For the purposes of this document, lawful intercept is the lawfully
authorized interception and monitoring of communications. Service
providers are being asked to meet legal and regulatory requirements
for the interception of voice as well as data communications in IP
networks in a variety of countries worldwide. Although requirements
vary from country to country, some requirements remain common even
though details such as delivery formats may differ. This document
describes Cisco's Architecture for supporting lawful intercept in
IP networks. It provides a general solution that has a minimum set of
common interfaces. This document does not attempt to address any of
the specific legal requirements or obligations that may exist in a
particular country. This memo provides information for the Internet
community.


The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is a new optical time-domain survey that uses the Palomar 48 inch Schmidt telescope. A custom-built wide-field camera provides a 47 deg2 field of view and 8 s readout time, yielding more than an order of magnitude improvement in survey speed relative to its predecessor survey, the Palomar Transient Factory. We describe the design and implementation of the camera and observing system. The ZTF data system at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center provides near-real-time reduction to identify moving and varying objects. We outline the analysis pipelines, data products, and associated archive. Finally, we present on-sky performance analysis and first scientific results from commissioning and the early survey. ZTF's public alert stream will serve as a useful precursor for that of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.


This work aims at characterizing the conditional probability of single or consecutive dry and wet days in West Africa using the first-order Markov chain approach during the monsoon season (June to October). The results show that the probabilities of having a wet day (PW), a wet day preceded by another wet day (PWW) and a wet day preceded by a dry day (PDW) are stronger in regions where the rainfall is maximum (mountain regions). In contrast, the probabilities of having a dry day (PD), a dry day preceded by a wet day (PWD) and a dry day preceded by another dry day (PDD) are lower in the regions with higher precipitation. The seasonal cycle of PWW (PDD) is consistent with that of PW (PD), respectively in Western Sahel and Central Sahel regions. At the interannual timescale, MK test results show that PW and PDW (PD and PDD) exhibit statistically significant increasing (decreasing) trends the Western Sahel and the Central Sahel. Besides, the shorter dry spells (3 days) show statistically significant decreasing trends only in the Western Sahel. The longer dry spells (5, 7 and 10 days) show statistically significant downward trends over the Western and Central Sahel. Wet spells probabilities show non-significant decreasing trends in all sub-domains, except in the Western Sahel for the 10 days spells. Knowledge of theses probabilities will contribute to develop efficient strategies for water resources management and agricultural decision making in West African countries.

 Key words: Markov chain, rainfall, occurrence, wet spell, dry spell, West Africa.


In recent years, the so-called Alt-Right, a white nationalist movement, has grown at an alarming rate. Taking advantage of high levels of racial polarization, the Alt-Right seeks to normalize explicit white identity politics. Growing from a marginalized and disorganized group of Internet trolls and propagandists, the Alt-Right became one of the major news stories of the 2016 presidential election. Discussions of the Alt-Right are now a regular part of political discourse in the United States and beyond. In The Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know® , George Hawley, one of the world's leading experts on the conservative movement and right-wing radicalism, provides a clear explanation of the ideas, tactics, history, and prominent figures of one of the most disturbing movements in America today. Although it presents itself as a new phenomenon, the Alt-Right is just the latest iteration of a longstanding radical right-wing political tradition. The Alt-Right represents a genuine challenge to pluralistic liberal democracy, but its size and influence are often exaggerated. Whether intentionally or not, President Donald Trump energized the Alt-Right in 2016, yet conflating Trump's variety of right-wing politics with the Alt-Right causes many observers to both overestimate the Alt-Right's size and downplay its radicalism. Hawley provides a tour of the contemporary radical right, and explains how it differs from more mainstream varieties of conservatism. In dispassionate and accessible language, he orients readers to this disruptive and potentially dangerous political moment.


This is the third of a sequence of papers on international flows of trade among fifteen Pacific Basin (PB) countries and between them and eleven regions in the Rest of the World (ROW). In Part I of the sequence (Hickman, Kuroda and Lau, 1977a) we presented and documented annual data on bilateral flows of total exports valued f.o.b. in current dollars among the twenty-six countries and regions for the years 1948 through1975. The primary data source is the Direction of Trade computer tape of the International Monetary Fund, but these data were supplemented from other sources, especially as regards the international trade of the socialist countries. The second report (1977b) extended the data base to include unit value export price indexes and the corresponding constant dollar trade flow matrices for the period 1955-1975. In this third report we analyze the changing pattern of PB trade over the same period, using as tools export growth decomposition indexes, trend analysis, and regression analysis of the price elasticity of import market shares. The present paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we describe the trends in the export performance of the PB countries and ROW regions, as measured by the cumulative percentage change in each country's share of world exports between 1955 and 1975 and for selected sub periods. In Section 3 and Appendices B and C these export share changes are decomposed into three sources: changes in the degree of penetration of the various import markets, changes in the size of the import markets themselves, and an interaction effect. The decomposition indexes are shown in Section 4 to be dominated by the market penetration or competitiveness effect, so that a country gains or loses in world trade according to whether or not it can increase its shares of the markets in which it sells rather than as a passive result of changes in the size of the markets themselves. This leads to a descriptive analysis in Section 5 of the secular growth rates of the market shares of each country or region in the import markets of the twenty-five remaining countries and regions. Finally, we conclude the paper in Section 6 with art exploratory regression analysis of the responsiveness of the market shares to changes in the relative prices of the various exporting countries competing in each import market, leading to the general conclusion that relative prices do matter and presenting estimates of share or substitution elasticities in the various import markets.


This paper probes the foundations and limits of visual representation in the sciences through a close reading of the diagrams that accompanied definitions of the geometric point in the first century of printed editions of Euclid's Elements. I begin with the modal form for such diagrams of Euclid's "small and unsensible shape," showing how it incorporates a broad spectrum of conventions and practices related to the point's philosophical and practical roles in the surrounding Euclidean geometry. I then explore the form's several variations in order to consider the role of "mere representation" in geometric exegesis, and conclude by characterizing the curious relationship between things and their images and that relationship's implications for understanding scientific knowledge and practice.


The goal of this paper is to obtain quantitative results on the number and on the size of maximal independent sets and maximal matchings in several block-stable graph classes that satisfy a proper sub-criticality condition. In particular we cover trees, cacti graphs and series-parallel graphs. The proof methods are based on a generating function approach and a proper singularity analysis of solutions of implicit systems of functional equations in several variables. As a byproduct, this method extends previous results of Meir and Moon for trees [Meir, Moon: On maximal independent sets of nodes in trees, Journal of Graph Theory 1988].


The digital representation of multimedia and the Internet allows for the unauthorized duplication, transmission, and wide distribution of copyrighted multimedia content in an effortless manner. Content providers are faced with the challenge of how to protect their electronic content. Fingerprinting and watermarking are two techniques that help identify content that are copied and distributed illegally. This thesis presents a novel algorithm for each of these two content protection techniques. In fingerprinting, a novel algorithm that model fingerprint using Gaussian mixtures is developed for both audio and video signals. Simulation studies are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithm in generating fingerprints that show high discrimination among different fingerprints and at the same time invariant to different distortions of the same fingerprint. In the proposed watermarking scheme, linear chirps are used as watermark messages. The watermark is embedded and detected by spread-spectrum watermarking. At the receiver, a post processing tool represents the retrieved watermark in a time-frequency distribution and uses a line detection algorithm to detect the watermark. The robustness of the watermark is demonstrated by extracting the watermark after different image processing operations performed using a third party evaluation tool called checkmark.


Introduction: Cultivated Limbal Epithelial Cells Transplantation (CLET) has been proven effective in reconstructing cornea surface of Limbal Stem Cell Deficiency (LSCD). To better understanding the potential and risk of this treatment in our current setup, we conducted a phase I clinical trial and determined the outcome of cultivated limbal epithelial transplantation for Ocular Surface Disease (OSD).
Methods: Prospective interventional trial was conducted in Hospital Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Fourteen eyes of 14 patients with limbal stem cells deficiency: chemical injury (6), advanced pterygium (4), advanced Vernal Kerato Conjunctivitis (VKC) (2), Persistent Epithelial Defect (PED) (1) and Ocular Cicatricial Pemphygoid (OCP) (1) were selected according to the inclusion/exclusion criteria. Autologous cornea limbal epithelial stem cells were cultured on human amniotic membrane and subjected to immunohistological staining for a panel of markers (ABCG2, cytokeratins (K) 3, K19, p63, involucrin, integrin α9 and K14). Cell sheets with epithelial morphology and growth area greater than 80% will be used for CLET. Two weeks later, the tissue was transplanted to the recipient eyes after superficial keratectomy. The patients were followed up for 1 year. Outcome measures were improvement of symptoms, an improvement in visual acuity, no conjunctivalisation and vascularisation and healed persistent corneal epithelial defect.
Results: Ten patients (71.4%) had an improvement in visual acuity of at least two lines at 6 months and one year (p<0.05%). Thirteen patients (92.8%) had cornea epithelisation in 1 month. The patient with persistent epithelial defect (PED) healed in 3 months and the patient with ocular cicatricial pemphygoid (OCP) had recurrent cornea epithelial defect at 6 months and healed after one year. On slit lamp examination, eight patients (57.1%) had no cornea vascularisation in 6 months and 1 year (p<0.05%). Ten patients (71.4%) had no cornea conjunctivalisation in 6 months and 1 year (p<0.05%).
Conclusions: Transplantation of cultivated autologous limbal epithelial cell can efficiently restore the cornea with improved vision. Patients with chemical injury, advance pterygium group had better outcome results.


Sensory nerves in the periphery respond to noxious stimuli that produce pain, thermal stimuli sensed as heat or cold, and mechanical stimuli perceived as touch. Two groups (Cockayne et al. and Souslova et al.) studied how sensory perception was altered in mice when the gene for the P2X3 adenosine triphosphate (ATP) receptor was knocked out. A third group (Price et al.) focused on sensory deficits in mice lacking the gene for the sodium channel BNC1, which is not a voltage-gated channel. The BNC1-/- mice exhibited decreased responsiveness to mechanical stimuli sensed by the class of rapidly adapting mechanoreceptors. The BNC1 channel is normally expressed by nerves found at the base of hair follicles consistent with its having an essential role in touch perception. The P2X3 knockout mice demonstrated decreased pain-related behavior. Furthermore, the P2X3-/- mice lost a rapidly desensitizing ATP-induced current in dorsal root ganglia and had altered ATP-induced currents in nodose ganglia consistent with a role for the P2X3 receptor in nociception. Additional phenotypes were also noted in the P2X3-/- mice. Cockayne et al. reported that the mice urinated less frequently and provided evidence for the P2X3 receptor in bladder volume reflexes; Souslova et al. reported a defect in neuronal responsiveness to nonnoxious thermal stimuli (temperatures below 45°C but greater than 37°C). Although these results suggest that the P2X3 receptor may be a candidate for pharmacological intervention in treating urinary incontinence and pain management, Souslova et al. found that the mice were hyperalgesic under conditions of chronic inflammation. The accompanying commentary by Cook and McCleskey highlights these caveats. Cockayne, D.A., Hamilton, S.G., Zhu, Q.-M., Dunn, P.M., Zhong, Y., Novakovic, S., Malmberg, A.B., Cain, G., Berson, A., Kassotakis, L., Hedley, L., Lachnit, W.G., Burnstock, G., McMahon, S.B., and Ford, A.P.D.W. (2000) Urinary bladder hyporeflexia and reduced pain-related behaviour in P2X3-deficient mice. Nature 407: 1011-1015. [Online Journal] Souslova, V., Cesare, P., Ding, Y., Akopian, A.N., Stanfa, L., Suzuki, R., Carpenter, K., Dickenson, A., Boyce, S., Hill, R., Nebenius-Oosthuizen, D., Smith, A.J.H., Kidd, E.J., and Wood, J.N. (2000) Warm-coding deficits and aberrant inflammatory pain in mice lacking P2X3 receptors. Nature 407: 1015-1017. [Online Journal] Price, M.P., Lewin, G.R., McIlwrath, S.L., Cheng, C., Xie, J., Heppenstall, P.A., Stucky, C.L., Mannsfeldt, A.G., Brennan, T.J., Drummond, H.A., Qiao, J., Benson, C.J., Tarr, D.E., Hrstka, R.F., Yang, B., Williamson, R.A., and Welsh, M.J. (2000) The mammalian sodium channel BNC1 is required for normal touch sensation. Nature 407: 1007-1011. [Online Journal] Cook, S.P., and McCleskey, E.W. (2000) ATP, pain and a full bladder. Nature 407: 951-952. [Online Journal]


Continual learning faces a crucial challenge of catastrophic forgetting. To address this challenge, experience replay (ER) that maintains a tiny subset of samples from previous tasks has been commonly used. Existing ER works usually focus on refining the learning objective for each task with a static memory construction policy. In this paper, we formulate the dynamic memory construction in ER as a combinatorial optimization problem, which aims at directly minimizing the global loss across all experienced tasks. We first apply three tactics to solve the problem in the offline setting as a starting point. To provide an approximate solution to this problem in the online continual learning setting, we further propose the Global Pseudo-task Simulation (GPS), which mimics future catastrophic forgetting of the current task by permutation. Our empirical results and analyses suggest that the GPS consistently improves accuracy across four commonly used vision benchmarks. We have also shown that our GPS can serve as the unified framework for integrating various memory construction policies in existing ER works.


Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a widely used dimensional reduction method that aims to find a low dimension sub space of highly correlated data for its major information to be used in further analysis. Machine learning methods based on PCA are popular in high dimensional data analysis, such as video and image processing. In video processing, the Robust PCA (RPCA), which is a modified method of the traditional PCA, has good properties in separating moving objects from the background, but it may have difficulties in separating those when light intensity of the background varies significantly in time. To overcome the difficulties, a modified PCA method, called Regression PCA (RegPCA), is proposed. The method is developed by combining the traditional PCA and regression approaches together, and it can be easily combined with RPCA for video processing. We focus the presentation of RegPCA with the combination of RPCA on video processing and find that it is more reliable than RPCA only. We use RegPCA to separate moving object from the background in a color video and get a better result than that given by RPCA. In the implementation, we first derive the explanatory variables by the background information. we then process a number of frames of the video and use those as a set of response variables. We remove the impact of the background by regressing the response against the explanatory variables by a regression model. The regression model provides a set of residuals, which can be further analyzed by RPCA. We compare the results of RegRPCA against those of RPCA only. It is evident that the moving objects can be completely removed from the background using our method but not in RPCA. Note that our result is based on a combination of RegPCA with RPCA. Our proposed method provides a new implementation of RPCA under the framework of regression approaches, which can be used to account for the impact of risk factors. This problem cannot be addressed by the application of RPCA only.


Introduction: Increased blood pressure (BP) is one of the most significant epidemiological, medical, social, and economic consequences of problems. The results of many studies indicate that in one-third of people in Ukraine, the level of BP exceeds 140/90 mm Hg, it is increased. There is a contradiction between the need to adhere to the current level of therapy, which involves the use of new, as a rule, expensive techniques and drugs, and the constant lack of funding for health care. Materials and Methods: Methods of statistical description, systematic, sociological, economic, and statistical analysis, including variational statistics, correspondence questionnaires, and expert assessments, were used in the research process. The study included 1568 patients diagnosed with hypertension. As a result of the pharmacoepidemiological analysis, it was shown that the most often antihypertensive monotherapy is performed for younger patients with initial lower BP values. Results: A more detailed analysis of the antihypertensive activity of drugs belonging to the main pharmacological groups was performed with arterial hypertension monotherapy. Therefore, it is important to analyze the therapeutic efficacy of antihypertensive drugs from different clinical and pharmacological groups, safety, and their impact on the wellbeing of patients. Discussion and Conclusion: Analysis of the structure of prescriptions revealed the dominant positions of Agriculture Commercialization Equity Fund drugs, and, above all, drugs enalapril, among patients with hypertension in all study groups, regardless of age and gender, as well as regimens of antihypertensive therapy. A retrospective study of the antihypertensive effect of drugs from different clinical and therapeutic groups revealed no significant differences, but significant differences were noted when comparing the original drugs with their reproduced analogs (generics)


BACKGROUND
Perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), found widely in wildlife and humans, is environmentally and metabolically stable. Environmental PFOS may be from its use as a surfactant, hydrolysis of perfluorooctanesulfonyl fluoride, and degradation of N-alkyl-perfluorooctanesulfonamide compounds formerly used in numerous applications. Prenatal exposure to PFOS in rodents causes neonatal mortality; treatment on gestation days (GD) 19-20 is sufficient to induce neonatal death in rats. Affected pups are born alive but present with labored breathing. Their lungs are pale and often do not expand fully on perfusion.

METHODS
Pregnant Sprague-Dawley rats received 0, 25, or 50 mg/kg/day PFOS/K+ orally on GD 19-20. Lungs from GD 21 fetuses and neonates were prepared for histology and morphometry. Rescue experiments included co-administration of dexamethasone or retinyl palmitate with PFOS. Pulmonary surfactant was investigated with mass spectrometry in GD 21 amniotic fluid and neonatal lungs. Microarray analysis was carried out on PND 0 lungs.

RESULTS
Histologically, alveolar walls were thicker in lungs of PFOS-exposed newborns compared to controls. The ratio of solid tissue:small airway was increased, suggesting immaturity. Rescue studies were ineffective. Phospholipid concentrations and molecular speciation were unaffected by PFOS. No changes in markers of alveolar differentiation were detected by microarray analysis.

CONCLUSIONS
Morphometric changes in lungs of PFOS exposed neonates were suggestive of immaturity, but the failure of rescue agents and normal pulmonary surfactant profile indicate that the labored respiration and mortality observed in PFOS-treated neonates was not due to lung immaturity.


Background:

Insufficient vitamin D levels have been linked to a wide range of diseases including several major neurological conditions, including the putative roles and levels of vitamin D in dementia. Owing to inter laboratory, inter method variations, overlapping peaks and identical masses of epimers and isobars, considerable discrepancies in results are frequent.
The primary aim of this study was to accurately identify and quantitate vitamin D metabolites through chromatographic separation from its epimers and isobars and to investigate the relationships or differences between vitamin D forms and cognitive state (MMSE scores), along with calcium levels.

Methods:

Blood samples were collected from 5 healthy male Caucasian volunteers and vitamin D metabolites along with co-eluting epimers and analogues were quantified. AD subjects were grouped as A: untreated (n= 26) and B: treated with acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEI) (n= 44) and C: control (n= 35), based on the cognitive function and treatment. Levels of vitamin D metabolites along with epimers and isobars were measured using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) and calcium measurements were conducted using inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS).

Results:

The new method allowed chromatographic separation and quantification of vitamin D metabolites, along with their epimer 3-epi-25OHD3 and isobars 1-∝-hydroxyvitamin-D3 (1∝OHD3), and 7∝hydroxy-4-cholesten-3-one (7∝C4).
In AD subjects, no relationship was observed between MMSE score, calcium and any form of vitamin D. There was no significant difference in calcium levels among the three groups. For Group A, the levels of both total 25-hydroxtvitamin-D (25OHD) (14.79 +/- 13.31 nmol/mL,) and 25-hydroxyvitamin-D2 (25OHD2) (undetected) were lower compared to the control (40.50 +/- 23.46 and 9.58 +/- 6.23 nmol/mL) and treated groups (32.89 +/- 28.58 and 6.84 +/- 7.86 nmol/mL) p=0.004 and p<0.001, respectively. No significant differences were found in the levels of the primary forms vitamin D2 and vitamin D3.

Conclusions:

This specific, reliable, reproducible and robust method provided valuable insight into the vitamin D status of AD sufferers with 25OHD being significantly lower in patients suffering from AD arising from extremely low levels of 25OHD2 along with low levels of 25OHD3. Treatment with AChEI appears to reverse this deficit.


Preface. 1 Basic Skills and Concepts Having Application to Transmission Lines. 1.1 Units and Unit Conversion. 1.2 Waves, Time Delay, Phase Shift, Wavelength, and Electrical Dimensions. 1.3 The Time Domain vs. the Frequency Domain. 1.3.1 Spectra of Digital Signals. 1.3.2 Bandwidth of Digital Signals. 1.3.3 Computing the Time-Domain Response of Transmission Lines Having Linear Terminations Using Fourier Methods and Superposition. 1.4 The Basic Transmission Line Problem. 1.4.1 Two-Conductor Transmission Lines and Signal Integrity. 1.4.2 Multiconductor Transmission Lines and Crosstalk. Problems. PART I TWO-CONDUCTOR LINES AND SIGNAL INTEGRITY. 2 Time-Domain Analysis of Two-Conductor Lines. 2.1 The Transverse ElectroMagnetic (TEM) Mode of Propagation and the Transmission-Line Equations. 2.2 The Per-Unit-Length Parameters. 2.2.1 Wire-Type Lines. 2.2.2 Lines of Rectangular Cross Section. 2.3 The General Solutions for the Line Voltage and Current. 2.4 Wave Tracing and Reflection Coefficients. 2.5 The SPICE (PSPICE) Exact Transmission-Line Model. 2.6 Lumped-Circuit Approximate Models of the Line. 2.7 Effects of Reactive Terminations on Terminal Waveforms. 2.7.1 Effect of Capacitive Terminations. 2.7.2 Effect of Inductive Terminations. 2.8 Matching Schemes for Signal Integrity. 2.9 Bandwidth and Signal Integrity: When Does the Line Not Matter? 2.10 Effect of Line Discontinuities. 2.11 Driving Multiple Lines. Problems. 3 Frequency-Domain Analysis of Two-Conductor Lines. 3.1 The Transmission-Line Equations for Sinusoidal, Steady-State Excitation of the Line. 3.2. The General Solution for the Terminal Voltages and Currents. 3.3 The Voltage Reflection Coefficient and Input Impedance to the Line. 3.4 The Solution for the Terminal Voltages nad Currents. 3.5 The SPICE Solution. 3.6 Voltage and Current as a Function of Position on the Line. 3.7 Matching and VSWR. 3.8 Power Flow on the Line. 3.9 Alternative Forms of the Results. 3.10 The Smith Chart. 3.11 Effects of Line Losses. 3.12 Lumped-Circuit Approximations for Electrically Short Lines. 3.13 Construction of Microwave Circuit Components Using Transmission Lines. Problems. PART II THREE-CONDUCTOR LINES AND CROSSTALK. 4 The Transmission-Line Equations for Three-Conductor Lines. 4.1 The Transmission-Line Equations for Three-Conductor Lines. 4.2 The Per-Unit-Length Parameters. 4.2.1 Wide-Separation Approximations for Wires. 4.2.2 Numerical Methods. Problems. 5 Solution of the Transmission-Line Equations for Three-Conductor Lossless Lines. 5.1 Decoupling the Transmission-Line Equations with Mode Transformations. 5.2 The SPICE Subcircuit Model. 5.3 Lumped-Circuit Approximate Models of the Line. 5.4 The Inductive-Capacitive Coupling Approximate Model. Problems. 6 Solution of the Transmission-Line Equations for Three-Conductor Lossy Lines. 6.1 The Transmission-Line Equations for Three-Conductor Lossy Lines. 6.2 Characterization of Conductor and Dielectric Losses. 6.2.1 Conductor Losses and Skin Effect. 6.2.2 Dielectric Losses. 6.3 Solution of the Phasor (Frequency-Domain) Transmission-Line Equations for a Three-Conductor Lossy Line. 6.4 Common-Impedance Coupling. 6.5 The Time-Domain to Frequency-Domain (TDFD) Method. Problems. Appendix. A Brief Tutorial on Using PSPICE. Index.


Abstractive summarization aims to generate a shorter version of the document covering all the salient points in a compact and coherent fashion. On the other hand, query-based summarization highlights those points that are relevant in the context of a given query. The encode-attend-decode paradigm has achieved notable success in machine translation, extractive summarization, dialog systems, etc. But it suffers from the drawback of generation of repeated phrases. In this work we propose a model for the query-based summarization task based on the encode-attend-decode paradigm with two key additions (i) a query attention model (in addition to document attention model) which learns to focus on different portions of the query at different time steps (instead of using a static representation for the query) and (ii) a new diversity based attention model which aims to alleviate the problem of repeating phrases in the summary. In order to enable the testing of this model we introduce a new query-based summarization dataset building on debatepedia. Our experiments show that with these two additions the proposed model clearly outperforms vanilla encode-attend-decode models with a gain of 28% (absolute) in ROUGE-L scores.


The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, introduced by Sydney Brenner for the genetic analysis of nervous system formation, is now a powerful model organism for studying nearly all aspects of biology, from development to diseases to evolution. Sequencing and analysis of the worm genome revealed intriguing nonrandom patterns of genome organisation and unusual features such as abundant operons. Surprising upon first discovery, worms and humans have a similar number of genes that are comprised of a similar proportion of transcription factors to regulate their genomes. However, differences in small ribonucleic acid content may contribute to differences in organismal complexity. In nature, the bacterivorous C. elegans is found primarily on rotting vegetation in temperate regions across the world. Natural selection, combined with the low effective recombination rate associated with selfing, strongly reduces nucleotide variation across the genome, yielding similarly low polymorphism to other selfing hermaphrodite species of Caenorhabditis. The genus Caenorhabditis provides a superb model system for ecological and evolutionary genetics, benefiting from C. elegans tools and information when applied to investigations of species with a higher polymorphism and better known ecological context.

Key Concepts:

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, introduced by Sydney Brenner for the genetic analysis of nervous system development, was the first metazoan to have a complete sequenced genome and is now a model organism for nearly all fields of biology.

Many genomic features are not randomly distributed along C. elegans chromosomes and are prevalent either in the chromosome arms or in its centre.

An unusually large fraction of protein-coding genes is organised in operons, possibly optimising transcriptional resources during recovery from developmental arrest.

Gene duplication and alternative splicing contribute to extensive diversification of gene function, with 10.5% of protein-coding genes having paralogs and 25% of genes being alternatively spliced.

The ratio of transcription factors to protein-coding genes is similar in worms and humans but the two species differ greatly in their microRNA content.

The differences in chromatin states contribute to phenotypic variation and the transgenerational epigenetic inheritance suggests a role for epigenetic information in evolution.

The rate of duplication is two orders of magnitude greater than the nucleotide mutation rate, highlighting the role of gene duplication in the evolution of the C. elegans genome.

Caenorhabditis is not a soil nematode but instead proliferates and feeds on bacteria in rotting vegetation.

Population genetic variation is strongly affected by the mating system of Caenorhabditis, with very low polymorphism in selfing hermaphroditic species relative to outcrossing gonochoristic species.

Keywords:

Caenorhabditis;
genome evolution;
operons;
gene regulation;
mating systems;
epigenetics;
polymorphism


Transaction processing workloads provide ample request level concurrency which highly parallel architectures can exploit. However, the resulting heavy utilization of core database services also causes resource contention within the database engine itself and limits scalability. Meanwhile, many database workloads consist of short transactions which access only a few database records each, often with stringent response time requirements. Performance of these short transactions is determined largely by the amount of overhead the database engine imposes for services such as logging, locking, and transaction management.

This paper highlights the negative scalability impact of database locking, an effect which is especially severe for short transactions running on highly concurrent multicore hardware. We propose and evaluate Speculative Lock Inheritance, a technique where hot database locks pass directly from transaction to transaction, bypassing the lock manager bottleneck. We implement SLI in the Shore-MT storage manager and show that lock inheritance fundamentally improves scalability by decoupling the number of simultaneous requests for popular locks from the number of threads in the system, eliminating contention within the lock manager even as core counts continue to increase. We achieve this effect with only minor changes to the lock manager and without changes to consistency or other application-visible effects.


On 2017 September 22, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory reported the detection of the high-energy neutrino event IC 170922A, of potential astrophysical origin. It was soon determined that the neutrino direction was consistent with the location of the gamma-ray blazar TXS 0506+056 (3FGL J0509.4+0541), which was in an elevated gamma-ray emission state as measured by the Fermi satellite. Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) observations of the neutrino/blazar region started on 2017 September 23 in response to the neutrino alert and continued through 2018 February 6. While no significant very-high-energy (VHE; E > 100 GeV) emission was observed from the blazar by VERITAS in the two-week period immediately following the IceCube alert, TXS 0506+056 was detected by VERITAS with a significance of 5.8 standard deviations (σ) in the full 35 hr data set. The average photon flux of the source during this period was (8.9 ± 1.6) × 10−12 cm−2 s−1, or 1.6% of the Crab Nebula flux, above an energy threshold of 110 GeV, with a soft spectral index of 4.8 ± 1.3.


Exterior insulation and finish systems (EIFS) are intended to act as a barrier against water penetration and not allow water to penetrate through the system to the backup wall construction and leak into the interior of the building. Recent investigations of EIFS on several buildings including a 15-year-old building that does not have any windows and buildings that are about five to ten years old that have windows, have revealed that failure of the joints between the EIFS and the windows and other openings in the EIFS, and at terminations in the EIFS, is the primary cause of water leakage and water damage in EIFS on buildings. Other conditions that cause water leakage in EIFS, to a lesser degree, include cracks in the EIFS, delamination of the base coat from the rigid insulation, and window deficiencies. To minimize water leakage in buildings with EIFS, the backup wall, EIFS, windows, doors and all other wall components and the joints between them should be designed and constructed to act as a facade system consistent with the barrier behavior of EIFS or as a unified facade system with a coordinated secondary line of defense against water penetration, rather than as separate elements jointed more » together; and the design and construction of the substrate to which the EIFS is attached should be the responsibility of the EIFS manufacturer and contractor. Recommendations on the design of a unified facade system with a secondary line of defense against water penetration are provided for consideration. « less


Computational methods have become a valuable tool for studying mathematical problems and for constructing large combinatorial objects. In fact, it is often not possible to find large combinatorial objects using human reasoning alone and the only known way of accessing such objects is to use computational methods. These methods require deriving mathematical properties which the object in question must necessarily satisfy, translating those properties into a format that a computer can process, and then running a search through a space which contains the objects which satisfy those properties. In this thesis, we solve some combinatorial and number theoretic problems which fit into the above framework and present computational strategies which can be used to perform the search and preprocessing. In particular, one strategy we examine uses stateof-the-art tools from the symbolic computation and SAT/SMT solving communities to execute a search more efficiently than would be the case using the techniques from either community in isolation. To this end, we developed the tool MathCheck2, which combines the sophisticated domain-specific knowledge of a computer algebra system (CAS) with the powerful general-purpose search routines of a SAT solver. This fits into the recently proposed SAT+CAS paradigm which is based on the insight that modern SAT solvers (some of the best general-purpose search tools ever developed) do not perform well in all applications but can be made more efficient if supplied with appropriate domain-specific knowledge. To our knowledge, this is the first PhD thesis which studies the SAT+CAS paradigm which we believe has potential to be used in many problems for a long time to come. As case studies for the methods we examine, we study the problem of computing Williamson matrices, the problem of computing complex Golay sequences, and the problem of computing minimal primes. In each case, we provide results which are competitive with or improve on the best known results prior to our work. In the first case study, we provide for the first time an enumeration of all Williamson matrices up to order 45 and show that 35 is the smallest order for which Williamson matrices do not exist. These results were previously known under the restriction that the order was odd but our work also considers even orders, as Williamson did when he defined such matrices in 1944. In the second case study, we provide an independent verification of the 2002 conjecture that complex Golay sequences do not exist in order 23 and enumerate all complex Golay sequences up to order 25. In the third case study, we compute the set of minimal primes for all bases up to 16 as well for all bases up to 30 with possibly a small number of missing elements.


The integrity of the content a user is exposed to when browsing the web relies on a plethora of non-web technologies and an infrastructure of interdependent hosts, communication technologies, and trust relations. Incidents like the Chinese Great Cannon or the MyEtherWallet attack make it painfully clear: the security of end users hinges on the security of the surrounding infrastructure: routing, DNS, content delivery, and the PKI. There are many competing, but isolated proposals to increase security, from the network up to the application layer. So far, researchers have focused on analyzing attacks and defenses on specific layers. We still lack an evaluation of how, given the status quo of the web, these proposals can be combined, how effective they are, and at what cost the increase of security comes. In this work, we propose a graph-based analysis based on Stackelberg planning that considers a rich attacker model and a multitude of proposals from IPsec to DNSSEC and SRI. Our threat model considers the security of billions of users against attackers ranging from small hacker groups to nation-state actors. Analyzing the infrastructure of the Top 5k Alexa domains, we discover that the security mechanisms currently deployed are ineffective and that some infrastructure providers have a comparable threat potential to nations. We find a considerable increase of security (up to 13% protected web visits) is possible at a relatively modest cost, due to the effectiveness of mitigations at the application and transport layer, which dominate expensive infrastructure enhancements such as DNSSEC and IPsec.


We present a data-processing pipeline based on sparse feature learning and describe its applications to music annotation and retrieval. Content-based music annotation and retrieval systems process audio starting with features. While commonly used features, such as MFCC, are handcrafted to extract characteristics of the audio in a succinct way, there is increasing interest in learning features automatically from data using unsupervised algorithms. We describe a systemic approach applying feature-learning algorithms to music data, in particular, focusing on a highdimensional sparse-feature representation. Our experiments show that, using only a linear classifier, the newly learned features produce results on the CAL500 dataset comparable to state-of-the-art music annotation and retrieval systems.


The coalition government have pledged a commitment to a shift from 'Big Government' that presumes to know best, to the 'Big Society' that trusts in people for ideas and innovation to mend Britain's 'broken society'. While the policy implications of this shift remain opaque at this stage, further work has been undertaken to articulate what this strategy entails (see Cabinet Office, 2010). Five key themes have emerged which promise a dramatic shake-up of the system. This paper focuses on the theme that most closely relates to notions of 'Big Society' - restorative justice. In the current economic climate it is perhaps unsurprising that the coalition is supportive of restorative justice, as it mirrors the desire to redistribute power from central government to local communities and individuals. The Liberal Democrat experimentation with Community Justice Panels (now being referred to as Neighbourhood Justice Panels or NJPs) in the run-up to the general election has been highlighted as a measure that will be introduced to combat low-level offending and antisocial behaviour. This is given particular consideration as it involves local communities and victims themselves responding to offending behaviour rather than the state. NJPs, it is claimed, have a dramatic impact on recidivism rates in comparison to the traditional
criminal justice process and a corresponding reduction on police time and resources. However, as Crawford & Newburn (2002) highlight, England has traditionally adopted a
more punitive approach towards dealing with offending behaviour due to widespread public anxiety about crime and political competition to secure votes. Thus, this paper seeks to explore the potential implementational difficulties and resistance that may come.


This field guide to the Restionaceae, or Cape reeds, commonly called restios, unpacks a unique family of fynbos plants found at the southern tip of South Africa.

Beautifully illustrated with photographs and over 400 colour images (scanned from living plants), this new edition of Els Dorrat-Haaksma's respected guide has now been revised, updated and freshly designed for greater ease of use. It will help demystify restios, a less known component of the fynbos – one that has in recent years become increasingly popular with gardeners and landscape designers as restios find their rightful place amongst the 'architectural' plants. It will be welcomed by all nature lovers, whether tourists, hikers, gardeners or botanists (both amateur and professional).


ABSTRACT Feasibility of a multidisciplinary caregiving training protocol for young caregivers in families with ALS. Objectives: To assess the feasibility of a multidisciplinary young caregiver group training protocol for children and youth who provide care to a family member with ALS. Method: Peer group experiential young caregiver model based on theories of self-management and self-efficacy. Training conducted by a multidisciplinary team of therapists in ALS (PT, OT, Speech and social work), as well as assistive device vendors. Demographic data, caregiving tasks and evaluations were collected. Results: The model is feasible for both youth and therapists. Youth found benefit, skill acquisition, and mastery by asking questions, teaching back skills to the group and engaging with peers. Conclusion: This project demonstrates young caregivers will participate in training, and engage with "like" peer group. Future projects will focus on developing a structured survey and observation, testing efficacy in larger groups.


This thesis examines the nature of the relationship between Shelley and the thought, politics, and discursive practices of Owenism and Chartism. Its objects of analysis are Owenite periodicals and Chartist newspapers, which I theorise as active in the process of transmission and reception. This thesis locates the reception and transmission of Shelley's poetry and politics within the broader context of the movements' political and social commitments. It makes an original contribution to knowledge by demonstrating that the movements used Shelley's poetry critically and with discrimination. It also argues that Owenite and Chartist approaches to Shelley changed as the movements developed over time in response to historical pressures.
I argue that a cultural materialist approach enables us to reconsider the nature of Shelley's influence and popularity within these movements, something that has become a critical commonplace. It also allows us to distinguish between Owenite and Chartist 'Shelleys'. I argue that the Owenite periodicals the Crisis and the New Moral World produced a qualitatively different Shelley from the one that emerged in Chartist newspapers such as the Northern Star. Although there was a degree of overlap between the two movements in terms of social commitments and personnel, the parameters set by the formal qualities and discursive strategies of the movements' print cultures allowed different Shelleys to emerge within them.
In terms of content, the Owenites quoted Shelley's poetry to support their social theories and the most frequently quoted poems were Queen Mab and The Revolt of Islam. The Chartists also used Queen Mab, but were less interested in a feminist poem like Revolt and more interested in poems that allowed them to articulate class conflict. I account for such differences within my broader argument: that the two movements had qualitatively different conceptions of the possibilities of language and aesthetics, and different approaches to social conflict.


Wheeled locomotion and legged locomotion have been studied by many researchers with various degrees of detail. On the contrary, the limbless locomotion has drawn very limited degree of interest. In limbless locomotion (of a serpent), the cyclic changes in the body shape is primarily responsible for locomotion. This research considers the development of an experimental serpentine robot for implementation of various serpentine and non-serpentine gaits. It also includes the laying out of serpentine, non-serpentine and synthetic locomotion gaits, including various innovative moves and postures, which were implemented on the serpentine robot. The gait implementation formalism termed as Joint Orientation Function (JOF) is considered as a major contribution of this research. Conventional techniques are limited to demonstrate only few gaits that are highly dependent on the design of specific robot configuration. On the other hand, joint orientation functions are versatile and parametric with limited parameters and can generate wide range of locomotion gaits as well as various static postures.


Our paper studies the effect of mimetic behaviour in the adoption of the ERP by large and midsize French companies. We propose an original synthesis of various visions suggested by theories of the management on the origin of mimicry, practices likely to be copied and on imitation relevance. Firms in "uncertain situations" resulting from insufficient scanning can copy positions taken by others. Some modify their judgement taking into account the advices of firms having adopted an ERP. Others copy the dominant practices or the choices of firms appearing legitimate as leaders, successful or innovating firms.


An ontogenetic series o f nine species; Centrophorus granulosus, Centroscymnus coelolepis, Dalatias licha, Deania calcea, Echinorhinus cookei, Isistius brasiliensis, Oxynotus centrina and Squalus acanthias were studied to determine swimming capabilities, boundary-layer flow conditions and placoid scale functional morphologies. Body morphometric variables included the girth and the distance from snout to the orbitals, origin of the median and paired fins, and the caudal peduncle, body and fin surface area, fin aspect ratios and caudal fin angles. Placoid scales were sampled from sixteen regions across the body. Morphometric variables included the number of scales per area of integument, scale crown width, length and area, and scale weight. Body shape morphometry coupled with published natural histories suggest a majority o f the species examined are probably capable of moderate to fast swimming speeds. There was a correlation between low fin aspect ratios and near neutral buoyancy among the species examined suggesting functions other than dynamic lift for the paired fins. Likewise, there was a trend for these fins to be reduced in size suggesting decreased drag. Freed from functioning in generating lift, the pectoral fins probably provide a high degree of vertical directional control. Larger fins with relatively high aspect ratios were correlated with negatively buoyant species suggesting a role in providing dynamic lift. These sharks were more typical in body form of coastal pelagic or benthic sharks of the order Carcharinidae. The squaloid sharks have been recognized to possess the most morphologically diverse placoid scales. Among the nine species examined, three general crown morphologies were distinguished; traditional plate-like crowns, spike or thorn-like crowns and concave trapezoidal crowns. Ontogenetic, sexual dimorphic, and spatial variability within a specimen was observed in all species and interspecific variability was observed in the trends of placoid scale variability. Placoid scale functional morphologies are hypothesisied from intraspecific and interspecific variability, body shape morphologies and natural histories.


A pivotal event in neural development is the point at which differentiating neurons become competent to extend long axons. Initiation of axon growth is equally critical for regeneration. Yet we have a limited understanding of the signaling pathways that regulate the capacity for axon growth during either development or regeneration. Expression of a number of genes encoding growth associated proteins (GAPs) accompanies both developmental and regenerative axon growth and has led to the suggestion that the same signaling pathways regulate both modes of axon growth. We have tested this possibility by asking whether a promoter fragment from a well characterized GAP gene, GAP-43, is sufficient to activate expression in both developing and regenerating neurons. We generated stable lines of transgenic zebrafish that express green fluorescent protein (GFP) under regulation of a 1 kb fragment of the rat GAP-43 gene, a fragment that contains a number of evolutionarily conserved elements. Analysis of GFP expression in these lines confirms that the rat 1 kb region can direct growth-associated expression of the transgene in differentiating neurons that extend long axons. Furthermore, this region supports developmental down-regulation of transgene expression which, like the endogenous gene, coincides with neuronal maturation. Strikingly, these same sequences are insufficient for directing expression in regenerating neurons. This finding suggests that signaling pathways regulating axon growth during development and regeneration are not the same. While these results do not exclude the possibility that pathways involved in developmental axon growth are also active in regenerative growth, they do indicate that signaling pathway(s) controlling activation of the GAP-43 gene after CNS injury differ in at least one key component from the signals controlling essential features of developmental axon growth.


DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING OF A SIMULATED CLOSED LOOP DRUG DELIVERY SYSTEM FOR CHF PATIENTS UNDER MILRINONE ADMINISTRATION by Runa Shah The purpose of this thesis project is the development and testing of a simulated closed loop drug delivery (CLDD) system that consists of a pharmacokinetic, physiological, and feedback-controlling model. The focus of this study is on the control of milrinone infusion to maintain cardiac output at desired setpoint range for patients suffering from congestive heart failure (CHF). The simulated CLDD system is written in VisSim dynamic simulation language for an IBM-compatible PC. Milrinone pharmacokinetics are represented by a three compartment model. The physiological model consists of the cardiovascular system model linked to the pharmacodynamic submodel of milrinone. The feedback-controlling model consists of a cascade controlling mechanism incorporating a PID controller. Validation of system dynamics was performed by comparison of simulated results of the loop model (pharmacokinetic and physiological model) to available experimental data. Pharmacokinetic and hemodynamic responses showed that the behavior of the simulated open loop model was similar to that of CHF patients under milrinone administration. The addition of the feedback-controlling model to the open loop model resulted in the development of the CLDD system. Performance of the cascade controller was optimized with tuning of PID controller. A two-hour control performance was monitored as the CLDD system underwent the following situations: (1) target CO was modified (transient response), (2) perturbation was incorporated as circulatory vessel resistances were changed, and (3) randomization of system parameter was achieved by varying the elimination rate constant. Onset delay, time taken for controller to bring CO within set boundaries, and percentage overshoot of cardiac output from target were the underlining results analyzed in understanding the performance of the controller. Aside from some minor refinements, the overall performance of the controller showed it to be robust in responding to the changes in the system by adjusting milrinone infusion so that cardiac output could track to the setpoint. The simulated CLDD system as a whole was observed to correctly represent clinical automated drug delivery. The results of the simulated controller also lead into the possibility of developing an automated control milrinone infusion system for maintaining cardiac output for CHF


A new design technique for multilayer reflectors is presented It is useful when slight absorption by one or both of the coating materials limits the performance of the reflector. The basic procedure is to add layers to a given substrate or multilayer system one pair at a time. The thickness of each layer is chosen to give the maximum increase in reflectance for each pair of layers added. In general, the optical thicknesses of the layers in each pair are not quarter waves, but depend on the optical constants of the materials, as well as the starting reflectance of the subsystem. By using such optimized pairs, it is possible to exceed the reflectance limit usually imposed on quarter-wave stack reflectors by absorption. Expressions for the optimum design and the ultimate reflectance for a high reflector made with a given set of coating materials are given. Other design techniques found in the literature require more layers to achieve the same level of reflectance as the present method.


CASE DESCRIPTION The primary subject matter of this case is the preparation of a basic process costing report using the weighted-average method. Secondary issues examined include understanding the physical flow of units in a processing environment, the notion of partially completed units, and the understanding of and accounting for equivalent units. The case has a difficulty level of two and is targeted at business students in a sophomore level managerial accounting course and/or MBA students in a graduate managerial accounting course. The case is designed to be taught in 1-2 class hours and is expected to require 1-2 hours of outside review by students following the class. This case is best administered in a class of 10 or more students. CASE SYNOPSIS Paper Airplanes, Inc. is a fictitious company organized to produce high-quality paper airplanes using aerodynamically superior paper and highly skilled labor. The company relies exclusively on college students for its labor and management pool. During a one hour class, students will be given an opportunity to "work" for the company by actually producing paper airplanes. Specifically, student volunteers are asked to assume roles as direct laborers, production supervisors, a materials (paper) manager, and, of course, cost accountants (all students). The basic production process is then explained to the class, and student volunteers are given quick training on their roles. Students will also see a few partially completed airplanes from the prior period and will be told that these need to be completed during the upcoming production period. After the training, student laborers will be given just two minutes to actually produce as many airplanes as they can and send (fly) them to the next department. When a production supervisor states that the time is up, the laborers will stop their production immediately. Production supervisors will count completed airplanes (those flown into the classroom), and then all students will assume the role of cost accountants to prepare a weighted-average process costing report. They will need to consider actual production during class and take into account such issues as partially completed airplanes and cost per equivalent unit. This hands-on, visual case is very instructive in its simplicity and ability to actively engage students in learning a challenging topic. Within a short class period, students will have actually participated in a production process and learned all the complexities and difficulties in preparing a basic process costing report. CASE: PAPER AIRPLANES, INC To better understand how process costing works, the classroom will be transformed today into a small-scale paper airplane factory. There will be direct materials (paper) and direct labor (student volunteers). …


The finite element model is used to simulate the behavior of the full scale instrumented anchored reinforced wall. The validated finite element model is then used to carry out parametric studies to ascertain the influence of the boundary conditions on the behavior of the wall. The boundaries at the crest, facing and base of the wall are varied to study their effects. At the crest of the wall, slope surcharge of various geometrical dimensions are imposed. At the facing of the wall, the boundary is allowed to yield laterally by inserting a compressible geoinclusion at the back face of the wall panels. Meanwhile, at the base, the boundary is allowed to yield vertically by allowing the wall to sit on a compressible foundation soil. The behavior of the wall is determined in terms of the tensile stress distribution developed in the reinforcing bars, the summation of the maximum tension in the reinforcing bars, the summation of the tensions developed at the connection to the facing panels, the lateral movement at the facing and the vertical movement at the base.


Summary

Land-use intensification is increasing dramatically in production systems world-wide. Livestock production is an important component of production land use, and increases in livestock densities have had a wide range of negative consequences. The off-site effects of livestock grazing and trampling on native vegetation adjacent to pastoral land have received less attention than on-farm effects. Moreover, where significant ecological effects of livestock spillover have been identified, the mechanistic determinants of these effects have not typically been investigated.
Here, we tested the mechanistic drivers of livestock trampling effects on land snail communities in forest remnants using simulated trampling under field conditions. We used a factorial combination of leaf-litter manipulation and trampling treatments to partition different causal drivers of livestock impacts on land snail communities and related them to five environmental variables that are altered by livestock.
We show that even very low frequency trampling caused severe changes to land snail communities. Land snail density, even under the lowest trampling frequency, declined by an average of 42 individuals m−2 and land snail species richness decreased by an average of 10 species per plot compared with control plots.
The underlying drivers of changes in land snail communities varied, but were primarily linked to leaf-litter mass, rather than soil compaction.
Synthesis and applications. Overall, these results suggest that even minimal disturbance by livestock has large effects on land snail communities, but the underlying drivers of these effects require further investigation in longer duration and more intensive studies. Our results provide strong support for livestock exclusion as an important management tool for native forest remnants embedded within production landscapes.


Since the 1990s, a growing body of research has sought to quantify the relationship between women's representation in leadership positions and organizational financial performance. Commonly known as the "business case" for women's leadership, the idea is that having more women leaders is good for business. Through meta-analysis (k = 78, n = 117,639 organizations) of the direct effects of women's representation in leadership (as CEOs, on top management teams, and on boards of directors) on financial performance, and tests that proxy theoretical arguments for moderated relationships, we call attention to equivocal findings. Our results suggest women's leadership may affect firm performance in general and sales performance in particular. And women's leadership—overall and, specifically, the presence of a female CEO—is more likely to positively relate to firms' financial performance in more gender egalitarian cultures. Yet taking our findings as a whole, we argue that commonly used methods of testing the business case for women leaders may limit our ability as scholars to understand the value that women bring to leadership positions. We do not advocate that the business case be abandoned altogether but, rather, improved and refined. We name exemplary research studies to show how different perspectives on gender, alternative conceptualizations of value, and the specification of underlying mechanisms linking leadership to performance can generate changes in both the dominant ontology and the epistemology underlying this body of research.


Well known CPI of urban consumers is never revised. Recently initiated chained CPI is initially released every month (ICPI), for that month without delay within BLS and for the previous month with one month delay to the public. Final estimates of chained CPI (FCPI) are released every February for January to December of the calendar year two years before. Every month, simultaneously with the release of ICPI, we would like to have a best estimate, given current information, of FCPI for that month, which will not be released until two calendar years later. ICPI and FCPI data may be indexed in historical time by months of occurrence or in current or real time by months of observation or release. The essence of the solution method is to use data indexed in historical time to estimate models and, then, for an estimated model, to use data indexed in real time to estimate FCPI. We illustrate the method with regression and VARMA models. Using a regression model, estimated FCPI is given directly by an estimated regression line; and, using a VARMA model, estimated FCPI is computed using a Kalman smoother.


This paper describes an approach developed to classify irrigation systems into categories. It discusses the general problem of developing a typology of irrigation systems and proposes a solution to the problem that relies on the flexible application of a fixed set of seven dimensions. The approach utilizes a computer-based expert system to elicit information from a user regarding a particular system and make replicable classification decisions in each dimensions. The paper first discusses the need for such a scheme in terms of research on irrigation performance and its determinants. It goes on to identify the dimensions employed as the basis for classification and lists discrete categories for each dimension. Finally, it describes an expert system developed to make repeatable classifications for any given irrigation system.


Abstract This article describes and discusses the results of observations concerning short-term changes in the thermal conditions and the thickness of the active layer in a test field located in the tundra of the Kaffiøyra (NW Spitsbergen) during the summer season of 2015. One of the objectives was to find a correlation between the dynamic of the changes and the local topography. In recent years, thawing of the active layer in the Kaffiøyra region has been considerably varied in individual summer seasons. The test field area was 100 square meters, comprised 36 measurement points and was situated at approximately 3 m a.s.l. in the tundra. The measurements of the thickness and temperature of the active layer were carried out in July, August and early September of 2015. The greatest thickness of the active layer in the tundra was found near the moraine, in the area with the sharpest slope (156 cm to 212 cm). Ground temperatures were observed to follow the prevailing weather conditions with a delay, which amounted to about 24 h at a depth of 25 cm, and as much as 48 h at a depth of 75 cm. A greater thickness of the active layer was found in the western part of the test field, in the vicinity of a tidal channel, and in the eastern part of the field, bordering on the foot of the Aavatsmarkbreen's moraine. A considerable sloping of the land, combined with increased surface runoff and infiltration at the time of precipitation, makes the water penetrating into the active layer increase its temperature. This demonstrates that the local land forms (tidal channels and terminal moraines) have a substantial influence on the extent and rate of changes which occur in the active layer.


Terrestrial laser-scanning (TLS) technology can be used to create a detailed model before and after construction to determine earthwork quantities. Cost-effective implementation of this technology requires that field operations are planned to efficiently acquire sufficient scan data and that data processing is able to filter out off-terrain points to provide an accurate bare earth model. This research developed a workflow for using TLS on road projects and created a customized computer program with a graphical user interface. Scans taken before and after construction were planned using the best available terrain model. Point cloud data were converted to station/offset coordinates for viewing cross-sections and generating the surface. An algorithm was developed, based on the finite element method, to create a surface through the lowest scan points. This surface was converted to a Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN) file, and earthwork quantities were calculated by comparing the TIN of the original terrain to that of the finished project.


Most of us are familiar in some way or another with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We have seen news reports, watched films or documentaries trying to explain this puzzling condition and showing examples of a child's unusual social, communication and repetitive behaviours. We may know a child with ASD or have a child with ASD. Recent evidence suggests that about one per cent of the entire population (one in 100 people) fall somewhere on the spectrum (1-2). Whilst we still understand relatively little about this complex condition, we do have a good idea of how it can affect the daily lives and education of children.


The hypothesis of attaching and realising market values as one means of conserving biodiversity has gained ground over the last decade. This has been challenged recently after examination of a number of case studies, largely from tropical Amazonia, on high value logging, marketing of non-timber forest products, and bioprospecting. The conclusion was that market-orientated conservation has seldom generated the financial returns envisaged, and as such cannot be used as an incentive to prevent land transformation. This paper reviews the basis of the challenge to market-orientated conservation on a number of grounds, drawing on examples largely from southern Africa. It concludes that generalizations from tropical Amazonia regarding the failure of market-orientated conservation are probably premature, and that it should remain an option, amongst a number of options, for conservation of biodiversity. Additionally, the prerequisite criteria identified as necessary to create an enabling framework for the success of market-orientated conservation are insufficient. Case studies are presented where the prerequisites do not apply, yet current extraction for market purposes is sustainable. Other potential prerequisites are also considered. There is a need for multivariate analysis, based on a large sample size drawn from across a range of environments and resources, of which factors are important prerequisites for successful market-orientated conservation, and under which circumstances.


Antibiotics are synthesized by dedicated gene products; they are anything but accidents. All the structural genes required for tylosin biosynthesis are probably present in the cluster, but additional regulatory genes might well be located elsewhere in the genome. Antibiotic-biosynthetic gene clusters commonly include ''pathway-specific'' regulators. These typically encode transcriptional activators that turn on the structural genes for antibiotic production. Antibiotic-producing organisms are typically resistant to their own toxic metabolite(s), and some of the strategies employed for self-protection are discussed below and elsewhere. Such resistance is usually quite specific for the avoidance of suicide; across-the-board resistance is not common. The fungus that produces penicillin is not faced with any particular problem as a result of doing so, since fungal cell walls do not contain peptidoglycan. On the other hand, actinomycetes that produce antibacterial compounds pose an interesting challenge for themselves. Such strains can adopt either of two resistance strategies in order to avoid suicide. Studies with puromycin and chloramphenicol revealed that peptidyltransferase activity has to do with the larger ribosomal subunit, whereas tetracycline blocked aminoacyl-tRNA binding to the ribosome mRNA complex from a site on the smaller subparticle. The convergence of these various approaches will reveal in molecular detail how antibiotics block conformational transitions that underlie ribosomal function. The ribosome continues to be a focus for the application of ground-breaking methodology to biological systems, and enigmatic small molecules still contribute to our enlightenment.


The Sarbanes–Oxley act (SOX) was enacted to strengthen corporate governance practices in the United States; since SOX enactment, the audit committee has received increasing emphasis in accounting research. The main objective of this study is to review and synthesize the growing volume of audit committee literature in the post-SOX era. While summarizing the post-SOX literature, this study also focuses on selected pre-SOX studies to compare the research issues and findings of pre- and post-SOX literature and to show how governance reforms shape the literature's domain. The extant audit committee literature reflects an enormous body of knowledge. Pre-SOX literature documents that audit the committee composition criteria play a significant role in determining the effectiveness of the audit committee. Like the pre-SOX literature, post-SOX literature establishes the notion that independent and expert audit committees enhance the effectiveness of the audit committee monitoring processes and improve the overall quality of financial reporting and auditing. These findings supplement the scholarly support for SOX requirements. In the post-SOX era, researchers have focused on those issues driven by SOX. However, other issues that are not addressed by SOX have also emerged during the post-SOX period, including audit committee compensation and the social ties of committee members with the chief executive officer as well as the supervisory or other expertise of audit committee members. However, for some issue, the findings are not conclusive. For example, post-SOX researchers have documented inconsistent findings regarding the association between the audit committee monitoring process and the different forms of compensation for audit committee members. Moreover, both the pre- and post-SOX literature contain predominantly experimental research. So, there remains ample room for future empirical research that can shed further light on the more theoretical issues. Future researchers can investigate unanswered questions by establishing an implicit understanding of existing findings and developing theories in this area.


Current legal responses to the problem of human trafficking often reflect a deep reluctance to address the socioeconomic root causes of the problem. Because they approach trafficking as an act (or series of acts) of violence, most responses focus predominantly on prosecuting traffickers, and to a lesser extent, protecting trafficked persons. While such approaches might account for the consequences of trafficking, they tend to overlook the broader socioeconomic reality that drives trafficking in human beings. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to reframe trafficking as a migratory response to current globalizing socioeconomic trends. It argues that, to be effective, counter-trafficking strategies must target the underlying conditions that impel people to accept dangerous labor migration assignments. The article recommends that existing counter-trafficking strategies be assessed with a view to assessing their potential for long-term effectiveness. It also advocates strategic use of the nondiscrimination principle to promote basic economic, social, and cultural rights, the deprivation of which has sustained the trafficking phenomenon.


This paper discusses the trial of the former head of state of Liberia, Charles Taylor, from Freetown to The Hague, by the Special Court for Sierra Leone. It highlights the principal legal issues surrounding Taylor's indictment in connection with the decade-long civil conflict in Sierra Leone, his arrest, and the dilemma about his subsequent prosecution. It discusses the possible implications for those involved in other African conflicts and also examines the trial in terms of its potential contribution to the struggle against impunity, the development of international law and conflict prevention in Africa.


Through the computing advance and GPU (Graphics Processing
Unit) availability for math calculation, the deep learning field becomes more
popular and prevalent. Object detection with deep learning, which is the part
of image processing, plays an important role in automatic vehicle drive and
computer vision. Object detection includes object localization and object
classification. Object localization involves that the computer looks through
the image and gives the correct coordinates to localize the object. Object
classification is that the computer classification targets into different
categories. The traditional image object detection pipeline idea is from
Fast/Faster R-CNN [32] [58]. The region proposal network
generates the contained objects areas and put them into classifier. The first
step is the object localization while the second step is the object
classification. The time cost for this pipeline function is not efficient.
Aiming to address this problem, You Only Look Once (YOLO) [4] network is born. YOLO is the
single neural network end-to-end pipeline with the image processing speed being
45 frames per second in real time for network prediction. In this thesis, the
convolution neural networks are introduced, including the state of art
convolutional neural networks in recently years. YOLO implementation details
are illustrated step by step. We adopt the YOLO network for our applications
since the YOLO network has the faster convergence rate in training and provides
high accuracy and it is the end to end architecture, which makes networks easy
to optimize and train.


Many elements of the cryosphere respond to changes in climate, but mountain glaciers are particularly good indicators of climate change, because they respond more quickly than most other ice bodies on Earth. Changes in glaciers are easily noticed by specialists and non-specialists alike, in ways that other climate indicators, such as ocean temperature or statistics of atmospheric circulation indices, are not. Remote sensing methods are capable of measuring many parameters of mountain glaciers and the changes they exhibit, leading to greater insight into processes affecting changes in glaciers and, hence, climate. Field-based measurements are indispensable, as they yield high-precision data and give key insights into processes. However, due to expense and difficult logistics, such measurements are limited to a small number of sites. Remote sensing can cover large numbers of glaciers per image, and some long-term data collections (e.g., Landsat) are available for free. Algorithms and computational resources are now capable of producingmaps of glacier boundaries at useful accuracy over large regions in a short time.New sensors will be coming online soon that will continue and extend this capability. Mass balance is an important parameter indicating the health of a glacier. Mass balance can be estimated fromsatellite data by the "geodeticmethod" of measuring volume changes, where the change in volume is estimated by subtracting two digital terrain models of the glacier surface. A more recent approach to detect mass changes in land ice is through measurement of the gravitational field using the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite system, which measures changes in mass below the orbit track. Advances have been made recently in remote sensing of glaciers on a number of fronts, including more complete and more accurate glacier inventories, improved glacier mapping techniques, and new insights fromgravimetric satellites.Through international cooperative efforts such as the Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS) initiative and the Global TerrestrialNetwork forGlaciers (GTN-G), satellite remote sensing of glaciers has led to the ability to produce glacier outlines quickly over large regions, leading to the production of nearly complete global glacier inventories.These remote sensing products are being used to better understand climate, hydrological systems, and water resources, as our environment continues to change.


of Thesis This thesis analyses some of the changing features by which Indian Muslims were identified in British colonialist discourse between the outbreak of revolt in 1857 and the partition of Bengal in 1905. Most of the texts examined emanate out of the relatively circumscribed Anglo-Indian official community, and range from personal correspondence, to 'Mutiny' memoirs, travel guides, and socio-political essays. The argument takes as its starting point David Washbrook's description of the selfconstitution of the Raj as a centralised, secular and neutral state arbitrating the claims of competing ascriptive racial and ethnic communities. Drawing on recent Lacanian analyses of the formation and maintenance of ideologies, as well as on the sociological schema of Zygmant Bauman, the thesis argues that in the post-1857 period the preservation of this official identity became dangerously reliant on a discourse of power centred on representations of Indian Muslims. Chapter One reads the stereotype of the Indian Muslim in 1905 for its most salient features debased foreign origins, religious incontinence, isolation within Indian society, and secret ambitions towards temporal power. It then traces them back to their first marked appearance in colonial discourse in 1857. Chapter Two begins with a reassessment of the historiography with regard to Muslim 'conspiracy' during the revolt, as well as a reconsideration of official praxis towards Indian Muslims in the half-century before its outbreak. Proceeding to a detailed analysis of' Mutiny' texts, it concludes that the unprecedented, widespread British misperception of 'conspiracy' stemmed in part from an irrational colonialist attempt to re-possess their own fractured secular ideology through tropes of Christian persecution. Chapter Three compares the highly ambivalent post-'Mutiny' representations of Indo-Muslim 'fanaticism' that resulted with a secularised late eighteenth-century discourse on Mughal figures of authority. It argues that the strikingly similar discourses of alienation and lack of self-command structuring both forms of representation derived from crises in the colonialist inability to command their own self-presentation as rulers within the Indian environment. In the later discourse, in particular, these instabilities issued in a disastrous process of representational stigmatisation and segregation.


We describe an interllngua-based methodology for translating encoded knowledge and present a formalism for declaratively specifying vocabulary translations within a predicate logic interlingua. In this paper we (1) use the formalism to provide a semantics for translation, (2) show that the formalism enables translation to be done as deduction by a standard theorem prover, (3) describe a proof technique for determining whether a given set of rules for translating from one vocabulary to another is sufficient for performing that translation for any theory, and (4) describe techniques for precompiling translation rules that translate directly between two given vocabularies.


Studying the interaction of spin-polarized currents with the magnetization configuration is of high interest due to the possible applications and the novel physics involved. High-resolution magnetic imaging is one of the key techniques necessary for a better understanding of these effects. Here, we present an extension to a magnetic microscope that allows for in situ current injection into the structure investigated, and furthermore for the study of current induced magnetization changes during pulsed current injection. The developed setup is highly flexible and can be used for a wide range of investigations. Examples of current-induced domain wall motion and vortex core displacements measured using this setup are presented.


Reading is an activity that is not only informative or pleasurable, but can have significant social benefits. Especially in a family setting, it is part of the interaction between children and their parents, it helps create a bond between children and their grandparents, and even bring adults and their older parents closer. However, with families increasingly living or spending time in different locations or managing busy schedules that afford very little time together, the social opportunities enabled by reading are often lost. Furthermore, reading can be a challenge for older adults or for those with impaired eyesight. To address these problems, we are proposing ALLT -- an Accessible, Large-Print, Listening and Talking e-book. ALLT is a tablet-based e-reading application that enhances the capabilities of e-book readers through customizable and intelligent accessibility features. It provides support for asynchronous "reading together" by synchronizing the audio recording of one user with the text that is later read by another user. This addresses the needs of a variety of users, from visually impaired adults reading together with a loved one, to children being able to replay an interactive story previously read together with their grandparents. In this demo paper we present ALLT's features and detail how they support asynchronously reading together.


OBJECTIVES
Despite the influx of female physicians in academic medicine departments, there are a small number of women in faculty and departmental leadership positions in emergency medicine (EM). The objective of this study was to determine if the gender of the chairperson of an academic EM department is associated with the gender of the residency program director (RPD) and gender proportion of its faculty.

METHODS
This was a retrospective analysis of 133 academic EM departments using the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine online residency catalog, program Web site, or e-mail. Main outcome measures were proportion of female EM faculty and gender of the RPD.

RESULTS
Data were available for 133 academic departments. Women chaired 7.5% (n = 10) of departments and comprised 22.3% of all faculty and 15.0% (n = 20) of RPD positions. EM departments that were chaired by women had a significantly higher percentage of female faculty compared with those led by men (31% vs. 22%; p = 0.01). Similarly, departments that were chaired by women had a significantly higher proportion of female RPDs compared with those chaired by men (50% vs. 12%; p < 0.01). Compared with departments chaired by men, the RPD was 5.0 times (95% confidence interval = 1.9 to 27.8; p < 0.01) more likely to be a woman if the chairperson was also a woman.

CONCLUSIONS
An academic EM department was more likely to have a higher proportion of female faculty and a female RPD when the department chairperson was female.


ABSTRACT More and more aspects of our everyday lives are being mediated, augmented, produced and regulated by software-enabled technologies. Software is fundamentally composed of algorithms: sets of defined steps structured to process instructions/data to produce an output. This paper synthesises and extends emerging critical thinking about algorithms and considers how best to research them in practice. Four main arguments are developed. First, there is a pressing need to focus critical and empirical attention on algorithms and the work that they do given their increasing importance in shaping social and economic life. Second, algorithms can be conceived in a number of ways – technically, computationally, mathematically, politically, culturally, economically, contextually, materially, philosophically, ethically – but are best understood as being contingent, ontogenetic and performative in nature, and embedded in wider socio-technical assemblages. Third, there are three main challenges that hinder research about algorithms (gaining access to their formulation; they are heterogeneous and embedded in wider systems; their work unfolds contextually and contingently), which require practical and epistemological attention. Fourth, the constitution and work of algorithms can be empirically studied in a number of ways, each of which has strengths and weaknesses that need to be systematically evaluated. Six methodological approaches designed to produce insights into the nature and work of algorithms are critically appraised. It is contended that these methods are best used in combination in order to help overcome epistemological and practical challenges.


Abstract Introduction Malignant catarrhal fever (MCF) is a rare, under-explored lethal viral infection of cattle with gammaherpesvirus aetiological agents. Most often, the disease occurs on farms where cattle and sheep are kept together. However, other trigger mechanisms and environmental factors contribute. This study investigates the causation of MCF. Material and Methods An outbreak of MCF occurred in June - August 2017 in Kharchev village in Irkutsk Oblast, Russia. In this paper, we provide epidemiological (sanitary status of pastures, watering places, and premises) and weather data during the outbreak, and descriptions of the clinical signs and post-mortem changes in cattle. The virus was detected and isolated from pathological material samples and identified by molecular methods. Results Extreme weather conditions, mixed-herd cattle and sheep farming, and unsatisfactory feed quality contributed to the outbreak. A virus related to herpesvirus OvHV2 was isolated and typed (MCF/Irkutsk/2017). Phylogenetic analysis showed its close genetic relationship to isolates from cattle and sheep in Germany, USA, and the Netherlands. Conclusion Sporadic outbreaks of MCF caused by biotic and abiotic factors together are typical for the Russian Federation, and the Irkutsk outbreak epitomised this. Temperature anomalies caused pasture depletion, resulting in feed and water deficiency for grazing animals and dehydration and acidosis. Heat stress in animals ultimately led to the occurrence of MCF in the herd.


Title of dissertation: VALUATION EFFECTS AND EXTERNAL ADJUSTMENT Ha Minh Nguyen, Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 Dissertation directed by: Professor Anton Korinek and Professor Carlos Végh Department of Economics In the past two decades, cross country portfolio holdings of a large variety of assets have risen sharply. This has created an important role for changes in asset prices, or "valuation effects". This dissertation examines the role of valuation effects in a country's external adjustment. The dissertation is organized as follows: Chapter 1 is a brief introduction. Chapter 2 presents some facts about the U.S.'s valuation effects from stocks and bonds during 1994-2007. In particular, total valuation effects from stocks and bonds during this period were $1295 billions, offsetting about 22.8% the size of the U.S.'s total current account deficits. Much of the positive, stabilizing effects arose after 2002. Before 2002 the valuation effects were often negative and reinforcing the current account deficits. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 present a two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model to study valuation effects theoretically. Chapter 3 outlines the set up of the model, where output has a transitory and a trend component, both of which are subject to AR(1) shocks. Chapter 4 solves analytically a simplified version of the model that only considers transitory output shocks. It shows that valuation effects are stabilizing in response to transitory shocks. That is, valuation effects move in the opposite directions of the current account, and mitigate the impact of the current account on the NFA position. Chapter 4 also shows analytically that the size of valuation effects relative to the current account is positively related with the level of financial integration, which in turn increases with risk aversion, with output volatility, with output persistence, and decreases with the discount factor and with the cost of investing abroad. For the benchmark calibration, when domestic investors hold about 40% of their financial wealth in foreign equity, valuation effects will completely offset the current account. Chapter 5 solves numerically for the full version of the model, where both transitory and trend output shocks are considered. It shows that valuation effects are not always stabilizing. Following trend shocks on output, valuation effects are amplifying : they move in the same direction as the current account and reinforce the impact of the current account on net foreign assets. The results are illustrated by the external imbalances between the U.S. and other industrialized countries since the 1990s. Chapter 6 concludes. VALUATION EFFECTS AND EXTERNAL ADJUSTMENT


In our thesis we use a preventive approach to stop privacy-invasive software (PIS) from entering the system. We aim at increasing the user awareness about the background activities of the software. These activities are implicitly written in End User License Agreement (EULA). We are using a multi-layer user notification approach to increase the user awareness and help him make a good decision, which is in accordance with the European legal framework. A proof of concept tool is developed that will use the user preferences to present the EULA in a compact and understandable form thereby helping the user in deciding with the installation of a software.


Background: Mid-life hypertension is an established risk factor for cognitive impairment and dementia and related to greater brain atrophy and poorer cognitive performance. Previous studies often have small sample sizes from older populations that lack utilizing multiple measures to define hypertension such as blood pressure, self-report information, and medication use; furthermore, the impact of the duration of hypertension is less extensively studied. Objective: To investigate the relationship between hypertension defined using multiple measures and length of hypertension with brain measure and cognition. Methods: Using participants from the UK Biobank MRI visit with blood pressure measurements (n = 31,513), we examined the cross-sectional relationships between hypertension and duration of hypertension with brain volumes and cognitive tests using generalized linear models adjusted for confounding. Results: Compared with normotensives, hypertensive participants had smaller brain volumes, larger white matter hyperintensities (WMH), and poorer performance on cognitive tests. For total brain, total grey, and hippocampal volumes, those with greatest duration of hypertension had the smallest brain volumes and the largest WMH, ventricular cerebrospinal fluid volumes. For other subcortical and white matter microstructural regions, there was no clear relationship. There were no significant associations between duration of hypertension and cognitive tests. Conclusion: Our results show hypertension is associated with poorer brain and cognitive health however, the impact of duration since diagnosis warrants further investigation. This work adds further insights by using multiple measures defining hypertension and analysis on duration of hypertension which is a substantial advance on prior analyses—particularly those in UK Biobank which present otherwise similar analyses on smaller subsets.


Purpose: The implementation and certification of Management Systems International Standards, such as ISO 9001 and ISO 14001, achieved a high international recognition, with more than 1 million organizations with their Quality Management Systems certified worldwide. Researchers have been paying considerable attention to this theme and the number of published articles has robustly grown. Although on an overall basis, the research results support the existence of positive impacts on the adoption and certification of these International Standards, there are various inconsistencies and contradictory results, leading to some controversy over its impacts for organizations. This study aims to bring a longitudinal time perspective to this area of research, analyzing the articles published since 1996, on the benefits of Management Systems Certification. A longitudinal perspective of countries of authors origin, keywords and journals is presented, complemented with an evaluation of the research results. Design/methodology/approach: A Bibliometric Study supported the research, with data collected from Web of Science, SCOPUS, and Research Gate data bases. Following the detailed analysis of the journal titles, articles abstracts and their full content, an evaluation scale was adopted to assess if the results support the existence of a positive relationship between Management System Certification and economic, financial or stakeholder results. Findings: The results evidence a steep increase in the number of publications addressing Management Systems Certification benefits, that mainly originate from Europe (48%) and East Asia and Pacific (23%), with Spain as the leading country (accounting for 14% of the total number of articles published between 1996 and April 2017). Journal of Cleaner Production (Environmental Management System Certification) and Total Quality Management and Business Excellence journal (Quality Management Systems Certification) are the leading journals for disseminating the research and the most used keywords are "Quality/Environment", "ISO 9001/14001", "Performance", "Management Systems" and "Certification". There are also insights that the research is now open to other Management Systems either than Quality and Environment. The systematic review of the selected papers shows that the Management Systems adoption and certification brings fairly positive benefits (average 2,34 in a 1 to 5 Likert type scale) for the certified organizations, although some variations are observed. Some avenues for future research should consider the reliability and validation of measures; sampling and biases errors; the identification of control, moderating and mediating variables; the consideration of time and situational contingencies; and the search for explanations for cause and effect relationships. The results of this research support the view that the investigation of Management Systems Certification benefits is indeed an issue of high academic and practitioners interest. This research, although subject to some subjective evaluation of the authors, and acknowledging that the research articles are not always comparable, aims to give some insights for this continuous research field. Research limitations/implications: Although the authors took measures to minimize subjectivity, it should be noted that the evaluation could be subject to the authors own interpretation and the research articles are not always comparable. Originality/value: This research presents a longitudinal and comprehensive evaluation of the articles published since 1996 addressing the topics of the benefits of Management System Certification. It highlights trends and gives contribution for future research, on a field of intense academic and practitioners interest.


In June 1942 Emanuel Ringelblum asked: "What kind of books do people read? This topic has always been interesting for each Jew and after the war it also became interesting to the world". This topic hasn't received a comprehensive study yet. The author of the paper The Remains of the Letters. Three Reading Paradigms in the Ghettos examined this aspect of history of the ghettos. The literature allows us to shed light on the topic of the life and deaths of their inhabitants. But, taking up this topic enables us also to activate new ways of interpreting the books. The volumes they spent time on in the ghetto allow to capture the way the residents of the ghettos built or broke the bond with the reality, how they taught their own children to read or found solace in someone else's pain. The author considers, however, whether the studies of ordinary life in extraordinary times of the Holocaust can be considered micro-historical.