This book uses the set of relations announced by teachers' and students' readings of literary fictions as a commonplace location to interpret the experience of curriculum. In addition to illuminating the complexity of schooled readings of literature, Private Readings in Public provides insightful and provocative interpretations of the intertwined, overlapping, and ever-evolving intertextual relations that comprise events of curriculum. It will be of interest to those who wish to expand their understanding of the way in which interpretations of shared reading can become a literary anthropology where the identities of readers, writers, and teachers are continually re-invented during processes of reading, writing, and teaching.


Vitamin D has been linked to various cardiovascular risk factors including indices of large-vessel disease. However, it remains unclear whether vitamin D is also associated with microvascular damage. In a community-dwelling population, we studied associations between vitamin D serum levels and retinal microvascular damage de fi ned as retinopathy signs, narrower arterioles, and wider venules. From the population-based Rotterdam Study, we included 5675 participants (age ≥ 45 years) with vitamin D data and gradable retinal photographs. Serum levels of vitamin D were measured using an antibody-based assay. Retinal exudates, microaneurysms, cotton wool spots, and dot/blot hemorrhages were graded on fundus photographs by experienced graders in the whole sample; retinal vascular calibers, that is, arteriolar and venular diameters, were semiautomatically measured in a subsample (n = 2973). We examined the cross-sectional association between vitamin D and retinal microvascular damage using logistic and linear regression models, adjusting for age, sex, and cardiovascular risk factors. We found that persons with lower vitamin D levels were more likely to have retinopathy (adjusted odds ratio per standard deviation (SD) decrease of vitamin D = 1.30; 95% con fi dence interval (CI): = 1.12 – 1.49). Furthermore, lower vitamin D levels were associated with wider venular calibers (adjusted mean difference per SD decrease in vitamin D = 1.35; 95% CI = 0.64 – 2.06). This association was strongest among men ( P for interaction = 0.023). partly run through changes in the microvasculature. CI = con fi dence interval, CVD = cardiovascular disease, RS = Rotterdam Study, SD = standard deviation.


Starting more than a decade ago, there is an on-going shift towards customer-centric marketing, but the wine market has shown a slower turn into this direction. In order to confer to the costumer a superior overall purchasing experience and to increase the performance of the wine shop, an important issue should be finding the right tools for evaluating the purchase and consumption behaviour of these wine consumers. The aim of this study is to assess the indicators used by Wine Shops to evaluate the performance of their physical (bricks-and-mortar) retail shops, the consumers' satisfaction and the factors influencing the purchase decision. The data was collected during 2012 in a bricks-and-mortar wine shop using the method of observation and the conversion rate was analysed along with the involved factors. The results show that, when purchasing wine, a multitude of extrinsic factors have a significant impact on the buying decision and hence on conversion rate. Touching the products, tasting wine in the shop and the amount of time spent discussing with staff have shown a positive impact on the conversion rate. The loyal clients versus new prospective clients and the existence of interaction with staff versus no contact have shown significant differences in conversion rate. As the costs of increasing the traffic into the wine shops is high, a better use of the existing sales opportunity, measured through conversion rate, should be an essential part in analysing the performance of the wine shop.


In this paper, we propose a semiparametric approach, named nonparanormal skeptic, for efficiently and robustly estimating high dimensional undirected graphical models. To achieve modeling flexibility, we consider Gaussian Copula graphical models (or the nonparanormal) as proposed by Liu et al. (2009). To achieve estimation robustness, we exploit nonparametric rank-based correlation coefficient estimators, including Spearman's rho and Kendall's tau. In high dimensional settings, we prove that the nonparanormal skeptic achieves the optimal parametric rate of convergence in both graph and parameter estimation. This celebrating result suggests that the Gaussian copula graphical models can be used as a safe replacement of the popular Gaussian graphical models, even when the data are truly Gaussian. Besides theoretical analysis, we also conduct thorough numerical simulations to compare different estimators for their graph recovery performance under both ideal and noisy settings. The proposed methods are then applied on a large-scale genomic dataset to illustrate their empirical usefulness. The R language software package huge implementing the proposed methods is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network: this http URL r-project.org/.


In this paper, queueing system with losses (M\M\m\-\m) is investigated depending on First in First out (FIFO) technique. The main task is to find the earnings of three airline companies in international airport of Baghdad, by establishing the best number of service centers. The researcher was present on daily basis to collect data related to travelers arrival and departure time from centers of services. The researcher calculated arrival averages and service (? ) ? , by using (Professional EasyFit5.6). Also, he observed distribution of service centers for all previously mentioned companies. The aim of researcher is to determine arrivals time of airline companies, service centers which are Poisson distributed and how service time (Exponential distribution) is distributed. Then, it is necessary to find the best service center depending on earnings indication of suggested model for each company, using Firefly Algorithm (FA) and writing the program by (Matlab R2015a) to show the results. And finally, the results are compared with Particle swarm Algorithm (PSO), (FA) algorithm is proved to be better as compared to (PSO).


The Bezier curve is fundamental to many challenging and practical applications, ranging from computer aided geometric design and postscript font representations through to generic object shape descriptors and surface representation. A drawback of the Bezier curve however, is that it only considers global information about the control points, so there is often a large gap between the curve and its control polygon, leading to considerable error in curve representations. To address this issue, this paper presents enhanced Bezier curve (EBC) models which seamlessly incorporate local information. The performance of the models is empirically evaluated upon a number of natural and synthetic objects having arbitrary shape and both qualitative and quantitative results confirm the superiority of both EBC models in comparison with the classical Bezier curve representation, with no increase in the order of computational complexity.


A significant volume of research has concentrated on operating system (OS)-directed power management. The primary focus of previous research has been the development of better policies. In this paper, we provide evidence that one policy may outperform another under different conditions. Hence, it is difficult, or even impossible, to design the "best" policy for all computers. We explain how to select the best policies at runtime without user or administrator intervention by using a software framework called the homogeneous architecture for power policy integration (HAPPI). This architecture is portable across different platforms running Linux. HAPPI specifies common requirements for policies and provides an interface to simplify the implementation of policies in a commodity OS. Our approach allows these policies to be compared simultaneously to select the best policy among a set of distinct policies at runtime. Experimental results indicate that HAPPI achieves energy savings within 4 percent of the best individual policy for each device in several computing systems without a priori knowledge of workloads.


Because myelomeningocele defects vary in size, shape, and location, no single procedure applies to all. A large number of techniques have been described for closing the back defects occurring after excision of the meningocele sac, but new studies focus more on simple, reliable, and versatile alternatives because large defect is a challenging problem for reconstruction. This study presented a new fasciocutaneous flap, called z advancement-rotation flap for the coverage of meningomyelocele defects with the successful outcomes of 11 patients. Meningocele defect is imagined as a rhombus shape placed vertically over the midline and accepted to have corners and angles of a rhombus, but any skin excision from the margins of the wound is not made for creating a defect, which will be completely similar to a rhombus so that its angles are obtuse and real appearance is elliptic or round. Flaps are elevated from both sides of the wound and can easily be advanced, then rotated to the midline, and the donor area can be primarily sutured with no complications. Defect sizes ranged from 7.5 × 6 to 12 × 9.5 cm, and mean operation time for flap elevation and closure was 29 minutes. Presented technique is not only simple, safe, and stable but also has got some more advantages such as short operation time because of easy dissection, minimal blood loss, and primary closure of the whole wound as well. It seems to be an alternative for safe, rapid, less bleeding, and easy surgery resulting in a solution for the closure of large meningomyelocele defects.


Nationalism has trumped solidarity, resulting in unnecessary loss of life and inequitable access to vaccines and therapeutics. Existing intellectual property (IP) regimens, trade secrets and data rights, under which pharmaceutical firms operate, have also posed obstacles to increasing manufacturing capacity, and ensuring adequate supply, affordable pricing, and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines and other health products in low-income and middle- income countries. We propose: (1) Implementing alternative incentive and funding mechanisms to develop new scientific innovations to address infectious diseases with pandemic potential; (2) Voluntary and involuntary initiatives to overcome IP barriers including pooling IP, sharing data and vesting licences for resulting products in a globally agreed entity; (3) Transparent and accountable collective procurement to enable equitable distribution; (4) Investments in regionally distributed research and development (R&D) capacity and manufacturing, basic health systems to expand equitable access to essential health technologies, and non-discriminatory national distribution; (5) Commitment to strengthen national (and regional) initiatives in the areas of health system development, health research, drug and vaccine manufacturing and regulatory oversight and (6) Good governance of the pandemic prevention, preparedness and response accord. It is important to articulate principles for deals that include reasonable access conditions and transparency in negotiations. We argue for an equitable, transparent, accountable new global agreement to provide rewards for R&D but only on the condition that pharmaceutical companies share the IP rights necessary to produce and distribute them globally. Moreover, if countries commit to collective procurement and fair pricing of resulting products, we argue that we can greatly improve our ability to prepare for and respond to pandemic threats.


The rapid deployment of large numbers of utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) plants in the United States, combined with heightened expectations of future deployment, has raised concerns about land requirements and associated land-use impacts. Yet our understanding of the land requirements of utility-scale PV plants is outdated and depends in large part on a study published nearly a decade ago, while the utility-scale sector was still young. We provide updated estimates of utility-scale PVs power and energy densities based on empirical analysis of more than 90% of all utility-scale PV plants built in the United States through 2019. We use ArcGIS to draw polygons around satellite imagery of each plant within our sample and to calculate the area occupied by each polygon. When combined with plant metadata, these polygon areas allow us to calculate power (MW/acre) and energy (MWh/acre) density for each plant in the sample, and to analyze density trends over time, by fixed-tilt versus tracking plants, and by plant latitude and site irradiance. We find that the median power density increased by 52% for fixed-tilt plants and 43% for tracking plants from 2011 to 2019, while the median energy density increased by 33% for fixed-tilt and 25% for tracking plants over the same period. Those relying on the earlier benchmarks published nearly a decade ago are, thus, significantly overstating the land requirements of utility-scale PV.


Shame as a self-conscious emotion is an important contributing factor controlling and motivating people's thoughts, feelings and behaviour in socially appropriate ways, especially during interactions with one another. Shame in its own capacity causes discomfort when the behaviour of individuals and/or the group violates personal or social standards. The article aims to determine what the perceptions are of undergraduate students registered for first-year History at the University of the Free State's Bloemfontein campus who took History as a school subject up to Grade 12; what enhances a sense of shame in them as South African citizens when judging the country's past. The article contextualises the concept of shame; explains the methodology and approach that was used; and highlights the perceptions of these students and the issues that enhance a sense of shame in them as students studying at the capital of the Free State when judging the country's past. In the process, the article assesses what is the level of the student's historical consciousness, background, insight and in-depth knowledge of South Africa's past, so as to be able to make a judgment on what they are ashamed of in past events in the country and the reasons why.


The environmental damage that plastic waste is causing has catalysed government action against plastic bags around the world. Despite anti-plastic bag policies gaining traction globally, there has been limited investigation of how the implementation of bans has varied. This paper is the first to comparatively examine why there has been variation in implementing bans on plastic bags, using the examples of three East African countries: Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda. Explanations of why anti-plastic bag policies have been blocked in other countries usually rely on business power-based explanations, with the assumption that plastic manufacturers (and the broader manufacturing sector) have obstructed implementation. The comparatively limited strength and size of plastic manufacturers in Rwanda, as compared to Kenya and Uganda, suggests that business power may partly explain why the ban in Rwanda has been implemented. However, business power-based arguments do not explain the variation between implementation in Kenya and Uganda. In both countries, anti-plastic bag actions have been announced repeatedly but implementation has stuttered, with commitment to implementation stronger and less contested in Kenya than in Uganda. Criticisms of the existing business power literature tend to be weak on examining why governments may go ahead with policies that are against the interests of businesses. This paper argues that developing country government's ecological modernisation initiatives may be shaped by pressures from three levels – business power, the local environment and the external environment – to explain why implementation of plastic bag bans has varied in Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda.


At the end of the last century a number of environmental laws, technical regulations and normative documents were created. At the same time there appeared the combination of such concepts as "business", "environment- oriented activity", "sustainable development", "continuous development" and "sustainable product management" in scientific articles. Country's economic and social development should be oriented according to sustainable development principle in the way that current satisfaction of consumer needs would not reduce the possibilities of satisfying the needs of generations to come. Austria and Lithuania signed the declaration containing this point together with other countries in Rio De Janeiro in 1992. Every state must have an environmental policy, which links all development strategies of economy branches and territories. Eco-labelling of products and services is part of environment- oriented activity and sustainable product management. Eco-label is an important product quality indicator. Eco-certification and eco-labelling are considered as instrument within the European strategy of Integrated Product Policy to achieve more sustainable consumption patterns. It is possible that the increased demand for green products and services from informed consumers will induce enterprises to supply markets with more environmentally friendly products. The main purpose of this work is to analyze and generalize the practice of products and services ecocertification and eco-labelling in the world as well as to identify their better possibilities of usage in Lithuania and in Austria. The article uses the following methods: comparative and systematic analysis of scientific literature, survey of Austrian and Lithuanian enterprises and markets, mathematical statistics, interviewing experts, managers and consumers. Special parallel investigations have been performed to assess the status in Austria and Lithuania with the purpose to define consumer and manufacturer attitudes and preferences upon ecological products. The comparative study also includes the range of awarded products and services in both countries and the structure of enterprises taking part in national ecolabelling schemes. In a next step the information of consumers in both countries on labels and awarded products will be analysed. Factors of success and failures in the spreading of eco-labelling shall be worked out as a result of the comparative study.


Fruits, which are consumed because of their excellent taste and health benefits, mainly contribute carbohydrate, dietary fibre, vitamins and minerals to balance the human diet. Fruits have
been a part of the human diet since the dawn of history but their nutritional importance has only been recognised in recent times. Commerce in fruits began in the 1980's when awareness on their nutritional importance has risen. Since then, its demand in the international markets has also increased tremendously. Hence, many tropical countries have moved from small, scattered farms to large commercial fruit plantations. Malaysia went through a series of phases since the inception of the National Agricultural Policy in 1984 to develop its fruit industry to reach its present status- able to be a leading exporter of some tropical fruits. It is not possible to improve the quality of fruits once the fruits harvested but they can be preserved by slowing down the rate of undesirable changes, which leads to a reduction in their quality. Postharvest qualities of fruits are affected by pre-harvest factors, stage of maturity at harvest and postharvest factors. This is due to the fact that there are many physico-chemical changes taking place during growth, maturation, ripening and senescence stages in the life span of the fruit. A range of environmental conditions such as temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric compositions and mechanical injury can influence the rate at which these changes occur in harvested fruits. All these can be manipulated by careful
management of the postharvest handling system for maintenance of quality and extension of shelf life of the fruits. Proper postharvest handling practices are essential to reduce postharvest losses and maintain overall quality of fruits after harvest. Human factors such as handling practices and attitudes, and technical aspects such as improper infrastructure and handling
techniques could contribute to these losses. Due to change in the life style especially in urban areas,
convenient and ready-to-eat fresh-cut fruits, which is also referred to as minimally processed fruits are becoming more popular in the last two decades. However, there are problems associated to it. Hence, studies were conducted to overcome these problems. Apart from the increasing demands for fresh-cut fruits, there is also a trend during the same period of time, where consumers consume fruits not only for its nutritional contents but emphasis is also given to its functional properties.
The way forward for the fruit industry globally, including Malaysia, is to develop technology both for whole, intact and minimally processed fruits for shelf-life extension and quality maintenance not only from the perspective of nutritional aspects but also to give emphasis on the stability of the functional
properties when they are being subjected to the different postharvest technologies at different stages of the distribution chains (whole, intact fruits) and preparation (minimally processed fruits).


Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is a colorless, toxic, and flammable gas with the smell of rotten eggs. High concentrations of H2S are toxic, but a very small amount of H2S can help plants and our bodies in many ways. The unexpected flowering (bolting) of leafy greens inhibits leaf growth and reduces the leaf quality, and the effect of H2S on plant bolting is still unknown. Here we investigated the effects of H2S on flowering and leaf growth by using the hearts of bok choy (Brassica rapa subsp. Chinensis), a type of Chinese cabbage. Incubation of bok choy hearts for 16 days in a solution of sodium hydrosulfide (NaHS), a H2S donor, significantly repressed bok choy flowering and shortened flower stems. In contrast, the flowering of bok choy in the tap water and sodium chloride (NaCl) groups was normal, with longer flower stems and many flowers. NaHS had no effect on the growth of leaf stems or on leaf chlorophyll contents. In addition, NaHS significantly reduced pollen viability but induced the growth of new leaves from the bottom part of bok choy hearts, in comparison with the two control groups, tap water and NaCl. These observations indicate that H2S inhibits flowering but hastens new leaf growth in bok choy. Not only can this discovery help grow green vegetables, but it can also potentially help control weeds.


Elie Wiesel has given hundreds of interviews. Yet his fame as a human rights advocate often directs such conversations toward non-literary issues. Indeed, many of Wiesel's questioners barely address the writer's role that has defined him since the 1950s. Unlike previous volumes in which he speaks with interviewers, Elie Wiesel: Conversations collects interviews which set in relief the writer at work. This book focuses on Wiesel the literary artist instead of Wiesel the Holocaust survivor or the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Beyond highlighting Wiesel's literary significance, these interviews also correct many faulty assumptions about his achievement. Few American readers know that he writes in French, that he has been favorably compared to Andre Malraux and Albert Camus. Not many realize that the Holocaust has been the subject of only a few of his forty books. Particularly in his nonfiction, Wiesel's scope is wide, addressing Jewish life in all its religious and historical complexity. Though most of Wiesel's books do not focus on the Holocaust, they are written against the backdrop of what he has come to term "The Event." Always, the presence of Auschwitz can be felt, always the author "lives in the shadows of the flames that once illuminated and blinded him." These interviews are reminders that the writing life is both solitary and public, interior and social. The writer must venture beyond his study and speak out against the world's traumas and outrages. Robert Franciosi is an associate professor of English at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Mich. He is the editor of Good Morning: A Holocaust Memoir. His work has appeared in American Poetry, Contemporary Literature, Modern Jewish Studies, and the William Carlos Williams Review.


Objective Cognitive-motor integration (CMI) is required in sport when performing movements where a rule is used to align the required motor output and the guiding visual information. Previous research has shown CMI declines in young athletes with a concussion history, deemed recovered at the time of evaluation. The purpose of this study was to characterise differences in symptoms, CMI, and white matter integrity (fractional anisotropy, FA) in those with post-concussion syndrome (PCS) and healthy controls. We hypothesised that those with PCS would have decreased FA and CMI performance, with increased symptom scores. Participants Twelve females were included; 6 with PCS for 6 months or more, and 6 age-matched healthy controls with no concussion history. Methods Participants were administered the SCAT3, four visuomotor CMI tasks, and diffusion weighted images were acquired. Participants displaced a cursor from a central target to peripheral targets by sliding their finger on a horizontally placed tablet either directly to the viewed target or with decoupled eye-hand coordination (targets viewed on a vertical monitor, 180° feedback rotation, or both). Results We observed worse symptom scores and impaired performance in CMI tasks, as well as decreased mean FA in bilateral corticospinal tracts beneath the premotor and primary motor cortices and in the white matter underlying the right superior parietal lobule, in those with PCS compared to healthy controls. Conclusions CMI decline may be related to decreased FA within the frontal-parietal-subcortical network. Measuring CMI, a skill crucial to athletes, provides an effective behavioural means for detection of brain alterations associated with concussion. Competing interests None.


A detailed look at how, and why, the American financial system has reached its current stateToday's economy and capital markets are faced with the long-term buildup of public and private credit. Furthermore, we face higher taxes, greater spending, and more debt. We are now at a critical crossroads and our leaders have few realistic solutions. Proposals calling for tax reforms or fewer regulations have fallen on deaf ears. In fact, U.S. democracy has become more socialist and reform is needed immediately. Endless Money is an examination of how the U.S. government and the country's financial systems have embraced socialism, and why cultural deterioration reinforces the trend and jeopardizes democracy. In it, author William Baker sees this socialism embodied in two things. The first is the socialization of income, the second is the socialization of credit.

 Explores the present socialistic qualities of the American government and its financial system
 Looks back at how today's conditions relate not just to the Great Depression, but ancient empires such as Rome
 Calls for radical changes such as reduced regulatory power of the Federal Reserve, a considerable devaluation of the dollar in terms of gold, and repeal of income tax
 Includes a Web site devoted to book, with recommendations, quotes from the financial community, and think tank contacts

Insightful and informative, Endless Money examines our current economic condition and describes what the United States can do to get back on the right economic track.


We consider the problem of constructing a function whose zero set is to represent a surface, given sample points with surface normal vectors. The contributions include a novel means of regularising multi-scale compactly supported basis functions that leads to the desirable properties previously only associated with fully supported bases, and show equivalence to a Gaussian process with modified covariance function. We also provide a regularisation framework for simpler and more direct treatment of surface normals, along with a corresponding generalisation of the representer theorem. We demonstrate the techniques on 3D problems of up to 14 million data points, as well as 4D time series data.


Ranking enables coaches, sporting authorities, and pundits to determine the relative performance of individual athletes and teams in comparison to their peers. While ranking is relatively straightforward in sports that employ traditional leagues, it is more difficult in sports where competition is fragmented (e.g. athletics, boxing, etc.), with not all competitors competing against each other. In such situations, complex points systems are often employed to rank athletes. However, these systems have the inherent weakness that they frequently rely on subjective assessments in order to gauge the calibre of the competitors involved. Here we show how two Internet derived algorithms, the PageRank (PR) and user preference (UP) algorithms, when utilised with a simple 'who beat who' matrix, can be used to accurately rank track athletes, avoiding the need for subjective assessment. We applied the PR and UP algorithms to the 2015 IAAF Diamond League men's 100m competition and compared their performance with the Keener, Colley and Massey ranking algorithms. The top five places computed by the PR and UP algorithms, and the Diamond League '2016' points system were all identical, with the Kendall's tau distance between the PR standings and '2016' points system standings being just 15, indicating that only 5.9% of pairs differed in their order between these two lists. By comparison, the UP and '2016' standings displayed a less strong relationship, with a tau distance of 95, indicating that 37.6% of the pairs differed in their order. When compared with the standings produced using the Keener, Colley and Massey algorithms, the PR standings appeared to be closest to the Keener standings (tau distance = 67, 26.5% pair order disagreement), whereas the UP standings were more similar to the Colley and Massey standings, with the tau distances between these ranking lists being only 48 (19.0% pair order disagreement) and 59 (23.3% pair order disagreement) respectively. In particular, the UP algorithm ranked 'one-off' victors more highly than the PR algorithm, suggesting that the UP algorithm captures alternative characteristics to the PR algorithm, which may more suitable for predicting future performance in say knockout tournaments, rather than for use in competitions such as the Diamond League. As such, these Internet derived algorithms appear to have considerable potential for objectively assessing the relative performance of track athletes, without the need for complicated points equivalence tables. Importantly, because both algorithms utilise a 'who beat who' model, they automatically adjust for the strength of the competition, thus avoiding the need for subjective decision making.


Clinical leadership and engagement across organisational boundaries has been gaining significant attention over the last few years. Within the NHS, there has been an increased focus within policy directives and the literature on partnership working, collaborations, cross-organisational and cross-professional working. These innovative ways of working are seen as a means of improving the quality and co-ordination of patient care across the pathway, thus impacting on the patients" experience. Despite this focus, the evidence of what constitutes and therefore what can deliver effective inter-organisational clinical leadership and engagement within this context is sparse. This study identifies the characteristics and impact of effective clinical leadership, clinical engagement and team effectiveness when working across organisational boundaries. "Practical Recommendations" have been developed as a mechanism to disseminate the findings. This research is based in the real world, which is complex and messy. The study uses an interpretative stance and gains insights from a number of different perspectives. The methodological approach is action research with a single case study design. Both quantitative and qualitative data are used and these are collected through a team effectiveness tool, focus groups and semi-structured interviews.
The study demonstrates there are significant improvements in the delivery of healthcare and patient experience when clinicians work effectively across the whole patient pathway, spanning organisational boundaries. The study findings are: the need for a focus or forum and for clinicians to have the time and space to initiate inter-organisational working; the power of the patient"s voice, involvement and leadership in delivering impactful change; the need to understand organisational and personal barriers and risks to inter-organisational working; the
requirement to align incentives and accountability; the need for the NHS to value service improvement approaches as well as randomised controlled trials; the necessity for clinicians to have managerial and leadership skills to effectively run inter-organisational projects; and, the necessity for senior management and corporate engagement. These findings are supported by the existing literature, whilst also contributing to knowledge and understanding. The study aligns with the current direction of increased inter-organisational working within the NHS, and illustrates the benefits of working in this way. It demonstrates the fundamental role of clinicians (especially doctors) and patients when using this approach. The "Practical Recommendations" offer clinicians and managers an opportunity to consider the key elements that determine the success of improvement initiatives spanning a whole pathway or health system. Additionally, this study raises several new research questions and highlights some key recommendations such as: the need to agree the level at which NHS organisations can support inter-organisational working whilst remaining financially and competitively viable; the requirement urgently to review and revise training for doctors to ensure that in the future it equips them for effective participation in inter-organisational working; and the need to ensure the patient voice is focussed on enhancing quality of life through improvements in healthcare, rather than just simple redesign projects.


"We stand for self-reliance We hope for foreign aid but can not be dependent on it. We depend on our own efforts, on the creative power of the whole army and the entire people". Mao--January 10, 1945 The History of Chinese Politics In order to truly appreciate the significance of the current influence of 20th century imperialism and colonialism on modern day China, it is crucial to acknowledge the political history of China towards the end of the imperial system in 1912. The year 1912 marked a profound change in the history of China. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, China's political, economic, and military influence had declined due to the growing regional power of imperial Japan and the penetration of Western powers. The last Chinese dynasty--the Qing--was abolished ending 2000 years of imperial rule. The Chinese Nationalists (Kuomintang) then established the Republic of China on January 1st, 1912. Yuan Shikai was the leader of the revolution against the Qings who dissolved the parliament and ruled as a dictator. Yuan's death in 1916 and the absence of a strong central leadership fragmented China further and created a political upheaval that China was not prepared to confront. China was facing a complete lack of control and power at the hands of local warlords who engaged in unfair taxation, corruption, and violence as a means of survival. It is notable that Japan's persistent, imperialistic ambitions made matters much worse for China due to the seizure of Shandong and southern Manchuria. The Western allies met in Paris in 1919 for the post-war Peace Conference and made a decision that helped to fuel the fire of a political uprising. It was concluded in Paris that the rights given in secret by the Western allies to the Japanese following their expulsion of the Germans from the leased areas of Shandong would be confirmed. This invasion by the Japanese, whom were already despised by the Chinese, led to the patriotic protest called the "May Fourth Movement" in 1919. Three thousand students gathered to protest at the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Peaceful protest soon turned into violence when a pro-Japanese official was assaulted and a government official's home was set on fire. The government arrested many students and imprisoned them. Demonstrations of this nature took place in over two-hundred locations. This marked a new expression of nationalism in China with students, factory workers, and women in the forefront. The authorities eventually were defeated when the protestors victoriously marched out of prison. This day was an important day as China embarked on a new era of intellectual, cultural, and political greatness and distanced itself from a more traditional past. Sun Yat- Sen as the leader of the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) in China placed maintenance of order and socio-economic reform of utmost priority for the nation. Sun Yat-Sen envisioned victory over the warlords and the unification of China between 1921 and 1925. It is an interesting coincidence that as Sun Yat-Sen was helping to strengthen the Nationalist Party, the Communist Party influenced by the Soviet Union was established in China in 1921. The Kuomintang accepted cooperation with the Communists although there may have been no consensus on whether the Communist revolution should be a proletarian or peasant movement in China. We know via history that the latter prevailed. The Russians were instrumental in the framing of the Party's constitution as well as reorganizing the armies of southern China. The army was being led by Sun's brother-in-law, General Chiang Kai-Shek. Sun Yat-Sen died in 1925 and Chiang Kai-Shek took control of power. Chiang Kai-Shek was faced with the enormous task of trying to reunite a nation of four hundred million people of whom ninety-five percent were peasants and fewer than twenty million literate. Chiang Kai-Shek was successful at his work. …


Williams Gas Pipeline requested that Stress Engineering Services provide engineering services to analytically assess issues that occurred in a 30-inch pipeline due to cracked girth welds. The focus of the analytical effort was to simulate the lifting during the pipeline construction process. Using finite element methods, nominal bending stresses were calculated considering a specific set of criteria including 80-foot pipe joints, skid locations, and a given root pass weld thickness. These bending stresses were used to calculate a total stress that included stress concentration factors (SCFs) due to hi-low weld mismatch and weld profile geometry. For conservatism, residual stresses were also included in computing the total stress. As an example, the results showed that if a residual stress of 50 percent yield and a total SCF of 4.5 are assumed, the lift height should be limited to approximately 9 inches for a root pass weld thickness of 0.0625 inches. In this calculation, a stress limit of two times yield was used. Once the final stress was computed considering the range of variables, a closed-form equation was developed that integrated the variables of interest for the 30-inch pipe. This equation was used to compute data points to guide Williams in establishing permissible lift heights for a range of SCFs for the welds. A stress limit of two times the yield strength was selected as the limiting value. The details of the work presented in this paper will assist pipeline operators in developing a protocol that balances the need for rapid construction and ensuring that proper girth welds are fabricated.Copyright © 2006 by ASME


G lobalization has remade the world we once knew. We now live in an era in which dangerous developments anywhere can have devastating consequences everywhere. Terrorism is an obvious example: a few young men born in Riyadh and trained in the Hindu Kush can turn jetliners into weapons of mass destruction in New York and Washington. Infectious disease is another: a person with a particularly virulent form of flu could board a plane in Hong Kong and inadvertently spread sickness to every corner of the globe. Or international finance: the collapse of the housing market in Northern California can trigger a major financial panic and push us to the brink of a global depression. A world in which problems cross borders so easily is one in which broadbased multilateral cooperation is essential. Today, however, we lack international institutions that are capable of prompt and effective action. Over a whole range of challenges, the world is essentially undergoverned. The institutions we do have were created in a different time for different purposes. They all too often reflect the geopolitical realities of a world that no longer exists, and are incapable of meeting the challenges we now face. New institutions are now needed that recognize how much the world has changed and that mobilize those states most capable of meeting the dangers we confront. One such institution would bring together the world's established democracies into a single organization dedicated to joint action—what has been called a ''League'' or ''Concert'' of Democracies. The world's democracies are powerful and capable. Most important, they share an essential value in a globalizing world— a common dedication to ensuring the life, liberty, and happiness of free peoples.


Mobile devices are being widely used in education for many purposes such as an instruction tool for learning. However, mobile devices suffer from the limitation of capabilities and resources. Potential solutions to this issue must consider the mobility and personal characteristics of potential education seekers. This paper theoretically describes how Semantic Web might be used to facilitate the interaction between mobile devices and learners in mobile and ubiquitous learning environments to provide mobile learners with the best learning experience.


Research into and practice of Higher Education for Sustainable Development (HESD) have been increasing during the last two decades. These have focused on providing sustainability education to future generations of professionals. In this context, there has been considerable progress in the incorporation of SD in universities' curricula. Most of these efforts have focussed on the design and delivery of sustainability-oriented competences. Some peer-reviewed articles have proposed different pedagogical approaches to better deliver SD in these courses; however, there has been limited research on the connection between how courses are delivered (pedagogical approaches) and how they may affect sustainability competences. This paper analyses competences and pedagogical approaches, using hermeneutics to connect these in a framework based on twelve competences and twelve pedagogical approaches found in the literature. The framework connects the course aims to delivery in HESD by highlighting the connections between pedagogical approaches and competences in a matrix structure. The framework is aimed at helping educators in creating and updating their courses to provide a more complete, holistic, and systemic sustainability education to future leaders, decision makers, educators, and change agents. To better develop mind-sets and actions of future generations, we must provide students with a complete set of sustainability competences.


Rendered with remarkable specificity and attention to place, Dubliners by James Joyce is a classic urban text. For Joyce, Dublin is synecdoche for a paralyzed Irish nation, immobilized socially, culturally, and economically by its colonial status. In portraying the geography of Dublin through fiction, Joyce conveys the city on two levels: first, through the social relations between characters, whose journeys through their city are always circular, and whose mobilities are circumscribed by their social position, and second, between reader and the text, whereby the city is coded via symbolic references to place that rely upon a knowledge of the city's urban geography and cultural history. Nevertheless, despite his reliance on literary realism, Joyce's depiction of Dublin is ultimately his own, personal reading of the 'real' city, written from afar. In this way, his collection pressures the boundaries of the real and the fictional. Through a close reading of three stories from the collection—'An Encounter,' 'Eveline,' and 'Two Gallants'—this paper provides an interpretation of Dubliners as a form of literary cartography, which reveals much about power and politics in Joyce's city.


Ideally, minimizing the flow completion time (FCT) requires millions of priorities supported by the underlying network so that each flow has its unique priority. However, in production datacenters, the available switch priority queues for flow scheduling are very limited (merely 2 or 3). This practical constraint seriously degrades the performance of previous approaches. In this paper, we introduce Explicit Priority Notification (EPN), a novel scheduling mechanism which emulates fine-grained priorities (i.e., desired priorities or DP) using only two switch priority queues. EPN can support various flow scheduling disciplines with or without flow size information. We have implemented EPN on commodity switches and evaluated its performance with both testbed experiments and extensive simulations. Our results show that, with flow size information, EPN achieves comparable FCT as pFabric that requires clean-slate switch hardware. And EPN also outperforms TCP by up to 60.5% if it bins the traffic into two priority queues according to flow size. In information-agnostic setting, EPN outperforms PIAS with two priority queues by up to 37.7%. To the best of our knowledge, EPN is the first system that provides millions of priorities for flow scheduling with commodity switches.


1. This study examined the effects of altering nitric oxide levels with sodium nitroprusside or L-arginine in rat hearts stored hypothermically.2. Hearts were microperfused at 4 degrees C for 24 h with a modified Krebs-Henseleit buffer (KHB) that contained either sodium nitroprusside, L-arginine, L-arginine methyl ester or dexamethasone.3. After hypothermic storage, hearts were rewarmed to 37 degrees C with KHB alone or KHB containing sodium nitroprusside or L-arginine. Cardiac function was then assessed in either Langendorff mode or working heart mode.4. Compared with values from fresh unstored hearts, hypothermic stored hearts showed a significant decrease in coronary flow and left ventricular developed pressure when the stored hearts were perfused in Langendorff mode. These hearts also produced less aortic flow and cardiac output when perfused in the working mode.5. Hearts hypothermically microperfused with buffer containing either L-arginine or sodium nitroprusside and then reperfused in the Langendorff mode with untreated KHB buffer had the highest left ventricular developed pressure and coronary flow values. Aortic flow and cardiac output were also higher in these hearts.6. In all groups of stored hearts, the concentrations of both ATP and creatine phosphate were significantly low, when compared with values from freshly isolated hearts. Addition of dexamethasone to the buffer either during storage or during reperfusion had no beneficial effect on high-energy phosphate loss or cardiac performance of stored hearts.7. This study showed that the addition of nitric oxide donors to storage buffer significantly improves cardiac function on normothermic reperfusion. The improved functional recovery is unrelated to the high-energy phosphate content of these hearts.


Private financing is the latest mark of the privatisation of global governance. The implementation of international agreements in the fields of environment, climate change and development has always been supported by public finance from developed countries. This tradition is broken by a transmutation towards private financing. This started in 2009 with the Copenhagen Accord of the UN climate negotiations and is also visible in, among others, the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were agreed upon at the 2015 Sustainable Development Summit. In the Copenhagen Accord, developed countries pledged to mobilise US$ 100 billion of climate finance annually by 2020, and included the private sector as a source of finance. However, the potential of private financing remains unclear. This dissertation studies the conditions under which private finance can effectively address climate change adaptation in developing countries. Research is based on participant observation; the analysis of international agreements, other negotiation outcomes, policy documents and business cases; and in-depth semi-structured interviews. This dissertation demonstrates that the private sector is currently not held accountable for adaptation finance or adaptation expenditure. It also demonstrates that there is little evidence that mobilised private adaptation finance leads to desired adaptation outcomes; and that the current institutional design is ineffective in mobilising substantial private adaptation finance that contributes to the US$ 100 billion target. Finally, this dissertation concludes that the allocation of private finance does not meet the criteria of the UNFCCC: it is neither balanced between adaptation and mitigation nor does it prioritise the most vulnerable developing countries. If its aim of the mobilisation of private finance is to reach the US$ 100 billion target, the transmutation towards private financing is ineffective in the field of adaptation. The institutional design of the climate finance regime would need to become more static and integrated. An alternative aim would be to focus on 'adaptation output' through private sector engagement. This dissertation proposes to maximise the mobilisation of private investments in resilience and reducing vulnerability, regardless of whether these could constitute climate finance or not. Public finance from industrialised countries could then be prioritised towards the countries that are most vulnerable to climate change.


Information is a central concept in economics, and The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information explores its treatment in modern economics. The study of information, far from offering enlightenment, resulted in all matter of confusion for economists and the public. Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah argue that the conventional wisdom suggesting "economic rationality" was the core of modern economics is incomplete. In this trenchant investigation, they demonstrate that the history of modern microeconomics is better organized as a history of the treatment of information. The book begins with a brief primer on information, and then shows how economists have responded over time to successive developments on the concept of information in the natural sciences. Mirowski and Nik-Khah detail various intellectual battles that were fought to define, analyze, and employ information in economics. As these debates developed, economists progressively moved away from pure agent conscious self-awareness as a non-negotiable desideratum of economic models toward a focus on markets and their design as information processors. This has led to a number of policies, foremost among them: auction design of resources like the electromagnetic spectrum crucial to modern communications. The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information provides insight into the interface between disputes within the economics discipline and the increasing role of information in contemporary society. Mirowski and Nik-Shah examine how this intersection contributed to the dominance of neoliberal approaches to economics, politics, and other realms.


It is widely accepted that embarking on a professional sporting career leads to a 'subordination of lifestyles 'to the cause (Stambulova, 1994). The intense commitment and focus dedicated to the pursuance of a professional athletic career (Wylleman et al., 1993) increases the risk of experiencing an ineffective transition out of sport, as other elements of life development are overlooked (Koukouris, 1994). Inevitably, living such an engrossing existence in the adolescent and early adult phases of life leaves athletes ill-prepared on retirement from sport, and presents disadvantages on entry to a second career (Rosenberg, 1981). It is posited therefore, that embarking on an athletic career has the potential to delay, or adversely affect an individual's psychosocial development (Naul, 1994).
A thorough review of literature relating to sporting retirement highlights a disparate approach developing, with researchers focusing on isolated areas pointing to ineffective transitions. To date, research falls into the following distinct areas: athletic identity (Brewer et al., 1993), life-skill development (Papacharisis et al., 2005), the moral obligations of the sporting organisations to their athletes (Andersen & Morris, 2000) and the markers of transitional difficulties (e.g. Ogilvie & Taylor, 1993; Taylor & Ogilvie, 1994, 1998). Research in this field has recently been criticised for an unreflective over-reliance on collegiate athletes as participants (Sinclair & Orlick, 1994). Furthermore, recommendations have been made as to the benefits of approaching retirement experiences from a sport specific viewpoint in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of this complex area (Greendorfer & Blinde, 1985). This approach is further supported by recent anecdotal reports suggesting that a number individuals representing England at the 2007 World Cup have differing business interests outside of their sports career, and completed higher educational courses ("From Boys to Men", 2007 p. 2:8-2:9), which appears to deviate from the academic and vocational norms of professional athletes in other sporting domains.
The aim of this study therefore, is to begin to approach retirement from elite sport in a more holistic and sport specific manner, addressing the interplay of contributing factors to the elite athlete's transition at the end of their career. The proposed research will examine the experiences of ex-professional rugby union players in their transition out of their sport.
Purposive sampling criteria for involvement in this study include: (a) participants (n = 12) are male, (b) had represented an English professional rugby union club(1995-onwards), (c) had retired from professional rugby union for no more than 10 years and no less than 1 year. The time span specified in the 'years since retirement' was imposed to ensure a representative view of the recent professional rugby union environment.
Qualitative data obtained from semi-structured interviews will be collected and analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) (e.g. Swain, 1991; Kvale, 1991). The semi-structured interview guide compiled was developed specifically for the study based on a thorough review of existing literature, theories and empirical evidence (Patton, 2002). The interviews are designed to facilitate in-depth discussions over the individuals' transitional experiences.
Although the nature of qualitative research precludes the prediction of specific findings, it is expected that this study will identify factors relating to the cultural influences of the sporting organisation and personality types of the individuals involved in predicting the quality of transition experienced by rugby union players.


The design of applications using mobile devices needs a different quality assessment than those known for desktop applications. Of the many aspects that have to be taken into account, one important criterion is the average time users need to complete a task. For interactions with the mouse, keyboard or touch screens, there exist models that predict interaction times like Fitts' law or the Keystroke-Level Model (KLM). This paper shows parallels to these models for advanced interactions with mobile phones targeted at pervasive services, including near field communication as well as built-in cameras and sensors. Applications can be evaluated with respect to user performance time without having a prototype running on the phone. To accomplish that, we extend the known KLM by identifying basic interaction elements for mobile phones and give estimates for expert user performance derived from several user tests.


It is widely recognized today that there is an alarming rise of lifestyle-induced chronic diseases (e.g., type II diabetes) in our society. Therefore, a strong need exists for cost-effective and non-invasive devices that can measure blood pressure (BP) to monitor, diagnose and follow-up patients at risk, but also healthy population in general. One promising method for arterial BP estimation is to measure a surrogate marker of it, such as, Pulse Transit Time (PTT) and derive pressure values from it. However, current methods for measuring PTT require complex sensing and analysis circuitry and the related medical devices are expensive and inconvenient for the user to wear. In this paper, we present a new smartphone-based method to estimate PTT reliably and subsequently BP from the baseline sensors on smartphones. This new approach involves determining PTT by simultaneously measuring the time the blood leaves the heart, by recording the heart sound using the standard microphone of the phone and the time it reaches the finger, by measuring the pulse wave using the phone's camera. Moreover, we also describe algorithms that can be executed directly on current smartphones to obtain clean and robust heart sound signals and to extract the pulse wave characteristics using smartphones. We also present methods to ensure a synchronous capture of the waveforms, which is essential to obtain reliable PTT values with inexpensive sensors. Our experiments show that the computational overhead of the proposed two-phase processing method is minimum, with the ability to reliably measure the PTT values in a fully accurate (beat-to-beat) fashion using directly state-of-the-art smartphones as medical devices.


Security breaches due to attacks by malicious software (malware) continue to escalate posing a major security concern in this digital age. With many computer users, corporations, and governments affected due to an exponential growth in malware attacks, malware detection continues to be a hot research topic. Current malware detection solutions that adopt the static and dynamic analysis of malware signatures and behavior patterns are time consuming and have proven to be ineffective in identifying unknown malwares in real-time. Recent malwares use polymorphic, metamorphic, and other evasive techniques to change the malware behaviors quickly and to generate a large number of new malwares. Such new malwares are predominantly variants of existing malwares, and machine learning algorithms (MLAs) are being employed recently to conduct an effective malware analysis. However, such approaches are time consuming as they require extensive feature engineering, feature learning, and feature representation. By using the advanced MLAs such as deep learning, the feature engineering phase can be completely avoided. Recently reported research studies in this direction show the performance of their algorithms with a biased training data, which limits their practical use in real-time situations. There is a compelling need to mitigate bias and evaluate these methods independently in order to arrive at a new enhanced method for effective zero-day malware detection. To fill the gap in the literature, this paper, first, evaluates the classical MLAs and deep learning architectures for malware detection, classification, and categorization using different public and private datasets. Second, we remove all the dataset bias removed in the experimental analysis by having different splits of the public and private datasets to train and test the model in a disjoint way using different timescales. Third, our major contribution is in proposing a novel image processing technique with optimal parameters for MLAs and deep learning architectures to arrive at an effective zero-day malware detection model. A comprehensive comparative study of our model demonstrates that our proposed deep learning architectures outperform classical MLAs. Our novelty in combining visualization and deep learning architectures for static, dynamic, and image processing-based hybrid approach applied in a big data environment is the first of its kind toward achieving robust intelligent zero-day malware detection. Overall, this paper paves way for an effective visual detection of malware using a scalable and hybrid deep learning framework for real-time deployments.


While there has been a lot of hype surrounding the potential of MOOCs to transform access to education, the reality of completion rates and participant profiles has tempered this hype such that within the hype cycle MOOCs have already hit the trough of disillusionment. However we argue that embedding cMOOC design within an educational design research methodology can enable the design of authentic professional development model that can indeed demonstrate transformation in pedagogical practice. Our design model links mobile learning theory, practice, and critical reflection within an EDR methodology to create an authentic experience for participating lecturers.


The fabrication of SnOx in thin film form via chemical solution deposition (CSD) processes is favored over vacuum based techniques as it is cost effective and simpler. The precursor employed plays a central role in defining the process conditions for CSD. Particularly for processing SnO2 layers that are appealing for sensor or electronic applications, there are limited precursors available for CSD. Thus the focus of this work was to develop metalorganic precursors for tin, based on the ketoiminate ligand class. By systematic molecular engineering of the ligand periphery, a series of new homoleptic Sn(ii) β-ketoiminate complexes was synthesized, namely bis[4-(2-methoxyethylimino)-3-pentanonato] tin, [Sn(MEKI)2] (1), bis[4-(2-ethoxyethylimino)-2-pentanonato] tin, [Sn(EEKI)2] (2), bis[4-(3-methoxypropylimino)-2-pentanonato] tin, [Sn(MPKI)2] (3), bis[4-(3-ethoxypropylimino)-2-pentanonato] tin, [Sn(EPKI)2] (4) and bis[4-(3-isopropoxypropylimino)-2-pentanonato] tin, [Sn(iPPKI)2] (5). All these N-side-chain ether functionalized compounds were analyzed by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, electron impact mass spectrometry (EI-MS), elemental analysis (EA) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). The solid state molecular structure of [Sn(MPKI)2] (3) was eludicated by means of single crystal X-ray diffraction (SCXRD). Interestingly, this class of compounds features excellent solubility and stability in common organic solvents alongside good reactivity towards H2O and low decomposition temperatures, thus fulfilling the desired requirements for CSD of tin oxides. With compound 3 as a representative example, we have demonstrated the possibility to directly deposit SnOx layers via hydrolysis upon exposure to air followed by heat treatment under oxygen at moderate temperatures and most importantly without the need for any additive that is generally used in CSD. A range of complementary analytical methods were employed, namely X-ray diffraction (XRD), Rutherford backscattering spectrometry (RBS), nuclear reaction analysis (NRA), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to analyse the structure, morphology and composition of the SnOx layers.


Drug-dosing recommendations for visceral leishmaniasis (VL) treatment are based on the patients' weight or age. A current lack of demographic and anthropometric data on patients hinders (1) the ability of health providers to properly prepare for patient management, (2) an informed drug procurement for disease control, and (3) the design of clinical trials and development of new drug therapies in the different endemic areas. We present information about the age, gender, weight, and height of 29,570 consecutive VL patients presenting to 20 locations in six geographic endemic regions of Brazil, East Africa, Nepal, and India between 1997 and 2009. Our compilation shows substantial heterogeneity in the types of patients seeking care for VL at the clinics within the different locations. This suggests that drug development, procurement, and perhaps even treatment protocols, such as the use of the potentially teratogenic drug miltefosine, may require distinct strategies in these geographic settings.


The adoption of paper in the early days of the Islamic rule changed literacy practices in the Middle East and eventually around the world, yet the circumstances of its adoption and its impact on the Middle Eastern economy are not well known or understood. This study determines that paper use was linked to an increase in purchasing power and to a shift in cultivation patterns from cereals to textile plants. It shows that the decline in the price of paper and books played a role in the standardization of the Arabic language and in the transition from oral to written practices, the formation of new knowledge, and the spread of literacy. The result was improvement in human capital and rising labor productivity, especially in manufacturing. Finally, the flow of paper documents in the economy changed norms of contract enforcement.


High quality Altai Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes are revealing which regions of archaic hominin DNA have persisted in the modern human genome. A number of these regions are associated with response to infection and immunity, with a suggestion that derived Neanderthal alleles found in modern Europeans and East Asians may be associated with autoimmunity. As such Neanderthal genomes are an independent line of evidence of which infectious diseases Neanderthals were genetically adapted to. Sympathetically, human genome adaptive introgression is an independent line of evidence of which infectious diseases were important for AMH coming in to Eurasia and interacting with Neanderthals. The Neanderthals and Denisovans present interesting cases of hominin hunter-gatherers adapted to a Eurasian rather than African infectious disease package. Independent sources of DNA-based evidence allow a re-evaluation of the first epidemiologic transition and how infectious disease affected Pleistocene hominins. By combining skeletal, archaeological and genetic evidence from modern humans and extinct Eurasian hominins, we question whether the first epidemiologic transition in Eurasia featured a new package of infectious diseases or a change in the impact of existing pathogens. Coupled with pathogen genomics, this approach supports the view that many infectious diseases are pre-Neolithic, and the list continues to expand. The transfer of pathogens between hominin populations, including the expansion of pathogens from Africa, may also have played a role in the extinction of the Neanderthals and offers an important mechanism to understand hominin-hominin interactions well back beyond the current limits for aDNA extraction from fossils alone. Am J Phys Anthropol 160:379-388, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.


The problem of finding out which positions are the most effective and how many flexible AC transmission system (FACTS) devices have to be installed and controlled in a deregulated environment on economic basis is a question of great significance for the dispatcher. This paper presents a flexible approach based in practical reasoning rules from fuzzy logic theory capable of governing multiple static VAr compensator (SVC) and a group of static compensator (STATCOM) by a flexible adjustment of reactive power injected or absorbed from the network. The main purpose of the presented coordinated strategy is the improvement of index power quality. Reactive index sensitivity coordinated with an expert rules to form a global database as a flexible tool to make an efficient decision about reactive power dispatch and to choose the size of the shunt FACTS controllers. Simulation results show clearly the advantage of this approach to enhance the reactive power planning.


Nanoscale zero-valent iron (NZVI) is one of the most important nanostructure for degradative remediation of environmental contaminants. In our research, NZVI was for the first time functionalized with cyclodextrins (CD), recently considered as excellent, environmentally friendly and cheap absorbents of toxic pollutants. Functionalization of the nano zero-valent iron by CD, their derivatives and polymers, can not only improve the ZVI nanoparticles stability and dispersibility, but also can complex toxic contaminants inside the CD cavities that will be further reduced by NZVI to a less toxic products. By this, one of the largest obstacles in the NZVI field i.e. lack of NZVI selectivity could be overcome. Moreover, reactivity towards a recalcitrant non-polar compound, that under standard conditions is not very reactive with the NZVI alone, has been shown herein.


Power systems are extremely non-linear systems which require substantial modeling and control efforts to run continuously. The movement of the power system in parameter and state space is often not well understood, thus making it difficult or impossible to determine whether the system is nearing instability. This dissertation demonstrates several ways in which the power system stability boundary can be calculated. The power system movements evaluated here address the effects of inter-area oscillations on the system which occur in the seconds to minutes time period. The first uses gain scheduling techniques through creation of a set of linear parameter varying (LPV) systems for many operating points of the non-linear system. In the case presented, load and line reactance are used as parameters. The scheduling variables are the power flows in tie lines of the system due to the useful information they provide about the power system state in addition to being available for measurement. A linear controller is developed for the LPV model using / ∞ with pole placement objectives. When the control is applied to the non-linear system, the proposed algorithm predicts the response of the non-linear system to the control by determining if the current system state is located within the domain of attraction of the equilibrium. If the stability domain contains a convex combination of the two points, the control will aid the system in moving towards the equilibrium. The second contribution of this thesis is through the development and implementation of a pseudo non-linear evaluation of a power system as it moves through state space. A system linearization occurs first to compute a multi-objective state space controller. For each contingency definition, many variations of the power system example are created and assigned to the particular contingency class. The powerflow variations and contingency controls are combined to run sets of time series analysis in which the Lyapunov function is tracked over three time steps. This data is utilized for a classification analysis which identifies and classifies the data by the contingency type. The goal is that whenever a new event occurs on the system, real time data can be fed into the trained tree to provide a control for application to increase system damping. Evaluation of Stability Boundaries in Power Systems


Dedication of this issue of the Journal to the theme of "Rights and Ethics" complements this month's Annual Meeting and Exposition of the American Public Health Association, titled "Public Health and Human Rights," and highlights the congruence of inclusion of both human rights norms and ethical standards in public health work. Historically, the promotion and protection of human rights as embodied in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights1 draws upon human rights principles, including those on the health and well-being of populations, to which many nations were already committed. Similarly, ethical conduct in health care can be traced in spirit to the time of Hippocrates and has its modern expression in the area of bioethics. Although there are key differences enabling each to be applied separately to public health efforts, human rights and health care ethics support and compliment each other when applied together in efforts to improve public health.


ABSTRACT Virulence has been proposed to be an emergent property, which by definition implies that it is not reducible to its components, but this application of a philosophical concept to the host-microbe interaction has not been experimentally tested. The goals of our study were to analyze the correlation of the phenotype with the ability to cause disease and to determine the dynamics of an experimental cryptococcal infection in Galleria mellonella and Acanthamoeba castellanii. By studying the outcome of infection as host death, we showed that the dynamics of virulence in the G. mellonella/Cryptococcus neoformans interaction follow a predictable pattern. We also found that the experimental temperature and not the presence of virulence factors was a critical parameter defining the pathogenic potential of cryptococcal species. Our results established that cryptococcal species not considered pathogenic could be pathogens given suitable conditions. Our results support the idea that virulence is an emergent property that cannot be easily predicted by a reductionist approach and yet it behaves as a deterministic system in a lepidopteran cryptococcal infection. These findings provide a road map for evaluating whether host-microbe interactions in other systems are chaotic, deterministic, or stochastic, including those with public health importance. IMPORTANCE Virulence is a complex phenotype that cannot be easily studied by analyzing its individual components in isolation. By studying the outcome of infection as the death of the host, we found that a given microbial phenotype does not necessarily correlate with its ability to cause disease and that the presence of so-called virulence factors does not predict pathogenicity, consistent with the notion that virulence is an emergent property. This paper reports that the dynamics of virulence in Galleria mellonella larvae infected with the fungus Cryptococcus neoformans follows a predictable pattern. Establishing that virulence is an emergent property is important because it implies that it is not reducible to its components, and consequently, this phenomenon needs to be studied by a holistic approach. Virulence is a complex phenotype that cannot be easily studied by analyzing its individual components in isolation. By studying the outcome of infection as the death of the host, we found that a given microbial phenotype does not necessarily correlate with its ability to cause disease and that the presence of so-called virulence factors does not predict pathogenicity, consistent with the notion that virulence is an emergent property. This paper reports that the dynamics of virulence in Galleria mellonella larvae infected with the fungus Cryptococcus neoformans follows a predictable pattern. Establishing that virulence is an emergent property is important because it implies that it is not reducible to its components, and consequently, this phenomenon needs to be studied by a holistic approach.


Abstract Official development assistance (ODA) constitutes one of Japan's most important foreign policy instruments as it builds Japan's global network and supports allies in the Southeast Asian region and beyond. In the context of a rising China and an increasingly severe fiscal and demographic situation at home, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) promulgated a domestic-oriented legitimation campaign featuring a popular anime character rebranded as 'ODA-man' to increase public understanding of and support for Japan's ODA. Drawing on interpretivist analysis of performances at a development cooperation promotion festival, anime videos on the MOFA YouTube channel and interviews and examining the use of rhetorical strategies, this article provides an in-depth study of the promotion of one of the central instruments in Japan's foreign policy repertoire. Though he comes off as goofy and benign, ODA-man's messages are serious ones that reproduce dominant economic and security narratives about Japan and the world. Analysis points to both innovation and path dependency in Japan's foreign policy repertoire; while ODA-man may be new the story he is telling, and the way that he is performing it, is very much familiar. The article further illuminates important trends in the public legitimation of foreign policy in Japan.


The task of providing military defense for the Texas Frontier was never an easy one because the territory was claimed by some of the greatest querrilla fighters of all times—the Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, and Lipans. Protecting a line running from the Red River southwest to El Paso was an impossible task, but following the Mexican War the federal government attempted to do so by establishing a line of forts. During the Civil War the forts were virtually abandoned and the Indians once again ruled the area. Following the war when the military began to restore the old forts, they found that the Indians no longer fought with bows and arrows but shouldered the latest firearms. With their new weapons the Indians were able to inflict tremendous destruction, bringing demands from settlers for more protection. In the summer of 1866 a new line of forts appeared through central Texas under the leadership of General Philip H. Sheridan, commander of federal forces in Louisiana and Texas. Guardians of a raw young land and focal points of high adventure, the old forts were indispensable in their day of service and it is fitting that they be preserved. In and around the forts and along the route of the Texas Forts Trail, history is abundant and enduring. Historian Rupert Richardson first wrote the travel guide of the fort locations for the Texas Highway Department. B. W. Aston and Donathan Taylor took the original version and revised and expanded it, giving additional historical information on the forts and their role in frontier defense, making this a valuable historical resource as well as a travel guide to the forts and surrounding towns.


While questions of law, religion, and health care have engaged scholars, policymakers, and the general public for decades, society continues to struggle over the conflict between patient access to care and conscience-based objections to the provision of care. To what extent can physicians, religiously-affiliated hospitals, or employers deny patients access to abortion, contraception, or end-of-life care that will hasten death? What about denying fertility services to a same-sex couple? Or when can parents refuse medical care for their children because of religious belief?
In this paper, I aim to articulate an overarching framework that can address the balance between access to care and conscience-based objections to care in the full range of situations in which the conflict between access and religious conscience arises. In considering the different ways in which the conflict arises, I identify a key principle:
For issues in which conscience is important, religious objections to providing care should be relevant only to the extent that there are legitimate non-religious bases for refusing to provide care. Thus, for example, physicians should be able to refrain from performing abortions or from providing aid-in-dying on religious grounds because one can view abortion or aid-in-dying as immoral on non-religious grounds.
On the other hand, if there are insufficient non-religious reasons for objecting to the care, then religious objections are insufficient as well. For example, since there is no legitimate secular basis for denying fertility services to same-sex couples, religious objections to providing fertility services should not be recognized.
Are there times when one can invoke religious beliefs even when there are no legitimate non-religious bases for the exercise of conscience? If religious freedom is measured in secular terms, then we could easily undermine the whole idea of religious freedom. While there can be circumstances outside of the delivery of health care for recognizing religious beliefs that do not have a secular counterpart, it is difficult to identify a situation in which a person's religious belief alone could justify the denial of beneficial care. We should not allow religious doctrine to trump a person's interests in health. In other words, even when someone has a religious freedom interest, the state's interest in protecting the health of its citizens outweighs the religious interest.


Modeling languages are used to make models that are commonly used in communicating about real-life situations such as the modeling of business and IT requirements in organizations. A way to evaluate how effective the modeling languages are for communicating their intended messages is to use the set of nine principles defined in the Physics of Notations Theory (PoNT, Moody). PoNT helps designers evaluate the notation of modeling languages and provides guidelines for improving it. We apply this theory to evaluate the visual notation of a systemic method, the Systemic Enterprise Architecture Methodology (SEAM) that is designed to model business and IT requirements. In order to make the SEAM notation more cognitively effective, we identify some notation limitations and provide specific recommendations for improvement for each of the nine PoNT principles.


Security vulnerability in software is the primary reason for security breaches, and an important challenge for IT professionals is how to manage the disclosure of vulnerability information. The IT security community has proposed several disclosure policies, such as full vendor, immediate public and hybrid, and has debated which of these should be adopted by coordinating agencies such as CERT. Our early study (Cavusoglu et al. 2004a) analyzed the optimal disclosure policy that minimizes social loss when vulnerability affects only one software vendor. In this paper, we extend our early work into three directions in order to sled light on current issues in vulnerability disclosure process. (i) When the vulnerability affects multiple vendors, we show that the coordinator's optimal policy cannot ensure that every vendor will release a patch. However, when the optimal policy does elicit a patch from each vendor, we show that the coordinator's grace period in the multiple vendor case falls between the grace periods that it would set individually for the vendors in the single vendor case. (ii) We analyze the impact of an early discovery, which can be encouraged with proper incentive mechanisms, on the release time of the patch, the grace period, and the social welfare. (iii) We also investigate the impact of an early warning system that provides privileged vulnerability information to selected users before the release of a patch for the vulnerability on the social welfare. Finally, we explore the several policy implications of our results and their relationship with current disclosure practices.


The remarkable performance of the Transformer architecture in natural language processing has recently also triggered broad interest in Computer Vision. Among other merits, Transformers are witnessed as capable of learning long-range dependencies and spatial correlations, which is a clear advantage over convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have been the de facto standard in Computer Vision problems so far. Thus, Transformers have become an integral part of modern medical image analysis. In this review, we provide an encyclopedic review of the applications of Transformers in medical imaging. Specifically, we present a systematic and thorough review of relevant recent Transformer literature for different medical image analysis tasks, including classification, segmentation, detection, registration, synthesis, and clinical report generation. For each of these applications, we investigate the novelty, strengths and weaknesses of the different proposed strategies and develop taxonomies highlighting key properties and contributions. Further, if applicable, we outline current benchmarks on different datasets. Finally, we summarize key challenges and discuss different future research directions. In addition, we have provided cited papers with their corresponding implementations in https://github.com/mindflow-institue/Awesome-Transformer.


Background: The purpose of this study is to describe the natural history of hip morphology in patients with mucopolysaccharidoses (MPS) I and MPS II. Methodology: This is a retrospective radiographic analysis of 88 hips in 44 children with MPS I and II. Radiographs were examined to determine hip migration, femoral head sphericity, and acetabular dysplasia at different ages throughout childhood. In individual hips, change in morphology and rate of change were analyzed. Results: There was a high rate of hip migration and femoral head dysplasia in both MPS I and MPS II. Progressive migration was seen in three quarters of hips and progressive femoral head deformity in over half of hips. Acetabular dysplasia was variable, ranging from normal to severely dysplastic, but did not change with time. Overall, hips were more dysplastic in MPS I than MPS II. Conclusions: Hip morphology is variable in MPS I and MPS II ranging from almost normal to severely dysplastic. Some hips do not deteriorate with time and thus surgical intervention may not be necessary in all cases. Deterioration is slow allowing time to plan a holistic approach to treatment. Level of Evidence: Level IV—case series.


Background. Data on the economic impact of Lyme borreliosis (LB) on European health care systems is scarce. This project focused on the epidemiology and costs for laboratory testing in LB patients in Germany. Materials and Methods. We performed a sentinel analysis of epidemiological and medicoeconomic data for 2007 and 2008. Data was provided by a German statutory health insurance (DAK) company covering approx. 6.04 million members. In addition, the quality of diagnostic testing for LB in Germany was studied. Results. In 2007 and 2008, the incident diagnosis LB was coded on average for 15,742 out of 6.04 million insured members (0.26%). 20,986 EIAs and 12,558 immunoblots were ordered annually for these patients. For all insured members in the outpatient sector, a total of 174,820 EIAs and 52,280 immunoblots were reimbursed annually to health care providers (cost: 2,600,850€). For Germany, the overall expected cost is estimated at 51,215,105€. However, proficiency testing data questioned test quality and standardization of diagnostic assays used. Conclusion. Findings from this study suggest ongoing issues related to care for LB and may help to improve future LB disease management.


In many practical situations, we know the exact form of the objective function, and we know the optimal decision corresponding to each value of the corresponding parameter x. What should we do if we do not know the exact value of x, and instead, we only know x with uncertainty - e.g., with interval uncertainty? In this case, a reasonable idea is to select one value from the given interval, and to use the optimal decision corresponding to the selected value. But which value should we choose? In this paper, we provide a solution to this problem for the situation in the simplest 1-D case. Somewhat surprisingly, it turns out the usual practice of selecting the midpoint is rarely optimal, a better selection is possible.


Molecular photoswitches incorporated in molecular junctions yield the possibility of light-controlled switching of conductance due to the electronic difference of the photoisomers. Another isomerization mechanism, dark photoswitching, promoted by a voltage stimulus rather than by light, can be operative in the Coulomb blockade regime for a specific charge state of the molecule. Here we elucidate theoretically the mechanistic and thermodynamic restrictions for this dark photoswitching for donor-acceptor substituted 4n and 4n+2 π-electron open-chain oligoenes (1,3-butadiene and 1,3,5-hexatriene) by considering the molecular energies and orbitals of the molecules placed in a junction. For an electrocyclic ring closure reaction to occur for these compounds, we put forward two requirements: a) the closed stereoisomer (cis or trans form) must be of lower energy than the open form, and b) the reaction pathway must be in accordance to the orbital symmetry rules expressed by the Woodward-Hoffmann rules (when the electrodes do not significantly alter the molecular orbital appearances). We find these two requirements to be valid for the dianion of (1E,3Z,5E)-hexa-1,3,5-triene-1,6-diamine, and the Coulomb blockade diamonds were therefore modeled for this compound to elucidate how a dark photoswitching event would manifest itself in the stability plot. From this modeling of conductance as a function of gate and bias potentials, we predict a collapse in Coulomb diamond size, that is, a decrease in the height of the island of zero conductance.


We use the conditional symmetry approach to study the r evolution of a minisuperspace spherically symmetric model both at the classical and the quantum level. After integration of the coordinates t , θ and ϕ in the gravitational plus electromagnetic action the configuration space dependent dynamical variables turn out to correspond to the r -dependent metric functions and the electrostatic field. In the context of the formalism for constrained systems (Dirac-Bergmann, Arnowitt-Deser-Misner) with respect to the radial coordinate r , we set up a pointlike reparametrization invariant Lagrangian. It is seen that, in the constant potential parametrization of the lapse, the corresponding minisuperspace is a Lorentzian three-dimensional flat manifold which obviously admits six Killing vector fields plus a homothetic one. The weakly vanishing r Hamiltonian guarantees that the phase space quantities associated to the six Killing fields are linear holonomic integrals of motion. The homothetic field provides one more rheonomic integral of motion. These seven integrals are shown to comprise the entire classical solution space, i.e. the space-time of a Reissner-Nordström black hole, the r -reparametrization invariance since one dependent variable remains unfixed, and the two quadratic relations satisfied by the integration constants. We then quantize the model using as supplementary conditions acting on the wave function, the quantum analogues of the various subalgebras of the classical conditional symmetries. We find that, as a semiclassical analysis shows, in all but one allowed case the ensuing solutions to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation exhibit a good correlation with the classical regime. In the remaining case, the emerging semiclassical geometry is a four-dimensional homogeneous space-time, thus exhibiting no curvature singularity.


Regulatory bundling is the aggregation or disaggregation of legislative rules by administrative agencies. Agencies, in other words, can bundle what would otherwise be multiple rules into just one rulemaking. Conversely, they can split one rule into several. This observation parallels other recent work on how agencies can aggregate adjudications and enforcement actions but now focuses on legislative rules, the most consequential form of agency action. The topic is timely in light of a recent executive order directing agencies to repeal two regulations for every new one promulgated. Agencies now have a greater incentive to pack regulatory provisions together for every two rules they can repeal. This Article explores the positive determinants and normative implications of regulatory bundling and unbundling. The empirical analysis reveals that agencies have been increasingly engaging in regulatory bundling for the last two decades. More generally, bundling behavior varies widely across different administrative agencies, and agencies appear to include more subjects in their final—as opposed to proposed—rules. These findings, in turn, raise significant normative concerns that could be addressed through a suite of tools novel to the administrative state: singlesubject rules, line-item vetoes, and innovative uses of more traditional doctrines of judicial review. Whether some of these tools should be adopted, however, requires further empirical assessment of regulatory bundling's causes and consequences. authors. Professor and Ronald H. Coase Teaching Scholar, University of Chicago Law School; Associate Professor of Law and Jia Jonathan Zhu and Ruyin Ruby Ye Sesquicentennial Fellow, Cornell Law School, respectively. Many thanks to Bruce Ackerman, Zach Clopton, Sean Farhang, Lee Fennell, Michael Gilbert, Tom Ginsburg, Emily Hammond, Aziz Huq, Ronald Levin, Anne O'Connell, Justin Pidot, Ricky Revesz, Susan Rose-Ackerman, Kyle Rozema, and David Zaring for helpful comments and conversations. Thanks also to participants in the New Frontiers in the Empirical Study of Agency Policymaking Conference at University of Wisconsin–Madison; the Political Economy and Public Law Conference at Cornell Law School; the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies at Michigan Law School; the AALS session on New Voices in Administrative Law; the Yale Law Journal Contemporary Issues in Legal Scholarship Workshop; and faculty workshops at Chicago-Kent College of Law, Cornell Law School, University of Chicago Law School, and University of Colorado Law School. Julia Bradley, Colleen Guo, Christine Liu, Nathaniel Ludewig, Eileen Prescott, and Paul Rogerson provided superb research assistance. The original dataset used in this Article is preserved in eYLS, Yale Law School's data repository, under an embargo until March 31, 2021. The dataset will be available at digitalcommons .law.yale.edu/ylj.


In last few years, the computer technologies developed in dramatically
At the same time new high-level languages appeared, and multimedia
development all of these factors take out new applications to appear and
solve our real life problems
One of these languages is Visual Basic, which uses the visual
environment to design and fun our systems, which make the programming
easier and application's Interface more attractive to the user and developers,
In addition to possibility of using multimedia tools in the applications
One category of these visualized applications IS educational systems,
which been recommended in high degree from the educational crew more
than unvisualized applications There is a lot of educational systems that already appeared and used
by global but unfortunately rare of these system devoted to learning Arabic
Language to non Arabian students. specially in Arabic Grammar, which is
difficult to understand.
Because all of these factors I'm going to develop an educational
application that will give any non Arabian student. who studying Arabic
language in advanced level one of the most important lessons in Arabic
grammar by discussing the topic in details with an examples, and at the last
the system will examine the student by multiple choice exam, and after the
student finish his exam the student will be given his result from the system.
The system will be developed Using Visual Basic 6, by using the
language tools and features. such as multimedia tools. Visual Basic scripts.


Abstract The rigidity of early class analysis and the recent demise of any type of class analytics have turned attention away from examining the growing population of informally employed workers as a class. By not examining informal workers as a class "in themselves," we are losing insights into how they are translating their positions into a class "for themselves." As a consequence, the recent literature on globalization and liberalization is increasingly concluding that the decreasing proportion of formally employed workers (and the subsequent rise in informal employment) the world over signifies a decline in all class-based organization. Such arguments have obscured our understanding of the current social dynamics of exploitation and resistance. In an attempt to begin filling this gap, this article recovers class as an important analytical tool with which to examine (1) the current relations of power between the state, employers, and the majority of India's workers, and (2) how the structures of production within which informal workers operate affect their collective action strategies. A reformulated labor movement model is offered to expose the underlying mechanisms through which informal workers translate their location in the class structure as a class "in itself" into a political group as a class "for itself." Insights into how informal workers organize can have profound implications for our understanding of changing state-labor relations as national governments attempt to liberalize their economies and simultaneously rein in their welfare functions.


Information systems actability theory builds on a communicative action perspective on IS. Information systems are seen as instruments for technology mediated work communication. Human actors are communicating i.e. sending and/or receiving messages through an information system. Information systems actability emphasises pragmatic dimensions of information systems. The paper presents 19 actability criteria divided into three groups: 1 criteria concerning user-system interaction, 2 criteria concerning user-through-system-to-user communication, and 3 criteria concerning information system's contribution to workpractice processes. These actability criteria should be possible to use in design and evaluation of information systems.