A key discovery in the last two decades has been the realisation that gold, when prepared as supported nanoparticles, is exceptionally effective as an oxidation catalyst, particularly for the oxidation of carbon monoxide at sub-ambient temperature but also for a number of organic reactions of synthetic significance. To some extent this observation is counterintuitive since extended gold surfaces do not chemisorb oxygen, nor do they corrode. For some oxidation reactions, the catalytic activity is markedly enhanced by the addition of palladium. This paper is concerned with recent advances in understanding the mechanism of catalysis by gold–palladium alloy nanoparticles of one such organic reaction, the oxidation of alcohols to the corresponding carbonyl compounds by molecular oxygen. We report detailed reaction studies using a high activity catalyst prepared by sol-immobilisation on a titania support. Using solvent-free conditions, benzyl alcohol is oxidised primarily to benzaldehyde but small amounts of toluene are also formed. The origin of these products is explored using initial rate measurements, deuterium labelling and kinetic isotope effects, and by the study of substituent effects. The effect of changing the nature of the catalyst support is also briefly examined. On the basis of all the results, we consider that we have evidence for multiple reaction pathways in this heterogeneous system. We put forward general mechanisms for the overall processes and describe confirmatory experiments in support of these, and we suggest possible reaction intermediates involved in the heterogeneously catalysed reaction.


How to make simple in clinical neurology in the

first years of life? Perinatal insults occur on a brain

which is in rapid development. The clinical presentation

of these pathologies is thus changing particularly

in the neuromotor domain during the first two years.

Therefore the clinician needs precise landmarks to

detect possible deviancy at each stage of development.

In the first edition published in 1998 we proposed

a single and unique assessment tool applicable from

birth to 6 years of life. This first edition already included

the technical description for each maneuvers scoring

and coding system.

After 10 years of use in clinical research as well as

in regular follow-up the current edition is improved:

? research data collected at the corrected age of

2 years have allowed to identify a spectrum of

neurological disabilities from disabling cerebral

palsy to more minor signs;

? the proposed 5-level categorization of neuromotor

disabilities has shown significant correlation

with developmental and intellectual performances

both at preschool and school age providing a

link between early perinatal insults and different

neurodevelopmental disabilities of late emergence.

This assessment tool should be systematically used

with high risk infants to better understand the course

of their development in order to implement early intervention

when neurocranial signs are present. It should

also be used to assess current perinatal practices.


The effects of acidic, basic and neutral reagents on the recovery of Pb 2+ and Cd 2+ from metal-loaded biomass of wild cocoyam ( C. bicolor ) were investigated by eluting the biomass in five successive cycles using 0.01 M HCl, 0.1 M HCl, 0.01 M NaOH, 0.1 M NaOH and distilled water at different contact times. The data showed that the ease of metal ion recovery from metal -loaded biomass by the eluent solutions is of the order 0.01 M HCl > 0.1 M HCl > 0.01 M NaOH > 0.1 M NaOH > distilled water. Over 94% Pb 2+ and 74% Cd 2+ of the initially adsorbed metals were recovered by 0.01 M HCl, while < 20% of both metals was recovered by basic reagent. Distilled water recovered less than 9% of both metal ions from the biomass. Macroscopic changes were also observed as the concentration of recovery reagent increased. This study has demonstrated that the selection of a recovery reagent for metal ions on a biomaterial should give consideration to the reusability of the biomass.


Characterizing the binding behaviors of RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) is important for understanding their functional roles in gene expression regulation. However, current high-throughput experimental methods for identifying RBP targets, such as CLIP-seq and RNAcompete, usually suffer from the false positive and false negative issues. Here, we develop a deep boosting based machine learning approach, called DeBooster, to accurately model the binding sequence preferences and identify the corresponding binding targets of RBPs from CLIP-seq data. Comprehensive validation tests have shown that DeBooster can outperform other state-of-the-art approaches in predicting RBP targets and recover false negatives that are common in current CLIP-seq data. In addition, we have demonstrated several new potential applications of DeBooster in understanding the regulatory functions of RBPs, including the binding effects of the RNA helicase MOV10 on mRNA degradation, the influence of different binding behaviors of the ADAR proteins on RNA editing, as well as the antagonizing effect of RBP binding on miRNA repression. Moreover, DeBooster may provide an effective index to investigate the effect of pathogenic mutations in RBP binding sites, especially those related to splicing events. We expect that DeBooster will be widely applied to analyze large-scale CLIP-seq experimental data and can provide a practically useful tool for novel biological discoveries in understanding the regulatory mechanisms of RBPs.


The critical and biographical introduction tells of Lady Wortley Montagu's travels through Europe to Turkey in 1716, where her husband had been appointed Ambassador. Her lively letters offer insights into the paradoxical freedoms conferred on Muslim women by the veil, the value of experimental work by Turkish doctors on inoculation, and the beauty of Arab poetry and culture. The ability to study another culture according to its own values and to see herself through the eyes of others makes Lady Mary one of the most fascinating of early travel writers and commentators


The purpose of this project was to develop an introductory Response to Intervention training module that teachers, administrators, and instructional paraprofessionals can understand and that will help them prepare for possible Response to Intervention implementation. Intended training participants have or work with general education and special education students who are in need of classroom and school wide interventions. Subjects for the pilot study were California State University Monterey Bay, Level 2Education Specialist credential candidates. Data was also gathered from experts in the education field such as; teachers familiar with RTI, university professors, researchers, and PhDs in both general education and special education to determine if the training was complete in content and format. Pilot results indicated that the training was complete but overwhelming. Expert results showed that the responses were positive and there was no mention of excluding components of the training nor did they suggest that the training was overwhelming. Some additions were suggested that provide opportunity for future research. Response to Intervention v


Nocturnal convection is often initiated by mechanisms that cannot be easily observed within the large gaps between rawinsondes or by conventional surface networks. To improve forecasts of such events, we evaluate the systematic impact of assimilating a collocated network of high-frequency, ground-based thermodynamic and kinematic profilers collected as part of the 2015 Plains Elevated Convection At Night (PECAN) experiment. For 13 nocturnal convection initiation (CI) events, we find small but consistent improvements when assimilating thermodynamic observations collected by Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometers (AERIs). Through midlevel cooling and moistening, assimilating the AERIs increases the fractions skill score (FSS) for both nocturnal CI and precipitation forecasts. The AERIs also improve various contingency metrics for CI forecasts. Assimilating composite kinematic datasets collected by Doppler lidars and radar wind profilers (RWPs) results in slight degradations to the forecast quality, including decreases in the FSS and traditional contingency metrics. The impacts from assimilating thermodynamic and kinematic profilers often counteract each other, such that we find little impact on the detection of CI when both are assimilated. However, assimilating both datasets improves various properties of the CI events that are successfully detected (timing, distance, shape, etc.). We also find large variability in the impact of assimilating these remote sensing profilers, likely due to the number of observing sites and the strength of the synoptic forcing for each case. We hypothesize that the lack of flow-dependent methods to diagnose observation errors likely contributes to degradations in forecast skill for many cases, especially when assimilating kinematic profilers.


As the relationship between Cuba and the United States evolves, many Americans are entertaining the idea of travel to Cuba. This study used the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to examine predictors of US residents' intentions to travel to Cuba across three time horizons: 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years. TPB constructs were administered to a cross-sectional panel of US residents. Results varied by time horizon, with US residents' negative attitudes toward Cuba having a positive and significant influence on their intention to visit Cuba within one year. This finding suggests that some US residents match Plog's Allocentric profile of tourists and that the current "rough edges" of Cuba are what attract them to travel in the short rather than long term. Findings from this study provide baseline data that is valuable for Cuban and American tourism organizations, should the US market become more accessible.


The number of species‐rich seminatural grasslands in Northern Europe has decreased significantly due to the abandonment of traditional land use practices. To preserve these habitats, an increasing number of abandoned and overgrown grasslands have been restored by cutting down trees and shrubs and reintroducing grazing. These practices are considered a useful tool to recover the species richness of vascular plants, but their impact on other taxa is hardly known. Here we studied ants as one important group of grassland insects. We investigated (1) the effects of restoration of nongrazed and afforested seminatural grasslands, compared to continuously managed reference sites; and (2) the modulating impacts of habitat characteristics and time elapsed since restoration. We found a total of 27 ant species, 11 of these were characteristic of open habitats and seven characteristic of forests. Neither species richness per site nor the number of open‐habitat species, nor the number of forest species differed between restored and reference sites. Yet, within the restored sites, the total species richness and the number of open‐habitat species was positively related to the time since restoration and the percentage of bare rock. High frequencies of most open‐habitat species were associated with low vegetation, older restored sites, and reference sites. Most forest species showed their highest frequencies in tree‐ and shrub‐dominated habitat. We conclude that restoration efforts have been successful in terms of retrieving species richness. A regular and moderate grazing regime subsequent to the restoration is suggested in order to support a high abundance of open‐habitat species.


Title of Document: Mitigation of Acceleration of Vehicles Subjected to Buried Mine Loading Zachary Tyler Plitt, M.S., 2015 Directed By: Professor William Fourney, Department of Mechanical Engineering This dissertation investigates the mitigation of acceleration to passengers on a blast loaded vehicle. Small scale explosive testing was conducted to simulate the detonation of a buried mine on a vehicle. Tests were conducted in saturated sand, which will act as the loading mechanism on the simulated vehicle. Piezoelectric accelerometers, in conjunction with high speed cameras, were used to record test data. Two forms of mitigation were utilized in this research: hull shaping and crushing polyurea-coated thin-walled cylinders. Hull shaping deflects the blast, while the polyurea-coated thin-walled cylinders are crushed to absorb energy. Both forms of mitigation were tested, both separately and together, to determine their effectiveness at mitigating acceleration on the simulated vehicle. The goal of this dissertation is to determine the effectiveness of different mitigation techniques at reducing acceleration in order to design safer military vehicles. MITIGATION OF ACCELERATION OF VEHICLES SUBJECTED TO BURIED MINE LOADING


"With a diverse group of contributors from law, business and the social sciences, this book explores the line not only between order and disorder in global affairs, but also chaos and control, continuity and change, the core and the margins. The key themes include: global crises and the role of international law, norms and institutions; the challenge of pluralism to regulatory clarity; and critical assessments of taken-for-granted systems and values such as capitalism, centralised government, de-militarisation and the separation of powers. The book divides into two key parts. The first part, 'Conceptions', considers the diverse way in which order/disorder can be conceived in global governance and regulation. The second part, 'Case Studies', groups chapters around five topic areas: citizens, capitalism, conflict, crime and courts. The authors here build on the themes presented in the first part by embedding them within specific areas of international regulation, such as international criminal law, maritime law or finance regulation; jurisdictions and regions, such as Australia, Canada, China, Japan and South Asia; and subject-matter, such as water resources, citizenship, statelessness and public interest litigation. This blend of contemporary subject-matter, empirical studies, multi-disciplinary perspectives and academic theories provides a comprehensive analysis to current and emerging debates in the broader global community. In utilizing interdisciplinary studies to draw out common issues and alternative solutions, the book will appeal to a wide readership among academics and policy-makers."--Publisher website


Households in some European countries increased their indebtedness massively over the past 20 years. Besides household debt, also government debt and corporate debt are in some countries at levels not seen before. While there is a common agreement that these high debt levels are not sustainable there is fewer consensus about the effect of changes in debt and especially debt levels on aggregate demand. Based on a cross country study of 18 European countries we show that there is a strong link between household sector debt and aggregate demand. We strengthen these results by an analysis for Spanish provinces. The level of household debt in the Spanish provinces is highly significant for changes in aggregate demand that translated into increasing unemployment in these regions during the recession following the financial crisis of 2007/08. We find that on aggregate about 1/3 of the increase in Spanish unemployment can be traced back to high household debt levels.


We investigate numerically the interplay between dispersion and nonlinearity for optimizing the performance of an all-optical 2R regenerator based on self-phase modulation and spectral filtering at 40 Gb/s. By considering the extent of improvement in the Q factor (related to level of noise reduction), we show that the ratio of accumulated dispersion to the maximum nonlinear phase shift can be used to predict the performance of regenerators making use of fibers with very different lengths, dispersions, and nonlinear parameters. Our results show that fiber dispersion plays an important role and needs to be properly optimized. In general, fibers with larger dispersion perform better but require higher input powers. We also study the impact of fluctuations in dispersion from their nominal value and show that their impact is much less severe when fiber dispersion is relatively small.


Background and Purpose Sneddon's syndrome, characterized by generalized livedo racemosa and cerebrovascular lesions, is an underdiagnosed disease. We evaluated clinical, laboratory, histological, and neuroradiological findings in a series of 17 patients to improve diagnostic criteria for Sneddon's syndrome. Methods Patients with generalized livedo racemosa and cerebrovascular events were included in the study. All underwent neurological and dermatological examination, skin biopsy, computed tomographic scan, magnetic resonance imaging as well as magnetic resonance angiography, sonography of the extracranial arteries, and a comprehensive laboratory protocol. Results Completed stroke was present in eight patients, and 15 reported transient neurological deficits. Magnetic resonance imaging yielded cerebral abnormalities in 16 of 17, whereas computed tomographic scans were abnormal in only 12 of 16 patients. Magnetic resonance imaging revealed more lesions in individual patients than did computed tomography. Magnetic resonance angiography demonstrated patent intracranial vessels in 16 of 17 patients. Skin biopsy showed distinct histopathological findings in all patients. The involved vessels were small to medium-sized arteries at the border between dermis and subcutis. Early inflammatory reactions were followed by subendothelial proliferation and a late fibrotic stage. Laboratory examinations showed impaired creatinine clearance in eight patients, whereas all other laboratory tests, including antiphospholipid antibodies, were normal. Conclusions In this series, magnetic resonance imaging and skin biopsy were useful for confirmation of the diagnosis of Sneddon's syndrome. Magnetic resonance findings were not specific, but the high sensitivity for detection of asymptomatic brain lesions helped to confirm the diagnosis in patients with transient symptoms. Histological features of skin biopsies were characteristic if appropriate techniques were employed.


. There are few psychotechnological researches in political world in Indonesia, whereas Indonesia will enter "Year of Politics" by General Election which will be held in 2014. This research aimed at examining the hypothesis of predictive correlation, at the individual level, between susceptibility to social influence, internet privacy concern (as predictor variables) and online political efficacy (as the dependent variable). This research hypothesized that the relationship between the variables is mediated by online identity management strategy in the form of social competition. This research employed questionnaire to gain variables data. Participants of this research were 214 undergraduate students of Bina Nusantara University, Jakarta (106 males, 108 females). Result of this research shows that five of seven proposed hypotheses are supported by empirical data. Implications of the result of this research for online system development for political activities are discussed in the end of this article.


In this paper we examine the case for a link at the national and firm level between human resource management (HRM) and economic success in Australia. A brief history of the industrial development of Australia (and New Zealand) is presented and some differentiating factors noted (Dowling/Boxall 1994). A key factor with regard to Australia is the relatively small size of the population and economy and the disproportionate impact of globalisation and global political and economic events upon the performance of the Australian economy. Recent empirical research in the US which argues that there is evidence that positive employee relations effectively serves as an intangible and enduring asset at the firm level (Fulmer/Gerhart/Scott 2003) is noted, as is the December 2003 special issue of International Journal of Human Resource Management which focuses on Developments in Comparative HRM and concludes that there is evidence both for and against the hypothesis that there are no universal prescriptions for effective HRM. The editors (Wright and Brewster) argue that "the variety of views about what makes for 'good HRM' and the variety of understandings of which policies and practices lead to success is not only inevitable, but should be welcomed" (Wright/Brewster 2003: 1305). The author is in broad agreement with this conclusion. Key words: HRM, Australian Perspective, Firm Performance, Economic Success, German Companies Operating in Australia Introduction The focus of this paper is on the extent to which there is a connection between human resource management and economic success in Australia. Before commencing this analysis it is appropriate to provide some historical context. In doing so, it should be noted that Australia and New Zealand have a similar history and are an interdependent economic region so some information about New Zealand is also provided. While not attempting to reduce the impact of human resource management policies and practices on firm performance, this paper argues that human resource management is one of several key components of the equation in developing a business strategy that can be implemented effectively in an increasingly globalised market. As Dowling and Boxall (1994) 1 have noted, Australia and New Zealand are small, resource-based economies with low populations (Australia, 20 million; New Zealand, 4 million) located in the geographically remote South Pacific. Both are former British colonies. They operate Westminster-style democracies and enjoy a strong reputation for political stability. Unlike most inhabitants of the South, however, Australians and New Zealanders have traditionally enjoyed high standards of living. In both countries, high agricultural productivity has traditionally been a major source of this wealth. New Zealand's success has largely been based on ideal conditions for sheep grazing (producing high quality meat and wool) and dairy farming (producing cheap butter, cheese and other dairy products). Forest products (e.g. pulp and paper) and fisheries have also added significantly to national income. Australia is similarly famed for its sheep products but is also a major producer of grains (e.g. wheat, barley and sugar). Besides these agricultural strengths, Australia has historically exploited its major mineral deposits. Australia, with a large land mass of over 7.6 million square kilometres, has grown rich on iron, ore, coal, gold, alumina, lead, zinc, and other mineral resources. Unlike New Zealand, Australia is a droughtprone country, so the value of its profound mineral deposits cannot be underestimated as a factor in supporting national output. In both countries, the success of the resource-based industries has enabled governments to protect relatively inefficient manufacturing sectors. This protection has been vital to employment in Australian and New Zealand cities. As some have remarked, protection of manufacturing has enabled governments to spread the benefits of high agricultural and mining productivity 'to an increasingly urbanised population' (Blandy 1988). …


Despite limited resources in mental health care, there is little research exploring variations in cost performance across mental health care providers. In England, a prospective payment system for mental health care based on patient needs has been introduced with the potential to incentivise providers to control costs. The units of payment under the new system are 21 care clusters. Patients are allocated to a cluster by clinicians, and each cluster has a maximum review period. The aim of this research is to explain variations in cluster costs between mental health providers using observable patient demographic, need, social and treatment variables. We also investigate if provider-level variables explain differences in costs. The residual variation in cluster costs is compared across providers to provide insights into which providers may gain or lose under the new financial regime. The main data source is the Mental Health Minimum Data Set (MHMDS) for England for the years 2011/12 and 2012/13. Our unit of observation is the period of time spent in a care cluster and costs associated with the cluster review period are calculated from NHS Reference Cost data. Costs are modelled using multi-level log-linear and generalised linear models. The residual variation in costs at the provider level is quantified using Empirical Bayes estimates and comparative standard errors used to rank and compare providers. There are wide variations in costs across providers. We find that variables associated with higher costs include older age, black ethnicity, admission under the Mental Health Act, and higher need as reflected in the care clusters. Provider type, size, occupancy and the proportion of formal admissions at the provider-level are also found to be significantly associated with costs. After controlling for patient- and provider-level variables, significant residual variation in costs remains at the provider level. The results suggest that some providers may have to increase efficiency in order to remain financially viable if providers are paid national fixed prices (tariffs) under the new payment system. Although the classification system for payment is not based on diagnosis, a limitation of the study is the inability to explore the effect of diagnosis due to poor coding in the MHMDS. We find that some mental health care providers in England are associated with higher costs of provision after controlling for characteristics of service users and providers. These higher costs may be associated with higher quality care or with inefficient provision of care. The introduction of a national tariff is likely to provide a strong incentive to reduce costs. Policies may need to consider safe-guarding local health economies if some providers make substantial losses under the new payment regime. Future research should consider the relationship between costs and quality to ascertain whether reducing costs may potentially negatively impact patient outcomes.


Heavy metals exert their toxic effects through different mechanisms. Lately, increasing attention has been focused on understanding the long-term ecological effects of chronically exposed populations and communities and their consequences to the ecosystem. The long-term exposure to heavy metals in the environment represents a threat to wild populations, affecting communities and putting ecosystem integrity at risk. Therefore, this type of exposure represents a threat to biodiversity. In the field, metal exposure is generally characterized by low doses and chronic exposures. This type of exposure exerts alterations across levels of biological organization. Distribution and abundance of populations, the community structure and the ecosystem dynamics may be altered. This chapter will focus on how chronically metal exposures in the field affect negatively populations and communities becoming a threat to biodiversity. Also, attention is put on the tools that enable to characterize and analyze the detrimental effects of heavy metal exposure on wild populations. Hence, the use and development of biomarkers in ecotoxi- cology will be discussed.


Equity-minded institutional transformation requires robust faculty learning.  Research has shown that the single most important factor in student success is faculty interaction.  Positive, supportive, and empowering faculty interaction is particularly important to the success of female students, poor and working class students, and students of color, but most faculty are not prepared to offer the kind of support that has been shown to be most effective for marginalized students.  If institutions are serious about equity and about transformation, then they are obligated to provide professional development that will support the learning necessary for faculty to fulfill these important roles and to support faculty financially or by buying their time to participate in it.  An effective way to do this is to align such professional development with the urgent needs of the campus and their related campus-wide initiatives.  This article describes a community of practice model of identity-conscious professional development that engages faculty in a scholarly approach to the science of learning and evidence-based teaching and curriculum development while at the same time insistently and consistently incorporating critical reflection on and exploration of how systems of power and oppression impact learning. We believe this faculty engagement is key to transforming our institution into a more equitable and inclusive learning environment for students and faculty alike.


In a widely cited study, Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2014a; hereafter CFR) evaluate the degree of bias in teacher value-added estimates using a novel "teacher switching" research design with data from New York City. They conclude that there is little to no bias in their estimates. Using the same model with data from North Carolina, Rothstein (2014) argued that the CFR research design is invalid, given a relationship between student baseline test scores and teachers' value-added. In this paper, we replicated the CFR analysis using data from the Los Angeles Unified School District and similarly found that teacher value-added estimates were valid predictors of student achievement. We also demonstrate that Rothstein's test does not invalidate the CFR design and instead reflects a mechanical relationship, given that teacher value-added scores from prior years and baseline test scores can be based on the same data. In addition, we explore the (1) predictive validity of value-added estimates drawn from the same, similar, and different schools, (2) an alternative way of estimating differences in access to effective teaching by taking teacher experience into account, and (3) the implications of alternative ways of imputing value-added when it cannot be estimated directly.


AB S TRACT. Mass incarceration has received extensive analysis in scholarly and political debates. Beginning in the 1970s, states and the federal government adopted tougher sentencing and police practices that responded to rising punitive sentiment among the general public. Many scholars have argued that U.S. criminal law and enforcement subordinate people of color by denying them political, social, and economic well-being. The harmful and disparate racial impact of U.S. crime policy mirrors historical patterns that emerged during slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, James Forman, Jr. demonstrates that many blacks supported aggressive anticrime policies that gave rise to mass incarceration. On the surface, this observation potentially complicates arguments that conceive of U.S. criminal law and enforcement as manifestations of white supremacist political power. Forman's failure to provide a comprehensive analysis of the racist dimensions of punitive sentiment makes his research subject to such an interpretation. A deeper analysis, however, reconciles Forman's research with antiracist accounts of U.S. crime policy. In particular, social psychology literature on implicit bias, social dominance orientation, and right-wing authoritarianism provides a helpful context for situating black punitive sentiment within antisubordination criminal law theory. These psychological concepts could link punitiveness among blacks with outgroup favoritism and in-group stigma that derive from structural inequality and antiblack social stigma. The social psychology of punitive sentiment, resilience of white supremacy, and conservative political ideology will likely present substantial barriers to the merciful approach to criminality that Forman proposes.


The loss of the American Colonies in 1783 did not convince
the statesmen of Great Britain that the grant of self government
was the only way to retain colonies; but it had
lasting effects on the British colonial policy. Colonies, with
rare exceptions, had been founded to increase the commerce
of the Mother-Country by providing her with markets for
the export of her manufactures. This commercial conception
of Empire was still uppermost after the loss of our American
colonies, and the discovery that British exports to America
increased instead of diminishing after the grant of independence
raised doubts about the value of colonies. In all colonies after the loss of her American empire,
Great Britain adopted a uniform policy in regard to government. All new colonies,
however acquired, were treated as conquered colonies, that
is, they were not granted loca1 legislatures, but coming under
the Royal prerogative were controlled by governors and
nominated executive councils. That New South Wales and Tasmania should be treated
as conquered colonies was, at their foundation, quite in accord
with this principle of English law. Both were occupied
as military posts. The first occupants consisted entirely
of soldiers, civilians attached to the military, and
convicts. The powers claimed and exercised by
the early governors of publishing General Orders,
by which they could do anything on their own
authority, were all military in character, and
were tolerated under the plea that for all practical purposes
there was a state of war between the authorities and the
convicts; in other words, that the colony was a conquered
possession.


While human listeners excel at selectively attending to a conversation in a cocktail party, machine performance is still far inferior by comparison. We show that the cocktail party problem, or the speech separation problem, can be effectively approached via structured prediction. To account for temporal dynamics in speech, we employ conditional random fields (CRFs) to classify speech dominance within each time-frequency unit for a sound mixture. To capture complex, nonlinear relationship between input and output, both state and transition feature functions in CRFs are learned by deep neural networks. The formulation of the problem as classification allows us to directly optimize a measure that is well correlated with human speech intelligibility. The proposed system substantially outperforms existing ones in a variety of noises.


The immune response of broiler chickens exposed to intra-tracheal (i.t.) administration of benzo[a]pyrene (BaP) with and without Nigella sativa (Ns) supplementation was investigated. A total of 120 day-old chicks were divided into four groups comprising 30 birds each, into a control, Ns, BaP, and BaP+Ns group. Immune responses to Newcastle disease (ND) were evaluated by haemagglutination inhibition (HI), phytohaemagglutinin (PHA) skin test and carbon clearance assay (CCA). In most instances, there was a significant increase (p<0.05) in the ND-HI antibody titers, PHA skin-swelling response and phagocytic activity in the BaP + Ns group compared to that of the BaP group. Likewise, organ weight and indices of the spleen, bursa of Fabricius and thymus of birds from the BaP + Ns group were also higher (p<0.05) than that of the BaP group from day 1 until day 21. It is concluded that exposure to BaP may exert adverse effects on the immune system of broilers which may increase their susceptibility to disease, and Ns supplementation significantly reduces these alterations.


One of the world's most famous philosophers, Jacques Derrida, explores difficult questions in this important and engaging book. Is it still possible to uphold international hospitality and justice in the face of increasing nationalism and civil strife in so many countries? Drawing on examples of treatment of minority groups in Europe, he skilfully and accessibly probes the thinking that underlies much of the practice, and rhetoric, that informs cosmopolitanism. What have duties and rights to do with hospitality? Should hospitality be grounded on a private or public ethic, or even a religious one? This fascinating book will be illuminating reading for all.


Under the catching title given above G.B. MONTEITH, Queensland Museum, has written an editorial in the Austr. Entom. Soc. News Bull. 21 (1985) 66—69, which has been copied in the Austr. Syst. Bot. Soc. Newsletter 44 (1985) with a comment by A. KANIS (CANB). Although it mainly concerns Australian herpetologists, many readers of the Flora Malesiana Bulletin will not have these journals available, so a short summary of its contents seemed to be in place, to give the situation a broader audience. Two Australians, who we will not honour to name, nor call scientists, have published two large, privately-owned, unrefereed papers in 1984 and 1985, purporting to revise the entire Australian herpetological fauna. They have added no less than 470 new or revived species and 107 genera to what previously was generally accepted. Apparently nearly all names must be considered as effectively and validly published and hence legitimate under the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. Most names have been introduced without diagnoses; many are erected on information in other people's work. In the second 'work' lectotypes for a number of names have been indicated. It also has a chapter on references, with no less than 500 papers by the authors themselves, listed by titles and page numbers, some approaching 100 pages, published in a certain journal. Reference is also made to a 10 volume work 'The Herpetology of Australia' written by them and said to be in press. The remarkable thing is that no one has ever seen any of these papers, nor is the journal known, nor is anyone aware of the 'Herpetology'. Both publications effusely acknowledge the assistance of other Australian herpetologists, rather to their chagrin! Species have been named after nearly everybody in sight, a genus even after the villain of the movie series 'Star Wars', Darth Vader!


Mealtimes serve important social and educational functions for all children. This article reports an observational study of the extent to which teachers of handicapped and nonhandicapped preschoolers use mealtimes to teach and practice functional skills. The lunch routine (pre-eating activities, physical setting, food service, mealtime interaction, posteating activities, organizing the mealtime routine, and teaching during mealtime) was observed in 40 preschool classrooms (20 handicapped and 20 nonhandicapped programs). Although the meals observed were warm and pleasant experiences, teachers generally did not capitalize on the potential of meals for teaching and reinforcing functional skills. Implications of these findings are discussed, and a sequence of mealtime instructional targets is provided.


What do Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Tom Waits, Cassandra Wilson, and Ani DiFranco have in common? In Highway 61 Revisited, acclaimed music critic Gene Santoro says the answer is jazz-not just the musical style, but jazz's distinctive ambiance and attitudes. As legendary bebop rebel Charlie Parker once put it, "If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." Unwinding that Zen-like statement, Santoro traces how jazz's existential art has infused outstanding musicians in nearly every wing of American popular music-blues, folk, gospel, psychedelic rock, country, bluegrass, soul, funk, hiphop-with its parallel process of self-discovery and artistic creation through musical improvisation. Taking less-traveled paths through the last century of American pop, Highway 61 Revisited maps unexpected musical and cultural links between such apparently disparate figures as Louis Armstrong, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and Herbie Hancock; Miles Davis, Lenny Bruce, The Grateful Dead, Bruce Springsteen, and many others. Focusing on jazz's power to connect, Santoro shows how the jazz milieu created a fertile space "where whites and blacks could meet in America on something like equal grounds," and indeed where art and entertainment, politics and poetry, mainstream culture and its subversive offshoots were drawn together in a heady mix whose influence has proved both far-reaching and seemingly inexhaustible. Combining interviews and original research, and marked throughout by Santoro's wide ranging grasp of cultural history, Highway 61 Revisited offers readers a new look at-and a new way of listening to-the many ways jazz has colored the entire range of American popular music in all its dazzling profusion.


Cases of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) rhinorrhea without a clear
etiology are known as spontaneous CSF leaks. Spontaneous CSF leaks most
commonly occur in the ethmoid skull base or lateral sphenoid and rarely
stop without surgical intervention. This chapter reviews the clinical
presentation, diagnostic workup, and treatment of patients with
spontaneous CSF rhinorrhea. Specific attention will be given to
endoscopic methods of repair and the importance of idiopathic
intracranial hypertension as a possible comorbidity and contributing
factor.


The ability to accurately represent sentences is central to language understanding. We describe a convolutional architecture dubbed the Dynamic Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) that we adopt for the semantic modelling of sentences. The network uses Dynamic k-Max Pooling, a global pooling operation over linear sequences. The network handles input sentences of varying length and induces a feature graph over the sentence that is capable of explicitly capturing short and long-range relations. The network does not rely on a parse tree and is easily applicable to any language. We test the DCNN in four experiments: small scale binary and multi-class sentiment prediction, six-way question classification and Twitter sentiment prediction by distant supervision. The network achieves excellent performance in the first three tasks and a greater than 25% error reduction in the last task with respect to the strongest baseline.


In a recent issue of Chapman Law Review, Professor John Yoo wrote: "While FDR did not join Lincoln's blatant defiance in declining to obey a judicial order, [Roosevelt's] administration regularly proposed laws that ran counter to Supreme Court precedent . . . ." My focus in this short responsive essay is on Yoo's claim regarding Lincoln. Professor Yoo's claim is odd — isn't it? He tells us that Lincoln passively "declin[ed] to obey a judicial order," but then he recharacterizes Lincoln's passivity as "blatant defiance." Odd. He cites to no particular case, and he cites to no specific judicial order in any case. Very odd. We are all just supposed to know that the case was Ex parte Merryman, a Civil War case, and the purported judicial order was issued by that old curmudgeon: Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney. In a prior publication, in 2015, Yoo wrote that Lincoln had "ignored Taney's order releasing Merryman." "Ignored" — no mention of defiance here. On another occasion, in 2009, Yoo characterized Lincoln's response to Merryman as "outright presidential defiance." But here the passive language of ignoring and declining to obey is absent. Now, in 2018, Yoo says it is both. We are down the rabbit hole. So which is it? [A] Lincoln passively declined to obey a judicial order; [B] Lincoln actively defied the Chief Justice; or, [C] Both. Which is it? The correct answer is....


Abstract Detailed shear and compressional gradient velocity structure for the unconsolidated sediments of the Mississippi Embayment (ME) have been obtained through simultaneous inversion of radial and vertical teleseismic transfer functions for 60 broadband stations inside the ME. Transfer functions were calculated by deconvolving a vertical array beam from the radial and vertical displacement at each station inside the embayment. The vertical array beam was constructed by stacking all the vertical components of motions for stations on the bedrock and outside the embayment to reduce the effect of incoherent scattering, improving estimates of the source time function and stabilizing the deconvolution. A bounded variable least‐squares inversion technique was applied to invert for velocity nodes on the top and bottom of the sediment layer. P ‐wave velocity changes from 1.0  km/s near the surface and increases with depth from 3.5 to 4  km/s in deeper parts. S ‐wave velocity varies from 0.3  km/s and increases to 1.6  km/s in deeper sections to the south. Electronic Supplement: Gradient velocity structure of the northern Mississippi Embayment sediments for 60 broadband stations.


There are three key types of political risk facing state and personal pension schemes: those induced by demographic, economic and pure political considerations. The state scheme in the UK has been susceptible to all three types of political risk with the result that the annual real internal rate of return (IRR) on the second-pillar state pension (SERPS) for the average male worker has fallen from 5% to 1.5% over the last quarter century. The New Labour government replaced SERPS with the Second State Pension (S2P) Scheme which was designed to benefit its natural supporters, low-paid workers, at the expense of middle- and higher-paid workers. S2P which assumes that all workers earn at least the Lower Earnings Threshold, regardless of their actual earnings, combined with the Minimum Income Guarantee and Pension Credit, has raised the prospective IRR to low-paid workers to 6.2%. Given the generosity of the MIG, which is uprated in line with earnings, most pensioners, including the well off, will become eligible for this means-tested benefit: we therefore question whether the MIG can survive in its present form. The flat-rate, first-pillar Basic State Pension has also experienced a fall in its IRR of 3 percentage points as a result of the indexation basis changing from earnings to prices. Personal pensions are not immune from political risk either, although to date they have been less susceptible than the state scheme: the abolition of the tax credit on UK dividends in 1997 lowered the IRR on personal pensions by 0.6 of a percentage point, for example. Given that company final-salary schemes in the UK have all but closed to new members, leaving state and personal (or company) defined contribution pension schemes as the only alternatives available for building up pension entitlements, it is hard to see where British workers can turn in future to guarantee their retirement income security.


The objective of this research is the examination of the correlation between stated and revealed driving behaviour using vehicle on-board diagnostics (OBD) data. To this end, a large data set derived from a driving behaviour experiment is exploited, during which, the driving behaviour of 17 drivers is monitored for a period of three months. These data concerned the number of harsh acceleration and braking events occurred, the average driving speed and the mileage travelled and were recorded at a 1Hz frequency. Drivers' stated behaviour is investigated using the results of a survey administered to all users participated in the experiment. A linear regression model is developed to perform data analysis and study the factors influencing a number of different driving behaviour indicators that were recorded in real time. The results demonstrated a strong correlation between the number of harsh braking and acceleration events on one hand and the number of accidents, the annual income and the declared frequency of harsh braking on the other. This research contributes towards the improvement of driving behaviour by performing behavioral analysis of driving characteristics and resulting to models that could potentially serve as a platform that provides feedback to drivers on how to improve their behaviour and become less risky. © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Peer-review under responsibility of WORLD CONFERENCE ON TRANSPORT RESEARCH SOCIETY.


Under investigation in this study was the effect of ASE certification of automotive technician training programs and other selected factors on ASE test outcome and job placement rate. This research ponders whether the time and money invested in certifying technician training programs is returning desired improvements in this automobile manufacturer's dealer service staff. The study focussed on technicians employed at Chrysler dealerships around the United States. The 2 samples totalling 387 males between the ages of 22 and 30 were drawn from 1,007 graduates of automotive technician training programs. Technicians that completed a formal training program beyond the high school level certified by the National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence (ASE) were compared to others whose training was not certified by ASE. Comparisons were made on the basis of ASE Automobile Technician Test scores and on the length of time from training program completion to employment. This research sought to identify the significance of association between three main predictors - the status of training program ASE certification, work experience and year of training program completion - and the most desirable levels of ASE test outcome (at or above 90% on the ASE test) and job placement rate (immediately following completion of training). The logistic regression procedure in SAS was used to analyze categorical data in testing the statistical hypotheses. Resulting odds ratios provided indications of significant associations between ASE program certification, technician experience and year of program completion and each of the dependent variables, ASE test outcome and job placement rate. The findings indicated that ASE automotive training program certification status was a significant predictor of ASE test outcome and of job placement rate. Recommendations for further study suggest a look at how technician skill levels affect implementation of the Clean Air Act or dependency on foreign sources of fuel, how training program certification impacts desirable results in industries other than automotive, and how realignment of resources might enhance the performance of training programs already certified.


Abstract
People from Black and Minority Ethnic groups, in particular Guyanese people, have a higher incidence of Type 2 Diabetes. Yet, there is a paucity of research which explores women's experiences of living with the condition.
In this participatory action research (PAR) inquiry, eight participants and I, 'we' researched together for 18 months. Participants were nine Guyanese middle class women, including myself, who had migrated to England many years ago. The inquiry aim was to listen to the women's voices about living with Type 2 Diabetes and explore associated cultural experiences that could influence self-management. The objectives were: 1) give voice to Guyanese women stories; 2) explore their experiences living with Type 2 Diabetes; 3) facilitate a participatory action research (PAR) group and explore with them self-care trajectories and 4) consider ways 'we' (women and researcher) can initiate health care reform at an individual level and/or within the Guyanese community.
Data generated included storytelling in one to one interviews in the safe environment of the women's own homes, followed by 14 PAR group sessions. Participants drove the research by determining what should go on the agenda and they decided on the resultant actions.
Fourteen constructs (commonalities in experience) were derived from our data and the women validated these findings and took ownership of their stories. The main focus of the PAR group conversations was on their identities as Guyanese migrant women which were constructed through the food and dietary transitions made over the time of the PAR group. The group's social context became a fertile bed for learning. In terms of living with a chronic illness, improving diabetes self-management was accelerated within the group. Group cohesion and working together to improve their lives are two of the most important findings. In 2015 the group continues to meet.
If theory is defined by its practical effects, together we have confronted the taken for granted meanings of culture, ethnicity and identity as we researched alongside each other to construct a theory of togetherness as empowerment that enabled a group of migrant women to bring about change in their lives.
My thesis is that listening to the voices of Guyanese / English women who live with a chronic illness improved self-management, fostered new understandings of diabetes and empowered this group to have a say about the health services received. Through participating in a PAR group, we recognised that we are bi-culturally competent women and when we connect, we recognise the practical effect of togetherness as empowerment.


Smart clothes increase the efficiency of long-term non-invasive monitoring systems by facilitating the placement of sensors and increasing the number of measurement locations. Since the sensors are either garment-integrated or embedded in an unobtrusive way in the garment, the impact on the subject's comfort is minimized. However, the main challenge of smart clothing lies in the enhancement of signal quality and the management of the huge data volume resulting from the variable contact with the skin, movement artifacts, non-accurate location of sensors and the large number of acquired signals. This paper exposes the strategies and solutions adopted in the European 1ST project MyHeart to address these problems, from the definition of the body sensor network to the description of two embedded signal processing techniques performing on-body ECG enhancement and motion activity classification


The efficacy of pulmonary rehabilitation has been established for people with COPD such that the addition of further controlled clinical trials comparing pulmonary rehabilitation with usual care is considered unnecessary.1 ,2 How well the degree of health benefit reported within clinical trials of pulmonary rehabilitation translates into real-life settings is more difficult to ascertain. In real-world clinical environments, the effectiveness of pulmonary rehabilitation for people with COPD is likely to be confounded by heterogeneity in national healthcare systems, structure and staffing of rehabilitation programmes and participant characteristics of those referred to, accessing and completing pulmonary rehabilitation. While pragmatic clinical trials might provide local intelligence on pulmonary rehabilitation effectiveness, census-level surveys of clinical outcomes and sociodemographic data or pulmonary rehabilitation registries, such as those established in the USA3 and proposed in Australia4 permit associations between service provision, demographic characteristics and clinical outcomes to be explored at the population level.

The value of such population-level approaches is evident in the paper by Steiner and colleagues5 published in Thorax . Using data from the 2015 National COPD Clinical Audit Programme (England and Wales), Steiner and colleagues present an analysis of uptake and performance of participants across 230 pulmonary rehabilitation services,6 including over 7000 participants with COPD.7 Steiner and colleagues have reported that completion (defined as attending a discharge assessment) of pulmonary rehabilitation is lower in those with greater levels of socioeconomic deprivation. Where programmes are not 'completed', the optimal benefits of rehabilitation in terms of quality of life, breathlessness and exercise capacity are not expected to be gained. This is consistent with the results shown in other population-based studies where people with COPD and lower socioeconomic status attain poorer outcomes across the board, including greater mortality, more hospitalisations, less use …


One way to unwind mass incarceration without compromising public safety is to use risk assessment instruments in sentencing and corrections. Although these instruments figure prominently in current reforms, critics argue that benefits in crime control will be offset by an adverse effect on racial minorities. Based on a sample of 34,794 federal offenders, we examine the relationships among race, risk assessment (the Post Conviction Risk Assessment [PCRA]), and future arrest. First, application of well-established principles of psychological science revealed little evidence of test bias for the PCRA — the instrument strongly predicts arrest for both Black and White offenders and a given score has essentially the same meaning — i.e., same probability of recidivism — across groups. Second, Black offenders obtain higher average PCRA scores than White offenders (d= 0.34; 13.5% non-overlap in groups' scores), so some applications could create disparate impact. Third, most (66%) of the racial difference in PCRA scores is attributable to criminal history — which is already embedded in sentencing guidelines. Finally, criminal history is not a proxy for race, but instead mediates the relationship between race and future arrest . Data are more helpful than rhetoric, if the goal is to improve practice at this opportune moment in history.


Introduction: Neuroactive steroids represent a class of both synthetic and naturally occurring steroids that have an effect on neural function. In addition to classical genomic mechanism by the hormones progesterone, deoxycorticosterone and testosterone 3α-OH metabolites of these hormones enhance GABAA receptor through rapid non-genomic mechanism. The site(s) of action of these neuroactive steroids namely 3α-OH-5α-pregnan-20 one, (3α,5α)-3,21-deoxycorticosterone(3α5α-THDOC) and 5α androstane-3α,17β-diol on GABAA receptor are distinct from that of benzodiazepines and barbiturate binding sites. The modulation site(s) has a well-defined structure activity relationship with a 3α-hydroxy and a 20-ketone configuration in the pregnane molecule required for agonistic action. Pregnenolone sulfate is a noncompetitive GABAA receptor antagonist and inhibit GABA activated Cl- current in an activation dependant manner. 3β-hydroxy A-ring reduced pregnane steroids are also GABAA receptor antagonist and inhibit GABAA receptor function and its potentiation induced by their 3α-diesteromers in a noncompetitive manner.Aim: The aim was to investigate if the effect of GABA, pentobarbital antagonism by bicuculline and if the effect of GABA-agonist and antagonist neuroactive steroids including pregnenolone sulfate is dependant on the α-subunits of GABAA receptor. Furthermore, the studies aimed at investigating the binding site of pregnenolone sulfate and if its effect is dependent on γ-subunit. In addition, the inhibitory effect of pregnenolone sulfate and 3β-hydroxy steroids has been characterized. We also wanted to investigate if the neuroactive steroids effect vary between the human and rat recombinant α1β2γ2L receptors and between the long (L) and short (S) variants of γ2-subunit.Method: Experiments were performed by the two electrodes voltage-clamp technique using oocytes of Xenopus laevis expressed with recombinant GABAA receptors containing α1, α4 or α5, β2, γ2L and γ2S-subunits.Results: There was no difference between the α1, α4 and α5-containing subunits regarding GABA and pentobarbital inhibition by bicuculline. GABA-activated current in the binary αβ was potent than that of ternary αβγ receptor. Unlike Zn2+ effect, inhibition by pregnenolone sulfate on the GABAA receptor is not dependant on the γ-subunit. It is likely that the 2' residue closest to the N-terminus of the protein at M2 helix on both α1 and β2 subunit are critical to the inhibitory actions of PS and the function of Cl- channels. Point mutation at M2 helix of the β2-subunit (b2A252S) can dramatically reduce the inhibitory effect of PS on the GABAA receptors without affecting the inhibitory properties of 3β-hydroxysteroids. Agonist and antagonist steroids also varied in their efficacy between the human and rat α1β2γ2L receptor. Neuroactive steroids also showed difference between human γ2L and γ2S-containing receptor.Conclusions: GABA and pentobarbital antagonism by bicuculline is not dependant on α-subunit. Pregnenolone sulfate binding site is different from that of Zn2+. 3β-hydroxysteroids and pregnenolone sulfate inhibit GABAA receptor through different mechanisms. Neuroactive steroids also differ between species and between the long and short variant of γ- subunit.


The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of weight discrimination on perceived attributions, person–job fit, and hiring recommendations. Three experiments were undertaken to investigate these issues with people applying for positions in fitness organizations (i.e., aerobics instructor and personal trainer). In all three studies qualified people who were overweight, relative to their qualified and sometimes unqualified thin counterparts, were perceived to have less desirable attributes (e.g., lazy), were thought to be a poorer fit for the position, and were less likely to receive a hiring recommendation. These relationships were influenced by applicant expertise and applicant sex in some cases. Implications for the fitness industry are discussed.


We consider experiments in dynamical systems where interventions on some experimental units impact other units through a limiting constraint (such as a limited inventory). Despite outsize practical importance, the best estimators for this `Markovian' interference problem are largely heuristic in nature, and their bias is not well understood. We formalize the problem of inference in such experiments as one of policy evaluation. Off-policy estimators, while unbiased, apparently incur a large penalty in variance relative to state-of-the-art heuristics. We introduce an on-policy estimator: the Differences-In-Q's (DQ) estimator. We show that the DQ estimator can in general have exponentially smaller variance than off-policy evaluation. At the same time, its bias is second order in the impact of the intervention. This yields a striking bias-variance tradeoff so that the DQ estimator effectively dominates state-of-the-art alternatives. From a theoretical perspective, we introduce three separate novel techniques that are of independent interest in the theory of Reinforcement Learning (RL). Our empirical evaluation includes a set of experiments on a city-scale ride-hailing simulator.


L. G. Khachiyan recently published a polynomial algorithm to check feasibility of a system of linear inequalities. The method is an adaptation of an algorithm proposed by Shor for non-linear optimization problems. In this paper we show that the method also yields interesting results in combinatorial optimization. Thus it yields polynomial algorithms for vertex packing in perfect graphs; for the matching and matroid intersection problems; for optimum covering of directed cuts of a digraph; for the minimum value of a submodular set function; and for other important combinatorial problems. On the negative side, it yields a proof that weighted fractional chromatic number is NP-hard.


On 30 August 2005, coming off a mostly sleepless night of on-call which mainly involved reading computed tomography (CT) scans in the emergency room, I received the phone call all parents dread. My ex-wife was on the phone, sobbing and telling me that our 23 year old daughter had been hit by a car while jogging and was in intensive care in a large, prestigious hospital with a head injury.

When I arrived at the intensive care unit, Molly was conscious but suffering from altered sensorium. Given the miracles of modern picture archiving and communication (PACS), I was able to review her radiological studies at her bedside with her nurse almost immediately. I realised that her injuries, although serious, would not be life threatening. She had had a basilar skull fracture, a severe concussion, pubic rami fractures, and a severe left knee injury. No immediate intervention would be required except for semi-elective knee surgery, and, given her age and excellent physical condition, a full recovery would be anticipated. CT scanning had been key in determining this prognosis. Molly had had a scan of the head and of the cervical spine, an arteriogram of her intracranial vessels, and a chest scan and abdominal scan that day; all …


Real Estate Analysis: Environments and Activities. Julian Diaz III and J. Andrew Hansz. 538 pages, Dubuque: Kendall Hunt Publishing Company, 2010. The emerging academic discipline of real estate may intrigue a student as much as it can perplex. Across the schools internationally, real estate has been taught in varying flavors. For example, a number of schools, particularly in Europe and Asia offer real estate education through their faculties of engineering and design. Similarly, some distinct themes can be identified in real estate programs in the United States, namely, economics, finance, and urban studies. Although, several real estate programs have been successful in galvanizing a comprehensive real estate perspective forging multidisciplinary faculties from different schools, colleges or departments, the need for an integrated understanding of real estate remains critically important. Courses on Real Estate Principles, thus, lay a sound foundation for students to build further knowledge upon. Obviously, one potential issue with such books is to identify the 'box' in which to fit the contents. Some extant publications on real estate principles have been authored with distinct themes: economics, finance or law. Real Estate Analysis: Environments and Activities by Julian Diaz III and J. Andrew Hansz is, however, a holistic introduction to real estate as an academic discipline. Based on real estate activities model, the book provides a comprehensive introduction to several facets of real estate. More importantly, the book has varying appeals for different audiences. It motivates undergraduate students of different major areas to relate to real estate as a discipline. For graduate students, it is the 'new perspectives' of analyzing real estate phenomena that makes this book unique. For example, recently a graduate student wrote to me: ''I've never seen it taught in that format, but it helps more in 'absorbing' the content.'' He was referring to the graphical representation of the Time Value of Money (TVM) concepts, which are based on the discussions provided in the book. Organization and Readability The 'real estate activities model' developed by Julian Diaz III is one of the most impressive descriptions of the real estate environments and activities, which is as helpful to the students for learning as it is to educators in organizing the concept map for the course. It provides a lucid relationship between various entities and their interlinking activities in the real estate system. The model posits real estate both as 'product and process' and leads the classroom discussion through a well-connected series of intellectually stimulating discussions. The authors have a knack for addressing profundities with plainly, yet, thoughtfully drafted writing style. Core contents are supplemented by tastefully developed graphics, carefully chosen photographs, and 'associative structure aids' boxes. The book has 14 chapters and three sections. The chapters are efficiently organized to cover a full semester in college or university teaching. The first section provides an introduction to real estate (Chapters 1-4) and helps in developing basic financial understanding (Chapter 5). The second section (Chapters 6-7) describes the relevant markets and environments of real estate. The third section (Chapters 9-14) discusses various real estate activities (such as lending, investing, consuming, governance, professional services, etc.) in detail. I do not cover the topics in this order but face no difficulties in re-organizing the lectures based on the book. Chapter 1 is an 'eye-opener' for many as it exposes students to a whole gamut of real estate topics. Several students find it intriguing that there is far more to real estate than what they had imagined. I enjoy the discussion on market efficiency, a topic which captures the interest of students from all majors: business or non-business. …


IN OCTOBER 1892 J. HENDRIX MCLANE, SOUTH CAROLINA'S MOST SUCcessful proponent of interracial agrarian radicalism, left a People's Party rally exhilarated by "great speeches" and a "righteous movement." But McLane did not spend the rest of the night planning strategy with South Carolina's other Populist leaders. For one thing, he was not a Populist: a decade earlier, the biracial agrarian coalition that McLane had led against the state's Democratic Party had been destroyed before it won a single office, and by 1892 McLane identified himself as a reform Republican. For another, South Carolina Populists were as dejected as they were scarce. Although only a few weeks remained before the November elections, the state lacked even a slate of People's Party candidates; instead, the mantle of agrarian rebellion in South Carolina had been seized by Benjamin R. Tillman, a wealthy planter, terrorist, and anti-Populist Democrat. But more to the point, McLane had taken up a role common to southern dissidents--that of exile. After listening to other men's speeches at Tremont Temple that October night, McLane made his way home through the streets of Boston.(1) Like other frustrated white radicals, McLane had been unable to contend with southern white men's "fear of Negro domination" and had given up on biracial political action.(2) Tillman's white supremacy had triumphed. But a close analysis of McLane's defeat and Tillman's ascendancy suggests that not simply race, but a racialized conception of manhood, shaped the fate of each man's efforts. Both Tillman and McLane, like their counterparts in other states, drew on their common experiences and expectations in appealing for political support. But while McLane and other radicals urged white men to think beyond their racial identity and build political coalitions on the basis of economic interest, Tillman used the history and language of white manhood to suggest that only white male producers were entitled to govern. McLane and his white allies failed to rebut this presumption. They failed in part because of the brutal violence committed by Tillman and other white supremacist Democrats, but the radicals were not defeated by armed force alone. Time and again, as McLane and men like him urged other white men to join their biracial movement--and, later, as they sought explanations for their failure--they spoke the same language of white manhood that Tillman and others had been using against them, a language of citizenship, productivity, and self-assertion that drew its power from southern white men's historically rooted expectations of political, economic, and social primacy. Beginning in the 1880s Tillman forged a white supremacy movement that rested on the racialized notion of manhood as much as on the enforcement of racial hierarchy; his radical opponents, however, proved unable to imagine or articulate a vision of manhood that was not also defined and delimited by race. Understanding white manhood in terms strikingly similar to those used by their opponents, they could not persuasively rebut the charge that their efforts would put that precious legacy at risk. For generations, political, economic, and social authority in the South had been the almost exclusive province of white men. Most slaveholding and non-slaveholding white men shared a system of law, custom, and metaphor: as the master of a small farm household--or of a vast "family, black and white"--a white man was an independent citizen, soldier, and voter; normatively, white women and children, and black men, women, and children existed only in various states of dependence on particular white men.(3) This was, of course, more an ideal than a uniform social reality. A significant minority of white men lacked economic independence and a political voice. Men of modest means had fought for decades to achieve even the nominal equality of citizenship and in some respects still remained politically disadvantaged. …


Does a bank's ownership matter for a firm's performance (to which it is connected)? Especially, in the event of a crisis? I study this question through the effect of 2008-09 crisis to provide evidence on a new channel which matters significantly for a firm's export performance - bank ownership. In particular, I find: (a) firms connected to private and/or foreign banks earn around 7.7- 39% less in terms of their export earnings during the crisis as compared to firms' having banking relationships with public-sector banks. This happened as the public-sector banks were differentially treated by the Central Bank of India during the crisis due to a clause in the Indian Banking Act of 1969; (b) effect is concentrated only on the intensive margin of trade; (c) drop in exports is driven by firms' client to big domestic-private banks and banks of US origin; (d) firms not connected to public-sector banks also laid-o¤ workers (both managers and non-managers), employed less capital and imported less raw materials. In addition, I also find that firms with lower average product of capital (than the median) received about 50% more loans from the public-sector sources, suggesting a significant reinforcement of inefficiency in the Indian economy due to misallocation of credit.


We examine the geography of the Tea Party movement by drawing upon a unique data source that harvested thousands of events from the Meetup.org and Tea Party Patriots websites during the latter half of 2010. The spatial distribution of events strongly suggests that Tea Party activism was borne out of economic grievance, as it corresponds quite closely to the incidence of home foreclosures. The findings more generally reinforce the impression that Tea Party activists varied in the extent of their broader political vision and strategic acumen. On the one hand, many gathered together to express dissent and make their opposition identity known wherever they happened to live. But some did unite with like-minded groups to direct their activity toward defeating incumbents, capturing open seats, and electing their own candidates, possibly altering the outcome in a number of elections, primary and general. A geographic perspective on movement activism reveals that while not remarkably strategic with respect to the 2010 elections, Tea Party protest was not purely expressive either.


An outgrowth of the 12th International Conference on Applied Stochastic Models and Data Analysis, this book is a collection of invited chapters presenting recent developments in the field of data analysis, with applications to reliability and inference, data mining, bioinformatics, lifetime data, and neural networks. Emphasized throughout the volume are new methods with the potential for solving real-world problems in various areas. The book is divided into eight major sections: * Data Mining and Text Mining * Information Theory and Statistical Applications * Asymptotic Behaviour of Stochastic Processes and Random Fields * Bioinformatics and Markov Chains * Life Table Data, Survival Analysis, and Risk in Household Insurance * Neural Networks and Self-Organizing Maps * Parametric and Nonparametric Statistics * Statistical Theory and Methods Advances in Data Analysis is a useful reference for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners in statistics, mathematics, engineering, economics, social science, bioengineering, and bioscience.


This chapter focuses on identifying the loci responsible for regulating Legionella pneumophila replication in the lungs, by comparing susceptible B10.A/Niid with other resistant inbred strains. First, the susceptibility of B10.A/Niid mice might be a general response against the L. pneumophila species. Second, in order to identify the locus that is responsible for the susceptibility phenotype on the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) region of the H-2a haplotype, the authors analyzed the influence of the MHC haplotypes on L. pneumophila infection by using three types of B10.A intra-MHC-congenic mice, i.e., B10.A (2R), B10.A (3R), and B10.A (5R), as well as the parental mice, B10.A/SgSnJ, obtained from the Jackson laboratory. Third, to identify the responsible locus, the authors performed a whole-genome single-point linkage analysis on 280 (AKR/NxB10.A/Niid)F2 mice using 81 simple sequence-length markers that are polymorphic for B10.A/Niid and AKR/N. On the basis of this analysis, a L. pneumophila susceptibility locus with significant linkage was mapped between D13Die26 and D13Mit287 (mapped position 54 to 57 cM) on chromosome 13 (P<0.00001); no additional significant linkages were observed. Finally, the authors compared the replication in thioglycolate-elicited macrophages obtained from B10.A/Niid mice and the B10.A/Niid- Lgn1
s congenic mouse strain that was constructed by introgressively backcrossing (B10.A/ NiidxA/J) F1 mice to B10.A/Niid mice.


For decades, James Wilson has been something of a "forgotten founder." The area where commentators generally recognize Wilson's influence at the Convention is with respect to Article II, which establishes the executive and defines its powers. Most scholars characterize him as a resolute advocate of an independent, energetic, and unitary presidency, and a particularly successful one at that. In this regard, some scholars have generally characterized Wilson's thinking as overly rigid. Yet a close examination of the Convention reveals Wilson to be more flexible than sometimes characterized. With respect to many aspects of the presidency, including the appointment power, the use of an advisory council, the veto power, and presidential selection, he adopted a more pragmatic approach than generally recognized. The most dramatic example of this is an event that is almost entirely overlooked in the historical record: Wilson's break late in the Convention from his consistent support for a unitary executive by proposing an advisory council to advise the president on appointments. While initially seeming like something of a puzzle, the reasons for Wilson's change of heart become clearer when debates over presidential power are placed in the context of the larger controversies that dominated the Convention, such as the Great Compromise and presidential re-eligibility and selection. This broader frame suggests that Wilson held a more pragmatic, less doctrinaire vision of executive power than is commonly recognized.


The Greens in Byron Shire on the North Coast of New South Wales gained four of ten seats on the Shire Council including the mayoral position in 2004, giving them a strong voice in the direction of the Shire. This degree of local success is incredibly rare for the Australian Greens or for any third party, and thus, the example of the Byron Greens is a significant case for anyone involved with local politics in Byron or anyone who is involved with third parties, specifically with the Greens. This study sets out to determine the factors in the success of this group, dating back to their 1991 inception. After collecting data from a number of sources, a series of six interviews was carried out with individuals experienced with the Byron Greens. The results of these interviews are presented and discussed by the following topics: natural beauty of the area, the demographics and voting rationale for Green supporters, the actions of other parties and groups, unique factors in the election or responsibilities of local government in Byron Shire, differences between the Byron Greens and other groups, the Greens' poor showing in the 1991 elections, the Greens' future in Byron Shire, and other factors that may be at work. The conclusions from the data find that the natural environment and the Aquarius Festival of 1973 were the most significant events in bringing Greens voters to the region, that the institutional setup of Byron Shire Council elections work in the Greens favor, that issues of development are significant, and that the party has found strong organization and leadership, which has helped create their marked achievements in the Shire.


Development of L-Band Down Converter Boards and Real-time Digital Backend for Phased Array Feeds Vikas Asthana Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Master of Science Recent developments in the field of phased array feeds for radio astronomical reflector antennas, have opened a new frontier for array signal processing for radio astronomy observations. The goal is to replace single horn feeds with a phased array feed, so as to enable astronomers to cover more sky area in less time. The development of digital backend signal processing systems has been a major area of concentration for the development of science-ready phased array feeds for radio astronomers. This thesis focuses on the development of analog down-converter receivers and an FPGAbased digital backend for real-time data processing and analysis support for phased array feeds. Experiments were conducted with new receiver boards and both single-polarization and dualpolarization phased array feeds at the Arecibo Observatory, Puerto Rico and at the 20-meter telescope at Green Bank, WV, and results were analyzed. The experiments were performed as a part of a feasibility study for phased array feeds. The new receiver boards were developed as an upgrade to the earlier connectorized receivers as the number of input channels increased from 19 to 38 and space constraints arose due to the large size of the earlier receivers. Each receiver card has four independent channels on it. The receiver cards were found to have lower cross-coupling between the channels in comparison to the earlier receivers. The development of a FPGA-based real time digital backend focused on a real-time spectrometer, beamformer and a correlator for all the 64-channels using a x64 ADC card and ROACH FPGA boards. The backend can plot results in real time and can stream and store the data on the computers for purpose of post-processing and data analysis. The design process uses libraries and blocks provided by the Center for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER) community.


Three isozymes of carboxylesterase were purified from rat liver microsomes by using Sephadex G-150 gel filtration, DE-52 ion exchange, and chromatofocusing column chromatographies. These isozymes each showed a single protein band on sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and were immunologically different from each other as determined by immunochemical blotting analysis and immunochemical inhibition of catalytic activity. The three isozymes were named RH1 (molecular weight 174,000, trimer, pl 6.0), RL1 (molecular weight 61,000, monomer, pl 6.5), and RL2 (molecular weight 61,000, monomer, pl 5.5). RL1 has the highest specific activities toward p-nitrophenylacetate and malathion. Acetanilide is a rather specific substrate for RL2, whereas RH1 has the highest specific activity for butanilicaine. RL1 has the highest specific activity for the hydrolysis of long-chain acyl-CoA. To investigate the hormonal regulation of carboxylesterase activities, we have quantitated RL1, RL2, and RH1 in liver microsomes from male and female rats using a radial immunodiffusion assay. The amount of RL1 in male rats was decreased by castration but recovered to almost the level in sham-operated rat liver microsomes after treatment of the castrated rats with testosterone. Conversely, in ovariectomized female rats, the amount of RL1 was increased as compared to that in sham-operated rats, and treatment of the ovariectomized rats with estradiol tended to decrease the quantity of RL1. In all cases of sex hormone treatment, the amount of RH1 remains unclear at present. However, the amount of RL2 may be, at least in part, regulated by estrogens. On the other hand, phenobarbital treatment of male and female rats caused a significant increase in the amounts of RH1 and RL2, whereas RL1 was not affected. It was concluded that the three isozymes differ considerably from each other in response to hormone treatment, inducibility, substrate specificity, and immunological properties.


The text of a written constitution or bill of rights is prone to 'drift' or 'slippage' in the meanings of terms. Even if such meanings have not altered over time, because of changes in attitudes and values there may be disagreement with the text's framers as to the scenarios that are covered or not covered by terms. This article submits that the distinction between the connotation and denotation of a term that has been applied in Australian jurisprudence is useful for determining the meaning of the text through time. The connotation of a term is the generally unchanging bundle of attributes that is central to the term's meaning. A term's connotation determines the scope of its denotation – the collection of things or scenarios to which the term refers. The denotation will be wider (that is, the term's essential meaning will apply to more things or scenarios) when the term expresses abstract concepts. Unlike connotation, denotation can expand or shrink over time.


This review of polar marine ecosystems covers both the Arctic and Antarctic, identifying the major threats and, where possible, predicting their possible state(s) in 2025. Although the two polar regions are similar in their extreme photoperiod, low temperatures, and in being heavily influenced by snow and ice, in almost all other respects they are very different. The Arctic Ocean is a basin surrounded by continental landmasses, close to, and influenced by, large populations and industrial activities. In contrast, the Southern Ocean is contiguous with all the other great oceans and surrounds a single land mass; Antarctica is remote from major centres of population and sources of pollution. Marine environments in both polar regions have been highly disturbed by fishing activity, but, in terms of pollution, some areas remain among the most pristine in the world. There are, however, both local and global pressures. Over the 2025 time horizon, the greatest concern for the Arctic is probably the ecological implications of climate change, particularly insofar as sea ice extent and duration are likely to be affected. Such changes are not expected to be as pronounced in the Southern Ocean over this time period, and concerns are related more to direct threats from harvesting of marine living resources, and the ability to manage these fisheries sustainably. In both polar regions, the capacity of marine ecosystems to withstand the cumulative impact of a number of pressures, including climate change, pollution and overexploitation, acting synergistically is of greatest concern.


Oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur, and carbon isotopes have been analyzed in the Pea Ridge magnetite-apatite deposit, the largest historic producer among the known iron deposits in the southeast Missouri portion of the 1.5 to 1.3 Ga eastern granite-rhyolite province. The data were collected to investigate the sources of ore fluids, conditions of ore formation, and provenance of sulfur, and to improve the general understanding of the copper, gold, and rare earth element potential of iron deposits regionally. The δ 18 O values of Pea Ridge magnetite are 1.9 to 4.0‰, consistent with a model in which some magnetite crystallized from a melt and other magnetite—perhaps the majority—precipitated from an aqueous fluid of magmatic origin. The δ 18 O values of quartz, apatite, actinolite, K-feldspar, sulfates, and calcite are significantly higher, enough so as to indicate growth or equilibration under cooler conditions than magnetite and/or in the presence of a fluid that was not entirely magmatic. A variety of observations, including stable isotope observations, implicate a second fluid that may ultimately have been meteoric in origin and may have been modified by isotopic exchange with rocks or by evaporation during storage in lakes. Sulfur isotope analyses of sulfides from Pea Ridge and seven other mineral deposits in the region reveal two distinct populations that average 3 and 13‰. Two sulfur sources are implied. One was probably igneous melts or rocks belonging to the mafic- to intermediate-composition volcanic suite that is present at or near most of the iron deposits; the other was either melts or volcanic rocks that had degassed very extensively, or else volcanic lakes that had trapped rising magmatic gases. The higher δ 34 S values correspond to deposits or prospects where copper is noteworthy—the Central Dome portion of the Boss deposit, the Bourbon deposit, and the Vilander prospective area. The correspondence suggests that (1) sulfur either limited the deposition of copper or was cotransported with copper, and (2) sulfur isotope analysis may be useful in evaluating southeast Missouri iron deposits for copper and possibly for gold.


Nitrogen fertilization for corn (Zea mays L.) production has relied extensively on yield-based recommendations that were developed to represent regional averages, yet are routinely applied to individual fields, on the assumption that fertilizer N serves as the major supply for crop N uptake. Using data from 102 on-farm N-response studies, an evaluation was conducted of the Illinois proven-yield (PY) method for accuracy and economic profitability on a site-by-site basis. As additional objectives, the Illinois soil N test (ISNT) was evaluated for detecting whether N fertilization was economical, and for quantifying crop response to N fertilization relative to soil and management factors. For 18% of the site-years studied, N recommendations by the PY method were accurate to within 20 kg ha - 1 , whereas 13% were underfertilized by 25 to 129 kg ha - 1 (60 kg ha - 1 on average) at a current cost of $5 to $170 ha - 1 ($75 ha - 1 on average), and 69% were overfertilized by 21 to 235 kg ha - 1 (103 kg ha - 1 on average) at a cost of $12 to $130 ha - 1 ($57 ha - 1 on average). The latter group included 30 site-years that were completely nonresponsive to N fertilization, all but two of which were predicted by site-average ISNT values assuming a critical test level of 230 mg kg - 1 . This level was exceeded for 19 of 69 responsive site-years, mostly during 2001-2003 when corn followed soybean (Glycine max L. Merr.) with high plant populations. A higher critical test level would have been required under such conditions, owing to more extensive residue inputs that would promote microbial N immobilization, and increased crop uptake of mineralized soil N. The ISNT was significantly related to crop N requirement, and was the most powerful predictor of error in PY recommendations (P < 0.001).


This title deals with conceiving, planning, and designing thematic exhibitions. "Project Area: Exhibition Design" is a fundamental work for all designers, architects, and museum professionals who conceive, design, plan, and produce thematic exhibitions. With its explanatory and practical hints, however, the book is also useful as an introduction to the subject for students of architecture, interior design, exhibition design, scenography, and visual communication. The typology elaborates the special features of the various thematic fields - nature, archeology, history, art, and science - since each represents different challenges for an exhibition design. Exemplary case studies clarify the specific features of the exhibition types presented with essays on the theory and practice of exhibition designs. Sketches, floor plans, visualizations, and attractive photographs illustrate the approach, whose essential structure remains the same while finding a different solution for each theme. The book presents current exhibitions designed for the Museum fur Naturkunde and the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Pommersches Landesmuseum in Greifswald, and the Wurttembergisches Landesmuseum in Stuttgart.


The use of foreign aid as a tool to advance national security interests has been a driving force in US foreign policy since the implementation of the Marshall Plan, the United States' first official aid program. Critics of using aid for national security purposes, such as Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs and InterAction President and CEO Samuel Worthington, claim that this geopolitical aid goes to countries that are often wealthier and more corrupt than the nations that do not receive it. Such aid, the argument continues, is not spent on long-term development, but on short-term political gain. Proponents of this view draw the conclusion that foreign aid, so motivated, cannot be effective in reducing poverty. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Such contentions are largely unfounded. While there are certainly motivational differences between development aid and security assistance, the natures of these projects are essentially the same, with resources in both cases targeted toward education, health care, agriculture, infrastructure, the environment, and long-term development. In addition, the evidence suggests that security aid does go to poor countries that are in need of assistance, and furthermore, that it is spread across many different regions of the world. However, critics are not wholly incorrect in saying that foreign aid has not been effective at reducing poverty and increasing prosperity. Indeed, evidence suggests that while disaster relief has been successful, development aid more broadly has been ineffective in generating prosperity, and security assistance has been only somewhat effective in improving US national security interests. The reason for this lack of success in development initiatives has been an unwillingness to engage with local populations and adapt aid programs to a rapidly changing world. The most effective aid programs are not those implemented by USAID or the US government, but are those that are run by private donors while being based on local initiative and involvement. If the United States hopes to use aid effectively in order to bring countries out of poverty and improve its image abroad, it must recognize these trends and devise policies to integrate new models into its foreign aid programs. Historical Rationales for US Foreign Aid Before addressing some common misperceptions and deficiencies in US aid policy, it is important to understand the historically central role of foreign aid in US national security policy. The goal of the Marshall Plan, which was to help European democracies back on their feet economically while working together politically, was obviously connected to US security interests at the outset of the Cold War. In the United States' early clashes with Communism, as Theodore White wrote in his book In Search of History, the Marshall Plan was the master move. When George Marshall returned from Moscow in the spring of 1947, there were fears that Stalin would occupy Western Europe. Marshall's plan to buttress European economies and provide political support for their unstable post-war governments likely kept Stalin from pursuing more aggressive policies. As White wrote, "The Marshall Plan had won because it had linked gain with freedom, had assumed that the movement of minds and the movement of peoples must go with the movement of goods and merchants." While some have questioned its economic impact, the Marshall Plan had an indisputable effect on European integration, bringing its countries together and Germany back into the European community. Thus, the two rationales for providing foreign aid--economic development and US national security--were embedded in the first modern economic aid package. Providing disaster and humanitarian relief to the developing world later became a third important pillar of the US foreign aid agenda. Disaster Relief and Development Assistance In evaluating the effectiveness of US financial assistance programs, it is useful to distinguish between the aforementioned three pillars of the US foreign aid agenda--disaster relief and humanitarian assistance, development assistance, and security assistance--as each has met with varying degrees of success. …


Even after just one year's worth of events, the Trump Presidency is proving extraordinarily difficult to pin down. Prominent concerns rightly center on racism, sexism, xenophobia, the rule of law, Russian election interference with collusion from within the Trump campaign itself, the obstruction of justice, the fracturing of both dominant political parties, nuclear war, and the global rise of authoritarian populism. Is there any defining element to this presidency, which so justly raises all of these concerns? President Trump's election has proven similarly difficult to pin down, essentially for the same reason — the presence of a host of factors, all with a bearing on the result. Sorting through the evidence about Trump's election and his presidency thus far, this article suggests, quite simply, that money and greed are at the heart of it all. Rather than a moral argument, however, this article elaborates a descriptive, legal argument from within the law of democracy that there is a corrupt system of government operating beneath all of the surface-level chaos. Trump's personal expenditures on his election campaign, conflicts of interest, foreign emoluments, cabinet choices, and legislative proposals all suggest the emergence of a kleptocracy. This article develops kleptocracy as a legal category applicable to the United States today: a system of government that goes beyond interest-group plutocracy in order tailor law and policy to the economic interests of the political leadership itself, in this case President Trump, his family members, advisors, and cabinet members.