Humans are capable of pursuing multiple objectives simultaneously in everyday life, thereby flexibly prioritizing motion tasks and constraints among others. A major goal of current robotics research is to equip highly redundant robots with similar adaptive behavior. The aim of this thesis is to endow such robots with the abilities to optimize priorities for possibly conflicting objectives, to smoothly rearrange such priorities and to decouple the objectives related to motion generation from the objective of simultaneous interaction with the environment through forces.

A commonly adopted approach is to tune priorities by hand once which then remain constant over time. In contrast to such constant prioritization, this thesis promotes a different view: A framework for automated learning soft priorities is introduced. Employing state-of-the-art optimization, different sets of priorities are evaluated offline and improved until the prioritized superposition of all underlying controllers satisfies a desired high-level goal.

As an alternative approach to soft prioritization with scalar weights, the well-known Stack-of-Tasks prioritization scheme relies on projectors and enforces strict priorities. The second part of this thesis performs a thorough formal analysis of projectors and proposes to smoothly shape between idempotent matrix operators. A novel prioritization scheme is presented with the help of this method, which generalizes previous approaches implementing either strict or soft priorities. It enables to insert new or remove outdated objectives if necessary and allows to rearrange priorities continuously online without inertia coupling while offering the ability to control the interference between objectives.

Finally, underactuated robots subject to contact constraints are studied. A projection operator is derived which enables to decouple contact wrench control from constraint-consistent motion generation for robots with passive or virtual joints. This is essential for controlling legged robots which are represented by a floating-base. Moreover, this thesis shows that the same principle holds for underactuated grasping scenarios.

The approach is validated with a large panel of experiments on various robot platforms both in simulation and the real-world. This thesis provides numerous tools that endows existing and future robot systems with ever-increasing degrees of freedom to create complex motion aiming to interact with their environment effectively.


Recently there has been growing tide of articles, papers and even conferences devoted to the question of the future of business. As we approach through the new millennium, we are living in a world that is the most unstable, dynamic, exciting and frustrating for the last decades. Not only change itself but also the rate of change is accelerating. Operating in an uncertain, highly competitive and highly complex business environment brings so many questions to the businesses. Business insights often fail to recognize that their marketplace/market space changes every few years. Leading edge companies increasingly seek ways to measure customer satisfaction, loyalty and value as mean of setting strategies of the companies. Essentially the point at the issue is whether traditional business approaches for the conditions that now prevail in the beginning of the new millennium, basic principles still apply but with this contribution I will try to clarify the concept of customer value and how the importance for the markets and difference between customer satisfaction and customer value. Because the focus on the business is to satisfy of the customer needs and wants so the practise may need to be changed fundamentally. This study also describes a customer-value hierarchy linking product or service attributes, product or service consequences and customer goals or purposes. It outlines, and discusses, the value hierarchies established for customers. At the same time it deals with the concept of net present value of customers, with the emphasize the importance of attracting and retaining customers by providing high customer value which, in turn, leads to long-term profitability and growth. Complex business environment brings so many questions to the companies. Their profitability and viability will depend on the efforts of an increasingly diverse customer value. Looking more closely at the question of customer value could help for the challenges for the new millennium.


Concerned about the Turing test's ability to correctly evaluate if a system exhibits human-like intelligence, the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) has been proposed as an alternative. A Winograd Schema consists of a sentence and a question. The answers to the questions are intuitive for humans but are designed to be difficult for machines, as they require various forms of commonsense knowledge about the sentence. In this paper we demonstrate our progress towards addressing the WSC. We present an approach that identifies the knowledge needed to answer a challenge question, hunts down that knowledge from text repositories, and then reasons with them to come up with the answer. In the process we develop a semantic parser (www.kparser.org). We show that our approach works well with respect to a subset of Winograd schemas.


Comparative Regional Integration: Governance and Legal Models is a groundbreaking comparative study on regional or supranational integration through international and regional organizations. It provides the first comprehensive and empirically based analysis of governance systems by drawing on an original sample of 87 regional and international organizations. The authors explain how and why different organizations select specific governance processes and institutional choices, and outline which legal instruments – regulatory, organizational or procedural – are adopted to achieve integration. They reveal how different objectives influence institutional design and the integration model, for example a free trade area could insist on supremacy and refrain from adopting instruments for indirect rule, while a political union would rather engage with all available techniques. This ambitious work merges different backgrounds and disciplines to provide researchers and practitioners with a unique toolbox of institutional processes and legal mechanisms, and a classification of different models of regional and international integration.


In order to insert a virtual object into a TV image, the graphics system needs to know precisely how the camera is moving, so that the virtual object can be rendered in the correct place in every frame. Nowadays this can be achieved relatively easily in postproduction, or in a studio equipped with a special tracking system. However, for live shooting on location, or in a studio that is not specially equipped, installing such a system can be difficult or uneconomic. To overcome these limitations, the MATRIS project is developing a real-time system for measuring the movement of a camera. The system uses image analysis to track naturally occurring features in the scene, and data from an inertial sensor. No additional sensors, special markers, or camera mounts are required. This paper gives an overview of the system and presents some results.


We present a simple, yet accurate, method to obtain the intersection point of a ray in a gradient-index medium and the surface following the medium. The method does not involve additional ray tracing, unlike the commonly used iterative technique, and the coordinates of the intersection point are obtained analytically.


The behavior of charge density waves (CDWs) in an external magnetic field is dictated by both orbital and Pauli (Zeeman) effects. A quasi-one-dimensional (Q1D) system features Q1D Fermi surfaces that allow these effects to be distinguished, which in turn can provide a sensitive probe to the underlying electronic states. Here, we studied the field dependence of an incommensurate CDW in a transition-metal chalcogenide Ta2NiSe7 with a Q1D chain structure. The angle-dependent magnetoresistance (MR) is found to be very sensitive to the relative orientation between the magnetic field and the chain direction. With an applied current fixed along the b axis (the chain direction), the angle-dependent MR shows a striking change of the symmetry below TCDW only for a rotating magnetic field in the ac plane. In contrast, the symmetry axis remains unchanged for other configurations (H in ab and bc planes). The orbital effect conforms to the lattice symmetry, while the Pauli effect in the form of μBB/ℏvF can be responsible for such symmetry change, provided that the Fermi velocity vF is significantly anisotropic and the nesting vector changes in a magnetic field, which is corroborated by our first-principles calculations. Our results show that the angle-dependent MR is a sensitive transport probe of CDW and can be useful for the study of low-dimensional systems in general.


This paper deals with a classic development question: how can the process of economic development – transition from stagnation in a traditional technology to industrialization and prosperity with a modern technology – be accelerated? Lewis (1954) and Rostow (1956) argue that the pace of industrialization is limited by the rate of capital formation which in turn is limited by the savings rate of workers close to subsistence. We argue that access to capital goods in the world market can be quantitatively important in speeding up the transition. We develop a parsimonious open-economy model where traditional and modern technologies coexist (a dual economy in the sense of Lewis (1954)). We show that a decline in the world price of capital goods in an open economy increases the rate of capital formation and speeds up the pace of industrialization relative to a closed economy that lacks access to cheaper capital goods. In the long run, the investment rate in the open economy is twice as high as in the closed economy and the per capita income is 23 percent higher.


Object affordance is an important concept in hand-object interaction, providing information on action possibilities based on human motor capacity and objects' physical property thus benefiting tasks such as action anticipation and robot imitation learning. However, the definition of affordance in existing datasets often: 1) mix up affordance with object functionality; 2) confuse affordance with goal-related action; and 3) ignore human motor capacity. This paper proposes an efficient annotation scheme to address these issues by combining goal-irrelevant motor actions and grasp types as affordance labels and introducing the concept of mechanical action to represent the action possibilities between two objects. We provide new annotations by applying this scheme to the EPIC-KITCHENS dataset and test our annotation with tasks such as affordance recognition, hand-object interaction hotspots prediction, and cross-domain evaluation of affordance. The results show that models trained with our annotation can distinguish affordance from other concepts, predict fine-grained interaction possibilities on objects, and generalize through different do-mains.


Background A range of interventions including physiotherapy, speech and language therapy, occupational therapy and pharmacological treatments are recommended as helpful to many individuals with Huntington's disease (HD) towards reducing the impact of disease effects on quality of life (Dickson and Weller 2011) but evidence in support of these suggested benefits is sufficiently poor that it continues to be reported that there is no effective treatment for HD (Khakh and Sofroniew 2014). Currently no treatment has been shown to halt or slow progression of the disorder (Aron, Tsebetkov, Finkbeiner, 2013). In the absence of hard evidence for effective interventions, this study examined what helps people live with HD from the perspective of patients, family caregivers and health professionals. Aims To establish what helps people live with HD from their own perspective and those of family caregivers and health professionals. Method Concept mapping: a process involving brainstorming, sessions to identify important factors captured in concise statements, prioritising of statements, and clustering, or grouping of statements. Analysis utilised 'Ariadne®' software, which produces a graphic 'concept map'. Participants: Brainstorming: 30 professionals, 29 people with HD, 31 caregivers. Prioritising and clustering: 19 people with HD, 20 professionals, 26 caregivers. Total: n = 126. Results Specialist HD knowledge and expertise among professionals, expert assessment and treatment for comorbid mental health problems and flexible care provision were prioritised among 94 identified factors, grouped into ten clusters. Conclusions This understanding can contribute towards future studies designed to establish priorities in research and practice aimed at improving life for people with HD. References Aron R, Tsvetkov A, Finkbeiner S. NUB1 snubs huntingtin toxicity, Nature Neuroscience 2013;16(5):523-5 Dickson D, Weller R. Neurodegeneration: The Molecular Pathology of Dementia and Movement Disorders. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. 2011 Khakh B, Sofroniew M. Astrocytes and Huntington's disease, Neuroscience, 2014.doi.org/10.1021/cn500100r


In musicology and music research generally, the increasing availability of digital music, storage capacities, and computing power enable and require new and intelligent systems. In the transition from traditional to digital musicology, many techniques and tools have been developed for the analysis of individual pieces of music, but large-scale music data that are increasingly becoming available require research methods and systems that work on the collection-level and at scale. Although many relevant algorithms have been developed during the past 15 years of research in Music Information Retrieval, an integrated system that supports large-scale digital musicology research has so far been lacking. In the Digital Music Lab (DML) project, a collaboration among music librarians, musicologists, computer scientists, and human-computer interface specialists, the DML software system has been developed that fills this gap by providing intelligent large-scale music analysis with a user-friendly interactive interface supporting musicologists in their exploration and enquiry. The DML system empowers musicologists by addressing several challenges: distributed processing of audio and other music data, management of the data analysis process and results, remote analysis of data under copyright, logical inference on the extracted information and metadata, and visual web-based interfaces for exploring and querying the music collections. The DML system is scalable and based on Semantic Web technology and integrates into Linked Data with the vision of a distributed system that enables music research across archives, libraries, and other providers of music data. A first DML system prototype has been set up in collaboration with the British Library and I Like Music Ltd. This system has been used to analyse a diverse corpus of currently 250,000 music tracks. In this article, we describe the DML system requirements, design, architecture, components, and available data sources, explaining their interaction. We report use cases and applications with initial evaluations of the proposed system.


We study the number of occurrences of any fixed vincular permutation pattern.
We show that this statistics on uniform random permutations is asymptotically
normal and describe the speed of convergence. To prove this central limit
theorem, we use the method of dependency graphs. The main difficulty is then to
estimate the variance of our statistics. We need a lower bound on the variance,
for which we introduce a recursive technique based on the law of total
variance.


Re/presenting Class is a collection of essays that develops a poststructuralist Marxian conception of class in order to theorize the complex contemporary economic terrain. Both building upon and reconsidering a tradition that Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff—two of this volume's editors—began in the late 1980s with their groundbreaking work Knowledge and Class, contributors aim to correct previous research that has largely failed to place class as a central theme in economic analysis. Suggesting the possibility of a new politics of the economy, the collection as a whole focuses on the diversity and contingency of economic relations and processes.

Investigating a wide range of cases, the essays illuminate, for instance, the organizational and cultural means by which unmeasured surpluses—labor that occurs outside the formal workplace' such as domestic work—are distributed and put to use. Editors Resnick and Wolff, along with J. K. Gibson-Graham, bring theoretical essays together with those that apply their vision to topics ranging from the Iranian Revolution to sharecropping in the Mississippi Delta to the struggle over the ownership of teaching materials at a liberal arts college. Rather than understanding class as an element of an overarching capitalist social structure, the contributors—from radical and cultural economists to social scientists—define class in terms of diverse and ongoing processes of producing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labor and view class identities as multiple, changing, and interacting with other aspects of identity in contingent and unpredictable ways.

Re/presenting Class will appeal primarily to scholars of Marxism and political economy.

Contributors. Carole Biewener, Anjan Chakrabarti, Stephen Cullenberg, Fred Curtis, Satyananda Gabriel, J. K. Gibson-Graham, Serap Kayatekin, Bruce Norton, Phillip O'Neill, Stephen Resnick, David Ruccio, Dean Saitta, Andriana Vlachou, Richard Wolff


While skin cancer is the most diagnosed form of cancer in men and women, with more cases diagnosed each year than all other cancers combined, sufficiently early diagnosis results in very good prognosis and as such makes early detection crucial. While radiomics have shown considerable promise as a powerful diagnostic tool for significantly improving oncological diagnostic accuracy and efficiency, current radiomics-driven methods have largely rely on pre-defined, hand-crafted quantitative features, which can greatly limit the ability to fully characterize unique cancer phenotype that distinguish it from healthy tissue. Recently, the notion of discovery radiomics was introduced, where a large amount of custom, quantitative radiomic features are directly discovered from the wealth of readily available medical imaging data. In this study, we present a novel discovery radiomics framework for skin cancer detection, where we leverage novel deep multi-column radiomic sequencers for high-throughput discovery and extraction of a large amount of custom radiomic features tailored for characterizing unique skin cancer tissue phenotype. The discovered radiomic sequencer was tested against 9,152 biopsy-proven clinical images comprising of different skin cancers such as melanoma and basal cell carcinoma, and demonstrated sensitivity and specificity of 91% and 75%, respectively, thus achieving dermatologist-level performance and \break hence can be a powerful tool for assisting general practitioners and dermatologists alike in improving the efficiency, consistency, and accuracy of skin cancer diagnosis.


This research aims at creating a detailed account on the diffusion of telecommunications services in a complex socio-economic context, taking Pakistan as a case study. The core research question of this thesis is to investigate why the successful experience of the rapid and an effective diffusion of mobile communications services in case of Pakistan couldn't be replicated in the cases of fixed telephony and internet services. The book investigates those major attributes which play a significant role in the diffusion of telecommunications services in a complex socio-economic and political context. Hence, the study reveals 47 major attributes (indicators) that fully explain why some telecom services successfully diffuse in the market; whereas the others fail to produce similar results. The thesis also conducts a detailed impact analysis of the diffused telecommunications services within the local context. In addition to that, the current research comes up with a list of strategic and policy recommendations for the relevant market players and authorities. Hence, this work presumably makes a significant contribution to an ongoing diffusion research, particularly in context of the diffusion of telecom services within a complex unit of adoption. The empirical part of the research includes a significantly high number of interviews that were conducted from the key players of the local telecom market, and they essentially represented all the five major domains i.e. the supplier, policy, regulatory, user, and supporting domains. There were several workshops organized primarily in different universities across the country in order to collect a substantial amount of users' responses, using a well-structured questionnaire. The research makes an effective use of the detailed observations and extensive amount of readings of the published research and media reports in order to fully understand the real dynamics and complexities involved in the diffusion process. The use of mixed-methodology i.e. the careful application of both the quantitative and qualitative research methods further strengthens the reliability of the collected data and validity of the investigated facts. It is assumed here that the validity of the derived results would be extendable to those cases that would have some degree of contextual resemblance with the presented case. Hence, the current study is likely to bring a fresh slant of perspective on the diffusion research in order to help other diffusion scholars in designing an analytical framework to conduct similar sort of studies on the other cases that would have similarities with the specific case that this thesis deals with. However, it is further assumed that most of the underdeveloped countries, as well as some of the developing nations would have a certain degree of social, economic, institutional, legal, historical and political resemblance with the presented case. Therefore the current research is believed to be highly beneficial and insightful for the telecom policy makers, regulators and suppliers in developing and aligning their tailored policies, regulations and strategies for the successful diffusion and sustainable growth of telecom services within any 'unit of adoption'; whether it is a private firm, social organization, public institution, a targeted market or a specific segment of the society.


DESCRIPTION: The concept "context of situation" introduced by Malinowski some eighty years ago has now become an essential element of the vocabulary of any linguistic theory whose aim is to reveal the nature of language. With the abandonment of the spurious distinction between competence and performance, the process of language, i.e., language use, has claimed its rightful place in the study of language. The chapters of this book focus on the relations of context and text, conceptualising the latter as language operative in some recognizable social context. It is argued that context is not simply a backdrop for the occurrence of words; rather, it is an active element which on the one hand plays a crucial role in the progression of human discourse and on the other enters into and shapes the very nature of language as process and as system, furnishing the foundation for functionality in language. Acting as the interface between language and society, context analysis reveals the power of language for creating, maintaining and changing human relationships.


The axial thrust is basically generated by a pressure imbalance across the impeller. The impeller is subjected to a great force trying to move it against the incoming flow. The cumulative thrust of all impellers on the shaft, especially when the impeller arrangement is in-line, has to be compensated by a balance piston. The purpose of this paper is to describe the calculation procedure for the accurate evaluation of the thrust in centrifugal compressors for medium and high pressure applications. In this respect the paramount factors which influence the thrust are considered such as the operating conditions (surge or choke), the different combinations of operating modes inside the compressor (in the case of multi-section configuration), as well as variable labyrinth seal clearances and different roughness of rotor and stator. Different arrangements of the compressor like in-line and back-to-back configurations are analysed and compared with regard to their influence on thrust and thrust variation. An example with a medium pressure compressor is given. The paper also focuses on the main inaccuracies for the calculation of the thrust like the core rotation factor and the degree of reaction of the stages. To validate the calculations, extensive measurements of the thrust forces acting on the axial thrust bearing were performed during the full-load, full-pressure factory testing of different high-pressure centrifugal compressors. The results of the tests demonstrate the accuracy of the prediction and the high sensitivity of the thrust to the boundary conditions. The evaluation of the thrust analyses is the base for the further determination of the stability behavior of the compressor which is compared to the damping measurement carried out during factory testing. These measurements emphasize the importance of performing such thrust measurements during a full-load, fullpressure or ASME PTC10 Type 1 test. The requirements of some specifications are discussed and their consequences on the design of the compressor are evaluated with respect to their feasibility. The impact of the size of the ASV (Anti-Surge Valve) on the thrust range of the compressor is further discussed.


Fishes were sampled on the restored floodplain of the Cosumnes River in Central California in order to determine patterns of floodplain use. The floodplain was sampled for seven years (1998-2002, 2004-2005) during the winter-spring flooding season. The fishes fell into five groups: (1) floodplain spawners, (2) river spawners, (3) floodplain foragers, (4) floodplain pond fishes, and (5) inadvertent users. Eight of the 18 abundant species were natives, while the rest were aliens. There was a consistent pattern of floodplain use, modified by timing and extent of flooding. The first fishes to appear were floodplain foragers, inadvertent users, and juvenile Chinook salmon (river spawners). Next were floodplain spawners, principally Sacramento splittail and common carp. At the end of the season, in ponds of residual water, non-native annual fishes, mainly inland silverside and western mosquitofish, became abundant. Adult spawners left when inflow decreased; their juveniles persisted as long as flood pulses kept water levels up and temperatures low. Juvenile splittail and carp quickly grew large enough to dominate floodplain fish samples, along with smaller numbers of juvenile Sacramento sucker and pikeminnow (river spawners). Such juveniles left the Relatively few fishes that used the floodplain for spawning or rearing became stranded, except late season alien fishes. Most alien fishes had resident populations in adjacent river, sloughs, and ditches and were not dependent on the floodplain for persistence. This indicates that Central Valley floodplains managed to favor native fishes should have the following char- acteristics: (1) extensive early season flooding, (2) complete drainage by the end of the flooding season, (3) few areas with permanent water, (4) a mosaic of physical habitats, (5) regular annual flooding but with high variability in flood regime.


Social psychology has been defined as "a branch of psychology that is concerned with those aspects of mental life which relate to social interaction and social phenomena in general" 1. Hewstone defines it thus: "the scientific study of how personal, situational and societal factors influence the cognition, motivation and behaviour of individuals and (members of) social groups"2. Jahoda lamented that many textbook definitions of social psychology were "pretentious and utterly futile" because they were so "grossly overinclusive that they could encompass a whole range of social and biological disciplines"3. What emerges clearly is that social psychology is seen as having the central task of explaining how the ways in which we think and behave is affected by interaction between people1. It is in this context that we define social psychology for the purposes of this article.


The hydrogen isotopic composition of fluids responsible for formation of the near-surface silver-base metal vein deposits at Creede was measured by direct analysis of inclusion fluids in sphalerite, quartz, and rhodochrosite and was estimated from analyses of illite and chlorite. The oxygen isotopic composition was determined directly on inclusion fluids in sphalerite and was estimated from analyses of quartz, illite, rhodochrosite, siderite, and adularia. The carbon isotopic composition was estimated from analyses of rhodochrosite and siderite. The ranges in isotopic composition for water and CO 2 in the fluids associated with the formation of each of the minerals is given below (number of determinations given in parentheses):Mineral delta D (sub H 2 ) O ppm delta 18 O (sub H 2 ) O ppm delta 13 C (sub CO 2 ) ppmSphalerite -81 to -54 (4) -10.1 to -4.5 (4)Quartz -97 to -86 (4) -5.9 to 1.8 (18)Illite -62 to -50 (8) -1.6 to 1.2(7)Chlorite -64 to -55 (10) -2.2 to 0.8 (10)Adularia 4.2 (1)Rhodochrosite -82 to -78 (2) 4.2 to 9.4 (9) -5.7 to -4.2 (9)Siderite 4.9 to 9.9 (6) -6.9 to -2.7 (6)The delta D (sub H 2 ) O and delta 18 O (sub H 2 ) O values of fluids associated with the formation of sphalerite, quartz, illite/chlorite, and carbonate minerals differ substantially from one another, and these differences appear to have been maintained throughout the depositional history, regardless of the positions of the minerals in the paragenetic sequence.The data suggest that waters from three coexisting reservoirs fed the vein system alternately and episodically during vein formation, and apparently there was little mixing of the fluids from the different reservoirs. The hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon isotope data suggest that the carbonate waters were deep seated, probably dominantly magmatic, in origin. The sphalerite and illite/chlorite waters must have been dominantly meteoric in origin and substantially oxygen shifted by exchange with the volcanic country rocks. The quartz waters were also oxygen shifted meteoric waters but were some 40 per mil lower in deuterium content than the sphalerite and illite/chlorite waters.We propose that the quartz fluids entered the vein system from reservoirs beneath the mountainous areas to the north in the vicinity of the present Continental Divide, but that the sphalerite and illite/chlorite fluids entered the vein system from a topographically low area to the south along the structural moat of the Creede caldera. The difference in delta D between the two meteoric waters may reflect differences in altitude of the recharge areas for the two reservoirs or may be clue to isotopic evolution of the closed-basin lake and interstitial waters in the moat surrounding the Creede caldera.


Nearly all farm business ventures involve financial risk. In some instances, private and public tools used to manage financial risks in agriculture may influence farmers' production decisions. These decisions, in turn, can influence environmental quality. This bulletin summarizes research and provides some perspective on private and public attempts to cope with financial risks and their unintended environmental consequences. Specifically, it examines the conceptual underpinnings of risk-related research, challenges involved with measuring the consequences of risk for agricultural production decisions, government programs that influence the risk and return of farm businesses, and how production decisions influence both the environment and the risk and average returns to farming.


Problems involved in the stability and control of tailless airplanes are discussed. Such factors as the location of the aerodynamic center and its effect on the longitudinal stability, longitudinal trim with high-lift devices, the effects of various changes in the shape of the wing on lateral stability, and the effects of nacelles are covered. It appears that sufficient stability and controllability can be secured without sweepback. With sweepback, a flap over the center section of the wing may be used to serve the dual purpose of elevator control and high-lift device. Sweepback introduces undesirable stalling characteristics, however, and may require auxiliary devices to prevent stalling of the tips.


Photograph of Childress High School Boys Football Team in 1930. The members are posing in three rows, the back two rows are standing and the front row is sitting. Two men in suits are standing on the right hand side of the photograph. The football players are wearing their team sweaters which displays a large "C". They are standing in front of an unidentifiable brick building.


Although commonly known for their ability to cause deadly infectious diseases, there are populations of bacteria (identified as normal flora) that symbiotically live on and amongst larger host organisms and positively impact survival of the host. In previous research, culturing methods suggest that freshwater fish (i.e. bluegill and northern pike) maintain a normal flora population and that this flora aids in protection and the health of the fish. Our study used Ion torrent PGM sequencing to identify a larger, more complete population of normal flora in 2 different lake samples from three different species of fish. Identifying and comparing the normal flora populations in the lakes and different fish species would provide us with an better understanding of a fish's interactions with normal bacterial flora. Data presented here suggests that fish mucus specializes its flora as compared to the aquatic environment in which they live. The diversity of the aquatic samples is significantly higher as compared to all fish samples. Fish tend to harbor particular phyla including types of Proteobacteria. Upon comparison of mucus flora between crappie and bluegill (regardless of lake), data suggests significant differences in flora. Some of this difference may be accounted for in the aquatic environment from which they were sampled. However, even within a single aquatic environment, there are some significant differences between bacterial floras. This suggests that certain fish may specialize their flora even while in the same environment.


Subsolidus equilibria in the PbO-poor part of the TiO_2–PbO–SiO_2 diagram were studied with the aim of investigating possible applications for low-temperature thick-film dielectrics. The tie lines are between PbTiO_2 and PbSiO_3, and between PbTiO_3 and SiO_2. The results show that the TiO_2, when added to low-temperature softening point glasses, reacts with the PbO from the glass, so forming PbTiO_3. These results were applied to a low-temperature firing dielectric, consisting of a lead-rich PbO–SiO_2–B_2O_3 glass filled with a TiO_2 powder. The conversion of TiO_2 to the PbTiO_3 crystalline phase was observed above firing temperatures of approximately 600 °C. The kinetics of the reaction depend on the particle size of the TiO_2.


Summary
Despite their importance in determining the rate of both energy gain and expenditure, how the fine-scale kinematics of foraging are modified in response to changes in prey abundance and distribution remain poorly understood in many animal ecosystems.
In the marine environment, bulk-filter feeders rely on dense aggregations of prey for energetically efficient foraging. Rorqual whales (Balaenopteridae) exhibit a unique form of filter feeding called lunge feeding, a process whereby discrete volumes of prey-laden water are intermittently engulfed and filtered. In many large rorqual species the size of engulfed water mass is commensurate with the whale's body size, yet is engulfed in just a few seconds. This filter-feeding mode thus requires precise coordination of the body and enlarged engulfment apparatus to maximize capture efficiency.
Previous studies from whale-borne tags revealed that many rorqual species perform rolling behaviours when foraging. It has been hypothesized that such acrobatic manoeuvres may be required for efficient prey capture when prey manifest in small discrete patches, but to date there has been no comprehensive analysis of prey patch characteristics during lunge feeding events. We developed a null hypothesis that blue whale kinematics are independent of prey patch characteristics.
To test this hypothesis, we investigated the foraging performance of blue whales, the largest filter-feeding predator and their functional response to variability in their sole prey source, krill using a generalized additive mixed model framework. We used a combination of animal-borne movement sensors and hydroacoustic prey mapping to simultaneously quantify the three-dimensional foraging kinematics of blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) and the characteristics of targeted krill patches.
Our analyses rejected our null hypothesis, showing that blue whales performed more acrobatic manoeuvres, including 180° and 360° rolling lunges, when foraging on low-density krill patches. In contrast, whales targeting high-density krill patches involved less manoeuvring during lunges and higher lunge feeding rates.
These data demonstrate that blue whales exhibit a range of adaptive foraging strategies that maximize prey capture in different ecological contexts. Because first principles indicate that manoeuvres require more energy compared with straight trajectories, our data reveal a previously unrecognized level of complexity in predator–prey interactions that are not accounted for in optimal foraging and energetic efficiency models.


Abstract Changes in sediment supply and caliber during the last ∼ 130 ka have resulted in a complex architectural evolution of the Y channel system on the western Niger Delta slope. This evolution consists of four phases, each with documented or inferred changes in sediment supply. Phase 1 flows created wide (1,000 m), low-sinuosity (1.1) channel forms with lateral migration and little to no aggradation. During Phase 2, the Y channel system began to aggrade, creating more narrow (300 m) and sinuous (1.4) channel forms with many meander cutoffs. This system was abandoned at ∼ 130 ka, perhaps related to rapid relative sea-level rise during Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 5. Phase 3 flows were mud-rich and deposited sediment on the outer bends of the channel form, resulting in the narrowing (to 250 m), straightening (to a sinuosity of 1.22), and aggradation of the Y channel system. Renewed influx of sand into the Y channel system occurred with Phase 4 at ∼ 50 ka, during MIS 3 sea-level fall. The onset of Phase 4 is marked by the initiation of the Y′ tributary channel, which re-established sand deposition in the Y channel system. Flows entering the Y channel from the Y′ channel were underfit, resulting in inner levee deposition that is most prevalent on outer banks, acting to further straighten (1.21) and narrow (to 200 m wide) the Y channel. The inner levees accumulated quickly as the flows sought equilibrium, with deposition rates > 200 cm/ky. Marked by the presence of the last sand bed, abandonment occurred at ∼ 19 ka in the Y channel and ∼ 15 ka in the Y′ channel and is likely related to progressive abandonment due to shelf-edge delta avulsion and/or progressive sea level rise associated with Melt Water Pulse 1-A. The muddy, 5-meter-thick Holocene layer has thickness variations that mimic those seen in the sandy part of Phase 4, suggesting that dilute, muddy flows continue to affect the modern Y channel system. This unique dataset allows us to unequivocally link changes in submarine channel architecture to variations in sediment supply and caliber. Changes in the updip sediment routing system (i.e., the channel "plumbing") are shown to have profound implications for submarine channel architecture and reservoir connectivity.


This paper reports on a study that used DEST data from 14 Australian universities to determine the historical publishing performance of academics against a set of ACPHIS identified quality journals. The research identified that between 2000 and 2005— 140 articles were published in 39 of the 61 ACPHIS journals. A relatively low number of articles (N=12) were published in 7 of the 10 Level A journals whilst only 4 articles were published in 2 of the proposed premier profession group of journals. A total of 67 articles were published in 14 of the level B journals with the Australasian Journal of Information Systems (AJIS) publishing the greatest number of articles (N=25) in the group. The research identified that a relatively high number of overseas authors (39.1%) were affiliated with papers published in the Level A journals— suggesting that Australian IS academics may need to collaborate with overseas scholars in order to increase the likelihood of publishing in such journals.


Digital signal processing in modern hearing aids is typically performed in a subband or transform domain that introduces analysis-synthesis delays in the forward path. Long forward-path delays are not desirable because the processed sound combines with the unprocessed sound that arrives at the cochlea through the vent and changes the sound quality. Nonetheless, subband domain processing for digital hearing aids is the most popular choice for hearing aids because of the associated computational simplicity. In this paper, we present an alternative digital hearing aid structure with low-delay characteristics. The central idea in the paper is a low-delay spectral gain shaping method (SGSM) that employs parallel parametric equalization (EQ) filters. The low-delay SGSM provides frequency-dependent amplification for hearing loss compensation with low forward path delays and performs dynamic signal processing such as noise suppression and dynamic range compression. Parameters of the parametric EQ filters and associated gain values are selected using a least-squares approach to obtain the desired spectral response. The low-delay structure also employs an off-the-forward-path, frequency domain adaptive filter to perform acoustic feedback cancellation. Extensive MATLAB simulations and subjective evaluations of the results indicate that the method of this paper is competent with a state-of-the-art digital hearing aid system, but exhibits much smaller forward-path delays.


Background: Until recently, pharmacies were not permitted to dispense any emergency contraceptives to women to prevent pregnancy. No legal statutes existed under which pharmacists with religious, moral or ethical objections could refuse to fill a prescription for contraceptives, nor were there direct guidelines describing the pharmacist's professional obligations.
Objectives: The purpose of this study is to explore the frequency of cases in which pharmacists have refused, due to their personal beliefs, to provide counsel regarding contraceptives or have refused to refer to a patient to a different pharmacist or healthcare provider. This study will compare and contrast the differences between independent pharmacies and chain pharmacies (i.e. time spent, location, most common recommended contraception). Finally, this study will compare the results evident between male pharmacists and female pharmacists.
Method: Quantitative method employed uses two interview questions directed to pharmacists:
(1) "I am moving in with my fiancee/boyfriend next month and I have never used contraceptives. What are my options?"
(2) "If I use a condom and it breaks, do I have any choices to prevent pregnancy after the fact?"
The survey was conducted in two locations, the greater Philadelphia area and Hershey, PA. The survey was conducted through face-to-face interactions with pharmacists, either employed at independent pharmacy or at a chain pharmacy. Data collected from each pharmacist included number of approximate age/gender; minutes spent in each consultation with a patient; the kind of privacy provided during the consultation; and the referrals given, if any.
Results: Fifty (50) pharmacists were interviewed. No pharmacist indicated that counseling would be denied, although one (1) pharmacist refused to counsel on Plan B and four (4) pharmacists referred the interviewer to a doctor immediately, indicating that all medications require a prescription. Two (2) pharmacists spent more than 10 minutes providing the best possible counseling.

Type: Student Project


Singapore is currently one of the wealthiest countries in the world in terms of GDP per capita. According to Forbes magazine, the combined net worth of the top forty wealthiest Singaporeans in 2010 was S$60 billion1, up from S$51 billion in 2009, and common sources of wealth for these individuals included Financial Services (OCBC, OUB) and Real Estate (Far East Organization, Pontiac Land). As such, there is no doubt that there are a substantial number of wealthy Singaporeans who reside in Singapore. However, the combined amount of assets that these Singaporeans hold pales in comparison to the over S$1.3 trillion2 worth of assets currently managed by Singapore"s asset management industry a statistic that bears witness to Singapore"s growing popularity as a wealth management hub among wealthy individuals from around the Asia Pacific region. Given this, this paper notes a distinction between the wealth that is flowing into the country through wealthy individuals, which includes both Singaporeans and non-Singaporeans, and the wealth generated by Singaporeans. This paper seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the former group, which mostly includes Asian investors, through a small-scale research study.


"This book is easy to read and has relevant content for student midwives, with inclusion of reflective activities which are clear and appropriate. I particularly like the vignette's which are relevant and explore the challenges that midwives face. The script-like format of these adds a further layer to the narratives, and the inclusion of non-verbal communication as well is excellent. This will be an essential text for all student midwives." (Mary Beadle, Midwifery Lecturer, Faculty of Health and Social Care, University of Hull, UK). "Communication Skills for Midwives is a unique book that focuses not only on fundamental communication issues, but goes much further by including the many difficult and tricky issues experienced within contemporary midwifery practice. This much needed text provides detailed and comprehensive information which is reinforced by illustrations, vignettes and activities that engage the reader from the beginning. This is an excellent resource for students, practitioners and educators." (Nicky Clark, Lead Midwife for Education, University of Hull, UK) "This book covers many poignant examples of difficult and challenging communication that midwives face in everyday practice...It covers both every day aspects of care such as facilitating choice and less common experiences like responding to domestic violence...This book is unique and would be good bedtime reading for any midwife!" (Tandy Deane-Grey, Senior Midwifery Lecturer, University of Hertfordshire, UK). "This comprehensive and reader friendly text ...utilises a variety of strategies to aid understanding and application to practice. Each chapter has clear aims to address a challenging situation that readers will readily identify with and provides an excellent mix of vignettes, reflective activities, text and diagrams to support the development of knowledge and skills..." (Heather Passmore, Senior Lecturer, UCS, UK). This is the first book on communication skills to explore the more challenging contexts and circumstances that midwives encounter in practice. As these occur infrequently and often unexpectedly in the daily practice of many midwives, they may find it difficult to communicate effectively to alleviate the situation. Knowing what to say and how to say it is part of this dilemma. The book uses case vignettes, reflective questions, illustrations, tools and techniques to provide the evidence base needed to cope effectively in a range of situations by offering support to enhance your communication skills. "Communication Skills for Midwives" explores challenges relating to: negotiating with others within inter-professional and inter-agency teams; working with minority groups; breaking significant news when labour threatens the life of a baby; telling parents that their baby has an abnormality; coping with loss and bereavement; and addressing issues of domestic abuse. Importantly the book provides information on how thoughts and feelings may be expressed both through body language and in words. Taking a practical and problem solving approach, the book will help you to enhance your learning and improve interaction with your colleagues, the women you care for and their families.


Thrombolysis remains the predominant reperfusion strategy for ST segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) in the United Kingdom. Although primary angioplasty may offer superior outcomes, the logistics of delivering this therapy in the UK have not been investigated. This thesis describes the development of a pilot primary angioplasty service in North East London. Outcomes are compared with the thrombolytic strategy, and platelet activation is explored as a possible biological mechanism determining reperfusion. The impact of the thrombolytic strategy on revascularisation following STEMI in North East London was first investigated. Thrombolytic delivery was effective, but necessitated frequent early revascularisation, leading to prolonged hospital stay. A primary angioplasty service was developed at the cardiac centre, and expanded to serve six network hospitals. Within the limitations of a daytime pilot, the service improved clinical outcomes, and was associated with a substantial reduction in hospital stay. Two admission strategies were compared direct access to the cardiac centre following pre-hospital diagnosis by ambulance crews, and transfer of patients presenting to network emergency (A&E) departments after upstream administration of abciximab and clopidogrel. Direct access significantly reduced reperfusion times. Upstream anti-platelet therapy improved angiographic reperfusion prior to primary angioplasty, possibly compensating for inter hospital transfer delays. A subgroup of STEMI patients underwent platelet activation studies. Lower baseline platelet monocyte aggregate (PMA) levels predicted improved angiographic reperfusion following primary angioplasty, supporting the concept that PMAs may reflect plaque rupture severity, and may promote microvascular


Androgen signaling facilitates the formation of an oncogenic fusion gene in prostate cancer cells. Gene fusions play a critical role in cancer progression. The mechanisms underlying their genesis and cell type specificity are not well understood. About 50% of human prostate cancers display a gene fusion involving the 5′ untranslated region of TMPRSS2, an androgen-regulated gene, and the protein-coding sequences of ERG, which encodes an erythroblast transformation–specific (ETS) transcription factor. By studying human prostate cancer cells with fluorescence in situ hybridization, we show that androgen signaling induces proximity of the TMPRSS2 and ERG genomic loci, both located on chromosome 21q22.2. Subsequent exposure of the cells to gamma irradiation, which causes DNA double-strand breaks, facilitates the formation of the TMPRSS2-ERG gene fusion. These results may help explain why TMPRSS2-ERG fusions are restricted to the prostate, which is dependent on androgen signaling.


This paper is concerned with the reliability analysis of building structures subjected to multiple natural hazards (seismic and wind in this case) within the framework of contemporary probabilistic risk assessment procedures. Seismic and wind hazards are considered for the vulnerability analysis of conventional structures, particularly low-rise shear-wall buildings. Studies of a similar nature have been carried out by H. Hwang et al. for five-story shear-wall buildings. The present paper extends the study to include shear-wall buildings with a maximum height up to 30 stories and at the same time performs a sensitivity analysis. The results are shown primarily in terms of diagrams where the limit state probabilities are associated with seismic design, wind design and design under combined loading conditions.


The fifth revision of the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki, published in October 2000, sets out international standards for conducting medical research with human subjects.1 Revisions of this or any other research ethics code are unlikely to make research more ethical throughout the world, however, without some means of strengthening capacity to promote and implement such standards.

Strengthened capacity in research ethics is needed in both developed and developing countries, though the need is particularly acute in developing countries. A recent Washington Post investigation into research in developing countries revealed "a booming, poorly regulated testing system that is dominated by private interests and that far too often betrays its promises to patients and consumers."2

Research in developing countries was a flash point of the fifth revision of Helsinki because the declaration retains the requirement that new treatments should be tested against the "best current" treatment. Critics argue that this standard does not allow the testing of low cost, sustainable treatments, such as aspirin for coronary artery disease, which might yield substantial health improvements in developing countries but …


In this paper we present a method to establish real-time connections with guaranteed quality of service (QOS), based on a per-session probabilistic burstiness curve (PBC). Under two distinctive service disciplines, role proportional processor sharing and fixed rate processor sharing, we derive useful probabilistic bounds on per-session end-to-end loss which is caused by either buffer overflow in the path or excessive delay to the destination. One remarkable feature of the bounding solutions is that they are solely determined by the PBC of each session itself, independent of the network environment and other connections. To improve network resource utilization, our method is extended to allow statistical sharing of buffer resources. The admission control scheme presented in this paper has a great flexibility in connection management since bandwidth and buffer allocations can be adaptively adjusted among incoming and existing sessions according to present network resource availability. We also present a novel method to compute the PBC of multimedia traffic based on the measurement of two important statistics (rate histogram and power spectrum). Our study of MPEG/JPEG video sequences reveals the fundamental interrelationship among the PBC, the traffic statistics, and the QOS guarantee, and also provides many engineering aspects of the PBC approach to real-time multimedia services in ATM networks.


Human migration has been an important activity in human societies since antiquity. Since 1890, approximately three percent of the world's population has lived outside of their country of origin. As globalization intensifies in the modern era, human migration persists even as governments seek to more stringently regulate flows. Understanding this phenomenon, its causes, processes and impacts often starts from measuring and visualizing its spatiotemporal patterns. This study builds a generic online platform for users to interactively visualize human migration through space and time. This entails quickly ingesting human migration data in plain text or tabular format; matching the records with pre-established geographic features such as administrative polygons; symbolizing the migration flow by circular arcs of varying color and weight based on the flow attributes; connecting the centroids of the origin and destination polygons; and allowing the user to select either an origin or a destination feature to display all flows in or out of that feature through time. The method was first developed using ArcGIS Server for world-wide cross-country migration, and later applied to visualizing domestic migration patterns within China between provinces, and between states in the United States, all through multiple years. The technical challenges of this study include simplifying the shapes of features to enhance user interaction, rendering performance and application scalability; enabling the temporal renderers to provide time-based rendering of features and the flow among them; and developing a responsive web design (RWD) application to provide an optimal viewing experience. The platform is available online for the public to use, and the methodology is easily adoptable to visualizing any flow, not only human migration but also the flow of goods, capital, disease, ideology, etc., between multiple origins and destinations across space and time.


Lyme borreliosis is the most common arthropod-borne disease in the United States and Europe, and cases are reported from nearly all regions of the Northern Hemisphere. As such, it is a particularly useful example of a zoonotic disease that should be considered not only from the perspective of the human patient but also from that of the vectors and reservoir hosts. This approach is the one adopted by the editors of Lyme Borreliosis–Biology, Epidemiology and Control. The first five chapters constitute a general review covering characteristics of the disease, molecular biology of the etiologic agent Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato, and vector and host biology. Some of these chapters are not reviews in the truest sense. For example, chapter 2 is a primer on ecologic research; it provides important definitions and categorization of hosts and vectors. Likewise, a substantial portion of the chapter on B. burgdorferi in the vertebrate host is devoted to the role of complement in host specificity. Still, these chapters provide a good general description of the topics covered.

Chapters 6–9 provide more specific detail on the unique aspects of ecology in Europe, Russia, Japan, and North America, respectively. Although these chapters do not follow the same format, all cover essentially identical topics, including description of the diversity of spirochete species, vectors, hosts, landscape ecology, and risk factors. The chapter on the ecology of B. burgdorferi in Russia is particularly worthwhile because many of the studies described have only been published to date in Russian-language journals. This information is now available to a broader audience.

The final three chapters deal with epidemiology, prevention, and control. The chapter by Dennis and Hayes on epidemiology is outstanding and provides an excellent consideration of several controversial topics, including seronegative Lyme disease, persistent infection, chronic refractory Lyme disease, and problems of both underdiagnosis (in Lyme disease–endemic areas) and overdiagnosis. Hayes and Schriefer provide a comprehensive description of vaccine development. Unfortunately, the only commercially available vaccine, Lymerix, has been discontinued by the manufacturer, and little progress is reported on development of alternative vaccines. This leaves personal protective measures (e.g., avoiding tick-infested terrain, using appropriate clothing, checking for attached ticks), single-dose antimicrobial prophylaxis following selected tick bites, and tick control as the primary means of prevention. The last topic is covered in the book's final chapter.

The reader interested in details of the clinical aspects of Lyme disease will not find them here. Rather, the book focuses on vector and host wildlife ecology and epidemiology, as the title implies. There is an obvious effort to cover Lyme borreliosis from a global perspective rather than from a distinctly American one. This approach is one of the book's strengths, although it does lead to some bias in the selected references in certain chapters. A comprehensive index is provided, and topics covered in multiple chapters are cross-referenced well, providing an integrated feel. The book will be quite useful for ecologists, epidemiologists, and public health workers, especially those interested in vector-borne infectious diseases. The book will be less informative for those interested in detailed descriptions of the molecular pathogenesis and clinical aspects of Lyme borreliosis.


We develop a special-purpose hypervisor called TrustVisor that facilitates the execution of security-sensitive code in isolation from commodity OSes and applications. TrustVisor provides code and execution integrity as well as data secrecy and integrity for protected code, even in the presence of a compromised OS. These strong properties can be attested to a remote verifier. TrustVisor only adds 5306 lines to the TCB (over half of which is for cryptographic operations). TrustVisor imposes less than 7% overhead in the common case. This overhead is largely the result of today's x86 hardware virtualization support.


In this paper, we explore the basic premise that IT service quality follows the structure of business/IT interactions and thus highlight an important organizational design issue in IT governance. Motivated by concepts used in social network theory we build a model that proposes a causal relationship between structural characteristics of social business/IT networks and IT service quality. The model is empirically evaluated and explained using case studies based on five interviews in three firms. Thus we extend the general assumption that the business/IT partnership is crucial for IT service quality by identifying structural characteristics of the network among and between business and IT staff which enhance this partnership. Important results are that strong and bridging ties at the business/IT interface are crucial for IT service quality and that a good integration of interface actors within their own unit supports IT service quality.


Detecting large reshare cascades is an important problem in online social networks. There are a variety of attempts to model this problem, from using time series analysis methods to stochastic processes. Most of these approaches heavily depend on the underlying network features and use network information to detect the virality of cascades. In most cases, however, getting such detailed network information can be hard or even impossible. In contrast, in this paper, we propose SANSNET, a network-agnostic approach instead. Our method can be used to answer two important questions: (1) Will a cascade go viral? and (2) How early can we predict it? We use techniques from survival analysis to build a supervised classifier in the space of survival probabilities and show that the optimal decision boundary is a survival function. A notable feature of our approach is that it does not use any network-based features for the prediction tasks, making it very cheap to implement. Finally, we evaluate our approach on several real-life data sets, including popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter, on metrics like recall, F-measure and breakout coverage. We find that network agnostic SANSNET classifier outperforms several non-trivial competitors and baselines which utilize network information.


This thesis explores the Islamic State, known as ISIS, with the aim of determining whether ISIS ascribes to the existing waves and frameworks of terrorism, or whether its pursuit of statehood and governance constitutes an evolving or uniquely new wave. The work of David Rapoport is consulted to examine the established first four waves of terrorism and their relation to ISIS. The fifth wave framework proposed by Jeffrey Kaplan is also explored in terms of its application to ISIS. The Islamic State's ideology of jihad, or jihadology, as well as its campaign of nation-building, testify to the evolution and transformation of this organisation from pre-existing theories and waves of terrorism to justifying a new wave on its own.


Background Especially in childhood, motor and cognitive functions are thought to address similar brain areas and thus seem to be interrelated. Further a close link between brain function and the skeletal muscle system as well as the cardiovascular system is accepted. A correlation between the concentration and the coordinative performance is also being assumed in adolescents. Methods The KOMPASS project (complex general school examination) investigates the motor performance (DMT 6–18), the movement behaviour (parents questionnaire) and the health status (school entrance examination) of first graders in the city of Chemnitz. 2.774 children (6.8±0.4 years, BMI 15.5 ±1.8 kg/m2) were tested and 2.035 parents were interviewed since 2010. The standard school entrance examination was conducted in 3.739 children. 1.901 parents gave their consent for merging the various data records. Results The motor performance of the first graders in the test tasks: 20 meter sprint (Z-value 99.1±9.1), side jumps (Z-value 103.5±11.3), broad jump (Z-value 101.8±10.7), sit-ups (Z-value 99.4±8.9), stand and reach (Z-value 102.2±10.2) and 6 minute run (Z-value 101.6±10.3) was average. They achieved performances above average in the tasks balancing backwards (Z-value 106.2±11.6) and press-ups (Z-value 108.4±11.6). Within the school entrance examination speech disorders were diagnosed in 40.8%, deficits of visual perception in 26.0% and behavioural disorders in 16.7% of all children. Some kind of supportive interventions were received by 15.9% of all first graders. Those mental-linguistic findings showed a highly significant negative relationship with the motor performance (R=0.257; p<0.01) in the multiple regression analysis. A highly significant negative correlation was also found between the motor performance and the medical findings: decrease of visual acuity (24.0%), impairment of seeing stereo (3.5%) and deficits in fine or gross motor skills (35.7% and 23.8%)(R=0.380; p<0.01). Discussion/Conclusions Various studies suggest a close relationship between brain function and physical performance. The results of the KOMPASS project confirm this nexus of cognitive function and physical performance in children without being able to prove a causal relationship.


The archival of content like publications or web pages is just the first step toward "full" content preservation. It also has to be guaranteed that content can be found and interpreted in the long run. The correspondence between the terminology used for querying and the one used in content objects to be retrieved, is a crucial prerequisite for effective retrieval technology. However, as terminology evolves over time, a growing gap opens between older documents in (longterm) archives and the active language used for querying such archives. Thus, technologies for detecting and systematically handling terminology evolution are required to ensure "semantic" accessibility of archived content in the long run. The core of our approach is to derive mappings between terminologies originating from different times by the fusion of term concept graphs. To verify the suitability of our approach, we present first results of experiments conducted on The Times archive that covers 200 years of documents. In addition, we discuss how our approach can be applied to web archives and the challenges that arise from this.


In a multitude of real-world situations, resources must be allocated based on incomplete and noisy information. However, in many cases, incomplete and noisy information render traditional resource allocation techniques ineffective. The decentralized Learning Automata Knapsack Game (LAKG) was recently proposed for solving one such class of problems, namely the class of Stochastic Nonlinear Fractional Knapsack Problems. Empirically, the LAKG was shown to yield a superior performance when compared to methods which are based on traditional parameter estimation schemes. This paper presents a completely new online Learning Automata (LA) system, namely the Hierarchy of Twofold Resource Allocation Automata (H-TRAA). In terms of contributions, we first of all, note that the primitive component of the H-TRAA is a Twofold Resource Allocation Automaton (TRAA) which possesses novelty in the field of LA. Second, the paper contains a formal analysis of the TRAA, including a rigorous proof for its convergence. Third, the paper proves the convergence of the H-TRAA itself. Finally, we demonstrate empirically that the H-TRAA provides orders of magnitude faster convergence compared to the LAKG for simulated data pertaining to two-material unit-value functions. Indeed, in contrast to the LAKG, the H-TRAA scales sublinearly. Consequently, we believe that the H-TRAA opens avenues for handling demanding real-world applications such as the allocation of sampling resources in large-scale Web accessibility assessment problems. We are currently working on applying the H-TRAA solution to the web-polling and sample-size detection problems applicable to the world wide web.


Objective: Physical activity is beneficial for many psychological factors. Recent longitudinal studies have shown positive relationships among physical activity, academic attainment, executive functions, and behavior in typically developing (TD) young people. Attention-Deficit-Hyperactivity-Disorder (ADHD) and readingdifficulties (RD) are commonly reported in children, with high rates of co-occurrence. Both of these difficulties are associated with deficits in a range of factors, especially executive functions. Emerging research suggests that programmes of physical activity can lead to positive improvements, however a paucity of interventions have been reported for children with such difficulties. The present study explores whether a pilot physical activity programme improves cognition and behaviour in children with ADHD, RD, and co-occurring ADHD-and-RD. Method: 68 children, aged 9-12, took part in the present study: 15 with ADHD; 15 with RD; 15 with co-occurring ADHD + RD; and 23 TD. Participants completed tasks assessing: IQ; reading; working memory; inhibition; shifting and planning. Levels of physical activity were recorded using accelerometers. Parents and teachers also completed behavioural questionnaires. Half of the participants took part in a 12 week physical activity programme. Following this, all participants completed the same measures as at baseline. A delayed control design was employed whereby the control group then took part in the intervention before completing the assessments again. Results: Levels of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) were similar for all groups at baseline with the ADHD group averaging 62 mins/day, the RD group 61 mins/day, the co-occurring group 66 mins/day and the TD group 64 mins/day. Baseline task performance was controlled for using Analysis of Covariance. Taking part in the intervention led to improvements in working memory scores for those with ADHD and co-occurring difficulties (p<0.05, pη2=0.33). A trend for improvement was also seen for the RD and TD group compared to those who did not take part in the intervention. Conclusions: A physical activity programme resulted in selective score improvements for those with ADHD and co-occurring difficulties. Further analysis is planned following the completion of the intervention by the control group in December 2014. These findings have implications for treatment for ADHD and cooccurring difficulties.


Adverse uterine environments experienced during fetal development can alter the projected growth pattern of various organs and systems of the body, leaving the offspring at an increased risk of metabolic disease. The thrifty phenotype hypothesis has been demonstrated as an alteration to the growth trajectory to improve the survival and reproductive fitness of the individual. However, when the intrauterine environment does not match the extrauterine environment problems can arise. With the increase in metabolic diseases in both Westernized and developing countries, it is becoming apparent that there is an environmental disconnect with the extrauterine environment. Therefore, the focus of this paper will be to explore the effects of maternal malnutrition on the offspring's susceptibility to metabolic disorders such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes with emphasis on programming of the neuroendocrine-immune system.


We demonstrate a novel mode locked ultrafast laser, based on an integrated high-Q microring resonator. Our scheme exhibits stable operation of two slightly shifted spectral optical comb replicas. It generates a highly monochromatic radiofrequency modulation of 65.8MHz with a linewidth < 10kHz, on a 200GHz output pulse train.


Tauopathies, including Alzheimer's disease, are a group of neurodegenerative disorders characterized by pathological aggregation of the microtubule binding protein tau. Recent studies suggest that toxic tau oligomers, which are soluble and distinct from insoluble beta-sheet fibrils, are central players in neuronal cell death. To exploit this new therapeutic window, we engineered two first-in-class FRET based biosensors that monitor tau conformations in cells. Because this new technology platform operates in cells, it enables high-throughput screening of small molecules that target tau oligomers while avoiding the uncertainties of idiosyncratic in vitro preparations of tau assemblies from purified protein. We found a small molecule, MK-886, that disrupts tau oligomers and reduces tau-induced cell cytotoxicity with nanomolar potency. Using SPR and an advanced single-molecule FRET technique, we show that MK-886 directly binds to tau and specifically perturbs the folding of tau monomer in the proline-rich and microtubule-binding regions. Furthermore, we show that MK-886 accelerates the tau aggregation lag phase using a thioflavin-T assay, implying that the compound stabilizes a non-toxic, on-pathway oligomer. The technology described here should generalize to the study and targeting of conformational ensembles within the aggregation pathways of most intrinsically disordered proteins.


In the present study, experiments were conducted on the suitability of tomato, carrot and mixed tomato+carrot juice for probiotication by Lactobacillus plantarum, Lactobacillus fermentum, Lactobacillus casei and Lysinibacillus sphaericus individually and in combination with a yeast (Saccharomyces boulardii). The combination of Lys. sphaericus and S. boulardii showed good results. Further optimization was carried out using a central composite design (CCD). The autoclaved juices were inoculated with probiotic cultures both alone or in combination with the yeast culture and incubated at 37°C for 72 h. After 24 h of fermentation, the pH levels had decreased from 6.1 to 4.0. Titratable acidity also increased from 0.12% to 0.36%, while the viable cell counts of probiotic bacteria and yeast gradually increased from 6.5 to 7.0 CFU/ml and from 5.4 to 7.9 CFU/ml, respectively. Subsequently, following further fermentation, viable cell counts decreased due to a decrease in pH and an increase in acidity as well as a lack of nutrients in the medium. The antimicrobial activity of mixed juice was found to have a maximum zone 1Department of Biochemistry, S.V. University, Tirupati 517 502, India 2Department of Biotechnology, S.V. University, Tirupati 517 502, India of inhibition of 11.8 mm and 9.8 mm against Pseudomonas aeruginosa MTCC 741 and Bacillus subtilis MTCC 2394, respectively. Probioticated tomato and carrot juices showed good sensory attributes.


Automatic forecasts of large numbers of univariate time series are often needed in business and other contexts. We describe two automatic forecasting algorithms that have been implemented in the forecast package for R. The first is based on innovations state space models that underly exponential smoothing methods. The second is a step-wise algorithm for forecasting with ARIMA models. The algorithms are applicable to both seasonal and non-seasonal data, and are compared and illustrated using four real time series. We also briefly describe some of the other functionality available in the forecast package.


ABSTRACT A first principles constant pressure approach is carried out to probe the high-pressure behaviour of the rocksalt (RS) structured zirconium nitride (ZrN). The existence of first order reconstructive phase transition from the RS crystal to a CsCl-type crystal is, for the first time, established throughout the simulations. Upon decompression, the CsCl type phase converts back to the original RS structure by following the same transformation mechanism, suggesting a reversible phase transformation in ZrN. The RS-to-CsCl phase change is additionally considered through the thermodynamic theorem and projected to take place at around 225 GPa in experiments. The structural parameters and mechanical properties computed are found to be comparable with some of the previous findings. Additionally, we investigate the response of ZrN to uniaxial compression and tension stresses. The uniaxial stresses initially lead to a tetragonal modification of the simulation box having an I4/mmm symmetry and subsequently structural failure that is expected to occurs at about −10 and 15 GPa in experiments.


In this article we develop a theory to explain how individual compassion becomes socially organized and how the organizing process gains collective competence in its ability to alleviate suffering. The theory is built from an in-depth case study of one organization's response to members who lost their belongings in a fire. The compassion organizing response was highly competent as reflected in the scale, scope, speed, and customization of resources extended in response to the members' suffering. The model theorizes five mechanisms as central to the competence in compassion organizing: 1) contextual enabling of attention, 2) contextual enabling of emotion, and 3) contextual enabling of legitimacy and trust, 4) agents improvising structures, and 5) symbolic enrichment. Together, these mechanisms elaborate a view of how the social architecture, agency, and emergent features of an organizing process create the extraction, generation and coordination of a variety of resources that contribute to compassion organizing competence. We discuss how our model adds to general theories of collective organizing competence.


Parkinson's disease is associated with altered neural activity in the motor cortex. Chronic high-frequency deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) is effective in suppressing parkinsonian motor symptoms and modulates cortical activity. However, the anatomical pathways responsible for STN DBS-mediated cortical modulation remain unclear. Cortical evoked potentials (cEP) generated by STN DBS reflect the response of cortex to subcortical stimulation, and the goal of this study was to determine the neural origin of STN DBS-generated cEP using a two-step approach. First, we recorded cEP over ipsilateral primary motor cortex during different frequencies of STN DBS in awake healthy and unilateral 6-OHDA-lesioned parkinsonian rats. Second, we used a detailed, biophysically based model of the thalamocortical network to deconstruct the neural origin of the recorded cEP. The in vivo cEP included short (R1)-, intermediate (R2)-, and long-latency (R3) responses. Model-based cortical responses to simulated STN DBS matched remarkably well the in vivo responses. The short-latency response was generated by antidromic activation of layer 5 pyramidal neurons, whereas recurrent activation of layer 5 pyramidal neurons via excitatory axon collaterals reproduced the intermediate-latency response. The long-latency response was generated by polysynaptic activation of layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons via the cortico-thalamic-cortical pathway. Antidromic activation of the hyperdirect pathway and subsequent intracortical and cortico-thalamo-cortical synaptic interactions were sufficient to generate cortical potential evoked by STN DBS, and orthodromic activation through basal ganglia-thalamus-cortex pathways was not required. These results demonstrate the utility of cEP to determine the neural elements activated by STN DBS that might modulate cortical activity and contribute to the suppression of parkinsonian symptoms. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Subthalamic nucleus (STN) deep brain stimulation (DBS) is increasingly used to treat Parkinson's disease (PD). Cortical potentials evoked by STN DBS in patients with PD exhibit consistent short-latency (1-3 ms), intermediate-latency (5-15 ms), and long-latency (18-25 ms) responses. The short-latency response occurs as a result of antidromic activation of the hyperdirect pathway comprising corticosubthalamic axons. However, the neural origins of intermediate- and long-latency responses remain elusive, and the dominant view is that these are produced through the orthodromic pathway (basal ganglia-thalamus-cortex). By combining in vivo electrophysiology with computational modeling, we demonstrate that antidromic activation of the cortico-thalamic-cortical pathway is sufficient to generate the intermediate- and long-latency cortical responses to STN DBS.


This paper provides new evidence on how the presence of immigrant peers in the classroom affects native student achievement. The analysis is based on longitudinal administrative data on two cohorts of vocational training students in Italy's largest region. Vocational training institutions provide the ideal setting for studying these effects because they attract not only disproportionately high shares of immigrants but also the lowest ability native students. We adopt a value added model, and exploit within-school variation both within and across cohorts for identification. Our results show small negative average effects on maths test scores that are larger for low ability native students, strongly non-linear and only observable in classes with a high (top 20%) immigrant concentration. These outcomes are driven by classes with a high average linguistic distance between immigrants and natives, with no apparent role played by ethnic diversity.


Modern computer-aided vision motion systems provide a computerized and fully integrated
tool kit for biomechanical measurement and analysis. These tools are useful for evaluation
of problems, prescription of treatment and evaluation of such treatment. Many of these
systems use reflective markers placed on key anatomical sites of the body to detect accurate
three-dimensional spatial positions of the limbs being measured. While these systems ease
automated data gathering, there are issues, such as the correspondence between an observed
target and an established track, that require significant human intervention when markers
disappear from view for short periods of time. When the system loses sight of a marker, it
has no way of knowing where that marker will reappear and the track becomes broken or
disjointed. Once the missing marker comes back into view, many current systems do not
easily establish an association between the marker and its original track. -- In this thesis a solution to the problem of making correspondence between markers and their
track histories was designed and tested. This solution also provided the capability of
predicting the path of markers when they were out of view of the cameras. To test the
algorithm three different repetitive motions were tracked using the Flock of Birds
measurement system. -- The solution used a three-state Kalman filter to predict marker locations. The Kalman filter was coupled with constraints to determine matches between tracks and their corresponding
marker positions. These constraints modelled a Region of Acceptance (ROA), distance from
the center of the ROA to the last known position of a marker, and velocity matching. -- The Kalman predictor algorithm, because it is linear in nature, was able to predict the motion
accurately while there was no change in acceleration. However, the Kalman predictor,
coupled with the constraints, was useful in predicting and matching markers over a longer
(100-500% longer) missing interval than the test case. -- To improve the prediction and matching capabilities of the Kalman predictor algorithm a
physical motion modelm, that considers angular rotations at joints, was developed. The model
is named the angular component model. This algorithm used an estimated or pre-measured
motion model to check the location of the Kalman predictor. If the prediction did not match
the model (within certain error bounds), it was corrected by the model algorithm using a
calculation process that estimated the location of the marker based on its model. The
addition of this algorithm to the Kalman prediction algorithm improved the prediction and
matching capabilities. The matching worked well over the length of a 2 second gap (the
longest used in testing) and the prediction of the marker path was excellent. The use of this
model with the available tracking algorithms used in gait analysis will help in preventing the
problem of disappearing markers in computer vision systems.


Data breaches are on the rise as consumers continue to exchange personally identifiable information for goods and services in sectors from retail to healthcare. In the aftermath of a data breach, it has been difficult for victims of the breach to establish Article III standing to sue in federal courts. The primary hurdle for those seeking a remedy for the theft of their data has been showing that they have suffered an injury-in-fact. Plaintiffs typically assert an injury based on the increased risk of identity theft following a breach. However, courts have divided on whether such an injury satisfies the standing test. For consumers who feel deeply that they have been harmed, a court's aversion to increased-risk standing is a devastating barrier to redress. This Note argues that courts should consider a different point of injury. Rather than looking at the risk of future identity theft, courts should analyze standing based on the injury that consumers suffer the moment their data is stolen. Looking to the Supreme Court's decisions in Clapper v. Amnesty International USA and Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, this Note argues that the inherent injury of the data breach is an actual, concrete, and particularized injury that is sufficient to confer standing. Ultimately, shifting the standing inquiry to the inherent injury of the data breach will ensure that meritorious claims are heard in court. The shift is easily implemented—it comports with existing precedent, requires no new action by Congress or the Supreme Court, and is harmonious with the principles that underlie the doctrine of standing. Most importantly, the shift will ensure access to justice for a growing body of consumers who have been harmed by a data breach.


Abstract Fifty patients with myocardial infarction were recruited from a hospital based Cardiac Education and Assessment Program (CEAP) in Sydney, Australia. The Exercise Motivation Inventory-2 (EMI-2) and the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS) were administered prior to commencement in the program and re-administered by telephone interview at 5-month followup. Four exercise adherence measures were completed: attendance, exercise stress test, self-report ratings and a 7-day activity recall interview. There was a 46% adherence rate for MI patients during the hospital based CEAP. Of those individuals who completed CEAP, 91% obtained functional improvement on the exercise stress test. For the 38 patients who were followed-up by telephone interview at 5 months, 71% were exercising according to CEAP prescription. Higher levels of anxiety were associated with lower levels of self-reported exercise adherence. The 3 strongest motivations for exercise in this group of MI patients were all health related; wanting to be free from illness, maintaining good health and recovering from the effects of coronary heart disease. The discussion highlights the implications of these findings for cardiac rehabilitation programs and the need for empirically driven guidelines for measuring exercise adherence. F ifty patients with myocardial infarction were recruited from a hospital based Cardiac Education and Assessment Program (CEAP) in Sydney, Australia. The Exercise Motivation Inventory-2 (EMI-2) and the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS) were administered prior to commencement in the program and re-administered by telephone interview at 5-month follow-up. Four exercise adherence measures were completed: attendance, exercise stress test, self-report ratings and a 7-day activity recall interview. There was a 46% adherence rate for MI patients during the hospital based CEAP. Of those individuals who completed CEAP, 91% obtained functional improvement on the exercise stress test. For the 38 patients who were followed-up by telephone interview at 5 months, 71% were exercising according to CEAP prescription. Higher levels of anxiety were associated with lower levels of self-reported exercise adherence. The 3 strongest motivations for exercise in this group of MI patients were all health related; wanting to be free from illness, maintaining good health and recovering from the effects of coronary heart disease. The discussion highlights the implications of these findings for cardiac rehabilitation programs and the need for empirically driven guidelines for measuring exercise adherence.


With the genomes of Otzi, the 5300-year-old iceman, and even Neandertals pouring out of DNA sequencing labs lately, you might think that it9s now a piece of cake to glean the entire genetic code of an ancient human. But it turns out that those studies used exceptionally pure and well-preserved samples of DNA. More often, human remains found by scientists have long sat in soil warm enough to harbor bacteria, whose genes swamp out the human DNA and make it too costly to analyze. A clever new method for purifying ancient human DNA samples, reported last week at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, could change that, however.


We demonstrate a novel deep neural network capable of reconstructing human full body pose in real-time from 6 Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) worn on the user's body. In doing so, we address several difficult challenges. First, the problem is severely under-constrained as multiple pose parameters produce the same IMU orientations. Second, capturing IMU data in conjunction with ground-truth poses is expensive and difficult to do in many target application scenarios (e.g., outdoors). Third, modeling temporal dependencies through non-linear optimization has proven effective in prior work but makes real-time prediction infeasible. To address this important limitation, we learn the temporal pose priors using deep learning. To learn from sufficient data, we synthesize IMU data from motion capture datasets. A bi-directional RNN architecture leverages past and future information that is available at training time. At test time, we deploy the network in a sliding window fashion, retaining real time capabilities. To evaluate our method, we recorded DIP-IMU, a dataset consisting of 10 subjects wearing 17 IMUs for validation in 64 sequences with 330 000 time instants; this constitutes the largest IMU dataset publicly available. We quantitatively evaluate our approach on multiple datasets and show results from a real-time implementation. DIP-IMU and the code are available for research purposes.1


OBJECTIVE
To use triangulation methodology to better understand clinically important differences (CIDs) in the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of patients with heart disease.

DATA SOURCES/STUDY SETTING
We used three information sources: a nine-member expert panel, 656 primary care outpatients with coronary artery disease (CAD) and/or congestive heart failure (CHF), and the 46 primary care physicians (PCPs) treating these outpatients. From them, we derived CIDs for the Modified Chronic Heart Failure Questionnaire (CHQ) and the Medical Outcomes Study Short Form 36-Item Health Status Survey, Version 2 (SF-36).

STUDY DESIGN
The expert physician panel employed Delphi and consensus methods to obtain CIDs. The outpatients received bimonthly HRQoL interviews for 1 year that included the CHQ and SF-36, as well as retrospective assessments of HRQoL changes. Their PCPs assessed changes in the patient's condition at follow-up clinic visits that were linked to HRQoL assessments to determine change over time.

DATA COLLECTION/EXTRACTION METHODS
Patient- and PCP-assessed changes were categorized as trivial (no change), small, moderate, or large improvements or declines. Moderate or large changes in HRQoL reflect the added risk or investment associated with some treatment modifications. Estimates for each categorization were calculated by finding the mean change scores within anchored change classifications.

PRINCIPAL FINDINGS
The small CID for the CHQ domains was consistently one to two points using the patient-assessed change categorizations, but small CIDs varied greatly for the SF-36. PCP-assessed changes differed substantially from patient estimates for both the CHQ and SF-36, while the panel-derived estimates were generally larger than those derived from patients.

CONCLUSIONS
Triangulation methodology provides a framework for securing a deeper understanding of each informant group's perspective on CIDs for these patient-reported outcome measures. These results demonstrate little consensus and suggest that the derived estimates depend on the rater and assessment methodology.


In the last quarter of a century, DBS has become an established neurosurgical treatment for Parkinson's disease (PD), dystonia, and tremors. Improved understanding of brain circuitries and their involvement in various neurological and psychiatric illnesses, coupled with the safety of DBS and its exquisite role as a tool for ethical study of the human brain, have unlocked new opportunities for this technology, both for future therapies and in research. Serendipitous discoveries and advances in structural and functional imaging are providing abundant "new" brain targets for an ever‐increasing number of pathologies, leading to investigations of DBS in diverse neurological, psychiatric, behavioral, and cognitive conditions. Trials and "proof of concept" studies of DBS are underway in pain, epilepsy, tinnitus, OCD, depression, and Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, as well as in eating disorders, addiction, cognitive decline, consciousness, and autonomic states. In parallel, ongoing technological development will provide pulse generators with longer battery longevity, segmental electrode designs allowing a current steering, and the possibility to deliver "on‐demand" stimulation based on closed‐loop concepts. The future of brain stimulation is certainly promising, especially for movement disorders—that will remain the main indication for DBS for the foreseeable future—and probably for some psychiatric disorders. However, brain stimulation as a technique may be at risk of gliding down a slippery slope: Some reports indicate a disturbing trend with suggestions that future DBS may be proposed for enhancement of memory in healthy people, or as a tool for "treatment" of "antisocial behavior" and for improving "morality." © 2013 International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society


Displacing Whiteness makes a unique contribution to the study of race dominance. Its theoretical innovations in the analysis of whiteness are integrated with careful, substantive explorations of whiteness on an international, multiracial, cross-class, and gendered terrain. Contributors localize whiteness, as well as explore its sociological, anthropological, literary, and political dimensions.

Approaching whiteness as a plural rather than singular concept, the essays describe, for instance, African American, Chicana/o, European American, and British experiences of whiteness. The contributors offer critical readings of theory, literature, film and popular culture; ethnographic analyses; explorations of identity formation; and examinations of racism and political process. Essays examine the alarming epidemic of angry white men on both sides of the Atlantic; far-right electoral politics in the UK; underclass white people in Detroit; whiteness in "brownface" in the film Gandhi ; the engendering of whiteness in Chicana/o movement discourses; "whiteface" literature; Roland Barthes as a critic of white consciousness; whiteness in the black imagination; the inclusion and exclusion of suburban "brown-skinned white girls"; and the slippery relationships between culture, race, and nation in the history of whiteness. Displacing Whiteness breaks new ground by specifying how whiteness is lived, engaged, appropriated, and theorized in a range of geographical locations and historical moments, representing a necessary advance in analytical thinking surrounding the burgeoning study of race and culture.

Contributors . Rebecca Aanerud, Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, Phil Cohen, Ruth Frankenberg, John Hartigan Jr., bell hooks, T. Muraleedharan, Chela Sandoval, France Winddance Twine, Vron Ware, David Wellman


ABSTRACT A number of publications, including a recent paper in World Archaeology, have developed theories on why stone suddenly became a popular material for tomb construction in Han Dynasty China and how foreign masonry techniques were brought to China from across Eurasia. The object of this paper is to examine further the reception of foreign masonry architectural techniques through an analysis of stone-carved tombs from early China. It argues that the reception of foreign masonry techniques was based on the demands generated by using stone as the primary tomb building material during the Han Dynasty. Through the introduction of advanced masonry techniques, new understandings of the material world were incorporated into masonry architecture in a Chinese cultural context.