Engineered wood products are becoming more prevalent in the residential and commercial construction industries and need to be regulated by standards that ensure their classification and performance requirements. The applicable standard in Australia for the qualification of glued laminated timber is AS/NZS 1328.1:1998 (2011), last revised in 2011. Confusion exists with the specific interpretation of the testing procedures and subsequent methods used for the delamination process. Two methods currently used for product qualification were compared: one using a drying chamber and the other using a standard laboratory dehydrating oven. The trials conducted in accordance with the standard showed a significant difference in glue line delamination between the two testing methods. This was attributed to the lack of humidity and airflow control within the laboratory dehydrating oven and an incomplete drying of the test samples, resulting in different stresses on the glue line. It is evident that the current standard procedure requires clarification to ensure consistency in the test methods and comparable test results.


PURPOSE
To develop an algorithm for detection of metallic fiducial markers in cine MV images, and to assess the prostate movement during RapidArc treatment.

METHODS
A Varian TrueBeam linear accelerator (LINAC) was used to deliver RapidArc treatment for prostate patients. Cine images were acquired with the onboard electronic portal imaging device (EPID) using the MV therapeutic beam. Three metallic fiducial markers were implanted inside the prostate. To detect the fiducial position, we explicitly account for the possible marker blockage by MLC during beam modulation. If the marker is not blocked, we employ the planning coordinates of the marker centroids projected onto the cine MV images and perform template matching in the vicinity of its projection to localize the actual position of the marker. Displacements of the fiducial markers are assessed by comparing the actual and planned positions.

RESULTS
We analyzed ∼280 cine MV images acquired during a 55-sec RapidArc treatment for a prostate patient. The three markers were visible in about 46%, 52%, and 48% of the images, and at least one fiducial was visible during almost entire treatment (97% of the time). The marker detection algorithm agrees well with manual detection (< 0.2 mm). The mean displacement for each fiducial was 0.40 ± 0.42, 0.27 ± 0.29, and 0.46 ± 0.34 mm. The maximum displacement was 2.33, 1.75, and 2.23 mm.

CONCLUSIONS
An algorithm for automatic detection of fiducial markers in cine MV images has been developed. The prostate movement during a RapidArc treatment has been analyzed for a patient with implanted markers. Accurate target positioning is achieved at all times during treatment. In light of the random nature of intrafraction prostate motion, this work represents an important step toward real-time image-guided prostate radiation therapy.


Context. Knowledge of the latitude variation of the solar granulation properties (contrast and scale) is useful to better understand interactions between magnetic field, convection, differential rotation, and meridional circulation in the solar atmosphere. Aims. We investigated the latitude dependence of the contrast and scale of the solar granulation, with the help of HINODE/SOT blue continuum images taken in the frame of the HOP 79 program, along the central meridian and along the equator on a monthly basis in 2009 during the last solar minimum of activity. Methods. We selected the sharpest images in latitude and longitude intervals. The selected images in all the N-S and E-W scans taken in 2009 were combined to get statistically reliable results. Results. The contrast of the solar granulation decreases towards the poles and the scale increases, but not regularly since a perturbation occurs at around 60° where both quantities return close to their values at the disk center. Conclusions. Such a latitude variation in a period of minimum of activity (2009), is probably not due to magnetic field, neither the quiet magnetic field at the surface, nor the strong magnetic flux tubes associated with active regions, which could be embedded more or less deeply in the convection zone before they reach the surface. The decrease in contrast and increase in scale towards the pole seem to be related to the differential rotation and the perturbation around 60° to the meridional circulation.


Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence—movement, affect, and sensation—in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In Parables for the Virtual Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models.

Renewing and assessing William James's radical empiricism and Henri

Bergson's philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. If such concepts are as fundamental as signs and significations, he argues, then a new set of theoretical issues appear, and with them potential new paths for the wedding of scientific and cultural theory. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with new distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, Parables for the Virtual tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan's acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multi-faceted argument.

Parables for the Virtual will interest students and scholars of continental and Anglo-American philosophy, cultural studies, cognitive science, electronic art, digital culture, and chaos theory, as well as those concerned with the "science wars" and the relation between the humanities and the sciences in general.


Objectives: To examine the effectiveness of four interventions on the rate and magnitude of muscle damage recovery, as measured by creatine kinase (CK). Methods: 23 elite male rugby players were monitored transdermally before, immediately after, 36 hours after, and 84 hours after competitive rugby matches. Players were randomly assigned to complete one of four post-match strategies: contrast water therapy (CWT), compression garment (GAR), low intensity active exercise (ACT), and passive recovery (PAS). Results: Significant increases in CK activity in transdermal exudate were observed as a result of the rugby match (p<0.01). The magnitude of recovery in the PAS intervention was significantly worse than in the ACT, CWT, and GAR interventions at the 36 and 84 hour time points (p<0.05). Conclusions: An enhanced rate and magnitude of recovery was observed in the ACT, CWT, and GAR treatment groups when compared with the PAS group. Low impact exercise immediately post-competition, wearing compression garments, or carrying out contrast water therapy enhanced CK clearance more than passive recovery in young male athletes.


1. INTRODUCTION Like the familiar complex numbers x + iy, spacetime numbers x + jt are a two dimensional extension of the one-dimensional real numbers x. In our previous paper [2], we explained how to add, subtract, multiply and divide spacetime numbers. We saw that some features of this arithmetic are identical to arithmetic with complex numbers (like addition and subtraction), but other manipulations (like multiplication and division) were very different. In this paper we introduce a subject of importance in applications of mathematics that has previously only been presented at a level appropriate for researchers or graduate students. We begin with a brief review of key concepts from [2], then introduce the spacetime version of Euler's Formula and use it to represent spacetime numbers. We end by showing how to extend any familiar function of the real variable x to the spacetime variable x + jt. We avoid a rigorous definition-lemma-theorem style in favor of a self-discovery approach. Rigorous presentations are easily found in the references. This paper can be presented to students in calculus, real analysis or complex analysis. The minimum requirement is a familiarity with complex numbers, complex arithmetic, series and Euler's formula for the complex exponential. Problems are given throughout the paper with selected answers appearing in the final section. 2. REVIEW OF IMPORTANT CONCEPTS IMAGE FORMULA6IMAGE FORMULA7IMAGE FORMULA8IMAGE FORMULA9IMAGE FORMULA10IMAGE FORMULA11IMAGE FORMULA12 6. COMMENTS ON THE REFERENCES For further study we suggest the excellent paper by Garret Sobczyk [16]. We strongly recommend this paper even though it does use the terminology of modern abstract algebra. We also recommend the paper by Fjelstad [4]. In this paper Fjelstad explains how he and his students rediscovered spacetime numbers (he calls them perplex numbers). The references by Band [1], Majernik [9] and Ronveaux [11] are letters in response to the paper of Fjelstad and we think the reader will find these interesting. Readers familiar with fractals and the Mandelbrot set will find the papers of Senn [12] and Metzier [10] interesting because they show what the Mandelbrot set looks in the spacetime plane. The paper by Lambert [7] is an amusing critique of this entire enterprise (in French). References [5] and [6] are graduate level textbooks. The remaining references are research papers in the theory and application of spacetime numbers and other related number systems. Our list of references represents only a small part of the available literature. …


Users quality of experience on web systems are largely determined by the tail latency, e.g., 95th percentile. Scaling resources along, e.g., the number of virtual cores per VM, is shown to be effective to meet the average latency but falls short in taming the latency tail in the cloud where the performance variability is higher. The prior art shows the prominence of increasing the request redundancy to curtail the latency either in the off-line setting or without scaling-in cores of virtual machines. In this paper, we propose an opportunistic scaler, termed SmallTail, which aims to achieve stringent targets of tail latency while provisioning a minimum amount of resources and keeping them well utilized. Against dynamic workloads, SmallTail simultaneously adjusts the core provisioning per VM and probabilistically replicates requests so as to achieve the tail latency target. The core of SmallTail is a two level controller, where the outer loops controls the core provision per distributed VMs and the inner loop controls the clones in a finer granularity. We also provide theoretical analysis on the steady-state latency for a given probabilistic replication that clones one out of N arriving requests. We extensively evaluate SmallTail on three different web systems, namely web commerce, web searching, and web bulletin board. Our testbed results show that SmallTail can ensure the 95th latency below 1000 ms using up to 53% less cores compared to the strategy of constant cloning, whereas scaling-core only solution exceeds the latency target by up to 70%.


An integrated setup allowing high resolution photothermal microscopy and laser damage measurements at the same wavelength has been implemented. The microscope is based on photothermal deflection of a transmitted probe beam : the probe beam (633 nm wavelength) and the CW pump beam (1.06 microm wavelength) are collinear and focused through the same objective. In-situ laser irradiation tests are performed thanks to a pulsed beam (1.06 microm wavelength and 6 nanosecond pulse). We describe this new facility and show that it is well adapted to the detection of sub-micronic absorbing defects, that, once located, can be precisely aimed and irradiated. Photothermal mappings are performed before and after shot, on metallic inclusions in dielectric. Results obtained on gold inclusions of about 600 nm in diameter embedded in silica are presented.


A plan to reduce CO2 emissions is a priority these days. Brick industry contributes to the increase of these emissions mainly through the use of combustible pore-forming agents such as sawdust, cellulose, and coal sludge. These agents are used to improve the thermal insulation properties of brick products, and the suppliers regularly increase the prices of these agents based on their high consumption. Therefore, in an effort to reduce raw material expenses and CO2 emissions, brick manufacturers are looking for new possibilities while maintaining the quality of their products. This article discusses the possibility of using industrially manufactured product Vuppor as an additive as a replacement for combustible poreforming agents. The presence of this additive in the fired clay body increases the proportion of pores, especially with a size range between 0.1 and 5 μm, having a positive impact on the reduction of its thermal conductivity. With a 0.5 wt.% dose of Vuppor additive, the brick production costs and thermal conductivity can be reduced by 20 % and 12 %, respectively, while also achieving reductions in CO2 emissions over 60 %. Consequently, the combustible pore-forming agents can be used in a more environmentally friendly manner, for example in the furniture industry, the biogas production, and the like.


This document recommends methods that are intended to improve the
scalability and stability of large networks using Open Shortest Path
First (OSPF) Version 2 protocol. The methods include processing OSPF
Hellos and Link State Advertisement (LSA) Acknowledgments at a higher
priority compared to other OSPF packets, and other congestion
avoidance procedures. This document specifies an Internet Best Current
Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and
suggestions for improvements.


A taxonomy of Internet applications has been created to describe the use of the Internet for project management communication. It is based on the technological characteristics of Internet applications, the requirements of project management communication, and the organizational issues associated with using Internet applications. Its dimensions are the sender/receiver synchronization and the relationship between the number of senders and receivers. The taxonomy is populated with six Internet applications that are used commonly in project management communication. The taxonomy is presented as an aid to understanding the capabilities and limitations of Internet applications for different types of project management communication.


According to the textbook approach, the developmental states of the Far East have been considered as strong and autonomous entities. Although their bureaucratic elites have remained isolated from direct pressures stemming from society, the state capacity has also been utilised in order to allocate resources in the interest of the whole society. Yet, society – by and large –has remained weak and subordinated to the state elite. On the other hand, the general perception of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has been just the opposite. The violent and permanent conflict amongst rent-seeking groups for influence and authority over resources has culminated in a situation where states have become extremely weak and fragmented, while society – depending on the capacity of competing groups for mobilising resources to organise themselves mostly on a regional or local level (resulting in local petty kingdoms) – has never had the chance to evolve as a strong player. State failure in the literature, therefore, – in the context of SSA – refers not just to a weak and captured state but also to a non-functioning, and sometimes even non-existent society, too. Recently, however, the driving forces of globalisation might have triggered serious changes in the above described status quo. Accordingly, our hypothesis is the following: globalisation, especially the dynamic changes of technology, capital and communication have made the simplistic "strong state–weak society" (in Asia) and "weak state–weak society" (in Africa) categorisation somewhat obsolete. While our comparative study has a strong emphasis on the empirical scrutiny of trying to uncover the dynamics of changes in state–society relations in the two chosen regions both qualitatively and quantitatively, it also aims at complementing the meaning and essence of the concepts and methodology of stateness, state capacity and state-society relations, the well-known building blocks of the seminal works of Evans (1995), Leftwich (1995), Migdal (1988) or Myrdal (1968).


Motion-capture techniques are rarely based on orientation measurements for two main reasons: (1) optical motion-capture systems are designed for tracking object position rather than their orientation (which can be deduced from several trackers), (2) known animation techniques, like inverse kinematics or geometric algorithms, require position targets constantly, but orientation inputs only occasionally. We propose a complete human motion-capture technique based essentially on orientation measurements. The position measurement is used only for recovering the global position of the performer. This method allows fast tracking of human gestures for interactive applications as well as high rate recording. Several motion-capture optimizations, including the multijoint technique, improve the posture realism. This work is well suited for magnetic-based systems that rely more on orientation registration (in our environment) than position measurements that necessitate difficult system calibration.


One of the most debated topics of modern extragalactic astrophysics is the co-evolution between the SMBHs sitting in the nuclei of the galaxies and their hosts.
According to the most popular models of AGN and galaxies co-evolution,
starburst galaxies, unobscured quasars and inactive (and quenched) galaxies represent the different phases of an evolutionary sequence reproducing the most massive galaxies observed in the Universe. In this context, gas flows in the form of energetic outflows are postulated to play a pivotal role in this process, given that they regulate both accretion and ejection of material onto and from the SMBH, acting on the fuel from which new stars form and stopping the host galaxy growth.

 In order to validate this AGN-galaxy binding nature, we investigate the kinematic and physical properties of ionized and atomic gas components of the ISM of well selected AGN-galaxy systems, obtained from ultraviolet, optical, near-infrared spectroscopic analysis, to unveil the presence of outflows. In particular, we propose and test different selection criteria to isolate sources at z ~2 in the predicted feedback phase, starting from multiwavelength information collected in the COSMOS field. As a complementary approach, we also collect a large sample of X-ray selected AGNs at z < 0.8 from the SDSS database to unveil the incidence of outflows and prove the crucial role of X-ray observations for the investigation of the feedback phase.

We combine the ionized/neutral gas kinematic and physical conditions with SMBH accretion and host galaxy properties, recovered from multiwavelength spectral energy distribution analysis and X-ray spectroscopic investigation, to infer the general conditions regulating the feedback processes. We also discuss our results in the context of the more recent observational and theoretical clues.


Purpose: This paper investigates whether permanent, one-time retirements are coming to an end just as the trend towards earlier and earlier retirements did nearly 20 years ago. We explore how common bridge jobs are among today's retirees, and how uncommon traditional retirements have become. Methods: Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we explore the work histories and retirement patterns of a cohort of retirees aged 51 to 61 in 1992 over a ten-year time period in both a cross-sectional and longitudinal context. Bridge job determinants are examined using bivariate comparisons and a multinomial logistic regression model of the bridge job decision. Results: We find that one-half to two-thirds of the HRS respondents with full-time career jobs take on bridge jobs before exiting the labor force completely. We also find that bridge job behavior is most common among younger respondents, respondents without defined-benefit pension plans, and respondents at the lower- and upper-end of the wage distribution. Implications: The evidence suggests that changes in the retirement income landscape since the 1980s appear to be taking root. Going forward, traditional retirements will be the exception rather than the rule.


This paper addresses three weaknesses in the literature on new organizational forms: the limited mapping of the extent of contemporary organizational change; confusion about how contemporary changes link together; and the lack of systematic testing of the performance consequences of this kind of change. Drawing on a large-scale survey of organizational innovation in European firms, the paper finds widespread but not revolutionary change in terms of organization structure, processes, and boundaries. Using the economics notion of complementarities, the paper develops contingency and configurational approaches to suggest that organizational innovations will tend to cluster in particular ways and that the performance benefits of these innovations depend on their clustering. Complementarities in performance are explored from both inductive and deductive perspectives. Consistent with the expectations of complementarity theory, high-performing firms appeared to be innovating more and differently than low-performing firms. Again consistent with complementarities, piecemeal changes-with the exception of IT-were found to deliver little performance benefit, while exploitation of the full set of innovations was associated with high performance. Though few European firms were found to exploit the complementarities of new organizational practices, those that did enjoyed high-performance premia.


Geometry is a branch of mathematics that studies of human capabilities in spatial abstraction, measurement, geometry intuition and visualization. As a branch of mathematics, geometry has many benefits in both basic sciences as well as in modern science application. Thus the geometry become to the material that has to be mastered by students in order to improve the quality of their life. This research is a study to define the learning trajectory of students in learning geometry specified in transformation. Learning trajectory can help teachers and students to achieve specific learning goals. It can be done because in the trajectory of learning consist of learning activities that are relevant to the learning objectives. The learning trajectory in this research was designed by applying the principle of realistic mathematics approach that takes advantage of previous experience as a bridge to establish a formal concept. This research was conducted by the research design method which is consisted of three stages to formulate hypothetical Learning Trajectory (HLT) into a Learning Trajectory. HLT testing is done by a formative evaluation approach. The results of this research showed that the learning trajectory were able to stimulate students to show characterizing of each type of transformation geometry. By utilizing Cartesian coordinates as basic foundation, and by assisting other visual media, students may find the concept of formal analytic transformation geometry. Through this formal concept, students can develop their ability in solving others mathematical problems.


This paper unifies the mathematical foundation of three multidimen- sional scaling algorithms: FastMap, MetricMap, and Landmark MDS (LMDS). All three algorithms are based on the Nystrom approximation of the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of a matrix. LMDS is applies the basic Nystrom approximation, while FastMap and MetricMap use generaliza- tions of Nystrom, including deflation and using more points to establish an embedding. Empirical experiments on the Reuters and Corel Image Features data sets show that the basic Nystrom approximation outper- forms these generalizations: LMDS is more accurate than FastMap and MetricMap with roughly the same computation and can become even more accurate if allowed to be slower.


In this investigation, the Questionnaire for User Interaction Satisfaction (QUIS 5.5), a tool for assessing users' subjective satisfaction with specific aspects of the human/computer interface was used to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the Information System for Youth Services (ISYS). ISYS is used by over 600 employees of the Maryland State Department of Juvenile Services (DJS) as a tracking device for juvenile offenders. Ratings and comments were collected from 254 DJS employees who use ISYS. The overall mean rating across all questions was 5.1 on a one to nine scale. The ten highest and lowest rated questions were identified. The QUIS allowed us to isolate subgroups which were compared with mean ratings from four measures of specific interface factors. The comments obtained from users provided suggestions, complaints and endorsements of the system.


Heterochromatin is made of repetitive sequences, mainly transposable elements (TEs), the regulation of which is critical for genome stability. We have analyzed the role of the heterochromatin-associated Su(var)3–7 protein in Drosophila ovaries. We present evidences that Su(var)3–7 is required for correct oogenesis and female fertility. It accumulates in heterochromatic domains of ovarian germline and somatic cells nuclei, where it co-localizes with HP1. Homozygous mutant females display ovaries with frequent degenerating egg-chambers. Absence of Su(var)3–7 in embryos leads to defects in meiosis and first mitotic divisions due to chromatin fragmentation or chromosome loss, showing that Su(var)3–7 is required for genome integrity. Females homozygous for Su(var)3–7 mutations strongly impair repression of P-transposable element induced gonadal dysgenesis but have minor effects on other TEs. Su(var)3–7 mutations reduce piRNA cluster transcription and slightly impact ovarian piRNA production. However, this modest piRNA reduction does not correlate with transposon de-silencing, suggesting that the moderate effect of Su(var)3–7 on some TE repression is not linked to piRNA production. Strikingly, Su(var)3–7 genetically interacts with the piwi and aubergine genes, key components of the piRNA pathway, by strongly impacting female fertility without impairing transposon silencing. These results lead us to propose that the interaction between Su(var)3–7 and piwi or aubergine controls important developmental processes independently of transposon silencing.


The inclusion level of DFS and Laku Pandai (inclusion of access or use of services) have reached 28% and 43%. Nevertheless, when we define the inclusion by account ownership (inclusion of banking account), the inclusion rates drop to 5% and 25%. The lack of awareness of DFS and Laku Pandai is still considered as the major obstacle to broaden the access of financial services through agents. Laku Pandai appears more reliable in improving financial service access for the poor and people in remote areas as it may provide a more efficient access (in term of cost, distance, and time of transport) and perceived by users to provide better service quality than other formal financial services they have experienced thus far. On the other hand, DFS services seems to be more attractive toward more educated and higher income segment of society. Nevertheless, the cost of access of DFS is not much different from the cost of access of banks and other formal financial services while the quality is perceived to be less by its users. Furthermore, the efficiency of both DFS and Laku Pandai could be much improved since there is a significant overcharging in their service fees. On the account ownership, there is an indication that DFS is not a preferable financial access for people who are excluded from formal financial services while it is for Laku Pandai. The regression results also show that users of both DFS and Laku Pandai need time to open or to register an account, possibly due to time needed to build in trust in the agents. Another factor that is important in determining whether user is to open an account is the (perceived) cost. Therefore, the aforementioned service fee overcharging should be taken seriously to improve rate of opening or registering account.


This paper addresses the question which factors influence a farmer in deciding to adopt an innovation. We differentiate between innovations that are new to the farmer, but already well established in the sector, innovations that are early in their process of diffusion, and innovations that are new to the farmer's sector. We use an ordered probit approach to relate adoption behaviour to variables that capture characteristics of the farm (labour and financial resources and market position), of the business environment of the farm (type of production and market, degree of regulation) and of the farmer (access to information, capabilities, preferences). We use data on 865 Dutch farms and find that innovation adoption is positively related to labour resources, market position, access to information and past adoption behaviour, and negatively to solvency and the degree of market regulation.


In contemporary organizations, many—if not most—teams work on cognitive or information processing tasks (Hinsz, Tindale, & Vollrath, 1997). The past 50 years of research have taught us much about how information is accessed, created, attended to, and processed as teams attempt to complete various tasks. However, many of the information processing effects that have been observed are task specific, yet little research has focused specifically on tasks and how their information processing requirements differ. In this chapter, we discuss how task differences can impact how teams use and process information and how different information distribution patterns across members might impact performance. In addition, we address how constraints on the amount and type of interactions among the team members influences performance in different task domains. We hope our discussion demonstrates the importance of task differences for understanding team information processing and highlights where greater research focus will be fruitful.


Descriptive techniques (lithofacies codes) and vertical profile analysis emphasizing lithofacies contacts and geometry allow objective characterization and comparison of diamict(ite) sequences irrespective of geologic age. Upper Precambrian diamictites (?650−600 m.y.) of the Middle Dalradian Port Askaig Formation in Scotland are traditionally interpreted as products of repeated ice-sheet advances over an emergent shallow marine shelf and deposition by in situ basal melt-out. The Dalradian sequences are, however, fundamentally different from modern and Pleistocene diamicts deposited by either lodgment or basal melt-out and fail to show evidence of tractional processes associated with basal ice movement. Scottish diamictite sequences are similar to assemblages of massive and stratified diamict lithofacies, of late Pleistocene age, deposited subaqueously below floating ice and recently described from the Lake Ontario Basin of North America. A glaciomarine depositional model may have implications for the origin and paleogeographical setting of other upper Precambrian diamictites of similar age and stratigraphic context in East Greenland, Spitsbergen, and Scandinavia.


Observations relevant to the North American stock complex of Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar L., suggest that marine mortality is influenced by variation in predation pressure affecting post-smolts during the first months at sea. This hypothesis was tested for Gulf of Maine (GOM) stocks by examining wind pseudostress and the distribution of piscivorous predator fields potentially affecting post-smolts. Marine survival has declined over recent decades with a change in the direction of spring winds, which is likely extending the migration of post-smolts by favouring routes using the western GOM. In addition to changes in spring wind patterns, higher spring sea surface temperatures have been associated with shifting distributions of a range of fish species. The abundance of several pelagic piscivores, which based on their feeding habits may predate on salmon post-smolts, has increased in the areas that serve as migration corridors for post-smolts. In particular, populations of silver hake, Merluccius bilinearis (Mitchell), red hake, Urophycis chuss (Walbaum), and spiny dogfish, Squalus acanthias L., increased in size in the portion of the GOM used by post-smolts. Climate variation and shifting predator distributions in the GOM are consistent with the predator hypothesis of recruitment control suggested for the stock complex.


The choice of language used to impart education can have important effects on the process of human capital formation. We develop a dynamic model to understand the implications of the choice of language used in education. The main contribution of the framework is to show that the number of years of primary schooling during which mother tongue instruction is provided might have non-linear effects on human capital. The marginal benefit to human capital in the provision of mother tongue instruction is seen to be positive for a certain duration of primary schooling, after which it turns negative. Panel data from 29 African countries support the conclusions of the model. The data show that the marginal benefit to human capital is positive and increasing for the first 4 years of primary schooling in the mother tongue and then turns negative. The data also indicate that providing mother tongue instruction for the first 4 years of primary schooling could increase average years of schooling in the affected cohort by around 0.80 years.


Shannon's monumental 1948 work laid the foundations for the rich fields of information and coding theory. The quest for efficient coding schemes to approach Shannon capacity has occupied researchers ever since, with spectacular progress enabling the widespread use of error-correcting codes in practice. Yet the theoretical problem of approaching capacity arbitrarily closely with polynomial complexity remained open except in the special case of erasure channels.

In 2008, Arikan proposed an insightful new method for constructing capacity-achieving codes based on channel polarization. In this talk, I will begin with a self-contained survey of Arikan's celebrated construction of polar codes, and then discuss our recent proof (with Patrick Xia) that, for all binary-input symmetric memoryless channels, polar codes enable reliable communication at rates within epsilon > 0 of the Shannon capacity with block length (delay), construction complexity, and decoding complexity all bounded by a polynomial in the gap to capacity, i.e., by poly(1/epsilon). Polar coding gives the first explicit construction with rigorous proofs of all these properties; previous constructions were not known to achieve capacity with less than exp(1/epsilon) decoding complexity.
We establish the capacity-achieving property of polar codes via a direct analysis of the underlying martingale of conditional entropies, without relying on the martingale convergence theorem. This step gives rough polarization (noise levels epsilon for the good channels), which can then be adequately amplified by tracking the decay of the channel Bhattacharyya parameters. Our effective bounds imply that polar codes can have block length bounded by
poly(1/epsilon). We also show that the generator matrix of such polar codes can be constructed in polynomial time by algorithmically computing an adequate approximation of the polarization process.


Incorporation of rice (Oryza saliva L.) straw, when compared with burning, affects soil N supply by increasing N and C inputs. This study determined the effects of long-term alternative rice straw management and winter flooding on seasonal crop uptake of N, fertilizer N use efficiency (FNUE), and crop N uptake from N-labeled straw. Microplots were established on two sites in California, Maxwell and Biggs, by applying N-labeled fertilizer during Year 4 of a long-term rice straw management study. At the end of the year, 15 N-labeled straw was applied to assess crop uptake of straw N in the following season. Fertilizer use efficiency by 15 N dilution (FUE- 15 N) over the growing season at Maxwell and at final harvest at Biggs was significantly higher when straw was burned rather than incorporated. Fertilizer use efficiency by N difference was significantly greater than FUE- 15 N, suggesting an apparent added N interaction (ANI). Straw management did not significantly affect the uptake of residual fertilizer 15 N or of straw 15 N in the subsequent year. Winter flooding had no significant effect on measured parameters. Data indicate a decrease in FNUE with a concomitant and more significant increase in the plant available soil N following the change in straw management from burning to incorporation. Belowground 15 N pools appear to be a larger source of N for the following crop than aboveground residue.


Learn about the EJB 2.0 specification Develop EJBs with Studio Application Developer Deploy EJBs to WebSphere Application Server This IBM Redbook provides detailed information on how to effectively use WebSphere Studio Application Developer for the development of applications based on the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) architecture, and deployment of such applications to a WebSphere Application Server. Throughout the book, we provide examples based on a simple banking application with an underlying relational database. In Part 1, we introduce EJBs as a part of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and cover the basic concepts and the architecture. In particular we point out the new functions introduced with the EJB 2.0 specification that provide, for example, enhanced functionality for container-managed persistence entity beans and message-driven beans. We also provide best practice guidelines for successful implementations of EJBs. In Part 2, we introduce the sample banking application and then implement entity beans, session beans, and message-driven beans using WebSphere Studio Application Developer. We also implement finder methods, different mapping strategies, and simple clients that use the EJBs. At the end, we describe how to deploy EJB applications to a WebSphere Application Server.


Abstract From 1998 to 2004, a series of critical experiments referred to as the fission product (FP) experimental program was performed at the Commissariat á l'Energie Atomique Valduc research facility. The experiments were designed by Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN) and funded by AREVA NC and IRSN within the French program supporting development of a technical basis for burnup credit validation. The experiments were performed with the following six key fission products encountered in solution either individually or as mixtures: 103Rh, 133Cs, natNd, 149Sm, 152Sm, and 155Gd. The program aimed at compensating for the lack of information on critical experiments involving FPs and at establishing a basis for FPs credit validation. One hundred forty-five critical experiments were performed, evaluated, and analyzed with the French CRISTAL criticality safety package and the American SCALE5.1 code system employing different cross-section libraries. The aim of the paper is to show the experimental data potential to improve the ability to perform validation of full burnup credit calculation. The paper describes three phases of the experimental program; the results of preliminary evaluation, the calculation, and the sensitivity/uncertainty study of the FP experiments used to validate the APOLLO2-MORET 4 route in the CRISTAL criticality package for burnup credit applications.


This paper presents the results of a case study investigating the use of video resources in teaching statistics proven to have their impact on student learning outcomes which positively affect the student understanding of topics and reduce students' anxiety. A two-way ANOVA is utilized to analyze the sample data from forty postgraduate students in the Health Informatics at University of Wollongong. The findings from the study show that male students are significantly more confident in their understanding of statistics topics e.g. writing meaningful paragraphs about variables (p=0.014, F=6.684), producing and interpreting scatter plots and correlations (p=0.007, F=8.388); and less anxious in working with numbers (p=0.014, F=6.691) than female students. International students are also significantly more confident in their understanding of statistics topics e.g. determining probabilities from tables (p=0.037, F=4.689), producing and using regression output (p=0.008, F=7.835); and less anxious in several aspects compared to domestic students. There is a significant difference between male and female respondents in the scale of video resources impact on making students feel more anxious or comfortable such as taking the subject that involves mathematics (p=0.029, F=5.269) and computing (p=0.016, F=6.482). However, no significant interaction was found between gender (male versus female) and location of students (international versus domestic) on student perceived competency with the statistics topics, changed in perspective after completing the subject, and video resources impact.


All you need to know about Storage Area Networks The amount of data of an average company doubles every year. Thus, companies who own 1TB of data today will own 32TB in five years. Storage networks help to tame such data quantities and to manage this data growth efficiently. Since stored data and information are the biggest asset of any company, anyone who is involved in the planning or the operation of IT systems requires a basic knowledge of the principle and the use of storage networks. Storage Networks Explained covers the fundaments, techniques and functions of storage networks such as disk subsystems, Fibre Channel SAN, Internet SCSI (iSCSI), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), Network Attached Storage (NAS), file systems, and storage virtualization. Furthermore the authors describe the use of these techniques and how they are designed to achieve high-availability, flexibility, and scalability of data and applications. Additional attention is given to network backup and the management of storage networks. Written by leading experts in the field, this book on storage area networks is updated and fully revised. Key features: Presents the basic concepts of storage networks, such as I/O techniques, disk subsystems, virtualization, NAS and SAN file systems Covers the design of storage networks which provide flexible, highly-available, and scaleable IT systems Explains the use of storage networks for data sharing, data protection, and digital archiving Discusses management of storage networks using SNMP, SMI-S, and IEEE 1244 This book provides system administrators and system architects, as well as students and decision makers, with the tools needed for optimal selection and cost-effective use of storage networks. The Linux Journal awarded the first edition with the Editors Choice Award 2005 in the category System Administration Book.


BACKGROUND
Although treatment of localized anal cancer (AC) is well established, very little evidence is available to inform the management of advanced tumors, and the prognosis of these patients remains poor. We have analyzed treatment pathways and outcomes of a single-institution series of advanced AC patients in order to provide insight into the management of this rare condition.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Inclusion criteria included epidermoid histology, inoperable locally recurrent or metastatic disease, and availability of full medical records. The primary objective was overall survival (OS). Prognostic factors were analyzed in univariate models.

RESULTS
Sixty-four patients (1997-2014) were included: 16 (25.0%) with inoperable locally advanced and 48 (75.0%) with metastatic tumors. Fifty-one (79.7%) received at least one line of chemotherapy; of these, 37% underwent multimodality treatment. A combination of a platinum agent plus a fluoropyrimidine was the most common first-line regimen (74.5%), with an objective response rate (ORR) of 34.4% (95% confidence interval [CI], 18.6%-53.2%). Paclitaxel-based chemotherapy was used in 15 patients as front-line or salvage treatment, and the overall ORR was 53.3% (95% CI, 26.6%-78.7%). Median progression-free survival (PFS) after first- and second-line chemotherapy was 5.8 (interquartile range [IQR], 2.8-7.6) and 3.2 (IQR, 2.5-7.1) months, respectively. Five-year OS in the overall population was 15% (95% CI, 7.0%-25.0%). Age ≤65 years and liver metastases were predictive of better PFS (hazard ratio [HR], 0.39; 95% CI, 0.16-0.97; p = .04) and worse OS (HR, 2.25; 95% CI, 1.25-4.03; p = .01), respectively.

CONCLUSION
A platinum agent plus a fluoropyrimidine and paclitaxel-based chemotherapy are active regimens for advanced AC. Clinical trials are needed to standardize treatment pathways, investigate the potential of novel therapeutics, and improve the poor prognosis of this rare condition. The Oncologist 2017;22:402-408Implications for Practice: Because of the lack of randomized trials, the optimal management of advanced anal cancer is uncertain. Despite its retrospective analysis and relatively small sample size, this is the second largest study ever conducted in this setting, and, as such, it has the potential to serve as a valuable source of information for everyday clinical practice. These findings suggest that chemotherapy with a platinum agent plus a fluoropyrimidine or paclitaxel-containing regimens are reasonable treatment options for patients with inoperable locally recurrent or metastatic anal carcinoma.


Sophocles9 Oedipus at Colonus has traditionally been regarded as the poet9s primary tragedy involving hero cult; this essay explores the more subtle but no less ritually explicit hero cult of the Aias first outlined by Burian. The passage, as Burian saw, occurs when the young Eurysakes kneels at his father9s body and Teukros conducts an unusual combination of rites: supplication, curse, offering of hair, and magic (1168-84). One crucial direction to the child, kai phulasse (1180), however, is here not understood to be a paradox of the suppliant who "protects" what he seizes but rather his physical attachment to the locus where he abides as well as his ritual dependence on the source of protection (as with Orestes in Eum. 242f., 439f.). By saying a curse and obtaining protection, Teukros and Eurysakes indicate how the still-warm body of the dead hero has already acquired special powers after death: specifically, the power to bestow both blessings and curses on mortals. The argument turns from the body to the tomb, the physical and lasting monument of hero cult, which the Sophoclean audience would know. The preceding scene ends with a pivotal choral passage where the hero9s burial and cult are prescribed in highly Homeric terms (1163-67). This passage forms an important link between the opposing views of the fate of the corpse (Menelaos vs. Teukros) and also between the hero9s death and burial. This choral celebration of the hero9s future status is cast in traditional Homeric language, but with some revealing inversions. One is the reversal of the verb whereby the earth "holds" (katechei) or possesses heroes in Homer, while Aias occupies and possesses his tomb (1167, kathexei). The evolution of Homeric views of death is traced (Archilochos, Simonides). In Sophocles9 Aias the chorus performs the burial as a ritual act establishing a cult, long before it happens at the end of the play. The article concludes with a discussion of the historical cults of Aias known to the Athenians and of the more significant way that Aias (a suicide) becomes a hero: not self-consciously, as Oedipus did, but through rituals performed by his family and community. In the Aias, the poet9s sense of hero cult lies closer to Homer and the epic tradition than it does, for instance, to Aeschylus.


This paper aims to show the capability of lidar systems to detect atmospheric phenomena taking place within the Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) and the Free Troposphere (FT). Usually, lidar systems can measure a variety of atmospheric parameters including aerosols optical and geometrical properties, temperature and wind velocity. Moreover, the Mixing Layer Height (MLH), cloud heights, mineral dust and other aerosols layers can be determined from lidar measurements. The Bucharest Multiwavelength Raman Lidar (RALI) performed measurements during the EArlinet Reference LIdars campaign 2009 – EARLI09. The campaign was organized at the Institute for Tropospheric Physics, in Leipzig, Germany, from May 4 to May 29, 2009. One interesting local atmospheric phenomenon related to a frontal passage was observed on RALI Range Corrected Signal (RCS) from 26 of May 2009. This phenomenon was also confirmed by meteorological observations. Combining Lidar observations with models, we were able to evidence, with a high confidence level, a dust intrusion event and a local extreme weather phenomenon.


Syncope is a frequent reason for medical consultation and hospital admission and is associated with high health service use and costs.1 ,2 From the pathophysiological standpoint, syncope is a transient loss of consciousness due to transient global cerebral hypoperfusion and can be the final common pathway of different conditions, whose prognosis is highly heterogeneous.3 Indeed, cardiovascular syncope (due to bradyarrhythmias or tachyarrhythmias or structural heart disease) is associated with significant morbidity and mortality, while the prognosis of reflex syncope (vasovagal, situational and carotid sinus syndrome) and syncope due to orthostatic hypotension is generally benign.4

Implantable loop recorders (ILRs) are small devices implanted or injected subcutaneously in the left side of the chest under local anaesthesia. They continuously record and delete a bipolar ECG signal with no need for intravascular leads and have a battery capable of storing significant events for up to 36 months. Thanks to their ability to register the patients' ECG during spontaneous symptoms, ILRs have gained popularity and are now recommended as an early diagnostic tool in the evaluation of unexplained syncope.3 However, randomised clinical trials (RCTs) proving that an ILR-guided diagnosis and treatment changes clinically relevant outcomes, besides increasing the diagnostic rate, are essential to support their use in clinical practice.

We conducted a Cochrane review of RCTs to compare ILRs and …


Numerous international state organisations have taken up human trafficking in recent years. They all claim to be protecting human rights. In fact, the political discourse of human trafficking is influenced above all by criminological thinking and revolves around strengthening and defending nation-state or supranational borders. As a result, the people affected by human trafficking are not helped, nor are the structural causes fought. Language: de


Regional competitiveness is the crucial area of research in modern economics. The European Union uses the regional competitiveness and divergences studies in creating the European Member States economies competitive advantages. Regional competitiveness determinates also the enterprises competitiveness advantages and plays the crucial role in creating their competitiveness position. The importance of the regional competiveness increases in the knowledge-based economy circumstances, where competitiveness depends on the ability to use knowledge, skills and attitudes of entrepreneurship. Regions are the leaders responsible for these resources mobilization so identification of their strengths and weaknesses allows to indicate the crucial growth tools. In terms of traditional concept, competitiveness is based on the classical theories of absolute advantage by Smith, Ricardo's comparative advantage to the first theory of Porter's competitive advantage. Modern knowledge-based economy creates a new approach to regional competitiveness researches – from the advanced Porter competitive advantage theory to the dynamic concept of constructed advantages. The key element of constructed advantages theory is an eclectic approach that combines a variety of different concepts such as Regional Innovation Systems, Triple Helix-concept and public-private partnership. They are characterized by multi-directional and multi-dimensional interactions between the actors of the economy. The purpose of the analysis is a preliminary assessment of selected economic relations between the entities in Pomeranian region. There be analyzed relations between business and research and development institutions with particular emphasis on the role of Science and Technology Park in Gdynia as an institution affecting the shape and strength of relationships that create advantages of the region.


We propose a self synchronous field programmable gate array (SSFPGA) with dual-pipeline (DP) architecture to eliminate pre-charge time for dynamic logic. A self synchronous LUT (SSLUT) consists of a three input tree-type structure with 8 bit SRAM for programming. A self synchronous switch box (SSSB) consists of both pass transistors and buffers. One common block with one SSLUT and one SSSB occupies 2.2λ2 area and the prototype SSFPGA with 34x30 (1020) blocks is designed and fabricated using 65nm CMOS. Measured results show 647MHz operation for a chain of 32 AND gates at 1.2V and 430MHz operation for a 3 bit ripple carry adder. Simulation results show 0.642pJ/block/cycle operation at 647MHz, 1.2V.


Aim. Investigate the clinical, economic, and cellular effects of the addition of oncothermia to standard treatment for HIV-positive and -negative locally advanced cervical cancer patients in public healthcare in South Africa. Objectives. Evaluate the effect that the addition of oncothermia has on local disease control, progression-free survival, overall survival at 2 years, treatment toxicity, quality of life, economic impact, and HIV status of participants. Radiobiology investigations will evaluate thermoradiosensitivity and the molecular markers for thermoradiosensitivity. Methodology. Phase III randomised clinical trial involving 236 HIV-negative and -positive stage IIb-III locally advanced cervical cancer patients. Treatment includes cisplatin, external beam radiation, and brachytherapy. The study group will receive oncothermia treatments. Participants will be monitored for two years after completion of treatment. Hypothesis. The addition of oncothermia to standard treatment protocols will result in improved clinical response without increasing treatment toxicity in HIV-positive patients or raising healthcare costs.


The amplitude of leverage procyclicality is heterogeneous across banks and across countries. This paper introduces international diversification of bank balance sheet as a factor of this observed heterogeneity, with a special emphasis on currency diversification. Theoretically, the impact of international diversification on leverage procyclicality depends on the relative performance of economies, the global business cycle and the exchange rate regime. Using granular data on banks located in France, I show that the pre-crisis international diversification of banks increased leverage procyclicality during the 2008-2009 crisis. Focusing on the foreign exchange rate impact, namely the valuation effect of currency diversification, my results suggest that it had a negative effect on leverage procyclicality during this period. These findings draw attention to the specific role of balance sheet currency diversification in financial stability risk.


4
Introduction
Currently fossil fuels - coal, oil and natural gas - provide about 85% of the world's total
energy demand (including heating, transport, electricity generation and other uses).
But, unfortunately, these types of energy resources have some negatives points.
Fossil fuels are non-renewable resources because they take millions of years to form,
and reserves are being depleted much faster than new ones are being formed.
Another negative aspect is that burning such fossil fuels results in major environmental
deterioration. Trying to restrain this rapidly growing environmental pollution,
authorities have more and more frequently turned towards alternative energy sources
(renewable), among which geothermal energy plays a significant role in some
countries.
Geothermal energy is the heat from the Earth. Resources of geothermal energy range
from the shallow ground to hot water and hot rock found a few kilometres beneath
the Earth's surface. The main inconvenience of this energy source is the hardly
economical cost of drilling new wells. Therefore, attempts are being made to adapt
existing boreholes, mostly drilled by the hydrocarbon industry, for geothermal
utilization.
In this context, deep borehole heat exchangers are an environmentally advantageous
way for geothermal energy production. In this project, a downhole coaxial heat
exchanger (DCHE)/heat pump (HP) system is simulated for shallow geothermal
resources exploitation. The downhole, coaxial heat exchanger is designed for two
different scenarios according to the working medium; one using water as a working
fluid and the other one using air. The hot water produced will be used for space
heating and domestic hot water production for a Central European home offering an
attractive way to supply local housing with heat for direct use.
All these systems need an electrical heat pump (HP) by which the low DCHE output
temperature (rarely above 10 oC) can be lifted to the required level (35-50 oC). Heat
extraction is established by closed-circuit fluid circulation.
In this project, a thermodynamic design for determining some optimal parameters of
the heat exchanger is presented. In this study, optimum diameter and thermal
resistance for the insulated inner pipe is determined by using the second law of
thermodynamics. The purpose of a thermodynamic design is to achieve a working
system. A goal of the design is high efficiency; minimization of entropy generated
(exergy destruction) is a way to achieve this.


Abstract: Reducing neonatal mortality is a particularly important issue in Bangladesh. We employ a competing risks model incorporating both observed and unobserved heterogeneity and allowing the heterogeneity terms for various causes to be correlated. Data come from the Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS), Matlab. The results confirm the general conclusion on levels, trends and patterns of causes of neonatal deaths in the existing literature, but also reveal some remarkable socioeconomic differences in the risks of causespecific deaths. Deaths due to low birth weight and other causes (sudden infant death, unspecified or specified) are better explained from the socio- economic covariates than deaths due to neonatal infections or obstetric complications. The analysis highlights the role of maternal and child health interventions (particularly tetanus toxoid immunization for pregnant women, nutrition programs, and high coverage health services: distance to nearest health centre). Policies that increase quality and equity in child births may help to further reduce neonatal mortality.


In this work, we propose a new technique for fast k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) classification in which the original database is represented via a small set of learned binary prototypes. The training phase simultaneously learns a hash function which maps the data points to binary codes, and a set of representative binary prototypes. In the prediction phase, we first hash the query into a binary code and then do the k-NN classification using the binary prototypes as the database. Our approach speeds up k-NN classification in two aspects. First, we compress the database into a smaller set of prototypes such that k-NN search only goes through a smaller set rather than the whole dataset. Second, we reduce the original space to a compact binary embedding, where the Hamming distance between two binary codes is very efficient to compute. We propose a formulation to learn the hash function and prototypes such that the classification error is minimized. We also provide a novel theoretical analysis of the proposed technique in terms of Bayes error consistency. Empirically, our method is much faster than the state-of-the-art k-NN compression methods with comparable accuracy.


Althoughmost children with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) achieve complete remission, the relapse rate is 30% to 40%. Because it is thought that leukemia-initiating cells (LIC) are responsible for AML relapses, targeting these cells might improve outcome. Treatment of pediatric AML blasts with the receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) inhibitor PTK787/ZK222584 (PTK/ZK) induces cell death in vitro.However, the role of PTK/ZK inhibition on outgrowth of (pediatric) LICs is unknown. In this study, we cultured CD34þ cells from pediatric patients with AML onMS5 stromal cells in long-term cocultures. In analogy to adult AML, long-term expansion of leukemic cells up to 10 weeks could be generated in 9 of 13 pediatric AMLs. Addition of PTK/ZK to long-term cocultures significantly inhibited leukemic expansion in all samples, ranging from 4% to 80% growth inhibition at week 5 compared with untreated samples. In 75%of the samples, the inhibitory effect wasmore pronounced at week 10. Proteome profiler array analysis of downstream kinases revealed that PTK/ZK reduced activation of PI3K/Akt kinase signaling. Although main targets of PTK/ZK are VEGF receptors (VEGFR), no effect was seen on outgrowth of LICs when cultured with bevacizumab (monoclonal VEGFA-antibody), specific antibodies against VEGFR2 or VEGFR3, or exposed to stroma-derived VEGFA.These data suggest that the effect of PTK/ZKonLICs is not only dependent on inhibition of VEGFA/VEGFR signaling. Taken together, our data elucidated antileukemic properties of PTK/ZK in long-term expansion cultures, and suggest that targeting multiple RTKs by PTK/ZK might be a potential effective approach in eradicating (pediatric) LICs. Mol Cancer Res; 11(4); 339–48. 2013 AACR.


A frequent reaction used in organic synthesis is amide bond formation also known as peptide bonds in proteins. Amide bond formation is commonly achieved through the combination of an amine and an activated carboxylic acid. Reports of amide bond formation through the direct coupling of carboxylic acids and amines are non-existent. The favored reaction between the amine and carboxylic acid is an equilibrium reaction. Water is produced in the forward condensation reaction and acts to hydrolyze the new bond in the reverse reaction. Recently, we have developed a method for the direct coupling of the amine and carboxylic acid using nano-reactors. The nano-reactors have three characteristics that allows them to facilitate direct amide bond coupling: (1) Nano-reactors absorb organic molecules into central cavities. (2) Upon absorption, the nano-reactor swells 3 times its dry volume. (3) The nano-reactor is hydrophobic, water does not enter the central cavity and water synthesized in the cavity migrates out. The produced water is expelled and drives the reaction forward. When applied to the synthesis of proteins, which has challenged chemists for over a century, trial syntheses conducted using nano-reactors and amino acids occur with high efficiency and yield. These advancements have multiple applications.


abstract (introduction): the purpose of this book is two-fold: (1) to present some of the conceptual and analytical considerations involved in the sociological study of change; (2) to present a fairly comprehensive survey and critical evaluation of the most prominent approach to the study of social change, i.e., structural-functionalism, in its entirety by treating it as a single theoretical stance; and (3) to present, within the context of these considerations, three contemporary theories dealing with various aspects of social change to show how they may be used as complementary schemes to produce a more "complete" theory of change. in part i, we review the major schools of thought, with special emphasis on functional theory, on the issues of conceptualization and explanation of change. more specifically, we deal with the questions of what social change is, what causes change and how change takes place and examine the answers to these questions proposed by some major theories on the subject. in part ii, we present summaries of three contemporary theories on change. the first theory to be presented was developed by barrington moore in his social origins of dictatorship and democracy. it is a societal level analysis of the changesconnected with a nation's transformation from a feudal to an industrial society. the second theory, presented by neil j. smelser in his theory of collective behavior, deals with group level actions directed toward partial or complete changes in the social order. the third theory, or set of related theories on the intra- and interpersonal level, involves various studies done on the relationship between social status and activities and attitudes related to social change. most of these concepts involve individual reactions to certain social conditions although some are generalizable to status group reactions. although each of the theories deals with various aspects of the problems considered in part i, they represent three very different approaches to the study of social change. after presenting these theories, some of their major differences will be examined in relation to the issues posed in the first part of this study. finally, the possibility and utility of bringing these theories together as complementary explanatory schemes will be explored, in spite of, or rather largely because of, their differences.;


We show that complex (scale-free) network topologies naturally emerge from hyperbolic metric spaces. Hyperbolic geometry facilitates maximally efficient greedy forwarding in these networks. Greedy forwarding is topology-oblivious. Nevertheless, greedy packets find their destinations with 100% probability following almost optimal shortest paths. This remarkable efficiency sustains even in highly dynamic networks. Our findings suggest that forwarding information through complex networks, such as the Internet, is possible without the overhead of existing routing protocols, and may also find practical applications in overlay networks for tasks such as application-level routing, information sharing, and data distribution.


A zero-dynamics attack allows an attacker to input some control action that results in zero measurable output but nonzero response of the internal states. This paper extends previous works on zero-dynamics attacks to nonlinear system dynamics. This is accomplished using invariant subspace techniques that identify the subspace on which zero dynamics exist. An iterative algorithm is presented to identify both this subspace and the resulting zero dynamics of the system. These methods are implemented on a model of a pressurizer in a nuclear power plant, which is a critical subsystem of pressurized water reactors that monitors and controls the system pressure and coolant inventory. This implementation is done by analyzing all combinations of attackable signals. These attackable signals are the set of all system inputs and outputs. From this analysis, there are eight unique combinations of attacked actuators and sensors that result in zero-dynamics attacks. These combinations are characterized by stability and damage time, where damage time is the time it takes to reach some undesirable state. The damage times range from half a day to sixteen days, depending on the number of signals the attacker has access to. These results demonstrate that the physics of the pressurizer system creates some vulnerabilities to zero-dynamics attacks. This work provides plant designers with tools to identify which subsystems are most susceptible to zero-dynamics attacks and might require additional defenses.


Deep Recurrent Neural Network architectures, though remarkably capable at modeling sequences, lack an intuitive high-level spatio-temporal structure. That is while many problems in computer vision inherently have an underlying high-level structure and can benefit from it. Spatiotemporal graphs are a popular tool for imposing such high-level intuitions in the formulation of real world problems. In this paper, we propose an approach for combining the power of high-level spatio-temporal graphs and sequence learning success of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). We develop a scalable method for casting an arbitrary spatio-temporal graph as a rich RNN mixture that is feedforward, fully differentiable, and jointly trainable. The proposed method is generic and principled as it can be used for transforming any spatio-temporal graph through employing a certain set of well defined steps. The evaluations of the proposed approach on a diverse set of problems, ranging from modeling human motion to object interactions, shows improvement over the state-of-the-art with a large margin. We expect this method to empower new approaches to problem formulation through high-level spatio-temporal graphs and Recurrent Neural Networks.


ABSTRACT: The main organising feature of Chinese characters is the structure of ideophonetic compound characters. In this structure, two components are identified: a semantic radical and a phonological component, which provide essential information for meaning category and pronunciation. Recent research has shown that knowledge of this structure is involved in the reading and writing processes of Chinese readers. This study investigated children's knowledge of the structure in their learning of novel characters. A structualist model of learning was proposed in this study: learners learn the structure, which underlies the Chinese characters and apply this knowledge generally to new characters with the same structure. This hypothesis was tested using a learning paradigm where 480 children, in grades 2-5 (aged 7-10) in Taiwan were asked to learn pseudo characters in a series of experiments. In Studies 2 and 3, the children were given two types of pseudocharacters, sensible (which followed the structure of ideophonetic characters) and nonsensical (which violated the structure). The effect of visual complexity of the stimuli was controlled. The results showed that the children in all four grade levels learned sensible stimuli significantly better than nonsensical ones. In Studies 4 and 5, the children were given the pseudocharacters that embedded different degree of regularity in relation to the semantic and phonological aspects of the structure of ideophonetic compounds. The regularity was defined as two levels of semantic transparency (transparent vs. opaque) and two levels of phonological regularity (regular vs. irregular). The results showed that the children learned significantly more semantic radicals when those radicals provided transparent semantic information than when they were opaque. The children also learned more phonological components when those components were regular than when they were irregular. With the two regular phonological principles, by derivation and by analogy, there was no difference between the two types of principles in children's learning. These findings were independent of the response modes in the experiments: this was true both when the children were asked to write down the characters they had learned and to identify the characters and read them. It is concluded that children use the knowledge about the main structure underlying the Chinese writing system in learning new characters. The semantic radicals and phonological components both play a significant role in children's knowledge of ideophonetic characters. The children use the phonological principles of both derivation and analogy equally well in their learning of new characters.


We consider diffusion within pores with general shapes in the presence of spatially linear magnetic field profiles. The evolution of local magnetization of the spin bearing particles can be described by the Bloch-Torrey equation. We study the diffusive process in the eigenbasis of the non-Hermitian Bloch-Torrey operator. It is possible to find expressions for some special temporal gradient waveforms employed to sensitize the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) signal to diffusion. For more general gradient waveforms, we derive an efficient numerical solution by introducing a novel matrix formalism. Compared to previous methods, this new approach requires a fewer number of eigenfunctions to achieve the same accuracy. This shows that these basis functions are better suited to the problem studied. The new framework could provide new important insights into the fundamentals of diffusion sensitization, which could further the development of the field of NMR.


This article examines a group of five ballades which stand at the very opening of those set to music in the Machaut manuscripts. The importance of manuscript order to arguments about chronology has led to the neglect of order's role in the construction of meaning. While they are ostensibly individual lyric items, Machaut's first five music ballades collectively outline a very cogent narrative, from the je -lover's declaration of love to his death from refusal. In parallel with such an amorous progress, there is a poetic and musical progress as the authorial persona of the poet-composer poses and solves problems of formal musical organization, ultimately narrating a parallel (and arguably equally fictive) story of the creation of the polyphonic ballade. The duplication of one of these five ballades within several of the central Machaut sources is viewed as an invitation to read parallels between the opening five ballades in the music section and the opening 11 ballades in the music-less lyric section, the Loange des dames . Between them, the openings of these sections explain the emotional and professional situation of a writer whose very success as a poet-composer almost requires his je 's failure as a lover-protagonist.


We present a discounted stochastic game with a continuum of states, finitely many players and actions, such that although all transitions are absolutely continuous w.r.t. a fixed measure, it possesses no stationary equilibria. This absolute continuity condition has been assumed in many equilibrium existence results, and the game presented here complements a recent example of ours of a game with no stationary equilibria but which possess deterministic transitions. We also show that if one allows for compact action spaces, even games with state-independent transitions need not possess stationary equilibria.


Economic multilateralism briefly flourished in the 1990s in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and of the opening up of the Chinese economy. Attempts were made towards completing the institutional architecture of globalisation. With the significant exception of the creation of the WTO, however, these attempts were frustrated and the vision of the 1990s failed to materialise. Three roadblocks to effective collective action are, first, the growing disconnect between changing channels of interdependence and the prevailing global institutional architecture; increased concentration of economic weight coupled with increased heterogeneity of economic development; and the growing multipolarity of the global economy. Against this background, new governance arrangements have emerged that depart from the standard template based on legally binding rules and universal treaty-based institutions. Clubs have developed along regional or thematic lines; informal arrangements have burgeoned; coordination procedures are often informal; incentives tend to substitute binding requirements. Since its creation, the Group of Twenty (G20) has actually often relied on non-universal, non-Westphalian or informal institutions. Economists are generally doubtful of the effectiveness of soft governance mechanisms. Whereas distrust is justified if the underlying game is of a prisoners' dilemma nature, it may be excessive if the underlying game can be solved through creating trust and monitoring the implementation of commitments. Clubs, pledge and review mechanisms and informal cooperation arrangements have significant weaknesses but they may deliver more than predicted by naive models. Five policy implications can be drawn from this analysis: first, completing the post-war global governance architecture is not the way forward anymore; second, club-type and incentive-based arrangements provide a wealth of experience to learn from and to build on; third, a case can be made for rooting clubs in universal principles; fourth, there is a need to think more systematically about the involvement of the private sector in governance arrangements; fifth, existing institutions should not be regarded as sectoral empires, but rather as potentially nimble poles of expertise and cooperation that represent globalisation's social capital.


Since the mid-1990s, the subject of corruption and integrity has been on the agenda of both the public and the private sectors. New regulations related to this area have been introduced, and organizations have increased their engagement in self-regulation, the drafting of codes of conduct, and the development of preventive programs. To address the phenomenon of "whistleblowers", (anonymous) hot-lines for reporting integrity violations have been established and confidential officers put in place. Nevertheless, our society is faced almost daily with new scandals, including corruption by public servants (sometimes entangled with private business enterprises), whistleblowers becoming victims of their openness, and organizations losing trust and reputation as a result of their management's behavior. Yet most research on corruption has focused on the scope of the problem and the causes situated in differences between countries and organizations. Such research, although it has led to important conclusions, does not answer the question of why in one particular organization, a specific employee or manager engages in unethical behavior while his or her close colleague does not. Yet such knowledge seems vital to achieving a drastic reduction of such unwanted behavior in organizations. This chapter delves into the causes of corruption by combining the relevant elements of criminological theory with valuable insights from other disciplines.


The present contribution proposes an analysis of adjectives that license nonmodal infinitival relative clauses. I propose to reduce the uniqueness constraint on the noun phrase modified by non-modal infinitival relatives to licensing by a contrastive identificational focus. The contrastive component ensures that the licensing adjectives exclude the existence of a still higher or lower degree: uniqueness is due to selection of the endpoint of a scale. I further propose that superlatives and comparable modifiers are polysemous. In their positive use they assert a positive proposition and entail a negative one, in which case they function as identificational foci; in their negative use, on the other hand, they assert a negative proposition and entail a positive one, in which case they function as contrastive foci. The negative use of superlatives and equivalent modifiers licenses non-modal infinitival relatives, subjunctive relative clauses (e.g. in Romance) and negative polarity items like ever. The positive use of superlatives and comparable modifiers does not license non-modal infinitival relatives, subjunctive relative clauses, and negative polarity items, but only indicative relative clauses.


Information about the functional or operational
performance of the product through life is useful in providing
validation and updating of knowledge assumed at the design
stage. The collection and exploitation of feedback from
experience in service allows engineers to reassess and refine
their original assumptions, and this new understanding in turn
informs the next design cycle. Current feedback documentation
of in-service occurrences (issues, requests, etc.) is found to be
inconsistent, thus reducing the ability to reuse operational
information for design improvements. We argue that enhanced
information representation and organisation not only allows for
improved retrieval in general but also provides a suitable basis
for analysis and inference of design-induced issues from the
information collection. The paper will discuss an approach to
information organisation based on faceted classification to
enhance retrieval and reuse of in-service information feedback.


We characterize the values of government debt and the debt's maturity structure under which financial crises brought on by a loss of confidence in the government can arise within a dynamic, stochastic general equilibrium model. We also characterize the optimal policy response of the government to the threat of such a crisis. We show that when the country's fundamentals place it inside the crisis zone, the government may be motivated to reduce its debt and exit the crisis zone because this leads to an economic boom and a reduction in the interest rate on the government's debt. We show that this reduction can be gradual if debt is high or the probability of a crisis is low. We also show that, while lengthening the maturity of the debt can shrink the crisis zone, credibility-inducing policies can have perverse effects.


The issue of when EU law applies, its scope, is obviously important and yet it has no clear answer. Two extreme positions are that EU law has a general scope, which it does not, and that all EU law provisions have different scopes, which clarifies nothing. This article explores the middle ground by seeking to identify underlying ideas capable of explaining when different EU law provisions apply on the national level and why seemingly similar provisions differ in scope. The article studies under what conditions an individual seeking protection against discrimination can invoke EU law on the national level and concludes that EU law provisions preventing discrimination differ greatly in scope but that such differences can be explained by the fact that they are based on different ideas: the idea of the internal market, the idea of actor equivalence, or the idea of a Europe without borders.


For almost a century composers and engineers have been attempting to create systems that allow drawings and imagery to behave as intuitive and efficient musical scores. Despite the intuitive interactions that these systems afford, they are somewhat underutilised by contemporary composers. The research presented here explores the concept of agency and artificial ecosystems as a means of creating and exploring new graphic sound synthesis algorithms. These algorithms are subsequently designed to investigate the creation of organic musical gesture and texture using granular synthesis. The output of this investigation consists of an original software artefact, The Agent Tool, alongside a suite of acousmatic musical works which the former was designed to facilitate. When designing new musical systems for creative exploration with vast parametric controls, careful constraints should be put in place to encourage focused development. In this instance, an evolutionary computing model is utilised as part of an iterative development cycle. Each iteration of the system's development coincides with a composition presented in this portfolio. The features developed as part of this process subsequently serve the author's compositional practice and inspiration. As the software package is designed to be flexible and open ended, each composition represents a refinement of features and controls for the creation of musical gesture and texture. This document subsequently discusses the creative inspirations behind each composition alongside the features and agents that were created. This research is contextualised through a review of established literature on graphic sound synthesis, evolutionary musical computing and ecosystemic approaches to sound synthesis and control.


I investigated the biology of the Mexican carabid, Lebia subgrandis Madge, a potential biological control agent of the Colorado Potato Beetle (CPB), Leptinotarsa decemlineata (Say). The consumption of CPB eggs and 1st through 3rd instar larvae increased with temperature for both male and female L. subgrandis. Under laboratory conditions, confined pairs consumed up to 108 CPB eggs / day at zs0 c (mean = 44.5 CPB eggs / day). Early-summer females produced more offspring than late-summer females. Apparently, mating was infrequent; I found no difference in oviposition rates when the females were confined with males for 0, 1, 2, or 3 days, or for the entire experiment. First instar L. subgrandis larvae lived an average of 8.3 days. They are ectoparasites of CPB prepupae and pupae and actively seek their hosts in the soil. Adult L. subgrandis seek their prey both day and night. The host range is narrow: previously starved or not, this species refused eggs and larvae of Coleomegilla maculata DeGeer, and eggs and nymphs of either Oplomus sp. or a reduviid predator. Adults lived four to five months. Reproductive capacity was temperature dependent. L. subgrandis might be considered as a candidate to control the CPB in the northeast U.S. .


The paper presents a case study of an ongoing implementation project in the framework of the European Union Services Directive. In the German federal state of Brandenburg, authorities are preparing a common taxonomy of professions and industries for general use and in particular for business registration. It is a measure for the creation of a point of single contact as required in the Services Directive. Existing code lists and taxonomies are used as "semantic interoperability assets" and consolidated for the new purpose with the help of the Semantic Interoperability Centre Europe SEMIC.EU). The unique contribution of the strategy chosen in the case is the combination of real-life feasibility and the instant creation of interoperability through semantic harmonization with an existing 20-language catalogue and an established classification of business activities.


In the 1994 Rwandan genocide 800,000 people were massacred. The victims were overwhelmingly of the minority Tutsi ethnic group and the aggressors of the majority Hutu group. At present, 125,000 Hutu prisoners remain incarcerated while awaiting trial on genocide-related charges. This article argues that these trials, and the extensive incapacitation that necessarily precedes them, may do little to promote justice, regime legitimacy, or national reconciliation in Rwanda. This, in turn, raises broader questions about the role of criminal punishment and sentencing in situations of mass violence. Criminality usually attaches to deviant conduct. Mass political violence - from Nazi Germany to Serbia to Rwanda - generally involves significant levels of public participation and complicity. How, then, should we punish conduct that, at the time it was committed, was not deviant? The thesis is advanced that restorative and transformative justice initiatives are effective at deconstructing complicity and can play a valuable part in the legal response to genocide. These initiatives may take the form of public inquiries, extra-judicial mediation, reparations, commemorations, and truth commissions. This thesis runs counter to the international legal community's embrace of the punitive criminal justice model as the preferred and often exclusive way to `deal with' perpetrators of genocidal violence and crimes against humanity.


In today's business world the complexity and pace of change can be daunting. In this environment of rapid change, leaders are coming to recognize that they need to develop adaptability to be effective. The process of developing adaptability begins with learning and practicing three types of flexibility—cognitive, emotional, and dispositional.


There are various views towards Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and the recent introduction of the disorder for adults has added to the controversies. I intend to explore variation in clinicians' perception and approach towards adults with ADHD. I produced a vignette describing an adult with a diagnosis of ADHD and sent it to 150 clinicians. I received 44 replies, and performed 16 semi-structured interviews. I found participants suggested various diagnoses, causes of the problem, treatments, and the appropriate professional group for the vignette. Participants confirmed the existence of variation in the clinicians' perception and approach. Their views also suggested that the different characteristics of clinicians, diagnostic methods, psychiatric disorders, the possibility of access to different information and social factors were contributing to the variation. In addition, my analysis indicated that participants might have different perceptions according to their experience, awareness and work-settings. I found that the variation might be also related to the inclination of participants towards particular disorders or styles of practice, and hermeneutical factors. Finally, I produced a model that illustrates a relationship between different factors with the variations in clinicians' perception and approach. In conclusion, I suggested the dependency of diagnosis on clinicians, the possibility of a variation in their knowledge, and gaps between research and practice. I described different types of competition that exist in the process of the medicalization of ADHD. Finally, I discussed directions for future investigations.


Justice Jackson's concurring opinion in The Steel Seizure Case has taken on iconic status among legal scholars and had been adopted by the Supreme Court as the governing framework for evaluating presidential power. But Jackson's principles are conclusory, do not rest on any historical foundation, and raise as many questions as they answer. He fails to examine, much less justify, the existence or scope of implied presidential powers, nor does he meaningfully explain the extent to which those powers are subject to congressional regulation and override. I apply novel originalist methodologies to answer those unexamined questions, with important consequences to several current theories and cases concerning presidential power.The construction of the presidency and the allocation of legislative and executive powers can be understood only by an examination of the historical experiences that influenced the Framers. Prominent among these were the preceding two centuries of constitutional developments in England which critically influenced the allocation of executive and legislative power in the Constitution. The central lesson of these historical experiences was that proscriptive legislative restraints on executive power were necessary but not sufficient to prevent autocracy. any of the English proscriptions on the exercise of executive power were included in our Constitution, but there was also a massive transfer of previously held executive power to the legislature. Most of the prerogatives that had been exercised by the King were vested completely in Congress, prohibited to the President, or omitted altogether from the Constitution. Of the small number delegated to the Executive, only one was the same as its royal counterpart; the others were more limited or structurally shared with the Legislative Branch.I examine this history in detail and apply its underlying principles to develop a general theory of presidential power. In lieu of creative but ultimately inconclusive arguments over indefinite powers that are said to be "executive" in nature, implied powers should be tied to, and derived from, the powers expressly vested in the President in Article II. I refute the propositions that the Vesting Clause is a residual source of plenary executive power and that there is a presidential "completion" power. I apply and elaborate on these principles in the context of the President's two most important implied powers - executing the laws and developing and implementing foreign policy. The President has broad discretion in choosing how to exercise these powers, but they are not plenary in nature. They are subject to three basic limitations: (1) the President may not, without congressional authorization, use these powers to change domestic law or create or alter existing legal obligations; (2) these powers are subject to regulation by Congress; and (3) in the event of a conflict between the exercise of these powers and congressional legislation, the latter prevails. Finally, I argue that these limits on presidential power have continuing validity despite the enormous changes in the country since these principles were established. We are now in much the same situation as England in the 18th century - the real power of the Executive is much greater than its nominal legal power. Although the Framers viewed the President as a necessary check on an otherwise dominant Congress, the present reality is now the reverse. The Executive has become the most powerful branch of government. There is no reason to adopt legal theories that would further enhance executive power.


We report the use of a temperature insensitive, food-grade hydrogel to reduce the caloric density of pancakes that were prepared at temperatures much higher than the boiling point of water. This cheap, facile method utilises a mixed agar-methylcellulose hydrogel, which was blended to produce a slurry of hydrogel microbeads. The pancake batter was mixed with a controlled volume percentage of slurry of hydrogel beads and cooked. From bomb calorimetry experiments, the composites were found to have a reduced caloric density that reflects the volume percentage of hydrogel beads mixed with the batter. Using this procedure, we were able to reduce the caloric density of pancakes by up to 23 ± 3% when the volume percentage of hydrogel beads initially used was 25%. The method is not limited to pancakes and could potentially be applied to various other food products. The structure and morphology of the freeze-dried pancakes and pancake-hydrogel composites were investigated and pores of a similar size to the hydrogel beads were found, confirming that the gel beads maintained their structure during the cooking process. There is scope for further development of this method by the encapsulation of nutritionally beneficial or flavour enhancing ingredients within the hydrogel beads.


In 2018, NSF funded an effort to pilot a Cyberinfrastructure Center of Excellence (CI CoE or Center) that would serve the cyberinfrastructure (CI) needs of the NSF Major Facilities (MFs) and large projects with advanced CI architectures. The goal of the CI CoE Pilot project (Pilot) effort was to develop a model and a blueprint for such a CoE by engaging with the MFs, understanding their CI needs, understanding the contributions the MFs are making to the CI community, and exploring opportunities for building a broader CI community. This document summarizes the results of community engagements conducted during the first two years of the project and describes the identified CI needs of the MFs. To better understand MFs' CI, the Pilot has developed and validated a model of the MF data lifecycle that follows the data generation and management within a facility and gained an understanding of how this model captures the fundamental stages that the facilities' data passes through from the scientific instruments to the principal investigators and their teams, to the broader collaborations and the public. The Pilot also aimed to understand what CI workforce development challenges the MFs face while designing, constructing, and operating their CI and what solutions they are exploring and adopting within their projects. Based on the needs of the MFs in the data lifecycle and workforce development areas, this document outlines a blueprint for a CI CoE that will learn about and share the CI solutions designed, developed, and/or adopted by the MFs, provide expertise to the largest NSF projects with advanced and complex CI architectures, and foster a community of CI practitioners and researchers.


We recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to random dichotic tone sequences as subjects attended to tone bursts of a designated pitch (250, 1000 or 4000 Hz) and ear of delivery. The effects of attention were isolated as negative difference (Nd) waves by subtracting ERPs to ignored tones from ERPs to the same tones when either one or both features were attended. Early sensory components of the ERP changed tonotopically in scalp distribution, while the distributions of Nd waves were feature-specific (pitch processing differed from location processing) but not tonotopic. At longer latencies, Nd waves specific to feature-conjunction operations were isolated. These began 40-50 ms after Nds to isolated cues and continued for hundreds of ms.


The Peer-to-Peer Streaming Peer Protocol (PPSPP) is a protocol for
disseminating the same content to a group of interested parties in a
streaming fashion. PPSPP supports streaming of both prerecorded (on-
demand) and live audio/video content. It is based on the peer-to- peer
paradigm, where clients consuming the content are put on equal footing
with the servers initially providing the content, to create a system
where everyone can potentially provide upload bandwidth. It has been
designed to provide short time-till-playback for the end user and to
prevent disruption of the streams by malicious peers. PPSPP has also
been designed to be flexible and extensible. It can use different
mechanisms to optimize peer uploading, prevent freeriding, and work
with different peer discovery schemes (centralized trackers or
Distributed Hash Tables). It supports multiple methods for content
integrity protection and chunk addressing. Designed as a generic
protocol that can run on top of various transport protocols, it
currently runs on top of UDP using Low Extra Delay Background
Transport (LEDBAT) for congestion control.