The current study investigated the claim that in list-method directed forgetting, List 2 must be as long as List 1 in order to obtain directed forgetting (Pastotter & Bauml, 2010). Participants studied two lists of words for a later memory test, and were instructed to forget or remember List 1 following its presentation. The length of List 1 was fixed (18 items), whereas the length of List 2 varied across conditions. In the equivalent condition , the objective number of items on List 2 was equivalent to the number of items on List 1. In other conditions, the objective number of items on List 2 was fewer than on List 1 (nine items), but the items on List 2 were repeated within the list so that the total number of trials was identical across the two lists. In the spaced condition , List 2 items were repeated in a spaced fashion, with a lag of eight items between the repetitions, whereas in the massed condition, List 2 items were repeated back to back with a lag of zero. Finally, in the short condition , List 2 was half the length of List 1 items (nine items), and the items were presented only once. The spaced group did not show directed forgetting impairment, whereas the massed and the equivalent groups showed impairment of identical magnitude. The short group showed numerical impairment, and the magnitude of the effect was similar to the massed and the equivalent groups , although the results were trending toward significance. The results are discussed in terms of the theoretical mechanisms underlying directed forgetting.


The Ediacara biota has been long championed as a snapshot of the marine ecosystem on the eve of the Cambrian explosion, providing important insights into the early evolution of animals. Fossiliferous beds in the eponymous Ediacara Member of South Australia have been recently reinterpreted as paleosols and Ediacara fossils as lichens or microbial colonies that lived on terrestrial soils. This reinterpretation, here dubbed the terrestrial Ediacara hypothesis, would fundamentally change our views of biological evolution just prior to the Cambrian explosion. We take a comparative paleobiology approach to test this hypothesis. The Ediacara Member shares a number of forms with assemblages in Ediacaran marine black shales in South China, shales that show no evidence of pedogenesis. Thus, the shared Ediacara fossils, and by extension other co-occurring fossils, are unlikely to have been terrestrial organisms. A terrestrial interpretation is also inconsistent with functional morphological evidence; some of the shared forms are not morphologically adapted to address the most critical challenges for terrestrial life (e.g., mechanical support and desiccation). Thus, the terrestrial Ediacara hypothesis can be falsified on comparative paleobiological and functional morphological grounds, and we urge paleopedologists to critically reevaluate evidence for pedogenesis in the Ediacara Member and other Ediacaran successions.


Mantaci et al have shown that if a word $x$ on the alphabet $\{a,b\}$ has a Burrows-Wheeler Transform of the form $b^ia^j$ then $x$ is a conjugate or a power of a conjugate of a standard word. We give an alternative proof of this result and describe words on the alphabet $\{a,b,c\}$ whose transforms have the form $c^ib^ja^k$. These words have some common properties with standard words. We also present some results about words on larger alphabets having similar properties.


This article sets out the case for repealing the $1 million tax cap on executive pay. The cap is easily avoided and, when not avoided, widely ignored. Since enactment in 1993, the cap has had little effect in reducing executive pay or in linking pay to performance. Even worse, the cap increases corporate tax liabilities – liabilities that, by clear economic consensus, burden workers and investors. In effect, the cap punishes rank-and-file employees and shareholders for pay deals made by directors and executives. The article demonstrates why prominent reform proposals would be ineffective and counterproductive. It then devises a novel reform approach – a confiscatory tax on excessive executive pay – that would limit executive pay without burdening workers or investors. But the article rejects the confiscatory tax because of the serious distortions that it would cause for business-organization and labor-supply decisions. Ultimately, the superior policy position is to repeal the cap. Concerns about income inequality are better addressed through robust progressive tax rates, and concerns about corporate governance are better addressed through non-tax mechanisms, such as reform of the business-judgment rule and expansion of director liability.


Fighting has spread across the Middle East and Central Asia to the borders of China. In the US, refugees from climate-change disaster subsist in FEMA camps. Images of official executions circulate on the Internet like al Qaeda videos. State agencies sponsor conspiracy theories as cover-ups. As the troops of the last superpower stand astride the last of the oil, China and Russia aren't the only states considering their options: certain nations of Old Europe are quietly preparing for the worst. James Travis is a middle-aged middle manager in a software company. He has a son in the army, a daughter in a peace-protest camp outside a USAF base, and a compromising relationship with a foreign intelligence service. When his cover is blown hours before a nuclear explosion destroys the base, Travis, his son, and his daughter are all in serious trouble. And as the spooks and disinformation specialists focus their efforts on his capture, Travis knows that all it will take is one mistake and his only memorial will be another grainy video on ...The Execution Channel


Utility computing models have long been the focus of academic research, and with the recent success of commercial cloud providers, computation and storage is finally being realized as the fifth utility. Computational economies are often proposed as an efficient means of resource allocation, however adoption has been limited due to a lack of performance and high overheads. In this paper, we address the performance limitations of existing economic allocation models by defining strategies to reduce the failure and reallocation rate, increase occupancy and thereby increase the obtainable utilization of the system. The high-performance resource utilization strategies presented can be used by market participants without requiring dramatic changes to the allocation protocol. The strategies considered include overbooking, advanced reservation, just-in-time bidding, and using substitute providers for service delivery. The proposed strategies have been implemented in a distributed metascheduler and evaluated with respect to Grid and cloud deployments. Several diverse synthetic workloads have been used to quantity both the performance benefits and economic implications of these strategies.


Digital Adherence Technologies (DATs) are an increasingly popular method for verifying patient adherence to many medications. We analyze data from one city served by 99DOTS, a phone-call-based DAT deployed for Tuberculosis (TB) treatment in India where nearly 3 million people are afflicted with the disease each year. The data contains nearly 17,000 patients and 2.1M dose records. We lay the groundwork for learning from this real-world data, including a method for avoiding the effects of unobserved interventions in training data used for machine learning. We then construct a deep learning model, demonstrate its interpretability, and show how it can be adapted and trained in three different clinical scenarios to better target and improve patient care. In the real-time risk prediction setting our model could be used to proactively intervene with 21% more patients and before 76% more missed doses than current heuristic baselines. For outcome prediction, our model performs 40% better than baseline methods, allowing cities to target more resources to clinics with a heavier burden of patients at risk of failure. Finally, we present a case study demonstrating how our model can be trained in an end-to-end decision focused learning setting to achieve 15% better solution quality in an example decision problem faced by health workers.


In an 1896 travel account of Guatemala, Richard Harding Davis described the city of Puerto Barrios, situated in the department of Izabal on Guatemala's short Caribbean coastline between Honduras and Belize, as a frontier railroad town full of "zinc depots, piles of railroad-ties, and rusty locomotives" belonging to the Northern Railroad, which provided the country with access to Caribbean shipping routes (see map). (1) The state-operated Northern Railroad was the most important enterprise on Guatemala's Caribbean coast. The government's Northern Railroad construction project called for laying track across the country from Puerto Barrios to Guatemala City, the capital of Guatemala, located closer to the Pacific side of the country. Indeed, soon after Davis published his account, Northern Railroad construction had expanded from Izabal into the neighboring department of Zacapa. (2) A few years later in 1901, the United Fruit Company (UFCO) of Boston established banana plantations in Guatemala in the Quirigua region of Izabal, and within three years, UFCO officials had consolidated many of the existing Guatemalan railroads, including the Northern, to form the International Railroad of Central America (IRCA), which UFCO used to transport picked bananas to the coast for shipment. IRCA established its headquarters in Gualan, Zacapa, where the Northern Railroad had previously been based. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The North American white officials of UFCO undertook what one historian called "trial and error racialist searches" for exploitable workers for the company's Central American banana plantations and railroads. African American immigrants from the United States and the West Indies represented but a portion of the thousands of laborers from around the globe with whom UFCO and IRCA managers experimented. (3) Firsthand accounts of 1920s and 1930s Central America (written largely by upper-class white Americans) indicate that UFCO and IRCA established a labor hierarchy on their Central American plantations in which African American immigrant laborers and some "Ladino" workers who were culturally and linguistically Spanish served under white American managers. In 1926 Wallace Thompson traveled by train through UFCO's Costa Rica division in Port Limon on the Caribbean coast of the country. Thompson described the banana-producing region as a "Latin American Black Belt" where banana plantations and black laborers were synonymous. African American immigrants could be seen working individually and in gangs on plantations, in villages, and almost "every-where." (4) Lilian Elwyn Elliott, who traveled extensively throughout Central America in the 1920s, saw lines of sweating black immigrants at Caribbean coastal ports loading bunches of bananas twenty-four hours a day onto UFCO boats headed for New Orleans, New York, and Boston. She wrote that "everywhere up and down the Caribbean coast of Central America," there could be no banana industry without black immigrant laborers; if these workers had not been available, the ports would have disappeared. (5) After visiting Guatemala's banana region in Izabal in the early 1930s, the radical American journalist Carlton Beals concluded similarly, "Central America is going black." (6) In the last years of World War I, Guatemala's Ladino laborers began to organize, and in 1920 a revolution unseated the repressive government and led to reforms that allowed workers to assert more rights. During the same period, the black immigrant labor force on the coast also began to unite and organize against the exploitation by their employers and the reactionary Guatemalan government. Unlike Ladino workers, however, African American laborers drew on the black nationalist ideas and objectives of Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) to do so. Consideration of Garveyism and its influence in Guatemala offers insight into how the movement operated outside the United States, where it was also very strong. …


This book discusses trends in the energy industries of emerging economies in all continents. It provides the forum for dissemination and exchange of scientific and engineering information on the theoretical generic and applied areas of scientific and engineering knowledge relating to electrical power infrastructure in the global marketplace. It is a timely reference to modern deregulated energy infrastructure: challenges of restructuring electricity markets in emerging economies. The topics deal with nuclear and hydropower worldwide; biomass; energy potential of the oceans; geothermal energy; reliability; wind power; integrating renewable and dispersed electricity into the grid; electricity markets in Africa, Asia, China, Europe, India, Russia, and in South America. In addition the merits of GHG programs and markets on the electrical power industry, market mechanisms and supply adequacy in hydro-dominated countries in Latin America, energy issues under deregulated environments (including insurance issues) and the African Union and new partnerships for Africa's development is considered.


Resolving the discrepancies between NEE estimates based upon (1) ground studies and (2) atmospheric inversion results, demands increasingly sophisticated techniques. In this paper we present a high-resolution inversion based upon a regional meteorology model (RAMS) and an underlying biosphere (SiB3) model, both running on an identical 40 km grid over most of North America. Current operational systems like CarbonTracker as well as many previous global inversions including the Transcom suite of inversions have utilized inversion regions formed by collapsing biome-similar grid cells into larger aggregated regions. An extreme example of this might be where corrections to NEE imposed on forested regions on the east coast of the United States might be the same as that imposed on forests on the west coast of the United States while, in reality, there likely exist subtle differences in the two areas, both natural and anthropogenic. Our current inversion framework utilizes a combination of previously employed inversion techniques while allowing carbon flux corrections to be biome independent. Temporally and spatially high-resolution results utilizing biome-independent corrections provide insight into carbon dynamics in North America. In particular, we analyze hourly CO2 mixing ratio data from a sparse network of eight towers in North America for 2004. A prior estimate of carbon fluxes due to Gross Primary Productivity (GPP) and Ecosystem Respiration (ER) is constructed from the SiB3 biosphere model on a 40 km grid. A combination of transport from Correspondence to: A. E. Schuh (firstname.lastname@example.com) the RAMS and the Parameterized Chemical Transport Model (PCTM) models is used to forge a connection between upwind biosphere fluxes and downwind observed CO 2 mixing ratio data. A Kalman filter procedure is used to estimate weekly corrections to biosphere fluxes based upon observed CO2. RMSE-weighted annual NEE estimates, over an ensemble of potential inversion parameter sets, show a mean estimate 0.57 Pg/yr sink in North America. We perform the inversion with two independently derived boundary inflow conditions and calculate jackknife-based statistics to test the robustness of the model results. We then compare final results to estimates obtained from the CarbonTracker inversion system and at the Southern Great Plains flux site. Results are promising, showing the ability to correct carbon fluxes from the biosphere models over annual and seasonal time scales, as well as over the different GPP and ER components. Additionally, the correlation of an estimated sink of carbon in the South Central United States with regional anomalously high precipitation in an area of managed agricultural and forest lands provides interesting hypotheses for future work.


Abstract : In recent work, the exact dynamic equations for the motion of a finite rigid body in a central gravitational field were shown to be of Hamiltonian form with a noncanonical structure. In this paper, the notion of relative equilibrium is introduced, based upon this exact model. In relative equilibrium, the orbit of the center of mass of the rigid body is a circle, but the center of attraction may or may not lie at the center of the orbit. This feature is used to classify great-circle and non-great-circle orbits. The existence of non-great-circle relative equilibria for the exact model is proved from various variational principles. While the orbital offset of the non-great-circle solutions is necessarily small, a numerical study reveals that there can be significant changes in orientation away from the classic Lagrange relative equilibria, which are solutions of an approximate model.


Collaborative learning has been gaining momentum as a promising pedagogy in higher education. Research on student collaboration is increasing. However, one arena is often overlooked—faculty collaboration. In this article, a cross‐institutional faculty collaboration is presented. The context is faculty collaboration on the design of an undergraduate engineering course. Specifically, this paper examines design issues encountered in the faculty collaborations associated with developing, delivering, and redesigning a senior‐level engineering design course that was taught simultaneously at two universities. This course was taught in state‐of‐the‐art distance learning classrooms. Both within class and outside class, participating students and faculty made use of a Web‐based environment that supported a variety of synchronous and asynchronous interactions. The course itself focused on team design projects and provided instruction on the engineering design process, in various specific skills needed for the students' projects, and on how to function effectively as part of a geographically distributed engineering design team. The participating faculty members represented different backgrounds, academic disciplines, and academic cultures. Issues related to collaborations on development, delivery, and redesign are elaborated. Based on the lessons learned, suggestions for future cross‐institutional faculty collaboration in course development are provided.


"This Fouauldian analysis of political identity- formation, social ethics, and cultural policy in advanced capitalist societies is a timely addition to democratic theory. Miller contrasts the ethic of 'incompleteness' which produces an accelerated and self-policing citizens to the 'autoinvention' exemplified by (some) new social movements and hinted at Foucault's later works. The middle, substantive chapters are the strongest; Miller marshalls a wealth of original data on the deep schism between selfless citizen and self-serving customer underlying much Australian and Brittish Public Policy; the politics of incivility (again, in Australia); and the issue of 'cultural imperialism' under the General Agreement on Tarriffs and Trade. These imaginative discussion denaturalize such classic concepts as national identity, state sovreignty, individual autonomy, self-discovery, and civic virtue."

— Choice


The Time Machine MOOC, currently under preparation, is designed to provide the necessary knowledge for students to use the editing tool of the Time Machine platform. The first test case of the platform in centered on our current work on the City of Venice and its archives. Small Teaching modules focus on specific skills of increasing difficulty: segmenting a word on a page, transcribing a word from a document series, georeferencing ancient maps using homologous points, disambiguating named entities, redrawing urban structures, finding matching details between paintings and writing scripts that perform automatically some of these tasks. Other skills include actions in the physical world, like scanning pages, books, maps or performing a photogrammetric reconstruction of a sculpture taking a large number of pictures. Eventually, some other modules are dedicated to general historic, linguistic, technical or archival knowledge that constitute prerequisites for mastering specific tasks. A general dependency graph has been designed, specifying in which order the skills can be acquired. The performance of most tasks can be tested using some pre-defined exercises and evaluation metrics, which allows for a precise evaluation of the level of mastery of each student. When the student successfully passes the test related to a skill, he or she gets the credentials to use that specific tool in the platform and starts contributing. However, the teaching options can vary greatly for each skill. Building upon the script concept developed by Dillenbourg and colleagues, we designed each tutorial as a parameterized sequence. A simple gradient descent method is used to progressively optimize the parameters in order to maximize the success rate of the students at the skill tests and therefore seek a form of optimality among the various design choices for the teaching methods. Thus, the more students use the platform, the more efficient teaching scripts become.


Soybean seed coat peroxidase (SBP) is a peroxidase with extraordinary stability and catalytic properties. It belongs to the family of class III plant peroxidases that can oxidize a wide variety of organic and inorganic substrates using hydrogen peroxide. Because the plant enzyme is a heterogeneous glycoprotein, SBP was produced recombinant in Escherichia coli for the present crystallographic study. The three‐dimensional structure of SBP shows a bound tris(hydroxymethyl)aminomethane molecule (TRIS). This TRIS molecule has hydrogen bonds to active site residues corresponding to the residues that interact with the small phenolic substrate ferulic acid in the horseradish peroxidase C (HRPC):ferulic acid complex. TRIS is positioned in what has been described as a secondary substrate‐binding site in HRPC, and the structure of the SBP:TRIS complex indicates that this secondary substrate‐binding site could be of functional importance. SBP has one of the most solvent accessible δ‐meso haem edge (the site of electron transfer from reducing substrates to the enzymatic intermediates compound I and II) so far described for a plant peroxidase and structural alignment suggests that the volume of Ile74 is a factor that influences the solvent accessibility of this important site. A contact between haem C8 vinyl and the sulphur atom of Met37 is observed in the SBP structure. This interaction might affect the stability of the haem group by stabilisation/delocalisation of the porphyrin π‐cation of compound I.


BACKGROUND: The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and Hepatitis B virus (HBV) are two deadly diseases that could be contacted through sexual route; however, the HBV is vaccine preventable virus infection though, both have been studied and found to be capable of coinfecting elevated risk in sexual active groups and immune-compromised subjects. Studies have also shown that co-infection increases the severity of illness in an infected individual. AIM: This study was aimed at determining the prevalence of HIV/HBV coinfection among subjects in some Orashi Communities of Niger Delta. METHODS: 1000 randomly selected subjects from seven locations in the area were involved in the study. The locations were Community Health Centre Edeogha-Ekpeye, Community Health Centre Ochigba, Community Health Centre Ahoada, UlaUpata community, Ahoada Timber Market, Ogbo town and Ahoada General Hospital. RESULTS: The study population was made up of 464 males and 536 females. The total infected prevalence was 2.6%; with females having 1.7% and males 0.9%. Of these, 43.5% were within ages 15-24, 30.4% within 25-34, 17.4% within 35-44 and 8.7% within 45-54. Nevertheless, 74% were single while both widowed and married had 13% each. CONCLUSION: The high prevalence among singles and person within the ages of 15-24, may probably be due to sexual promiscuity as well as the use of intravenous drugs. The study further highlight that females are more vulnerable to sexually-transmitted diseases more than their male counterparts, which may have accounted for the increased prevalence among females. Nonetheless, awareness on the means of preventing these infections such as the use of condoms and not sharing sharp objects will greatly reduce the prevalence of HIV/HBV prevalence, especially in rural areas where access to functional health facilities and affordable drugs remains a massive challenge of unprecedented proportion.


SUMMARY The challenge to manage coastal resources within Asia-Pacific's Coral Triangle has gained global attention. Co-management is promoted as a key strategy to address this challenge. Contemporary community-based co-management often leads to 'hybridization' between local (customary) practices, and science-based management and conservation. However, the form of this hybrid has rarely been critically analysed. This paper presents examples of co-management practices in eastern Indonesia and Solomon Islands, focusing in particular on area closures. In contrast to the temporary closures used before the influx of sustainability discourses, contemporary closures are periodically-harvested but predominantly closed, reflecting attempts to reduce fishing effort and enhance ecological sustainability. When areas are opened, harvests are relatively short and largely triggered by the social and economic needs of particular individuals or whole communities. In all cases, engagement with environmental management interventions has led to more formalized access and use arrangements. The harvesting and management practices observed are influenced by these relatively recent interventions designed to promote sustainability, but also by religious institutions, increasing resource demand, and modernization. This study unpacks some of the contemporary influences, particularly environmental sustainability initiatives, on local management practices, and provides insights for co-management in practice.


Rhodium-catalysed hydroformylation is the major industrial process to obtain aldehyde products from olefins. The isomerization of the olefin at the catalyst is the most prominent side reaction and lowers the overall yield of the process. We here investigate whether the olefin isomer distribution obtained from batch experiments using Rh(BiPhePhos) as a catalyst and n-decene as the olefin reaches the thermodynamic equilibrium and computational quantum chemical approaches are able to accurately reproduce the experimental olefin isomer distribution. The relative energies of cis/trans configurational and double bond positional isomers of long chain n-decene were calculated using Hartree–Fock, DFT and correlated ab initio methods. Results were compared to experimental data. Electron correlation was found to be critical for the description of cis-isomer relative energies. Dispersion corrections in the DFT calculations partially compensate for deficiencies and generally improve the agreement with experiment. Adding thermodynamic corrections suffers from the neglect of certain contributions to the entropy of flexible molecules. Accounting for the entropy of mixing of multiple conformers significantly reduces the deviation from experiment. The equilibrium distribution of long chain olefins is reasonably described by correlated QM and also some density functional methods. Computational thermochemistry has thus reached a state where it provides reliable parameters for complex reaction network models and process engineering.


Learning to rank is an increasingly important task within the scientific fields of machine learning and information retrieval, that comprises the use of machine learning for the ranking task. New learning to rank methods are generally evaluated in terms of ranking accuracy on benchmark test collections. However, comparison of learning to rank methods based on evaluation results is hindered by non-existence of a standard set of evaluation benchmark collections. Furthermore, little research is done in the field of scalability of the training procedure of Learning to Rank methods, to prepare us for input data sets that are getting larger and larger. This thesis concerns both the comparison of Learning to Rank methods using a sparse set of evaluation results on benchmark data sets, as well as the speed-up that can be achieved by parallelising Learning to Rank methods using MapReduce.

In the first part of this thesis we propose a way to compare learning to rank methods based on a sparse set of evaluation results on a set of benchmark datasets. Our comparison methodology consists of two components: 1) Normalized Winning Number, which gives insight in the ranking accuracy of the learning to rank method, and 2) Ideal Winning Number, which gives insight in the degree of certainty concerning its ranking accuracy. Evaluation results of 87 learning to rank methods on 20 well-known benchmark datasets are collected through a structured literature search. ListNet, SmoothRank, FenchelRank, FSMRank, LRUF and LARF were found to be the best performing learning to rank methods in increasing order of Normalized Winning Number and decreasing order of Ideal Winning Number. Of these ranking algorithms, FenchelRank and FSMRank are pairwise ranking algorithms and the others are listwise ranking algorithms.

In the second part of this thesis we analyse the speed-up of the ListNet training algorithm when implemented in the MapReduce computing model. We found that running ListNet on MapReduce comes with a job scheduling overhead in the range of 150-200 seconds per training iteration. This makes MapReduce very inefficient to process small data sets with ListNet, compared to a single-machine implementation of the algorithm. The MapReduce implementation of ListNet was found to be able to offer improvements in processing time for data sets that are larger than the physical memory of the single machine otherwise available for computation. In addition we showed that ListNet tends to converge faster when a normalisation preprocessing procedure is applied to the input data. The training time of our cluster version of ListNet was found to grow linearly in terms of data size increase. This shows that the cluster implementation of ListNet can be used to scale the ListNet training procedure to arbitrarily large data sets, given that enough data nodes are available for computation.


In this paper, the impact of noncoordinated interfering signals on a point to point communication is addressed. While the transmitter has no information about the other users' messages, the receiver has full knowledge of the codebooks of the interfering users and can potentially decode some part of the interference. A simple coding strategy is proposed for this channel. Assuming its own data is decoded successfully, the receiver partitions the set of interfering users into two disjoint subsets, namely the set of decodable users and the set of nondecodable users. Then the transmitter's rate is chosen such that the intended signal can be jointly decoded with the set of decodable users. It is proved that the proposed strategy achieves the capacity of the additive Gaussian channel with Gaussian interfering users. A polynomial time algorithm is proposed to compute the achievable rate of the scheme. This algorithm is based a subroutine which separates the set of interfering users into decodable and nondecodable users in polynomial time. The proposed scheme is also applied to the case of -user interference channel and some achievable points are characterized by successive maximization of users' rates.


This empirical study of conservation tillage adoption relies on the logit model applied to fieldlevel information on agents' attributes and county-aggregated measures of agents' choices. The methodology treats the aggregated data as an expected value—the area-weighted group average of individual probabilities of choosing conservation tillage—subject to a measurement error. Using 2002 and 2004 data for Iowa, we estimate field-level costs of the adoption of conservation tillage. The results indicate that adoption is significantly affected by soil characteristics and crop rotation and highlight the heterogeneity in adoption costs when controlling for these characteristics.


Health data requires context to be understood. I show how, by examining two areas: self-surveillance, with a focus on representation of bodily data, and mass-surveillance, with a focus on representing populations. I critically explore how Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can be made to represent individuals and populations, and identify implications of such representations. My contributions are: (i) the design of a self-tracking stress management system, (ii) the design of a mass-surveillance system based on mobile phone data, (iii) an empirical study exploring how users of a fitness tracker make sense of their generated data, (iv) an analysis of the discourse of designers of a syndrome surveillance system, (v) a critical analysis of the design process of a mass-surveillance system, and (vi) an analysis of the historicity of the concepts and decisions taken during the design of a stress management system. I show that producing health data, and subsequently the technological characteristics of algorithms that produce them depend on factors present in the ICT design process. These factors determine how data is made to represent individuals and populations in ways that may selectively make invisible parts of the population, determinants of health, or individual conception of self and wellbeing. In addition, I show that the work of producing data does not stop with the work of the engineers who produce ICT-based systems: maintenance is constantly required.


The toxicity of the organochlorine pesticide, endosulfan, to Daphnia carinata was measured at three levels of biological organization: allocation of resources to reproduction, growth and reproductive rates, and population dynamics. The mechanisms by which responses at one level of organization manifest at higher levels are discussed. Two experiments were performed: in the first experiment, groups of Daphnia were exposed to endosulfan at one of three concentrations (0, 40, or 80 microg/liter) and two algal food levels (Selanastrum capricornatum) (1 x 10(5) or 5 x 10(4) cells/ml). Animals were subsampled daily and length, dry weight, egg number, total egg mass, mean egg weight, and timing of reproduction measured. The fraction of available resources that were allocated to reproduction was calculated. In the second experiment, 12 populations of Daphnia were established in flowthrough culture systems. Populations were allowed to grow for 45 days before addition of endosulfan at 0, 40, 80, or 160 microg/liter. Population density, the number of egg-bearing females, and the chlorophyll a concentration in each culture were measured at weekly intervals. The effects of endosulfan on length, dry weight, brood size, and total egg mass were greater at the high food level; however, the timing of reproduction was significantly delayed for the low-food endosulfan-exposed animals. A model is proposed whereby the low-food animals increased the intermolt period to partially offset the costs of endosulfan toxicity. The fraction of available resources allocated to reproduction increased with each instar, although no endosulfan-induced changes could be detected. Daphnia population densities fluctuated in a cyclic manner. Chlorophyll a concentration also fluctuated with peaks coinciding with depressions in the daphnid population density. The effect of endosulfan was to dampen the amplitude of the cycles.


Ren, Y. 2017. Annealing of Cu2ZnSn(S,Se)4 Thin Films. A Study of Secondary Compounds and Their Effects on Solar Cells. Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Science and Technology 1476. 85 pp. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. ISBN 978-91-554-9817-7. Kesterite Cu2ZnSnS4 (CZTS) is interesting as a sustainable photovoltaic technology due to its earth-abundant elements and suitable semiconducting properties. To date, a record efficiency of 12.6% has been achieved but further improvements are required to reach high efficiency for industrial implementation. Among the limiting issues is the understanding of the annealing process, which is crucial in promoting high material quality. In particular, the knowledge of the effects of segregated secondary compounds on solar cell performance is lacking. In contrast to formation of ZnS particles throughout CZTS film, it is notable that SnS forms and usually segregates on the CZTS top and rear surfaces. The influence of SnS on CZTS solar cells was studied by electron beam induced current measurements. It is found that SnS presence on the CZTS surfacecan introduce "dead area", whereas it seems beneficial for solar cell current when accumulates on the CZTS rear. For SnS passivation and from investigation of the passivation effect from an Al2O3 thin layer at the CZTS rear, improvement in overall device performance could not be demonstrated, due to either poor CZTS bulk or non-optimal device structure. The limitation in CZTS bulk quality was shown from a thickness study where carrier collection saturated already about 700-1000 nm CZTS thickness. Formation of SnS alongside CZTS implies the anneal is limited by a deficient sulfur partial pressure (PS2). By looking into Sn-S phase transformations in SnS2 films after annealing, we find that PS2 drops rapidly over the annealing time, which could be well-correlated to a series of changes in CZTS material quality including secondary phase formations and defect modifications. It is shown that annealing CZTS under sufficiently high PS2 is critical for CZTS solar cells with high open circuit voltage (upto 783mV was reached), possibly due to the defect modification. Besides SnS, it is observed that NaxS compounds are also readily formed on CZTS surfaces, due to Na diffusion from the glass substrate during annealing. NaxS negatively affects the formation of the CdS/CZTS interface during chemical bath deposition. It can be removed by an oxidation process or wet chemical etching.


This book provides a comprehensive review of the existing perspectives and applications of narcissism as a psychoanalytic concept that has been extremely influential in the fields of psychotherapy, social science, arts and humanities. Ten authors from different disciplines have been invited to write on the topic of narcissism as it is approached in their specialist field, resulting in an exciting and inclusive overview of contemporary thought on narcissism. This book is also a critical reader. Each author closely examined and analysed the possibilities and limitations of different views on narcissism. It is thus a very useful book both for students and experts who look for a deeper and broader understanding of the notion of 'narcissism' and its various psychotherapeutic, social and cultural applications.


Extratropical cyclones in the North Atlantic – European sector are among the most perilous and damaging natural hazards affecting Europe. While most of the severe
extratropical cyclones pass by Europe in northeastern direction, a small number of strong storms hit Europe each year. Their destructive power is mainly related to strong wind gusts, sustained high wind speeds or huge amounts of precipitation. Especially the relation between wind gusts and losses is a current topic of research. The focus of this thesis is to analyse severe extratropical cyclones affecting Europe during the winter half year (winter storms). The investigation of dynamical aspects and mesoscale processes associated with these hazardous extratropical cyclones is based on results from partly high-resolution mesoscale modelling approaches with the regional climate model COSMO-CLM. In the first part of this
study, the ability of the COSMO-CLM to simulate severe winter storm events realistic is verified. With this aim, a total of 158 historical winter storms events between 1972 and 2008 are simulated. A new physically based wind gust estimation method, extended by a probabilistic approach, has been implemented to the COSMO-CLM to provide realistic areawide wind gust distributions during the storm passage. In the second part, two recent severe winter storms (Kyrill in January 2007, Xynthia in February 2010) that caused widespread damage and even fatalities are investigated in more detail. Particularly, the dynamical aspects and mesoscale processes affecting their development are considered.
In general, the results approve the ability of realistic simulations of severe winter storm events by the COSMO-CLM. Further, the novel introduced wind gust estimation method
provides comparable results to existing wind gust estimation methods. The probabilistic extension permits an estimation of the uncertainties of severe gusts at observational sites. This could be utilised as a valuable application when forecasting severe winter storm events to
determine the possible range of maximum wind gusts and their related losses. This is of relevance for both society and for applications in insurance industry as well.
The results for winter storm Kyrill reveal the genesis of a secondary cyclone along the occluded front of the parent cyclone. This is an uncommon location for secondary frontal
development and has not been documented in recent review articles covering this field of research. The formation of the secondary cyclone was associated with negative deformation stretching and supported by diabatic processes in the lower and mid troposphere. The analysis of severe wind gusts associated with the strong cold front over Central Europe reveals the existence of a conditionally instable boundary layer in addition with a turbulent flow. This indicates that high momentum at the top of the boundary layer could have been mixed downward to the ground leading to the strong surface wind gusts.
The analyses of winter storm Xynthia show that moist and warm air masses over the anomalously warm North Atlantic Ocean were incorporated into the cyclone. The realisation
of sensitivity studies with modified (lowered) sea surface temperatures (SSTs) or reduced surface latent heat fluxes reveal their important influence on the intensity of the storm. A stronger reduction of SST or surfaces fluxes leads to a less intensive cyclone, which emphasizes the importance of warm and moist air near the ocean surface. This is also indicated by reduced diabatic heating rates at lower and mid levels and a weakening of the PV (potential vorticity) tower in case of altered surface conditions. These findings may be of relevance within the context of climate change and possible warming of SSTs.
To conclude, the ability of the COSMO-CLM to provide realistic simulations (including realistic area-wide wind gust estimates) of winter storms over the North Atlantic – European sector is ascertained. The realistic representation of near surface wind gusts by the model
permits the possibility of estimation of losses and thus is of potential importance e.g. in the insurance business. Furthermore, the outcomes of this thesis extends the current knowledge and provides a substantial basis for the understanding of dynamical aspects and mesoscale mechanisms being relevant during the genesis, development and the passage of individual winter storms like Kyrill (January 2007) and Xynthia (February 2010) over Europe. Finally,
the understanding of physical mechanisms and the effects of atmospheric conditions associated with individual winter storms are essential to improve the accuracy of the
prediction of future storm events.


This study aims to analyze the meanings and to comparative the urban . architectural characteristics between the remodeling buildings and non-remodeling buildings based upon a theory consideration about remodeling on the focus of the commercial buildings under performing almost functions of the downtown, Eup-Seong in Cheongju. Analyzing processes of this study are composed of three main parts. First, on administrative dimension, remodeling mainly occured by the extension of a building and the use change in pedestrian-oriented Seongan-gil and traffic-pedestrian coexisted inner road than traffic-oriented outer road, so interpret that pedestrian moving quantity might effect on remodeling. Second, on urban dimension, there are many old buildings in Seongan-gil and inner road, especially small scale buildings are made into one larger scale building in inner road. Third, on architectural dimension, building facade design is changed more ornament by remodeling and attempted increase cognition and attraction by the variety of a materials and colors, an unified exterior of buildings. Especially, this trend conspicuous in Seongan-gil, pedestrian-oriented.


To raise the occupant's and vehicle's safety in traffic, the automotive industry develops more and more safety systems which should assist the driver and protect the occupants, respectively. For the development and the improvement of these systems, a large number of accident scenarios have to be analyzed in respect of the influence of such systems to the accident. Since the vehicle rollover is amongst the most dangerous accident and responsible or serious injuries or even fatal cases, this scenario has to be investigated and analyzed for the development of so-called passive safety systems, like airbags, belt pretensioners and rollover bars, with the help of computer simulations. Therefore, the vehicle dynamic has to be mapped. A special focus of this paper is on the modeling of the ground contact during the touching of the vehicle underbody in case of embankment maneuvers. Therefore, detailed contact models are developed. Simulation results with and without consideration of the ground contact are compared


Abstract The current study presents the results of an experiment investigating the effects of processing instruction (PI) and dictogloss (DG) on the acquisition of the English passive voice. Sixty speakers of Turkish studying English at university level were assigned to three groups: one receiving PI, the other receiving DG and the third serving as a control group. Assessment measurements consisted of an interpretation task, a sentence-level production task and a reconstruction task in a pretest-posttest design. The results indicated that PI offered an advantage over DG in terms of developing correct interpretation of passive structures in English. In addition, PI was found to be as good as DG in terms of developing sentence-level production and simple text reconstruction.


This technical note considers whether low savings in Latin America and the Caribbean may result from low productivity rather than vice versa. Economies with low TFP growth tend to be economies in which returns to investments are low, with low saving rates as well. In that sense, low TFP growth, by providing weaker incentives to save, could be another determinant of the low saving rates observed in the region. Moreover, firms need to invest, which in turn requires that they can access financial markets. If instead, firms are constrained because of financial frictions, some entrepreneurs may have to run small firms and save in order to fund their projects, slowing down aggregate productivity growth. This note further examines the distribution of private savings in the economy and the behavior of firm saving to explore whether financial frictions distort price signals and incentives to save.


Atherosclerosis is a chronic inflammatory disease characterised by accumulation of monocytic cells and lipids within the sub-endothelial space by direct MO-to-EC contact through GJ. Both cell types express connexin (Cx)43 isoforms that permit formation of GJ. This is enhanced by adhesion molecules in the presence of pro-inflammatory stimuli such as TNF-α.TNF-α suggested to have a role on Cx43 expression through MAPK mainly over other intercellular pathways, however, so far the mechanism is still unclear which our hypothesis is to investigate it. Experiments were carried out in the absence and presence of 25ng/ml TNF-α.Human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) monolayer functional integrity was assessed by measuring trans-endothelial electrical resistance (TEER). TEM assay used as a model for the transmigration of MOs to the sub-endothelial space. Upper and lower contents were collected, marked with CD14+ and measured by flow cytometry. MAPk inhibitors, Chelerythrine Chloride(ChC) and SB 203580. TEER measurements shown a reduction in the resistance in the presence of TNF-α compared to the control respectively (13.58±2.82 Ω.cm2, 43.94±3.32 Ω.cm2; n=6), however, in the presence of PKC inhibitor; ChC, the resistant was the same as control (48.64±3.62 Ω.cm2, 45.76±4.83 Ω.cm2; n=6). In TEM,TNF-α enhanced the migration of MOs (66.3±2.1%; n=3) compared to the control (9.9±4.5%; n=3; P<0.001). Such an effect was prevented in monolayer treated with ChC (13.70±2.45%; n=3; P<0.001). Also, this fraction was attenuated by GAP26 and GAP27 and was comparable to the fraction of HUVECs Cx43-siRNA (8.33±4.66%; n=3). These results show that GJs is formed between ECs and MOs. TNF-α increased TEM, reduced the TEER and had no effects in HUVECs with Cx43-siRNA.The effect of TNF-α is mediated through PKC as it is effect attenuated by PKC inhibitor; ChC.


This unique book brings together international experts on seed policy and law. While other books approach the subject from the perspective of seed industry development and privatization, the case studies in Seed Policy, Legislation and Law make clear that a successful national seed policy must be based on a thorough analysis of connected issues such as biodiversity and rural development. In addition to giving you an essential overview of seed regulatory reform, this book will also bring you up to date on recent developments in the field, such as intellectual property and the biosafety of GMOs.


Nitric oxide (NO) plays important physiological roles in the vasculature to regulate angiogenesis, blood flow, and hemostasis. In solid tumors, NO is generally acknowledged to mediate angiogenic responses to several growth factors. This contrasts with conflicting evidence that NO can acutely increase tumor perfusion through local vasodilation or diminish perfusion by preferential relaxation of peripheral vascular beds outside the tumor. Because thrombospondin 1 (TSP1) is an important physiological antagonist of NO in vascular cells, we examined whether, in addition to inhibiting tumor angiogenesis, TSP1 can acutely regulate tumor blood flow. We assessed this activity of TSP1 in the context of perfusion responses to NO as a vasodilator and epinephrine as a vasoconstrictor. Nitric oxide treatment of wild type and TSP1 null mice decreased perfusion of a syngeneic melanoma, whereas epinephrine transiently increased tumor perfusion. Acute vasoactive responses were also independent of the level of tumor-expressed TSP1 in a melanoma xenograft, but recovery of basal perfusion was modulated by TSP1 expression. In contrast, overexpression of truncated TSP1 lacking part of its CD47 binding domain lacked this modulating activity. These data indicate that TSP1 primarily regulates long-term vascular responses in tumors, in part, because the tumor vasculature has a limited capacity to acutely respond to vasoactive agents.


Anesthesia neurotoxicity in developing brain has gained increasing attention. However, knowledge regarding its mitigating strategies remains scant. Sevoflurane, a commonly used anesthetic, is responsible for learning and memory deficits in neonates. Molecular hydrogen is reported to be a potential neuroprotective agent because of its antioxidative and anti-inflammatory activities. This study aimed to investigate the effect of hydrogen gas on sevoflurane neurotoxicity. The newborn rats were treated with sevoflurane and/or hydrogen gas for 2 h. Spatial recognition memory and fear memory were determined by Y-maze and fear conditioning tests at 10 weeks of age. Nuclear factor &kgr;-light-chain-enhancer of activated B cells (NF-&kgr;B) and proinflammatory cytokine levels were detected using western blot analysis. The data showed that the spatial recognition memory and fear memory of the rats treated with sevoflurane decreased compared with the control, and the cognitive function of the rats treated with sevoflurane and hydrogen gas significantly increased in comparison with treatment with sevoflurane alone. Moreover, hydrogen gas suppressed NF-&kgr;B phosphorylation and nuclear translocation and reduced the production of interleukin-1&bgr;, interleukin-6, and tumor necrosis factor-&agr; following sevoflurane administration. Thus, the results proposed that hydrogen gas might protect against sevoflurane neurotoxicity by inhibiting NF-&kgr;B activation and proinflammatory cytokine release, providing a novel therapeutic strategy for anesthesia neurotoxicity.


: Current unemployment rates, job market competition, and the thirst for the college experience has more millennials attending college than any other previous generation, but with the increase in university tuition and courses that feature both online and face-to-face segments for over-sized classrooms, approaches to teaching that keep students engaged can be challenging. Using my own personal reflection, anonymous midterm survey results, and Student Perception of Instruction survey results, the author analyzes the challenges and benefits of feminist pedagogy—a student-centered teaching method that focuses on student responsibility for learning, a decentralized classroom hierarchy, and strategies that promote self-reflection and participation—utilized in a course titled Women in Literature at the University of Central Florida. The author finds that the elements of feminist pedagogy used in the course were effective in motivating students to learn more about themselves and each other in a community that is becoming more ethnically and socially diverse. Though there exist many challenges to the ways feminist pedagogy can be implemented in a large, technologically-centered class, this research paper explains that even non-ambitious implementations can beneficial to students, teachers, and the university as a whole.


Set at a boardinghouse in rural New Jersey in the summer of 1939, this novel revolves around four people who experience the comedies, torments and rare pleasures of family, romance and sex while on vacation from Brooklyn and the Depression. Billy Recco, an eager ten-year-old in search of a father . . . Marie nee McGrath, an attractive divorcee caught between her son and father, without a life of her own . . . John McGrath, dignified in manner yet brutally soured by life, insanely fearful of his daughter s restlessness . . . Tom Thebus, a rakish salesman who precipitates the conflict between Marie s hopes and her father s wrath. We follow these individuals through the events of thirty-six hours, culminating in Tom s disastrous near seduction of Marie. As the novel s perspective shifts to each of these characters, four discrete stories take form, stories that Sorrentino further enriches by using a variety of literary methods fantasies, letters, a narrative question-and-answer, fragments of dialogue and memory. Strong and unforgettable, each voice is compelling in itself, yet in the end is only part of a complex, painful pattern in which dreams go unfulfilled and efforts unrewarded. What emerges is a sure understanding of four people who are occasionally ridiculous, but whose integrity and good intentions are consistently, and tragically, frustrated. Combining humor and feeling, balancing the details and the rhythms of experience, Aberration of Starlight re-creates a time and a place as it captures the sadness and value of four lives. First published by Random House in 1980, it is widely considered one of Sorrentino s finest novels."


Soliton formation processes for various waveforms given initially at an origin by using a valid computer algorithm will be discussed. Results obtained are as follows. The propagation behavior of a hyperbolic soliton governed by aKdV equation is described by three parameters which are pulse height, pulse width, and soliton velocity. A proportional relationship is found among these parameters. If a definite proportional constant is found in any propagation distance, it may be recognized that it is stable. In a dissipative medium, a different proportional constant from the one in a nondissipative medium is found. A negative sinusoidal pulse is changed to a hyperbolic one with propagation, while a positive pulse does not show any soliton. A period of sinusoidal waveform gives a soliton changing from a negative pressure part being in the waveform. The tone burst of a sinusoid with some wavelets also makes successively some solitons from the negative pressure part in the leading period to the one in the following period.


This study analyzes the continued and separate fiscal policy options regarding taxes, expenditures and public debt for Pakistan. It evaluates the plausibility of an important hypothesis that seeks to maintain a balance between raising resources, increasing expenditures and contracting public debt i.e., the tax smoothing hypothesis. The study determines whether Pakistan has adopted a tax smoothing policy to overcome fiscal deficit and if so, what forms such policy has taken. The Wavelet Transformation is used for the first time to decompose the expenditure rate series into the permanent and transitory parts. The graphical and empirical analyses presented here reveal that Pakistan has tried to minimize the welfare cost of taxation but these policies have not followed best practices in tax smoothing elsewhere. The paper also makes some useful recommendations in this regard. It shows that in order to minimize the welfare cost of taxation the government should finance its permanent expenditure by increasing the tax rate while transitory shocks to the expenditures or output should be financed by creating public debt. The debt, so incurred, should, however, be contingent upon an emergency situation and retired when that emergency ends. It is asserted that if Pakistan's fiscal policies are reformed along the lines suggested in this study it would lead to efficient and equitable policies which are based on robust theoretical and empirical foundations.


Tight regulation of APC/C activity is essential for cell cycle progression. An important class of negative APC/C regulators are the Rca1/Emi1 family proteins. All members of the Rca1/Emi1 family share a conserved zinc binding region (ZBR) which is essential for their inhibitory activity. The Rca1/Emi1 proteins belong to the class of F-box proteins that are known to act as substrate recognition subunits in SCF-E3-ligase complexes. Emi1 and Rca1 interact in vitro with members of the Skp family via the F-box. However, no F-box dependent function has been ascribed to these proteins. In Drosophila, Rca1 is required in G2 to prevent premature activation of the APC/C by Fzr. Loss of Rca1 results in an arrest during G2 of the 16th embryonic cell cycle due to premature cyclin degradation. In order to map the essential domains for Rca1 function, a series of deletion constructs was tested for their ability to inhibit APC/C-Fzr activity in vivo. A C-terminal Rca1 fragment including the ZBR was sufficient to restore mitosis 16 in rca1 mutant embryos. This observation confirms that the ZBR is the only protein motif essential for APC/C-Fzr inhibition by Emi1/Rca1. Moreover, this result indicates that the F-box is dispensable for APC/C-Fzr inhibition during embryogenesis. However, analysis of Rca1 function during larval development revealed that Rca1 has a secondary role as an F-box protein. Using the MARCM technique, wing disc cells were generated in which endogenous Rca1 was replaced by an Rca1 construct lacking the F-box. These cells displayed a reduced proliferation rate and prolonged G1-phase. Conversely, overexpression of Rca1 accelerates the G1-S transition in imaginal discs in an F-box dependent manner. Hence, it is likely that Rca1 regulates S-phase entry as part of a yet uncharacterized SCF-complex. In addition, the effect of Rca1 on endoreplication was analyzed. Overexpression of Rca1 during salivary gland development leads to a reduction of polyploidization. This phenotype also depends on a functional F-box. Endoreplication cycles are driven by oscillating waves of Cyclin E/Cdk2 activity, whereas Cdk1 and the mitotic cyclins are transcriptionally downregulated. Furthermore, APC/C-Fzr activity seems not to be required once the endoreplication program has been initiated. Cells overexpressing Rca1 displayed elevated levels of Cyclin E, although Cyclin E is not a target of the APC/C-Fzr complex. It has been shown that continuous expression of Cyclin E interferes with DNA-licensing. Thus, the reduced DNA content in Rca1 overexpressing cells might be due to elevated Cyclin E levels. Additionally, Rca1 overexpressing cells displayed markers for mitotic cells such as Cdk1 and nuclear Cyclin A. The accumulation of Cdk1, Cyclin A and Cyclin E cannot simply be explained by APC/C inhibition. It rather appears that Rca1 activates the transcription of these genes by an unknown mechanism. Nevertheless it cannot be excluded that the APC/C-Fzr complex indirectly contributes to this process. Altogether, Rca1 might act as an F-box protein in an SCF complex that is involved in maintaining diploidy.


Haemangioma of the rectum and colon is very rare malformation with only around 100 cases have been reported so far. Most commonly young adult is affected. Common site is recto sigmoid junction. Here we present three cases of rectal haemangioma affecting two males and one female patient. All were having cavernous type of haemangioma at rectum and recto sigmoid junction with one involving additional caecum and ascending colon. All the cases were misdiagnosed previously. Colonoscopy is the cornerstone for evaluation of these patients showing bluish discoloration with engorged mucosa. Rectum and sigmoid colon are commonly affected. Abdominoperineal resection was the favored procedure in the past. At present, definitive treatment of diffuse cavernous haemangioma (DCH) of rectum and sigmoid colon is excision of the involved bowel with sphincter saving procedure with either stapling or hand sewn anastomosis of colon and anal canal. Key words : Rectal haemangioma; sphincter saving surgery. DOI: 10.3329/bsmmuj.v2i2.4767 BSMMU J 2009; 2(2): 92-94


Approaches to the study of human mate preferences commonly involve judgements of facial photographs and assume that these judgements provide a reasonable reflection of how individuals would be perceived in real encounters. However, three recent studies have each reported non-significant correlations between judgements using photos (static images) and those using videos (dynamic images). These results have led previous authors to conclude that static and dynamic faces are judged according to different evaluative standards and that this may call into question the validity of findings from experiments using static images. However, the extent of the discrepancy in judgements between image formats remains unknown, and may be influenced by different experimental designs. Here, we tested the effects of several experimental design factors on the strength of correlations between image presentation formats. Using both male and female targets, we compared observed static–dynamic judgement correlations when (1) judgements were made by the same or different raters, or (2) by raters of the same- or opposite-sex to the targets, and (3) when dynamic stimuli were collected under different contextual scenarios. For (1) and (2), we also measured correlations when order of presentation of static and dynamic stimuli was alternated. Our results suggest that each design feature has independent effects on the strength of static–dynamic correlations. Correlations were stronger when static and dynamic stimuli were rated by the same raters. They were weakest for judgements of males by females, when based on seeing photos before videos. This interaction with sex is consistent with previous studies, indicating that females are especially responsive to male dynamic cues. However, in contrast to previous findings and in all cases, static–dynamic correlations were strongly and significantly positive, indicating that judgments based on static images provide an accurate representation of someone's attractiveness during prolonged encounters.


Aerosol optical depth (AOD) over Indian subcontinent and Indian Ocean region is derived operationally for the first time from the geostationary earth orbit (GEO) satellite INSAT-3D Imager data at 0.65 µm wavelength. Single visible channel algorithm based on clear sky composites gives larger retrieval error in AOD than other multiple channel algorithms due to errors in estimating surface reflectance and atmospheric property. However, since MIR channel signal is insensitive to the presence of most aerosols, therefore in present study, AOD retrieval algorithm employs both visible (centred at 0.65 µm) and mid-infrared (MIR) band (centred at 3.9 µm) measurements, and allows us to monitor transport of aerosols at higher temporal resolution. Comparisons made between INSAT-3D derived AOD (τI) and MODIS derived AOD (τM) co-located in space (at 1 o resolution) and time during January, February and March (JFM) 2014 encompasses 1165, 1052 and 900 pixels, respectively. Good agreement found between τI and τM during JFM 2014 with linear correlation coefficients (R) of 0.87, 0.81 and 0.76, respectively. The extensive validation made during JFM 2014 encompasses 215 co-located AOD in space and time derived by INSAT 3D (τI) and 10 sun-photometers (τA) that includes 9 AERONET (Aerosol Robotic Network) and 1 handheld sun-photometer site. INSAT-3D derived AOD i.e. τI, is found within the retrieval errors of τI = ±0.07 ±0.15τA with linear correlation coefficient (R) of 0.90 and root mean square error equal (RMSE) to 0.06. Present work shows that INSAT-3D aerosol products can be used quantitatively in many applications with caution for possible residual clouds, snow/ice, and water contamination.


Brazilian soils destined for fodder production are infertile and acidic and contain toxic levels of aluminum (Al), which cause a reduction in growth of the root system and aerial plant parts. The main aim of the present pot trial was to determine ultrastructural and developmental changes in root and leaf tissues of Urochloa brizantha, when grown in an acid Oxisol containing varying levels of Al. The experimental design was a 3 × 5 factorial arrangement, involving 3 cultivars of U. brizantha (Marandu, Paiaguás and Piatã) and 5 concentrations of Al in the soil (0.2, 0.4, 0.8, 1.6 and 3.2 cmol/dm), with 4 replications; a total of 60 pots. All cultivars responded negatively to increasing Al concentration in the soil, even in small amounts. Root ultrastructures were damaged even at concentrations of 0.4 cmol Al/dm, primarily in the conducting tissues (xylem and phloem) and epidermal cells. Shoot development and leaf tissues were also negatively affected. In general, plant development and ultrastructure of root and leaf tissues in all 3 cultivars of U. brizantha were impaired when grown in the presence of Al at doses >0.2 cmol/dm in the soil.


Polymer nanocomposites have elicited extensive research efforts due to their potential to exhibit spectacular properties. In the presentwork,mixtures of four different concentrations (2.5, 5, 7.5, and 10 wt%) of titaniumoxide (TiO2) nanoparticles with poly (methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) were prepared. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and optical analysis were employed to characterize and reveal the miscibilitymap and the relationship of the structure properties. From the obtained results, it is clear that the TiO2 nanoparticles have a great effect on improving the performance properties of PMMA greatly depends on the concentration of nanoparticles. Moreover, the organic parts are attached with the inorganic parts in the PMMA/TiO2 nanoparticles composites.


Appointed by Pope Paul IV to examine the role of women in the Bible, the Pontifical Biblical Commission found, in part, that the will of Christ would not be disobeyed if the Roman Catholic Church ordained women. The Commission reported; "The New Testament does not settle in a clear way...whether women can be ordained priests, scripture grounds alone are not grounds enough to exclude the possibility of ordaining women [and] Christs plan would not be transgressed by permitting the ordination of women." Further, it is attested among biblical scholars that although the Bible was written in a patriarchal culture, Jesus is predominantly portrayed as one who promoted the equality of women and men. Yet the Church has continued to exclude women for twenty centuries primarily on the basis of the precedent of twelve male apostles at the Last Supper. It is clear that women will be needed, and in elevated roles, if a declining Church is to grow and prosper in the coming century. Catholicism is faced with a precipitous drop in the number of priests, portending 21st-century parishes without pastoral care--unless women are ordained. Addressed here are the conflicts and questions surrounding the struggle by women to serve the Roman Catholic Church and receive full equality within the church hierarchy.


We formulate the maintenance scheduling decision as a dynamic optimization problem, subject to an accelerating decay. This approach offers a formal, yet intuitive, weighting of the trade-offs involved when deciding a maintenance schedule. The optimal maintenance schedule reflects the trade-off between the interest rate and the rate at which the decay accelerates. The prior reflects the alternative cost, since the money spent on maintenance could be saved and earn interests, while the latter reflects the cost of postponing maintenance. Importantly, it turns out that it is sub-optimal to have a cyclical maintenance schedule where the building is allowed to decay and then be intensively maintained before decaying again. Rather, local governments should focus the maintenance either early in the building's life span and eventually let it decay towards replacement/abandonment or first let it decay to a target level and then keep it there until replacement/abandonment. Which of the two is optimal depends on the trade-off between the alternative cost and the cost of postponing maintenance.


The relationship ·between death and the millennium is not an area of scholarship that has received adequate attention. Millenarian groups desire the creation of a paradise in the temporal world. The world is seen as corrupt and evil without hope of reform. This viewpoint leads millenarians to conclude that the temporal world must be completely destroyed and created anew, eliminating the corrupt and providing a utopia where the faithful can exist in peace. Hezbollah and Aum Shinrikyo are two terrorist groups which share this worldview, and believe that they can hasten the millennium by eliminating their enemies. This thesis explores the ways in which Hezbollah and Aum Shinrikyo understand death, not only as it relates to their enemies, but also as it relates to group members. Hezbollah uses suicide bombings as a tool for eliminating enemies and furthering their millenarian goals. Yet if suicide bombers no longer exist in the temporal world, they are unable to experience the millennium they are fighting for once it has been achieved. Similarly, when members of Aum Shinrikyo began to die unexpectedly, or were intentionally killed by other group members, Asahara (the group's leader) needed to explain such deaths within the context of Aum's millenarian worldview. In addition to locating the problem of 'death' within existing millenarian research, this thesis also questions the very nature of millenarian aspirations within Hezbollah and Aum Shinrikyo. In the case of Hezbollah, it is argued that establishing the millennium is not the ultimate goal of the group's terrorist activities. Whilst it claims to be fighting on behalf of the Shiite population in Lebanon, it is actually exploiting them to secure a somewhat different objective aimed at the personal salvation of Hezbollah's members in the afterlife. Although the study of 'death' does not contradict Aum's millenarian nature in the same manner as Hezbollah, it is clear that 'death' contributes to our understanding of millenarian groups in a way which should not be ignored to the extent that it has been in the existing literature.'· Millenarian research performs an important role when studying terrorism, illuminating the beliefs and motivations of such groups. Ignoring the element of 'death' when researching the millenarian nature of terrorist groups can, in some cases, lead to a misrepresentation of the groups' true character.


We present general nondimensional solutions for uptake across a solid‐water boundary, considering the combined influences of mass transfer flux limitation and uptake reaction kinetics. Mass transfer processes are represented by a general mass transfer velocity. Reaction kinetics are represented by first‐order and Monod models. Mathematical solutions are well approximated by standard mass transfer models for low values of the derived nondimensional mass transfer velocity and by standard kinetic models for high values. Approximate limiting values of the nondimensional mass transfer velocity are defined for mass transfer control and kinetic control. The intermediate region, where both mass transfer and kinetics influence the solution, is relatively broad for first‐order kinetics and Monod kinetics in oligotrophic environments. Both limits decrease as concentration increases in the Monod solution, such that under increasingly eutrophic conditions mass transfer control becomes less important, the intermediate range shrinks, and kinetic control becomes an increasingly good approximation. Example calculations using data from experimental ecosystems indicate that boundary nutrient uptake was mass transfer controlled or intermediate under oligotrophic conditions. Nutrient pulses applied to the systems caused temporary eutrophication, which resulted in temporary kinetic control.


Abstract. This study develops a social-economic-engineering combined framework for decision making in water resources planning. This framework consists of four parts which are to spatially identify the grades on hydrological vulnerability (potential streamflow depletion and potential water quality deterioration), to evaluate the monetary values of improvements on hydrological vulnerability grades using the choice experiment method, to derive an alternative evaluation index (AEI) to quantify the effectiveness of all alternatives, and to combine the derived willingness-to-pays (WTPs) with the AEI and do the cost-benefit analysis of feasible alternatives. This framework includes the stakeholder participation in order to quantify the preferences with regard to management objectives (water quantity and quality) and WTPs of alternatives. Finally, the economic values of each alternative can be estimated by this study which combines the WTPs for improvements on hydrologic vulnerability grades with the AEI. The proposed procedure is applied in the Anyangcheon watershed which has been highly urbanized for past thirty years. As a result, WTPs are $0.24~$10.08/month-household for water quantity and $0.80~$8.60/month-household for water quality and residents of the five regions among six have higher WTPs for water quality improvement. Finally, since three of ten alternatives have BC>0, they can be proposed to the decision makers. This systematic screening procedure will provide decision makers with the flexibility to obtain stakeholders' consensus for water resources planning.


A total of 1,215 pigs (PIC 1050 × 280; initially 11.7 lb BW) were used in a 42-d growth trial to determine the effects of ZnO, Zn hydroxychloride (IntelliBond Z; IBZ), and tri-basic copper chloride (IntelliBond C; IBC) on growth performance of nursery pigs. Pigs were allotted by pen weight and assigned to 1 of 5 dietary treatments. Treatments consisted of added Zn as ZnO (3,000 ppm in phase 1 and 2,000 ppm in phase 2); Zn hydroxychloride (IBZ; 1,000 ppm in phase 1 and phase 2); and Cu as tri-basic copper chloride (200 ppm), alone or in combination, as follows: 1) Cu only; 2) ZnO only; 3) ZnO and Cu; 4) IBZ only; and 5) IBZ and Cu. Experimental diets were fed from d 0 to 21. From d 21 to 42, pigs were fed a common diet that contained 200 ppm Cu from tri-basic copper chloride but no additional Zn other than that provided by the trace mineral premix. From d 0 to 21, there was a tendency (P = 0.073) for interaction between Zn source and Cu for ADG, where the addition of Cu to ZnO diets increased ADG; whereas, adding Cu to IBZ diets decreased ADG. Pigs fed added ZnO had greater ADFI (P = 0.018), ADG (P = 0.033), and BW on d 21 (P = 0.042) than those fed added IBZ. From d 21 to 42, pigs previously fed diets with ZnO had greater ADFI (P = 0.040) and a tendency (P = 0.071) for poorer F/G than those previously fed Cu only. Overall, feeding diets with ZnO resulted in greater ADFI (P = 0.026) compared to feeding the diet with Cu only. There was a tendency (P = 0.053) for decreased removal rate when IBZ was added to the diet compared to only adding Cu. Overall, pigs fed diets with ZnO had greater ADFI (P = 0.048) and a tendency (P = 0.074) for increased ADG compared to pigs fed diets with added IBZ. Feed cost marginally increased (P = 0.064) with the addition of ZnO compared to IBZ. Diets with ZnO resulted in greater feed cost (P = 0.018) and a tendency for higher revenue (P = 0.062) compared to the diet with Cu only. Similarly, diets with added IBZ resulted in tendencies for greater feed cost (P = 0.070), revenue (P = 0.052), and income over feed cost (IOFC) (P = 0.071) compared to the diet with Cu only. The results suggest that there are no additive effects of Zn and Cu and no major differences in performance between pigs fed diets with added Zn or Cu. Pigs fed diets with higher levels of ZnO had improved performance compared to those fed added IBZ.


OBJECTIVE
To examine the relationship between reflection, brooding, and suicidality in participants with a history of major depression.

METHOD
Participants were divided into three groups - those who had never been suicidal (N=11), suicide ideators (N=11), and suicide attempters (N=10). Participants completed the Ruminative Responses Scale to explore scores on the brooding and reflection subscales in each group.

RESULTS
There was a significant interaction between groups and type of self-focused thinking: suicide attempters more strongly endorsed brooding than reflection, whilst non-suicidal, but previously depressed individuals showed the reverse trend. Suicidal and non-suicidal groups differed significantly in levels of reflection, but did not differ significantly in levels of brooding.

CONCLUSIONS
Deficits in reflection appear to be linked to suicidality in major depression consistent with evidence of problem-solving deficits in these groups.


Inspired by nature's exploitation of the 1,2-dihydroxybenzene unit (or catechol) in mammalian and bacterial siderophores, we report the first example of a nanoparticle sensing system that utilises the strong catechol-Fe3+ binding motif to trigger nanoparticle aggregation, promoting a powerful optical response. Gold nanoparticles are functionalised with RAFT polymerisation-prepared water-soluble poly(N-hydroxyethyl acrylamide) containing a catechol moiety at the α-chain-end. A strong red-to-purple colorimetric response occurs in the presence of Fe3+ at serum concentrations (8-25 μM) in saline solution. Sodium chloride is critical in generating a strong optical output, as is the length of polymer used to coat the AuNPs. This behaviour is also demonstrated to be selective for Fe3+ over a host of other biologically relevant ions.


We investigate the causal impact of a generous unconditional cash transfer at birth on children's later health outcomes and academic performance. Using rich administrative data, we take advantage of the unexpected introduction of a "baby bonus" in Spain in 2007, and implement a difference-in-discontinuity approach comparing children born in the surrounding months in different years. We find that the subsidy did not have a significant effect on health outcomes during childhood, nor on test scores in primary school. In line with this result, we show that the benefit did not affect the main potential mechanisms that could in turn have affected children's health and academic performance. Our results contribute to understanding which interventions are effective at improving children's health and human capital formation.


Computing approximate patterns in strings or sequences has important applications in DNA sequence analysis, data compression, musical text analysis, and so on. In this paper, we introduce approximate k-covers and study them under various commonly used distance measures. We propose the following problem: "Given a string x of length n, a set U of m strings of length k, and a distance measure, compute the minimum number t such that U is a set of approximate k-covers for x with distance t". To solve this problem, we present three algorithms with time complexity O(km(n - k)), O(mn 2 ) and O(mn 2 ) under Hamming, Levenshtein and edit distance, respectively. A World Wide Web server interface has been established at http://www.uncg.edu/mat/kcover/ for automated use of the programs.


The official curriculum guidelines for upper secondary school in Sweden emphasise the use of mathematical models and mathematical modelling in mathematics education. However, no explicit definitions or descriptions of the notions are given in the curriculum. This licentiate thesis is an exploratory study which investigates teachers' and students' conceptions of the notion of mathematical modelling as well as their attitudes and experiences of working with mathematical modelling in mathematics classrooms. One experience of mathematical modelling that faces both students and teachers which is investigated is the national course tests in mathematics. The thesis includes five papers and a preamble, where the papers are summarised, analysed, and discussed. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are being used in the thesis and theoretical aspects concerning mathematical modelling and conceptions are examined. The results indicate that mathematical modelling plays a minor role in the investigated mathematics classrooms. The students as well as the teachers were not familiar with the notion of mathematical modelling. Only 23% of the 381 students and 50 % of the 18 teachers had heard the notion before participating in the study. Both teachers and students participating in this study expressed a variety of different interpretations of the notion of mathematical modelling. Negative attitudes were expressed by the students as well as by some of the teachers concerning mathematical modelling. These negative attitudes may present obstacles for implementing mathematical modelling in the upper secondary mathematics classroom. However, these negative attitudes are related to the used test items, which may have had a negative impact on the research, especially, as the test items only test parts of the modelling process. One dominant conception found among the teachers was that mathematical modelling is related to physics or chemistry. The conclusion made from the investigation about national course tests in mathematics course D, is that there is a lack of holistic assessment of mathematical modelling. Intra-mathematical aspects of mathematical modelling are put in favour for extra-mathematical aspects. Researchers argue that if we want develop students' modelling competency, than modelling has to be explicitly used and practised in the mathematics classrooms. However, for the Swedish upper secondary school this study concludes that this is not the case. A suggestion for future research is to focus on mathematical modelling in teacher education and design studies of incorporation of modelling activities into mathematics classrooms.


The molecular mechanisms of putative anti-inflammatory nutrients, i.e., fish oil, curcumin and limonin, were investgated with respect to CD4+ T cell function. Initially, using a DO11.10 mouse model which exhibits a transgenic T cell receptor specific to OVA 323-339 peptide, we demonstrated that dietary fish oil suppresses antigen-specific Th1 clonal expansion in vivo. Following immunization, the accumulation of adoptively transferred transgenic cells in wild type recipient mouse lymph nodes was suppressed. In addition, cell division analysis by carboxyfluorescein succinimidyl ester (CFSE) revealed that both total cell number in lymph nodes as well as cell division were decreased by fish oil.
Since n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), active long chain fatty acids in fish oil, elicit favorable effects on a variety of cell types, e.g., anti-tumor effect on colonocytes, amelioration of coronary heart disease and anti-inflammatory effects involving T cells, B cells, dendritic cells and macrophages, we postulated that a fundamental mechanism of action may explain the multiple effects observed. In a series of experiments described herein, we demonstrated that n-3 PUFA alters the formation/location of membrane subdomains, referenced to as lipid rafts. Specifically, lipid raft formation at the immunological synapse (IS) in CD4+ T cells was suppressed following membrane enrichment with n-3 PUFA. The alteration of lipid rafts down-regulated the localization of select signaling proteins, including F-actin, PKC? and PLC?-1, and phosphorylation of PLC?-1 at the IS. Consequently, CD4+ T cell proliferation was suppressed as assessed by CFSE analysis and radioactive thymidine incorporation. Phytochemicals have been used for chemopreventive and chemotherapeutic purposes. We examined the putative anti-inflammatory effects of curcumin (1%) and limonin (0.02%) with respect to CD4+ T cell function. Dietary curcumin and limonin suppressed NF-?B activation in CD4+ T cells. In addition, CD4+ T cell proliferation was modulated by 2% curcumin. We further investigated the combined therapeutic potential of phytochemicals and fish oil, containing n-3 PUFA. Interestingly, fish oil and limonin together significantly (P<0.05) suppressed T cell proliferation, whereas feeding either fish oil or limonin alone showed little effect. In summary, our data indicated that dietary fish oil alters proximal signaling of T cells by perturbing lipid raft formation. Curcumin and limoin are capable of suppressing NF-?B in T cells, thereby exhibiting a synergistic effect when combined with fish oil. Further studies are required to elucidate the relationship of dietary dose of active compoments with respect to mechanism of actions.


In this work, we analyze the decentralized formation control problem for a class of multi-robotic systems evolving on slippery surfaces. Grounded on experimental data of robots moving on a gravel surface inducing slippery, we show that a deterministic model cannot capture the uncertainties resulting from the kinematics of the robots while, instead, a model incorporating stochastic noise is capable of emulating such perturbations on wheel driving speed and turn rate. To account for these uncertainties, we consider a second order non-holonomic unicycle model to capture the full dynamics of individual vehicles where both actuation force and torque are subject to stochastic disturbances. Upon reducing the input-output dynamics of individual robot to a stochastic double integrator, we investigate the effects of these perturbations on the control input using concepts from stochastic stability theory and through numerical simulations. We demonstrated the applicability of the proposed scheme for formation control notably by providing sufficient conditions for exponential mean square convergence and we numerically determined the range of noise intensities for which team of robots can achieve formation stabilization. The promising findings from this work are expected to aid the design of robust control schemes for formation control of non-holonomic robots on off-road or un-paved surfaces.


Brief nine-page typed account of the history of Danish settlers in Texas written by Andrew Enermark Berndt over a period, it would seem, of several years.

He begins by explaining the lineage of his parents, Laura and Helvig Berndt, and progresses to his family's immigration from Denmark to the United States sometime between the 1840's and the beginning of World War I. A short anecdote is given about his father's butchering of a wild hog.

His father, Helvig, bought 3,000 acres of land that now makes up modern day Danevang from a land survey company. Danevang, roughly translated, means Danish Meadows. The last few pages are sprinkled with stories of hardship for these pioneers and the successful establishment of a fire and storm insurance agency, as well as a telephone company that served to modernize their small community.


A loose coalition of advocates for Open Government Data (OGD) argue that such data has the potential to have a transformative impact by catalyzing innovation across sectors of the economy and by fostering democratic participation and engagement. However, there is limited evidence to date of the OGD agenda having such a transformative impact. This article applies the Multi-level Perspective (MLP); an approach more typically applied to study transitions to a sustainable society, to explore the nature of the barriers currently faced by the OGD agenda. It argues that such barriers exist in two forms: implementation barriers and barriers to use. The empirical results presented include survey responses measuring the perceptions of U.K. OGD community members of 33 barriers to the OGD data agenda. These results are analyzed to identify implications for OGD policy and practice. The article concludes with a start at establishing a theoretical grounding for the study of barriers to the OGD agenda.


Since the 1990s economists have devoted considerable attention to the study of the relationship between financial markets development and economic growth. In particular, the emergence of stock markets with economic development is an intriguing and interesting aspect of such a relationship, and yet relatively unexplored. This paper examines the most recent findings in the theoretical and empirical literature trying to determine the rationale behind the development of stock markets along the path of growth and the nature of the interrelationship between real and financial variables.


The dominant conception of the corporation today is that firms exist to maximize value for shareholders. Unfortunately, a narrow understanding of this paradigm causes many business leaders to believe that they are legally and morally obligated to maximize stock price for their investors. This conventional wisdom unnecessarily constrains thinking about the role of corporations in the long-term health of society. In doing so, it may also be an impediment to building the skills that companies, investors, and society are demanding from corporate leaders. We clarify the widespread assumption that shareholders own the corporation, then explore the implications for what is being taught to business students about value creation, risk, accountability, good management, and good governance. Business education is uniquely positioned to develop business leaders and investors who exercise sound judgment, resist the allure of the short term, and thus help realize the full potential of the corporate form.


This study examined the impact of a training programme which aimed to support language-, literacy- and social-communication-promoting strategies for professionals working with children with language delay. Sixteen teachers, special needs assistants and therapists based in services for children with mild to severe learning difficulties attended workshops and took part in six video-feedback sessions from the Hanen `Learning Language and Loving It' Programme (Weitzman, 1992). Video analysis found that participants' language and social interaction skills significantly improved on most of the targeted skills. However, the majority of skills needed further development as indicated by a rating scale. There was also a significant improvement in how participants rated their skills in working with children with speech and language difficulties and in their attitudes towards their role in remediating speech and language difficulties. There was no significant change in their opinions towards collaborative working practices. The findings suggest that with appropriate training, allied education and health professionals can produce measurable changes in behaviour and attitudes towards implementing speech- and language-promoting strategies.


Distillation, both batch and continuous, is the most often used separation technique in the Specialty Chemical Industry. While continuous distillation has historically received the most attention, batch distillation has suffered from some public neglect. This paper will present a summary of design basis criteria and control strategies for a multi-purpose batch still. Given the multiple product and flexible processing requirements of batch manufacturing, optimization of a batch distillation process is generally very equipment and process specific, unless the equipment was designed and is used for manufacturing a single product. The concepts presented here are suitable for processing over 80% of the Crude encountered in the industry and the design features and control strategies shown have accounted for 1530% improved yields and throughputs.


This research examines three factors – macroeconomic conditions, the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, and inter-vivos transfers – that influence both the availability of long-term care services and the use of these services. The first essay explores how changes in the macroeconomy, specifically the 2007-2009 "Great Recession," affect the utilization of paid and unpaid long-term care services. It is theoretically unclear how long-term care use should be affected by such downturns, as an individual's health status, wealth, insurance coverage and access to care are all likely to change during a significant downturn such as the "Great Recession." Using data from the 1998-2012 waves of the Health and Retirement Study, a survey that follows Americans over the age of 50 as they begin to transition into retirement, we estimate the effects of changes in the unemployment rate at both the national and county levels on long-term care use. We find consistent evidence that overall care use declines significantly during downturns, with additional results suggesting that these results may be driven by reductions in individual wealth and improvements in individual health status. The second essay examines how the implementation of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, a policy that imposed stricter regulations about how individuals could "spend down" their assets to become Medicaid eligible, impacts both asset transfers and long-term care use among the elderly. Using data from the 1998-2010 waves of the Health and Retirement Study, I estimate the effects of this policy using a difference-in-difference framework. Overall, individuals seem to substitute from making inter-vivos transfers to holding assets in trusts in response to the enactment of the Deficit Reduction Act. With regard to care use, individuals seem to substitute from in-home long-term care to more visits to both doctors and adult day care facilities following the DRA, an effect primarily driven by the wealthiest and youngest individuals. The third essay investigates the relationship between parent-to-child inter-vivos asset transfers and future informal care provision by that child. Using data from the 1998 – 2010 waves of the Health and Retirement Study, I am able to use the timing of the transfers and the care use to describe this relationship. The results suggest that the receipt of an inter-vivos transfer during the previous two years is strongly positively correlated with that child's likelihood of providing care during the previous month. In addition, I confirm a previous finding in the literature that child's gender, relationship to the parent and geographical proximity to the parent all significantly influence the child's decision to provide care.


Statement of Problem: In this study, in teaching the unit "electricity in our lives" in the 7th grade science and technology class, the effect of using smart boards to the students' retention of the information is examined and compared to the 2005 Science and Technology curriculum. Purpose of the study: The aim of the current study is to investigate the effect of smart board use on science education. Method: For this research, two 7th grade classes were selected, one a control group and the other the experimental group, at a Secondary School in Kastamonu Province. An achievement test of 25 questions was used as a means of collecting data related to the unit. For four weeks, the control group students studied the unit according to the 2005 Science and Technology curriculum, while the experimental group studied the unit with supporting smart board activities. The achievement test, prepared to measure the equivalence of the groups in terms of knowledge, was applied as the pre-test. The same test was also applied as the post-test to measure the achievement of both groups. Finally, in order to measure how much the students recalled the learned information, the same test was applied a third time as a retention success test four weeks later. The resulting data was analysed with the SPSS 20 statistical software package, and the t-test was used in the evaluation of the data. Findings: A significant difference in favour of the experimental group was determined between the achievement of the experimental group, in which the lessons were studied using the smart board, and the control group. Furthermore, according to the results of the permanence test applied four weeks after the application, the students' recall rate was higher among the students of the experimental group than of those in the control group. Results: The use of smart boards in teaching 7th grade secondary school students the unit "electricity in our lives" increased the students' achievement and retention of the information learned. As a result, students in the experimental group were more successful than the control group students. Keywords: Electricity in our lives, academic achievement, retention, 7th grade students, technology, technological classrooms.