The p53 tumor suppressor gene frequently is mutated in many forms of human carcinomas. A common polymorphism occurs at codon 72 of exon 4, with two alleles encoding either arginine (CGC) or proline (CCC). This p53 polymorphism reportedly is associated with lung cancer susceptibility. However, not all investigations have been consistent, and this hypothesized association remains controversial. We tested the hypothesis that the Pro/Pro genotype is associated with increased lung cancer risk in a large case-control study of lung cancer that included 482 cases and 510 controls from the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. DNA from peripheral blood samples was examined by PCR-RFLP. Pro/Pro homozygotes were found more frequently in adenocarcinomas (cases, 16.4%; controls, 12.0%; P = 0.03). The prevalence of the Pro/Pro homozygous genotype increased in frequency with increasing pack-years of smoking. The combined susceptible genotype homozygous Pro/Pro and heterozygous Arg/Pro was associated with a 1.45-fold higher risk of adenocarcinoma compared with Arg/Arg genotype (95% confidence interval = 1.01-2.06; P = 0.04) after adjustment for relevant variables. Lung adenocarcinoma risk increased with the presence of one or both variant alleles across smoking strata. In addition, at each level of smoking (except nonsmoker and light smoker), the risk associated with smoking was higher for the population with the combined variant (Arg/Pro + Pro/Pro) genotype. The risk for the combined genotype was associated with tobacco exposure status. In conclusion, the codon 72 germ-line polymorphism (Arg/Pro) of the common tumor suppressor gene p53 contributes to heritable susceptibility for smoke-induced lung adenocarcinoma. The modifications by p53 polymorphism and pack-years resulted in an increased risk of the susceptible genotype to lung adenocarcinoma. The p53 gene may modulate the response to environment carcinogens and thereby affect the risk of developing lung adenocarcinoma.


. People frequently use internet-based messaging systems to coordinate. In order to achieve that, it is sufficient for them to exchange natural language messages. The message history they generate can be seen as a shared database that can be tapped into by personal assistive systems; moreover, messaging is increasingly used for human-computer communication. However, if natural language understanding is required for such systems to function properly, the cost of developing them is high and only few market players will be able to compete. If, on the other hand, it is possible to mix machine-interpretable data with natural language conversations, assistive or conversational programs may be developed more easily. As a first important challenge, we tackle the problem of negotiating agreements and unambiguously represent what has been agreed upon in a machine-readable form. In this paper, we propose an extension of the Web of Needs, a decentralized, Linked Data based matching and messaging system, to allow conversation partners to produce a mutually agreed-upon RDF dataset.


Conrad's Heart of Darkness has received a torrent of painstaking research as an intricate literary work which portrays the horrifying details of Marlow's physical and philosophical quest. However, within this framework does lurk a matrix of male chauvinism which relegates the female characters in the novella to irreversibly inferior positions and silent bodies. This necessitates a reading of Conrad's text that goes beyond the context of sexist innuendos in order to attain a deeper comprehension of the novella; that is, a contextualized reading which directs attention towards the variable of colonization and imperialism in the novella and its imperialist exploitation of femininity which makes women embrace specific roles and identities assigned to them while being deceived into thinking that they are ardent keepers of noble dreams. This paper argues that the female figures in the novella are imperialized by men in ways that make them consume the falsehood men produce about "the noble cause" and "the white man's burden". It also attempts to identify the reasons which make women accept such a subservient role by elaborating on the idea of human mimicry as discussed by Rene Girard in Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Girard claims that the person's desire for a certain object is not provoked by the object itself, but by another person who possesses the same object. This implies that the attraction of Conrad's women to the noble cause and to the wealth of the Congo extorted along with it has made them unquestionably accept the ancillary roles assigned to them by men, the possessors of the object. As more and more white people consider Africa a source of wealth, they became rivals, and since rivalry in Girard's theory leads to violence; a scapegoat is needed to prevent the disintegration of the colonizers. So, in Heart of Darkness, all the violence is directed against the black natives who are held responsible for violence to the extent that they fit in Girard's theory as the "scapegoat."


ABSTRACT A fluid flow simulation study was performed to investigate potential contrasts in reservoir performance between models displaying a soft-linked relay ramp vs. models with a continuous fault. The relay ramp model is based on a well-exposed outcrop analogue – the Delicate Arch Ramp, Arches National Park, Utah. In outcrop, the relay ramp exhibits a pervasive system of cataclastic deformation bands, which were mapped and incorporated into the reservoir simulation models. Several models were simulated, using deformation-band permeability as the main variable tested. Results show that when compared to flow across continuous faults, the presence of soft-linked relay ramps enhances net flow across the fault zone in all tested scenarios. Comparing models with deformation bands to the model that includes the ramp but no deformation bands illustrates that, although having an impact on flow tortuosity and sweep efficiency, deformation bands must have a very low permeability and be numerous before having a negative impact on recovery. Deformation bands with midrange permeabilities were shown to have a positive effect on recovery in the relay models, as they increase flow tortuosity and enhance sweep, causing later water breakthrough and prolonging production. Using very low-permeable deformation bands in the same models caused extremely poor pressure communication between the fault-breached compartments, despite the geometric connectivity provided by the sub-continuous relay beds.

http://folk.uib.no/nglhe/Papers/MPG 2009 Rotevatn et al Arches modeling.pdf


If insurance providers cannot determine the risk levels of their various clients, but individuals do know this information, then adverse selection arises. We present the canonical models of adverse selection in insurance markets that shed some light on the economic consequences of this phenomenon. Under symmetric information, companies observe all relevant risk characteristics. By charging risk-type specific prices, all risk types purchase full coverage. The result is an efficient allocation of resources with no risk bearing costs incurred by individuals. Under asymmetric information (adverse selection), if contracting is exclusive (i.e. each insured can contract with one and only one insurer), high risks end up with full insurance, but low-risk types end up with partial coverage. Under nonexclusive contracting (i.e. each insured may purchase contracts from more than one insurance provider), higher risk individuals end up with too much insurance, while low risk individuals end up with too little. In either case, the allocation of resources is inefficient.

Key Concepts

Under symmetric information, each risk type purchases full insurance at the risk type specific actuarially fair odds rate and this allocation is pareto efficient. However, if these contracts were offered under asymmetric information, one expects high risk types to report being low risk in order to receive a more favorable contract
If insurance companies do not have access to information about immutable characteristics of their potential customers where these characteristics affect the risk level of some activity, then this creates a situation of asymmetric information and a problem of adverse selection (also called antiselection).
As individuals who are 'bad risks' (i.e. low risk) will desire more insurance than 'good risks' (i.e. high risk) if the price is the same for all, then insurers would end up selling more insurance to the bad risks and so the overall price of insurance would reflect this.
If a pooling contract is offered and purchased, there is always a profitable deviation that is only attractive to low risk types but not high risk types. However, if insurance companies have sufficient foresight, they would not offer such a contract in the first place as such a deviation will make losses once other firms react to it.
Adverse selection may also result in screening strategies whereby insurers offer higher coverage at a higher unit price in order to attract high-risk types with lower risk types ending up with less insurance coverage.

Keywords:

insurance;
adverse selection;
linear pricing;
nonlinear pricing;
asymmetric information


One of the most powerful monarchs in British history, Henry VIII ruled England in unprecedented splendour. In this remarkable composite biography, Alison Weir brings Henry's six wives vividly to life, revealing each as a distinct and compelling personality in her own right. Drawing upon the rich fund of documentary material from the Tudor period, The Six Wives of Henry VIII shows us a court where personal needs frequently influenced public events and where a life of gorgeously ritualised pleasure was shot through with ambition, treason and violence.


This book presents an inter-disciplinary investigation into contemporary migration and social inclusion through an examination of migrant and refugee experience.

In this edited volume, contributors discuss new understandings of individual and community security in a world where legal borders and definitions of citizenship no longer adequately capture the reality of migration. Distinguished contributors approach questions of social belonging and inclusion from diverse perspectives. Drawing its primary examples from Australia, Migration and Insecurity is framed by the wider experience of the Global North, with examples from Europe, the United Kingdom and United States woven throughout the collection. An inter-disciplinary approach to migration studies, this book integrates local, national and transnational spaces in its discussion of new constructs of inclusion and security. It considers questions of historical memory, ontological security, transnational communities, the role of civic institutions and social relationships in local spaces to guide the reader towards the wider conceptual questions of migration studies using expertise from the fields of sociology, gender, historical and political studies

Migration and Insecurity will be of interest to students and scholars of transnationalism, migration politics and international relations.


. Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification has been a hot topic in the remote sensing community. A large number of methods have been proposed for HSI classification. However, most of them are based on the extraction of spectral feature, which leads to information loss. Moreover, they rarely consider the correlation among the spectrums. In this paper, we see spectral information as a sequential data which should be relevant to each other. We introduce long short-term memory (LSTM) model, which is a typical recurrent neural network (RNN), to deal with HSI classification. To tackle the problem of overfitting caused by limited labeled samples, regularization strategy is introduced. For unbalance in different classes, we improve LSTM by weighted cost function. Also, we employ guided filter to smooth the HSI that can greatly improve the classification accuracy. And we proposed a method for modeling hyperspectral sequential data, which is very useful for future research work. Finally, the experimental results show that our proposed method can improve the classification performance as compared to other methods in three popular hyperspectral datasets.


From Huckleberry Finn to Harry Potter, from Internet filters to the v-chip, censorship exercised on behalf of children and adolescents is often based on the assumption that they must be protected from "indecent" information that might harm their development - whether in art, in literature, or on a Web site. But where does this assumption come from, and is it true?In "Not in Front of the Children", Marjorie Heins explores the fascinating history of "indecency" laws and other restrictions aimed at protecting youth. From Plato's argument for rigid censorship, through Victorian laws aimed at repressing libidinous thoughts, to contemporary battles over sex education in public schools and violence in the media, Heins guides us through what became, and remains, an ideological minefield. With fascinating examples drawn from around the globe, she suggests that the "harm to minors" argument rests on shaky foundations.There is an urgent need for informed, dispassionate debate about the perceived conflict between the free-expression rights of young people and the widespread urge to shield them from expression that is considered harmful. "Not in Front of the Children" spurs this long-needed conversation.


Keynote paper presented at the International Leucaena Conference, 1‒3 November 2018, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.Leucaena (Leucaena leucocephala ssp. glabrata) is a highly palatable and productive forage used mainly by beef producers on extensive properties in northern Australia. When sown into native or sown grass pastures, leucaena provides significant production, economic, environmental and social benefits. Adoption of leucaena was slow initially due to a range of technical, agronomic and landscape factors. These have now been largely overcome through extensive research, development, producer experience and other advances, resulting in around 130,000 ha of cultivated leucaena being utilized across northern Australia.A range of aspects will need to be addressed if the adoption of leucaena is to be accelerated into the future. These include environmental concerns, especially potential weediness, and a range of technological needs, including soil nutritional requirements, grazing and toxicity management, opportunities for companion fodder systems and conservation options. Advances in technology and the ongoing need for a high-quality, profitable and sustainable perennial forage will ensure the continued adoption of leucaena across northern Australia for the foreseeable future.


Access to huge patient populations with well-characterized datasets, coupled with novel analytical methods, enables the stratification of complex diseases into multiple distinct forms. Patients can be accurately placed into distinguishable subgroups that have different disease causes and influences. This offers huge promise for innovation in drug discovery, drug repurposing, and the delivery of more accurately personalized care to patients. Complex diseases such as cancer, dementia, and diabetes are caused by multiple genetic, epidemiological, and/or environmental factors. Understanding the detailed architecture of these diseases requires a new generation of analytical tools that can identify combinations of genomic and nongenomic features (disease signatures) that accurately distinguish the disease subgroups. These sub-groups can be studied to find novel targets for drug discovery or repurposing, especially in the areas of unmet medical need and for selecting the best treatments available for an individual patient based on their personal genetic makeup, phenotype, and co-morbidities/co-prescriptions. This chapter describes new developments in combinatorial, multi-factorial analysis methods, and their application in patient stratification for complex diseases. Case studies are described in novel target discovery for a non-T2 asthma patient sub-group with distinct unmet medical need and in drug repurposing in a triple negative breast cancer population.


Aim: To examine the problem of substance abuse with its different forms among male secondary school students in Abha City, KSA.
Methods: A Cross sectional design. Conducted in Abha City, which is the capital of Aseer Region in Saudi Arabia. The study population was all secondary school students in Abha city for boys (n=13). The number of registered students for the academic year 1434-1435 was 3852 students. In a selected school, the questionnaires were distributed to all chosen 350 students in the selected school. A self-administered pencil-and-paper questionnaire was used to collect data on history of substance abuse. The researcher personally collected the data from boys.
Results: The age of about two thirds of participant students (68.8%) was 17-18 years. About half of students' fathers (49.8%) attained university education, compared with 52.8% of mothers. About one fourth of students' fathers (23%) were unemployed compared with 43.3% of their mothers. Alcohol was taken by 9.3% of male secondary school students. 8.8% of male secondary school students were substance abusers. The main illicit drug was cannabis (51.4%) followed by glue/solvents (48.6%) and amphetamine (45.7%). 4% of male secondary students chew khat. More than one third of students (37.5%) started chewing khat before the age of 16 years. prevalence of cigarette smoking was significantly higher among older students (p=0.001) and third year students (p=0.020) and those who had lower grades in the last year (p<0.001). Prevalence of alcohol intake was higher among older students. However, differences were not statistically significant.
Conclusion: The prevalence of substance abuse among male secondary school students in Abha City is quite high. Students start smoking at an early age. Prevalence of substance abuse increases with students' age. The students mainly obtain the substance by themselves but sometimes through the help of friends.


Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved great successes in recent years with the help of novel methods and higher compute power. However, there are still several challenges to be addressed such as convergence to locally optimal policies and long training times. In this paper, firstly, we augment Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) method with a novel self-supervised auxiliary task, i.e. \emph{Terminal Prediction}, measuring temporal closeness to terminal states, namely A3C-TP. Secondly, we propose a new framework where planning algorithms such as Monte Carlo tree search or other sources of (simulated) demonstrators can be integrated to asynchronous distributed DRL methods. Compared to vanilla A3C, our proposed methods both learn faster and converge to better policies on a two-player mini version of the Pommerman game.


The lactational amenorrhea method (LAM) is a modern contraceptive method based on the natural period of infertility after childbirth. It is effective as long as a mother's menses has not returned since her baby was born she exclusively breastfeeds her baby and her baby is under 6 months of age. Promoting LAM and exclusive breastfeeding simultaneously can improve infant nutrition and support the healthy timing and spacing of pregnancies. In Madagascar where the use of LAM other modern contraceptive methods and exclusive breastfeeding is low among postpartum women FANTA conducted a literature review and a formative research study to help inform efforts to promote use of LAM and exclusive breastfeeding in USAID / Madagascar programs. The study was conducted in Madagascar's Ambilobe District DIANA region. While the study had a relatively small sample and relied on respondents' recall of exclusive breastfeeding it yielded findings that helped identify several strategies for strengthening exclusive breastfeeding and use of modern contraception such as LAM among postpartum women in Ambilobe. Strategies include strengthening training for health care providers and community health workers; counseling pregnant women on exclusive breastfeeding and modern contraception use during antenatal visits at delivery and during the first 6 months postpartum; and identifying ways to involve men and others in the community in promoting and supporting those practices. .


The evolution of ridge-hotspot systems is not well understood. In this investigation, satellite-derived marine gravity data are used in conjunction with underway bathymetric and magnetic anomaly profiles to investigate the nature of ridge-hotspot interaction at four sparsely explored systems in the Southern Ocean. These systems illustrate three different stages of ridge-hotspot interaction in which a migrating spreading center approaches a hotspot (Pacific-Antarctic/Louisville), passes over or is captured by the hotspot (Mid-Atlantic/Shona-Discovery), and ultimately migrates away from the hotspot (Southeast Indian/Kerguelen). All of these systems show some evidence of discrete ridge jumps in the direction of the hotspot as the spreading center attempts to relocate toward the hotspot by asymmetric spreading. Interestingly, these ridge jumps show no evidence of propagating offsets as have been seen on many other ridge-hotspot systems. A simple model predicts that typical plume excess temperatures can weaken the lithosphere sufficiently to promote asymmetric spreading and possibly allow a discrete ridge jump. The presence of previously uncharted, obliquely oriented aseismic ridges and gravity lineations between the ridge and the hotspot supports the notion of asthenospheric flux from the plume to the spreading center both before and after the time when the hotspot is ridge centered. The azimuths of the aseismic ridges cannot be explained by plate kinematics alone; they consistently extend from the ends toward the centers of the adjacent spreading segments suggesting some interaction between plume derived asthenospheric flux and local lithospheric structure. The features discussed here also indicate that the transfer of asthenospheric material from the plume to the spreading center is influenced by the local plate boundary configuration and interaction with transform offsets.


The growth of third-party funding (TPF) in international arbitrations seems to have intensified recently, as suggested by the rise in the number of publicly-known cases involving funders.TPF is here to stay and it can play an important and commendable role in the arbitral process when it provides an impecunious party with access to justice. However, the flipside is that the addition of funders to the arbitral e quation also creates imbalances where there were none before. This article provides an innovative perspective into the issue of TPF, by analysing how funders have impacted the arbitral process. The arbitral community should be aware of these imbalances and seriously consider effective remedies to redress them, thereby safeguarding the integrity and efficiency of the arbitral process. Currently, there is virtually no regulation of TPF conduct in international arbitration, and funders have been left to define their own rules of conduct. In the absence of appropriate and consistent regulation, two remedies can already be implemented to address the imbalances created by TPF. First, a funded party should communicate upfront and transparently about TPF. Second, arbitral tribunals should be more amenable to granting security for costs, especially when an impecunious claimant is being funded and the respondent is faced with a serious risk of a hit-and-run arbitration.


A services trade, which has increasingly got important and a subject of trade due to improvements in knowledge and communication technologies, has been one of the important sources of economic growth for many countries. In this study, the effect of services trade on economic growth for country groups classified according to their development levels has been empirically investigated using panel data techniques for 1980-2007. The results reveal that while the coefficient which shows the relationship between services trade and economic growth is insignificant for developed countries, it is found significant for developing countries and for the whole sample which comprises both country groups. However, it is also observed that this effect is larger for developing countries which have higher services trade shares.


Unitarian, born the son of a church minister influential in post-colonial America, he was destined for piety but became instead the most important essayist and lecturer of his time, one whose Zeitgest he described and defined. An apologist for Napoleon, celebrant of Hamlet and his creator, intimate of Coleridge and Wordsworth, he devoted himself to the study of genius. Though unorthodox in religion, his Christ was a teacher and he himself became in time a moral instructor, dedicated to the liberty of the individual within an equal and free society. Power is the key term within his aesthetics and it is in the often mystical-seeming value with which he invests poetry that this is most manifest as an emancipating force for humankind. A believer in brotherhood, he spent much of his life considering national character, reflecting in lectures and essays upon the idea of Englishness. He is perhaps the first truly transatlantic essayist in his nation's canon, and though entombed within his reputation as a difficult prose writer during much of the literary criticism of the last half-century, he has emerged finally as an intellectual force of the first rank, one for whom metaphysics was never to be divorced from the examination of emotion. He is above all an analyst of the Self. (1) From recent reassessments, this is a now familiar portrait. (2) And yet the writer whom I am describing is not William Hazlitt but rather Ralph Waldo Emerson, better known to students of the Romantic period as a transcendentalist and disseminator in America of the principles of German idealism, a thinker not so much with but against history, a friend of Carlyle and a writer beloved of Friedrich Nietzsche. What is to be gained from reading William Hazlitt with an awareness of Ralph Waldo Emerson? Or more specifically, what is gained by reading Hazlitt alongside and indeed through Emerson when they inhabit so much common intellectual ground, and yet when the scholarly conception of both writers has conditioned neglect of their potential connections; when indeed it is a relationship that has never been seriously explored? (3) In particular, I am interested in examining continuities in their aesthetic thought that grow from their shared Unitarian heritage. William Hazlitt first achieved a form of prominence in America because of his important role in conditioning the reception of late Romantic poetry with his Select British Poets of 1824, a volume owned and annotated by Emerson. His early works were widely disseminated and republished in America. Reading The Spirit of the Age in 1828 proved to be transformational for Emerson because it brought the ideas of Wordsworth and Coleridge alive and convinced him that he lived at a distinct moment in history, one which looked back to the past only to strike it out. "Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers," he writes at the start of Nature, at once echoing and trampling upon Hazlitt's phrase in his essay on "Mr. Coleridge," "we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements." (4) Given his Unitarian background and the radical foundation of his thought, Hazlitt was destined to find early champions in America. Nevertheless, he is of all the major British Romantic writers, perhaps the quietest presence in later 19th century American thought. Kept alive by amateur interest, his critical reputation grew in America during the second half of the 20th century considerably more than it did in Britain, culminating in indispensible studies by David Bromwich, John Kinnaird and John Mahoney. (5) Writing in Oxford, Roy Park observed in 1980 that like "so many of our writers Hazlitt has been wrested from us by the Americans" and he regretted that 150 years after his death, there was no available edition of his criticism in Britain. (6) Emerson meanwhile, although he is of insuperable importance as the champion of Thoreau, Whitman and the American Renaissance, has enjoyed an indistinct reputation in Britain, rediscovered only recently by critics concerned to recover the history of his influence upon the transatlantic context of Romantic thought. …


Robust perception of self-motion requires integration of visual motion signals with nonvisual cues. Neurons in the dorsal subdivision of the medial superior temporal area (MSTd) may be involved in this sensory integration, because they respond selectively to global patterns of optic flow, as well as translational motion in darkness. Using a virtual-reality system, we have characterized the three-dimensional (3D) tuning of MSTd neurons to heading directions defined by optic flow alone, inertial motion alone, and congruent combinations of the two cues. Among 255 MSTd neurons, 98% exhibited significant 3D heading tuning in response to optic flow, whereas 64% were selective for heading defined by inertial motion. Heading preferences for visual and inertial motion could be aligned but were just as frequently opposite. Moreover, heading selectivity in response to congruent visual/vestibular stimulation was typically weaker than that obtained using optic flow alone, and heading preferences under congruent stimulation were dominated by the visual input. Thus, MSTd neurons generally did not integrate visual and nonvisual cues to achieve better heading selectivity. A simple two-layer neural network, which received eye-centered visual inputs and head-centered vestibular inputs, reproduced the major features of the MSTd data. The network was trained to compute heading in a head-centered reference frame under all stimulus conditions, such that it performed a selective reference-frame transformation of visual, but not vestibular, signals. The similarity between network hidden units and MSTd neurons suggests that MSTd may be an early stage of sensory convergence involved in transforming optic flow information into a (head-centered) reference frame that facilitates integration with vestibular signals.


A nonlinear dynamic model of a multi-mesh involute spur pinion-driven face-gear split-torque drive system is developed. The lumped mass model consists of five pinions and two face-gears with seven rotational degrees-of-freedom. Model includes two inputs, two outputs, and three idler gears meshing with two identical face gears at the bottom and top of the assembly. Face-gear tooth form and corresponding spur gear teeth are established by differential geometry and the theory of gearing. Face-gear drive system mesh stiffnesses are established by utilizing Finite Strip Method for the first time in the literature. The mesh stiffness and damping are time-variant. The model includes clearance type nonlinearity. The Harmonic Balance Method (HBM) is utilized to solve the nonlinear differential equations of motion. The results are compared with the time simulation results. The stability is checked with Floquet Theory and bifurcation diagrams from Poincare Sections. The model is fully capable of generating the tooth geometries, mesh stiffnesses, and gear train dynamics without reliance on any package programs. Hence, the model provides flexibility and fast computation for parametric studies compared to existing literature. The effect of the pinions' orientation angle patterns on the face-gear are investigated to evaluate the mesh phasing effects among system dynamic response. The effect of subharmonic motion on the dynamic response of the split-torque face-gear system is also demonstrated for the first time in the literature. The case studies demonstrate that subharmonic resonance peaks are avoided.


Research at the individual level shows strong positive relationships between performance in video games and on intelligence tests. Together with evidence of above average IQs of players of traditional mental sports such as chess, this suggests that national IQs should be strongly related to national performance on mental sports.
To investigate this, lists of top players for 12 different electronic sports (e-sports) and traditional mental sports were collected from a variety of sources (total n = 36k). Using a log count approach to control for population size, national cognitive ability/IQ was found to be a predictor (p<.05) of the relative representation of countries among the top players for every game except Go. When an overall mental sports score was calculated using a factor analytic approach, the factor scores correlated r = .79 with Lynn and Vanhanen's (2012) published national IQs.
The pattern was somewhat nonlinear such that national IQs below 85 seemed to have no relationship. The games that related most strongly with the general factor of mental sport ability also correlated more strongly with national IQs (r = .94). The relationship was fairly robust to controls for geographical region (coefficient 74% of the original in chosen model specification).


The mining industry worldwide spends a significant amount of human and financial resources in sampling of safety and health hazards for ensuring adequate control measures. Most mining countries carry out personal exposure monitoring for respirable dust. Unlike Australia, very few countries spend their resources in sampling of inhalable dust in mining industry. Over the years, size-selective sampling curve and instruments which replicate human inhalation have also changed. In addition, since its inception in 1920s, the recommended occupational exposure limits of a substance have varied significantly between mining countries worldwide. This paper discusses the experiences of introducing newly available monitoring instruments through laboratory and field evaluation. The institute of occupational medicine respirable foam sampler was evaluated in coal, diamond, gold and platinum mines. For comparison purposes, Higgins-Dewell type cyclone that conforms to the new size-selective curve with a D50 of four microns was used as a "true" reference sampler. For the laboratory study, the two samplers were exposed to two types of dust, viz. coal and sandstone briquette dust with a quartz content of 50.6%. Based on the results of the laboratory study, the correlation coefficient (r) between the foam and reference sampler was found to be 0.79 and 40% underestimation in measured values by the foam foam sampler (p-value of 0.000). Field evaluations of side-by-side foam and reference samplers in coal, gold, platinum and diamond mines, showed a poor non-linear relationship (r = 0.67) for a wide range of dust levels. From the non-linear regression equation, on average, the foam respirable sampler underestimated the dust levels by approximately 48% for a compliance level of 2 mg/m 3 . For increased dust levels, the underestimation of the measured dust levels by the foam sampler also increased, which led to the sampler being unsuitable for use during engineering control purposes. In overall, the foam sampler failed to meet the NIOSH accuracy criteria and was not pursued further for use in South African mines. Study suggests sufficient and prior due-diligence of any new instruments or methodologies to industry wide applications. Any modifications to sampling methodology or introduction of new instruments must ensure that the collected exposure data is relevant for continued development of long term dose-response curves and understand potential level of risks.


As the core counts on modern multi-processor systems increase, so does the memory contention with all the processes/threads trying to access the main memory simultaneously. This is typical of UMA (Uniform Memory Access) architectures with a single physical memory bank leading to poor scalability in multi-threaded applications. To palliate this problem, modern systems are moving increasingly towards Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architectures, in which the physical memory is split into several (typically two or four) banks. Each memory bank is associated with a set of cores enabling threads to operate from their own physical memory banks while retaining the concept of a shared virtual address space. However, accessing shared data structures from the remote memory banks may become increasingly slow. This paper proposes a way to determine and pin certain parts of the shared data to specific memory banks, thus minimizing remote accesses. To achieve this, the existing application code has be supplied with the proposed interface to set-up and distribute the shared data appropriately among memory banks. Experiments with NAS benchmark as well as with a realistic large-scale application calculating ab-initio nuclear structure have been performed. Speedups of up to 3.5 times were observed with the proposed approach compared with the default memory placement policy.


Today's mobile smartphones are very powerful, and many smartphone applications use wireless multimedia communications. Mobile phone security has become an important aspect of security issues in wireless multimedia communications. As the most popular mobile operating system, Android security has been extensively studied by researchers. However, few works have studied mobile phone multimedia security. In this article, we focus on security issues related to mobile phone cameras. Specifically, we discover several new attacks that are based on the use of phone cameras. We implement the attacks on real phones, and demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the attacks. Furthermore, we propose a lightweight defense scheme that can effectively detect these attacks.


This paper argues that John Hick's commitment to the moral principle of altruism undermines his pluralistic claim that all of the major world religions are equally efficacious from a soteriological perspective. This argument is placed in a context of a discussion evaluating the theoretical virtues of various hypotheses about religious diversity.


Michael Haneke's film Hidden ( Cache, 2005) raises questions about responsibility and guilt in the context of post-colonial inequities that are profoundly discomfiting for the viewer, framing a meditation on identity, consciousness and responsibility that is at once visceral and intellectual. On the reading presented here, this film makes visible and palpable some of the effects of the  ' strange suppositions' about personal responsibility and memory that were first articulated by a philosopher who also felt called upon to justify colonialism: John Locke. The perspective provided by the film casts light both on the unpleasant emotional resonances of Locke's theory of personal identity and points to the likely source of its structure in his celebrated theory of private property.


This paper aims to define a concept of strategic innovation given the impact it has on competitiveness, creation of growth strategies, new product categories and business models, as well as on changing the rules of the game on the existing market. In this sense, companies have to strategically redefine their business, to define new ways of competing in order to offer new value for consumers, stakeholders and companies themselves. If companies want to be successful they have to discover and exploit new strategic positions that emerge from time to time as industry evolves. Supporting this, the paper presents strategic elements of the National Innovation System (NIS), which can significantly contribute to Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) to boost their business and to increase their competitiveness and innovativeness. Starting from the strategic positioning map, the paper gives some of the possible answers to the question of how SMEs in Serbia can improve their business, i.e., how the NIS can influence SMEs in terms of increasing business success.


The detective novel is the only novel truly invented in the twentieth century. In the detective novel the hero is dead at the very beginning, so you don't have to deal with human nature at all, only the slow accumulation of facts. --Laurie Anderson the underpart is, though stemmed, uncertain is, as sex is, as moneys are, facts! facts, to he dealt with, as the sea is, the demand that they be played by, that they only can be, that they must be played by, said he, coldly, the --Charles Olson (6) When Libra was published in 1988, the normally private Don DeLillo granted several interviews. Perhaps because of the book's subject matter--Lee Harvey Oswald's role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy--the interviews tended to focus on what really happened on 22 November 1963 in both the fictional and the real world. (1) The novel presents possible answers to well-known questions about Oswald's role in the event and the existence of possible conspirators, but it raises as many questions as it answers: Oswald may be a patsy, the novel suggests, but he also has his own curious and complicated motivations. DeLillo's comments ascribed the tension in the novel between "conspiracy" and "contingency" ("Outsider" 56) to the ambiguity in the assassination between actions that were plotted and those that happened by coincidence. Critics have been quick to follow DeLillo's lead by considering the work in relation to conspiracy and coincidence, design and chance. (2) Such criticism treats the assassination as the determining factor of the plot and structure of the novel, asking: Does the novel perpetuate or confound conspiratorial explanations of the event? What does it tell us about who really killed Kennedy? DeLillo does not offer a new interpretation of accepted facts or locate a smoking gun. Instead, Libra dramatizes the uncertainty at the heart of the event and the growing evidentiary glut that has collected over the years in response to that uncertainty. In the novel the assassination is not an event to be known but an evidentiary landscape to be mastered. With Libra DeLillo thus registers a cultural anxiety about and fixation on how our society produces truth. Another way of putting this is that the event of the novel is the event of the archive's ascendance. By focusing on DeLillo's portrayal of the events, criticism of Libra tends to collapse the novel's plot with the theoretical assassination plots, assuming that the epistemological uncertainty of the novel derives from uncertainties about the assassination. Michael Rizza argues: when a plot takes on a momentum of its own, when an event arises out of a multiplicity of causes that extend beyond the limits of knowledge and slip off into the realm of chance, when agency gets dispersed through a system, when actions become performative and the audience complicit in the act--then the question "Who shot Kennedy?" evades a simple answer. (183) He asserts that it is "chance, coincidence, and randomness" that "mark the edge of knowledge" (178). Here the novel's uncertainty reflects the shadowy nature of the event. Similarly, Timothy Parrish suggests that the contingency of truth and the necessary fictions in Libra's account of the assassination are two symptoms of "our age of suspicion" (14). In both cases the suspicion of conspiracy, either in the act of the assassination or the subsequent investigations, makes it impossible to produce the truth of the event. However, in Libra the continuing indeterminacy is not merely the result of suspicion, skepticism about metanarratives, or the explosion of alternative and conspiratorial histories. Indeterminacy is the government's own conclusion. The Warren commission had blamed Oswald unequivocally (President's Commission 19) even though it heard CIA officer Richard Helms testify: "I would assume the case will never be closed" (Select Committee, Investigation 77). …


Background and Purpose— Conflicting reports in the literature exist with regard to the association of apolipoprotein E (apo E) alleles and lobar intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH). We genotyped 12 single-nucleotide polymorphisms in the 5′ upstream regulatory, exonic, and intronic regions of the apo E gene and performed genotype and haplotype association analyses. Methods— We prospectively enrolled subjects with hemorrhagic stroke and matched them with 2 controls based on age, race, and sex. Each case was reviewed by a physician to determine case status and location of the ICH. Multivariate logistic-regression modeling with backward elimination was used to determine significant risk factors for lobar ICH. Associations at the genotype and haplotype levels and linkage disequilibrium were conducted according to standard statistical methods. Results— Between May 1997 and December 2002, 315 cases of ICH were recruited, of whom 107 were lobar ICH cases matched to 205 controls. No association was found for apo E2, E3, or E4 with nonlobar ICH. Independent, significant risk factors for lobar ICH included apo E4, untreated hypertension, anticoagulant use, a first-degree relative with ICH, and ≤high school education (compared with >high school education). Treated hypercholesterolemia compared with "no history of hypercholesterolemia" was associated with a decreased risk of lobar ICH. Haplotype association analysis demonstrated a significant association of the apo E gene with lobar ICH among whites (P<0.0001) and blacks (P=0.0024). Conclusions— Apo E4 is independently associated with lobar ICH but not nonlobar ICH. Haplotypes of the apo E gene are associated with lobar ICH. Untreated hypertension is a risk factor for lobar ICH.


BARNRS' ELEMENTARY HISTORY OF THE l'NITED STATES. By James BaldwIn. New York: American Book Company. . 1 hIs Is admirably gotten up as to sl7.e, paper, prInt, and Ilh,strat.lonR. It Is attractive to the child and easIly used by' the t.eaeher In getting desired results. "Me,n make hIstory," and the storiES of the lOves of mE'n, who have lived during successive generations, are made to carry the history of America forward, from the time of Its dIscovery by Columbus until now, through all the settlements and after struggles, Wll.rB, Invelll,tlon~. rP.ronstructlon.., and extensions. HlsWry, as e. study In elEmentary schools, Is at last coming Into Its InherItance which must mean much In the making of American cltl7.ens. MONTEITH'S SOME USEFUL ANIMALS AND WHAT THEY DO FOR US. By John Monteith, M. A., author of "Famlll'ar Animals.' "Living Creatures," etc .. and Caroline Monteith. New York, Clnclnnattl, and Chicago: American Book Company. Cloth. 232 pp. With illustrations. Price, 50 cents. Interest.lng, reliable. valuable, is each of the books In t ho series of eclectic school readings, and this Is as timely as It Is worthy The subjects treated In this book both assist In nature study and /lIve aid In learning to read. The form of treatment was suggested by actual experIence In the school and the home. The moral lessons derived from the actions of animals are vivid and engaging, and much useful and Interestlng Information Is Imparted. The Interdependence of mankind and the domestic and tur-bearlng animals Is emphasIzed. The book Is fully Illustrated by cuts.


ANGELOVA, V. R., V. I. AKOVA, N. S. ARTINOVA and K. I. IVANOV, 2013. The effect of organic amendments on soil chemical characteristics. Bulg. J. Agric. Sci., 19: 958-971 Enrichment of soils with organic matter could reduce the content of bioavailable metal species as a result of complexation of free ions of heavy metals. In this experiment, the influences of different rate of organic amendments on the soil chemical characteristics, as well as organic content and humus fractions and their ability to reduce heavy metal availability in contaminated soils were investigated. The field experiment was conducted on soils contaminated by the Non-Ferrous-Metal Works near Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Different amounts of vermicompost and compost (5 and 10 g.kg -1 ) were incorporated into the top 20 cm of soil. To determine the effect of the organic amendments, the soil samples were collected 1 month after addition of organic amendments from depth of 20 cm. The soil characteristics (pH, EC, organic content and humus fractions) were determined. The total content of micro, macroelements, heavy metals and concentration of their available species in the soil were determined using aqua regia and DTPA extraction, respectively. The results showed that compost and vermicompost treatments had significant effect on soil physical and chemical properties like EC, pH, organic matter, macro and micronutrients content. Compared with the unamended soil, soil treated with organic amendments showed apparent increases of organic matter, total N, pH, EC and available macroelements (P, K, Ca and Mg). Organic amendments influenced considerably the humus fractions by changing the ratio C HA /C FA in favour of the humic acids, in which changes of the type of humus from filvic type in control to humic-fulvic type in addition of 5 g.kg -1 and 10 g.kg -1 vermicompost and humic type in addition of 10 g.kg -1 compost. Application of the compost and vermicompost reduces the amount of aggressive fulvic acids, organic matter components that pose a potential environmental risk. The results of the present study indicated that soil application of compost and vermicompost decreased DTPA-extractable levels of heavy metals in the soil. This is indicative of heavy metals immobilisation by humic substances from compost and vermicompost application. Results appear that verify the function of humic acid in improving phytoremediation efficiency of soils contaminated with heavy metals and potential environmental availability of metals may be controlled by soil organic amendments.


This article deals with the question of managers' ethical responsibilities in their communication with employees. The idea of a social contract for business is used as a starting point for the development of an ethical standard for communication. Focusing on the concept of corporate culture, the author looks at the role of power, rhetoric and ideology in exerting symbolic control in the organisation. He argues that although some believe that the presence of rhetoric and of power differences precludes the possibility of ethical communication, this is not necessarily true. Finally, Sonja Sackmann's view of corporate culture as a dynamic construct is introduced as an approach that seems to promote ethical communication with respect to employees.


The purpose of this study is to know what interests so that this text made and to what extent the manuscripts can elevate the status of Arung Palakka. These two main points are the focus of this paper. The document in question is a manuscript found in the palace of the Kingdom of Bone in Passempe in 1859. The contents of the script tell the history of the Kingdom of Bone since its establishment until the reign of Arung Palakka, the legendary figure of the Kingdom of Bone. The type of research used is historical research with descriptive method. Primary data used in the form of manuscripts found in Bone districts. As for the figure who was held responsible for the creation of this script, C.C.Macknight has read this text. Then from the results of the study of the book obtained that when Arung Palakka inaugurated as king in the Kingdom of Bone in 1672, appears rejection of some of the high nobility of the Kingdom of Bone. In fact, there is no precise mechanism of succession in the Kingdom of Bone. Men, women, old, young, even a baby had been king in the Kingdom of Bone. If it considered bloody pure noble, then that person deemed entitled to be king. It is a problem for Arung Palakka. A figure who is supposed to have an enormous share in liberating the Kingdom of Bone from the kingdom of Gowa Kingdom, but he found not to have the blood of Tomanurung nobility, so it deemed to be unworthy. Also, La Pakokoe, the son of the king of Bone Kingdom replaced by Arung Palakka, regarding custom and culture, is worthier of occupying that position. Due to disagreement over the appointment, La Pakokoe with a group of high nobles of the Kingdom of Bone as well as a group of nobles from several kingdoms in this region rejected. Though La Pakokoe it is the sister-in-law of Arung Palakka itself. To overcome the possible problems about his appointment as king, and the impact that may arise in the future, a text made to legitimize the power of Arung Palakka, not only for himself but also for his descendants.


Farmers use mobile phones to access information needed to improve their agricultural practice. However, in cases where they do maximize their mobile phone utilization, they may be hindered by some socio-economic factors which may lead to inadequate access to agricultural information. Therefore, this study investigated the influence of socio-economic factors on famers' use of mobile phones for agricultural information in Nigeria. The research adopted a survey design. The study population was 9,650 registered farmers in Yewa South Local Government, Ogun State, Nigeria. The proportionate stratified random sampling technique was used. The instrument used was structured questionnaire. Data were collected from 363 farmers; thus the study had 93%. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics, Regression and Multi regression analysis. Findings from this study revealed that majority of the farmers use mobile phones daily (75.5%). It was further showed that farmers use mobile phones for specific purposes such as making phone calls (mean= 3.47), and receiving text messages (mean= 2.90). The findings also revealed that farmers use mobile phones to acquire different types of Agricultural information such as fertilizer and pesticide information (mean=2.52), and market information (mean=2.31). High tariff deductions from telecommunication companies (mean=3.53) was a major constrain. Findings further revealed that family size (β= .173; P˂.05), and Farm Size (β= .168; P˂.05) had positive significant influence on farmers' use of mobile phones for agricultural information while Age range (β= -.031; P˂.05), Gender (β= -.027; P˂.05), Marital status (β= -.18; P˂.05), Educational qualification (β= -.031; P˂.05), Years of farming (β= -.126; P˂.05), Farm income per month (β= -.021; P˂.05) had negative influence respectively. Finally, socio-economic factors jointly influenced farmers' use of mobile phones for agricultural information (F = 3.81; R2 = .58, p < .05). The study concluded that, socioeconomic factors collectively contribute to farmers' use of mobile phones for agricultural information. Therefore, it is recommended that telecommunication companies in Nigeria, in conjunction with the Federal Government, should provide a low tariff plans for farmers. This would enable them to adequately utilize their mobile phones for agricultural information.


A spectral acceleration attenuation model for Japan is presented in the present study. The data set includes a very large number of strong ground-motion records up to the 2003 Off Tokach main and aftershocks. Site class terms, instead of individual site correction terms, are used. The site classes of recording stations are from a recent study on site classification for strong-motion recording stations in Japan according to a classification scheme that has been used in Japanese engineering design. The use of site class terms enables tectonic source-type effects to be identified and accounted for in the present model. The effects of a faulting mechanism for crustal earthquakes also are accounted for. For crustal and interface earthquakes, a simple form of an attenuation model (with respect to distance) is able to capture the main strong-motion characteristics and achieves unbiased estimates. For subduction slab events, a simple distance modification factor is employed to achieve plausible and unbiased predictions. The effects of source depth, tectonic source type, and faulting mechanism of crustal earthquakes are significant. The need for magnitude- squared terms is evaluated, and the use of magnitude-squared terms reduces the interevent error further.


The often overlooked easy reader genre offers some of the most enduring characters, and subtle authorial constructions, in children's literature.  In his 9 Fox books, James Marshall plays a never-ending game of hide and seek with readers, in that every encounter with the texts consistently reveals something previously unnoticed.  This seeming bit of magic is due to the vast amount of latent or implicit content in the books.  An analysis of this latent content will follow a brief background of the Fox series and its hilarious mammalian protagonist.  An analysis of the series' history, hero, and hidden gems will serve to finally articulate Marshall's true contributions to the easy reader tradition.


Peter Birks has famously described the way in which rights operate in Blackstone's legal cosmos as "superstructural." In order to fully understand what this assessment entails, we will have to take a closer look at how the elements of Blackstone's conceptual mechanism – right/wrong, rights, wrongs, and remedies – interact and complement each other. This "juridical" analysis, however, will inevitably take us back to the more foundational aspects of Blackstone's vision of private law. In a formalist jurisprudence, Ernest J. Weinrib has explained, conceptual constructions and philosophical foundations are closely and intrinsically linked in the sense that the former are the expression of the latter – an insight particularly helpful, I believe, in Blackstone's case, where the explicit verbalization of philosophical underpinnings remains fragmentary and basic theoretical assumptions have to be gleaned from doctrinal construction and categorization. As we shall see, the rights-remedies division in Blackstone's organizational scheme is the expression of a "dualist" conception of the rights-remedies relationship: Blackstone's perception of private law is not a Weinribian vision of a coherent, transactional unit, defined by the correlativity of right and duty. The "rights" that come into existence when a "wrong" is committed are of such nature that they can only be perceived as a triangular relationship that necessarily involves plaintiff, defendant and the state.


The central purpose of this study was to investigate novice and experienced teachers' pedagogical knowledge by comparing the targeted learners' academic performance. For this purpose, several instruments such as a questionnaire, an observation technique, and an interview were utilized for collecting data. From the population of teachers teaching English at Gooyesh Language Institute, a sample of 30 English teachers (15 novice and 15 experienced teachers) were asked to fill in the questionnaire. Subsequently, an interview was used in which 10 teachers (5 novice and 5 experienced teachers) participated. Finally, 16 teachers (8 experienced and 8 novice teachers) were carefully observed during teaching in their classes. To analyse the collected data, an independent samples t -test was run to see if there was a difference between the ways these two groups of teachers perceived the pedagogical knowledge they employed to enhance the motivational strategies of the learners. Moreover, Pearson Correlation Coefficient was used in the analysis of the data. The findings reflected that there were significant differences between pedagogical knowledge of experienced and novice teachers in only two categories and the differences in the remaining cases were not significant. Notably, the correlation was reported high merely in two categories of pedagogical knowledge for both groups of teachers, the most and the least frequently used motivational strategies were the same for both groups of teachers, and there was a significant difference between the achievement of the learners of the experienced teachers and those of the novice instructors .


Body mass index (bmi) values reflect the net balance between nutrition, work effort, and calories consumed to fight disease. Nineteenth-century prison records in the United States demonstrate that the bmi values of blacks and whites were distributed symmetrically; neither underweight nor obese individuals were common among the working class. bmi values declined throughout the nineteenth century. By modern standards, however, nineteenth-century bmis were in healthy weight ranges, though the biological living standards in rural areas exceeded those in urban areas. The increase in bmis during the twentieth century did not have its origin in the nineteenth century.


Remote debugging facilities are a technical necessity for devices that lack appropriate input/output interfaces (display, keyboard, mouse) for program- ming (e.g., smartphones, mobile robots) or are simply unreachable for local development (e.g., cloud-servers). Yet remote debugging solutions can prove awkward to use due to re-deployments. Empirical studies show us that on aver- age 10.5 minutes per coding hour (over five 40-hour work weeks per year) are spent for re-deploying applications (including re-deployments during debugging). Moreover current solutions lack facilities that would otherwise be available in a local setting because it is difficult to reproduce them remotely. Our work identifies three desirable properties that a remote debugging solution should exhibit, namely: run-time evolution, semantic instrumentation and adaptable distribution. Given these properties we propose and validate Mercury, a remote debugging model based on reflection. Mercury supports run-time evolution through a causally connected remote meta-level, semantic instrumentation through the reification of the underlying execution environment and adaptable distribution through a modular architecture of the debugging middleware.


Each year the Fraser Institute and the Heritage Foundation (in conjunction with the Wall Street Journal) publish indexes of economic freedom, while the Freedom House publishes an index of political freedom around the world (Gwartney and Lawson 2002; O'Driscoll, Holmes, and Kirkpatrick 2002; Freedom House 2001). The explanations and graphs in those reports illustrate the relationships between each of the indexes and relevant socioeconomic variables such as GDP growth, life expectancy, and measures of human development. What the annual reports suggest is that there is a positive relationship between economic freedom and the standard of living, as well as between economic growth and political freedom. Although such assertions would appear to be intuitively correct, the reports do not undertake any rigorous empirical tests to provide scientific support to such relationships. The empirical analyses existing in the literature afford more or less clear, but inconclusive, results. They highlight the positive impact of economic freedom on growth, (1) or the ambiguous relationship between growth and political freedom. Fewer studies have been published on the association between the two types of freedom, but much attention is paid to the hypothesis of both being mutually enhancing. Such conclusions are open to criticism. Generally speaking, they depend on the choice of methodology and sample size. Moreover, a series of control variables must be included in the model for the analysis to be robust. In other words, there is a need for data on a broad range of variables, for a considerable number of countries, over a long period of time--a task whose complexity should not be under-estimated. Indeed, in many cases we are obliged to work with a small sample of countries and a small set of time observations. This problem conditions the methodology to be used (Judson and Owen 1999). Under such circumstances, any new contribution on the subject is welcome, as bar as it can offer additional evidence on the behavior of these variables and contribute to suitable institutional reform. It is along these lines that our study is intended. Our study adopts the general approach previously taken by Farr, Lord, and Wolfenbarger (1998), hereafter FLW, although with a different econometric technique. We do not try to analyze the variables relevant to economic growth, (2) but rather to discern the causal relationships existing among economic freedom, democracy, and growth. With this aim in mind, we have structured the article as follows. First, we provide a review of what we regard to be some key ideas in the existing research on the relationships among the three variables. Second, we define economic and political freedom and briefly explain the most relevant ingredients used to build the indexes to measure them. Third, we develop the model we use to study and analyze the different associations and statistical relationships between the variables, and we succinctly explain the methodology. Finally, we examine the results and set out our conclusions. Democracy, Economic Freedom, and Growth: The Question of Causality As North (1990) has pointed out, a society's institutional framework seems to play an instrumental role in the long-term performance of its economy. As appropriate data have become available, empirical researchers have added economic freedom, democracy, and other institutional variables to the set of potential determinants of economic welfare. More specifically, many studies attempt to identify the variables that determine economic growth and how they do so. But some interesting questions remain, as the following review of the relevant literature will show. A significant body of research indicates that economic freedom enhances economic growth. Baumol (2002) stresses that the free-market economic system acts as a powerful innovation machine--a fundamental driving force behind growth processes--in societies where the rule of law prevails. …


We re-examine the link between changes in housing wealth, financial wealth, and consumer spending. We extend a panel of U.S. states observed quarterly during the seventeen-year period, 1982 through 1999, to the thirty-one year period, 1978 through 2009. Using techniques reported previously, we impute the aggregate value of owner-occupied housing, the value of financial assets, and measures of aggregate consumption for each of the geographic units over time. We estimate regression models in levels, first differences and in error-correction form, relating per capita consumption to per capita income and wealth. We find a statistically significant and rather large effect of housing wealth upon household consumption. This effect is consistently larger than the effect of stock market wealth upon consumption. This reinforces the conclusions reported in our previous analysis. In contrast to our previous analysis, however, we do find -- based on data which include the recent volatility in asset markets -- that the effects of declines in housing wealth in reducing consumption are at least as large as the effects of increases in housing wealth in increasing the course of household consumption.


It has been two years since the housing bubble began to deflate. In this time, home prices in major metropolitan areas have fallen more than 32.3 percent and the woes in the housing sector have spread to the broader economy. Where is the housing market today? Have we hit bottom? This paper, written by researchers from the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the National Low Income Housing Coalition, finds that while most of the nation's metropolitan housing bubbles have deflated and many markets never had one to contend with, there is the possibility of a persistent housing slump in the years ahead. An appropriate response to this situation involves 1) stimulating demand for housing by acting to lower unemployment and raise wages, 2) recognizing a leading role for rental housing in federal foreclosure mitigation and neighborhood stabilization policy, including allowing foreclosed homeowners to remain in their homes as renters (Right to Rent), and 3) adequately funding the National Housing Trust Fund.


Multi-annual simulations over the Central America CORDEX domain are conducted with the latest version of regional climate model RegCM4 driven by ERA-Interim reanalysis fields. The RegCM4 system can reproduce both the annual cycle and the spatial patterns of mean summer precipitation over Central America and Mexico. Regional circulation features are also reproduced, although the intensity of the Caribbean Low-Level Jet is underestimated and it is located too far south. Over most land areas, RegCM4 surface air temperatures are lower than observations by 1 to 3°C, which however may also be related to biases in the reanalysis forcing data. The model can realistically simulate the amplitude of the convective diurnal cycle in areas where the convective triggering is dominated by non-local gravity wave effects. However, the simulation of the phase of the diurnal cycle of convection is less satisfactory, with the peak precipitation occurring earlier than observed, a common fault in atmospheric models. Sensitivity experiments are carried out to investigate the model sensitivity to land surface and a prognostic diurnal sea surface temperature scheme. Use of the Community Land Model (CLM) instead of the Bio sphere-Atmosphere Transfer Scheme (BATS) results in a warmer and drier land surface and a better simulation of the seasonal average spatial pattern of precipitation. However, with BATS, RegCM4 has a more realistic simulation of the mid-summer drought over the region. The impact of the prognostic sea surface temperature (SST) scheme is generally small. In general, neither of these surface physics upgrades results in a clearly superior model performance.


To stay informed about book updates and additional SONAR tips, articles, and videos sign up for the free DigiFreq pro audio newsletter: digifreq.com/digifreq/The leading reference to Cakewalk's powerful digital audio workstation, SONAR X2 POWER! is an all-new edition of this popular guide, offering top-to-bottom detailed coverage of the SONAR X2 software. The book's comprehensive treatment begins with the basics and takes you from setup to final mix with clear, step-by-step instructions and exercises. If you're a new user, you'll start at the beginning and learn everything you need to know to use SONAR for recording, editing, producing, mixing, and sharing your music with the world. If you're already a SONAR user, you'll learn the details about all the exciting new features in SONAR X2--and you'll sharpen your workflow and improve your music-making. SONAR X2 POWER! is the most complete guide to SONAR X2 available, covering everything from working with SONAR files and navigating projects to advanced editing, surround sound, automation, and much more. No matter what genre you're working in, or what part of the music/audio world you call home, you will benefit from the book's clear guidance and the wealth of production tips and shortcuts. Build and strengthen your SONAR expertise with SONAR X2 POWER!


Abstract. Stably stratified canopy flow in complex terrain has been considered a difficult condition for measuring net ecosystem–atmosphere exchanges of carbon, water vapor, and energy. A long-standing advection error in eddy-flux measurements is caused by stably stratified canopy flow. Such a condition with strong thermal gradient and less turbulent air is also difficult for modeling. To understand the challenging atmospheric condition for eddy-flux measurements, we use the renormalized group (RNG) k–v turbulence model to investigate the main characteristics of stably stratified canopy flows in complex terrain. In this two-dimensional simulation, we imposed persistent constant heat flux at ground surface and linearly increasing cooling rate in the upper-canopy layer, vertically varying dissipative force from canopy drag elements, buoyancy forcing induced from thermal stratification and the hill terrain. These strong boundary effects keep nonlinearity in the two-dimensional Navier–Stokes equations high enough to generate turbulent behavior. The fundamental characteristics of nighttime canopy flow over complex terrain measured by the small number of available multi-tower advection experiments can be reproduced by this numerical simulation, such as (1) unstable layer in the canopy and super-stable layers associated with flow decoupling in deep canopy and near the top of canopy; (2) sub-canopy drainage flow and drainage flow near the top of canopy in calm night; (3) upward momentum transfer in canopy, downward heat transfer in upper canopy and upward heat transfer in deep canopy; and (4) large buoyancy suppression and weak shear production in strong stability.


Background: Nursing practice has to contribute to evidence pointing out why there is a need for more nurse-designed randomized control trials (RCTs) focusing on evidence-based practice (EBP). How far this EBP has progressed in different health aspects is usually established by systematic reviews of RCTs. Nurse-led RCTs exist but no study has addressed the essentials of nursing care. Aim: The aim was therefore to determine the essentials of nurses' interventions by means of nurse-led RCTs in somatic care focusing on the stated context, goals, content, strategies as well as the nurse's role related to effectiveness. Methods: A systematic review was realized according to Cochrane review assumptions to identify, appraise and synthesize all empirical evidence meeting pre-specified eligibility criteria. The PRISMA statement guided the data extraction process (n = 55) from PubMed and CINAHL. Results: Of the RCTs in somatic care, 71% showed a positive effective- ness of nurse-led interventions, of which the nurse had a significant role with regard to being the main responsible in 67% of the studies. Also, 47% of the RCTs presented a theoretical standpoint related to the nurse-led interventions and most prominent were international evidence-based guidelines. Goals were found to have either a patient-centered or a professional-centered ambi- tion. Strategies were based on patient-directed initiatives, nurse-patient-directed initiatives or nurse-directed initiatives, while contents were built upon either a patient-nurse interaction or a nursing management plan. Conclusions: This review underlines the necessity of a holistic view of a person, as nurse-led RCTs comprising a patient-centered ambition, patient-directed initiative and patient-nurse interaction plan showed beneficial nursing care effectiveness, particularly if * Corresponding author.


My thesis contributes to research on the consequences of labour market institutions for employment using an original Greek dataset I have constructed, the TERS. This survey gives a representative sample of micro-enterprises as well as small and medium enterprises. I investigate whether firms use temporary (and family) employment as "escape" routes from mandated wage floors (corporate collective wage agreements) and working conditions floors (employment protection legislation (EPL) monitored by the Labour Inspectorate). My basic hypothesis is thus that temporary and family work are forms of insurance for the poorer firms which cannot cope with EPL coupled with wage floors. I find significant wage floor effects, in particular, where firms have many workers at the minimum (or below it - in the case of "grey" market firms), they are more likely to employ temporary workers. The implication is that where firms have many workers on the minimum they are likely to worry about the possibility of a rise in the minimum, and hence will employ on a more temporary basis. Wage floors thus matter. I also find significant EPL effects. In particular, firms whose managers believe that temps have low EPL are more likely to employ temps, ceteris paribus. My result thus shows that an advantage of employing temps is quite simply their low EPL. My findings for family worker employment are similarly confirmatory. Workplaces in the "grey" category, paying low wages probably below nationally agreed rates, are much more likely to employ a high percentage of family workers, other things equal-they are easy to layoff, and less likely to complain about low wages. The policy implication of my research is therefore that Greece's wages and working conditions floors indeed appear both to promote precarious temporary employment, and also small-scale family business, which is not the way to grow and prosper.


Active galactic nuclei (AGN) probably control the growth of their host galaxies via feedback in the form of wide-angle wind-driven outflows. These establish the observed correlations between supermassive black hole (SMBH) masses and host galaxy properties, e.g. the spheroid velocity dispersion $\sigma$. In this paper we consider the growth of the SMBH once it starts driving a large-scale outflow through the galaxy. To clear the gas and ultimately terminate further growth of both the SMBH and the host galaxy, the black hole must continue to grow its mass significantly, by up to a factor of a few, after reaching this point. The mass increment $\Delta M_{\rm BH}$ depends sensitively on both galaxy size and SMBH spin. The galaxy size dependence leads to $\Delta M_{\rm BH} \propto \sigma^5$ and a steepening of the $M-\sigma$ relation beyond the analytically calculated $M \propto \sigma^4$, in agreement with observation. Slowly--spinning black holes are much less efficient in producing feedback, so at any given $\sigma$ the slowest--spinning black holes should be the most massive. Current observational constraints are consistent with this picture, but insufficient to test it properly; however, this should change with upcoming surveys.


Purpose: Entrepreneurship can be perceived as a weapon in the fight against unemployment. It is especially true within the segment of young people. The paper seeks to investigate and report on the incentives for and obstacles to entrepreneurial motivation among youth. The focus will be put on capturing the extent of school pupils' self-estimated chances and capabilities of becoming an entrepreneur. Design/Methodology/Approach: A structured survey questionnaire was used to collect primary data from school pupils aged 12-17. A sample group of over 350 young participants of university-run entrepreneurship programs was selected. The data gathered in the research were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Findings: Our findings suggest that entrepreneurial motivation is the resultant of numerous factors such as one's individual characteristics and intuitive capacity, as well as various environmental variables. Of the last ones, formal entrepreneurship education is crucial. Practical Implications: Efforts to encourage people to become entrepreneurs could start as early as childhood or adolescence. University programs and courses for youth are a perfect forum for shaping entrepreneurial skills. Therefore, such initiatives should be supported by government funding schemes and heavily promoted. Originality/Value: To the author's best knowledge, the present study is the first empirical research into incentives and challenges that build perceptions and attitudes towards entrepreneurship among youth aged 12-17 in Poland.


Abstract: Besides being involved in the gradual formation of blood vessels during embryonic development, vascular remodeling also contributes to the progression of various cardiovascular diseases, such as; myocardial infarction, heart failure, atherosclerosis, pulmonary artery hypertension, restenosis, aneurysm, etc. The integrated mechanisms; proliferation of medial smooth muscle cell, dysregulation of intimal endothelial cell, activation of adventitial fibroblast, inflammation of macrophage, and the participation of extracellular matrix proteins are important factors in vascular remodeling. In the recent studies, microRNAs (miRs) have been shown to be expressed in all of these cell-types and play important roles in the mechanisms of vascular remodeling. Therefore, some miRs may be involved in prevention and others in the aggravation of the vascular lesions. miRs are small, endogenous, conserved, single-stranded, non-coding RNAs; which degrade target RNAs or inhibit translation post-transcriptionally. In this paper, we reviewed the function and mechanisms of miRs, which are highly expressed in various cells types, especially endothelial and smooth muscle cells, which are closely involved in the process of vascular remodeling. We also assess the functions of these miRs in the hope that they may provide new possibilities of diagnosis and treatment choices for the related diseases.


Functioning of the living cell is controlled by a complex network of interactions among genes, proteins, and other molecules. A major goal of systems biology is to understand and explain the mechanisms by which these interactions govern the cell's response to various conditions. Molecular interaction networks have proven to be a powerful representation for studying cellular behavior. Numerous algorithms have been developed to unravel the complexity of these networks. Our work addresses the drawbacks of existing techniques. This thesis includes three related research efforts that introduce network-based approaches to bridge current methodological gaps in systems biology.
i. Functional enrichment methods provide a summary of biological functions that are overrepresented in an interesting collection of genes (e.g., highly differentially expressed genes between a diseased cell and a healthy cell). Standard functional enrichment algorithms ignore the known interactions among proteins. We propose a novel network-based approach to functional enrichment that explicitly accounts for these underlying molecular interactions. Through this work, we close the gap between set-based functional enrichment and topological analysis of molecular interaction networks.
ii. Many techniques have been developed to compute the response network of a cell. A recent trend in this area is to compute response networks of small size, with the rationale that only part of a pathway is often changed by disease and that interpreting small subnetworks is easier than interpreting larger ones. However, these methods may not uncover the spectrum of pathways perturbed in a particular experiment or disease. To avoid these difficulties, we propose to use algorithms that reconcile case-control DNA microarray data with a molecular interaction network by modifying per-gene differential expression p-values such that two genes connected by an interaction show similar changes in their gene expression values.
iii. Top-down analyses in systems biology can automatically find correlations among genes and proteins in large-scale datasets. However, it is often difficult to design experiments from these results. In contrast, bottom-up approaches painstakingly craft detailed models of cellular processes. However, developing the models is a manual process that can take many years. These approaches have largely been developed independently. We present LINKER, anefficient and automated data-driven method that analyzes molecular interactomes. LINKER combines teleporting random walks and k-shortest path computations to discover connections from a set of source proteins to a set of target proteins. We demonstrate the efficacy of Linker through two applications: proposing extensions to an existing model of cell cycle regulation in budding yeast and automated reconstruction of human signaling pathways. Linker achieves superior precision and recall compared to state-of-the-art algorithms from the literature.


Cocrystals are modular multicomponent solids with exceptional utility in synthetic chemistry and materials science. A variety of methods exist for the preparation of cocrystals, yet, some promising cocrystal phases have proven to be intractable synthetic targets. We describe a strategy for the synthesis of the pharmaceutically relevant (caffeine)·(benzoic acid) cocrystal (1), which persistently failed to form using a broad range of established techniques. State-of-the-art crystal structure prediction methods were employed to assess the possible existence of a thermodynamically stable form of 1, hence to identify appropriate heteronuclear seeds for cocrystallization. Once introduced, the designed heteronuclear seeds facilitated the formation of 1 and, significantly they (or seeds of the product cocrystal) continued to act as long-lasting laboratory "contaminants", which encouraged cocrystal formation even when present at such low levels as to evade detection. The seeding technique described thus enables the synthesis of cocrystals regarded as unobtainable under desired conditions, and potentially signifies a new direction in the field of materials research.


Background: Fexofenadine (AllegraⓇ) is a H1-receptor selective antihistamine which exhibits consistent efficacy and safety in the treatment of allergic diseases. We thought that fexofenadine may be useful in treatment of the pruritus associated with eczema. Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy and safety of fexofenadine in the treatment of pruritus associated with eczema. Methods: In this study, patients with atopic and allergic contact dermatitis were divided into a group given fexofenadine 180 mg once daily with topical prednicarbate treatment group or a topical prednicarbate treatment only group, for 1 week. The primary efficacy parameter was the mean change from baseline in pruritus score, and the secondary parameters were the mean change in the incidence of scratching, the mean change in visual analogue scale (0∼100 mm) of pruritus, and a comparison of patient satisfaction. Results: 435 patients were included and the mean age was 32.9 years old. The mean pruritus score at baseline was 3.55 point in fexofenadine group and 3.51 point in the control group. Regarding the mean change in pruritus score, fexofenadine significantly decreased the severity of pruritus compared with the control group (p<0.05). There were no significant differences in the decrease in the incidence of scratching between the two groups. A decrease in pruritus levels utilizing visual analogue scale was significant in the fexofenadine group (p<0.05) and patient satisfaction was significantly higher in the fexofenadine group (p=0.0192). There was no significant difference in the incidence of adverse events between two groups (p=0.6237). Conclusion: Fexofenadine administered 180 mg once daily in combination with topical prednicarbate treatment was effective and well tolerated in this study. (Korean J Dermatol 2008;46(2):151∼159)


Currently, inflammatory processes activate various systems in the body. This article reveals the etiology and pathogenesis of odontogenic inflammatory diseases of the maxillofacial region. Special attention is paid to the aggressive course of the inflammatory process with the defeat of deep cellular spaces, accompanied by pronounced endogenous intoxication. The author analyzes the importance of the use of antibiotics from the group of penicillins in the treatment of inflammatory processes of the maxillofacial region.


>Kinematic assumptions of geodetic inversions for fault slip require
 that the slip sums to the (plate) boundary velocity. This assumption neglects permanent off-fault
 deformation, which could account for discrepancies between geologic and geodetic estimates. We
 use three-dimensional mechanical models to assess if unaccounted permanent strain surrounding
 faults could contribute to slip rate discrepancies across disconnected faults within the Mojave
 Desert (California, USA) portion of the eastern California shear zone (ECSZ). We modified fault
 configurations derived from the Southern California Earthquake Center Community Fault Model to
 better represent the disconnected nature of active faults in the ECSZ south of the Garlock fault.
 The models with revised fault geometry produce slip rates that better match geologic strike-slip
 rates, thus validating the revisions. Within these models, off-fault deformation accounts for
 40% ± 23% of the total strain across the ECSZ. This suggests that a significant portion of the
 discrepancy between the geologic and geodetically modeled slip rates in the ECSZ could be due to
 the geodetic inversion model assumption of zero permanent off-fault deformation.


In trying to promote the development of an open Internet, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has primarily tried to encourage network providers to be transparent about their traffic management practices and quality of service prioritization policies. Dominant network operators have successfully challenged this minimalist approach to addressing end-user concerns about the rise of a two-tiered Internet, motivating the FCC to engage in yet another public consultation process to assess its future approach to the problem. This article maps the debate using Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools that allow us to build a systematic picture of the positions of the regulator and groups of private interests trying to shape its decisions. A quantitative linguistic analysis of the content of formal written submissions to the FCC by parties with divergent views helps document how the conceptual model of the regulator evolved during the rulemaking process leading to the FCC February 2015 network neutrality Order. Despite the adoption of a broader substantive basis by the FCC under Title II of the Communications Act, the rule-of-reason approach to substantive interpretation in the Order limits the capacity of the new regulatory framework to protect and promote an open Internet. The evidence suggests the public consultation process is likely to serve as a tool for legitimizing status quo institutional arrangements that allow operators to engage in discriminatory traffic prioritization strategies.


This Article examines the application of equitable subordination under Title 11 of the United States Code to bankruptcy claims purchasing transactions that transpire after the occurrence of inequitable conduct by a third party. Although a significant issue with practical consequences, it has drawn relatively scant commentary. To the author's knowledge, no scholarship to date has attempted to comprehensively discuss the issue or describe the indirect cleansing and washing of tainted claims resulting therefrom. While analyzing and criticizing the current state of the law, this Article introduces the concepts of the "subordination benefit," "subordination benefit elimination theory," and "limited subordination benefit theory" to facilitate and further conversations related to the intersection of equitable subordination and bankruptcy claims trading.

This Article primarily aims to promote an active, fluid bankruptcy claims trading market to, on an ex post basis, benefit creditors and, on an ex ante basis, reduce the cost, and induce the extension, of credit in the primary capital markets, thereby supporting the broader economy. Additionally, this Article seeks to reduce indirect cleansing of tainted claims and indirect claims washing through the bankruptcy claims market.

The subject matter is particularly timely and relevant, given the recent publication of the Final Report and Recommendations of the American Bankruptcy Institute Commission to Study the Reform of Chapter 11, the significant growth of the claims trading market and the increasing activity and sophistication of distressed investors, and the recent formation of the American Bankruptcy Institute's Claims Trading Committee.

This Article argues that subordination benefit elimination theory, which represents the dominant theory propagated by courts and commentators, finds support in a misguided reading of caselaw and conflicts with sound economic policy and logic. Further, while acknowledging limited subordination benefit theory is a superior approach to subordination benefit elimination theory, this Article argues that limited subordination benefit theory also runs contrary to sound economic policy and logic. This Article requests commentators and courts halt and reverse the propagation of subordination benefit elimination theory and avoid disseminating limited subordination benefit theory. Instead, this Article proposes post-misconduct discounted claims purchasers be entitled to participate in the subordination benefit to the same extent as pre-misconduct claimholders.

If commentators and courts are unready to abandon both theories and if required to make a suboptimal binary choice, this Article suggests limited subordination benefit theory be propagated and utilized in lieu of subordination benefit elimination theory.


Abstract Some parameters of growth were examined in three test crops as indices of plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) ability of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Crops include Abelmoschus esculentus L. (okra), Lycopersicon esculentum L. (tomato) and Amaranthus sp. (African spinach). This study aimed to examine the effectiveness of PGPR in West Africa and determine whether the inoculation method has an impact on PGPR's effectiveness. Bacterium was isolated from topsoil in the Botanical Garden, University of Lagos, Nigeria. Inoculation with bacteria was done by soaking seeds in 106 cfu/ml of bacterial suspension and coating was done using 10% starch (w/v) as seed adhesive with 106 cfu/ml of bacterial suspension. The third treatment involved soaking seeds in distilled water and later applying NPK 15:15:15 fertilizer. Control seeds were soaked in distilled water. Two methods of bacterial inoculation (soaking and coating) produced statistically similar results to plants grown with fertilizer but performed better than the control, suggesting a high potential of P. aeruginosa as PGPR.


Bone is a complex organ with the capacity to regenerate. Even with this healing potential, healing results in fractured bone are unsatisfactory in a considerable patient cohort even with a good treatment regimen. These delayed healing cases encourage further research into possible new treatment approaches. The recently developed field of osteoimmunol‐ ogy addressing the tight interconnectivity of the skeletal system and the immune system could be a promising opportunity in this regard. In this review, the complexity of bone and the bone healing process are highlighted with an emphasis on the early healing phase. Specific immune cell subsets are considered for their potential to enhance bone healing and thus to develop new treatment strategies for patients in need.


In the last decade, interest in the field of three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting has increased enormously. 3D bioprinting combines the fields of developmental biology, stem cells, and computer and materials science to create complex bio-hybrid structures for various applications. It is able to precisely place different cell types, biomaterials and biomolecules together in a predefined position to generate printed composite architectures. In the field of tissue engineering, 3D bioprinting has allowed the study of tissues and organs on a new level. In clinical applications, new models have been generated to study disease pathogenesis. One of the most important components of 3D bio-printing is the bio-ink, which is a mixture of cells, biomaterials and bioactive molecules that creates the printed article. This review describes all the currently used bio-printing inks, including polymeric hydrogels, polymer bead microcarriers, cell aggregates and extracellular matrix proteins. Amongst the polymeric components in bio-inks are: natural polymers including gelatin, hyaluronic acid, silk proteins and elastin; and synthetic polymers including amphiphilic block copolymers, PEG, poly(PNIPAAM) and polyphosphazenes. Furthermore, photocrosslinkable and thermoresponsive materials are described. To provide readers with an understanding of the context, the review also contains an overview of current bio-printing techniques and finishes with a summary of bio-printing applications.


Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is a data fitting technique used to estimate properties of the Earth from seismic data by minimizing the misfit between observed and simulated seismograms. Because of very high computational cost, this technique has so far been used either in a 2D fully elastic formulation or in a 3D acoustic formulation, when applied to active-source surveys in order to image the shallow subsurface (i.e., down to the first few kilometers). However, the Earth is three-dimensional, (visco)elastic and highly heterogeneous. Therefore, obtaining more accurate models requires solving the full 3D elastic wave equation. In this study, we use an envelope-based misfit function to construct shallow 3D models of shear wavespeed while inverting surface waves. The envelope-based misfit function has proven to be effective for inverting surface waves, which are particularly exposed to the cycle-skipping problem. To accurately model the wavefield in the presence of complex topography, we use a spectral-element wave propagation code. A synthetic example on the SEAM Phase II foothills model illustrates that inversion of surface waves at the initial stages in such a challenging environment allows us to obtain an improved shear wavespeed starting model for traditional FWI.


Solar-driven evaporation based on photothermal membrane has been proved to be promising in the field of fresh water generation, and it is considered as an emerging strategy both in laboratory and in industrial scales. However, further research efforts have to be made on light harvesting and thermal management to improve water evaporation. In this study, an extensive research was carried out to develop a bio-inspired 3D photothermal cone for high-efficiency solar-driven evaporation with minimum light reflection and heat loss to bulk water. The artificial photothermal cone with a polypyrrole (PPy) coating layer was facilely fabricated via chemical vapor deposition polymerization (CVDP). The present 3D cone with a rationally designed conical structure exhibited satisfactory absorbance around 99.2% in the entire solar spectrum, which is comparable with the performances of super-black materials. Additionally, the heat loss has been minimized by elevating the photothermal cone to narrow the contact area between water and the PPy-based cone with good wettability, thus achieving a highly efficient interface heating. The solar conversion efficiency up to 93.8% for evaporation was achieved for the photothermal cone under one sun illumination, which is about 1.7 times as high as the result obtained for a plane film. Based on our results, controlling the 3D morphology can be considered as an important strategy for designing a novel high-efficiency photothermal membrane and also, it provides new opportunities in practical application.