(31/01/2019)  Cloud-Based Software Platform for Smart Meter Data Management Today smart meters are increasingly used in the worldwide. Smart meters are the advanced meters capable of measuring customer energy consumption at a fine-grained time interval, e.g., every 15 minutes. The data are very sizeable, and might be from different sources, along with the other social-economic metrics such as the geographic information of meters, the information about users and their property, geographic location and others, which make the data management very complex. On the other hand, data-mining and the emerging cloud computing technologies make the collection, management, and analysis of the so-called big data possible. This can improve energy management, e.g., help utility companies to forecast energy loads and improve services, and help households to manage energy usage and save money. As this regard, the proposed paper focuses on building an innovative software platform for smart meter data analytics using cloud technologies, aiming to maximize the information assets in demand-side energy management and relieving peak load. The proposed platform will oer information integration pipeline to ingest smart meter time-series data; a secure repository for researchers sharing their knowledge; scalable data analytics platform for data mining over big data sets for energy demand forecasting and consumption discovering; data as the service for other applications using smart meter data; and a portal for visualizing data analytics results. The design will incorporate hybrid clouds, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), which are suitable for on-demand provisioning, massive scaling, and manageability. Besides, the design will impose extensibility, eciency, and high availability on the system. The paper will evaluate the system comprehensively, and compare with other similar works. This paper will provide a proof of concept for building the data management system expanding from the data management of energy sector to the entire sectors of smart cities.


Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is an extremely important method in exploratory and confirmatory data analysis. Unfortunately, in complex problems (e.g., split-plot designs), it is not always easy to set up an appropriate ANOVA. We propose a hierarchical analysis that automatically gives the correct ANOVA comparisons even in complex scenarios. The inferences for all means and variances are performed under a model with a separate batch of effects for each row of the ANOVA table. We connect to classical ANOVA by working with finite-sample variance components: fixed and random effects models are characterized by inferences about existing levels of a factor and new levels, respectively. We also introduce a new graphical display showing inferences about the standard deviations of each batch of effects. We illustrate with two examples from our applied data analysis, first illustrating the usefulness of our hierarchical computations and displays, and second showing how the ideas of ANOVA are helpful in understanding a previously fit hierarchical model.


Hedging, a sociopragmatic phenomenon that allows authors to maintain their presence in discourse, is a rather difficult strategy for non-natives scholars. In this paper, we present two studies: the first analyses hedging from cross-linguistic (Spanish and English L2) and cross-generic (Research Paper and Case Report) approaches in a corpus of 30 Medical full-texts from highly indexed research journals. Our results indicate that Spanish authors hedge more when writing in English L2 but less than an English native. The second focus on attitude markers (Affect, Judgement and Appreciation) following Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005) to detect cross-cultural differences in 60 Medical Book Reviews. The outcome shows that Spanish reviewers blend categories and seem more positive and direct in their assessments.


The present study offers a critical analysis of post-colonial feminism in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North (1969) and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). It analyzes the notion of double colonization as portrayed through marginalization and subordination of women in the novels. It shows the relationship between the colonizer and colonized and the purpose of colonization. In addition, it examines the status of the colonized women in relation to customs, traditions, and race where customs are obviously against women in their society and women characters appear as an inferior class and have no recognized status and view in that society. The method used can be described as descriptive and analytical relying mainly on the texts of the two novels and the critical literature produced on them that sheds more light on the problem in question.


Item response theory is a modern model-based measurement theory. More recently, the popularity of the IRT models due to many important research applications has become apparent. The purpose of conducting explanatory and confirmatory factor analysis is to explore the interrelationships between the observed item responses and to test whether the data fit a hypothesized measurement model. The item response models applied to undergraduate statistics exams show how the trait level estimates from the models depend on both examinees ́ responses and on the properties of the administered items. The reliability analysis indicates that both exams measure a single unidimensional latent construct, ability of examinees very well. Two-factor model is obtained from the explanatory factor analysis of the second exam. Based on several goodness of fit indices confirmatory factor analysis verifies again the obtained results in the explanatory factor analysis. We fit the testlet-based data with the dichotomous and polytomous item response models. Estimated item parameters and total information functions from the three different models are compared with each other. Difficulty item parameters estimated from one and two parameter logistic item response functions correlate highly. The first statistics exam is a good test measurement since examinees with all level of abilities measured with the questions of different difficulty along the whole scale. Several more difficult questions are needed to measure high-proficiency examinees in the second round. The polytomous IRT model provides more information than the two parameter logistic item response model only in high-ability level.


'Tai-Me' is a traditional medicine bundle used by the Kiowa in their Sun Dance. The bundle has been handed down from generation to generation, through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. N. Scott Momaday made this discovery when he began his journey to learn about the Kiowa and his paternal lineage. Following the death of his beloved Kiowa grandmother, Aho, in 1963 Momaday set out on his quest to learn and document the Kiowa heritage, stories, and folklore. His Kiowa-speaking father, artist Al Momaday, served as translator when Scott visited tribal elders to ask about their memories and stories. Scott gathered these stories into "The Journey of Tai-Me". Originally published only in a limited edition in 1967, "The Journey of Tai-Me" is recognized as the basis from which Momaday's more popular "The Way to Rainy Mountain" grew. When compiling "The Way to Rainy Mountain", published by the University of New Mexico Press, Momaday added his own memories and some poems.


The propagation of monochromatic electromagnetic waves in metal circular cylindrical dielectric waveguides filled with inhomogeneous medium is considered. The physical problem is reduced to solving a transmission eigenvalue problem for a system of ordinary differential equations. Spectral parameters of the problem are propagation constants of the waveguide. Numerical results are found with a projection method. The comparison with known exact solutions (for particular values of parameters) is made.


Online social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, provides users with services that enable them to interact both globally and instantly. The nature of socialmedia interactions follows a constantly growing pattern that requires selection mechanisms to find and analyze interesting data. These interactions on social media can then be modeled into interaction networks, which enable network-based and graph-basedmethods tomodel and understand users' behaviors on socialmedia. These methods could also benefit the field of complex networks in terms of finding initial seeds in the information cascade model. This thesis aims to investigate how to efficiently collect user-generated content and interactions fromonline social media sites. A novel method for data collection that is using an exploratory research, which includes prototyping, is presented, as part of the research results in this thesis. Analysis of social data requires data that covers all the interactions in a given domain, which has shown to be difficult to handle in previous work. An additional contribution from the research conducted is that a novel method of crawling that extracts all social interactions from Facebook is presented. Over the period of the last few years, we have collected 280million posts from public pages on Facebook using this crawling method. The collected posts include 35 billion likes and 5 billion comments from 700 million users. The data collection is the largest research dataset of social interactions on Facebook, enabling further and more accurate research in the area of social network analysis. With the extracted data, it is possible to illustrate interactions between different users that do not necessarily have to be connected. Methods using the same data to identify and cluster different opinions in online communities have also been developed and evaluated. Furthermore, a proposed method is used and validated for finding appropriate seeds for information cascade analyses, and identification of influential users. Based upon the conducted research, it appears that the data mining approach, association rule learning, can be used successfully in identifying influential users with high accuracy. In addition, the same method can also be used for identifying seeds in an information cascade setting, with no significant difference than other network-based methods. Finally, privacy-related consequences of posting online is an important area for users to consider. Therefore, mitigating privacy risks contributes to a secure environment and methods to protect user privacy are presented.


A discrete number of global signals in covarying sea surface temperature (SST) and sea level pressure (SLP) dominated climate variability from 40°S to 60°N during the 20th Century. They are the quasi‐biennial (∼2.2‐year period), interannual (3‐ to 7‐year period band), quasi‐decadal (∼11‐year period), and interdecadal (∼17‐year period) signals. A joint frequency‐domain analysis of SST and SLP anomalies over the global ocean finds these signals composed of mixed global standing modes and traveling waves that are similar in pattern and evolution. On each period scale, the global traveling wave is composed of global zonal wavenumbers‐1 and ‐2, directed eastward with a phase speed that takes 1 to 2 cycles to traverse the global ocean between 40°S and 20°N. The existence of these global traveling waves may enhance the predictability of regional climate variability.


We have reported previously that mutation of two conserved nonbasic amino acids (G203 and Q209) within the highly basic 201-218 region in the C-terminal domain of IGF-binding protein-5 (IGFBP-5) decreases binding to IGFs. This study reveals that cumulative mutagenesis of the 10 basic residues in this region, to create the C-Term series of mutants, ultimately results in a 15-fold decrease in the affinity for IGF-I and a major loss in heparin binding. We examined the ability of mutants to inhibit IGF-mediated survival of MCF-7 cells and were able to demonstrate that this depended not only upon the affinity for IGF-I, but also the kinetics of this interaction, because IGFBP-5 mutants with similar affinity constants (K(D)) values, but with different association (Ka) and dissociation (Kd) rate values, had markedly different inhibitory properties. In contrast, the affinity for IGF-I provided no predictive value in terms of the ability of these mutants to enhance IGF action when bound to the substratum. Instead, these C-Term mutants appeared to enhance the actions of IGF-I by a combination of increased dissociation of IGF-IGFBP complexes from the substratum, together with dissociation of IGF-I from IGFBP-5 bound to the substratum. These effects of the IGFBPs were dependent upon binding to IGF-I, because a non-IGF binding mutant (N-Term) was unable to inhibit or enhance the actions of IGF-I. These results emphasize the importance of the kinetics of association/dissociation in determining the enhancing or inhibiting effects of IGFBP-5 and demonstrate the ability to generate an IGFBP-5 mutant with exclusively IGF-enhancing activity.


Abstract Few studies have reported on the amount of acute changes in flexibility of the hamstrings resulting from stretching prior to activity, and no studies of this nature have focused on an elderly population. Methods: Ninety-seven subjects (mean age=65 years, range 55–79 years) participating in the World Senior Games were randomly selected for participation in this study. Subjects were randomly assigned to either a control group (no stretching), or one of two treatment groups (contract-relax proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation stretch [CRPNF], or a static stretch). Hamstring flexibility was measured with a Penny and Giles goniometer prior to and after one repetition of stretching lasting 32 seconds. Analysis: Differences in flexibility scores from pretest to posttest for control and two treatment groups were assessed using the Wilcoxon signed-ranks test. Pair-wise comparisons in median differences between groups were assessed using rank analysis of covariance and the Mantel-Haenszel statistic. Results: Flexibility scores for participants in each of the control and treatment groups significantly increased from pretest to posttest. However, the increase was much greater for those in the two treatment groups, with median differences of 1 degree in the control group, 5 degrees in the CRPNF group, and 4 degrees in the static group. Both gender and age influenced the median difference between CRPNF and static groups. Specifically, the median difference was significantly greater in the CRPNF versus the static group for men but not women. Similarly, the median difference was significantly greater in the CRPNF versus the static group for participants younger than age 65 but not aged 65 years or older. Conclusion: One repetition (32 seconds) of stretching provides an acute increase in flexibility of the hamstrings. CRPNF and static stretches significantly improve flexibility. For men and participants less than 65 years of age, CRPNF stretch appears more beneficial than static stretch. The benefits in flexibility between CRPNF and static stretches are similar for women and participant ages 65 years and older.


ABSTRACT India continues to modernize its nuclear arsenal, with at least five new weapon systems now under development to complement or replace existing nuclear-capable aircraft, land-based delivery systems, and sea-based systems. India is estimated to have produced enough military plutonium for 150 to 200 nuclear warheads, but has likely produced only 130 to 140. Nonetheless, additional plutonium will be required to produce warheads for missiles now under development, and India is reportedly building several new plutonium production facilities. India's nuclear strategy, which has traditionally focused on Pakistan, now appears to place increased emphasis on China.


THE PREPARATION of teachers in any discipline is a complex enterprise with an array of stakeholders serving as gatekeepers. In the May Kappan, Sam Wineburg focused his analysis of the preparation of social studies teachers on the curriculum standards of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and on the teacher preparation standards of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). We find his argument to be incomplete, for we believe that it ignores forces--subtle and not so subtle--that are also a part of this complex enterprise. The preparation of social studies teachers involves colleges of education and the liberal arts, K-12 schools, state departments of education, social studies/social science professional organizations, and accrediting agencies. These major players are influenced by societal trends; by interest groups; by research in social studies, in the social sciences, and in education; and by society's proclivity for developing programs that are cost-effective, well grounded in research, sufficiently flexible to be implemented in a variety of settings, and capable of satisfying the ever-changing demand for teachers. Moreover, the preparation of social studies teachers is influenced by the ideologies espoused by the various groups involved in this complex enterprise. And these ideologies address questions that educators have struggled with for decades: What is the definition and purpose of social studies? What are effective approaches for implementing social studies education in K-12 schools? How should children and young adults demonstrate their knowledge and competencies in social studies? Despite all of this complexity, we must still ask the important question: What educational experiences will lead to the effective preparation of K-12 social studies teachers? Focusing on the NCSS curriculum standards and the NCATE teacher preparation standards, as Wineburg does, does not take account of all parts of this complex enterprise. So what do the NCSS/NCATE standards have to say about the preparation of social studies teachers, and what impact can they have on that preparation? Let us reflect on the second question first and consider, as an example, the relationship between professional education programs and the liberal arts. Education faculty members are not solely responsible for the preparation of teachers. Indeed, if we hope for social studies teachers to be more literate in their content fields, we must look to the social science faculties at our colleges and universities to help us meet that need. However, relations between liberal arts faculty members and education faculty members are often distant, and collaboration and communication are not common. Faculty members in the social sciences are often not rewarded for expending energy on teacher education. That is not why they earned Ph.D.s in history or political science, nor is it why they were hired as professors. Furthermore, it is often the case that courses offered in history and the social sciences do little to facilitate an understanding of literacy in those disciplines. Rather than thinking like historians and political scientists, undergraduate majors in social science disciplines spend much of their time learning information. Not surprisingly, many of the questions Wineburg raises are rarely dealt with in courses in the disciplines. However, the NCATE/NCSS teacher preparation standards have promoted initiatives to improve communication between faculty members in the arts and sciences and their peers in education. In order for programs preparing social studies teachers to demonstrate that their teacher candidates have acquired the necessary knowledge and skills to teach social studies, education faculty members must collaborate with faculty members in history and the social sciences. In short, dialogue about the appropriate skills and knowledge for teachers of social studies, which has been promoted by the NCATE/NCSS teacher preparation standards, has fostered cross-disciplinary cooperation. …


We hypothesize current financial reporting standards contribute to "money illusion," in which investors overemphasize nominal cash flows and underemphasize effects of discount rates on valuation. We test our predictions in two experiments using a pool of professional and nonprofessional investors. In the first experiment we vary whether a change in the fair value of debt securities is reported in Net Income or Other Comprehensive Income. We find participants knowledgeable about U.S. GAAP are more (less) likely to attribute fair value changes presented in Net Income (Other Comprehensive Income) to changes in expected nominal cash flows. The perception that such changes are attributable to changes in expected nominal cash flows increases investors' risk assessments, resulting in lower assessments of value. In a second experiment, we confirm money illusion as the mechanism behind our findings in Experiment 1. We find investor valuations are lower when a negative change in fair value is caused by a decrease in expected nominal cash flows relative to an increase in the discount rate, and that this effect is partially mediated through risk perceptions. Overall, our results provide evidence of a structural mechanism in accounting standards that contributes to money illusion, potentially leading financial statement users to lower-quality investment decisions. Our results have implications for accounting standard setters as well as financial statement users.


The major problem in the country at present is the lack of electrification to provide refrigeration. Another option is erratic power also results in significant operating costs due to use of fossil fuels such as diesel. The thermal fossil fuel driven refrigeration system has a general efficiency of about 35% on average and leads to large volumes of greenhouse gas emissions. This review is related to advances in solar refrigeration in which Li-Br and H2O is best suitable pair for the absorption refrigeration process. Also refrigerant (H2O) has zero ozone depletion potential and very low global warming potential. Thus the refrigerator is eco-friendly. There are no moving parts involved in the system. In India average insolation is 5.5 kW / m2 / day over nearly 60% of the landscape which is most abundant, non-polluting source for the operation of such facilities. Hence this review emphasizing on employing renewable energy sources like solar energy in refrigeration system.


There is growing operational awareness of the challenges in securely operating IPv6 networks. Through a measurement study of 520,000 dual-stack servers and 25,000 dual-stack routers, we examine the extent to which security policy codified in IPv4 has also been deployed in IPv6. We find several high-value target applications with a comparatively open security policy in IPv6 including: (i) SSH, Telnet, SNMP, are more than twice as open on routers in IPv6 as they are in IPv4; (ii) nearly half of routers with BGP open were only open in IPv6; and (iii) in the server dataset, SNMP was twice as open in IPv6 as in IPv4. We conduct a detailed study of where port blocking policy is being applied and find that protocol openness discrepancies are consistent within network boundaries, suggesting a systemic failure in organizations to deploy consistent security policy. We successfully communicate our findings with twelve network operators and all twelve confirm that the relative openness was unintentional. Ten of the twelve immediately moved to deploy a congruent IPv6 security policy, reflecting real operational concern. Finally, we revisit the belief that the security impact of this comparative openness in IPv6 is mitigated by the infeasibility of IPv6 network-wide scanning—we find that, for both of our datasets, host addressing practices make discovering these high-value hosts feasible by scanning alone. To help operators accurately measure their own IPv6 security posture, we make our probing system publicly available.


Extracted from text ... 14 January 2006 Moneyweb's PERSONAL FINANCE
TAX
SARS checklist for
2006
In an ideal world, tax planning should start on
1 March. However, human nature being what it is,
things get put off until the end of the year. There's still
time to sort things out - if you act now
By STEVEN JONES
THE beginning of a new year is
traditionally not the time to be
thinking about your taxes. I'm
reasonably certain that, apart from
Finance Minister Trevor Manuel,
no-one was raising their glasses in
a toast to SARS Commissioner
Pravin Gordhan and his team for
the ..


Local governments play an important role in structuring urban transportation through street design, zoning, and shared jurisdiction over ride-hailing, transit, and road pricing. While cities can harness these powers to steer planning outcomes, there is little research about what local officials think about regulatory changes related to autonomous vehicles (AV). We compile key AV-related policies recommended by scholars but rarely implemented, and conduct a survey of municipal officials throughout the United States, exploring their personal support and perceptions of bureaucratic capacity, legal limits, and political backing for each policy. This paper finds broad personal support for regulations related to right-of-way, equity, and land use, such as for increasing pedestrian space, expanding access for low-income people, and reducing sprawl. However, officials emphasized uncertain bureaucratic and legal capacity for city intervention outside of these areas, reaffirming limited local power in the federal system. Only a minority expected political support for any policy. Greater population size and more liberal resident political ideologies are strongly associated with personal and political support for many policies. Local population growth is correlated with greater capacity to undertake policies. This work contributes to the growing literature on transportation governance in the context of technological uncertainty.


This report describes stream sediment and gravity
surveys carried out across the Berwyn Dome and adjacent
areas. The gravity survey confirmed the presence of a
broad regional Bouguer anomaly low in the central part of
the Dome, on which is superimposed several smaller irregular
highs and lows. Some of these local anomalies
possibly reflect small igneous bodies but more detailed
gravity surveys would be needed to determine their form.
Near Corwen the Bryneglwys Fault coincides with a 4.5
mGa1 anomaly but southwards the two features diverge,
suggesting that the density interface is related either to a
splay fault or to the eastern margin of the Lower
Palaeozoic Montgomery trough. Some other structural
trends are weakly reflected on the Bouguer anomaly and
aeromagnetic maps, but there is no clear correlation with
known base metal mineralisation. The Bouguer
anomalies cannot be attributed to particular structures
with any certainty but are probably due to a number of
factors, including variation in the Precambrian basement
and changes in the lithology and thickness of Lower
Palaeozoic sedimentary rocks. There is no evidence for a
large granitic body in Lower Palaeozoic rocks underlying
the mineralisation at Llangynog. The aeromagnetic map
suggests the presence of a magnetic basement at a depth
of 3-4 km centred beneath the northwestern margin of
the Dome.
The stream sediment survey involved the collection of a
- 100 mesh stream sediment, panned concentrate and
water sample from each of the 399 sites sampled. The
sample density was 1 site per 1.5 km*. Cu, Pb, Zn, Ba,
Fe, Mn, Co, V, Cr, Ni, Zr, MO and Sn were determined
in the stream sediments, Cu, Pb, Zn, Ba, Fe, Mn, Ce,
Sn, Sb, Ti, Ni and As in the panned concentrates and Cu,
Pb and Zn in stream waters. Major variations in the
results are related to (i) hydrous oxide precipitation processes,
(ii) contamination from human activities, (iii) base
metal and baryte mineralisation, (iv) monazite concentrations
in panned concentrates, (v) hitherto unrecorded
gold mineralisation and (vi) lithological variations. The
latter were related principally to shale-sandstone variation,
but groups of elements attributable to the presence
of basic intrusions, phosphatic rocks, coal measures,
sandstones, limestones and volcanics were also discerned.
Threshold levels were established from cumulative frequency
curve analysis, and some anomalous sites were examined
in the field. Anomalies did not form prominent
coherent groups and were generally weak and scattered,
with a wide variety of element groupings reflecting a
range of causes. Many anomalous panned concentrates
were examined mineralogically to try to . determine
whether anomalies were related to chemically extreme
background lithologies, contamination, or mineralisation.
All the anomalies were related to one or more of the
major causes of variation, although because of the very
limited amount of follow-up work carried out the precise
cause of many anomalies remains uncertain. No anomaly
is considered to represent a strong prospect but several
deserve further limited investigation, notably those
associated with (i) gold mineralisation in the northwest of
the area, (ii) baryte, perhaps accompanied by base metal
' mineralisation, associated with Caradocian volcanics and
phosphatic rocks at several localities, (iii) mineralisation
associated with Llandeilian limestones and volcanic rocks
north of Llanrhaeadr, and (iv) copper mineralisation
associated with intrusives near the eastern margin of the
Dome, where survey data is most incomplete.


This study examines the mental representation of clitic object pronouns in English L2 Spanish speakers of beginning, intermediate and advanced proficiencies. We present the results of a scalar grammaticality judgment task, which examines knowledge of clitic placement in both Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) verb constructions and non-ECM (finite and modal + infinitival) constructions. Our findings suggest that these advanced L2 learners have converged on the Spanish grammar, showing high sensitivity to the restrictions placed on clitic solidarity in ECM constructions coupled with acute knowledge of the distribution pattern of Spanish clitics in non-ECM environments. We argue that this pattern supports UG-accessibility approaches to adult L2 acquisition.


The decline in the usefulness of financial reports and the invisibility of intangibles
information in those reports has resulted in a growing effort to expand disclosure by
way of voluntary reporting to reduce the information asymmetry problem. Prior
studies on intangibles disclosure have successfully created awareness about the
importance of intangibles. However, the literature argues that clear results on the
determinants of differential disclosure are still scarce and that prior research does not
offer a strong theoretical basis to interpret the motives for disclosure. A direct
comparison of disclosure behaviour between firms with and without a capital-raising
motive provided by this study should provide an understanding of how these firms
signal their intangibles information.
Focusing on the top 200 Australian firms (based on market capitalisation) in 2006-
2008, this study aims to determine whether financing decisions provide a strong
incentive for firms to signal a greater variety of intangibles information, a higher
level of disclosure and more intense information to the capital market. Content
analysis of annual reports and prospectuses is carried out to determine the variety,
and extent of intangibles disclosure. Incorporating a range of impression
management tools in signalling information, this study also explores the concept of
intensity of disclosure, which reflects the strength of messages presented based on
their type, nature and also their presentation emphasis.
The findings, which support signalling theory, provide evidence that capital-raiser
firms disclose a greater variety of voluntary intangibles information with a higher
level of disclosure in their annual reports immediately prior to capital-raising
activity. Further, capital-raisers provide more intense and powerful signals compared
to their non-capital-raiser counterparts. In addition to annual reports, these firms also
utilise prospectuses to signal intangibles information during capital-raising activity.
However, the variety, extent and intensity of disclosure in prospectuses are
significantly lower compared to disclosure in annual reports. The overall findings
suggest that in order to compensate for the inadequacy of financial reports, capitalraiser
firms strive to make intangibles information visible in both annual reports and
prospectuses by not only making narrative disclosures but also by emphasising
intangibles using pictures and presentation emphasis by way of repetition. This is consistent with the motivation to provide intangibles information that investors will
not only recognise but that they will also retain and recall when making investment
decisions.


ABSTRACT Purpose: The purpose of this single case study was to examine the effectiveness of utilizing a wearable fitness tracker device in self-monitoring behavior change in complying with prescribed treatment. It was hypothesized that using a wearable self-monitoring device while involved in the treatment of multiple medical conditions will be beneficial to behavioral compliance and behavioral change in an overweight type 2 diabetic, geriatric subject being treated by a multidisciplinary health team utilizing an integrated treatment model. Methods: An exploratory single case study research design is employed to explore those situations in which the intervention, a wearable monitoring device, is employed. This observational case study model was applied to the utility of self-monitoring wearable smart technology marketed as FitBit for self-monitoring activity and exercise over a 36-week period. Results: After the 36-week intervention program, results revealed qualitative improvements in the (1) active minutes, (2) steps taken and (3) miles walked by the subject. In addition, the technology reported on calories burned, sleep hours and minutes logged and liquid consumed during each 24-hour period. The integrated allied health team was able to monitor changes made over time and noted improved time dedicated to exercise, walking and total miles walked. On miles walked per day, the results show that the subject increased miles walked from less than one mile per day to more than 4.6 miles per day which approached the recommended 5 miles per day goal. The calorie monitor aided the subject in changing calorie intake from that which exceeded 3500 per day to the recommended 2500 calories per day. Furthermore, the hours slept per night changed from less than 6.8 per night to 8.1 per day. Conclusions: It was concluded that a 36-week intervention program can be an effective intervention methodology for improved health and well-being as measured by standard healthcare and wellness markers utilizing a wearable fitness tracker device like the Fitbit. While further research is needed with a larger sample, it is therefore recommended that allied health professionals consider the utilization of wearable smart technology as an adjunct to self-monitoring and compliance with treatment planning and follow-up care with allied health care providers.


John Rawls' idea of public reason holds that comprehensive doctrines including religion should not be allowed a voice in the public square. Such ideas prevent society achieving that 'overlapping consensus' which is said to be a requirement for enduring peace and progress. However, the suggestion that some ideas should be excluded from public debate is anti-democratic. This article reviews Rawls' idea of public reason' against its US legal context and suggests it was a response to US Supreme Court decisions concerning their First Amendment. Though our framers copied most of that clause into the Australian Constitution, the High Court has interpreted it completely differently. The article concludes that Rawls' idea of public reason does not fit in a Westminster democracy tied to parliamentary sovereignty rather than judicial review.


REASONS FOR PERFORMING STUDY
Nutritional support in critically ill neonatal foals is of great importance given their high metabolic rate and minimal stores of energy and protein. Nutrient requirements of healthy growing foals have been estimated based on daily milk intake; however, little is known about the resting energy expenditure (REE) of sick foals.

OBJECTIVES
To determine REE in critically ill neonatal foals (sepsis and/or hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy [HIE] and compare this with REE in control foals.

METHODS
Critically ill newborn foals admitted to the Fundació Hospital Clinic Veterinari, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain from March 2009 to February 2011 were included in this study. Healthy neonatal foals and foals with nonsystemic conditions were used as controls. Oxygen consumption and CO2 production were measured with a respiratory monitor connected to a tight fitting facemask and REE (kcal/kg bwt/day) was calculated with the abbreviated Weir formula. Measurements were performed within 24 h of admission and repeatedly during hospitalisation.

RESULTS
Twenty-seven foals were included (16 critically ill foals and 11 controls) and a total of 47 measurements were performed. In the critically ill, REE was reduced (mean +/- s.e. 49.5 +/- 2.1 kcal/kg bwt/day) on admission relative to the controls. In surviving foals (n = 5), REE before hospital discharge was not different (68.4 +/- 7.0 kcal/kg bwt/day) from control foals (64.8 +/- 2.7 kcal/kg bwt/day).

CONCLUSIONS
REE was lower in critically ill foals upon admission (40-50 kcal/kg bwt/day) and normalised before hospital discharge (60-80 kcal/kg bwt/day).

POTENTIAL RELEVANCE
Critically ill neonatal foals tolerating enteral feeding would receive approximately their REE when given 10% of their bodyweight in mare's milk daily. For sick neonates unable to tolerate enteral nutrition, provision of 50 kcal/kg bwt/day would be a reasonable goal for parenteral nutrition.


The EU-US Summit on 26 March will mark eight months since the partners decided to formally launch negotiations on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The aim of the TTIP – if finalised – is to remove tariffs, align regulatory standards and open up government procurement. Born out of the need to boost economic growth on both sides of the Atlantic and to respond to the rise of emerging markets, the Partnership will add an extra €120 billion to the EU economy annually, according to estimates by the European Commission. While President Obama's first visit to Brussels will likely be dominated by an agenda focusing on Ukraine and economic recovery, it is also worth thinking about some of the more sensitive areas involved in the TTIP discussions. One such area relates to defence industry and markets. Back in June 2013, public procurement of defence and security goods was included in the Commission's negotiating mandate. Given the sensitive nature of defence procurement, however, both sides have, for the time being, agreed to drop a 'defence TTIP'. This situation is indicative of a broader negotiating environment that has seen a moratorium on including an investment chapter in the Partnership and other sectoral exclusions. Therefore, at first glance, the TTIP's overarching aims of abolishing tariffs, enhancing the compatibility of the EU and US regulatory environment and ensuring a greater flow of goods, services and investments in the transatlantic space will not apply to the defence sector. But is this necessarily the end of the story?


Citizenship revocation has emerged in the UK and Canada as a supplement to the counter-terrorism toolkit, and is on the legislative agenda elsewhere. Citizens who engage in conduct deemed threatening to national security face potential deprivation of citizenship through the exercise of executive discretion. The author situates citizenship revocation within the evolving field of 'crimmigration', as well as in its historical context. The new 'two-step exile' extends the functionality of immigration law by turning citizens into deportable aliens: first, strip citizenship; second, deport the newly minted alien. This revival of banishment raises various normative, legal and practical considerations. The paper critically engages with the depiction of citizenship as a privilege versus a right, and citizenship revocation for misconduct as constructive breach of the social contract versus punishment. It argues that citizenship revocation as conceived under both the UK and Canadian regimes is essentially punitive. It then analyses the legality of citizenship revocation under international law and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, using US Supreme Court judgments on expatriation as a relevant source of comparative jurisprudence.


"With the introduction of a new welfare benefit system in 2005, Germany implemented quite strict benefit sanctions for welfare recipients aged younger than 25 years. For all types of non-compliance except for missing appointments, their basic cash benefit is withdrawn for three months. A second sanction of the same type within one year implies a complete benefit cut for three months. We analyze the impact of these sanctions on job search outcomes and on transitions out of the labor force. Our analysis is based on administrative data on a large inflow sample of young male jobseekers into welfare in West Germany. We estimate separate models for people living alone and people living with their family, as sanctioned welfare recipients living with other household members can partly rely on their support and might react less by increasing search intensity and lowering reservation wages. We estimate the parameters of multivariate duration models taking selection based on unobservables into account. Our results suggest that both the first and the second sanction increase the probability of finding a job, but that these jobs go along with lower earnings due to first but not the second sanction. Moreover, first sanctions significantly increase the transition rate out of the labor force of both groups of young men, while second sanctions amplify this effect only for young men living in single households." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))


In recent years, bioethicists have worked on government commissions, on ethics committees in hospitals and nursing homes, and as bedside consultants. Because ethical knowledge is based on experience within the field rather than on universal theoretical propositions, it is open to criticism for its lack of theoretical foundation. Once in the clinic, however, ethicists noted the extent to which medical practice itself combined the certitudes of science with craft forms of knowledge. In an effort to forge a middle path between pure science and applied medical and ethical knowledge, bioethicists turned to the work of classical philosophy, especially the theme of a practical wisdom that entails a variable knowledge of particulars.In this book contemporary bioethicists and scholars of ancient philosophy explore the import of classical ethics on such pressing bioethical concerns as managed care, euthanasia, suicide, and abortion. Although the contributors write within the limits of their own disciplines, through cross references and counterarguments they engage in fruitful dialogue.


Efficient and dependable methods for detection and measurement of synaptic events are important for studies of synaptic physiology and neuronal circuit connectivity. As the published methods with detection algorithms based upon amplitude thresholding and fixed or scaled template comparisons are of limited utility for detection of signals with variable amplitudes and superimposed events that have complex waveforms, previous techniques are not applicable for detection of evoked synaptic events in photostimulation and other similar experimental situations. Here we report on a novel technique that combines the design of a bank of approximate matched filters with the detection and estimation theory to automatically detect and extract photostimluation-evoked excitatory postsynaptic currents (EPSCs) from individually recorded neurons in cortical circuit mapping experiments. The sensitivity and specificity of the method were evaluated on both simulated and experimental data, with its performance comparable to that of visual event detection performed by human operators. This new technique was applied to quantify and compare the EPSCs obtained from excitatory pyramidal cells and fast-spiking interneurons. In addition, our technique has been further applied to the detection and analysis of inhibitory postsynaptic current (IPSC) responses. Given the general purpose of our matched filtering and signal recognition algorithms, we expect that our technique can be appropriately modified and applied to detect and extract other types of electrophysiological and optical imaging signals.


The increasing use of interactive learning [IL] strategies in Astro 101 classrooms has led some instructors to consider the usefulness of a textbook in such classes. These strategies provide students a learning modality very different from the traditional lecture supplemented by reading a textbook and homework and raise the question of whether the learning that takes place during such interactive activities is enough by itself to teach students what we wish them to know about astronomy. To address this question, assessment data are presented from an interactive class, which was first taught with a required textbook, and then with the textbook being optional. Comparison of test scores before and after this change shows no statistical difference in student achievement whether a textbook is required or not. In addition, comparison of test scores of students who purchased the textbook to those who did not, after the textbook became optional, also show no statistical difference between the two groups. The Light and Spectroscopy Concept Inventory (LSCI; Bardar et al. 2007), a research-validated assessment tool, was given pre-instruction and postinstruction to three classes that had a required textbook, and one for which the textbook was optional, and the results demonstrate that the student learning gains on this central topic were statistically indistinguishable between the two groups. Finally, the Star Properties Concept Inventory (SPCI), another research-validated assessment tool, was administered to a class for which the textbook was optional, and the class performance was higher than that of a group of classes in a national study (Bailey et al. 2011). Taken together, these results suggest that, if research-tested alternative learning modalities are provided, students' ability to learn the content of an Astronomy 101 course can be independent of a textbook requirement. Details on the course and the methodology used to reach this conclusion are presented.


The leasing industry has long existed in MENA and is currently active in 70% of the countries in the region. However, despite its long presence in MENA, the leasing industry remains generally underdeveloped by international comparison and there is a lot of potential for further growth. However, this potential will only be realized if MENA policy-makers address the existing regulatory and institutional constraints hindering the growth of the industry. These include the absence of an effective legal framework that reduces ambiguities and introduces clear definitions of leasing and clear rights and responsibilities of the parties to a lease. The growth of the industry is also hampered by lack of registries of leased assets and ineffective legal mechanisms for repossessing these assets. Also, the limited access to long term fixed-rate funding has restricted providers' ability to mitigate their operating and treasury risks, especially independent providers which do not have easy access to bank finance. Finally, tax rules do not recognize leasing as a financing mechanism and fail to create a level playing field between leasing and other forms of finance, reducing the attractiveness of leasing.


Abstract We have carried out optical microscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning and transmission electron microscopy (SEM and TEM) studies of phyllosilicates from black slates of very low to low-grade metamorphism. Such slates belong to a Middle/Late Devonian basin and an Early Carboniferous basin associated with the Porto-Tomar-Ferreira do Alentejo strike-slip shear zone (Ossa-Morena Zone, Portuguese Iberian Variscan Massif). These black slates are imbricated in an Upper Proterozoic substratum of higher metamorphic grade. Kübler Index values of white micas and mineral assemblages deduced from the XRD, SEM and TEM data (muscovite, chlorite and pyrophyllite) indicate high anchizonal and epizonal metamorphic conditions for slates from these basins. The b parameter and the phengitic contents of mica suggest the occurrence of low pressures (1-2 kbar) related to an extensional geotectonic setting. The dense fracture network shown by SEM images and the high density of crystal defects revealed by the TEM study in the eastern basin, adjacent to faults produced by shearing, suggest that their epizonal phyllosilicates were more affected during deformation than those belonging to the western basin, favouring the development of a retrograde association (siderite, kaolin group minerals and Al-smectite) on the epizonal paragenesis. Microcavities formed along phyllosilicate cleavage acted as channels for fluid transport favouring alteration under low-temperature conditions.


Diabetes is a metabolic disorder characterized by chronic hyperglycemia and impaired cytokine levels leading to inflammation. Interlukin-10 (IL-10) is an anti-inflammatory cytokine which acts as macrophage deactivator affecting the synthesis of TNF-a, IL-1, IL-6, IL-8 and GM-CSF. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) viz. -592A/C, -819T/C and -1082A/G in IL-10 promoter are associated with IL-10 production. Low IL-10 levels in T2DM cases may be regulated by such gene variants. The present study was undertaken to evaluate the association of two genetic polymorphisms viz. IL-10 -819T/C and -1082A/G with T2DM in a North Indian population. Blood samples from 402 subjects (201 each of controls and T2DM cases) were collected after ethical approval and individual written consent. All subjects were genotyped by polymerase chain reaction-restriction length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) using specific primers and restriction enzymes. Genotypic, allelic, carriage rate frequencies were calculated and haplotypic analysis performed by SPSS (version 21.0) and SHEsis (online version). All biochemical parameters except WHR and TG showed significant association with T2DM (P<0.005). In the study population 'TC' genotype of -819T/C and 'GG' genotype of -1082A/G showed significant association with T2DM (P< 0.0001, OR=2.195; P<0.038, OR=1.946 respectively) while allelic frequencies did not show association. Individuals with genotypic combinations viz. CT/AG (+/-) and CT/GG (+/-, +/+) showed 2-4 times higher risk of developing T2DM while haplotype analysis did not show any association. All genotypes of IL-10 polymorphism showed significant association with biochemical parameters viz. BPS, BPD, F, PP and TC (P<0.007). The IL-10 gene polymorphisms therefore play important roles in determining diabetes susceptibility.


One foundational element of Rob Kling's research and writing is his critical perspective on the nature, role, and dynamics of computerization. His main argument was that one should view as dubious any statements that are not grounded in empirical evidence or theoretical analysis. Rob's work was replete with critical refutation, in which he challenged assumptions or statements about computerization and provided alternative interpretations. Much of his work delivered indictments against hyperbolic statements that claimed either utopian or dystopian outcomes from computerization. However, some of his own writings on emerging technologies tended to be dismissive and marginalizing, revealing in his own work some of the weaknesses he pointed out in others' rhetoric and writing. This article identifies intellectual traps inherent in critical perspectives that can catch even the most acute practitioners. The objective is to help elucidate and stabilize the epistemological foundations for Rob's critical perspective on the role of computerization.


NOTE: Access Code is NOT INCLUDED Develop the Microsoft Office 2016 skills you need to be successful in college and beyond with the emphasis on critical-thinking, problem-solving, and in-depth coverage found in NEW PERSPECTIVES MICROSOFT OFFICE 365 & OFFICE 2016: INTRODUCTORY. Updated with all-new case scenarios, this edition clearly applies the skills you are learning to real-world situations to make concepts even more relevant. New Productivity Apps provide a visual introduction to Microsoft OneNote, Sway, Office Mix and Edge with fun, hands-on activities. Companion Sways provide videos and step-by-step instructions to help you learn to use each app. NEW PERSPECTIVES MICROSOFT OFFICE 365 & OFFICE 2016: INTRODUCTORY demonstrates the importance of what you're learning while strengthening your skills and helping you transfer skills to other applications and disciplines for further success.


This dissertation contains three essays. The first essay, entitled "Pricing and Production Flexibility: An Empirical Analysis of the U.S. Automotive Industry," uses a detailed dataset of the U.S. auto industry to examine the relationship between production flexibility and responsive pricing. Our analysis shows that deploying production flexibility is associated with a reduction in observed discounts and with an increase in plant utilization. Our results allow quantifying some of the benefits of production flexibility. The second essay, entitled "An Empirical Analysis of Reputation in Online Service Marketplaces," uses a detailed dataset from a leading online intermediary for software development services to empirically examine the role of reputation on choices and prices in service marketplaces. We find that buyers trade off reputation and price and are willing to accept higher bids posted by more reputable bidders. Sellers primarily use a superior reputation to increase their probability of being selected, as opposed to increasing their prices. Our analysis shows that the numerical reputation score has a smaller effect in situations where there exists a previous relationship between buyer and seller, when the seller has certified his or her skills, when the seller is local, or in situations that prompt higher interpersonal trust. The third essay, entitled "The Effects of Product Line Breadth: Evidence from the Automotive Industry," studies the effects of product line breadth on market shares and costs, using data from the U.S. automotive industry. Our results show a positive association between product line breadth and market share and production costs. Beyond the effects on production costs, we study the effect of product line breadth on mismatch costs, which arise from demand uncertainty, and we find that product line breadth has a substantial impact on average discounts and inventories. Our results also show that platform strategies can reduce production costs and that a broader product line can provide a hedge against changes in demand conditions. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Operations & Information Management First Advisor Christian Terwiesch


"From 2007-2013 the European 7th Framework Program Science in Society (FP7) funded a multitude of formal and informal educational institutions to join forces and engage in alternative ways to teach science—inside and outside the classroom—all over Europe. This book reports on one of these projects named INQUIRE which was developed and implemented to support 14 Botanic Gardens and Natural History Museums in 11 European countries, to establish a collaborative learning network and expand their understanding of inquiry based science teaching (IBST). Suzanne Kapelari provides insight into the complex theoretical background and practical considerations that informed the project design and which guided the consortium through a three-year process of collaborative knowledge creation. 'Expansive Learning Theory' is fundamental to this approach and places emphasis on communities as learners, on transformation and creation of culture, on horizontal movement and hybridization of knowledge, and on the formation of theoretical concepts. This book is to be considered for planning and running international science education projects as well as a multifaceted theoretical underpinning of teaching. It serves as a conceptual and practical resource for formal and informal science educators and project managers. This project has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 266616."


The Kafala (or sponsorship) system is the key instrument behind the economic development of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and most Middle East economies. The system governs both labor migration and foreign investment by assigning a native-UAE sponsor to each migrant worker and each foreign investor. Sponsors enjoy significant command over these factors and extract sizable economic rents. Firms in free-zones, in contrast, are exempt from the Kafala system. Therefore, they provide an appropriate counterfactual to study the effect of policy regulations on technical efficiency. Using a representative sample of 600 firms of Dubai we estimate stochastic frontier models to identify and compare the degree of technical inefficiency between firms operating under the Kafala system and those in free zones. Our results suggest that on average technical inefficiency resulting from the Kafala amounts to 6.6% of total costs (or 11% of profits). Inefficiency is also greater among firms in Main Dubai in all economic sectors.


Knowledge distillation~(KD) aims to craft a compact student model that imitates the behavior of a pre-trained teacher in a target domain. Prior KD approaches, despite their gratifying results, have largely relied on the premise that \emph{in-domain} data is available to carry out the knowledge transfer. Such an assumption, unfortunately, in many cases violates the practical setting, since the original training data or even the data domain is often unreachable due to privacy or copyright reasons. In this paper, we attempt to tackle an ambitious task, termed as \emph{out-of-domain} knowledge distillation~(OOD-KD), which allows us to conduct KD using only OOD data that can be readily obtained at a very low cost. Admittedly, OOD-KD is by nature a highly challenging task due to the agnostic domain gap. To this end, we introduce a handy yet surprisingly efficacious approach, dubbed as~\textit{MosaicKD}. The key insight behind MosaicKD lies in that, samples from various domains share common local patterns, even though their global semantic may vary significantly; these shared local patterns, in turn, can be re-assembled analogous to mosaic tiling, to approximate the in-domain data and to further alleviating the domain discrepancy. In MosaicKD, this is achieved through a four-player min-max game, in which a generator, a discriminator, a student network, are collectively trained in an adversarial manner, partially under the guidance of a pre-trained teacher. We validate MosaicKD over {classification and semantic segmentation tasks} across various benchmarks, and demonstrate that it yields results much superior to the state-of-the-art counterparts on OOD data. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/zju-vipa/MosaicKD}.


ABSTRACT In the Pennsylvanian Swope Formation of southeastern Kansas, diagenetic replacement phenomena involving pyrite, sphalerite, calcite, dolomite, silica, kaolinite and dickite took place in the same sequence within different carbonate facies. Two stages of dolomitization are evident in the Swope Formation: 1) The earlier stage of dolomitization selectively replaces micrite in the basal portion of the formation; 2) Later ferroan dolomite selectively replaces grains, chiefly algal blades and ooids, and fills primary voids and fractures in the middle and upper parts of the formation. Neither stage of dolomitization can be unequivocally demonstrated to result from capillary concentration of saline waters in evaporite lagoons or reflux of hypersaline waters from such lagoons. Therefore dolomi ization in the Swope Formation may possibly be due to diagenetic alteration by nonevaporitic, metasomatic processes. Pyrite was the first diagenetic mineral to form within the limestone. It continued to form through the stage of precipitation of drusy calcite cement. Trace amounts of sphalerite formed after initial pyritization. Calcite spar cementation apparently followed the first stage dolomitization and preceded the second stage dolomitization. The youngest calcite spar contains iron rich zones. Silicification followed the second stage of dolomitization. Later kaolinite and dickite formation is believed to be related to hydrothermal events associated with Tertiary intrusions in southeastern Kansas. Calcitization of dolomite is interpreted to be a late, possibly Holocene event.


The task of text classification is usually divided into two stages: {\it text feature extraction} and {\it classification}. In this standard formalization categories are merely represented as indexes in the label vocabulary, and the model lacks for explicit instructions on what to classify. Inspired by the current trend of formalizing NLP problems as question answering tasks, we propose a new framework for text classification, in which each category label is associated with a category description. Descriptions are generated by hand-crafted templates or using abstractive/extractive models from reinforcement learning. The concatenation of the description and the text is fed to the classifier to decide whether or not the current label should be assigned to the text. The proposed strategy forces the model to attend to the most salient texts with respect to the label, which can be regarded as a hard version of attention, leading to better performances. We observe significant performance boosts over strong baselines on a wide range of text classification tasks including single-label classification, multi-label classification and multi-aspect sentiment analysis.


Objective. To investigate and to quantify the relationship between hospital costs and health outcomes for patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in Veterans Health Administration (VHA) hospitals using individual-level data for costs and outcomes. Data Sources. VHA administrative files for the fiscal years 2000–2006. Study Design. Costs were defined as costs incurred during the index hospitalization for treatment of AMI. Mortality and readmission, assessed 1 year after the index hospitalization, were used as measures of clinical outcome. We examined health outcomes as a function of costs and other patient-level and hospital-level characteristics using a two-stage Cox proportional hazard model that accounted for competing risks within a multilevel framework. To control for patient comorbidities, we compiled a comprehensive list of comorbidities that have been found in other studies to affect mortality and readmissions. Principal Findings. We found that costs were negatively associated with mortality and readmissions. Every U.S.$100 less spent is associated with a 0.63 percent increase in the hazard of dying and a 1.24 percent increase in the hazard to be readmitted conditional on not dying. This main finding remained unchanged after a number of sensitivity checks. Conclusions. Our results suggest that there is a trade-off between costs and outcomes. The negative association between costs and mortality suggests that outcomes should be monitored closely when introducing cost-containment programs. Additional studies are needed to examine the cost–outcome relationship for conditions other than AMI to see whether our results are consistent.


During the two decades after World War II, two Christian theologians of public life appeared on the cover of Time magazine: Reinhold Niebuhr in 1948 and John Courtney Murray in 1960. As their appearances suggest, during this time Murray the Catholic and Niebuhr the Protestant were America's most prominent Christian theologians concerning the relationship between religion, morality, and politics. Niebuhr inspired not only two generations of Christian clergy and activists, but also numerous secular statesmen and thinkers who admired his hard-nosed policy and cultural analyses, and some of whom dubbed themselves "Atheists for Niebuhr." Murray, of course, set forth the most prominent account of how faithful Catholics could affirm the American political system and laid the intellectual groundwork for the Church to embrace equal religious freedom as a moral ideal at Vatican II. Murray and Niebuhr each engaged in polemics directed at the other's writings or school of thought. Niebuhr criticized the Catholic natural-law tradition for rigidity and for elevating contingent features of pre-modern societies into the supposedly universal standards of human reason. Murray, in defending the universal propositions of natural law, blasted Niebuhr's Christian realism as a theory that sees things as so complicated that moral judgment becomes practically impossible. The thesis of this paper, though, is that Murray and Niebuhr, natural law and Christian realism, are not as far apart as they seemed, for the reasons following. (Indeed, the philosophically deepest aspects of the American founding reflect elements both of natural-law reasoning (as Murray emphasized) and realist concerns to structure institutions so as to counter the inevitable tendencies to self-aggrandizement (as Niebuhr emphasized).) First, Niebuhr was more of a natural-law theorist than he admitted. Although Christian realism emphasizes how moral-political assertions are typically tainted by partiality and self-aggrandizement, Niebuhr himself set forth a universal theory about the perennial dynamics of human nature, and he affirmed the universal validity of certain moral-political concepts sich as equality. Second, although Niebuhr criticized natural-law theory for elevating historically contingent propositions to universal status, recent natural-law approaches have given much greater attention to historical contingencies and differences in the application of general principles. I show how Murray exhibited this historical consciousness and often relied on arguments of prudence and pragmatics that a Christian realist should appreciate. Third, although Niebuhr's appreciation for ambiguity and tension made him reluctant to rely on absolute rules in political matters, later Christian realists affirmed the need for rules precisely to limit the human propensities for self-aggrandizement. Natural law and Christian realism both assert that moral-political principles and institutions should rest on assessments of human nature and what will promote human flourishing in the light of that nature. Both recognize real, objectively valid moral-political principles - grounded ultimately in God the creator - but both can recognize also that these universal principles tend to be general in nature and that applying them to concrete contexts will produce varying specific rules. There remain many differences between natural-law and Christian-realist approaches, but often the differences complement each other, so that a full vision of Christian political ethics can benefit from both approaches. A combination of natural law and Christian realism suggests that a moral-political principle or institution is most solid when its justification rests on both the possibilities of human nature and on its negative tendencies. For example, the most powerful case for democracy, in Niebuhr's words, is that man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, and man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. I close the paper with a brief discussion of why the common project that Murray and Niebuhr shared remains of value in America today. Among other things, both Murray and Niebuhr articulated their arguments in terms that others could access and evaluate without having already adopted the premises of the Christian faith. Although I do not believe there is any general legal or moral obligation to present political arguments in such terms, nevertheless in a society characterized by religious disagreement, such arguments are more likely to be effective in political debate and lead to productive deliberation about political choices.


Hide contamination represents a main source of microbiological contamination of carcass surface. In order to reduce the potential health risks for the consumer the EU implemented measures in the context of the regulations no. 852/-, 853/- and 854/2004. These imply that only clean cattle are suitable for slaughter in order to eliminate the risk of meat contamination via hide or skin. Food business operators are responsible for ensuring that the requirements are met. One problem is, that the meaning of cleanliness is not defined clearly enough. Therefore some European states implemented regulations for the grading of hide cleanliness.
The main objective of the own analysis was to point out the correlation between the level of hide contamination and the total bacteria count of the surfaces of the carcasses. Therefore an ascending hide cleanliness classification system for beef cattle was developed which is based on two vertical hide regions, an area measure as well as aspects of cleanliness and humidity based on three major-classes for hide-cleanliness. In total 180 female bovine cattle were classified by their hide, digitally photographed from four perspectives (two standing and two stunned) as well as slaughtered and examined in a group of equal or very similar level of conta- mination on test days.
The sampling technique was based on stalked sponge swabs, which were pulled over four exactly defined locations of the freshly flayed carcass twice (front and back side) through a self-developed oblong template measuring 100 cm2. The four incre- mental samples per animal were pooled and tested for the hygiene indicators aerobic colony count as well as for Enterobacteriaceae count and Escherichia coli count.
Analyzing the data set statistically all logarithmized aerobic colony counts were normally distributed. Three ordinal scores for aerobic colony count were defined (Score1:0bis≤2log10 cm-2,Score2:2bis≤ 3log10 cm-2 andScore3:>3log10 cm-2) and tested in conjunction with the three major classes of hide contamination. The general finding was that the amount of animals with low total bacteria count (Score 1) decreased with higher major class. The amount of cattle with moderate
Summary 119
bacteria content (Score 2) increased slightly with the major class. The amount of animals with high total bacteria count (Score 3) increased substantially with the major class. It could be shown that major-class-I included a statistically significant lower amount of animals with high total bacteria count compared to major-class-II. The same held for the comparison of major-class-II and -III as well as of major- class-I and -III. E. coli and Enterobacteriaceae could be evidenced only on about a third of the carcasses and thus be analyzed in combination with the major-classes and the three Scores. Applying the reduced population respectively the same correlation could be confirmed approximately.
Overall the described correlations can be taken as indication that the considered colony counts rise with an increasing visual level of contamination. In case of development and implementation of a regulation system in Germany the application of a maximum of three ascending classes of hide contamination appears to be justifiable. Furthermore the terms "clean" and "cleanliness" should be complemented with attributes as "sufficient(ly)".


The aim of this paper is to examine and expand our focus on human capital capacity building as a foundation for poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa. The data showed significant differences in the human capital capacity building characteristics as measured by demographic, education and gender equality characteristics. In analyzing select human capital capacity building markers, the findings suggest that the educational indicators were among the strongest in explaining the variation in human development in Sub-Saharan Africa. The findings showed that gender inequality was a serious inhibitor of human development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Overall, the Sub-Saharan nations with the lowest level of poverty had some combination of a population with higher median years of school completed, a higher literacy rate, a lower population growth rate, a larger percent of the population that lived in an urban area, and it had a higher rate of students progressing to secondary education. The findings of this paper lends support to the belief that poverty reduction cannot be confined to enhancing and understanding capacity building as an institutional level activity or only as an economic phenomenon. Finally, the findings lend support to the adoption of an integrated policy approach that takes into consideration social development as well as economic development as a means of poverty reduction in SubSaharan Africa. The social component of the strategy would emphasize the collective human capital development of the population, while the economic component would employ an inclusive growth strategy.


This article seeks to use queer theory as a social theory and a critical challenge to normalcy all together to theorise old age in gender studies. Additionally the article discusses some implications of bringing old age into queer theory, where the able body, older person-s sexualities in relation to heteronormativity, to mention a few things, are central for future queer theory. The red thread of the article is how the anti-social turn in queer theory and embracing shame may be used to critique the prevailing discourses of old age as either -successful- where the older person should be active and independent or old age as decline and decay. Queer theoretical notions such as failure and the abject are used to theorise old age and ageing bodies, but the article also discusses how some flexible bodies can overcome failures given class, sexuality, ablebodiedness and race etc. To perform in the Butlerian sense an intelligible and desired self is dependent both on gender, sexuality and age and this is in effect relying on certain modes of temporality. Queer temporality may thus challenge what is considered normal and good ageing but also reveal the taken for grantedness of normative time. The article concludes that by thinking queer theory and old age together a resurrection of knowledges is made possible, outside the good, successful and respectable old age.


Pancreatic tumors are rare in children and adolescents. Here, we report the case of a 15-year-old boy who presented with a mixed acinar cell carcinoma/ductal adenocarcinoma with blastomatous components. He received multimodal treatment including various chemotherapy regimens and multistep surgery including liver transplantation. Introduction of FOLFIRINOX after relapse repeatedly achieved a durable metabolic and clinical response with good quality of life.


Abstract Using nationally representative data from nine countries, we document demographic and employment trends in Africa's workforce based on full-time labour equivalents (FTE). The FTE approach takes account of individuals' multiple jobs throughout the year and is therefore likely to give more accurate estimates of the pace of structural transformation. Since 2000, Africa has experienced a sharp decline in the share of its labour force in farming. Because of the seasonal nature of farming, the share of the labour force remaining in farming is substantially lower using the FTE approach than when examined in terms of individuals' primary sources of employment or total numbers of jobs. Using the FTE approach, the share of the labour force in farming ranges across the nine countries from 35 per cent in Ghana to 54 per cent in Rwanda. Employment in off-farm segments of agri-food systems is expanding rapidly in percentage terms, but in terms of absolute numbers, non-farm activities are by far the major source of employment outside of farming. Contrary to widespread perceptions, the mean age of adults engaged primarily in farming is not rising – in fact it is falling slightly in some countries and remains stable in most others. The pace at which the labour force is shifting out of agriculture is strongly and positively tied to the rate of lagged farm productivity growth. Given the unprecedented growth in the number of young Africans entering the labour market, an effective youth employment strategy in most African countries will rely on massive job expansion, which in turn will rely on the multiplier effects of agricultural productivity growth. Strategies that raise the returns to labour in farming therefore remain crucial for achieving rapid economic transformation and may constitute the core of effective youth employment strategies.


Federal and state regulatory agencies are increasingly making use of litigation as a means of regulation. In this book, three experts in regulatory law and theory offer a systematic analysis of the use of litigation to impose substantive regulatory measures, including a public choice-based analysis of why agencies choose to litigate in some circumstances. The book examines three major cases in which litigation was used to achieve regulatory ends: the EPA's suit against heavy duty diesel engine manufacturers; asbestos and silica dust litigation by private attorneys; and private and state lawsuits against cigarette manufacturers. The authors argue that litigation is an inappropriate means for establishing substantive regulatory provisions, and they conclude by suggesting a variety of reforms to help curb today's growing reliance on such practice.


This interactive template was created for HIBBs module developers or users of HIBBs in training activities as a tool to create a simple game for any content. Game adaptors can identify the content to be covered, create questions and answers for each gameboard block, and paste them into the game template. The game can be used in a classroom setting with teams of players competing against each other or it can be modified for use by an independent learner as an aid in reviewing material. Instructions for adapting the game: 1) Select the content to be learned from a Health Informatics textbook, class lecture, or other learning resource; 2) Create questions and answers for each block on the gameboard; 3) Have questions and answers reviewed by a content specialist; 4) Replace existing questions and answers by pasting your content into the game template.


This study analyses farmers' attitudes towards free trade and deregulated domestic product and input markets using a survey conducted in 1996 among 112 commercial farmers in KwaZulu-Natal. Most respondents were in favour of Iiberalised trade and deregulated domestic markets, but expected a decline in product prices, farm profits and land values. Logit analyses of farmers' personal and business characteristics that influence their attitudes towards free trade and deregulated domestic markets were conducted. Results indicate that improved information on risk: management practices and import tariff levels may help commercial farmers to adapt to a changing economic environment and reduce resistance to free trade.


The low level of representative power and political parties in Lithuanian public opinion inspired this analysis of political parties, as organizations using basic knowledge of management science. Understanding that voters are consumers of political party's activities result, programs for election campaigns are considered as a main product of political parties' activity basing on the most popular contemporary understanding of political party. Basing on the fundamentals of management science a strategy of state development and persons prepared to implement that strategy in representative and governmental institutions are considered as a more valuable product of party activities in the article. Acquiring the power to govern a state for long enough period, when more than half of citizens participating in elections are oriented towards short term goals is considered as a paradox of democracy. Creation and popularizing a philosophy of political party, forming a field of main values in the state's life, serving as a basis for strategy and short time election programs is considered as a mission of political parties in contemporary Lithuania enabling to overcome the paradox of democracy.


Conflict in multi-agent systems is ubiquitous. Research oft en focuses on the process of resolving conflicts between different agents. We call this the inter-agent conflict resolution process. However, in complex problem so lving agents the process of resolving conflicts with other agents i mpacts local problem solving as well as deals made with other agents. This leads to the need for an intra-agent conflict resolution process between the agent's coordinati on mechanism and its local controller. In situations in which c onflicts cannot be resolved to produce satisfactory solutio n paths for the agent, or a set of agents, it may be necessary to m ove the conflict resolution process to a higher level, a meta level, in which the agents negotiate to possibly revis e their (individual and/or joint) high-level objectives. I n this paper, we explore these different levels and their inte rdependence in the context of our research in multi-agent control and coordination.


ABSTRACT We have recently demonstrated that upregulation of the ATP binding cassette (ABC) transporter-encoding gene AFR1 in Cryptococcus neoformans is involved in the in vitro resistance to fluconazole of this yeast. In the present study, we investigated the role of AFR1 in the in vivo response to fluconazole in a mouse model of systemic cryptococcosis. Mice were infected with a wild-type fluconazole-susceptible strain of C. neoformans, strain BPY22; an afr1 mutant, BPY444, which displayed hypersusceptibility to fluconazole in vitro; or an AFR1-overexpressing strain, BPY445, which exhibited in vitro resistance to the drug. In each of the three groups, infected animals were randomly assigned to fluconazole treatment or untreated-control subgroups. As expected, fluconazole prolonged survival and reduced fungal tissue burdens (compared with no treatment) in BPY22- and BPY444-infected mice, whereas it had no significant effects in mice infected with BPY445. When the pathogenicities of these strains in mice were investigated, strain BPY445 was significantly more virulent than BPY22 following inhalational or intravenous inoculation, but mice infected with BPY444 survived significantly longer than BPY22-infected animals only when infection was acquired via the respiratory tract. In in vitro macrophage infection studies, strain BPY445 also displayed enhanced intracellular survival compared with strains BPY22 and BPY444, suggesting that its increased virulence may be due to its reduced vulnerability to the antimicrobial factors produced by phagocytic cells. These findings indicate that the upregulation of the AFR1 gene is an important factor in either determining the in vivo resistance to fluconazole or influencing the virulence of C. neoformans.


Extracellular tetraethylammonium (TEA) inhibits currents in Xenopus oocytes that have been injected with mRNAs encoding voltage-dependent potassium channels. Concentration-response curves were used to measure the affinity of TEA; this differed up to 700-fold among channels RBK1 (KD 0.3 mM), RGK5 (KD 11 mM), and RBK2 (KD greater than 200 mM). Studies in which chimeric channels were expressed localized TEA binding to the putative extracellular loop between trans-membrane domains S5 and S6. Site-directed mutagenesis of residues in this region identified the residue Tyr379 of RBK1 as a crucial determinant of TEA sensitivity; substitution of Tyr in the equivalent positions of RBK2 (Val381) and RGK5 (His401) made these channels as sensitive to TEA as RBK1. Nonionic forces are involved in TEA binding because (i) substitution of the Phe for Tyr379 in RBK1 increased its affinity, (ii) protonation of His401 in RGK5 selectively reduced its affinity, and (iii) the affinity of TEA was unaffected by changes in ionic strength. The results suggest an explanation for the marked differences in TEA sensitivity that have been observed among naturally occurring and cloned potassium channels and indicate that the amino acid corresponding to residue 379 in RBK1 lies within the external mouth of the ion channel.


Despite the incredible influx of sequencing data, pinpointing the gene variants responsible for the development of heterogeneous diseases remains a particularly hard task because the same phenotypic outcome (disease) can result from a myriad of combinations of different alterations across the genome. A promising avenue is to consider genome alterations within the context of pathways instead of genes because different alterations within any of several genes comprising the same pathway can have similar consequences with respect to disease development. Large-scale biological networks provide a helpful proxy for biological pathway knowledge as genes that participate in the same pathway tend to interact with each other and form modules within the larger network. In this dissertation, I introduce two novel methods that further our ability to computationally highlight potential disease-causing genes by examining disease genomes in the context of biological networks. First, in Chapter 2, I present a novel network-based approach which tackles cancer mutational heterogeneity by utilizing per-individual mutational profiles. I provide an intuitive formulation relying on balancing the size of a connected subgraph within the larger network with covering many patients. I describe a machine learning-like schema for selecting the value of the single required parameter and both an integer linear programming framework and a fast heuristic for optimizing the objective function. I demonstrate the outstanding performance of my method in identifying cancer-relevant genes, especially those mutated at very low rates. Next, in Chapter 3, I propose a general computational framework that uses prior knowledge of disease-associated genes to guide a network-based search for novel ones based upon newly acquired information. I use a graph diffusion kernel to spread the signal from the set of already known disease genes and then use it to bias a random walk originating from the newly implicated genes to move closer to the known ones. I demonstrate that integrating the two types of information is better than using iii either one of them alone. I show, in the context of cancer, that my method readily outperforms other network-based methods. Finally, I apply my approach to several complex diseases, thereby demonstrating its versatility in a broad range of settings.


In this paper, we embed the microeconomic decisions associated with investment under uncertainty, capacity utilization, and machine replacement in a general equilibrium model based on putty-clay technology. We show that the combination of log-normally distributed idiosyncratic productivity uncertainty and Leontief utilization choice yields an aggregate production function that is easily characterized in terms of hazard rates for the standard normal distribution. At low levels of idiosyncratic uncertainty, the short-run elasticity of supply is substantially lower than the elasticity of supply obtained from a fully-flexible Cobb-Douglas alternative. In the presence of irreversible factor proportions, an increase in idiosyncratic uncertainty about the productivity of an investment project typically reduces investment at the micro level, but it raises aggregate investment. Increases in uncertainty also have important dynamic implications, causing sustained increases in investment and hours and a medium-term expansion in the growth rate of labor productivity.


This contribution embraces a purely utilitarian view of European Union law in suggesting a viable way to enlarge the horizon of opportunities of the holders of the so called "non-citizen" status in the Republic of Latvia, which is reserved for some ethnic minorities in that country and does not amount to the possession of full Latvian citizenship. It is argued that the extension of EU citizenship to the holders of this status can be helpful in the context of an ethnically divided society. It is demonstrated that such an extension is legally feasible and is in line with the doctrine of continuity on which the statehood of the Latvian Republic rests, implying virtually no economic or political internal cost.


This paper explores the impact of Australia's migration laws on women migrants. It begins with some brief comments about record keeping and awareness of gender issues within different political administrations. It attempts a balanced account of the impact of immigration law and policy on women. It recounts positive gains that have been made for women migrants in terms of access to residency; social entitlements and particular measures taken to protect vulnerable populations of women migrants. It considers aspects of law and policy that have had obviously negative impacts – most notably the regime for granting temporary protection to certain asylum seekers; immigration detention; and "offshore" refugee processing. It then examines the gender impacts of law and policy that are less obvious, using skilled migration as a case study. These laws are interrogated for their propensity to impact differentially on women in ways that entrench gender roles.


The calculation of accurate reaction energies and barrier heights is essential in computational studies of reaction mechanisms and thermochemistry. To assess methods regarding their ability to predict these two properties, high-quality benchmark sets are required that comprise a reasonably large and diverse set of organic reactions. Due to the time-consuming nature of both locating transition states and computing accurate reference energies for reactions involving large molecules, previous benchmark sets have been limited in scope, the number of reactions considered, and the size of the reactant and product molecules. Recent advances in coupled-cluster theory, in particular local correlation methods like DLPNO-CCSD(T), now allow the calculation of reaction energies and barrier heights for relatively large systems. In this work, we present a comprehensive and diverse benchmark set of barrier heights and reaction energies based on DLPNO-CCSD(T)/CBS called BH9. BH9 comprises 449 chemical reactions belonging to nine types common in organic chemistry and biochemistry. We examine the accuracy of DLPNO-CCSD(T) vis-a-vis canonical CCSD(T) for a subset of BH9 and conclude that, although there is a penalty in using the DLPNO approximation, the reference data are accurate enough to serve as a benchmark for density functional theory (DFT) methods. We then present two applications of the BH9 set. First, we examine the performance of several density functional approximations commonly used in thermochemical and mechanistic studies. Second, we assess our basis set incompleteness potentials regarding their ability to mitigate basis set incompleteness errors. The number of data points, the diversity of the reactions considered, and the relatively large size of the reactant molecules make BH9 the most comprehensive thermochemical benchmark set to date and a useful tool for the development and assessment of computational methods.


Space structures nowadays are often designed to serve just one objective during their mission life, examples include truss structures that are used as support structures, solar sails for propulsion or antennas for communication. Each and every single one of these structures is optimized to serve just their distinct purpose and are more or less useless for the rest of the mission and therefore dead weight. By developing a smart structure that can change its shape and therefore adapt to different mission requirements in a single structure, the flexibility of the spacecraft can be increased by greatly decreasing the mass of the entire system. This paper will introduce such an adaptive structure called the Self-inflating Adaptive Membrane (SAM) concept which is being developed at the Advanced Space Concepts Laboratory of the University of Strathclyde. An idea presented in this paper is to adapt these basic changeable elements from nature's heliotropism. Heliotropism describes a movement of a plant towards the sun during a day; the movement is initiated by turgor pressure change between adjacent cells. The shape change of the global structure can be significant by adding up these local changes induced by local elements, for example the cell's length. To imitate the turgor pressure change between the motor cells in plants to space structures, piezoelectric micro pumps are added between two neighboring cells. A passive inflation technique is used for deploying the membrane at its destination in space. The trapped air in the spheres will inflate the spheres when subjected to vacuum, therefore no pump or secondary active deployment methods are needed. The paper will present the idea behind the adaption of nature's heliotropism principle to space structures. The feasibility of the residual air inflation method is verified by LS-DYNA simulations and prototype bench tests under vacuum conditions. Additionally, manufacturing techniques and folding patterns are presented to optimize the actual bench test structure and to minimize the required storage volume. It is shown that through a bio-inspired concept, a high ratio of adaptability of the membrane can be obtained. The paper concludes with the design of a technology demonstrator for a sounding rocket experiment to be launched in March 2013 from the Swedish launch side Esrange.


Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era. By Christopher B. Strain. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Pp. vii, 254. Acknowledgments, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95, cloth; $19.95, paper.) In Pure Fire, Christopher B. Strain examines how self-defense developed within the civil rights movement in the very years that nonviolent methods used by Martin Luther King, Jr. were becoming the dominant approach in the struggle for racial justice. Arguing that self-defense has been a crucial element in African-American history, Strain suggests that the 1954 Brown decision and the 1955 murder of Emmett Till instigated the rise of self-defense ideology as a key element of the civil rights movement. Interracial violence had been on the decline for decades, but the 1950s saw a renewed militancy among white southerners. In response, many black activists began openly espousing self-defense as a necessary means of confronting white violence. But, as Strain notes, whites perceived self-defense quite differently, viewing armed blacks as terrorist threats to civility. When whites heard the rhetoric of self-defense, they tended to respond with "fear and force" (p. 176). Strain skillfully traces the evolution of self-defense, from its antebellum incarnations to its ultimate collapse as a viable tactic by the 1970s. During the late 1950s, as Martin Luther King, Jr. publicly dismissed self-defense as reckless and unwieldy, other black voices emerged in support of it. The national black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier ran a five-part series in 1957 that directly challenged King's nonviolent approach, which the paper called a "diversionary tactic" (p. 50). National Association for the Advancement of Colored People local chapter leader Robert Williams, to whom Strain devotes a chapter, argued that blacks had to show a willingness to fight back on an individual level, that while Gandhian nonviolence might work for communal action such as the Montgomery bus boycott, it was useless for the solitary black facing white lynch mobs. Even Gandhi, he argued, had approved of self-defense when nonviolence was not feasible. A World War II veteran, Williams returned home to Monroe, North Carolina, determined to practice the egalitarian lifestyle he had encountered abroad. Eventually he promoted armed resistance against whites, found exile in Cuba, and became an early inspiration to Black Power advocates. Strain's study of Williams, however, yields little information that was not unearthed in Timothy B. Tyson's Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (1999). Nonetheless, Strain rightly notes Williams's significance in the movement, a fact reinforced by Rosa Parks' eulogy at the latter's 1996 funeral. …


In this paper, I describe an arts-based curricular project taught to ten White-identifying and two non-White-identifying pre-service art teachers in Fall of 2018. The curriculum used a cultural studies framework to examine Whiteness as both a hegemonic cultural construction and identity construct. As a means to expand an arts-based pedagogy and curriculum, I utilize film as a pedagogical tool, and the circuit of culture, as a framework to reveal the power inherent within various "moments" or processes of visualization culture. By using this framework, students analyzed, exposed and challenged White supremacist ideologies and were given a contemporary way to examine Whiteness and the power invested in its creation and how this investment impacts every part of their personal and professional lives. Three key cultural analyses of Whiteness are offered in this paper. In sum, I propose the necessity of development of Whiteness art education curricula in support of critical multicultural methods and give suggestions of next steps for art education.


Abstract A detailed checklist of the Rubiaceae (coffee family) occurring naturally on the islands of Bioko and Annobon (Equatorial Guinea, Gulf of Guinea) is presented, based on herbarium collections deposited in the herbaria of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and The Natural History Museum, London. The checklist comprises 58 genera and 147 species, including six new generic records and 26 new infrageneric records. The total number of native Rubiaceae species occurring in Bioko is 139; three entities do not have formal names and probably represent new taxa. In Annobon there are 12 native genera and 13 indigenous species of Rubiaceae. The conservation status of two endemic species is assessed using IUCN criteria and it is proposed that they are considered Vulnerable.