The Islamization of politics in Indonesia after 1998 presents an underexplored puzzle: why has there been a rise in the number of shari'a laws despite the electoral decline of Islamist parties? Michael Buehler presents an analysis of the conditions under which Islamist activists situated outside formal party politics may capture and exert influence in Muslim-majority countries facing democratization. His analysis shows that introducing competitive elections creates new pressures for entrenched elites to mobilize and structure the electorate, thereby opening up new opportunities for Islamist activists to influence politics. Buehler's analysis of changing state-religion relations in formerly authoritarian Islamic countries illuminates broader theoretical debates on Islamization in the context of democratization. This timely text is essential reading for students, scholars, and government analysts.


– The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) targeted substantial School Improvement Grants (SIGs) to the nation's " persistently lowest achieving " public schools (i.e., up to $2 million per school annually over 3 years) but required schools accepting these awards to implement a federally prescribed school-reform model. Schools that met the " lowest-achieving " and " lack of progress " thresholds within their state had prioritized eligibility for these SIG-funded interventions. Using data from California, this study leverages these two discontinuous eligibility rules to identify the effects of SIG-funded whole-school reforms. The results based on these " fuzzy " regression-discontinuity designs indicate that there were significant improvements in the test-based performance of schools on the " lowest-achieving " margin but not among schools on the " lack of progress " margin. Complementary panel-based estimates suggest that these improvements were largely concentrated among schools adopting the federal " turnaround " model, which compels more dramatic staff turnover.


This Essay responds to Lea Brilmayer and Dan Listwa's criticisms of the Draft Restatement (Third) of Conflict of Laws. We appreciate their engagement. As a general matter, we disagree about the nature and purpose of restatements. More specifically, we disagree about the history and aims of the Restatements of Conflict of Laws. Brilmayer and Listwa's main criticism— that the drafters of the Restatement (Third) are not authoritatively interpreting any single state's law and therefore can be only persuasive authority as to the content of a state's law—could apply to all restatements. But since this Draft Restatement, like other restatements, draws its rules from decided cases, the criticism makes little sense even on its own terms.


Multilayer neural networks trained with the back-propagation algorithm constitute the best example of a successful gradient based learning technique. Given an appropriate network architecture, gradient-based learning algorithms can be used to synthesize a complex decision surface that can classify high-dimensional patterns, such as handwritten characters, with minimal preprocessing. This paper reviews various methods applied to handwritten character recognition and compares them on a standard handwritten digit recognition task. Convolutional neural networks, which are specifically designed to deal with the variability of 2D shapes, are shown to outperform all other techniques. Real-life document recognition systems are composed of multiple modules including field extraction, segmentation recognition, and language modeling. A new learning paradigm, called graph transformer networks (GTN), allows such multimodule systems to be trained globally using gradient-based methods so as to minimize an overall performance measure. Two systems for online handwriting recognition are described. Experiments demonstrate the advantage of global training, and the flexibility of graph transformer networks. A graph transformer network for reading a bank cheque is also described. It uses convolutional neural network character recognizers combined with global training techniques to provide record accuracy on business and personal cheques. It is deployed commercially and reads several million cheques per day.


The necessary and sufficient condition for CSP noninterference security stated by the Ipurge Unwinding Theorem is expressed in terms of a pair of event lists varying over the set of process traces. This does not render it suitable for the subsequent application of rule induction in the case of a process defined inductively, since rule induction may rather be applied to a single variable ranging over an inductively defined set. Starting from the Ipurge Unwinding Theorem, this paper derives a necessary and sufficient condition for CSP noninterference security that involves a single event list varying over the set of process traces, and is thus suitable for rule induction; hence its name, Inductive Unwinding Theorem. Similarly to the Ipurge Unwinding Theorem, the new theorem only requires to consider individual accepted and refused events for each process trace, and applies to the general case of a possibly intransitive noninterference policy. Specific variants of this theorem are additionally proven for deterministic processes and trace set processes.


Sleep spindles promote the consolidation of motor skill memory in young adults. Older adults, however, exhibit impoverished sleep-dependent motor memory consolidation. The underlying pathophysiological mechanism(s) explaining why motor memory consolidation in older adults fails to benefit from sleep remains unclear. Here, we demonstrate that male and female older adults show impoverished overnight motor skill memory consolidation relative to young adults, with the extent of impairment being associated with the degree of reduced frontal fast sleep spindle density. The magnitude of the loss of frontal fast sleep spindles in older adults was predicted by the degree of reduced white matter integrity throughout multiple white matter tracts known to connect subcortical and cortical brain regions. We further demonstrate that the structural integrity of selective white matter fiber tracts, specifically within right posterior corona radiata, right tapetum, and bilateral corpus callosum, statistically moderates whether sleep spindles promoted overnight consolidation of motor skill memory. Therefore, white matter integrity within tracts known to connect cortical sensorimotor control regions dictates the functional influence of sleep spindles on motor skill memory consolidation in the elderly. The deterioration of white matter fiber tracts associated with human brain aging thus appears to be one pathophysiological mechanism influencing subcortical–cortical propagation of sleep spindles and their related memory benefits. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Numerous studies have shown that sleep spindle expression is reduced and sleep-dependent motor memory is impaired in older adults. However, the mechanisms underlying these alterations have remained unknown. The present study reveals that age-related degeneration of white matter within select fiber tracts is associated with reduced sleep spindles in older adults. We further demonstrate that, within these same fiber tracts, the degree of degeneration determines whether sleep spindles can promote motor memory consolidation. Therefore, white matter integrity in the human brain, more than age per se, determines the magnitude of decline in sleep spindles in later life and, with it, the success (or lack thereof) of sleep-dependent motor memory consolidation in older adults.


Abstract The traditional assumption of the state sovereignty norm has been that an international society of states will structure the international order to safeguard the interests of the state. The end of the Cold War era transformed international relations and led to a discussion on how states interacted with their populations. From the early 1990s, research on international relations, war and peace, and security studies identified the growing problem of failing states. Such states are increasingly unable to implement the core functions that define the sovereignty norms. This article explores the state-building process of Kosovo with a focus on the political road taken from independence in February 2008 to the challenges Kosovo faces today. Kosovo still has substantial issues to address regarding core state functions in the development of prosperity, popular representation and security.


Among the most important texts of Zen literature, the Lin-Chi lu details the insights and exploits of the great ninth century Chinese Zen master Lin-chi, one of the most highly regarded of the T'ang period masters. PEN Translation Prize-winner Burton Watson presents here an eloquent translation -- the first in the English language -- of this seminal classic, The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi. The work is an exacting depiction of Lin-chi's words and actions, describing the Zen master's life and teaching, and includes a number of his sermons. Because Lin-chi's school outlasted other forms of early Chinese Zen to become dominant throughout China to this day, this translation bears unique significance within the literature of this great Asian nation. With Watson's lucid introduction to the work, a glossary of terms, and notes to the text, The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi is a generously constructed and accessible model of translation that will stand as the definitive primary material on Lin-chi for many years to come.


Abstract Background: Patient satisfaction influences the outcomes of the physician-patient encounter. Patient satisfaction has become a significant health care outcome and a useful indicator of the quality of care. The aim of the study was to assess the level of satisfaction among Obafemi Awolowo University Health Centre attendees in relation to physician-patient interaction and ascertain the relationship between the different aspects of physician-patient interaction, patient satisfaction and adherence intent. Methods: Demographic information and information on patients' feelings about their doctors was collected from 300 consenting patients in a cross-sectional survey, using an adapted Medical Interview Satisfaction Scale self-administered questionnaire. Data were analysed with SPSS version 11. Logistic regression was conducted to identify the factors predicting patient satisfaction and adherence intent. Results: Of the 300 patients studied, 63.3% were generally satisfied with their physician-patient interaction. Nineteen per cent of patients were uncertain of their level of satisfaction. Patient satisfaction was positively associated with adherence intent. Patient confidence in the doctor and good communication skills and information provision on the part of the doctor predicted patient satisfaction, while patient confidence in the doctor and information provision by the doctor predicted adherence intent. Conclusions: A fifth of the study subjects were dissatisfied with their doctor-patient relationship. This study suggests the need for primary care physicians to be aware of the important place of interpersonal skills development in the application of medical knowledge and expertise in the provision of health care.


Children are the future of every country. They are presumed to be the backbone of every country. They have to enjoy their rights and should not be neglected and should not be suffered from the cruel and heartless society. Children happen to be the potential human resource of a country.so, providing an enabling environment to the children is the priority area in all national agenda. Children constitute the supreme assets of all the countries. The main motto of the country is to develop the national human resources. The population of children in India are more in number than the world. In 2011 census data states that 40% are children in India. The vulnerability of the children is thus very high in India. However, the incidence is higher among the groups like orphans, abandoned and destitute, missing and run away, abused, tortured and exploited children in India. The issues of these children are a multi-dimensional social problem and it is difficult to obtain an accurate and unambiguous picture of these children. Today the main problem is named as the psycho-social problems which lead to mental disorder, unhappiness and other mental problems. So, because of mental disorder and pitiable life these children such as the missing, runaway, abandoned and street children are the victims of many thing in our present society.So, the problems of these kind of children are the alarming issues in India. The general opinion of the public is that the runaway, destitute and abandoned children are involved in antisocial activities and they are the juvenile delinquents. The present study is an analysis of children staying in various orphan homes.


Educators deal with the many dynamic functions and applications of the human brain on a dally basis. The theoretical research of the biology and functionality of the human brain is on the rise, and educational publishers continue to support books and scholarly articles that promote the notion that "brain research" can and should be applied to classroom teaching. Key terms such as brain-differentiated learning, brain-compatible learning, brain-friendly learning, and brain-based teaching have been used to lure educators to adopt these theoretically supported teaching strategies. Much of the literature on brain research deals with explaining the memory systems of the brain, or more specifically how the brain works to retain and retrieve bits of information. The idea that applying this knowledge base to educational psychology to yield positive outcomes in the teaching and learning process sounds promising, however, there is a lack of empirical research conducted in K- 12 classrooms to support the positive results of applying brain research to teaching practices. So, the question arises- Have educators and proponents of brain research assumed all too quickly that brain-informed teaching strategies will yield consistent positive results? Our study offers empirical evidence which helps answer this question. This empirical study has investigated how information about human memory from the field of cognitive psychology can be applied specifically to teaching Spanish vocabulary in high school classrooms. Our interdisciplinary study brought together the fields of cognitive and educational psychology along with foreign language teaching in order to understand better how research on human memory can improve teaching vocabulary in high school Spanish classes. Literature Review Given the interdisciplinary nature of this study, we reviewed literature from several different fields to gain a comprehensive understanding of the issue at hand. Educational psychology, cognitive psychology, and foreign language teaching all intersect when considering the implications of the knowledge of human memory and its impact upon teaching vocabulary in high school Spanish classrooms. In the field of educational psychology, brain-based, brain-friendly, or brain-compatible teaching have become popular terms that are prominently noted in the literature and commonly included in programs of well attended teacher conferences. Understanding how the brain works and applying this information to teaching practices has become a popular phenomenon in education. Best-selling books and curriculum have saturated the book market to attract educators to purchase resources which will teach them how to apply information about the physiological and biological functions of the brain to enhance the teaching and learning process (Jossey-Bass, 2008; Tate, 2003; Sousa, 2003; Sousa, 2006; Jensen, 2000; Caine, et al., 2005). For example, Sprenger (2005) explained brain terms and extracted examples from her own teaching when she found successful learning outcomes after applying insights from the field of cognitive psychology. Though this type of anecdotal evidence of brain-based teaching methods is common throughout educational psychology texts, empirical studies which highlight particular teaching methods tested in K-12 classrooms are lacking. In fact, Smilkstein (2003,p. 124) asserted, "although educators have an understanding of how the brain learns, that alone is not enough to generate a methodology for developing and delivering curricula that trigger and sustain the brain's innate learning process as well as the learner's motivation and attention". The Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences Education (1999) also cautioned, "In considering which findings from brain research are relevant to human learning or, by extension, to education, one must be careful to avoid adopting faddish concepts that have not been demonstrated to be of value in classroom practice" (p. …


Causative processes behind variability in social and sexual equality appear to include resource availability and competition, variables that are also evidenced to drive life history evolution. Here we review social and sexual equality in terms of their relevance as social sequelae of life history strategies, and thus as integral to understanding the sociodemographic differences among human populations. We focus on two multivariate latent constructs: sexual inequality and economic inequality. The theoretical rationale for these constructs is provided, and the indicators for each are introduced. Our results, based on data for subnational regions of Italy, Spain and Mexico, indicate that egalitarianism is predicted by slower life history strategies, with residual direct effects of climatic variables also found to select for slower life histories. We discuss the implications of these findings to an understanding of human social biogeography.


This book introduces students to the groups of vertebrates and explores the anatomical evolution of vertebrates within the context of the functional interrelationships of organs and the changing environments to which vertebrates have adapted. The text contains all of the material taught in classic comparative anatomy courses, but integrates this material with current research in functional anatomy. This integration adds a new dimension to our understanding of structure and helps students underst ...


Gaps in educational achievement between high- and low-income children are growing. Administrative datasets maintained by states and districts lack information about income but do indicate whether a student is eligible for subsidized school meals. We leverage the longitudinal structure of these datasets to develop a new measure of persistent economic disadvantage. Half of 8th graders in Michigan are eligible for a subsidized meal, but just 14 percent have been eligible for subsidized meals in every grade since kindergarten. These children score 0.94 standard deviations below those never eligible for subsidies and 0.23 below those occasionally eligible. There is a negative, linear relationship between grades spent in economic disadvantage and 8th grade test scores. This is not an exposure effect: the relationship is almost identical in 3rd grade, before children have been differentially exposed to five more years of economic disadvantage. Survey data show that the number of years that a child will spend eligible for subsidized lunch is negatively correlated with her current household income. Years eligible for subsidized meals can therefore be used as a reasonable proxy for income. Our proposed measure can be used in evaluations to estimate heterogeneous effects, to improve value-added calculations, and to better target resources.


From the Publisher:
The rapid growth of electronic commerce, along with changes in information, computing, and communications, is having a profound effect on the United States economy. President Clinton recently directed the National Economic Council, in consultation with executive branch agencies, to analyze the economic implications of the Internet and electronic commerce domestically and internationally, and to consider new types of data collection and research that could be undertaken by public and private organizations.
This book contains work presented at a conference held by executive branch agencies in May 1999 at the Department of Commerce. The goals of the conference were to assess current research on the digital economy, to engage the private sector in developing the research that informs investment and policy decisions, and to promote better understanding of the growth and socioeconomic implications of information technology and electronic commerce. Aspects of the digital economy addressed include macroeconomic assessment, organizational change, small business, access, market structure and competition, and employment and the workforce.


Abstract More than 46 years of exploration in the Irish offshore has yielded modest commercial success. However, working petroleum systems have been proven in all the offshore basins. The pace of exploration has been controlled by: (a) data quality and technological advances; (b) geological understanding and plays; (c) fiscal and infrastructural environments; and (d) international conditions. Irish offshore exploration drilling started in the Celtic Sea basins in 1970 and the region has seen a recent renewal of exploration interest, stimulated by new and much improved seismic data. In the Atlantic margin basins west of Ireland, there has been a recent significant improvement in the understanding of the geological evolution and petroleum systems, especially in the hyperextended basins such as the Porcupine and Rockall basins. Here the major targets of current exploration are stratigraphic traps at Lower Cretaceous and Lower Cenozoic levels. The application of new and innovative seismic and other geophysical technologies in a number of the Irish offshore basins has led to significant enhancement in data quality and in resolving imaging challenges. Combined with recent geological learnings, they offer renewed hope for exploration success in the Irish offshore basins.


'Hello, I'm Stephen the Fry. Now time for the first outing of a brand, spanking new feature here on "The Incomplete and Utter History of Classic Music"...putting some unsuspecting figure in music under the spotlight.' In his "Incomplete & Utter History of Classical Music", Stephen Fry presents a potted and brilliantly rambling 700-year history of classical music and the world as we know it.Along this musical journey, he casually throws in references to pretty much whatever takes his fancy, from the Mongol invasion of Russia and Mr Khan (Genghis to his Friends), the founding of the MCC, the Black Death (which once again became the new black in England) to the heady revolutionary atmosphere of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" and the deep doo-doo that Louis XVI got into (or 'du-du' as the French would say). It's all here - Ambrose and early-English plainsong, Bach, Mozart (beloved of mobile phones everywhere), Beethoven, Debussy, Wagner (the old romantic), right up to the present day. Entertaining and brilliantly written, this is a pretty reckless romp of a history through classical music and much much more.


Digital media gain their cultural authority in part because of the perception that they function on mathematical principles. The relationship between digital images and their encoded files, and in other cases, between digital images and the algorithms that generate them as display, lends itself to a conviction that the image and the file are mutually interchangeable. This relationship posits a connection of identicality between the file and the image according to which the mathematical basis and the image seem to share similar claims to truth. Since the history of images within Western culture is fraught with charges of deception and illusion, the question arises whether the ontological condition of the digital image, its very existence and identity, challenges this tradition. Or, by contrast, does the material instantiation of images, in their display or output, challenge the truth claims of the mathematically based digital file?


Background and Aim: The prophylactic oral administration of vitamin K to newborns has markedly reduced the incidence of vitamin K deficiency (VKD); however, intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) is still one of the complications found in biliary atresia (BA) patients and is associated with VKD bleeding. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the incidence and long-term outcome of ICH in patients with BA who previously received prophylactic vitamin K during the neonatal period. Methods: Eighty-eight consecutive infants with BA were treated and followed up at Kyushu University Hospital from 1979 to 2009. The clinical records and imaging study results were retrospectively reviewed in the infants with BA who presented with ICH. Results: ICH occurred in 7.95% of patients with BA. The onset of ICH occurred at 47 to 76 days after birth, before the patients underwent surgery for BA (9–37 days after the onset of ICH). Coagulopathy was found upon admission in all of the cases with available data and improved after intravenous administration of vitamin K. A craniotomy was required in 2 cases before the surgery for BA. During the 22 to 278 months of follow-up, some neurologic sequelae persisted in 5 of 7 cases. Follow-up head computed tomography scans showed a low-density area in the left hemisphere in 5 cases. Conclusions: Although vitamin K prophylaxis had been given during the neonatal period, ICH-associated VKD bleeding was still found in 7.95% of patients with BA. Persistent neurologic sequelae were found in 5 of 7 cases, with low-density area in the left hemisphere.


We perform an econometric investigation of the contribution of pharmaceutical innovation to mortality reduction and growth in lifetime per capita income. In both of the periods studied (1970-80 and 1980-91), there is a highly significant positive relationship across diseases between the increase in mean age at death (which is closely related to life expectancy) and rates of introduction of new, priority' (as defined by the FDA) drugs. The estimates imply that in the absence of pharmaceutical innovation, there would have been no increase and perhaps even a small decrease in mean age at death, and that new drugs have increased life expectancy, and lifetime income, by about 0.75-1.0% per annum. The drug innovation measures are also strongly positively related to the reduction in life-years lost in both periods. Some of the more conservative estimates imply that a one-time R&D expenditure of about $15 billion subsequently saves 1.6 million life-years per year, whose annual value is about $27 billion. All age groups benefited from the arrival of new drugs in at least one of the two periods. Controlling for growth in inpatient and ambulatory care utilization either has no effect on the drug coefficient or significantly increases it.


This research is comparison study between convetional concept of CSR and Islamic concept. These two concepts, they are fundamental distinction, such in philosophy aspect and objective aspects. Conventional CSR generally on solving problem of poverty in addition to obtain the level of profit such as the trust of society. Whereas CSR responsibilities related to Islam between individual and social responsibilities of humanity. On basic of philosophy of CSR aspects of Islam in Quran and Sunnah, which deliver on the concept of relationship between institution and society or environment. This means the bond is stronger than conventional concept of CSR, which are only binding based on public confidence at Islamic Institution teaches that worship is not limited on the worship of mahdhah (hablumminallah), but other worship mahdhah also so due to considerations related to social worship (hablumminannas); This cue contained in God's Word QS. Al-Ma'un verses 1-7. Islam has the principle of accountability which is balanced in all shapes and spaces in scope. Between body and soul, between individuals and between individuals and the family, social and, between a community with other societys and finally CSR Islam far has nailai maslahah compared to conventional CSR.


This paper studies the effect of energy market integration (EMI) on foreign direct investment (FDI). EMIs diminish energy uncertainty and price volatility in the host country and affect FDI through two channels: first, by harmonizing energy prices and, second, by reducing price dispersion. FDI may, as a result, increase both within and outside the EMI area, through energy stability mechanisms and price mechanisms, respectively. An empirical application on a global dataset including bilateral FDI data, during 2003-2012, using the gravity equation, shows that the integration of Portugal and Spain's electricity market in 2007 increased the amount of FDI's participants. Additionally, a positive increase in FDI from neighboring countries (in this instance, France), albeit lower in magnitude, is observed.


Biopharmaceutical drug development is risky, lengthy, and expensive. Decisions in this delicate process are complicated by constraints on resources such as available capacity and uncertainties that include the risk of clinical failure. Hence, the impact of making sub-optimal decisions in this environment can be severe. Accordingly, this work explores the development of algorithms to support strategic drug development decisions and contains four results sections.
Firstly, a decision-support framework based on multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) is presented for assessing options when acquiring biopharmaceutical manufacturing capacity. An example case illustrates the use of this framework where a biopharmaceutical company is faced with options for acquiring commercial manufacturing capacity. The development portfolio consists of three monoclonal antibody drugs at varying stages of clinical development with varying levels of demand. Capacity acquisition options include building in-house capacity, outsourcing, and partnering in addition to some hybrids of these. Deterministic and stochastic analyses showed that building manufacturing capacity ranked highest for the scenario considered when accounting for both financial and operational metrics. Secondly, the development of a stochastic combinatorial multi-objective optimisation framework is presented which confronts the problem of handling the multitude of decisions and trade-offs when designing portfolio management strategies, which results in extremely large decision spaces. The framework is considerate of strategic decisions that include the portfolio composition, the scheduling of critical development and manufacturing activities, and the involvement of third parties for these activities. The framework simulates development and manufacturing alongside the wider commercial environment. Machine learning and evolutionary computation techniques are also harnessed to characterise the conditional and probabilistic structure of superior decisions and evolve strategies to multi-objective optimality. A case study is constructed to derive insight from the framework where results demonstrate that a variety of options exist for formulating nondominated strategies in the objective space considered, giving the manufacturer a range of pursuable options. The most preferred means for development across the set of optimised strategies is to fully integrate development and commercial activities in-house, however, alternatives include partnering during early stages of portfolio development and then coordinating outsourced and in-house activities for remaining drugs. Popular scheduling strategies tend to develop two drugs in close succession while spacing out the remaining drug development activities into longer time frames. Thirdly, this framework is expanded to explore the impact of the size of biopharmaceutical drug development portfolio and cash flow constraints on algorithmically formulated strategies. Illustrative examples suggest that naively applying strategies optimal for a particular size of portfolio to a portfolio of another size is inappropriate. Also, the size of the portfolio appears to have a larger impact on strategy than the magnitude of cash flow constraint. Fourthly and finally, the economics of biopharmaceutical manufacture are explored with the aim of developing equations that can estimate the cost of manufacturing for both monoclonal antibodies and antibody fragments using mammalian cell culture and bacterial fermentation respectively. The correlations, derived using multiple linear regression, allow the cost of goods to be estimated given the following inputs: the required annual output, fermentation titre, whole process yield, and the probability of achieving a successful batch.


We study the relaxation dynamics of a trapped polariton gas in the nonlinear regime. We excite the three lowest energy states of the system and observe the time evolution of the polariton density in the momentum space. At a low excitation power, the dynamics is characterized by dipole oscillations of constant amplitude. A damping of these oscillations is observed at a high excitation power. It is attributed to collisional relaxation within the coherent polariton gas. We investigate the dependence of this effect on the excitation power, polarization, and polariton excitonic content to highlight the role of polariton-polariton scattering. The experiments are described in the frame of a Gross-Pitaevskii mean-field theory. We find a good agreement between the theoretical simulations and the experimental observations. Analysis of the theoretical model reveals that multiple parametric scattering and final-state stimulation are responsible for the damping of the oscillations.


Ridgeway is a high-grade gold-copper porphyry deposit (54 Mt at 2.5 g/t Au and 0.77% Cu), related to an alkalic intrusive complex of monzonitic composition. The deposit occurs within the Cadia district of New South Wales, Australia, which consists of a cluster of four Late Ordovician gold-copper porphyry deposits and two
iron-copper-gold skarn deposits with a combined gold resource in excess of 574 metric tonnes (t). The deposits
lie on a 7-km-long, northwest-oriented corridor of alteration and mineralization, transverse to the axis of the
postulated volcanic arc.
Alteration and mineralization at Ridgeway are zoned around a vertically attenuated intrusive complex of
monzodioritic to quartz monzonitic composition. Distinct styles of veining and alteration are related to different
intrusive phases of the monzonite complex, with the intensity of alteration and grade of mineralization
decreasing from early- to late-mineral intrusions. Early-mineral intrusions are associated with intense actinolite-
magnetite-biotite (calc-potassic) alteration and up to four stages of high-grade quartz-magnetite-sulfide
veining. Bornite is the most abundant sulfide formed during early-stage alteration and correlates well with gold.
Moderate- to weak-intensity orthoclase-biotite plus or minus magnetite (potassic) alteration accompanies the inter- and late-mineral intrusions, this alteration being associated with chalcopyrite- and pyrite-rich quartz-orthoclase veins. Propylitic and sodic (albite-pyrite) alteration assemblages are peripheral to, and locally overprint, the potassic alteration. Phyllic alteration is restricted to the margins of late-stage faults.
The fluid inclusion assemblage comprises one and two salt-bearing brine inclusions, in addition to aqueous
liquid-vapor inclusions of low to moderate salinity. No low-density, vapor-rich inclusions are present, indicating
that the fluids from which the quartz veins precipitated did not enter the liquid-vapor field of the H2O-NaCl system.
The brine inclusions undergo final homogenization to liquid via halite dissolution. This phenomenon, in addition
to the absence of low-density vapor inclusions, suggests that the mineralizing fluids at Ridgeway were nonboiling
hypersaline brines that exsolved directly from the crystallizing magma. The presence of mineralized
aplitic vein dikes and comb quartz layering are interpreted to indicate that the early and transitional stages of
mineralization at Ridgeway formed at the transition between magmatic and hydrothermal conditions.


This article examines section 226-b of the New York Real Property law, enacted by the New York State Legislature in 1975. Enacted to give tenants in a dwelling having four or more residential units the right to sublease or assign their apartments, subject to the landlord's consent, it provides that the landlord must release the tenant from the lease if (s)he "unreasonably withholds consent for such sublease or assignment." The section thus gives tenants the right to remain in occupancy or to elect to be released from their leasehold obligations. However, some courts have interpreted this section to confer upon tenants a broad statutory right to sublease their apartments upon compliance with the statute's procedural notification requirements and the landlord's unreasonable withholding of consent. This Note discusses the legislative intent of section 226-b, specifically addressing whether it gives a residential tenant the right to execute a valid sublease without the landlord's consent if s/he complies with the statute's requirements. It analyzes the right to sublease under common law as compared to the statutory right to sublease under section 226-b, and contends that the tenant has the statutory remedies of terminating or remaining in occupancy, but not of subleasing without landlord approval.


Abstract Context: Practitioners of manipulative medicine have long sought to prove the intra- and interexaminer reliability of palpatory examinations in assessing somatic dysfunction. However, decades of research have yet to achieve the level of reproducibility needed to satisfy evidence-based criteria. Objectives: To examine the content validity of segmental motion evaluations using ultrasonographic measurements and to investigate the implication of these results for understanding the effects of an osteopathic manipulative treatment technique—high-velocity, low-amplitude (HVLA)—applied to somatic dysfunction in the lumbar spine. Methods: A repeated-measures design was used, with the ultrasonographer blinded to the findings for each participant. The study was divided into 2 phases: (1) palpatory and ultrasonographic examination with no treatment and (2) palpatory and ultrasonographic examination with HVLA treatment. During phase 1, measurements were taken of tissue depth corresponding to bony landmarks of the dysfunctional vertebrae. Dysfunction was identified by means of palpatory examination and captured in sequential (ie, test-retest) ultrasonographic images. Content validity of somatic dysfunction was addressed by comparing palpatory examination with ultrasonographic data. During phase 2, the same protocol for tissue depth measurements was applied to the pre- and posttreatment images for comparison. Results: Twelve young, healthy, asymptomatic students with no contraindications to HVLA treatment were recruited at Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences. The test-retest reliability, as determined by a Pearson correlation coefficient, was 0.997. For all participants, objectively identified side of dysfunction correlated with palpatory evaluation of segmental motion. A within-subjects analysis of variance was performed on the raw data, corrected for lumbar lordosis, showing statistical significance for main effect for side of measurement (P<.001) and interaction of side and time (P<.001), and showed no statistically significant effect for time (P=.259). Conclusion: Ultrasonography is a reliable instrument for the assessment of somatic dysfunction of the lumbar spine. The data also establish the content validity of palpatory examinations. In addition, this study provides the first objective evidence, to our knowledge, of the effect of a thrusting manipulative treatment on dysfunctional lumbar vertebrae.


This chapter aims to evaluate the application of knowledge management (KM) literature in supply chains. The underlying understanding derived from this evaluation can be used to devise a valid business strategy to encourage knowledge management practices in supply chains. The concept of a supply chain encompasses businesses organised around a common goal of delivering a product or service from the initial supplier to the end customers. In this respect, the importance of knowledge management within the boundaries of supply chain management has been iterated by many authors; some underline the strategic and tactical importance of knowledge management, whereas others focus on the advantages and tools used to create knowledge in supply chains. The difficulty of assessing knowledge management is twofold when considering supply chains–first, the underlying difficulty of locating the trail of knowledge creation in supply chains and secondly how this can be utilised to devise a business strategy. On close examination of the literature in this field, we can identify a salient need for the theoretical categorisation of existing theoretical frameworks of supply chain management (SCM) on KM-related practices. This chapter explicitly looks into three supply chains, namely learning chains, virtual chains and build-to-order supply chains, and the specific challenges that these create for knowledge management and devising a valid business strategy.


The purpose of our article is to examine how current East European migration to the UK has been racialized in immigration policy and tabloid journalism. The state's immigration policy, we argue, exhibits features of institutionalized racism that implicitly invokes shared whiteness as a basis of racialized inclusion. The tabloids, in contrast, tend toward cultural racism in their coverage of these migrations by explicitly invoking cultural difference as a basis of racialized exclusion. Our analysis focuses on two cohorts of migrants: Hungarians, representing the larger 2004 entrants, and Romanians, representing the smaller 2007 entrants. The processes of racialization we examine in this article reveal degrees of whiteness that give 'race' continued currency as an idiom for making sense of these migrations and the migrants that people them.


The rhythmic sedimentation of Cenomanian age in Southern England is most likely the result of orbital forcing (precession). The oxygen isotope signature and the foraminiferal assemblage from detailed (5cms), continuous samples through three of these rhythms show systematic variation with lithology. The marls yield cooler surface water palaeotemepratures with high benthonic diversities, low planktonic:benthonic ratios and the planktonic assemblage contains around 5–10% rotaliporids. The chalks yield warmer surface water palaeotemperatures with low benthonic diversities, high planktonic:benthonic ratios and the planktonic assemblage contains 1–4% rotaliporids. This indicates that the chalks represent enhanced surface water productivity induced by increased surface water palaeotemperature. Three groups (Tritaxia pyramidata Reuss, Gavelinella spp. and Lenticulina spp.) together form over 90% of the benthonic assemblage. Each >250μm assemblage exhibits a systematic variation in size with lithology. The mean sizes are smallest and the maximum sizes of the moving populations decrease in the middle of the chalks. This may be a consequence of three different factors, (a) during intervals of increased productivity (chalks) the benthonic foraminifera may be achieving gametogenesis at an enhanced rate due to the increased availability of food supplies, or (b) the increased productivity may cause dwarfism within the micro-benthos, or (c) the effects of current winnowing prior to burial. The relative merits of each of these possibilities are discussed.


Abstract. Dense point clouds can be nowadays considered the main product of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) photogrammetric processing and clouds registration is still a key aspect in case of blocks acquired apart. In the paper some overlapping datasets, acquired with a multispectral Parrot Sequoia camera above some rice fields, are analysed in a single block approach. Since the sensors is equipped with a navigation-grade sensor, the georeferencing information is affected by large errors and the so obtained dense point clouds are significantly far apart: to register them the Iterative Closes Point (ICP) technique is applied. ICP convergence is fundamentally based on the correct selection of the points to be coupled, and the paper proposes an innovative procedure in which a double density points subset is selected in relation to terrain characteristics. This approach reduces the complexity of the calculation and avoids that flat terrain parts, where most of the original points, are de-facto overweighed. Starting from the original dense cloud, eigenfeatures are extracted for each point and clustering is then performed to group them in two classes connected to terrain geometry, flat terrain or not; two metrics are adopted and compared for k-means clustering, Euclidean and City Block. Segmentation results are evaluated visually and by comparison with manually performed classification; ICP are then performed and the quality of registration is assessed too. The presented results show how the proposed procedure seem capable to register clouds even far apart with a good overall accuracy.


The dual labor market theory is one of the primary explanations for the gender differences in earnings. It shows that gender inequality and stereotypes lead to employment of men and women in different segments of the labor market characterized by various incomes. This theory is based on the hypothesis that such markets are divided into segments, which are divided by different rules of conduct for workers and employers. Differences also include production conditions, terms of employment, productivity of employees, and the characteristics of the workers' jobs. This labor division is related to employee characteristics such as gender, age, and race that define their work environment and lifestyle.


Hematospermia is a distressing disorder in sexually active men resulting in great concern to the patient. We report an unusual case of hematospermia with an atypical presentation, involving a 54-year-old man presented with acute urinary retention after sexual intercourse. Although the causes are widely known, arteriovenous malformation as the cause of this disorder has not much been reported in the literature. Transcatheter embolization of internal pudendal artery is a promising option for hematospermia caused by arterial fistula or bleeding.


Background —Diabetes mellitus and obesity, which confer an increased risk of sudden cardiac death, are associated with cardiomyocyte lipid accumulation and altered cardiac electric properties, manifested by prolongation of the QRS duration and QT interval. It is difficult to distinguish the contribution of cardiomyocyte lipid accumulation from the contribution of global metabolic defects to the increased incidence of sudden death and electric abnormalities. Methods and Results —In order to study the effects of metabolic abnormalities on arrhythmias without the complex systemic effects of diabetes mellitus and obesity, we studied transgenic mice with cardiac-specific overexpression of peroxisome proliferator–activated receptor (cid:1) 1 (PPAR (cid:1) 1) via the cardiac (cid:2) -myosin heavy-chain promoter. The PPAR (cid:1) transgenic mice develop abnormal accumulation of intracellular lipids and die as young adults before any significant reduction in systolic function. Using implantable ECG telemeters, we found that these mice have prolongation of the QRS and QT intervals and spontaneous ventricular arrhythmias, including polymorphic ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation. Isolated cardiomyocytes demonstrated prolonged action potential duration caused by reduced expression and function of the potassium channels responsible for repolarization. Short-term exposure to pioglitazone, a PPAR (cid:1) agonist, had no effect on mortality or rhythm in WT mice but further exacerbated the arrhythmic phenotype and increased the mortality in the PPAR (cid:1) transgenic mice. Conclusions —Our findings support an important link between PPAR (cid:1) activation, cardiomyocyte lipid accumulation, ion channel remodeling, and increased cardiac mortality. ( Circulation . 2011;124:2812-2821.) test with equal variances was used for comparisons of larger groups. A 2-tailed value of P (cid:3) 0.05 was considered statistically significant, except for ECG intervals and premature ventricular complexes (PVCs) burden where the Bonferroni correction was used for multiple comparisons. Linear regression analysis was performed using GraphPad Software. and ventricular fibrillation. Isolated cardiomyocytes demonstrated prolonged action potential duration caused by reduced potassium currents, which are responsible for repolarization. Short-term exposure to pioglitazone, a PPAR (cid:1) agonist, had no effect on mortality or rhythm in wild-type mice but further exacerbated the arrhythmic phenotype and increased mortality in the PPAR (cid:1) mice. Our findings support an important link between PPAR (cid:1) activation, cardiomyocyte lipid accumulation, ion channel remodeling, and increased cardiac mortality. This mouse model may help identify the molecular mechanisms leading to sudden death in diabetic and/or obese patients. with 0.3% H 2 O 2 to block endogenous peroxidase. Sections were incubated with rabbit polyclonal antibodies against Cx43 (1:200 dilution, Invitrogen Corp.) or non-immune rabbit polyclonal IgG at the same concentration, at 4˚C overnight. For DAB staining, after exposure to anti-rabbit swine antibody conjugated to biotin (1:500, DakoCytomation Denmark A/S, Glostrup, Denmark) for 1 hr in room temperature, the sections were treated with peroxidase-labeled ABC (VECTASATIN ABC Kit, Vector Laboratories, Inc., Burlingame, CA) and developed with DAB solution (ImmPACT DAB Peroxidase Substrate, Vector Laboratories, Inc.). After the reaction, the sections were counterstained with hematoxylin and observed by a light microscope. For immunofluorescent staining, after reaction with anti-rabbit donkey antibody conjugated to Alexa Fluor 488 (1:500, Invitrogen Corp.), the sections were counterstained with DAPI and observed by a fluorescent microscope. Tissues from two mice in each group (PPAR γ overexpression and WT littermates) were used. Slides were photographed with a digital camera. Signal intensity was quantified using ImageJ software (NIH).


In November 2012, the American Academy of Pediatrics reaffirmed the following publication: Diekema DS; American Academy of Pediatrics, Committee on Bioethics. Responding to parents who refuse immunization for their children. Pediatrics. 2005;115(5):1428–1431. The reaffirmation includes 1 change in wording, as follows: In the section "Responding to Parents Who Refuse Immunization for Their Children," sixth paragraph, the fifth sentence should read "In general, pediatricians should endeavor not to discharge patients from their practices solely because a parent refuses to immunize a child." This document is copyrighted and is property of the American Academy of Pediatrics and its Board of Directors. All authors have filed conflict of interest statements with the American Academy of Pediatrics. Any conflicts have been resolved through a process approved by the Board of Directors. The American Academy of Pediatrics has neither solicited nor accepted any commercial involvement in the development of the content of this publication.


Fiscal stimulus has been suggested as a tool to prevent excessive price declines by creating incentives to increase current demand. In 2008 and 2009 the U.S. Congress passed several housing tax credits to encourage activity in the residential real estate market. This paper examines the impact of the different housing tax credits on the demand for housing during the Great Recession. Using city level data we implement a differences - in - differences - in - differences methodology to isolate the impact of the tax credits on the price and quantity of housing transactions. We find that quantity was not perceptibly affected and that prices rose only temporarily. The results show no statistically significant difference in quantity sold during the credits from the periods before and after the credits. However, prices in affected housing markets rose $6,116 more than unaffected markets during the program. This price differential more than reverses, falling $6,470 after the expiration of the final tax credit program (which gave $6,500-8,000 to a broad class of homebuyers). The speed of these price movements is quick. The price rises during the first major tax credit, peaks during the subsequent and broadest credit, then drops back to pre-legislation levels within two months of the credit expiration.


Established in 2003, the Frente Parlamentar Evangélica no Congresso Nacional (National Evangelical Front in the National Congress) unites evangelical members of the Brazilian National Congress to pursue political agendas informed by their shared religious beliefs, as opposed to traditional party affiliation or political coalition. The rise in power and influence of the Evangelical Caucus is related to the transformation of Brazilian society from centuries of Catholic dominance to an early 21st century where around one-quarter of the population identifies as evangelical. Even though this group is known for its heterogeneity, as the Evangelical Caucus continues to increase in numbers and influence, the group may be able to better influence policymaking related to morality politics and views shared among evangelical Christian voters.


Approximately 86% of online display advertising space in the U.S. is bought and sold in real-time on electronic trading venues, which the industry calls "advertising exchanges." With intermediaries that route buy and sell orders, the structure of the ad market is similar to the structure of electronically traded financial markets. In advertising, a single company, Alphabet ("Google"), simultaneously operates the leading trading venue, as well as the leading intermediaries that buyers and sellers go through to trade. At the same time, Google itself is one of the largest sellers of ad space globally. This Paper explains how Google dominates advertising markets by engaging in conduct that lawmakers prohibit in other electronic trading markets: Google's exchange shares superior trading information and speed with the Google-owned intermediaries, Google steers buy and sell orders to its exchange and websites (Search & YouTube), and Google abuses its access to inside information. In the market for electronically traded equities, we require exchanges to provide traders with fair access to data and speed, we identify and manage intermediary conflicts of interest, and we require trading disclosures to help police the market. Because ads now trade on electronic trading venues too, should we borrow these three competition principles to protect the integrity of advertising?


We report the results of a numerical study of multimode behaviour of a Fabry-Perot laser. The model is based on travelling-wave equations for the slowly varying amplitudes of the counterpropagating waves in the cavity, coupled to equations for spatially dependent population inversion and polarization of a two-level active medium. Variations in the material variables on the scale of a wavelength are taken into account by means of an expansion in a Fourier series. Results are given for typical semiconductor laser parameters. Spatially distributed spontaneous emission noise and carrier diffusion are taken into account. The competing roles of spatial hole burning (SHE), spontaneous emission noise, and carrier diffusion in determining multimode behaviour are elucidated; with no carrier diffusion, spontaneous emission noise excites a large number of modes close to threshold, while SHE leads to a fixed number of significant lasing modes well above threshold. Carrier diffusion washes out the gratings in the material variables, and the resulting strengthening of the inter-mode coupling (cross-saturation) restores dominant single-mode emission well above threshold. We have also studied the effects of optical feedback and opportunities for mode selection with short external cavities; for an external cavity much shorter than the laser cavity length and a small field amplitude reflectivity coefficient, a single mode can be selected. For a large reflectivity coefficient, two groups of intracavity modes separated by the external cavity mode interspacing are selected. For an external cavity with a round trip time half that of the laser cavity, the laser can be forced with modest feedback to operate on two modes that are both quasiresonant with the external cavity. Mode selection is not found, even for weak feedback, when the external mode spacing is about 90% of the laser mode spacing.


This chapter discusses the concept of geopolitics and its role in formulating and implementing a grand strategy. It first provides an overview of the relationship between grand strategy and geography before explaining how the meanings of grand strategy and geopolitics evolved in response to changing world historical contexts. It then considers the reasons why geopolitics and grand strategy are linked to the politics of great powers and why these concepts are currently making a comeback. In particular, it examines the revival of geopolitical thinking after the Second World War and how geopolitical reasoning informed containment as a grand strategy during the cold war. It also takes a look at the pitfalls and problems associated with formulating a grand strategy, especially in today's complex international environment. Finally, it argues that there is a need to rethink geopolitics with the ultimate goal of balancing ends and means.


[1] A single-ultrafine-particle mass spectrometer was deployed for size-resolved ultrafine aerosol composition measurements during the winter of 2002–2003 in College Station, Texas. Three separate experiments were held between December and March with 6 week intervals. Almost 128,000 mass spectra, corresponding to particles with aerodynamic diameters between 30 and 300 nm, were collected and classified. Fifteen statistically significant classes were identified and are discussed in this paper. Nitrate, potassium, carbon, and silicon/silicon oxide were the most frequently observed ions. Nitrate was present in most of the particles, probably because of the agricultural activity in the vicinity of the sampling site. The nitrate detection frequency was found to be sensitive to the ambient temperature and relative humidity. Another particle class, identified as an amine, exhibited a strong relative humidity dependence, appearing only during periods of low relative humidity. There is evidence that some of the detected particles originated from the large urban centers and were coated with nitrate, sulfate, and organics during transport.


Within the current study, the process of adolescent burnout is considered in relation to perceived contributors, symptoms, consequences, and subsequently, effective and ineffective coping strategies. Through case studies, the researchers sought the burnout experiences of three competitive female gymnasts. Participants were selected based on scores obtained from Raedeke and Smith's (2001) Athlete Burnout Questionnaire. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the process, athlete data were considered in tandem with interviews from at least one parent and one coach. Transcribed data were segmented into meaning units, coded into a hierarchy of themes and verified by each respondent. Despite common trends among the participants, differences were also found in relation to symptoms, contributors, and the progression of the condition. Implications are provided for the athlete/parent/coach triad and also for sport psychologists.


We study Nesterov's accelerated gradient method with constant step-size and momentum parameters in the stochastic approximation setting (unbiased gradients with bounded variance) and the finite-sum setting (where randomness is due to sampling mini-batches). To build better insight into the behavior of Nesterov's method in stochastic settings, we focus throughout on objectives that are smooth, strongly-convex, and twice continuously differentiable. In the stochastic approximation setting, Nesterov's method converges to a neighborhood of the optimal point at the same accelerated rate as in the deterministic setting. Perhaps surprisingly, in the finite-sum setting, we prove that Nesterov's method may diverge with the usual choice of step-size and momentum, unless additional conditions on the problem related to conditioning and data coherence are satisfied. Our results shed light as to why Nesterov's method may fail to converge or achieve acceleration in the finite-sum setting.


Smart devices and surveillance in everyday life What does home mean to you? Relief as you walk in the door after a long day of work? Peace when you lie on the couch on a cosy Sunday afternoon? Perhaps above all it's the place where the outside world is left behind. But today the home has become a hybrid space, both public and private. In the information society, the network connects dwellings with the world, integrating the inside with the outside. The hybrid home is not merely a private sanctuary but a space invaded by digital newcomers - technology corporations who aggregate behavioural surplus value from ordinary people. Privacy, the thing we value most about home, is under threat.


This study factor analytically examined the convergence of three questionnaires used in previous research to measure night-sky related attitudes and behaviors in a sample of 72 college students. One factor emerged accounting for the majority of variance in responses. It was concluded that the single factor found across separate measures used in previous research appear to assess the higher-order construct known as noctcaelador. ********** Through factor analysis, previous research has indicated that a single latent construct accounts for the majority of the variance in students' night-sky watching attitudes, interests, and self-reported behaviors (Kelly, 2003; Kelly & Kelly, 2003). Kelly (2003) termed this construct noctcaelador and defined it as a psychological attachment to the night-sky. Previous studies examining individual differences correlates of one noctcaelador measure, the Noctcaelador Inventory (Kelly, 2004a), among student samples have found the construct to be related to habitually attaining less sleep (Kelly & Rose, 2005), artistic and investigative vocational interests (Kelly, 2005), openness to experience (Kelly, 2004b), and a preference for spending time outdoors (Kelly & Kelly, 2005). Outside of this limited knowledge, however, little is known about noctcaelador. Further knowledge of the topic might assist educators and researchers interested in better understanding students with an interest in night-sky related phenomena. One limitation of existing research on noctcaelador is the lack of evidence to substantiate the existence of the construct. In the absence of a theory for the construct, perhaps one method to assist in its substantiation is to empirically evaluate the convergence of measures used in previous studies. One measure used in previous research is the Noctcaelador inventory (NI; Kelly, 2004a). The NI is a psychometrically sound 10-item instrument developed from a pool of 33-items measuring different aspects of night-sky related psychological phenomena, i.e. behavior and attitudes. Earlier studies which found evidence of the existence of the noctcaelador construct (Kelly, 2003; Kelly & Kelly, 2003) used measures other than the NI which examined different aspects of night-sky watching. For instance, Kelly (2003) used five items primarily assessing night-sky watching attitudes. Kelly and Kelly (2003), on the other hand, used five items primarily assessing night-sky watching behaviors. Analyses in each study found that each of the three scales used to assess noctcaelador thus far have had unidimensional factor structures. Each study, however, factor analytically evaluated different measures assessing different dimensions of night-sky attitudes and behaviors. Thus, there is no existing evidence to indicate whether or not the measures used in these three studies tap the same construct. Such evidence could be important in providing support for the existence of a higher-order noctcaelador construct and the generalizability of previous studies using different measures. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to determine whether or not the measures used in each of these studies indeed assessed a single higher-order construct. Method After obtaining informed consent, 72 college students (M age = 28 years, SD = 8.3; 86% female; 89% White), enrolled in undergraduate psychology courses completed the 10-item Noctcaelador Inventory (NI; Kelly, 2004a; _ in this study = . …


Different aspects of decisions regarding parenthood are analysed. From an institutional perspective, reconciliation policies and features of the female labour market are studied, as well as the values and life views that may affect the decision to become a parent. From a micro-perspective, a multivariate model of proportional hazards is created from the 2004-2007 Spanish EU-SILC, where likelihood of pregnancy is analysed according to specific employment, personal, and family situations. Results are not conclusive, because the Hypothesis of Fertility Positive Turn was not confirmed directly for cases with a steadier work status. However, educational level does have a continuous effect, that is, women with university degrees, and especially employed ones, are more likely to become parents.


This paper proposes another realistic application of the economic order quantity EOQ model. Researchers have studied EOQ models that assume the received lot contains items that are perfect and imperfect. All models in the literature assume that the received lot goes through a 100% inspection to separate acceptable items from the non-acceptable items. This paper argues that 100% inspection is not always a cheap option to the buyer; instead, the received lot is subjected to an acceptance sampling plan before the lot can be accepted. In addition, for real life cases, destructive testing of items in the acceptance sample must be performed to test the acceptability of the items in the lot, as in packaged food and electrical wires. This paper will develop an EOQ model when items are of perfect and imperfect quality and a single acceptance sampling plan with destructive testing and inspection errors is adopted. It is assumed that when the lot is rejected, items in the rejected lot are sold at a secondary market at a reduced price and the buyer will place another order. It is also assumed that there are inspection errors.


Title of Dissertation / Thesis: EVALUATION OF THE ROLE OF BarA-UvrY TWO-COMPONENT SYSTEM IN ESCHERICHIA COLI. Isha Patel, Masters, 2004 Dissertation / Thesis Directed By: Assistant Professor, Dr. Suman Mukhopadhyay, Department of Veterinary and Medicine Pathogenic strains of Escherichia coli, a gram-negative bacterium, colonize the gastric mucosa and urinary tracts of birds, animals and human beings causing diseases like chronic gastritis, diarrhea, peptic ulceration, and urinary tract infections. Pathogenic strains cause a worldwide problem affecting 20% popuation in the U.S. The BarA-UvrY is a two-component system involved in bacterial adaptation and survival. The barA (bacterial adaptive response) gene, induced in uropathogenic E. coli upon contact with eukaryotic cell surface, plays a key role in attachment and colonizing urinary tract epithelia during infection and codes for the transmembrane sensor kinase, BarA. The UvrY protein, is a barA-regulated transcriptional modulator whose targets are yet to be determined. Determination of genes under regulation of BarA-UvrY signaling cascade under various stress conditions will help in better understanding the overall role of this pathway in metabolic adaptation and pathogenesis. Microarray work done in the laboratory shows that BarA-UvrY regulates several stress-response and membranetransport genes. One such gene identified from the microarray results, luxS, is involved in the detoxification of the S-adenosyl methionine in E. coli and produces a furanone, essential for cell density-dependent bacterial quorum sensing. LuxS is known to regulate virulence in E. coli. We chose to study the regulation of the luxS gene expression as it has not been studied in great detail. Using physiological approaches, we validated part of the microarray results. EVALUATION OF THE ROLE OF BarA-UvrY TWO-COMPONENT SYSTEM IN ESCHERICHIA COLI


Abstract Study design: Randomized, single blind, same subject crossover trial. Objectives: To compare the effects of two neurodynamic treatment doses on range of hip flexion (ROM HF) and electromyographic (EMG) activity of semitendinosus, at first onset of pain (P1). Methods: A total of 26 healthy participants without low back or leg pain received each treatment in a random order with at least 48 hours between sessions. Baseline ROM HF and EMG magnitude of semitendinosus at P1 were collected. Subjects then received either 361 or 362 minutes of oscillating end of range (grade IVz) straight leg raise (SLR) neurodynamic treatment and were re-assessed for baseline measures. Results: There was no significant difference between groups in EMG magnitude (P50.190) and ROM HF (P50.739) at P1. There was also no significant difference within groups in EMG magnitude at P1 (P50.182); however, there was a significant improvement in ROM HF at P1 in both groups compared to baseline readings (P50.000), with increases of 6.7u and 5.1u for the 361- and 362-minute groups, respectively. Conclusion: Findings indicate that 362 minutes of oscillating grade IVz SLR neurodynamic treatment has no additional benefit over 361 minute, on ROM HF or EMG magnitude of semitendinosus at P1. Using an oscillating SLR treatment may, however, help to increase pain-free ROM HF, although further studies are necessary to confirm this.


Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has proven to be an essential imaging modality for ophthalmology and is proving to be very important in neurology. OCT enables high resolution imaging of the retina, both at the optic nerve head and the macula. Macular retinal layer thicknesses provide useful diagnostic information and have been shown to correlate well with measures of disease severity in several diseases. Since manual segmentation of these layers is time consuming and prone to bias, automatic segmentation methods are critical for full utilization of this technology. In this work, we build a random forest classifier to segment eight retinal layers in macular cube images acquired by OCT. The random forest classifier learns the boundary pixels between layers, producing an accurate probability map for each boundary, which is then processed to finalize the boundaries. Using this algorithm, we can accurately segment the entire retina contained in the macular cube to an accuracy of at least 4.3 microns for any of the nine boundaries. Experiments were carried out on both healthy and multiple sclerosis subjects, with no difference in the accuracy of our algorithm found between the groups.


Metabolic acidosis is known to be associated with increased blood potassium and phosphorus concentrations but the influence of mineral versus nonmineral acids on these variables remains undefined. Therefore, we infused anesthetized mongrel dogs with 0.45% saline (controls), the mineral acids HCl and NH4Cl, and the nonmineral acids lactic, beta-hydroxybutyric and methyl malonic for 1-3 h. Administration of both mineral acids was associated with significant increases in plasma potassium. In contrast, infusion of the three monmineral acids did not result in increases in plasma potassium; in fact, the levels decreased initially in the majority of the dogs. Phosphorus concentrations were increased by lactic and beta-hydroxybutric acids, were unchanged by NH4Cl and HCl, and were decreased by methyl malonic acid. Although the mechanisms responsible for these changes remain to be elucidated, the findings indicate that short-duration infusion of mineral and nonmineral acids has substantially different effects on plasma concentrations of these predominantly intracellular ions.


The Kyrgyz Republic is one of the largest recipients of international remittances in the world; from a Balance of Payments measure of remittances, it ranked tenth in the world in 2008 in the ratio of remittances to GDP, a rapid increase from 30th place in 2004. Remittances can be used to maintain the household's standard of living by providing income to families with unemployed and underemployed adult members. Remittances can also be used to promote investment not only in businesses and communities but also in people. In this paper, we examine the role that remittances have played in the Kyrgyz Republic in promoting investments in children. Based on the capabilities approach to well-being initiated by Sen (2010), we look at the impact of remittances and domestic transfer payments primarily from internal migration on children's education and health. Our outcomes include enrollment in school and preschool, expenditures, stunting and wasting of preschool children, and health habits of older children. We use unique panel data from the Kyrgyz Republic for 2005-2008 and thus control for some of the biases inherent in cross-sectional studies of remittances and family outcomes. We find that overall remittances and domestic transfers have not promoted investments in the human capital of children. Specifically, preschool enrollments were higher in the urban north but secondary school enrollments were lower in other regions in remittance receiving households; expenditures were also negatively affected in the south and the mountain areas. These negative enrollment results were larger for girls than for boys. We also found evidence of stunting and wasting among young children and worse health habits among boys in remittance or transfer receiving households. In the long run, Kyrgyzstan needs human capital development for growth; our results suggest that remittances are not providing the boost needed in human capital to promote development in the future.


Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), the mathematical framework underlying most algorithms in Reinforcement Learning (RL), are often used in a way that wrongfully assumes that the state of an agent's environment does not change during action selection. As RL systems based on MDPs begin to find application in real-world safety critical situations, this mismatch between the assumptions underlying classical MDPs and the reality of real-time computation may lead to undesirable outcomes. In this paper, we introduce a new framework, in which states and actions evolve simultaneously and show how it is related to the classical MDP formulation. We analyze existing algorithms under the new real-time formulation and show why they are suboptimal when used in real-time. We then use those insights to create a new algorithm Real-Time Actor Critic (RTAC) that outperforms the existing state-of-the-art continuous control algorithm Soft Actor Critic both in real-time and non-real-time settings.


I. INTRODUCTION II. THE HAGUE CONVENTION III. THE HAGUE CONVENTION IN THE UNITED STATES A. Jurisdiction B. Burdens of Proof C. Emergency Injunctive Relief D. Venue, Costs, and Administrative Aspects IV. ABBOTT V. ABBOTT: MORE HAGUE CONVENTION CASES COMING TO U.S. COURTS? V. CONCLUSION I. INTRODUCTION The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (the "Hague Convention" or the "Convention") establishes the legal framework to prevent and remedy the growing phenomenon of trans-border abduction of children. (1) To achieve these goals, contracting states to the Convention undertake, among other things, to return wrongfully abducted children to their country of habitual residence. (2) Recent U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence suggests that, in the United States, relief under the Hague Convention may be more easily accessible to abducted children and their parents. This paper is divided into three sections. Section I introduces the legal framework of the Hague Convention. Section II provides an overview of the U.S. statute implementing the Hague Convention with an aim toward aiding practitioners in Hague cases. Section III reviews a recent Supreme Court decision and its impact on Hague Convention cases litigated in U.S. courts. II. THE HAGUE CONVENTION The Hague Convention was signed on October 25, 1980, as a result of the Fourteenth Session of the Hague Conference on Private International Law. (3) It has two primary objectives: (1) "to secure the prompt return of children wrongfully removed to or retained in any Contracting State," and (2) "to ensure that rights of custody and of access under the law of one Contracting State are effectively respected in the other Contracting States." (4) The Convention's forty-five articles establish the contracting states' various obligations. Among other things, the Convention seeks to safeguard "rights of custody" and "rights of access" over children wrongfully removed from one contracting state to another. (5) Under the Convention, '"rights of custody' shall include rights relating to the care of the person of the child," while '"rights of access shall include the right to take a child for a limited period of time to a place other than the child's habitual residence." (6) The removal or retention of a child is "wrongful" within the meaning of the Convention if (1) it is in breach of rights of custody (7) (2) under the law of the country where the child was habitually resident, (8) (3) those rights were being exercised at the time of removal, (9) and (4) the child is under the age of sixteen. (10) Articles 6 and 7 provide that each contracting state shall establish a "Central Authority" to assist with fulfilling the objectives of the Hague Convention. (11) In the United States, for example, the State Department's Office of Children's Issues serves as the central authority. (12) When a child is wrongfully removed or retained, the person who has rights of custody (frequently a so-called "left-behind parent") can apply to the central authority of the country where the child habitually resided for assistance in securing the return of the child. (13) Article 8 of the Convention specifies what information must be included in the application. (14) Upon receiving an application, the local central authority forwards it to the central authority of the country where the child is located. (15) Local organizations or attorneys may then be contacted to assist with initiating administrative or judicial proceedings to secure the return of the child. (16) Articles 8 to 20 of the Convention address issues related to the administrative and judicial procedures for the return of wrongfully removed children to their country of habitual residence. If a petitioner establishes that the removal of a child was wrongful within the meaning of the Convention, a competent authority (e. …


The purpose of this article is to report the findings of a national survey study of school counseling professionals to determine if higher ego development contributes to a lower degree of burnout. Additionally, this article provides current data relating to professional school counselors' (PSCs') levels of ego development, burnout, and burnout's three respective dimensions (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment). In addition, PSCs' feelings concerning the amount of occupational support they receive relative to these three dimensions of burnout are reported. PSCs experience high levels of stress because of multiple job demands, role ambiguity, large caseloads, and lack of clinical supervision (Lambie, 2002). Prolonged periods of stress, in turn, can produce burnout, leading to deterioration in the quality of service provided (Lambie, 2006; Maslach, 2003; Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001). Thus, counselor burnout appears to correlate with counselors' negative attitudes toward their clients (Ackerley, Burnell, Holder, & Kurdek, 1988). Clearly, the potential consequences of burnout are very serious for PSCs, students, peers, parents/guardians, and the school system at large (Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1996). Failure to address burnout in counselor preparation programs is similar to not addressing other ethical counseling issues, such as client suicide, violence, and abuse. All are costly to clients, counselors, and society, both in human and in financial terms. Counselor educators are in the position of teaching prospective counselors about burnout prior to their encountering the multiple stresses of the job. Indeed, counselor preparation programs and clinical supervisors have an ethical responsibility to inform counseling students and practicing clinicians about the burnout phenomenon and to work with students/supervisees to help them develop effective coping skills to manage the occupational stress inherent in counseling. Self-awareness and adaptivity are defenses against burnout, and ego development is an essential component in the development of an adaptive, self-aware counselor. For example, research has shown that counselors at more mature levels of ego functioning are better able to recognize that others may differ in their interpretations of interpersonal and social situations, while showing significantly higher levels of empathy (Carlozzi, Gaa, & Liberman, 1983). Additionally, counselors with higher ego levels are cognitively more capable of conceptualizing the complexity of situations and tend to use a reality-orientated coping style rather than a reality-distorting defense mechanism (Manners & Durkin, 2000). As a result, they accommodate to challenging experiences more easily, thereby reducing possible burnout. Counselor preparation programs and clinical supervisors can help promote ego development in their students/supervisees, thereby improving their cognitive and socioemotional coping abilities and better equipping them with the necessary qualities to cope with occupational stress. Specifically, research suggests that counselor educators can work to promote ego development of counseling students by structuring the educational environment to be one level higher than the student's current level of functioning (Manners & Durkin, 2002; Turiel, 1966). Attention to promoting psychological development and burnout prevention should be continuous throughout the counselor preparation program, beginning with introductory course work and continuing in practicum and internship experiences. * Ego Development Loevinger's (1976) developmental theory defines ego as the core component of one's personality, incorporating elements of cognitive, self, interpersonal, character, and moral development. The ego develops toward increasingly more sophisticated levels of meaning making, mastery, and integration. Ego development is a progressive differentiation between "subject" and "object," that is, the aspect of self one controls and the aspects one is controlled by (Blasi, 1998; Kegan, Lahey, & Souvaine, 1998). …


Context: Workforce surveillance efforts have long been called for in public health: the Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey (PH WINS) answers that call. Objective: To characterize the state of the governmental public health workforce among State Health Agency-Central Office (SHA-CO) staff across the United States. Design: The SHA leadership were contacted and invited to have their agency participate in PH WINS 2017 as a census-based fielding. Participating agencies provided staff lists, and staff were then directly invited by e-mail to participate in a Web-based survey. Pearson and Rao-Scott &khgr;2 analyses are employed in descriptive analyses. Balanced repeated replication weights account for design and nonresponse. Setting and Participants: SHA-CO staff. Main Outcome Measures: The PH WINS focuses on 4 primary domains: perceptions of workplace environment and job satisfaction, training needs, national trends, and demographics. In addition, measures of intent to leave and employee burnout are analyzed. Results: The state governmental public health workforce is primarily female (72%), non-Hispanic white (64%), and 46 years of age or older (59%). Nearly one-third (31%) of the workforce is older than 55 years, with 9% aged 30 years or younger. Overall, 74% of respondents indicated that they had at least a bachelor's degree, and 19% indicated having a public health degree of some kind. Seventy-nine percent of the respondents indicated that they were somewhat/very satisfied with their jobs. Approximately 47% of SHA-CO staff say that they are considering leaving or are planning to retire. With respect to training needs, the largest overall gaps for the state health agency workforce were observed in budget and financial management, systems and strategic thinking, and developing a vision for a healthy community. Conclusions: PH WINS represents the first nationally representative survey of governmental public health staff in the United States. It holds potential for wide usage from novel workforce research to identifying and helping address practice-based needs.


The four plays in this volume, written late in Ibsen's career as a dramatist, move away from his earlier preoccupation with people at odds with society to instead explore the inward struggle with their own thoughts, feelings and dreams. "The Master Builder" (1892) depicts a powerful man whose illusions collapse in the face of a young woman's courageous common sense. In "Rosmersholm" (1886), an idealist is forced to question his beliefs and confront terrible truths about the past, while "Little Eyolf" (1894) portrays a man's self-deception, which brings both tragic repercussions for his family and new hope for their future. And in "John Gabriel Borkman" (1896), a dying woman returns to reclaim the affections and loyalty of her nephew, resulting in a bitter struggle with her sister.


This chapter examines the challenges that need to be addressed before the promise of informed consent can be realized. It begins by tracing the evolution of physicians' duty to secure a patient's informed consent before turning to two seminal cases that established what physicians must disclose to patients to satisfy the duty of informed consent: Culbertson v. Mernitz and Canterbury v. Spence. In particular, it considers two competing standards for determining the scope of disclosure: the professional or "reasonable physician" standard and the patient-centered or "reasonable patient" standard. It also explores the application of duties to secure informed consent to medical research, along with criticisms against the duty to secure informed consent. Finally, it describes the efforts of state legislatures to standardize disclosure to patients so as to reduce the burden on and legal risk to physicians without compromising the right of patients to receive needed information.


One of the core promises of blockchain technology is that of enabling trustworthy data dissemination in a trustless environment. What current blockchain systems deliver, however, is slow dissemination of public data, rendering blockchain technology unusable in settings where latency, transaction capacity or data confidentiality is important. In this thesis, we focus on providing solutions on two of the most pressing problems blockchain technology currently faces: scalability and data confidentiality. To address the scalability issue, we present OMNILEDGER, a novel scale-out distributed ledger that preserves long-term security under permissionless operation. It ensures security and correctness by using a bias-resistant public-randomness protocol for choosing large, statistically representative shards that process transactions, and by introducing an efficient cross-shard commit protocol that atomically handles transactions affecting multiple shards. To enable the secure sharing of confidential data we present CALYPSO, the first fully decentralized auditable access-control framework for secure blockchain-based data sharing which builds upon two abstractions. First, on-chain secrets enable collective management of (verifiably shared) secrets under a Byzantine adversary where an access-control blockchain enforces user-specific access rules and a secret-management cothority administers encrypted data. Second, skipchain-based identity and access management enables efficient administration of dynamic, sovereign identities and access policies and, in particular, permits clients to maintain long-term relationships with respect to the evolving user identities thanks to the trust-delegating forward links of skipchains. In order to build OMNILEDGER and CALYPSO, we first build a set of tools for efficient decentralization, which are presented in Part II of this dissertation. These tools can be used in decentralized and distributed systems to achieve (1) scalable consensus (BYZCOIN), (2) biasresistant distributed randomness creations (RANDHOUND), and (3) relationship-keeping between independently updating communication endpoints (SKIPPER). Although we use these tools in the scope of this thesis, they can be (and already have been) used in a far wider scope.


On January 26, 2009, the nation's second set of live-born octuplets was delivered. The public fascination with this event quickly turned ugly when the media revealed that the mother was thirty-three year-old Nadya Suleman, who is single, unemployed, and already caring for six children under the age of eight. The cultural backlash against Suleman has focused on three separate issues. The first revolves around Suleman herself, and her ability as a single, unemployed mother to parent fourteen young children successfully. A second set of concerns revolves around the medical procedures at her fertility clinic. How could the clinic agree to implant a woman under the age of thirty-five with at least six embryos? A final set of issues concerns more fundamental questions about screening parents. How could a clinic provide a single woman with six children with treatment that could double the number of children she has? As a result, commentators and legislators are calling for new, more restrictive regulation of the fertility industry. We support some of these initiatives, specifically more meaningful limits on the number of embryos that may be transferred in any single IVF procedure. But we are far more troubled by another set of proposals: some commentators are now urging the imposition of restrictions on which individuals may receive fertility treatment. Under this theory, women with a certain number of children, or with limited financial resources, should be precluded from receiving further treatment. Our conclusion here differs from our position about regulating the medical procedures themselves: as we explain, neither fertility clinics nor the state should be in the business of restricting access to reproductive technology.


The modern physiological optics introduces the notions related to the conditions of fusion of binocular images by the concept of correspondence, due to Christiaan Huygens (1704), and by an experiment attributed to Christoph Scheiner (1619). The conceptualization of this experiment dates, in fact, back to Ptolemy (90-168) and Ibn al-Haytham (d. after 1040). The present paper surveys Ibn al-Haytham's knowledge about the mechanisms of binocular vision. The article subsequently explains why Ibn al-Haytham, a mathematician, but here an experimenter, did not give the circular figure of the theoretical horopter, construction due to Gerhard Vieth (1818) and Johannes Müller (1826). But, on the other hand, it is clear that Ibn al-Haytham's experimental study puts in place the notion of corresponding points, the cases of homonymous and cross diplopia, and even prepares the discovery of Panum area.


The poliovirus was supposed to be gone by now—by 2000, in fact—assigned to the dustbin of history, like smallpox, the only human pathogen ever eradicated. But the poliovirus did not cooperate, for reasons both social and scientific. Since 1988, global polio cases have dropped more than 99%, but the virus is hanging on in some of the most troubled corners of the world, like Nigeria and Pakistan, where poverty and violence make it hard to vaccinate all the kids. Now, a new study in Science and a related report published online on 11 July in The Lancet suggest that an old vaccine, used in a new way, may help break the impasse. Jonas Salk9s inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) has been widely used in wealthy countries, but it was sidelined in the global polio eradication initiative because of its cost and the challenge of delivering an injectable vaccine. The new studies show that, in children who have already received multiple doses of the oral polio vaccine (OPV), adding a shot of IPV is better at boosting immunity than another dose of OPV alone. And that suggests an expanded role for IPV in the global polio program, not just in routine immunization but in mass vaccination campaigns to accelerate eradication of the virus. IPV is still expensive and difficult to use, and OPV remains the vaccine of choice in the eradication program. But in some of the most challenging settings, where the virus in entrenched and conflict limits access to children, the new work suggests that using IPV and OPV together may be just what is needed to finish the job.


Courts have always been the final repository of hope for parents and students who feel that their schools are consigning them to second-class citizenship. In the United States, no modern educational injustice has a longer or more abusive history than racial segregation, and its effective redress has proven all but impossible without occasional judicial intervention. Now, concerned parents are finding new legal avenues towards desegregating their schools, relying on state courts and state constitutions. But there are warning signs that those courts may, for the first time ever, decide that claims of racial segregation fall outside the purview of the judicial system.
Over several decades, education advocates have developed "educational adequacy" lawsuits as a vehicle for reforms to education. While the claims in these suits vary, they all share a basic structure. Educational adequacy lawsuits assert that a state's constitution has created either a legislative obligation to provide an education with particular characteristics, or a fundamental right to education. Plaintiffs then allege that some defect in a state's K-12 school system has resulted in a failure to meet those requirements, or else violated that fundamental right. In doing so, plaintiffs seek to override the legislatively-developed educational system in order to correct the inequity.
Most often, the asserted defect is funding inequality or insufficiency – a state school funding formula that prevents the creation of constitutionally adequate schools in some districts. But other claims have proven viable as well.
Of particular note are segregation claims. Segregation, particularly racial segregation, is the grandparent of all educational inequality in the United States. As long as parents have been fighting for fairer schools, segregation has been at the heart of those fights. Although few in number, educational adequacy segregation lawsuits stand out. They're a novel mechanism for attacking a morally and politically evocative problem – a problem against which previous legal remedies have at times fallen short.
However, educational adequacy lawsuits have met resistance, and segregation claims are no exception. In recent years, there have been indications that some courts have come to see the education system as a policy consideration for the legislature, resulting in education clause suits' dismissal under the principles of justiciability.
This article addresses the intersection of justiciability, education clause claims, and segregation. It will argue that while education clause claims are often justiciable, this is particularly true when the harm being alleged is racial segregation.
Part I provides background on the historic roots of education policy and educational inequality. Part II describes historical efforts to secure integrated and equitable education from federal and state courts. Part III summarizes the doctrine of justiciability, and analyzes cases in which it has been held to prevent education clause claims in state courts. Part IV shows how the harms of segregation form a special case that supports the justiciability of education clause claims.


A 63-year-old man was referred to the stroke unit after waking with an isolated right-sided lower motor neurone facial palsy. MR brain imaging was reported as normal. He was diagnosed with Bell's palsy and discharged home with a short course of oral prednisolone.

Three weeks later, he was readmitted with additional left-sided facial weakness, double vision, mild bilateral leg weakness and associated distal numbness. Neurological examination showed weakness of right eye abduction, bilateral lower motor neurone facial nerve palsies and mild generalised lower limb weakness with reduced or absent reflexes. Upper limb motor function and reflexes were normal. Peripheral sensory testing showed a high sock distribution of reduced pinprick sensation with additional involvement in the distribution of the right ulnar nerve. Other than abdominal bloating, systemic examination was normal.

He had a history of late-onset hypogonadotropic hypogonadism with low serum testosterone concentration, diagnosed 7 years previously (MR brain imaging at the time was normal) and hypothyroidism. He was taking replacement therapy for both.

### Question 1

What is the differential diagnosis for bilateral lower motor neurone facial nerve palsy?

Unilateral facial nerve palsy is common with an incidence of around 25 per 100 000.1 The most common cause is Bell's palsy (idiopathic facial paralysis), accounting for around 65% of cases. This has a typical presentation of acute, unilateral lower motor neurone facial palsy, often associated with mild postauricular pain and sometimes with other features of facial nerve dysfunction, such as altered taste and hyperacusis, that should improve within 4 weeks. This has been termed 'Bell's palsy syndrome'.2 Features outwith this typical presentation should raise concern and lead to consideration of alternative diagnoses. In particular, simultaneous bilateral facial nerve palsy, as in this case, is rare, occurring in less than 1% of cases of facial weakness, and should always prompt a search for …