition temperature for this material is close to room temperature, 32 °C. When exposed to high relative humidity (80 %) at 25 °C, the gel absorbs 0.6 g of water per gram and swells. The presence of water on the polymer chains causes them to respond to temperature in a similar way as hydrogels immersed in solution, so that the chains, that are initially hydrophilic, change to hydrophobic with raising temperature. When this happens, the water molecules desorb and condense into liquid water. Indeed, as the sample is heated to a temperature of up to 50 °C, water appears on its surface, and its amount increases sizably for temperatures above 40 °C. Thus the gel acts as a dehumidifier but, unlike traditional dehumidifiers that require energy to evaporate the absorbed water to regenerate the material, and then to condense it for collection, the gel can condense water simply in response to a small temperature change (from 25 °C to 50 °C). Regeneration of the material and collection of the water can thus be achieved using very little energy. Further optimization is still needed, but thermo-responsive gels like the one presented in this paper could find applications as energy-efficient materials for condensing moisture into water.


The most important problem for pregnant and gynecologist is tracking of unborn baby. An important part of infant deaths occur in the last months of pregnancy. For this reason, by using an external fetal monitor non-stress test (NST) measurements are done for gathering information about the baby's condition. This method is a procedure that requires specialist from a medical center. The proposed study aims wirelessly transmission of NST measurement results to the specialist or health center. Thus, in case of any particular problems by giving notice to the patient, it is intended to provide her being shipped to the nearest medical facility.


The design of the embedded software for industrial systems progressively integrates more intelligent functions to ease the integration between the factory floor hardware and operator-friendly control front ends. New software development paradigms such as service oriented architecture (SOA) make it possible by embedding small footprint web servers inside small embedded devices that are connected to the actuators which they control. In general, the timing requirements of such distributed systems are not in the front plane and temporal guarantees provided by most solutions are typically best effort. iLAND is an example of a middleware that supports communication and reconfiguration of distributed services, ensuring temporal correctness. It includes the logic for adapting the architectural structure of a service-based application (i.e., number and connections of the software pieces/functions) to respond to operator requests in a time-deterministic way, focusing only on the temporal correctness. In this paper, we apply the principles of autonomic computing to the middleware design, and we provide a high-level description on how its verification process could be extended beyond the purely temporal properties using more comprehensive formal techniques. We exemplify these ideas with a modified on-line verification manager that suits the needs of a kind of systems with specific timing and functional constraints.


Failures in the security process can have profound costs for both the individual and organizations (e.g., fraud costs the British economy approximately £72 billion; NFA, 2012). A biological and socio-cognitive framework may enhance our understanding of the security process, as the two perspectives collectively acknowledge that (i) competition for resources is/was an important factor in human social behavior and evolution (e.g., Bowles, 2009) and (ii) individuals differ in the ways in which they interpret information given their own traits and circumstances. Both levels of explanation (Mayr, 1963; Tinbergen, 1963) could generate novel hypotheses. For example, proximate-level explanations may clarify how resources are defended and extorted, and the cognitive processes underlying the "chess game" between gatekeepers and "gate crashers." Ultimate-level explanations may clarify why some individuals are more likely than others to succeed at securing or gaining access to resources and whether certain security-related outcomes can be reliably predicted given specific contexts or ecological conditions.


Extracted from text ... Y
Why financial literacy
is a complete failure
48 Management Today May 2005
Yes, financial education and training fails!
There are a number of reasons why personal
financial literacy education and
training are failing and will remain a failure.
To deal with this issue, however, we
must appreciate the present status of empowerment
in this area. Personal financial
management must be divided into different
levels of financial lifeskills education
and training.
Unfortunately people don't know what
the subject looks like and they use parts of
it to market their specific products and
services - here financial empowerment is
in the ..


Domestic abuse is a public health issue with long term health and social consequences for its victims. The prevalence of domestic abuse among women seeking healthcare is higher than in the general UK population and often begins or worsens in pregnancy. Health visitors, because of their role with pregnant women and mothers are in a key position to offer both supportive interventions and to play a preventative role in domestic abuse.
The aim of this research is to improve understanding of issues health visitors face when working with Pakistani mothers living with domestic abuse. The study is set in the north of Britain in an area that has experienced chain migration and settlement from the Mirpur and Faisalabad regions of Pakistan since the 1970s. Taking a qualitative approach and informed by a critical realist perspective, first-hand accounts from health visitors working in the area are used.
The findings of the study confirm that domestic abuse perpetrated against some Pakistani mothers is a complex aspect of health visiting practice compounded by deep rooted cultural and social practices within many Pakistani families. The key challenge health visitors face appears to be non-disclosure of abuse by many Pakistani women and the main approach taken by health visitors in this situation is predominantly one of harm minimisation. Inconsistencies in practice were however noted.
Three overarching themes were found from the analysis of the data which depict the challenges health visitors face and the endeavours they take to keep women safe. The theme of Presence depicts a range of actions linked to 'seeing' or 'being with' women and includes carrying out repeated enquiry into abuse. Role Strain describes how the health visitors express difficulty in fulfilling the various demands and expectations of the role. The term Covert Actions encompasses a range of seemingly hidden or concealed activities undertaken by health visitors in an endeavour to maintain Presence.
The study provides useful insight into the forms of evidence many health visitors deem can legitimately inform their clinical interventions when working with this population group and succeeds in extending current understanding of the types of knowledge health visitors draw from to inform their decisions in this specific area of practice. It also provides awareness of the wider challenges health visitors can encounter when working more generally among collectivist and honour-based communities and raises questions about some of the philosophical assumptions usually associated with Western models of healthcare.
Implications for practice are that mainstream domestic abuse interventions should be used with sensitivity to the different cultural contexts in which many Pakistani mothers live, and attempts should be made to develop appropriate interventions that derive from those contexts. This includes holistic assessment tools that are flexible enough to allow clinical judgements to be informed by the more subjective elements of evidence gathering and which take into consideration the impact of the multiple oppressions some women encounter.
Recommendations for service providers are that they should take a broader view of domestic violence that recognises 'difference' and therefore enables health visiting interventions to be flexible and responsive to differing need. This includes considering more community-based interventions among certain population groups


E-learning is a massive industry in the world wide web from our days and helps people to easily distribute and access content, without any boundaries from websites or learning system. With this ability, the e-learning environment is also facing a lot of challenges: the different learning methods, technical requirements for online courses, the usability, security, multi-platforms, web standard, etc. The today semantic technology trends are influencing the e-learning traditional approach and it provides a lot of solutions to those challenges. Semantic technologies can keep up with the evolution of web environment, can provides the capability to understand human necessities and define awareness system in e-learning. The e-learning approaches needs to have a technology base, to sustain the needed learning methods for the user and to be easily adaptable and usable in any situation. As far as we know, the e-learning system is represented in the virtual environment by visual and textual information, each educational training or student lecture is heavily relying on the content offered. A short example of the benefits of semantic technologies is that they simplify the search mode. A student will always look for keywords instead of complex phrases, so the reasoning between the defined terms helps to make a more effective search. From this point of view, e-learning system has increased significantly based on the evolution of semantic technologies, is being used by a lot of teachers that want to share their knowledge to students and also is very popular with companies, which are looking forward in offering a learning program to employees. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that e-learning domain combined with semantic technologies, has a huge potential and is a successful combination of the teaching system.


Purpose: The article aims to identify the international legal mechanisms for protecting the labour rights of domestic workers and determine the extent of their conformity with the Russian legislation. Structure / Methodology / Approach: To determine the mechanisms for protecting the labour rights of domestic workers, it seems necessary: first, to estimate the efficiency of the international legal mechanisms; second, to analyze the labour standards of the Russian legislation aimed at the legal registration of such labour relations; third, to study the provisions of the legislation in a number of states; fourth, to formulate recommendations on the implementation of the provisions of the international labour law in part of regulation of domestic workers' labour; fifth, to determine the legal prospects for the Russia's participation in ILO Convention No. 189 concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers. Results: The conducted comparative legal analysis showed that the Russian legislation in general complies with the provisions of ILO Convention No. 189 concerning Decent Work. However, in practice labour relations with domestic workers are rarely subject to legal formalization, which results in the violation of rights of such workers without further consequences. The authors propose to enshrine in the legislation the employer's obligation to conclude written employment contracts. Besides, the authors have developed proposals for improving the existing labour legislation in accordance with the international standards. Practical Implications: The results can be used to improve international legal regulations, as well as in the formulation of policies aimed to protect and promote the labour rights. Originality / Value. The main contribution of this study is the elaboration of ways aimed at progressive development of international and national legal regulation of relations associated with the legal status and labour of domestic workers.


This paper deals with the mid-Holocene shore level history and vegetation development in Gästrikland, east-central Sweden. This is investigated using sediment and microfossil records and 14C datings. The time span covered is c. 8000–5000 cal yr BP. Vegetation history during this time includes an increase in Tilia pollen 6500–6300 cal yr BP and a decrease in Ulmus and Corylus c. 5500 cal yr BP. The former change coincides with a sharp drop in relative sea level (RSL) of some 5 m; this RSL drop can be correlated to the regression from the L3 transgression of the Litorina Sea, identified in other areas around the Baltic Sea. The possible connections between RSL and climate (in particular changes on a maritime-continental continuum), as indicated by new pollen data and other records, are investigated. The new material shows, in comparison to other pollen records from southern and central Scandinavia, unusually high percentages of Tilia, Ulmus and Corylus pollen, but less Quercus. The change in pollen spectra around 5500 cal yr BP can be correlated to the northern European "elm decline". A regional cooling is recorded in widespread data for this time, but observations suggest that other factors must be considered here, including disease and change in the physical landscape due to the ongoing land uplift.


A new multiuser detection scheme based on signal subspace estimation is proposed. Blind channel estimation technique estimate the channel coefficients and those channel coefficients are used by the rake receiver to estimate the bits. The existing blind methods suffer from high computational complexity and sensitivity to accurate knowledge of the noise subspace rank. In this paper a blind adaptive implementation based on a signal subspace tracking algorithm is proposed. The proposed method estimates the noise subspace by a simple matrix power that is computationally efficient and requires no knowledge of the noise subspace rank. Using the estimated noise subspace channel impulse response is identified by using a low dimensional SVD which reduces the computational complexity significantly.


This paper addresses the problem of efficient scheduling of large clusters under high load and heterogeneous workloads. A heterogeneous workload typically consists of many short jobs and a small number of large jobs that consume the bulk of the cluster's resources. Recent work advocates distributed scheduling to over-come the limitations of centralized schedulers for large clusters with many competing jobs. Such distributed schedulers are inherently scalable, but may make poor scheduling decisions because of limited visibility into the overall resource usage in the cluster. In particular, we demonstrate that under high load, short jobs can fare poorly with such a distributed scheduler. We propose instead a new hybrid central-ized/distributed scheduler, called Hawk. In Hawk, long jobs are scheduled using a centralized scheduler, while short ones are scheduled in a fully distributed way. Moreover, a small portion of the cluster is reserved for the use of short jobs. In order to compensate for the occasional poor decisions made by the distributed scheduler, we propose a novel and efficient randomized work-stealing algorithm. We evaluate Hawk using a trace-driven simulation and a prototype implementation in Spark. In particular, using a Google trace, we show that under high load, compared to the purely distributed Sparrow scheduler, Hawk improves the 50th and 90th percentile runtimes by 80% and 90% for short jobs and by 35% and 10% for long jobs, respectively. Measurements of a prototype implementation using Spark on a 100-node cluster confirm the results of the simulation.


The seasonal activity of the pugnacious ant, Anoplolepis custodiens (Smith). was studied in a paddock representative of the Central Orange Free State. The distribution in time of the number of workers active on the soil surface, tended towards the negative binomial. The insects were more active during spring and autumn than during summer and winter. The lowest activity was recorded in July, while the highest activity occurred during March. The influence of season on activity was further demonstrated by a significant relationship between activity on the one hand and rainfall, relative humidity and temperature on the other. A multiple regression equation was calculated which indicated that both air temperature and relative humidity had a highly significant influence on the activity of the ants. These two factors, however, were responsible for only about 40% of the total variation in the number of workers.


Some phylogenetic datasets omit data matrix positions at which all taxa share the same state. For sequence data this may be because of a focus on single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) or the use of a technique such as restriction site-associated DNA sequencing (RADseq) that concentrates attention onto regions of differences. With morphological data, it is common to omit states that show no variation across the data studied. It is already known that failing to correct for the ascertainment bias of omitting constant positions can lead to overestimates of evolutionary divergence, as the lack of constant sites is explained as high divergence rather than as a deliberate data selection technique. Previous approaches to using corrections to the likelihood function in order to avoid ascertainment bias have either required knowledge of the omitted positions, or have modified the likelihood function to reflect the omitted data. In this paper we indicate that the technique used to date for this latter approach is a conditional maximum likelihood (CML) method. An alternative approach — unconditional maximum likelihood (UML) — is also possible. We investigate the performance of CML and UML and find them to have almost identical performance in the phylogenetic SNP dataset context. We also make some observations about the nucleotide frequencies observed in SNP datasets, indicating that these can differ systematically from the overall equilibrium base frequencies of the substitution process. This suggests that model parameters representing base frequencies should be estimated by maximum likelihood, and not by empirical (counting) methods.


This Law Review article, and ones that follow, are an introduction to Buddhist Law and its influence in Asia and the rest of the world. While the legal traditions of all major religious traditions have been extensively studied and written about, there are very few scholars of, and little written in any language on, the legal concepts in the Buddhist tradition. There is basically nothing in the legal academic literature in the U.S. nor are translations of the actual legal texts available for general use when working to understand this form of thinking, or in making comparisons to other religious laws. This series of articles will examine the reasons for this gap, outline the contextual setting, explore the actual rules that were established, note how they influenced social systems in Asia and address other general aspects of Buddhist Law. This article will have two types of writing: (1) in regular script, the legal discussion and description common to a Law Review and (2) in italics, translations of actual Buddhist law code texts, particularly the Vinaya, or canonical law code. The second type of writing is presented to familiarize non-Asian lawyers with the style of the text and some of the concepts and ideas that underlie Buddhism and Buddhist Law. Besides the intrinsic interest of a wholly unknown legal system, this material is useful for comparative lawyers, international lawyers, scholars of public policy and anyone doing law in a former or current Buddhist country.


The MELiSSA (Micro-ecological life-support system) project is intended to be a tool to gain understanding of closed life-support systems, and consequently a knowledge base for European development of regenerative life-support systems for long-term manned missions (e.g. lunar base, Mars mission). The driving elements of MELiSSA are the production of food, water, and oxygen from the organic wastes of the mission (e.g., urine, CO2,). Inspired by a terrestrial "aquatic" ecosystem, the MELiSSA process consists of five main sub-processes called compartments, from the anoxygenic thermophilic up to the photo-autrophic (e.g., higher plants). The choice of this compartmentalized structure is required by the very high level of space requirements in terms of robustness and safety. During the 20 years of the project, a very progressive and structured approach has been developed to characterize, model, and control the MELiSSA loop. This approach starts from the selection of the involved sub-processes, up to its predictive control. The project is structured on a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and is managed by ESA. It involves roughly 30 organizations encompassing Europe and Canada; eleven of these organizations, called partners, have signed the MOU: University of Ghent, University of Mons-Hainault, Studie Centrum voor Kernergie, Vlamish Institute Technology Onderzoek (B), University of Clermont-Ferrand, Sherpa Engineering, Technomembranes (F), University Autonoma de Barcelona (E), University of Guelph (CDN), IP Star (NL) and the European Space Agency. The project is cofunded by ESA, the MELiSSA partners, and local and national authorities. The project is organized in five phases: basic R&D, preliminary flight experiments, ground and space demonstration, technology transfer, and communication and education. More than a complete status of the project, this paper presents an overview of recent achievements.


Because of its nearly global coverage, the Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) topography is a promising data set for estimating mountain glacier volume changes. But, first, its absolute accuracy must be thoroughly investigated in a glacial environment. We use topographic data available in the French Alps to assess the usefulness of SRTM for the monitoring of glacier volume variations. We observe clear biases with altitude both on ice‐free and glacier‐covered areas. At high altitudes, SRTM elevations are underestimated by up to 10 m. These biases can have a significant impact on any estimate of glacier volume changes. If SRTM is the most recent of the two compared topographies, the volume loss is overestimated (and vice versa). We cannot conclude definitively on the origin of these biases and whether they affect all high‐mountain areas but our findings invite reconsideration of previous estimates of glacier wastage based on SRTM.


The achievement gap in many developing countries is defined in terms of rich/poor and public/private. The prevailing explanation for the "developing" achievement gap is an underfunded, inefficient, and/or inadequately supplied public school sector. Via an analysis of a Colombian voucher experiment, this article examines the extent to which income-contingent vouchers can narrow the achievement gap and provide a cost-effective method for increasing secondary school enrollments. Despite structural and implementation flaws, which diminish the program's impact on achievement and enrollments, its successes strengthen the argument that implementing an income-contingent voucher program can help narrow the achievement gap in developing countries. To cost-effectively increase enrollments, however, significant modifications and expansions to the program would be necessary—as explained in the conclusion of this article.


Calcium phosphate cements (CPCs) are commonly used as bone substitute materials. However, their slow degradation rate and lack of macroporosity hinders new bone formation. Poly(dl-lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) incorporation is of great interest as, upon degradation, produces acidic by-products that enhance CPC degradation. Yet, new bone formation is delayed until PLGA degradation occurs a few weeks after implantation. Therefore, the aim of this study was to accelerate the early stage pore formation within CPCs in vitro. With that purpose, we incorporated the water-soluble porogen sucrose at different weight percentages (10 or 20 wt %) to CPC and CPC/PLGA composites. The results revealed that incorporation of sucrose porogens increased mass loss within the first week of in vitro degradation in groups containing sucrose compared to control groups. After week 1, a further mass loss was observed related to PLGA and CPC degradation. Macroporosity analysis confirmed that macroporosity formation is influenced by the dissolution of sucrose at an early stage and by the degradation of PLGA and CPC at a later stage. We concluded that the combination of sucrose and PLGA porogens in CPC is a promising approach to promote early stage bone tissue ingrowth and complete replacement of CPC through multimodal pore formation. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res Part A: 106A: 500-509, 2018.


This study explored the relation between parents' production of gestures and symbolic play during free play and children's production and comprehension of symbolic gestures. Thirty-one 16- to 22-month-olds and their parents participated in a free play session. Children also participated in a forced-choice novel gesture-learning task. Parents' pretend play with objects in hand was predictive of children's gesture production during play and gesture vocabulary according to parental report. No relationship was found between parent gesture and child performance on the forced-choice gesture-learning task, although children's performance was negatively correlated with their verbal vocabulary size. These data suggest a strong link between parental input and the children's use of gestures as symbols, although not a direct link from parent gesture to child gesture. The data also suggest that children's overall expectations that gestures can be symbols is unaffected by parental input, and highlight the possibility that children play a role in transforming the symbolic play behaviors that they observe into communicative signals.


This thesis probes the extent and consequences of the new local government reforms in four municipalities, namely, Msunduzi, (Pietermaritzburg) Buffalo City, (East London) eThekwini (Durban) and Nelson Mandela (port Elizabeth). These reforms call for a shift from a representative type of local government to a participative form of local governance and require municipalities to conduct their activities in a more democratic way than they did before. Of particular concern to this thesis is the effect of these democratic requirements on the efficiency of the decision-making process. The research has yielded sufficient evidence to support the claim that greater democracy in the decision-making structures and processes will result in a cost to efficiency. This, therefore, confirms the tension between democracy and efficiency in municipal decision-making. A distinction is made between efficiency and efficacy, in that whereas efficiency is measured in terms of "minimum effort", efficacy includes normative evaluation as to whether the decision-making outcomes really address the needs and preferences they are intended to. This thesis examines the impact of these new democratic requirements on the municipal decision-making process in terms of both theories of democracy and systems theory. Through applying Robert Dahl to the new democratic requirements the thesis identifies four criteria in terms of which democratic operation of municipal decision-making is measured: inclusivity, transparency, accountability and participation. Through reviewing systems theory, the thesis identifies the importance of reviewing the structural, organizational culture and development aspects of the decision-making process to develop the fullest picture of what is going on. The thesis then proceeds on the basis of a qualitative evaluation of the case studies to yield several significant sub-findings including that there are no efficiency reasons for preferring the executive mayoral system over the executive committee system, and good democracy reasons to prefer the latter over the former.


We consider the problem of automatic genome segmentation (AGS) that aims to assign discrete labels to all genomic regions based on multiple ChIP-seq samples. We propose to use a hybrid model that combines a hidden Markov model (HMM) with an artificial neural network (ANN) to overcome the weaknesses of a standard HMM. Our contributions are threefold: first, we benchmark two approaches to generate targets for ANN training on an example dataset; second, we investigate many different ANN models to identify the ones with best predictions on chromatin states; third, we test different hyper-parameters and discuss how they affect the machine learning algorithms' performance. We find our best performing models to beat two pervious state-of-the-art methods for AGS by large margins.


Abstract This study investigated the efficacy of Tamarind Leaves (TL) and Mango Leaves (ML) with Oxytetracycline (OXY) on growth performance, haematoimmunological and disease resistance of Clarias gariepinus juveniles against Aeromonas hydrophila. Experimental diets consist of control (0%), TL2 (1%), TL3 (2%), ML4 (1%), ML5 (2%), OXY6 (30mg/kg diet), (TL+ML) 7, (TL+OXY) 8, (ML+OXY) 9 and (TL+ML+OXY) 10. The fish (3.02±0.01g) were replicated twice with 20 fish per replicate and were fed twice daily at 3% body weight of 40% crude protein for twelve weeks (8 weeks for feeding trial and 4 weeks for challenge test). Mean Weight Gain (MWG), Specific Growth Rate (SGR), Packed Cell Volume (PCV), Haemoglobin (Hb), Lymphocytes (LYM), Globulin (GLO), Amino Alanine Transferase (ALT) and Aspertate Amino Transferase (AST) contents were ascertained using standard technique. The fish were infected with A. hydrophila at 5.94 log10 CFU/ml interperitoneally and fed different diets to evaluate their Relative Percent of Survival (RPS). Data was subjected to descriptive statistics and one-way analysis of variance at P=0.05. Clarias gariepinus juveniles fed treated diets had higher growth rates than the control diet but C. gariepinus fed (TL+ML+OXY) 10 had a significantly higher MWG and SGR of 7.74±0.69 g and 0.97±0.01 g, respectively. The PCV (44.0±2.00%), Hb (14.7±2.00 g/dl), LYM (37.0±2.00), GLO (42.0 ±2.00 g/dl) were higher in the C. gariepinus fed (TL+ML+OXY) 10 than the control diet. The AST and ALT values among the treated groups were lower than the values in the control at the post-challenge test. The RPS against A. hydrophila was higher in the treated groups (100%) than in the control (0%). Fish fed tamarind and mango leaves had enhanced mean weight gain and were more resistant to A. hydrophila infection.