Summary 1. Species richness is the most widely used biodiversity metric, but cannot be observed directly as, typically, some species are overlooked. Imperfect detectability must therefore be accounted for to obtain unbiased species-richness estimates. When richness is assessed at multiple sites, two approaches can be used to estimate species richness: either estimating for each site separately, or pooling all samples. The first approach produces imprecise estimates, while the second loses site-specific information. 2. In contrast, a hierarchical Bayes (HB) multispecies site-occupancy model benefits from the combination of information across sites without losing site-specific information and also yields occupancy estimates for each species. The heart of the model is an estimate of the incompletely observed presence‐absence matrix, a centrepiece of biogeography and monitoring studies. We illustrate the model using Swiss breeding bird survey data, and compare its estimates with the widely used jackknife species-richness estimator and raw species counts. 3. Two independent observers each conducted three surveys in 26 1-km 2 quadrats, and detected 27‐56 (total 103) species. The average estimated proportion of species detected after three surveys was 0·87 under the HB model. Jackknife estimates were less precise (less repeatable between observers) than raw counts, but HB estimates were as repeatable as raw counts. The combination of information in the HB model thus resulted in species-richness estimates presumably at least as unbiased as previous approaches that correct for detectability, but without costs in precision relative to uncorrected, biased species counts. 4. Total species richness in the entire region sampled was estimated at 113·1 (CI 106‐123); species detectability ranged from 0·08 to 0·99, illustrating very heterogeneous species detectability; and species occupancy was 0·06‐0·96. Even after six surveys, absolute bias in observed occupancy was estimated at up to 0·40. 5. Synthesis and applications . The HB model for species-richness estimation combines information across sites and enjoys more precise, and presumably less biased, estimates than previous approaches. It also yields estimates of several measures of community size and composition. Covariates for occupancy and detectability can be included. We believe it has considerable potential for monitoring programmes as well as in biogeography and community ecology.


The fundamental principles of the scientific method are essential for enhancing perspective, increasing productivity, and stimulating innovation. These principles include deductive and inductive logic, probability, parsimony and hypothesis testing, as well as science's presuppositions, limitations, ethics and bold claims of rationality and truth. The examples and case studies drawn upon in this book span the physical, biological and social sciences; include applications in agriculture, engineering and medicine; and also explore science's interrelationships with disciplines in the humanities such as philosophy and law. Informed by position papers on science from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, National Academy of Sciences and National Science Foundation, this book aligns with a distinctively mainstream vision of science. It is an ideal resource for anyone undertaking a systematic study of scientific method for the first time, from undergraduates to professionals in both the sciences and the humanities.


In this paper, a three-dimensional, single-phase proton-exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) is studied numerically. Finite volume method was used for solving the governing equations and, consequently, the numerical results were validated by comparing them with experimental data, which showed good agreement. The main objective of this work is to investigate the effect of a novel gas channel shape– by applying sinusoidal gas channel- on the cell performance and mass transport phenomena. Some parameters such as oxygen consumption, water production, protonic conductivity, and temperature distribution for two cell voltages were studied, and the results were compared with respect to conventional and new models.    The results indicated that the new novel model showed better performance than the conventional model, especially at low cell voltages, causing an increase in oxygen consumption and water production. Therefore, based on a number of investigated relations, a higher rate of current density was obtained, thus enhancing the fuel cell performance. This is because the incoming species path to the gas channels in the  new model becomes longer. Therefore, the diffusion of the species toward the electrochemical reaction area increased.


As personal transportation is one of the greatest contributors of CO2 emissions, means able to assist travelers in reducing their ecological impact are urgently needed. In this work we focus on travel recommenders that encourage green transportation habits among travelers who have a preexisting interest in taking action to lessen their impact on the environment. We aim to provide urban travelers with a personalized travel recommender that will nudge them to plan routes while considering the environmentally friendliest travel modes. We present a novel, ecologically-aware approach for travel recommender systems and propose a system architecture that incorporates dimensions of recommendation information elements and prole matching methods.


This chapter aims to highlight and raise awareness of the previously unknown barriers currently faced by wheelchair using consumers in the spa industry and the implications of these barriers for consumer and industry alike. Existing research on accessibility within this specific environment is extremely limited (if any). This study shows that access to accurate information is a key issue, a key barrier to participation and not only for those who have not visited a spa before. Gaining information pre visit in tourism is increasingly done online and there is the opportunity to use technologies and especially websites and social media platforms to help provide this information. The chapter also illustrates the potential for health and greater mental and social wellbeing the spa industry and the wider wellness tourism industry have for wheelchair users and how they could mutually benefit each other, as well as further promoting the case for barrier free accessible tourism and leisure opportunities.


The data used, and the methods and assumptions fundamental to the development of an equilibrium displacement model (EDM) of the Australian sheep and wool industries specified in Mounter et al. (2007), are contained in this report. The national sheep flock is disaggregated into Merino and non-Merino sheep in the three agricultural zones of Australia using 2002-03 Australian agricultural and grazing industries survey data. Opening and closing sheep numbers, death rates and weaning percentages were used to derive the supply and use of sheep in each zone. Annual shorn wool production was split into four fibre-diameter categories in each zone corresponding to ABS wool export categories. Wool production percentages and relative greasy fleece weights were used to estimate the quantities of wool attributable to ewes, wethers and hoggets in each zone. Estimates were also constructed of lamb, mutton and live sheep export volumes produced from the different sheep enterprises in each agricultural zone. As the flock composition data are based on 2002-03 figures, aggregate production and export data for 2002-03 were used to validate the methods involved in deriving the disaggregated production estimates. The data in the EDM of the Australian sheep and wool industries by Mounter et al. (2007) are average annual values for the years 2002-03 to 2004-05. The methods and assumptions used in specifying the data are the same as those used in obtaining the disaggregated 2002-03 estimates. In some cases, where data did not exist, estimated values were calculated.


Launched in 1999 by CEPR and the International Center for Monetary and Banking Studies, "the Geneva Reports on the World Economy" series consists of an annual report, written by a team of internationally-known macroeconomists, and occasional Special Reports. This tenth volume in the series looks at the effects of low inflation on the global economy.


Microprocessor-based systems today are composed of multi-core, multi-threaded processors with complex cache hierarchies and gigabytes of main memory. Accurate characterization of such a system, through predictive pre-silicon modeling and/or diagnostic post silicon measurement based analysis are increasingly cumbersome and error prone. This is especially true of energy-related characterization studies. In this paper, we take the position that automated micro-benchmarks generated with particular objectives in mind hold the key to obtaining accurate energy-related characterization. As such, we first present a flexible micro-benchmark generation framework (MicroProbe) that is used to probe complex multi-core/multithreaded systems with a variety and range of energy-related queries in mind. We then present experimental results centered around an IBM POWER7 CMP/SMT system to demonstrate how the systematically generated micro-benchmarks can be used to answer three specific queries: (a) How to project application-specific (and if needed, phase-specific) power consumption with component-wise breakdowns? (b) How to measure energy-per-instruction (EPI) values for the target machine? (c) How to bound the worst-case (maximum) power consumption in order to determine safe, but practical (i.e. affordable) packaging or cooling solutions? The solution approaches to the above problems are all new. Hardware measurement based analysis shows superior power projection accuracy (with error margins of less than 2.3% across SPEC CPU2006) as well as maxpower stressing capability (with 10.7% increase in processor power over the very worst-case power seen during the execution of SPEC CPU2006 applications).


Introduced species are having major impacts in terrestrial, freshwater and marine
ecosystems worldwide. In Australia, the introduced northern Pacific seastar (Asterias
amurensis) was first recorded in southeast Tasmania in 1986, where it has become
the dominant invertebrate predator in the Derwent River Estuary. Despite indirect
indications based on seastar foraging behavior, stomach contents, and estimates of
feeding electivity that suggest the potential for considerable impact on native benthic
marine assemblages, the impact of the seastar has not previously been examined
directly or quantitatively in either its native or introduced range. Because of the
absence of baseline data prior to the arrival of the seastar and the presence of other
anthropogenic stressors in the estuary, estimating the impact of the seastar is
difficult. To overcome these difficulties and the limitations of any one method of
impact assessment, I used multiple methods at different scales to provide
independent tests of impact: (a) experiments in which seastar density is manipulated
at several sites immediately beyond the current range of the seastar; (b) experiments
in which seastar density is manipulated following recruitment of prey; ( c)
experiments in which the density of both seastars and another introduced benthic
predator (Carcinus maenas) are manipulated to examine their interaction; (d)
comparative analysis of prey taxa in the sediments and in seastar stomachs; and ( e)
spatially hierarchical surveys to examine the relationship between soft sediment
assemblages and seastar abundance at several sites in southeast Tasmania. The
combination of these methods provide, for the first time, a robust estimate of the
impact of the seastar.
In the Derwent River Estuary where the seastar occurs at high densities, live adult
bivalves are rare despite the presence in sediments of numerous recent remains
(intact shells) of adults. Experiments conducted immediately beyond the current
range clearly demonstrated a large impact of Asterias amurensis on adult bivalve
populations and on the commercial cockles Fu/via tenuicostata and Katelysia
rhytiphora in particular. Manipulative experiments also demonstrated that Asterias
amurensis has a large impact on the survivorship of bivalve recruits in the estuary,
effectively arresting significant recruitment events. Observations of diet and prey
switching show that while the seastar has clear food preferences, it is a generalist
predator able to switch to other prey when preferred prey become relatively rare.
This finding and results of experiments conducted at several sites demonstrated that
the exact nature of seastar effects is site and time specific given the inherent natural
variability in soft sediment assemblages and the seastar's responses to them. In the
event of spatial overlap with the introduced predatory European green crab (Care in us
maenas), experiments suggest that both predators may coexist because of resource
partitioning on the basis of prey size and/or habitat requirements, and that the impact
on bivalves may be greater in the presence of both species.
I use the results from experimental manipulations, feeding observations and large
scale surveys to provide a broad synthesis of the immediate and predicted impacts on
native assemblages and commercial species. There is strong evidence that predation
by the seastar is responsible for the decline and subsequent rarity of bivalve species
that live just below or on the sediment surface in the Derwent River Estuary. Recent
modelling of dispersal of seastar larvae indicates that the large majority of larvae
produced in the estuary are likely to be advected from it (Morris & Johnson in prep).
It seems clear that should seastar densities in other areas on the Tasmanian coast
attain the levels that occur in the Derwent River Estuary, there are likely to be large
direct effects on native assemblages, particularly on populations of large bivalves
(including commercial species) that live just under or on the sediment surface. Given
the seastar's ability to exploit a range of other food resources and the importance of
bivalves as a functional component of native systems, I also predict broader direct
and indirect effects on native assemblages. Overall, these important consequences of
the establishment and potential spread of this introduced predator warrant
management efforts to control its spread and impact.


Affordability of water services is a pressing water policy issue for both the developed and in particular the developing world. Despite its well-known theoretical shortcomings affordability analysis for water supply is up to now widely based on the ratio of a household's water expenditure and income (CAR). However in the housing sector alternative concepts of measuring affordability have been developed among them the potential affordability approach (PAA) and the residual income approach (RIA). Against this background the article compares three prominent affordability measures (CAR, PAA, RIA) on the basis of an empirical case study of a ger i.e. low income area in the Mongolian city of Darkhan using household data from a survey conducted in 2009. Thus we gain insight into both the water-related affordability situation of people in Mongolia checking the World Bank's thesis of missing affordability problems in this country as well as the comparative functionality of different affordability measures. Additionally, institutional as well as access-driven problems of water supply are introduced into the analysis. It is shown that affordability problems quite occur for considerable parts of the households but have to be distinguished depending on the economic causation: We argue that none of the regarded measures gives a satisfyingly contoured notion of affordability properly distinguished from the adjacent problems of poverty and access. A mere CAR analysis does not provide sound recommendations for water policy at all. In particular, problems of access entailing non-pecuniary costs of water provision have to be taken into account and might explain both problems of underconsumption and given CAR-affordability at the same time.


A sound informatics infrastructure is essential to optimise the application of evidence in nursing practice. A comprehensive review of the infrastructure and associated research methods is supported by an extensive resource of references to point the interested reader to further resources for more in depth study. Information and communication technology (ICT) has been recognized as a fundamental component of applying evidence to practice for several decades. Although the role of ICT in generating knowledge from practice was formally identified as a nursing informatics research priority in the early 1990s (NINR Priority Expert Panel on Nursing Informatics, 1993), it has received heightened interest recently. In this chapter, the authors summarize some important trends in research that motivate increased attention to practice-based generation of evidence. These include an increased emphasis on interdisciplinary, translational, and comparative effectiveness research; novel research designs; frameworks and models that inform generation of evidence from practice; and creation of data sets that include not only variables related to biological and genetic measures, but also social and behavioral variables. The chapter also includes an overview of the ICT infrastructure and informatics processes required to facilitate generation of evidence from practice and across research studies: (1) information structures (e.g., re-usable concept representations, tailored templates for data acquisition), (2) processes (e.g., data mining algorithms,


The synthesis of 2-aza-norborane derivatives is presented. The use of these compounds in preparation of Ir catalysts for asymmetric hydrogenations is described. The evaluation and optimization of the catalysts as well as the mechanistic aspects of the catalytic process are discussed.The use of non-activated iminodieniphiles in stereoselective aza-Diels-Alder reaction has expanded the scope of the reaction and provided a convenient root for preparation of 2-aza-norboranes, analogues of which were developed into novel bicyclic 2-aza-norbornyl-oxazoline ligands for Ir-catalyzed asymmetric transfer hydrogenations. Using ths Ir complexes acetophenone was hydrogenated in 79% ee.2-Aza-norbornyl-oxazolines were also developed into novel N,P-ligands. Resulting phosphine-oxazolines were evaluated in Ir-catalyzed asymmetric hydrogenation of structurally diverse imines and olefins.Optimization of ligands was performed through: 1) Alteration of the stereoconfiguration at the 5'-position as well as variation of the size and geometry of the substituents at this position; 2) Screening through various phosphine substituents of the ligand. Both directions of optimization reflect on the influence of the ligands' sterik bulk on stereoselectivity of catalytic process. High performance catalysts were developed for both transformations allowing asymmetric hydrogenation of imines with 92% ee and asymmetric hydrogenation of olefins with 99% ee.Possible mechanisms for these transformations were suggested based on computational studies. Selectivity model for rationalization of results of Ir-catalyzed olefin hydrogenation also was designed.


Firearm injuries are a major cause of morbidity and mortality among children and adolescents in the United States and take financial and emotional tolls on the affected children, their families, and society as a whole. Musculoskeletal injuries resulting from firearms are common and may involve bones, joints, and neurovascular structures and other soft tissues. Child-specific factors that must be considered in the setting of gunshot injuries include physeal arrest and lead toxicity. Understanding the ballistics associated with various types of weaponry is useful for guiding orthopaedic surgical treatment. Various strategies for preventing these injuries range from educational programs to the enactment of legislation focused on regulating guns and gun ownership. Several prominent medical societies whose members routinely care for children and adolescents with firearm-related injuries, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Pediatric Surgical Association, have issued policy statements aimed at mitigating gun-related injuries and deaths in children. Healthcare providers for young patients with firearm-related musculoskeletal injuries must appreciate the full scope of this important public health issue.


Most research on the mental life of medical patients has focused on personality characteristics said to influence the experience and reporting of physical symptoms. This is despite minimal support for personality as causally related to physical illness. The popularity of daydreaming (and dreaming) is widespread in the self-help market. Yet research definitions of mental life have seldom included imaginal activities. The aim of this research was to establish a health (and mental life) profile of patients in general practice to the west of Melbourne. The principal focus was to determine if the health of patients could be predicted by mental life. Two studies were conducted. The first study investigated mental life in the form of daydreaming. Patients, approached prior to their consultation with a general practitioner, completed the Short Form Health Survey (SF-36), Severity of Physical Symptoms Checklist (SPSC), Daydream Frequency Scale (DFS), and Short Imaginal Processes Inventory (SIPI). The mental health of the sample was below the norm in the general population. The physical health of males, but not females, was also below the norm. Most patients reported less frequent daydreaming. They did, nevertheless, report more negative daydreams (than the norm). Patients unable to maintain sufficient mental control reported more negative daydreams, but not more (or fewer) positive daydreams. More negative daydreams predicted lower mental health. Patients reported fewer positive daydreams than the norm, and more positive daydreams did not improve their mental health. These findings were only partially consistent with the research literature. The second study sought to explore these findings further by determining if they were mediated by life orientation. Patients completed the Revised Life Orientation Scale (LOT-R), in addition to the SF-36 and SIPI. There were important sex differences in relationships between measures of mental life and mental health. For females, more pessimism was related to more negative daydreams and predicted lower mental health. For males, insufficient mental control predicted lower mental health. Consistent with the first study, positive daydreams (and optimism in the second study) was not related to male or female mental health. Results for females support recent research indicating that it is pessimism, and not optimism, that is the principal determinant of mental health. It is clear, however, that much more research on the correlates of male mental health, and how these differ from those of females, is warranted. The findings of the present research suggest that daydreaming is not a mundane activity: rather it is an important dimension of mental life requiring further consideration in mental health research.


Approximately 4,500 14- to 18-year-olds completed questionnaires concerning their parents' practices and their academic achievement, psychosocial competence, behavior problems, and internalized distress. Independent reports from participants' friends were used to measure authoritativeness in the peer network. Parental authoritativeness in the network benefits adolescents above and beyond the positive impact of parental authoritativeness at home. Network authoritativeness was associated with lower levels of delinquency and substance use among all participants, lower levels of school misconduct and peer conformity for boys, and greater psychosocial competence and lower levels of psychological distress among girls. The beneficial impact of network authoritativeness on adolescent behavior is (a) mediated mainly through its effect on adolescents' peers and ( b) greatest among adolescents who perceive their own parents to be relatively more authoritative.


Exerpt from the Financial Times Comment & Analysis: Europe takes on reform of the welfare state: A new study indicates that while the UK has transformed its social policies, the rest of Europe has been far from idle - '[A] stimulating new book on European welfare states [Welfare States under Pressure] suggests that the view of Britain as the only great welfare state reformer is overstated. And it adds that the game across Europe is about to change!. This new study argues that, particularly in the late 1990s, there has been more reform in the rest of Europe than is appreciated in the UK. And that Europe as a whole is on the cusp of much greater changes!. Certainly in France and possibly in Germany, the study judges, the traditional power balance between government, employers, unions and welfare providers has shifted such that government may be able to impose much more drastic measures...In the UK, by contrast, the impact of EU institutions may in some areas mean a degree of levelling up - as in healthcare. The most intriguing question is how far reformed welfare states will retain the social cohesion they are designed to produce.So far, even in the UK, they have proved remarkably resilient - adapting to changing needs rather than being "rolled back". This study's verdict on the issue is "don't know". But so much change is on the way, it says, that "the past is unlikely to be a good guide to the future"' - Nicholas Timmins, The Financial Times Welfare States under Pressure provides a timely and comprehensive review of welfare policy-making in Europe. The text compares the different ways in which welfare states have responded to similar pressures over recent years, and considers how welfare is likely to develop in the future. This work: * provides up to date accounts of welfare development in Finland, Sweden, France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and the United Kingdom. * explores how similar pressures can lead to different responses due to different policy-making mechanisms in each of the seven different countries * contains chapters written by leading national experts * written accessibly, and tightly edited, with each chapter following the same conceptual structure. This volume takes a fresh approach in its analysis of the future of the welfare state in Europe.It suggests that opportunities for radical change in welfare systems are now opening up, and that there will be little continuity between the future and the past/present of the welfare system in Europe. Welfare States under Pressure is invaluable to undergraduate students in social policy, European studies and politics, and will also be of great use to other social science students interested in Europe and its future development.


Abstract In this paper we set out to test whether, on sector level, returns series in South Africa exhibit long memory and asymmetries and, more specifically, whether these effects should be accounted for when assessing downside risk. The purpose of this analysis is not to identify the most optimal downside risk assessment model or to reaffirm the often regarded stylised fact of the existence of long memory and asymmetry in asset returns series. Rather, we set out to establish whether accounting for these effects and allowing for more flexibility in second order persistence models actually leads to improved downside risk assessments. We use several variants of the widely used GARCH family of second order persistence models that control for these effects, and compare the downside risk estimates using Value-at-Risk measures of different model formulations and compare the out-of-sample performances. Our findings confirm that controlling for asymmetries and long memory in volatility models improve risk management calculations.


This article reports some findings of a study about the online public expression by activists in a local context. The objective of this paper is to explore some challenges of online communication practices to the concept of public space. There are a short description of media and ICT's context in different levels: global, Latin American, national, and local. The theoretical framework in communication, from a sociocultural perspective, dialogues with sociology of social movements and political philosophy. The methodological approach was ethnography, with two activist groups in Aguascalientes, Mexico, in three spaces of communication: internet, the streets, and the media. The data collection methods included virtual ethnography, semi-structured interviews, participative observation, and media monitoring. In this text, I present three main findings: 1) visibility of online public expression by activists has different logics, it is related with specific social situations and with the logics of the activist communities; 2) communication could be understood as a space of differences, activists have their very own worldviews and those are generally opposed to the dominant worldviews; 3) communication could be understood too as a space of inequalities, activist access to public expression in conditions of inequalities and asymmetries. These findings contribute to the discussion about public space in the global age.


We provide the first coreset for clustering points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ that have multiple missing values (coordinates). Previous coreset constructions only allow one missing coordinate. The challenge in this setting is that objective functions, like $k$-Means, are evaluated only on the set of available (non-missing) coordinates, which varies across points. Recall that an $\epsilon$-coreset of a large dataset is a small proxy, usually a reweighted subset of points, that $(1+\epsilon)$-approximates the clustering objective for every possible center set.
Our coresets for $k$-Means and $k$-Median clustering have size $(jk)^{O(\min(j,k))} (\epsilon^{-1} d \log n)^2$, where $n$ is the number of data points, $d$ is the dimension and $j$ is the maximum number of missing coordinates for each data point. We further design an algorithm to construct these coresets in near-linear time, and consequently improve a recent quadratic-time PTAS for $k$-Means with missing values [Eiben et al., SODA 2021] to near-linear time.
We validate our coreset construction, which is based on importance sampling and is easy to implement, on various real data sets. Our coreset exhibits a flexible tradeoff between coreset size and accuracy, and generally outperforms the uniform-sampling baseline. Furthermore, it significantly speeds up a Lloyd's-style heuristic for $k$-Means with missing values.


This study uses contingent valuation (CV) methods to estimate the benefit of an environmental water quality project of the Tiete River and its tributaries that flow through the Sao Paulo, Brazil, Metropolitan Area (SPMA). This paper demonstrates the range alternative central tendency measures for WTP produced under alternative parametric and nonparametric approaches using data gathered from a recent referendum CV survey that was conducted in Brazil to analyze a large, multi-phase water quality improvement project. It explains why one of the most commonly used measures, the unrestricted mean of the conditional inverse distribution function of WTP, may be less desirable and more computationally intensive than simpler alternatives like the nonparametric mean of the marginal inverse distribution function.


Scholars have increasingly investigated "crowdsourcing" as an alternative to expert-based judgment or purely data-driven approaches to predicting the future. Under certain conditions, scholars have found that crowd-sourcing can outperform these other approaches. However, despite interest in the topic and a series of successful use cases, relatively few studies have applied empirical model thinking to evaluate the accuracy and robustness of crowdsourcing in real-world contexts. In this paper, we offer three novel contributions. First, we explore a dataset of over 600,000 predictions from over 7,000 participants in a multi-year tournament to predict the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States. Second, we develop a comprehensive crowd construction framework that allows for the formal description and application of crowdsourcing to real-world data. Third, we apply this framework to our data to construct more than 275,000 crowd models. We find that in out-of-sample historical simulations, crowdsourcing robustly outperforms the commonly-accepted null model, yielding the highest-known performance for this context at 80.8% case level accuracy. To our knowledge, this dataset and analysis represent one of the largest explorations of recurring human prediction to date, and our results provide additional empirical support for the use of crowdsourcing as a prediction method.


Title: Mild cognitive impairment: classification method and procedure. Abstract: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is one of the most important clinical entities in the field of cognitive neuroscience, the size of their numbers and the possible evolution of some of the subtypes of dementia. The aim of this study is to test a method and procedure for classification of MCI in terms of neuropsychological test scores and its convergence with established clinical criteria, and analyze the differences between the resulting groups. After applying the inclusion-exclusion criteria, was as- sessed using a battery of neuropsychological tests to 39 people aged be- tween 60 and 89 years. Diagnostic groups were established by psychomet- ric criteria and a cluster analysis and satisfactory results were obtained by analyzing the coherence between the two criteria. There is a significant number of subjects diagnosed with MCI (43.6% and 53.9% as a function of each criterion), showing them lower levels of schooling than healthy controls. MCI prevention and the definition of subtypes is necessary, al- though the use of criteria: objective, scientifically valid and assess different cognitive domains, is an appropriate mechanism to be analysis and diag-


The presence of employers and jobs on American Indian reservations has been difficult to analyze due to limited data. We are the first to geocode confidential data on employer establishments from the U.S. Census Longitudinal Business Database to identify location on or off American Indian reservations. We identify the per capita establishment count and jobs in reservation-based employer establishments for most federally recognized reservations. Comparisons to nearby non-reservation areas in the lower 48 states across 18 industries reveal that reservations have a similar sectoral distribution of employer establishments but have significantly fewer of them in nearly all sectors, especially when the area population is below 15,000 (as it is on the vast majority of reservations and for the majority of the reservation population). By contrast, the total number of jobs provided by reservation establishments is, on average, at par with or somewhat higher than in nearby county areas but is concentrated among casino-related and government employers. An implication is that average job numbers per establishment are higher in these sectors on reservations, including those with populations below 15,000, while the remaining industries are typically sparser within reservations (in firm count and jobs per capita). Geographic and demographic factors, such as population density and per capita income, statistically account for some but not all of these differences.


Photo-realistic free-viewpoint rendering of real-world scenes using classical computer graphics techniques is challenging, because it requires the difficult step of capturing detailed appearance and geometry models. Recent studies have demonstrated promising results by learning scene representations that implicitly encode both geometry and appearance without 3D supervision. However, existing approaches in practice often show blurry renderings caused by the limited network capacity or the difficulty in finding accurate intersections of camera rays with the scene geometry. Synthesizing high-resolution imagery from these representations often requires time-consuming optical ray marching. In this work, we introduce Neural Sparse Voxel Fields (NSVF), a new neural scene representation for fast and high-quality free-viewpoint rendering. NSVF defines a set of voxel-bounded implicit fields organized in a sparse voxel octree to model local properties in each cell. We progressively learn the underlying voxel structures with a diffentiable ray-marching operation from only a set of posed RGB images. With the sparse voxel octree structure, rendering novel views can be accelerated by skipping the voxels containing no relevant scene content. Our method is over 10 times faster than the state-of-the-art (namely, NeRF) at inference time while achieving higher quality results. Furthermore, by utilizing an explicit sparse voxel representation, our method can easily be applied to scene editing and scene composition. We also demonstrate several challenging tasks, including multi-scene learning, free-viewpoint rendering of a moving human, and large-scale scene rendering.


A 45-T hybrid magnet is being built at the High Field Magnet Laboratory of the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The hybrid magnet consists of a 12-T cable-in- conduit-conductor (CICC) Nb 3Sn superconducting outsert and a 33-T resistive insert magnet. To verify the CICC design, a thorough testing has been completed in the SULTAN facility at Swiss Plasma Center, EPFL in Villigen (Switzerland) for the medium- grade conductor of the outsert. In two test campaigns, the dc cable performance (current-sharing temperature, critical current), the ac loss, and the conductor's performance stability during cyclic loading and after one warmup and cooldown cycle have been investigated. Two different cable layouts were tested-one with a very short twist pitch (STP) and the second one with a long twist pitch (LTP) cabling pattern. As both conductors were made of the same Nb 3Sn strand and underwent the same heat treatment and sample preparation procedure, the effect of the twist pitch on the ac loss and on the dc performance with respect to cyclic loading could be reliably evaluated. The test results show that both cable layouts are actually very robust. The cable could withstand 2000 load cycles and the warmup and cooldown cycle without any significant degradation of the dc performance, and even the overloading at BI product (field multiplied by current) approximately two times larger than those foreseen during magnet operation did not lead to a big performance change. Small differences between the STP and LTP options have been observed, indicating that the STP conductor withstands high electromagnetic loads better than the LTP one.


Plato's dialogues can be read as a carefully staged exhibition and investigation of paideia, education in the broadest sense, including all that affects the formation of character and mind. The twentieth century textbook Plato — the Plato of the Myth of the Cave and the Divided Line, the ascent to the Good through Forms and Ideas — is but one of his elusive multiple authorial personae, each taking a different perspective on his investigations. As its focused problems differ, each Platonic dialogue exhibits a somewhat different model for learning; each adds a distinctive dimension to Plato's fully considered counsel for education. Setting aside the important difficult questions about the chronological sequence in which the dialogues were written and revised, we can trace the argumentative rationale of Plato's fully considered views on paideia, on who should be educated by whom for what, on the stages and presuppositions of different kinds of learning. Those views are inextricably connected with his views about the structure of the soul, about the virtues and the politeia that can sustain a good life; and about cosmology and metaphysics.


Deep convolutional network architectures are often assumed to guarantee generalization for small image translations and deformations. In this paper we show that modern CNNs (VGG16, ResNet50, and InceptionResNetV2) can drastically change their output when an image is translated in the image plane by a few pixels, and that this failure of generalization also happens with other realistic small image transformations. Furthermore, we see these failures to generalize more frequently in more modern networks. We show that these failures are related to the fact that the architecture of modern CNNs ignores the classical sampling theorem so that generalization is not guaranteed. We also show that biases in the statistics of commonly used image datasets makes it unlikely that CNNs will learn to be invariant to these transformations. Taken together our results suggest that the performance of CNNs in object recognition falls far short of the generalization capabilities of humans.


In 2011, Tunisia achieved a successful democratic transition, albeit not yet a consolidation of democracy. It did so while adhering to a relationship between religion and politics that follows the pattern of what I have called the "twin tolerations." The first toleration is that of religious citizens toward the state. It requires that they accord democratically elected officials the freedom to legislate and govern without having to confront denials of their authority based on religious claims—such as the claim that "Only God, not man, can make laws." The second toleration requires that laws and officials must permit religious citizens, as a matter of right, to freely express their views and values within civil society, and to freely take part in politics, as long as religious activists and organizations respect other citizens' constitutional rights and the law.


Classical, non-equilibrium systems of diffusing species or entities undergoing depletion, evaporation and reaction processes are at the heart of many problems in Physics,
Chemistry, Biology and Financial Mathematics. It is well known that fluctuations and correlations in statistical systems can have a profound influence on the macroscopic
properties of the system. However, the traditional rate equations that describe the evolution of mean populations in time and space do not incorporate statistical
fluctuations.
This becomes an issue of great importance when population densities are low. In order
to develop a stochastic description of birth-and-death processes beyond the mean field
approximation I employ techniques in classical many-body Physics in a manner analogous
to the treatment of quantum systems. I obtain promising results to understand
and quantify the exact circumstances of the failure of the mean-field approximation in
specific problems in Astrophysics, namely heterogeneous chemical reactions in interstellar
clouds, and in Aerosol Science, namely heterogeneous nucleation processes, and
deliver the means to manipulate the alternative stochastic framework according to the
Doi-Peliti formalism. In this framework the mean population of a species is given by
the average of a solution to a set of constraint equations over all realisations of the
stochastic noise. The constraint equations are inhomogeneous stochastic partial differential
equations with multiplicative real or complex Gaussian noise. In general, these equations cannot be solved analytically. Therefore I resort to the numerical implementation of the Doi-Peliti formalism. The main code is written in the GNU C language,
some algebraic calculations are performed by means of the MapleV package. In the
case of large population densities the stochastic framework renders the same results
as the mean field approximation whereas for low population densities its predictions
differ substantially from the calculations using the traditional model.


While advance directives hold a great deal of promise for ensuring self-determination and quality of life near its end, the majority of Americans face life-threatening illness without having completed effective advance care planning. This volume recounts the history of advance directives, chronicling the evolution of an approach that initially focused on completing forms, to one that now emphasises more comprehensive strategies for facilitating conversations about end-of-life care and planning for dying and death. It provides helpful strategies for initiating and guiding discussions among providers, patients, and their loved ones, easing the burdens of uncertainty, and improving the efficacy of surrogate decision making near the end of life. Scholars and practitioners from a variety of disciplines provide a well-rounded view of the history and challenges of advance directives. Authors include palliative care physicians, nurses, social workers, grief counsellors, educators, lawyers, psychologists, sociologists, and medical ethicists. The book shares successful strategies on how effective advance care planning can provide smoother transitions at the end of life and ensure better quality of living before death. It incorporates effective multidisciplinary, relationship-based models of advance care planning along with multidisciplinary perspectives to help caregiving professionals initiate conversations and disseminate relevant information to patients and their loved ones and advocates. Case studies illustrate the importance of, challenges with, and prospects for advance directives and advance care planning. The book addresses common barriers to advance care planning and offers ways to overcome them, as well as detailing public health, legal, and comprehensive community planning approaches to change how our current American society deals with dying, death, and end-of-life care. Key Features:Introduces a multidisciplinary, pragmatic approach to advance care planningAddresses strategies to reform advance care planningPresents case studies illustrating the importance, benefits, and challenges of advance directivesFeatures successful initiatives in advance care planning and new directions that shift community practice related to dying, death, and end-of-life care. Includes the contributions of physicians, grief counsellors, medical ethicists, social workers, psychologists, medical ethicists, lawyers, nurses, educators, and others


Forced to address human-induced climate change, the world has embarked on the transition to a low-carbon economy, requiring massive amounts of financing. Municipalities in the US have begun to issue bonds that are third-party certified and registered with the Climate Bonds Initiative (CBI) to attract funding for much-needed climate-related infrastructure. As this market is developing, borrowers and lenders are assessing the potential for new risk–return trade-offs over time. Variations in the pricing of CBI-certified municipal bonds with different terms to maturity likely depend on the extent to which climate-related projects are expected to be prioritized in fund allocations to correspond to increases in public attention to the dynamics of climate change. As the pricing of time-dependent climate-related risks progresses, the market for CBI-certified bonds promises to become an efficient funding mechanism for communities grappling with climate risks while expanding the menu of risk–return choices for investors. TOPICS: ESG investing, risk management, fixed-income portfolio management Key Findings • The yields of municipal bonds that are certified to address the risks associated with climate change appear to decline relative to the yields of comparable conventional bonds with lengthening maturities. • The dynamic nature of the climate risks and the public's growing willingness to prioritize climate-related projects are likely factors in the bonds' time-dependent pricing. • This emerging market segment may develop into a valuable funding mechanism for climate-conscious municipalities while expanding the menu of risk–return opportunities for investors.


Slim slime robot (SSR), that looks like an active cord mechanism (snake like robot) and is composed by units that can stretch, shrink and bend actively, is meant to be used for several tasks in narrow spaces such as moving under collapsed houses or for inspection of pipelines in plants. We propose a new concept named "bridle drive", that was developed from the prototype model of the units of the SSR-2.3 that has units of the bridle bellows composed of a large caliber bellows and wire lock systems. The use of the bellows allows to produce a high output using air pressure, and its shape can be changed by controlling the length of the wires. In this paper, to solve problems of the previous model of the bridle bellows, we modified its brake systems and propose a new control method named PCBS.


It is pleasing to see that the Environmental Protection Authority is aiming to achieve more rigour in assessing the need for and the appropriateness of particular offset initiatives. Offsets have been an important aspect of environmental management and decision making in Western Australia for many years. The Commission is particularly interested in the maintenance or enhancement of ecological function and biodiversity as an outcome of offsets and the following comments are made in that light.


Purpose of the article: There are more kinds of used financial sources and the chargeable of them are termed as capital. They can can be divided into two basic groups according to the legal position of the provider, namely into equity and debt. Each item of capital is connected with some costs because of the existence of risk. There is generally known, that owners bear a higher rate of risk than creditors, thus the cost of equity should be higher than cost of debt. But there are also differences in risk rates within each group of capital, because there are more kinds of equity and debt. So the cost of every item of equity and debt should be estimated differently. Furthermore, there is used a mezzanine capital, which has some characteristics of both equity and debt.
Methodology/methods: There is implemented a secondary research based on studying existing literature dedicated to either kinds of capital, including the mezzanine capital, or cost of capital. The existing theory about estimating cost of equity and debt is consequently applied on individual types of mezzanine capital.
Scientific aim: This article has its aim to estimate cost of mezzanine capital, which can be used in three basic forms, namely senior subordinated debt, convertible subordinated debt or redeemable preferred stock. To fulfill this aim, there is used the theory of estimating cost of common and preferred stock and the theory of options.
Findings: The providers of senior subordinated debt bear a higher risk than other "classical" creditors, which is analogous to holders of common and preferred stock. So the difference between cost of these two kinds of debt (before interest tax shield) should be the same as the difference between cost of common and preferred stock. By estimating cost of convertible subordinated debt can be used the theory of options. So the convertible subordinated debt is divided into two parts, debt itself and the call option, whose cost is estimated as cost of equity. Costs of both parts are added up. Cost of redeemable preferred stock is estimated by using the theory of options, too. But in this case, the holder of preferred stock is in the short position, which means, that cost of this option is subtracted from the cost of preferred stock itself.
Conclusions: Cost of any types of mezzanine capital is higher than cost of debt, but lower than cost of equity, which is related to the rate of risk. Furthermore, cost of senior subordinated debt is lower than cost of convertible subordinated debt and cost of this type of mezzanine capital is lower than cost of redeemable preferred stock, because of different rates of risk, too. So using mezzanine capital can significantly affect the capital structure and the weighted average cost of capital.


When I was a child, the chant I always associated with Islamism was "the Qur'an is our constitution." Gradually it has been replaced, however, with the mantra of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, "Islam is the solution." These simplistic tropes seem similar, but the difference between them is significant. In many ways, this distinction lies at the heart of the considerable contribution that Ran Hirschl has made in his fine work, Constitutional Theocracy, to the understanding of constitutional governance in societies where there is a substantial legal and formal recognition of religion. However, this distinction also reveals the biggest problem in his analysis. Simply stated, one of these slogans ("the Qur'an is our constitution") is logically incompatible not only with modern constitutional governance but also with the very notion of the Westphalian nation-state, while the other ("Islam is the solution") is not. To many people raised in a secular tradition, constitutional governance is necessarily secular. It is precisely this belief, often so thoroughly internalized that it is not questioned, that Hirschl convincingly critiques. While he acknowledges that the marriage of theocratic and constitutional governance is one fraught with friction, Hirschl also points out – correctly – that the two systems have far more in common than has been previously acknowledged. Less convincing is what I might describe as an ancillary thesis, though one Hirschl takes quite seriously, which is that the constitutional theocratic structure is a rational and prudent secular response to growing global religious fervor. Hirschl argues that constitutional theocracy is designed to empower courts, with their secularly trained elite judges, to interpret religious mandate, thereby constraining, limiting, and in some cases neutering the more radical religious claims. I do not mean that Hirschl is entirely wrong about this, for surely he is describing some fair number of constitutional theocratic states accurately. Yet understood as a global feature of constitutional theocracy, his description seems flawed in at least two respects. First, the notion of court as secularizing agent may be widely applicable but, as Hirschl well knows, is by no means universal. Second, and more importantly, Hirschl seems to be conflating two different phenomena. The first are traditional and informal forces of law-making and law interpretation, from tribal councils to local priests (i.e., those likely to proclaim Qur'an as constitution), that any state instrument, including a court, would seek to constrain and limit for reasons that anyone who has read her Weber knows well. The second are religio-political movements operating within the state and competing for maximum control over state institutions and apparatus. To assume that these immensely popular movements, which are perfectly comfortable within a national constitutional structure (but still believe Islam to be the solution), will not be able to exercise significant influence over a judiciary seems fanciful and difficult to defend, at least as an empirical matter. It seems that Hirschl therefore describes not so much the successful constraining of religion by forces of secularism so much as the destruction of the traditional mechanisms for the creation of religious law and their replacement with something altogether different – whether the new mechanisms be secular or simply some dramatic mutation of religio-legal norms as to enable them to fit better within a modern state paradigm. The review proceeds in two Parts. Part One describes Hirschl's central thesis and explains why it is a fresh and compelling contribution. Part Two describes the ancillary claim that the courts in constitutional theocracies operate as secular agents and some of the problems associated there with.


This paper focusses on the study of the Map Alignment problem in a multirobot SLAM context. Given a team of robots, we consider the situation in which each robot is building its own local map independently. These maps are landmark-based and three-dimensional. The local maps built by the different robots will have different reference systems. At some point, it may be interesting to express all maps in the same reference system. In that way, the maps can be fused into a unique global one. This is known as the map fusion problem and can be tackled by dividing the problem into two subproblems: map alignment and map merging. In this paper, we concentrate on the map alignment problem which consist on computing the transformation between the local maps so that we have one reference system. We therefore evaluate a set of aligning methods. These methods establish correspondences between each pair of maps and compute an initial estimate of the alignment. Finally, we apply the least squares minimization to obtain a more accurate solution. We also concentrate on the case in which we want to align more than two local maps. In this case, the alignment must be globally consistent. For the experiments, real data are used. Each robot extracts distinctive 3D points from the environment with a stereo camera. Then, the robots use these observations as landmarks to build their maps while simultaneously localize themselves. The SLAMproblem is solved using the FastSLAM algorithm. The movements of the robots occur only in 2D plane, so although the maps are 3D landmark-based, the alignment takes place only in 2D.


Background: The BioCreative series of competitive evaluations of text mining systems provide a major test bed for
novel techniques in biomedical text mining. Results from the previous and current competition are of fundamental
importance for further development in the area.

Results: The OntoGene group participated in all tasks of the current edition. Preliminary results seem satisfactory,
however a detailed analysis cannot be performed without a comparison with the results of the other participants.


Millions of people wear some kind of wristband activity tracker and use the device to monitor their own exercise and health, often sharing the data with their physician. But is the data accurate? Such people can take heart in knowing that if the device is measuring heart rate, it's probably doing a good job, a team of researchers at the School of Medicine reports. But if it's measuring energy expenditure, it's probably off by a significant amount. An evaluation of seven devices in a diverse group of 60 volunteers showed that six of the devices measured heart rate with an error rate of less than 5 percent. The team evaluated the Apple Watch, Basis Peak, Fitbit Surge, Microsoft Band, Mio Alpha 2, PulseOn and the Samsung Gear S2. Some devices were more accurate than others, and factors such as skin color and body mass index affected the measurements. In contrast, none of the seven devices measured energy expenditure accurately, the study found. Even the most accurate device was off by an average of 27 percent. And the least accurate was off by 93 percent. "People are basing life decisions on the data provided by these devices," said Euan Ashley, DPhil, FRCP, professor of cardiovascular medicine, of genetics and of biomedical data science at Stanford. But consumer devices aren't held to the same standards as medical-grade devices, and it's hard for doctors to know what to make of heart-rate data and other data from a patient's wearable device, he said. A paper reporting the researchers' findings was published online May 24 in the Journal of Personalized Medicine. Ashley is the senior author. Lead authorship is shared by graduate student Anna Shcherbina, visiting assistant professor Mikael Mattsson, PhD, and senior research scientist Daryl Waggott.


Abstract One of the key uncertainties surrounding the impacts of climate change in Africa is the effect on the sustainability of rural water supplies. Many of these water supplies abstract from shallow groundwater (<50 m) and are the sole source of safe drinking water for rural populations. Analysis of existing rainfall and recharge studies suggests that climate change is unlikely to lead to widespread catastrophic failure of improved rural groundwater supplies. These require only 10 mm of recharge annually per year to support a hand pump, which should still be achievable for much of the continent, although up to 90 million people may be affected in marginal groundwater recharge areas (200–500 mm annual rainfall). Lessons learnt from groundwater source behaviour during recent droughts, substantiated by groundwater modelling, indicate that increased demand on dispersed water points, as shallow unimproved sources progressively fail, poses a much greater risk of individual source failure than regional resource depletion. Low yielding sources in poor aquifers are most at risk. Predicted increased rainfall intensity may also increase the risk of contamination of very shallow groundwater. Looking to the future, an increase in major groundwater-based irrigation systems, as food prices rise and surface water becomes more unreliable, may threaten long-term sustainability as competition for groundwater increases. To help prepare for increased climate variability, it is essential to understand the balance between water availability, access to water, and use/demand. In practice, this means increasing access to secure domestic water, understanding and mapping renewable and non-renewable groundwater resources, promoting small-scale irrigation and widening the scope of early warning systems and mapping to include access to water.


Objective To assess the frequency and possible risk indicators of severe hypoglycemia in insulin-dependent (type I) diabetic patients with impaired kidney function. Research Design and Methods Retrospective follow-up examination of case subjects and control subjects with mean follow-up periods of 2.9 and 1.3 yr, respectively. The setting was the diabetes center at the Düsseldorf University hospital. Subjects were consecutive type I diabetic patients. Case subjects consisted of 44 patients with initial serum creatinine levels of ≥133 μM and pathological proteinuria. Control subjects consisted of 46 patients with normal serum creatinine levels matched for age, duration of diabetes, and hypertension; 57% of case subjects and 67% of control subjects were being treated with p-blockers. Incidence of severe hypoglycemia (cases/patient-yr) was assessed through an interviewer-administered questionnaire. Results At comparable levels of HbA1c (7.9 ±1.8 vs. 7.6 ± 1.1%), case subjects had a fivefold higher incidence of severe hypoglycemic episodes (1.28 vs. 0.25 cases/patient-yr, P <0.02) than control subjects. Within the group with impaired kidney function, patients with severe hypoglycemic episodes had lower HbA1c levels (7.4 ± 1.6 vs. 8.7 ± 2.0%, P <0.03) and a lower body mass index (22.0 ± 3.4 vs. 24.4 ± 3.8 kg/m2 P <han those without severe hypoglycemic episodes, whereas serum creatinine levels, body weight-related insulin dosage (U kg−1 day−1), prevalence of blindness, autonomic neuropathy, and treatment with β-blockers were comparable. Conclusions Type I diabetic patients with impaired kidney function are at an excessively high risk of severe hypoglycemia. In addition to low HbA1c levels, a low body mass index appears to be a risk indicator for this adverse effect of insulin therapy.


Onychomycosis is a chronic infection disease that is induced by different types of fungi. Changes of nail color, shape and thickness are disease clinical findings. The disease affects all ages and genders of people, however higher incidence is observed in the people who have reduced immunity. To study natural immunity of the nail, 22 nail biopsies from onychomycosis patients were taken. Material was stained with hematoxilin and eosin and immunohistochemical methods were used. We found the nests of hypertrophy in the granulose layer of the epidermis, with focal acanthosis. In the horn layer, we identified the nests of parakeratosis of various sizes, with the incorporations of homogenous and eosinophil masses. We found high levels of IL-6 and IL-10 positive cells in the bed of the nail and in the bloodstream. IL-1, however, was not a part of any of the functional units of any of the nails. High amount hBD-2-containing fibres was found in the bed and the plate of the nail. Interestingly, hBD-3 and hBD-4 were not found in any of the samples. So, when it comes to onychomycosis infected nails, the most effective morphopathogenic processes include cytokine and defensin excretion occurs in the bed of the nail.


The sport of disc golf has grown, and is still growing, at an astounding rate. Despite all of disc golf's positive qualities, it can be harmful to the natural ecology of the area in which it is played. Disc golf has been documented to cause such environmental degradation as greatly increased erosion, soil compaction, significant trampling of undergrowth and loss of vegetative cover, as well as persistent damage to trees, such as the stripping of bark, leaves, and branches and indentations and nicks made by the discs, which can result in tree death. Because of the sport's increasing popularity and negative ecological impacts, it is important to know whether the benefits of disc golf courses are worth the cost. Moreover, because there are mitigation techniques available to offset the negative impacts of disc golf such as behavioral modification, tree-wrapping, and mulching, it would also be beneficial to know whether players would be willing to pay, and how much, to help fund mitigation costs. Using the non-marketvaluation survey techniques of contingent valuation and contingent behavior analysis, this study examines players' recreational demand for disc golf at Richmond Hill Disc Golf Course in Asheville, NC, and their willingness to pay(WTP) to maintain the park. Results of this study indicate that there is a high demand for disc golf recreation at Richmond Hill, players value course maintenance positively, and are willing to change their behavior to offset negative impacts. The data collected from this study provides helpful information for making decisions, such asexpected levels of course use and how to fund maintenance, at proposed and existing disc golf courses.


This article highlights the benefits of incorporating the qualitative perspective, and in particular the use of life stories, in studies based on the life-course perspective. These benefits will be illustrated using as an example a study of the effects of social protection measures on career paths based on the theoretical underpinnings of SEN's (1987, 1992, 1993) capability approach. The life-course perspective is a very good methodological option for evaluating the extent to which social protection systems are adapted to the present situation in labor markets, where many trajectories are non-linear and unstable. Studies adopting such a perspective use research designs in which secondary statistical data are central, whereas qualitative data are used little, if at all. This article will explain how these quantitative approaches can be improved by using semi-structured interviews and a formalized qualitative analysis to identify turning points, critical events, transitions and stages, in which social protection measures and resources play a significant role in redressing or channeling personal and career paths. Paying attention to the person and his or her agency—not only at a given time but in a broader perspective that embraces past episodes and projections into the future—is essential in order to consider how individuals use the resources at their disposal and to effectively evaluate the effects of social protection measures. URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1103152


A Distributed Event-based System (DEBS) exhibits its desired behavior through its functional components collaborating with each other via event exchanging. Due to loose-coupling and flexibility, DEBS applications have become increasingly popular. Indeed, such systems are expected to appear in various application domains such as large-scale Internet applications and ubiquitous computing. Notwithstanding their popularity, current DEBS applications are still often developed in an informal process and are not modularized. On the individual event level, current DEBS developers can define what events a component can accept and publish, and, by registering event handlers, what action an event can trigger. Currently, developers lack structuring mechanisms for representing event interactions and dependencies in a modular way. While current research has made fruitful contributions to various aspects in the DEBS paradigm, such as, event delivery, event detection and composition, event visibility, its emphasis is on the individual event level. In this thesis, we advocate that by designing a new DEBS metamodel with extended behavioral interfaces and high-level structure mechanisms, we can (1) define an interface-based modular approach to model and design DEBS applications, (2) implement a prototype framework on a P2P network that provides built-in support to our proposed interface-based DEBS development, and (3) provide case studies illustrating the interface-based development process and the applicability of our proposed approach.


from the article): Several online forums exist to facilitate open and/or anonymous discussion of the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Data integrity is a common discussion topic, and it is widely assumed that publicity surrounding such matters will accelerate correction of the scientific record. This study aimed to test this assumption by examining a collection of 497 papers for which data integrity had been questioned either in public or in private. As such, the papers were divided into two sub-sets: a public set of 274 papers discussed online, and the remainder a private set of 223 papers not publicized. The sources of alleged data problems, as well as criteria for defining problem data, and communication of problems to journals and appropriate institutions, were similar between the sets. The number of laboratory groups represented in each set was also similar (75 in public, 62 in private), as was the number of problem papers per laboratory group (3.65 in public, 3.54 in private). Over a study period of 18 months, public papers were retracted 6.5-fold more, and corrected 7.7-fold more, than those in the private set. Parsing the results by laboratory group, 28 laboratory groups in the public set had papers which received corrective action, versus 6 laboratory groups in the private set. For those laboratory groups in the public set with corrected/retracted papers, the fraction of their papers acted on was 62% of those initially flagged, whereas in the private set this fraction was 27%. Such clustering of actions suggests a pattern in which correction/retraction of one paper from a group correlates with more corrections/retractions from the same group, with this pattern being stronger in the public set. It is therefore concluded that online discussion enhances levels of corrective action in the scientific literature. Nevertheless, anecdotal discussion reveals substantial room for improvement in handling of such matters.


This Article explores a problem faced by many wedded same-sex couples: the difficulty in obtaining a divorce. Suppose two men from Pennsylvania travel to Massachusetts to obtain a marriage license and return to Pennsylvania shortly thereafter. If their marriage breaks down, the couple will be unable to divorce in the state because Pennsylvania refuses to recognize the marriage for any purpose. Moreover, due to Massachusetts' residency requirement, the couple cannot simply travel back to Massachusetts to divorce. Because this problem is in part encouraged by state miniDOMAs, and the Supreme Court has the opportunity to rule on DOMA's constitutionality, this Article will also explore the various rationales for holding DOMA unconstitutional, how each affects mini-DOMAs, and thus same-sex divorce. If miniDOMAs are permitted to stand, this Article urges that all States be required to recognize same-sex marriage at least for the limited purpose of granting divorce so that married same-sex couples will no longer find themselves "wedlocked."


We introduce the Dammann phase-encoding method into original distorted gratings and propose a modified distorted grating, called a distorted Dammann grating (DDG), to realize multiplane imaging of several tens of layers within the object field onto a single image plane. This property implies that the DDG makes it possible to achieve simultaneously high axial resolving power and large axial imaging range without scanning. This DDG should be of high interest for its potential applications in real-time three-dimensional optical imaging and tracking. Multiplane imaging of 7×7 object layers onto a single camera plane is experimentally demonstrated using a 7×7 DDG for an objective of NA=0.127.


Objective

To develop a new strategy for generating an animal model of temporal lobe epilepsy.

Methods

A total of 160 healthy adult male SD rats were used to generate the models of temporal lobe epilepsy by three kinds of techniques and select an optimal technique to generate a suitable model of temporal lobe epilepsy. The animals were assigned to a amygdale-kindling control group (AKC group), lithium chloride-pilocarpine control group (LPC group), a lithium chloride-pilocarpine followed by amygdale-kindling group (PAK group). Other healthy normal rats were used as normal rat control group (NRC group). The epileptic seizures, the EEG changes, the expression of ZnT3, Glial Fibrillary Acidic Protein (GFAP), and GABAA receptors, the number of hippocampal pyramidal cells detected by Nissl's staining were compared among groups.

Results

The rate of successful model of temporal lobe epilepsy, the spontaneous seizures in the PAK group were significantly greater than those in the AKC group. The mortality in the PAK group was significantly decreased compared to the LPC group. The decreased number of pyramidal cells and GABAA receptors, MFS and astrocyte hyperplasia were found in the hippocampus of the epileptic rats in the PAK, AKC and LPC groups. Compared with the traditional amygdala kindling model, intraperitoneal injection of lithium chloride-pilocarpine combined with amygdala kindling (PAK group) decreased the time of modeling, increased the success rate of temporal lobe epilepsy modeling. Compared with the traditional lithium chloride-pilocarpine model, the mortality decreased significantly in the improved model (PAK group). The pathological features of the reformative model (PAK group) were consistent with the results of the amygdala kindling model (AKC group) and lithium chloride-pilocarpine model(LPC group). It is a viable way to improve the rat model of temporal lobe epilepsy.

Conclusions

The strategies for developing an temporal lobe epilepsy model in our study might be a reliable method. Such strategies increased the success rate of preparing the model of temporal lobe epilepsy than single amygadale kindling and decreased the mortality compared with the single lithium chloride-pilocarpine model.


This article explores the historical changes in the national identity of the Korean minority in China from the period of Japanese colonial invasion through to the present. Existing studies have taken an ethno-cultural approach to the Korean minority's dual identity, but they have ignored the importance of political identity-formation which creates, re-creates, and transforms national identity. The Korean minority's national identity has been determined by political and economic factors rather than ethnic and cultural backgrounds. In this regard, the Korean minority's double-minded self-understanding of its own nationhood has shifted from an ethnicity-centred dual identity to a nationality-centred dual identity. This article notes that the Korean minority's national identity has been created and re-created by political identity-formation, and its imagination of ethnicity has been transformed through this political process.


There appears to be little support for an initiation of continental glacierization in the Palaeogene. The palaeobiological evidence indicates warm–temperate climates in the Antarctic Peninsula and Wilkes Land coast of East Antarctica. Glacial marine sediments from JOIDES Leg 28, oxygen-isotope analyses from Leg 29, global sea level changes and palaeontological investigations favour the development of full-bodied ice sheets from local, longer lived icefields and glaciers only in the late Cenozoic (after the lower Miocene) with a possible maximum about 5 m.y. BP. Recent geophysical exploration has enabled a model for the evolution of the East Antarctic ice sheet to be developed. The Transantarctic Mountains, the north-eastern sector of the Gamburtsev Mountains and other, smaller subglacial mountain massifs within continental East Antarctica provided growth centres for the ice sheet. Extensive glacial erosion took place within these highland areas at this time. Many glacial valleys in the Transantarctic Mountains were subsequently utilized by outlet glaciers of the ice sheet. Tectonic implications of the growth model indicate that the Transantarctic Mountains were probably 1500–2000 m lower at the commencement of glaciation, and that the initial vertical movements of the Victoria Orogeny began in the Eocene in response to the crustal separation of the Australian and Antarctic lithospheric plates.


ABSTRACT Purpose: Following a first phase of trachoma mapping in Malawi with the Global Trachoma Mapping Project, we identified and mapped trachoma districts previously suspected to be non-endemic, although adjacent to districts with estimated trachoma prevalences indicating a public health problem. Methods: We conducted population-based surveys in eight evaluation units (EUs) comprising eight districts in Malawi (total population 3,230,272). A 2-stage cluster random sampling design allowed us to select 30 households from each of 30 clusters per EU; all residents aged 1 year and older in selected households were examined for evidence of trachomatous inflammation–follicular (TF) and trachomatous trichiasis (TT). Results: None of the eight EUs had a TF prevalence in 1–9-year-olds ≥10%, one district (Dedza) had a TF prevalence between 5.0% and 9.9%, and only one district (Karonga) had a trichiasis prevalence in adults ≥0.2%. Conclusion: The prevalence of TF and TT in six of eight EUs surveyed was consistent with an original categorization of trachoma being unlikely to be a public health problem. In the absence of formal surveys, health management information system data and other locally available information about trachoma is likely to be useful in predicting areas where public health interventions against trachoma are required.


Clinical practice is an essential requirement of any graduate physiotherapy programme. For this purpose, valid and reliable assessment tools are paramount for the measurement of key competencies in the real-world setting. This study aims to determine the internal consistency and inter-rater reliability of a newly developed and validated clinical performance assessment form. A cross-sectional quantitative research design was used, which included paired evaluations of 32 (17 treatment and 15 assessment) student examinations performed by two independent clinical educators. Chronbachs alpha was computed to assess internal consistency and intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC's) with confidence intervals of 95% were computed to determine the percentage agreement between paired examiners. The degree of internal consistency was substantial for all key performance areas of both examinations, except for time and organisational management (0.21) and professionalism (0.42) in the treatment and evaluation examinations respectively. The overall internal consistency was 0.89 and 0.73 for both treatment and assessment examinations, indicating substantial agreement. With regard to agreement between raters, the ICC's for the overall marks were 0.90 and 0.97 for both treatment and assessment examinations. Clinical educators demonstrated a high level of reliability in the assessment of students' competence using the newly developed clinical performance assessment form. These findings greatly underscore the reliability of results obtained through observation of student examinations, and add another tool to the basket of ensuring quality assurance in physiotherapy clinical practice assessment.


Minimalism is our name for the dominant liberal perspective on public policy implementation in contemporary legal scholarship. Minimalism emphasizes public interventions that incorporate market concepts and practices and that centralize and minimize administrative discretion. This essay appraises Minimalism in relation to a competing liberal view of the administrative state. Experimentalism emphasizes interventions in which central government affords broad discretion to local administrative units but measures and assesses their performance in ways designed to induce continuous learning and revision of standards. We fault Minimalist scholarship for ignoring an important reorientation in public policy along Experimentalist lines in the U.S. and elsewhere since the 1990s. We also argue that, in practice, Minimalism is excessively preoccupied with static efficiency norms and price signals and insufficiently attentive to learning and to "weak signals" of risk and opportunity. Experimentalist intervention is a more promising approach in the growing realm of policy areas characterized by uncertainty about both the definition of the relevant problem and its solution.


This empirical paper presents the results of a detailed case-study investigation of co-creation in radical service innovation. The rationale for the paper is that detailed interventions must be tracked to offer a realistic account of how co-creation occurs. This provides a strong empirical contribution to the emerging body of scholars developing the co-creation paradigm, predominantly characterized by conceptual advances in service-dominant logic. Our focus is on radical service innovation, which is disruptive in the sector. The overall aim of the paper is to unravel the nature of microlevel processes of co-creation in radical service innovation.

The study adopts sequential analysis to examine co-creation. Patterns of sequences of actions and interactions associated with 40 incremental developments, involving multiple actors, are investigated. These co-created innovative developments underpin the emergence of a radical telematics-based motor insurance service. The findings suggest that the co-creation path is not simple or uni-faceted, and the paper unravels the nature of complex patterns of activities and interactions, Our in-depth systematic analysis illuminates a combination approach with two main patterns of sequences: one dominated by ad-hoc and enduring independent innovation activities by network actors and one dominated by lead-firm innovation and interaction activity. The findings advance knowledge of the way co-creation occurs in radical service innovation. The study results suggest that managerial attention be placed to, first, finding ways to induce independent innovative behavior from network partners and, second, to the development of interaction mechanisms to foster sharing and visualization of such innovation advances.


The great success of electrochemiluminescence (ECL) for in vitro diagnosis (IVD) and its promising potential in light-emitting devices greatly promote recent ECL studies. More than 45% of ECL articles were published after 2010, and the first international meeting on ECL was held in Italy in 2014. This critical review discusses recent vibrant developments in ECL, and highlights novel ECL phenomena, such as wireless ECL devices, bipolar electrode-based ECL, light-emitting electrochemical swimmers, upconversion ECL, ECL resonance energy transfer, thermoresponsive ECL, ECL using shape-controlled nanocrystals, and ECL as an ion-selective electrode photonic reporter, a paper-based microchip, and a self-powered microfluidic ECL platform. We also comment on the latest progress in bioassays, light-emitting devices and, the computational approach for the ECL mechanism study. Finally, perspectives and key challenges in the near future are addressed (198 references).


This paper studies a training method to jointly estimate an energy-based model and a flow-based model, in which the two models are iteratively updated based on a shared adversarial value function. This joint training method has the following traits. (1) The update of the energy-based model is based on noise contrastive estimation, with the flow model serving as a strong noise distribution. (2) The update of the flow model approximately minimizes the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the flow model and the data distribution. (3) Unlike generative adversarial networks (GAN) which estimates an implicit probability distribution defined by a generator model, our method estimates two explicit probabilistic distributions on the data. Using the proposed method we demonstrate a significant improvement on the synthesis quality of the flow model, and show the effectiveness of unsupervised feature learning by the learned energy-based model. Furthermore, the proposed training method can be easily adapted to semi-supervised learning. We achieve competitive results to the state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning methods.


AIM
The aim of the present study was to describe staff members' perceptions of an information and communication technology (ICT) support package during the process of implementation.

BACKGROUND
ICT in dementia care will likely increase in the future. The diffusion of new innovations can be better understood through diffusion research.

METHODS
Fourteen staff members in dementia care were interviewed, in groups, once before the new ICT, twice during its implementation and once after. Data were analysed using qualitative content analyses. The ICT included monitors/alarms: passage alarms, fall detectors, sensor-activated night-time illumination of the lavatory, and communication technology: Internet communication and additional computers.

RESULTS
The results showed two themes 'Moving from fear of losing control to perceived increase in control and security' and 'Struggling with insufficient/deficient systems'.

CONCLUSIONS
Staff perceptions of ICT were diverse and changed during the implementation. Benefits were more pronounced than disadvantages, and improvements were described both in care and in staff job situation.

IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT
Functioning and use of ICT may relate to design as well as by application and the surrounding structure, and the whole system: the organizational structure, the employers and the new product needs to be taken into consideration when implementing new technology.


How well migratory birds meet en route contingencies depends on their ability to locate resources and avoid sources of stress in an unfamiliar setting. Exploration is a means by which migrants could collect information about the kinds, distribution and abundance of available resources and places safe from predators. We used radio-telemetry to study the movements of 24 summer tanagers (Piranga rubra) during stopover on a barrier island following migration across the Gulf of Mexico. The movement of some individuals was characterized by high linearity and low turn bias (i.e. alternating left and right turns). The combination of left- and right-hand turns while maintaining an overall linear track represents an efficient way of exploring an unfamiliar area. Other summer tanagers restricted their movements to a particular area (e.g. low directionality and high meander ratio), which may reflect less time spent in exploration. Birds that had been on the island for a day and a night displayed a pattern of movement less consistent with exploration than did 'newly arrived' birds. Given pressure to minimize migration time, the time a migrant spends in exploration probably depends on the cost of acquiring information and the benefits to be gained, the ratio of which surely varies among individuals.


Recent studies have shown that the gender-swearing relationship is more complex and context-specific than has been supposed. We adopted a 'communities of practice' framework to contextualize the linguistic practice of swearing and to explore the meanings of this practice for one particular 'community, ' a group of undergraduate drinking friends. Through members' accounts, we can observe their negotiation of specific linguistic categories, and their ongoing (re)definition of 'bad language' as a resource for identity construction. These findings provide insights into the ways in which gender itself becomes redefined and contextualized within particular frames of reference. Both female and male participants reported habitually deploying strong language in the context of shared group enterprises, although a number of subtle, yet persistent gender differences reflect the respondents' location within the wider sociocultural context(s).


Why study government elites? Because the decisions of the great and the good affect all our lives for good or ill. We want to know what ministers, bureaucrats and managers do, why, how, and with what consequences. In other words, we are interested in their reasons, their actions and the effects of both. To understand their reasons we need a political anthropology of government elites. Observing Government Elites studies top-level political office-holders, civil servants and public managers in different countries and the European Union. It describes their world through their eyes, focusing on beliefs and everyday practices. It analyses how such practices are embedded in political-administrative traditions; in webs of institutional rules, routines, rituals, and relations. It explores how their beliefs, practices and traditions create meaning in politics, policy making and public service delivery and it reflects critically on how to do this kind of field work; on being up close and personal. By being there and getting up close to elites in ways that social scientists hardly ever do, the authors provide unique insights into the everyday life of ministers and senior public servants.


Objectives. To estimate the economic burden of untreated perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMADs) among 2017 births in the United States.Methods. We developed a mathematical model based on a cost-of-illness approach to estimate the impacts of exposure to untreated PMADs on mothers and children. Our model estimated the costs incurred by mothers and their babies born in 2017, projected from conception through the first 5 years of the birth cohort's lives. We determined model inputs from secondary data sources and a literature review.Results. We estimated PMADs to cost $14 billion for the 2017 birth cohort from conception to 5 years postpartum. The average cost per affected mother-child dyad was about $31 800. Mothers incurred 65% of the costs; children incurred 35%. The largest costs were attributable to reduced economic productivity among affected mothers, more preterm births, and increases in other maternal health expenditures.Conclusions. The US economic burden of PMADs is high. Efforts to lower the prevalence of untreated PMADs could lead to substantial economic savings for employers, insurers, the government, and society. (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print April 16, 2020: e1-e9. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2020.305619).


Ground-penetrating radar has been used to de- tect and map tree roots using surface-based antennas in reflection mode. On amenable soils these methods can accurately detect lateral tree roots. In some tree species (e.g. Pinus taeda, Pinus palustris), vertically orientated tap roots directly beneath the tree, comprise most of the root mass. It is difficult if not impossible to vertically delineate these roots with surface-based radars. To address this problem, a collaborative project between the USDA Forest Service, Southern Research Station, Radarteam AB and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), was undertaken in August 2003 to assess the potential of high-frequency borehole radar to detect vertical, near-surface reflectors (0-2 m) result- ing from tree roots. A set of controlled experiments on buried logs were used to test the efficacy of crosshole and borehole to surface travel time data to model near surface woody targets with tomography. Using these results, five Pinus sylvestris trees were scanned with borehole to surface radar and tomograms of their root systems were created. Three of the five tomograms compared favorably with root distribution maps made using destructively sampled data. However, the other two trees were misinterpreted, one was sharply underestimated, the other overestimated. This is the first report of using borehole radar to study vertical tree roots. Crosshole tomography provided excellent information on the depth of tree roots, but was less useful for imaging near surface features. Borehole to surface measures provided the best information on the near surface, where the bulk of roots are found (0-0.3 m). The technique has promise in forest re- search, but the development of new high-frequency borehole antennas, and forward modeling software that allows concur- rent processing of travel-time and amplitude data is necessary


Abstract. The current regulations governing production of biofuels in the European Union require that they have to mitigate climate change, by producing >35% less greenhouse gases (GHG) than fossil fuels. There is a risk that this may not be achievable, since land use for crop production inevitably emits the potent GHG nitrous oxide (N2O), due to nitrogen fertilisation and cycling in the environment. We analyse first-generation biofuel production on agricultural land and conclude that efficient agricultural crop production resulting in a good harvest and low N2O emission can fulfil the EU standard, and is possible under certain conditions for the Swedish agricultural and bioethanol production systems. However, in years having low crop yields, and where cropping is on organic soils, total GHG emissions per unit of fuel produced can be even higher than those released by burning of fossil fuels. In general, the N2O emission size in Sweden and elsewhere in northern Europe is such that there is a >50% chance that the 35% saving requirement will not be met. Thus ecosystem N2O emissions have to be convincingly assessed. Here we compare Swedish emission data with values estimated by means of statistical models and by a global, top-down, approach; the measurements and the predictions often show higher values that would fail to meet the EU standard and thus prevent biofuel production development.


We investigate the changes in the optical properties of fused silica exposed to intense infrared femtosecond pulses. The laser-induced absorption spectrum reveals the creation of color centers inside the glass matrix, comparable with those observed in ultraviolet-exposed fused silica. The laser-induced absorption is associated with a laser-induced refractive-index change, which can be used for waveguide fabrication. The change in third-order susceptibility in such waveguides is measured by third-harmonic-generation microscopy as a function of the irradiation parameters.


Abstract The alteration and transformation behaviour of Ceca smectite in two acid and saline solutions (NaCl and KCl) was studied in batch experiments. This type of smectite is proposed as potential backfill material for nuclear waste storage sites. The initial solution was enriched with 500 ppm of U, Th and Eu. The evolution of pH and solution concentrations were measured over a period of 25 months. The mineralogical and chemical evolution of the clays was also studied. X-ray diffraction revealed a significant loss of diffraction intensity and the clays became amorphous to X-rays with increasing reaction time. Deconvolution of the XRD data indicated a continuous collapse of the smectite layers but no illitization. Infrared spectroscopy revealed unchanged smectite spectra at the end of the experiment. Thorium precipitated as amorphous ThO2, but showed an incipient crystallization after 500 days. The Th, Eu and U were neither adsorbed onto the clays nor incorporated into a secondary phase.


Poly(2-methoxyethyl acrylate) (PMEA) has attracted attention as a biocompatible polymer that is used as an antithrombotic coating agent for medical devices, such as during artificial heart and lung fabrication. However, PMEA is a viscous liquid polymer with low Tg, and its physical strength is poor even if a cross-linker is used, so it is difficult to make tough and freestanding objects from it. Here, we design and fabricate a biocompatible elastomer made of tough, self-supporting PMEA-silica composites. The toughness of the composite elastomer increases as a function of silica particle filling, and the stress at break of it is improved from 0.3 MPa to 6.7 MPa. The fracture energy of the composite elastomer with 39.5 vol% silica particles is up to 15 times higher than that of the cross-linked PMEA with no silica particles and the material demonstrates stress-strain behavior that is similar to that of biological soft tissue, which exhibits nonlinear elasticity. In addition, the composite elastomer shows the potential to be an antithrombotic property, while the results of the platelet adhesion test of the composite elastomer show that the number of adhered platelets is not significantly affected by the silica addition. Since the composite elastomer can be rapidly 3D-printed into complex geometries with high resolution features, it is expected to contribute to the development of medical devices from readily available materials.


Designers need to have an empathic understanding of their intended users if they are to design products that fit. This holds especially strong for elderly and children as user groups, because they are very different from the designer. However, it might be harder to obtain this information from children and elderly. This paper describes a research project that explored new approaches to involve children and elderly as a combined user group in the context of user involvement in product development. The research took place in a design setting; the development of an intergenerational movement park. We describe the role these two user groups played in the design process in order to develop new products that help them to be physically and socially active together. The process is examined on two aspects: the combination of the two user groups and the influence of the users on the project. We will discuss the methods used, the outcomes and give recommendations.