Every day, we use our sensory organs to perceive the environment around us. However, our perception not only depends on sensory information, but also on information already present in our brains, i.e. prior knowledge acquired by previous experience. The idea that prior knowledge is required for efficient perception goes back to Hermann von Helmholtz (1867). He raised the hypothesis that perception is a knowledge-driven inference process, in which prior knowledge allows to infer the (uncertain) causes of our sensory inputs. According to the currently very prominent "predictive coding theory" (e. g. Rao and Ballard, 1999; Friston, 2005, 2010; Hawkins and Blakeslee, 2005; Clark, 2012; Hohwy, 2013) this inference process is realized in our brains by using prior knowledge to build internal predictions for incoming information.
Despite the increasing popularity of predictive coding theory in the last decade (see Clark, 2012 and comments to his article), previous research in the field has left out several important aspects: 1. The neural correlates of the use of prior knowledge are still widely unexplored; 2. Neurophysiological evidence for the neural implementation of predictive coding is limited and 3. Assumption-free approaches to study predictive coding mechanism are missing.
In the present work, I try to fill these gaps using three studies with magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings in human participants:
Study 1 (n = 48) investigates how prior knowledge from life-long experience influences perception. The results demonstrate that prediction errors induced by the violation of predictions based on life-long experience with faces are reflected in increased high-frequency gamma band activity (> 68 Hz).
For studies 2 and 3, neurophysiological analysis is combined with information-theoretic analysis methods. These allow investigating the neural correlates of predictive coding with only few prior assumptions. In particular, the information-theoretic measure active information storage (AIS; Lizier et al., 2012; Wibral et al., 2014) can quantify how much information is maintained in neural activity (predictable information). I use AIS in order to study the neural correlates of activated prior knowledge in study 2 and 3.
Study 2 (n = 52) assesses how prior knowledge is pre-activated in task relevant states to become usable for predictions. I find that pre-activation of prior knowledge for predictions about faces increases alpha and beta band related predictable information as measured by AIS in content specific brain areas.
Study 3 (n patients = 19; n controls = 19) explores whether predictive coding related mechanism are impaired in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The results show that alpha and beta band related predictable information is reduced in the brain of ASD patients, in particular in the posterior part of the default mode network. These findings indicate reduced use or precision of prior knowledge in ASD.
In summary, the results presented in the present work illustrate the neural correlates of the use of prior knowledge in the predictive coding framework. They provide neurophysiological evidence for the link of prediction errors and fast neural activity (study 1, gamma band) as well as predictions and slower neural activity (study 2 and 3, alpha and beta band). These findings are in line with a theoretical proposal for the neural implementation of predictive coding theory (Bastos et al., 2012). Further, by application of AIS analysis (study 2 and 3) the present work introduces the largely assumption-free usage of information-theoretic measures to study the neural correlates of predictive coding in the human brain. In future, analysis of predictable information as measured by AIS may be applied to a broad variety of experiments studying predictive coding and also for research on neuropsychiatric disorders as has been demonstrated for ASD.


The presence of spiders in terrestrial ecosystems has been studied extensively. Little is known, however, about the role of spiders in aquatic ecosystems, especially wetlands. The purpose of this study was to obtain a preliminary understanding of the spider community found in a local wetland, Paint Creek. Aerial and ground samples were collected along a 50-meter transect in a dense stand of native Typha angustifolia. Samples were taken monthly from May to September, and were analyzed for both species composition and plant biomass. Initial findings indicate that spider communities in wetlands are highly variable. Ground samples yielded the largest number of individuals, high plant biomass yielded high species composition, and all variables changed with season. Overall, the family Lycosidae exhibited the highest abundance, followed by Clubionidae. Unexpectedly, the family Tetragnathidae exhibited the least number of individuals collected over the five month period. Continued sampling is needed to further understand the complex dynamics of spider communities in wetland habitats. Degree Type Open Access Senior Honors Thesis


Wetlands perform many essential ecosystem services—carbon storage, flood control, maintenance of biodiversity, fish production, and aquifer recharge, among others—services that have increasingly important global consequences. Like biodiversity hotspots and frontier forests, the world's largest wetlands are now mapped and described by an international team of scientists, highlighting their conservation importance at the global scale. We explore current understanding of some ecosystem services wetlands provide. We selected four of these wetlands (the largest peatland, West Siberian Lowland; the largest floodplain, Amazon River Basin; the least-known wetland, Congo River Basin; and the most heavily developed wetland, Mississippi River Basin), and we illustrate their diversity, emphasizing values and lessons for thinking big in terms of conservation goals. Recognizing the global significance of these wetlands is an important first step toward forging global conservation solutions. Each of the world's largest wetlands requires a basinwide sustainable management strategy built on new institutional frameworks—at international, national, and regional levels—to ensure provision of their vital services.


"Smart Ball" follows Major League Baseball's history as a sport, a domestic monopoly, a neocolonial power, and an international business. MLB's challenge has been to market its popular mythology as the national pastime with pastoral, populist roots while addressing the management challenges of competing with other sports and diversions in a burgeoning global economy. Baseball researcher Robert F. Lewis II argues that MLB for years abused its legal insulation and monopoly status through arrogant treatment of its fans and players and static management of its business. As its privileged position eroded eroded in the face of increased competition from other sports and union resistance, it awakened to its perilous predicament and began aggressively courting athletes and fans at home and abroad. Using a detailed marketing analysis and applying the principles of a "smart power" model, the author assesses MLB's progression as a global business brand that continues to appeal to a consumer's sense of an idyllic past in the midst of a fast-paced, and often violent, present.


Importance The etiology of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is poorly understood, but prior studies suggest associations with airborne pollutants. Objective To evaluate the association between prenatal exposures to airborne pollutants and ASD in a large population-based cohort. Design, Setting, and Participants This population-based cohort encompassed nearly all births in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, from 2004 through 2009, with follow-up through 2014. Children were diagnosed with ASD using a standardized assessment with the Autism Diagnostic Interview–Revised and Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule. Monthly mean exposures to particulate matter with a diameter less than 2.5 µm (PM2.5), nitric oxide (NO), and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) at the maternal residence during pregnancy were estimated with temporally adjusted, high-resolution land use regression models. The association between prenatal air pollution exposures and the odds of developing ASD was evaluated using logistic regression adjusted for child sex, birth month, birth year, maternal age, maternal birthplace, and neighborhood-level urbanicity and income band. Data analysis occurred from June 2016 to May 2018. Exposures Mean monthly concentrations of ambient PM2.5, NO, and NO2 at the maternal residence during pregnancy, calculated retrospectively using temporally adjusted, high-resolution land use regression models. Main Outcomes and Measures Autism spectrum disorder diagnoses based on standardized assessment of the Autism Diagnostic Interview–Revised and Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule. The hypothesis being tested was formulated during data collection. Results In a cohort of 132 256 births, 1307 children (1.0%) were diagnosed with ASD by the age of 5 years. The final sample size for the PM2.5-adjusted model was 129 439 children, and for NO and NO2, it was 129 436 children; of these, 1276 (1.0%) were diagnosed with ASD. Adjusted odds ratios for ASD per interquartile range (IQR) were not significant for exposure to PM2.5 during pregnancy (1.04 [95% CI, 0.98-1.10] per 1.5 &mgr;g/m3 increase [IQR] in PM2.5) or NO2 (1.06 [95% CI, 0.99-1.12] per 4.8 ppb [IQR] increase in NO2) but the odds ratio was significant for NO (1.07 [95% CI, 1.01-1.13] per 10.7 ppb [IQR] increase in NO). Odds ratios for male children were 1.04 (95% CI, 0.98-1.10) for PM2.5; 1.09 (95% CI, 1.02-1.15) for NO; and 1.07 (95% CI, 1.00-1.13) for NO2. For female children, they were for 1.03 (95% CI, 0.90-1.18) for PM2.5; 0.98 (95% CI, 0.83-1.13) for NO; and 1.00 (95% CI, 0.86-1.16) for NO2. Conclusions and Relevance In a population-based birth cohort, we detected an association between exposure to NO and ASD but no significant association with PM2.5 and NO2.


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Abstract

The among- and within-night changes in the vertical and horizontal distribution of ichthyoplankton assemblages across the Sydney continental shelf, SE Australia, were examined in relation to concurrent changes in hydrography. Of the environmental factors examined, spatial position (sampling depth, distance from shore), water temperature and sampling depth relative to the base of the mixed layer gave the best explanation for variability in assemblage distributions. There was good agreement between observed changes in ichthyoplankton distributions and among-night variability in the cross-shelf temperature and current fields. Ichthyoplankton assemblages functioned as short term, biological tracers of hydrographic variability. Our observations suggest several cross-shelf advective processes, including a recirculation cell over the shelf, could retain passively drifting ichthyoplankton within the shelf region and also minimise longshore drift. The multivariate analysis used was an effective method of examining patterns within and between large, highly variable biological and environmental data sets.


Videos engulf the media archive in every capacity, generating a rich and vast source of information from which machines can learn how to understand such data and predict useful attributes that can help technologies make human lives better. One of the most significant and instrumental part of a computer vision system is the comprehension of human actions from visual sequences – a paragon of machine intelligence that can be achieved through computer vision. The problem of human action recognition has high importance as it facilitates several applications built around recognition of human actions. Understanding actions from monocular sequences has been studied immensely, while comprehending human actions from a skeleton video has developed in recent times. We propose action recognition frameworks that use the skeletal data (viz. 3D locations of some joints) of human body to learn spatiotemporal representations necessary for recognizing actions. Information about human actions is composed of two integral dimensions, space and time, along which the variations occur. Spatial representation of a human action aims at encapsulating the configuration of human body essential to the action, while the temporal representation aims at capturing the evolution of such configurations across time. To this end, we propose to use geometric relations between human skeleton joints to discern the body pose relative to the action and physically inspired kinematic quantities in order to understand the temporal evolution of body pose. Spatio-temporal understanding of human actions is thus conceived as a comprehension of geometric and kinematic information with the help of machine learning frameworks. Using a representation inculcating an amalgamation of geometric and kinematic features, we recognize human actions from skeleton videos (S-videos) using such frameworks. We first present a non-parametric approach for temporal sub-segmentation of trimmed action videos using angular momentum trajectory of the skeletal pose sequence. Meaningful summarization of the pose sequence is a product of the sub-segmentation achieved through systematic sampling of the segments. Descriptors capturing geometric and kinematic statistics encoded as histograms and spread across a periodic range of orientations are computed to represent the summarized pose sequences, which are fed to a kernelized classifier for recognizing actions. This framework for understanding human actions instils the effects of using geometric and kinematic properties of human pose sequences, important to spatio-temporal modeling of the actions. However, a downside of this framework is the inability to scale with availability of large amount of visual data. To mitigate the impending drawback, we next present geometric deep learning frameworks and specifically, graph convolutional networks, for the same task. Representation of human skeleton as a sparse spatial graph is intuitive and a structured form which lies on graph manifolds. A human action video hence results in the formation of a spatio-temporal graph and graph convolutions facilitate the learning of a spatio-temporal descriptor for the action. Inspired by the success of Deformable Part-based Models (DPMs) for the task of object understanding from images, we propose a part-based graph convolutional network (PB-GCN) that operates on a human skeletal graph divided into parts. Incorporating the culmination of understandings from the success of geometric and kinematic features, we propose to use relative coordinates and temporal displacements of the 3D joints coordinates as features at the vertices in the skeletal graph. Owing to these signals, the prowess of graph convolutional networks is further boosted to attain state-of-the-art performance among several action recognition systems using skeleton videos. In this thesis, we meticulously examine the growth of the idea about using geometry and kinematics, transition to geometric deep learning frameworks and design a PB-GCN with geometric + kinematic signals at the vertices, for the task of human action recognition using skeleton videos.


In the era of the Internet-of-everything, learning the principles of data communications and networking is inevitable for many electrical engineering disciplines. The paper addresses the effectiveness of teaching the fundamentals of data communications and networking using a dedicated lab course as a co-requisite to a classic lecture-based course. In the introduced lab course, the students are asked to do a variety of tasks using real hardware and a network simulator. The paper introduces quantitative measures of an outcomebased learning approach applied to both courses. Based on students' achievements, the role of the lab course in the attainment of both the course learning outcomes and the electrical engineering program learning outcomes is measured in comparison with the case where the lab course is not taken. Our findings reveal a general enhancement trend in attaining the course and program learning outcomes with a significant increase in the program outcome related to solving engineering problems. Also, a slight increase is noticed in meeting the lab course outcomes for the students who attended the lab with the course in the same semester, which indicates an improvement in gaining practical knowledge.


Thermal Transport at Superhydrophobic Surfaces in Impinging Liquid Jets, Natural Convection, and Pool Boiling Matthew Clark Searle Department of Mechanical Engineering, BYU Doctor of Philosophy This dissertation focuses on the effects of superhydrophobic (SHPo) surfaces on thermal transport. The work is divided into two main categories: thermal transport without phase change and thermal transport with phase change. Thermal transport without phase change is the topic of four stand-alone chapters. Three address jet impingement at SHPo surfaces and the fourth considers natural convection at a vertical, SHPo wall. Thermal transport with phase change is the topic of a single stand-alone chapter exploring pool boiling at SHPo surfaces. Two chapters examining jet impingement present analytical models for thermal transport; one considered an isothermal wall and the other considered an isoflux wall. The chapter considering the isothermal scenario has been archivally published. Conclusions are presented for both models. The models indicated that the Nusselt number decreased dramatically as the temperature jump length increased. Further, the influence of radial position, jet Reynolds number, Prandtl number and isoflux versus isothermal heating become negligible as temperature jump length increased. The final chapter concerning jet impingement reports an experimental exploration of jet impingement at post patterned SHPo surfaces with varying microfeature pitch and cavity fraction. The empirical results show a decrease in Nusselt number relative to smooth hydrophobic surfaces for small pitch and cavity fraction and the isoflux model agrees well with this data when the ratio of temperature jump length to slip length is 3.1. At larger pitch and cavity fractions, the empirical results have higher Nusselt numbers than the SHPo surfaces with small pitch and cavity fraction but remain smaller than the smooth hydrophobic surface. We attribute this to the influence of small wetting regions. The chapter addressing natural convection presents an analytical model for buoyant flow at a vertical SHPo surface. The Nusselt number decreased dramatically as temperature jump length increased, with greater decrease occurring near the lower edge and at higher Rayleigh number. Thermal transport with phase change is the topic of the final stand-alone chapter concerning pool boiling, which has been archivally published. Surface heat flux as a function of surface superheat was reported for SHPo surfaces with rib and post patterning at varying microfeature pitch, cavity fraction, and microfeature height. Nucleate boiling is more suppressed on post patterned surfaces than rib patterned surfaces. At rib patterned surfaces, transition superheat decreases as cavity fraction increases. Increasing microfeature height modestly increases the transition superheat. Once stable film boiling is achieved, changes in surface microstructure negligibly influence thermal transport.


In the Ministry of Defense, military and civilian personnel carry out, in accordance with their job description, activities with foreign partners. Those activities are in line with procedures of foreign partners or organizations or are even run by multinational structures. The need of owning communication competences particularly in English, but not exclusively, has led to imposing a linguistic standard at the NATO level, namely the standard STANAG 6001. This framework mainly standardizes assessment of foreign languages. Romania, as a NATO-member state, has set up, within the MoD, the Capability Taskforce N 11012 which states that trained and linguistically assessed personnel will fill the positions that require communicating in English. Reaching the capability taskforce can be mainly achieved within the language training system, by means of flexible and custom-tailored training programs. Such language training programs comprise both traditionally organized face-to-face modules and online modules. Also, there are assessment sections where the online module plays a major role. In terms of assessing language proficiency, an important part of it is the intercultural competence evaluation. On one hand, assessing acquisition of information, knowledge and understanding can be apparently easily carried out, but, on the other hand, that is just part of the intercultural competence. How can ability be evaluated? How can we assess or even quantify tolerance, attitudes, changing perspective, overcoming stereotypes? Intercultural competence stems out from solid cultural knowledge of the target language and it also is a cornerstone component of the communicative proficiency. The possibilities of applying, the legal framework of organizing and the advantages of the online assessment represent elements that could boost the efficiency of reaching the above-mentioned taskforce.


Many women with early breast cancer undergo mastectomy as a consequence of an unfavorable tumor/breast ratio or because they prefer this option to breast conservation. As reported, breast reconstruction offers significant psychological advantages. Several techniques are currently available for the breast oncoplastic surgeon and offer interesting results in terms of aesthetic and patient-reported outcomes, using both breast implants and autologous tissues. On the other hand, advanced methodologies and technologies, such as reverse engineering and additive manufacturing, allow the development of customized porous scaffolds with tailored architectures, biological, mechanical and mass transport properties. Accordingly, the current research dealt with challenges, design methods and principles to develop 3D additively manufactured structures in breast reconstructive surgery.


While co-addition and subtraction of astronomical images stand at the heart of observational astronomy, the existing solutions for them lack rigorous argumentation, are not achieving maximal sensitivity and are often slow. Moreover, there is no widespread agreement on how they should be done, and often different methods are used for different scientific applications.

I am going to present rigorous solutions to these problems, deriving them from the most basic statistical principles. These solutions are proved optimal, under well defined and practically acceptable assumptions, and in many cases improve substantially the sensitivity, robustness and speed of both coaddition and subtraction.

For coaddition, I will present a coadd image that is:

a) sufficient for any further statistical decision or measurement on the underlying constant sky, making the entire data set redundant.

b) improves both survey speed (by 5-20%) and effective spatial resolution of past and future astronomical surveys.

c) improves substantially imaging through turbulence applications.

d) much faster than many of the currently used coaddition solutions.

For subtraction, I will present a subtraction image that is:

a) optimal for transient detection under the assumption of spatially uniform noise.

b) sufficient for any further statistical decision on the differences between the images, including the identification of cosmic rays and other image artifacts.

c) Free of subtraction artifacts, potentially allowing (for the first time) robust automatic transient detection in real time, opening new avenues for scientific exploration.

d) more sensitive than previous transient detection methods

e) orders of magnitude faster than past subtraction methods.


Roddy Boyd's Fatal Risk: A Cautionary Tale of AIG's Corporate Suicide and Greg Farrell's Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris and the Fall of Merrill Lynch and the Near Collapse of Bank of America are reviewed to analyze why AIG and Merrill Lynch nearly failed during the financial crisis of 2007--09. Both books argue that each firm collapsed because of failures of senior management. Using the accounts provided by the books, as well as other sources, the review goes further and argues that both firms were vulnerable to managerial failures because they were inefficiently large, complex, and leveraged, that is, "too big to manage." The review also argues that these firms were able to get to that point because 40 years of governmental interventions in financial markets created the expectation that large financial firms are too big to fail.


This thesis reports on the contribution of cervical factors to headache, which
occurred in the absence of a history of trauma to the neck. Individuals who
had never sustained an injury to the neck were randomly selected from the
electoral rolls of two southern Tasmanian municipalities for this crosssectional
observational study. Five hundred and twenty-three individuals
were invited to participate, and following exclusions and refusals, 490
subjects were examined. Twenty subjects participated in a pilot study of the
device designed to measure cervical posture, 427 subjects participated in the
main study, which examined the association between headache and habitual
cervical resting posture in sitting, and 43 subjects supplied data on which the
predictive model was tested. New measures needed to be developed because no appropriate measures
were available in a clinical setting. A diagnostic tool for headache was
constructed from colloquial descriptions of three of the seven pain patterns
attributed by Jull (1981) to headache of cervical origin. Non-diseased status
was conferred upon those subjects who failed to identify all elements of the
diagnostic tool. Headache frequency was measured retrospectively using a
seven level nominal scale. Headache frequency in the study sample ranged
from one headache every couple of months to daily. Cervical resting posture
in sitting was measured by the Linear Excursion Measurement Device
(LEMD), as the excursion of the superior-most tip of the helix of the ear (an
anatomical point chosen to represent the distal aspect of the cervical spine)
and the spinous process of C7 (a point chosen to represent the proximal
aspect of the cervical spine), when subjects moved from a standard corrected
posture to their habitual resting posture.
All 427 subjects participating in the main study were asked to recall the
frequency of their headaches in the preceding month. A subset of these
subjects (93 subjects) also supplied prospective headache data by
completing a headache diary for a month. A comparison of retrospective
and prospective data indicated that, over a two month period, the headache
characteristic was stable and consistent. Compared with the prospective
headache diary, men tended to over-report headache retrospectively while
women tended to under-report it.
Headache was expressed in frequencies of occasional and frequent:
occasional headache occurred less frequently than twice per month, and
frequent headache occurred at least twice a month. The prevalence in the
sample data, of headache specifically associated with cervical factors, was
63.7 per cent. Occasional headache was suffered by 55.5 per cent of
headache sufferers and frequent headaches were suffered by the remaining
44.5 per cent of headache sufferers. Significantly more women reported
headache than men. The excursion of the two chosen anatomical points was reproducible over
days, and over a month. Angles of excursion of 11.5 degrees or more,
traced by the spinous process of C7, were associated with frequent
headache. The crude odds ratios (C.O.R.) were similar for men and women
(2.29 (95%CL 1.03-5.01) and 2.43 (95%CL 1.00-5.81) respectively). Angles
of excursion of 6 degrees or more, traced by the superior-most tip of the helix
of the ear, were associated with frequent headache for men but not for
women (C.O.R. of 1.73 (95%CL 0.86-3.49) and 1.06 (95%CL 0.52-2.14)
respectively). There was no convincing association between occasional
headache and large angles of excursion at the spinous process of C7 and the
superior-most tip of the helix of the ear, for either men or women. The cervical resting posture described by large angles of excursion of the
superior-most tip of the helix of the ear, and of the spinous process of C7 was
characterised by a forward leading chin with the occiput of the skull caudally
rotated within, or slightly anterior to, the vertical axis. The cervical lordosis
was habitually extended in this resting head position.
In order to inform future studies on headache, and to control for confounding
effects on the association between frequent headache and cervical excursion
angles, a number of other causes of headache were proposed and measured.
There was little biological theory to guide these investigations. Two
scenarios were proposed to more clearly define the nature of the relationship
of headache with its causes. One scenario was proposed where causes of
headache were associated in an antecedent fashion with cervical resting
posture during postural development, and during moment-by-moment
postural manoeuvres. The second scenario described the independent
action of selected variables with headache, acting on established posture. There were gender differences in estimates of the strength of association,
between headache, cervical resting posture and the other proposed causes
of headache. The cross-sectional nature of the data precluded more specific
examination of these relationships. Under the scenario of independence of
action with headache, wearing dentures confounded the association between
C7 excursion angles and frequent headache for men but not for women. A
predictive model for frequent headache was developed. It included only the
dummy predictor for C7 excursion angles, as no other variable was identified
as an important inclusion. This model predicted frequent headache with
moderate sensitivity and fair specificity, but predicted less well in an
independent data set.


The dynamics of probability (modulus) and phase (current) components of general electronic states is used to determine the temporal evolution of the overall descriptors of the information (determinicity) and entropy (indeterminicity) content of complex molecular states. These resultant information-theoretic concepts combine the classical (probability) contributions of Fisher and Shannon, and the corresponding nonclassical supplements due to the state phase/current. The total time derivatives of such overall measures of the gradient information and complex entropy are determined from Schrodinger's equation using the chainrule transformations. These overall productions of the gradient information and complex entropy are shown to be of a purely nonclassical origin, thus identically vanishing in real electronic states, e.g., the nondegenerate ground state of a molecule.


Abstract : This handbook documents the QUASAR (QUality Assessment of System ARchitectures) method for assessing the quality of the architecture of a software-intensive system. It begins by discussing the challenges that are faced when assessing a system's architecture and outlines the development history of the method. The next section of the handbook documents the concept of quality cases and the claims, arguments, and evidence that compose them. This is followed by a description of the teams that collaborate to perform QUASAR tasks. Next, individual tasks and associated steps performed as part of the QUASAR method are documented. Next, the work products produced by these teams when performing these tasks are described. Finally, lessons learned during the development and use of the method when assessing the quality of major subsystems during the development of a very large, software-intensive system of systems are presented. Also provided are appendices that define common quality factors and subfactors, offer reusable checklists, and give examples of quality cases. The example quality cases illustrate valid quality goals and requirements that compose claims, example architecture decisions and associated rationales that compose arguments, and the types of evidence that architects might provide.


Background: Stroke, a cerebrovascular disease, is the second-most common cause of mortality worldwide while it ranks third among other causes of disability. The incidence of stroke in the Middle East is even higher than in developed countries. Despite the increasing disease burden, presently, there is only one established acute stroke unit at King Fahad Medical City in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Objective: The objective of the study is to assess the number of stroke patients admitted to different units in all hospitals across Riyadh city at one point of time. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted in 30 hospitals distributed across Riyadh in 2016 and included newly diagnosed stroke patients. Data were extracted using case report forms depicting all patient data collected during admission to the specified hospital wards. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the quantitative and categorical variables. Results: Of the total of 30 hospitals invited to participate, only 3 (10%) hospitals agreed to participate. A total of 33 stroke patients were admitted to these hospitals, majority (27 [81.8%]) were admitted to internal medicine, 5 (15.2%) to surgery, and 1 (3%) to a neurosurgery unit. The prevalence of stroke among patients with age groups of 51–60, 61–70, and >80 years was higher in men than women. Conclusion: More epidemiological studies on stroke need to be conducted in different regions of the Middle East for effective planning and management. Further, other key areas to be improved include the development of wellequipped and trained health-care providers, collaboration of a multidisciplinary team, and raising public awareness.


Screen writing can be stretched to cover many things. Put writing in quotes and the possibilities for sophisticated definition aggravatingly multiply. In its basic and most simple form, however, screen writing is dialogue, the words we hear spoken. That, at least, is how it is most commonly understood, and that's what I wish to deal with here. In truth, very little has been written about dialogue, so I can feel less apologetic about collecting some scattered thoughts about it. Let's start by admitting that there are as many uses and effects of dialogue as there are contexts. If we could pinpoint a number of repetitive patterns we could perhaps reduce the number of contexts and try our hand at mapping out some systems of dialogue (given situation y, dialogue ? should follow). But that's a task I think is premature to undertake, so I'll be content to work with "instances" instead. Some obvious observations- so obvious, apparently, that concern for them has been minimal indeed- should be made at the outset. Since the advent of the sould film, whenever we see human beings on the screen we expect them to talk. When they don't, our sense of a complete human being is violated (i.e., the mute girl in The Seventh Seal). Speech is a defining human faculty, so we expect dialogue: if they are human, they can speak. And we expect certain people (military captains, wealthy playboys, unshaven outlaws, ladies of the night, etc.), depending on their dress, age, the situation they find themselves in, and a bunch of other cues and factors, to speak accordingly. Hence dialogue is generally keyed to propriety, and this "law" makes it possible to exploit incongruity (Stan Laurel's mechanically learned mouthful to Oliver Hardy in the attic sequence of Sons of the Desert). Despite all the arguments that have been made on behalf of film as a visual medium, the common viewer hangs on dialogue. We whisper, sometimes frantically, to our next-seat neighbor, "What did she say?" and really hope to get an answer, because we sense that a lot hinges on our knowing what was said. We squint to hear better. When nothing is said for a long time we can grow tense (the silent robbery in Ri fifi) or uneasy (the verbal silences in Antonioni as signs of dwindling human communication) or curious (the experiment of Russell Rouse's The Thief). Among the most troubling moments at the movies are when we are unsure whether words were spoken or not. We thought we saw the lips move, but something inaudible or only half-audible came out. Something resembling sound more than speech. We always want to understand, and what characters say to each other or to themselves is crucial to our desire for a firmer grasp of what's going on. And since film is a medium in which "writing" (i.e., most commonly talk) could be dispensed with, its appearance is always meaningful. A page would be blank without words, but the screen would still contain the meaning(s) of its images. Every instance of dialogue can be seen as a means of enhancement. It could be left out, but there it is- and the wish behind it is to improve on what's already there.* While there may be a general tenor to the dialogue of a film, the dialogue from scene to scene is rarely consistent in the way that dialogue in literature tends to be. Film dialogue is incurably opportunistic, it caters promiscuously to each shift in context. No matter how tight the film's underlying structure, dialogue-as part of the surface whose job is to gain and hold attention-plays fast and loose above it. Thus, in a single film, there may be dialogue designed to make you think, dialogue that's twaddle, dialogue that's just "there" (pointless- or, better, unpointed- non-distracting, as "naturalism," perhaps), dialogue that's dense and rippling (as when some of the literate characters come together), sudden speechifying dialogue appropriate in a local, immediate way but incongruous with the rest of the film, dialogue with a moralistic undertow functional to theme or character indentification, and a minimum, probably, of 57 other varieties, including lines put in just to get a reaction, to create a small, sharp impact. …


Description
Written and edited by an authoritative team of internationally known experts in environmental impact assessment (EIA), this is the first book to present in a coherent manner the theory and practice of EIA and strategic environmental assessment (SEA) follow-up. Without some form of follow-up, the consequences of impact assessments and the environmental outcomes of development projects will remain unknown. Assessing Impact examines both EIA follow-up and the emerging practice of SEA follow-up, and showcases follow-up procedures in various countries throughout Europe, North America and Australasia. Theoretical and legislative perspectives are examined in the light of detailed case study examples, and the authors present a micro-, macro- and meta scale analysis of EIA practice ranging from individual plan and project level through to the jurisdictional level, as well as an analysis of the concept of EIA. Full coverage is given to the roles of proponents, both private and governmental, EIA regulators and the affected public in designing and executing follow-up programmes.


Examination of recent benthic material collected during several cruises in the Gulf of Cadiz (NE Atlantic) and the Strait of Sicily (Mediterranean) has allowed the taxonomic reassessment of some previously identified specimens belonging to the monogeneric gorgonian family Dendrobrachiidae Brook, 1889. Dendrobrachia fallax Brook, 1889 is the type species of the single genus in this family, and was originally described from Ascension Island (South Atlantic). Subsequently, other authors reported the presence of this species in Cape Verde Islands (north-eastern Atlantic) and some Mediterranean localities (Alboran Sea and the Strait of Sicily). The study of the specimen from the Prince of Monaco collections in Cape Verde Islands, and recently collected material from the Gulf of Cadiz (north-eastern Atlantic) and in the south of Malta (Mediterranean), materials previously considered as D. fallax , allow us to recognize two undescribed species in this genus. All previous records of D. fallax from the north-eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean should be considered incorrect. Opresko and Bayer (1991) added two additional species of Dendrobrachia. Two new species are described here and compared with their congeners.


A complex dietary supplement designed to impact multiple mechanisms associated with aging and cancer reduced overall tumorigenesis in cancer-prone heterozygous Trp53+/- mice by ~30% (P < 0.018). Carcinomas were reduced by 67% (P < 0.006). Remarkably, metastasis (a leading cause of cancer mortality) was undetectable in treated animals (P < 0.004), and the occurrence of multiple primary tumours was reduced by 74% (P < 0.012). Reduction of pulmonary adenocarcinoma by 62% (P < 0.021) was of particular note given that lung cancer is the second leading cause of death in humans. Tumours showed pronounced age-related expression in untreated animals older than 600 days. Benefits of treatment only emerged in these later ages, suggesting that the supplement acted on mechanisms common to aging and cancer. The supplement was administered daily on bagel bits that were usually eaten within minutes by the mice. Although longevity was not statistically different between treatments, longevity was strongly related to the compliance of mice in eating the supplement. Linear regression revealed a strong positive relationship between the proportion of supplement eaten and the longevity of mice within the treatment group (P < 0.0001).


Two recent disruptions to the online advertising market are the widespread use of ad-blocking software and proposed restrictions on third-party tracking, trends that are driven largely by consumer concerns over privacy. Both primarily impact display advertising (as opposed to search and native social ads), and affect how retailers reach customers and how content producers earn revenue. It is, however, unclear what the consequences of these trends are. We investigate using anonymized web browsing histories of 14 million individuals, focusing on "retail sessions" in which users visit online sites that sell goods and services. We find that only 3% of retail sessions are initiated by display ads, a figure that is robust to permissive attribution rules and consistent across widely varying market segments. We further estimate the full distribution of how retail sessions are initiated, and find that search advertising is three times more important than display advertising to retailers, and search advertising is itself roughly three times less important than organic web search. Moving to content providers, we find that display ads are shown by 12% of websites, accounting for 32% of their page views; this reliance is concentrated in online publishing, e.g., news outlets) where the rate is 91%. While most consumption is either in the long-tail of websites that do not show ads, or sites like Facebook that show native, first-party ads, moderately sized web publishers account for a substantial fraction of consumption, and we argue that they will be most affected by changes in the display advertising market. Finally, we use estimates of ad rates to judge the feasibility of replacing lost ad revenue with a freemium or donation-based model.


Composite predicates (CPs), that is, complex predicate structures comprising a light verb and an eventive noun
 (e.g., make a move or give a speech) are common in Present-day English and are particularly
 characteristic of spoken language. The aim of the paper is to trace language changes involving CPs from 1560 to 1760, a period in
 which the use of CPs has not yet received adequate scholarly attention. Specifically, the study examines the frequencies, lexical
 productivity and syntactic patterns of CPs in two types of Early Modern English (EModE) dialogues, drawn from Trial Proceedings and Drama
 Comedy sampled in A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 – a 1.2-million word computerized corpus of EModE
 speech-related texts. The results reveal significant differences between the two types of dialogue and shed light on the
 development of CPs in association with grammaticalization and lexicalization.


Fairness is a fundamental principle of American culture. Is it also a constitutional principle to redress economic oppression? Simply, does the U.S. Constitution protect its citizens from predatory lending practices? Will President Obama's call for empathy in constitutional jurisprudence protect America's middle and under-privileged classes from class discrimination? This Article challenges the fairness of subjecting certain borrowers to overreaching, economically-oppressive lending practices. This seminal approach to the issue of predatory lending explores how established constitutional principles might protect and redress past, present, and future predatory lending victims, often socially and economically disadvantaged citizens. It seeks to define a novel constitutional theory, hereinafter entitled "moral capitalism," guaranteeing freedom from economic oppression and ensuring financial fair dealing. It concludes that class is the civil-rights' issue of the twenty-first century.


MODELING INVENTORY AND RESPONSIVENESS COSTS IN A SUPPLY CHAIN by Robert Nearier Evaluation of supply chain performance is often complicated by the various interrelationships that exist within the network of suppliers. Currently many supply chain metrics cannot be analytically determined. Instead, metrics are derived from monitoring historical data, which is commonly referred to as Supply Chain Analytics. With these analytics it is possible to answer questions such as: What is the inventory cost distribution across the chain? What is the actual inventory turnover ratio? What is the cost of demand changes to individual suppliers? However, this approach requires a significant amount of historical data which must be continuously extracted from the associated Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) system. In this dissertation models are developed for evaluating two Supply Chain metrics, as an alternative to the use of Supply Chain Analytics. First, inventory costs are estimated by supplier in a deterministic (Q, R,δ)2 supply chain. In this arrangement each part has two sequential reorder (R) inventory locations: (i) on the output side of the seller and (ii) on the input side of the buyer. In most cases the inventory policies are not synchronized and as a result the inventory behavior is not easily characterized and tends to exhibit long cycles. This is primarily due to the difference in production rates (δ), production batch sizes, and the selection of supply order quantities (Q) for logistics convenience. The (Q, R, δ) 2 model that is developed is an extension of the joint economic lot size (JELS) model first proposed by Banerjee (1986). JELS is derived as a compromise between the seller's and the buyer's economic lot sizes and therefore attempts to synchronize the supply policy. The (Q, R, δ)2 model is an approximation since it approximates the average inventory behavior across a range of supply cycles. Several supply relationships are considered by capturing the inventory behavior for each supplier in that relationship. For several case studies the joint inventory cost for a supply pair tends to be a stepped convex function. Second, a measure is derived for responsiveness of a supply chain as a function of the expected annual cost of making inventory and production capacity adjustments to account for a series of significant demand change events. Modern supply chains are expected to use changes in production capacity (as opposed to inventory) to react to significant demand changes. Significant demand changes are defined as shifts in market conditions that cannot be buffered by finished product inventory alone and require adjustments in the supply policy. These changes could involve a ±25% change in the uniform demand level. The research question is what these costs are and how they are being shared within the network of suppliers. The developed measure is applicable in a multi-product supply chain and considers both demand correlations and resource commonality. Finally, the behavior of the two developed metrics is studied as a function of key supply chain parameters (e.g., reorder levels, batch sizes, and demand rate changes). A deterministic simulation model and program was developed for this purpose. MODELING INVENTORY AND RESPONSIVENESS COSTS IN A SUPPLY CHAIN


My aim in this paper is to show that, in modified form, semantic connectivity maps of the kind developed in van der Auwera & Plungian (1998) and van der Auwera (2013) can be useful for showing the development over time of relationships among polysemous constructions. Since these maps pertain primarily to meaning and are intended as contributions to cross-linguistic generalizations rather than to language-specific grammars, their purpose might seem orthogonal to construction grammar, in which form–meaning pairs are the basic units of grammar. I propose that the semantic maps can usefully be rethought as being of two kinds: schema-construction maps that represent relationships between abstract, conceptual schemas linked to underspecified form, and micro-construction maps that represent relationships between specific constructions. These two kinds of maps capture both form and meaning since they represent form–meaning pairings, but at different levels of abstraction. They can also capture direction of changes, as tendencies at the schema level and specific trajectories at the micro-level. My case study is the development of the marginal modals better, rather, sooner (see Denison & Cort 2010, van der Auwera & De Wit 2010). I show that better is significantly different in distribution and meaning from rather and sooner, and that, although they form a family of micro-constructions, they do not form a tight-knit group. This can be captured well by modified semantic maps.


Mammalian cardiac myocytes and neurons are conditioned by a period of hypoxia (low oxygen tension) to survive subsequent, more severe conditions of hypoxia. This adaptation process, known as hypoxic preconditioning (HP), has not been observed in invertebrates, leading Dasgupta et al. to investigate whether the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans exhibits features of HP. The authors exposed C. elegans to a 4-hour hypoxic episode, allowed the animals to recover, and then subjected them to a further 20 hours of hypoxia. This resulted in a much higher survival rate for these organisms than was observed in C. elegans that underwent 20-hour hypoxia without the earlier incubation. At least 8 hours of recovery time was needed after the initial hypoxic episode for protection to occur, which is consistent with late-phase HP in vertebrates. Microscopic analysis showed that the extent of hypoxia-induced pathology in the myocytes and neurons of C. elegans that had undergone HP was reduced compared with that in organisms without HP. Whereas C. elegans that had a loss-of-function mutation in ced-4 (which encodes a component of the C. elegans apoptosis pathway) did not exhibit HP after early hypoxia, C. elegans with mutants of other components of this pathway exhibited normal HP. These included C. elegans with mutations in ced-3, which encodes CED-3, a protein that is known to multimerize with CED-4 to form an active caspase. This suggests a nonapoptotic role for CED-4 in the establishment of HP. Together, these data suggest that HP does indeed occur in invertebrates and that C. elegans might serve as a useful model organism for the study of HP. N. Dasgupta, A. M. Patel, B. A. Scott, C. M. Crowder, Hypoxic preconditioning requires the apoptosis protein CED-4 in C. elegans. Curr. Biol. 17, 1954-1959 (2007). [PubMed]


All-optical magnetic state switching Magneto-optical memory storage media, such as hard drives, use magnetic fields to change the magnetization of memory bits, but the process is slow. Light can often reveal information about the magnetization state of a sample, such as its field direction. Lambert et al. show that under the right circumstances, light can also switch the magnetization state of a thin ferromagnetic film. Using light pulses instead of magnetic fields led to ultrafast data memory and data storage. Science, this issue p. 1337 The all-optical control of magnetization in thin ferromagnetic films is demonstrated. The interplay of light and magnetism allowed light to be used as a probe of magnetic materials. Now the focus has shifted to use polarized light to alter or manipulate magnetism. Here, we demonstrate optical control of ferromagnetic materials ranging from magnetic thin films to multilayers and even granular films being explored for ultra-high-density magnetic recording. Our finding shows that optical control of magnetic materials is a much more general phenomenon than previously assumed and may have a major impact on data memory and storage industries through the integration of optical control of ferromagnetic bits.


It has been noted that Europeans are more liable to Paralytic poliomyelitis than the Bantu and that the Majority of paralytic cases in the Bantu occur in the 0-5 Year age group. It has been suggested that the relatively Low incidence of paralytic poliomyelitis in the Bantu and its main incidence on the lowest age group is to some extent due to an immunity of the older age groups acquired as a result of previous infection. This hypothesis is supported by serological surveys which have shown that in all age groups a greater proportion of Bantu than Europeans have neutralizing antibodies against the Lansing strain of poliomyelitis virus. To determine whether this serological immunity is developed in response to an infection, a group of Bantu Infants born and living in a Native location have been examined for the virus of poliomyelitis at regular monthly intervals. The first test was carried out within two weeks of birth. Of 29 infants selected 16 have remained under observation for the first full year of this study. Of these 16 infants, four (25%) were proved to be infected with the virus of poliomyelitis during this time. One contracted the infection in the fourth month, one in the eighth month and two in their twelfth month. The virus isolated from the infant in its fourth month proved not to be of the Lansing type. One of the other three was proved to be of the Lansing type. The remaining two were presumably also of the Lansing type. The infant infected with the non-Lansing virus did not subsequently develop antibodies against the Lansing strain. Two of the infants infected with the Lansing type of virus developed Lansing antibodies following their infection. It appears, therefore, that the Lansing antibodies demonstrable in the sera of older Bantu children develop as a result of a previous, usually silent infection. With this type of virus, it is significant that four of 16 Infants (25%) were proved to be infected with the virus of poliomyelitis during a non-epidemic year, in which no cases of clinically recognizable poliomyelitis occurred amongst the 18,200 inhabitants of this Native location. None of the four infants who were proved to be infected had signs or symptoms suggestive of poliomyelitis at the time of their infection with the virus.


Although long considered the most distinctive American contribution to philosophy, pragmatism—with its problem-solving emphasis and its contingent view of truth—lost popularity in mid-century after the advent of World War II, the horror of the Holocaust, and the dawning of the Cold War. Since the 1960s, however, pragmatism in many guises has again gained prominence, finding congenial places to flourish within growing intellectual movements. This volume of new essays brings together leading philosophers, historians, legal scholars, social thinkers, and literary critics to examine the far-reaching effects of this revival.

As the twenty-five intellectuals who take part in this discussion show, pragmatism has become a complex terrain on which a rich variety of contemporary debates have been played out. Contributors such as Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Nancy Fraser, Robert Westbrook, Hilary Putnam, and Morris Dickstein trace pragmatism's cultural and intellectual evolution, consider its connection to democracy, and discuss its complex relationship to the work of Emerson, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. They show the influence of pragmatism on black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, explore its view of poetic language, and debate its effects on social science, history, and jurisprudence. Also including essays by critics of the revival such as Alan Wolfe and John Patrick Diggins, the volume concludes with a response to the whole collection from Stanley Fish.

Including an extensive bibliography, this interdisciplinary work provides an in-depth and broadly gauged introduction to pragmatism, one that will be crucial for understanding the shape of the transformations taking place in the American social and philosophical scene at the end of the twentieth century.

Contributors . Richard Bernstein, David Bromwich, Ray Carney, Stanley Cavell, Morris Dickstein, John Patrick Diggins, Stanley Fish, Nancy Fraser, Thomas C. Grey, Giles Gunn, Hans Joas, James T. Kloppenberg, David Luban, Louis Menand, Sidney Morgenbesser, Richard Poirier, Richard A. Posner, Ross Posnock, Hilary Putnam, Ruth Anna Putnam, Richard Rorty, Michel Rosenfeld, Richard H. Weisberg, Robert B. Westbrook, Alan Wolfe


This thesis concerns numerical techniques for two phase flowsimulations; the two phases are immiscible and incompressible fluids. Strategies for accurate simulations are suggested. In particular, accurate approximations of the weakly discontinuousvelocity field, the discontinuous pressure, and the surface tension force and a new model for simulations of contact line dynamics are proposed. In two phase flow problems discontinuities arise in the pressure and the gradient of the velocity field due to surface tension forces and differences in the fluids' viscosity. In this thesis, a new finite element method which allows for discontinuities along an interface that can be arbitrarily located with respect to the mesh is presented. Using standard linear finite elements, the method is for an elliptic PDE proven to have optimal convergence order and a system matrix with condition number bounded independently of the position of the interface.The new finite element method is extended to the incompressible Stokes equations for two fluid systemsand enables accurate approximations of the weakly discontinuous velocity field and the discontinuous pressure. An alternative way to handle discontinuities is regularization. In this thesis, consistent regularizations of Dirac delta functions with support on interfaces are proposed. These regularized delta functions make it easy to approximate surface tension forces in level set methods. A new model for simulating contact line dynamics is also proposed. Capillary dominated flows are considered and it is assumed that contact line movement is driven by the deviation of the contact angle from its static value. This idea is used together with the conservative level set method. The need for fluid slip at the boundary is eliminated by providing a diffusive mechanism for contact line movement. Numerical experiments in two space dimensions show that the method is able to qualitatively correctly capture contact line dynamics.


Observations of recurrent evolutions have been noted for long suggesting that evolution prefers certain pathways. At the phenotype and genotype level it appears that evolution tends to arrive at certain solutions that suit environmental conditions present. Further, adaptive Laboratory Evolution studies on single celled organisms show that evolution is consistent and predictable when organisms are subjected to the same environmental Input. This paper presents a case from a different perspective and takes these observations as the starting point to propose a theory that Evolution on the whole is predictable. Only certain organisms are defined to exist as solutions in evolution space and only certain change pathways are possible and evolution necessarily proceeds along them. Presence of many regulatory networks in the organism is common knowledge supplemented by emerging understanding of Gene Regulatory Networks. Networks exist that control an organism right from birth, development, sustenance and survival. Extending this further, hidden regulatory networks are proposed to exist that activate and control organism change (speciation) as a response to environmental change. Evidence (possible cases) for such networks are proposed from literature. A key implication of this hypothesis is it eliminates the need of natural selection as a role player in Evolution. Instead the hidden networks proposed control Speciation. It proposes that beneficial mutations are the result of action of these hidden networks to initiate phenotype change (speciation).


Americans spend hours every day sitting in traffic. And the roads they idle on are often rough and potholed, their exits, tunnels, guardrails, and bridges in terrible disrepair. According to transportation expert Robert Poole, this congestion and deterioration are outcomes of the way America provides its highways. Our twentieth-century model overly politicizes highway investment decisions, short-changing maintenance and often investing in projects whose costs exceed their benefits. In Rethinking America's Highways , Poole examines how our current model of state-owned highways came about and why it is failing to satisfy its customers. He argues for a new model that treats highways themselves as public utilities—like electricity, telephones, and water supply. If highways were provided commercially, Poole argues, people would pay for highways based on how much they used, and the companies would issue revenue bonds to invest in facilities people were willing to pay for. Arguing for highway investments to be motivated by economic rather than political factors, this book makes a carefully-reasoned and well-documented case for a new approach to highways that is sure to inform future decisions and policies for U.S. infrastructure.


ABSTRACT Background: Given the well-established association between perceived stress and quality of life (QoL) in dementia patients and their partners, our goal was to identify whether relationship quality and dyadic coping would operate as mediators between perceived stress and QoL. Methods: 82 dyads of dementia patients and their spousal caregivers were included in a cross-sectional assessment from a prospective study. QoL was assessed with the Quality of Life in Alzheimer's Disease scale (QoL-AD) for dementia patients and the WHO Quality of Life-BREF for spousal caregivers. Perceived stress was measured with the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-14). Both partners were assessed with the Dyadic Coping Inventory (DCI). Analyses of correlation as well as regression models including mediator analyses were performed. Results: We found negative correlations between stress and QoL in both partners (QoL-AD: r = −0.62; p < 0.001; WHO-QOL Overall: r = −0.27; p = 0.02). Spousal caregivers had a significantly lower DCI total score than dementia patients (p < 0.001). Dyadic coping was a significant mediator of the relationship between stress and QoL in spousal caregivers (z = 0.28; p = 0.02), but not in dementia patients. Likewise, relationship quality significantly mediated the relationship between stress and QoL in caregivers only (z = −2.41; p = 0.02). Conclusions: This study identified dyadic coping as a mediator on the relationship between stress and QoL in (caregiving) partners of dementia patients. In patients, however, we found a direct negative effect of stress on QoL. The findings suggest the importance of stress reducing and dyadic interventions for dementia patients and their partners, respectively.


This thesis explores what a range of people know and understand about cognitive impairment. The research presented here also explores the language and terminology that people use when discussing cognitive impairment. In order to do so, a mixed methods design was employed, involving three related studies; a systematic review of the literature about knowledge and understanding of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a questionnaire study exploring respondents' knowledge and understanding of cognitive impairment, and an interview study building on the results of the questionnaire and exploring perceptions of cognitive impairment in-depth.
 The systematic review included 30 studies; 20 qualitative articles and 10 survey studies. The questionnaire study received 417 responses predominantly from England, but including some international responses. Questionnaire respondents were drawn from six population groups: people living with cognitive impairment, care partners, younger adults, older adults, healthcare professionals, and dementia specialists. Twenty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with representatives from each of these six participant groups.
 The findings from these studies suggest that most participants were able to offer a definition of cognitive impairment, highlighting similar symptoms (focusing on memory problems) and causes (such as brain damage and ageing). Participants discussed cognitive impairment in the context of dementia and were uncertain as to whether the two were synonymous or different. Where participants felt that cognitive impairment and dementia were different, they were unable to articulate these differences suggesting that the boundaries between cognitive impairment and dementia are not clear to the wider population. Participants offered causation accounts and narratives which suggested both controllable and uncontrollable factors may play a role in cognitive health, but participants generally claimed that cognitive impairment was beyond an individual's personal sphere of control.
 Participants identified that professionals and the lay population used different language and labels when discussing cognitive impairment and most felt that MCI was not an acceptable or appropriate label. The use of the word memory in diagnostic services for cognitive impairment and dementia (such as memory clinic, memory assessment service) is challenged as this may contribute to the perception that cognitive impairment and dementia are conditions which are solely or primarily characterised by a memory impairment.
 The results of the studies inform the development of an illness representation model of cognitive impairment, providing a framework on which to base future information resources, media messages and public health and awareness campaigns. This thesis has begun to address a key gap in the literature, considering the views of a range of populations about cognitive impairment. However, future research is needed to explore factors which influence perspectives about cognitive impairment and to consider whether these perspectives change over time and can be influenced by educational campaigns and information.


We present SegFormer, a simple, efficient yet powerful semantic segmentation framework which unifies Transformers with lightweight multilayer perception (MLP) decoders. SegFormer has two appealing features: 1) SegFormer comprises a novel hierarchically structured Transformer encoder which outputs multiscale features. It does not need positional encoding, thereby avoiding the interpolation of positional codes which leads to decreased performance when the testing resolution differs from training. 2) SegFormer avoids complex decoders. The proposed MLP decoder aggregates information from different layers, and thus combining both local attention and global attention to render powerful representations. We show that this simple and lightweight design is the key to efficient segmentation on Transformers. We scale our approach up to obtain a series of models from SegFormer-B0 to SegFormer-B5, reaching significantly better performance and efficiency than previous counterparts. For example, SegFormer-B4 achieves 50.3% mIoU on ADE20K with 64M parameters, being 5x smaller and 2.2% better than the previous best method. Our best model, SegFormer-B5, achieves 84.0% mIoU on Cityscapes validation set and shows excellent zero-shot robustness on Cityscapes-C. Code will be released at: github.com/NVlabs/SegFormer.


We quantitatively describe the creation and evolution of phase-separated domains in a multicomponent lipid bilayer membrane. The early stages, termed the nucleation stage and the independent growth stage, are extremely rapid (characteristic times are submillisecond and millisecond, respectively) and the system consists of nanodomains of average radius approximately 5-50 nm. Next, mobility of domains becomes consequential; domain merger and fission become the dominant mechanisms of matter exchange, and line tension gamma is the main determinant of the domain size distribution at any point in time. For sufficiently small gamma, the decrease in the entropy term that results from domain merger is larger than the decrease in boundary energy, and only nanodomains are present. For large gamma, the decrease in boundary energy dominates the unfavorable entropy of merger, and merger leads to rapid enlargement of nanodomains to radii of micrometer scale. At intermediate line tensions and within finite times, nanodomains can remain dispersed and coexist with a new global phase. The theoretical critical value of line tension needed to rapidly form large rafts is in accord with the experimental estimate from the curvatures of budding domains in giant unilamellar vesicles.


Objective: To investigate whether autoantibodies to ion channels and other neural antigens are present in the sera of patients with epilepsy and seizure-related diseases. Methods: Sera were obtained from 139 patients, including 26 with preexisting autoimmune disease, 46 in whom an autoimmune basis was suspected, and 67 with drug-resistant epilepsy. The sera were assayed for antibodies to voltage-gated potassium (VGKC) and calcium (VGCC) channels, glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD), gangliosides, glutamate receptor type 3, cardiolipins, DNA, and nuclear antigens; the results were compared with results from a large cohort of healthy and disease controls. Results: Increased titers of VGKC antibodies (>100 pM) were detected in 16 of 139 (11%) patients with seizures but only 1 control (0.5%). Eight VGKC-positive patients presented with an acute/subacute illness, and 5 of these had the highest VGKC antibodies; 3 patients improved spontaneously, another 5 patients responded well to immunomodulatory therapy. The other VGKC-positive patients had longer disease duration (>6 years) and intermediate levels of antibodies; immunotherapies have not been tested in this group. Very high levels of GAD antibodies (>1,000 U) were found in an additional 3 patients (2.1%) with long-standing drug-resistant epilepsy. Conclusions: The presence of autoantibodies to voltage-gated potassium channels and glutamic acid decarboxylase suggests that the immune system may contribute to certain forms of epilepsy or seizure-associated disorders. Further studies are needed to determine whether the antibodies are pathogenic.


This article provides a small-scale empirical study which interrogates the restorative justice dialogue underpinning the Youth Justice Group Conferencing Program (YJGCP) in Victoria. Personal refl ections collected from interviews suggest that participants in the YJGCP should be provided with information giving them a realistic understanding of the outcomes which restorative processes might deliver. The article argues that the YJGCP would be well served by a common narrative that is comprehensively understood by all service-providers and stakeholders to ensure that participants are given a meaningful understanding of the program, its goals and likely outcomes.


The work that Maurice Merleau-Ponty planned to call "The Prose of the World, " or "Introduction to the Prose of the World, " was unfinished at the time of his death. The book was to constitute the first section of a two-part work whose aim was to offer, as an extension of his Phenomenology of Perception, a theory of truth. This edition's editor, Claude Lefort, has interpreted and transcribed the surviving typescript, reproducing Merleau-Ponty's own notes and adding documentation and commentary.


Abstract : Honeypots are a technique that can mitigate the risk of cyber threats. Effective honeypots are authentic and targetable, and their design and implementation must accommodate risk tolerance and financial constraints. The proprietary, and often expensive, hardware and software used by Industrial Control System (ICS) devices creates the challenging problem of building a flexible, economical, and scalable honeypot. This research extends Honeyd into Honeyd+, making it possible to use the proxy feature to create multiple high interaction honeypots with a single Programmable Logic Controller (PLC). Honeyd+ is tested with a network of 75 decoy PLCs, and the interactions with the decoys are compared to a physical PLC to test for authenticity. The performance test evaluates the impact of multiple simultaneous connections to the PLC. The functional test is successful in all cases. The performance test demonstrated that the PLC is a limiting factor, and that introducing Honeyd+ has a marginal impact on performance. Notable findings are that the Raspberry Pi is the preferred hosting platform, and more than five simultaneous connections were not optimal.


This paper presents a novel approach to design obfuscated circuits for digital signal processing (DSP) applications using high-level transformations, a key-based obfuscating finite-state machine (FSM), and a reconfigurator. The goal is to design DSP circuits that are harder to reverse engineer. High-level transformations of iterative data-flow graphs have been exploited for area-speed-power tradeoffs. This is the first attempt to develop a design flow to apply high-level transformations that not only meet these tradeoffs but also simultaneously obfuscate the architectures both structurally and functionally. Several modes of operations are introduced for obfuscation where the outputs are meaningful from a signal processing point of view, but are functionally incorrect. Examples of such modes include a third-order digital filter that can also implement a sixth-order or ninth-order filter in a time-multiplexed manner. The latter two modes are meaningful but represent functionally incorrect modes. Multiple meaningful modes can be exploited to reconfigure the filter order for different applications. Other modes may correspond to nonmeaningful modes. A correct key input to an FSM activates a reconfigurator. The configure data controls various modes of the circuit operation. Functional obfuscation is accomplished by requiring use of the correct initialization key, and configure data. Wrong initialization key fails to enable the reconfigurator, and a wrong configure data activates either a meaningful but nonfunctional or nonmeaningful mode. Probability of activating the correct mode is significantly reduced leading to an obfuscated DSP circuit. Structural obfuscation is also achieved by the proposed methodology via high-level transformations. Experimental results show that the overhead of the proposed methodology is small, while a strong obfuscation is attained. For example, the area overhead for a (31)th-order IIR filter benchmark is only 17.7% with a 128-bit configuration key, where 1 ≤ l ≤ 8, i.e., the order of this filter should be a multiple of 3, and can vary from 3 to 24.


In this policy brief, we focus on the debates surrounding what has been called the "silent debt crisis" of the Caribbean. We discuss the level of debt at which the relation with economic growth turns from positive to negative. We also discuss, illustrated with simulations of the tradeoffs, how to reduce the debt level with policy options that complement fiscal austerity with debt restructuring, economic growth promotion, acceleration of inflation, and financial repression. Each policy option carries an advantage in terms of easing the required fiscal adjustment; however, each also presents downsides that could undermine such a benefit. There appears to be no gain without upfront pain.


type="main" xml:id="ecpa12068-abs-0001"> The "Henry tax review," Australia's Future Tax System (Commonwealth of Australia, Department of Treasury, [, 2010]), recommended that royalties be abolished and replaced by a resource rent tax. Regarding abolition, AFTS drew on KPMG Econtech ([, 2010a]) ( http://taxre view.treasury.gov.au/content/html/commissioned_work/downloads/KPMG_Econtec h_Efficiency%20of%20Taxes_Final_Report.pdf ), a major report commissioned by Treasury to investigate the efficiencies of a wide range of Australian taxes, using MM900, a proprietary CGE model. That report estimated that the average excess burden of royalties and crude oil excise, taken together, was 50 cents per dollar of public revenue, and that the marginal excess burden, at 70 cents, was the highest of all imposts except those on gambling. We argue that the KPMG Econtech long-run comparative static framework was inappropriate for policy purposes. By ignoring that mining is largely foreign owned, the model missed a large "rectangle" of gain – which we calculate using a partial equilibrium model. More fundamentally, the finding that royalties do harm is difficult to reconcile with the widely accepted claim that a rise in the terms of trade is beneficial. Using a partial equilibrium model, we conclude that royalties are likely to have brought substantial benefits to Australians, and that higher royalty rates would have increased both economic welfare as well as public revenue.


This book uses the PMBOK Guide, Third Edition, so that all information is up to date for the new PMP examination.Don't just take the PMP® exam: Pass it, the first time!Less than 50% of PMP exam candidates actually pass the exam on their first attempt. But one group passes at an amazing 80+% rate: the students of Dr. Rudd McGary, PMP. McGary has spent years teaching the PMP certification exam and helping professional project managers prepare for it. Now, he's integrated all of these techniques and knowledge to assist you in one book: Passing the PMP Exam.Dr. McGary shows you exactly what the Project Management Institute expects from you and exactly how to be prepared for the certification examination. Whatever your experience, he'll help you rapidly achieve deep mastery of PMI's Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK®). Other books cover PMBOK, but this book is relentlessly focused on helping you ace your exam the first time. Learn proven strategies, methods, and tips for passing your PMP exam Master all five project phases: initiation, planning, execution, control, and closing Use the book to become a project management professional in project integration, scoping, scheduling, costs, quality, human resources, communications, risk, and procurement Understand critical project management details, from Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) to change control systems Review the professional conduct and ethics standards you will be tested on Continue to use the book as a valuable resource of practical information after you are certifiedThe accompanying CD-ROM presents Rudd McGary's unique approach to passing the PMP exam. You'll find more valuable content than on any other PMP study guide CD-ROM-including more than 400 sample exam questions and answers!© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.


In Hollywood Cartoons, Michael Barrier takes us on a glorious guided tour of American animation in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, to meet the legendary artists and entrepreneurs who created Bugs Bunny, Betty Boop, Mickey Mouse, Wile E. Coyote, Donald Duck, Tom and Jerry, and many other cartoon favorites. Beginning with black-and-white silent cartoons, Barrier offers an insightful account, taking us inside early New York studios and such Hollywood giants as Disney, Warner Bros., and MGM. Barrier excels at illuminating the creative side of animation-revealing how stories are put together, how animators develop a character, how technical innovations enhance the "realism" of cartoons. Here too are colorful portraits of the giants of the field, from Walt and Roy Disney and their animators, to Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. Based on hundreds of interviews with veteran animators, Hollywood Cartoons gives us the definitive inside look at this colorful era and at the creative process behind these marvelous cartoons. "This definitive depiction of our most American medium will leave all but the most hardened Disnophobe shouting Yabba-Dabba-Doo!"-The Boston Book Review


Bob Fagin was a boy who helped twelve-year-old Dickens during his traumatic experience at Warren's Blacking Factory. Taking the cue from the discrepancy between the real Fagin and devilish Fagin in Oliver Twist, I will consider the reasons underlying Dickens's choice of this particular name for such a villain. At the same time, in light of the scarcely plausible contrast between Oliver's innocence and the urban decay surrounding him, I will argue that the novel should be interpreted as a social metaphor whose ethical model is The Pilgrim's Progress. Indeed, as suggested by the novel's complete title – The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress – the eponymous hero's experience can be regarded as a transition from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City where the "principle of good" is ultimately brought into action. However, unlike Bunyan's motivated and energetic hero, Oliver is a character whose main traits are passivity, innocence, and silence. Although melodramatic and awash with sentimentality, Victorian middle-class readers readily subscribed to the novel's message based on the final triumph of goodness.


Our concern for the future and our conception of human nature have both a philosophical dimension and a public policy dimension. Which would be the better way to spend our next dollar: on life-extension or on artificial intelligence? Manned space-exploration or robotic space-exploration? Answering such public-policy questions involves confronting some deep philosophical mysteries. If you were only concerned for your own survival, would you prefer to have your brain transplanted into another body, or have your brain scanned and its information realized in the hardware of a durable, Turing-testable robot? Would it be better to live one long life without offspring, or a short life leaving generations of descendants? If personal superlongevity and normal fertility would lead to overcrowding, which should we choose? Does considering "existential threats" change how we should answer? This article explores the conceptual and empirical interdependencies of these seemingly disjoint questions.


A structural equation model (SEM) is an effective framework to reason over causal relationships represented via a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Recent advances have enabled effective maximum-likelihood point estimation of DAGs from observational data. However, a point estimate may not accurately capture the uncertainty in inferring the underlying graph in practical scenarios, wherein the true DAG is non-identifiable and/or the observed dataset is limited. We propose Bayesian Causal Discovery Nets (BCD Nets), a variational inference framework for estimating a distribution over DAGs characterizing a linear-Gaussian SEM. Developing a full Bayesian posterior over DAGs is challenging due to the the discrete and combinatorial nature of graphs. We analyse key design choices for scalable VI over DAGs, such as 1) the parametrization of DAGs via an expressive variational family, 2) a continuous relaxation that enables low-variance stochastic optimization, and 3) suitable priors over the latent variables. We provide a series of experiments on real and synthetic data showing that BCD Nets outperform maximum-likelihood methods on standard causal discovery metrics such as structural Hamming distance in low data regimes.


Retail trade sector is growing rapidly and shows significant improvements in the "World Trade". This charming sector is expanding and developing in Turkey appropriate to the developments in the world. In particular, population growth, the spread of the use of a credit card, the developments in Turkey's economy and such other reasons, this sector has made a quite development in recent years. There are a total of eight companies operating in the retail trade sector in Borsa (Stock Market) Istanbul. Operating expenses such as; research and development expenses, marketing, sales and distribution expenses, general administrative expenses are very important for the determination of profitability of these companies. In this study answers to the following questions are to be searched; what is the share of operating expenses in this sector? Is there a relationship between the profitability with operating expenses? What is the ratio of total expenses in operating expense? What is the rate and volume amount of domestic market sales and export to foreign markets? This eight retail trade company operating in Bourse Istanbul will be reviewed by analyzing their income tables statistically.


Approximate Newton methods are standard optimization tools which aim to maintain the benefits of Newton's method, such as a fast rate of convergence, while alleviating its drawbacks, such as computationally expensive calculation or estimation of the inverse Hessian. In this work we investigate approximate Newton methods for policy optimization in Markov decision processes (MDPs). We first analyse the structure of the Hessian of the total expected reward, which is a standard objective function for MDPs. We show that, like the gradient, the Hessian exhibits useful structure in the context of MDPs and we use this analysis to motivate two Gauss-Newton methods for MDPs. Like the Gauss-Newton method for non-linear least squares, these methods drop certain terms in the Hessian. The approximate Hessians possess desirable properties, such as negative definiteness, and we demonstrate several important performance guarantees including guaranteed ascent directions, invariance to afine transformation of the parameter space and convergence guarantees. We finally provide a unifying perspective of key policy search algorithms, demonstrating that our second Gauss-Newton algorithm is closely related to both the EM-algorithm and natural gradient ascent applied to MDPs, but performs significantly better in practice on a range of challenging domains.


AIMS
The English Public Health Responsibility Deal (RD) is a public-private partnership involving voluntary pledges between industry, government and other actors in various areas including alcohol, and designed to improve public health. This paper reviews systematically the evidence underpinning four RD alcohol pledges.

METHODS
We conducted a systematic review of reviews of the evidence underpinning interventions proposed in four RD alcohol pledges, namely alcohol labelling, tackling underage alcohol sales, advertising and marketing alcohol, and alcohol unit reduction. In addition, we included relevant studies of interventions where these had not been covered by a recent review.

RESULTS
We synthesized the evidence from 14 reviews published between 2002 and 2013. Overall, alcohol labelling is likely to be of limited effect on consumption: alcohol unit content labels can help consumers assess the alcohol content of drinks; however, labels promoting drinking guidelines and pregnancy warning labels are unlikely to influence drinking behaviour. Responsible drinking messages are found to be ambiguous, and industry-funded alcohol prevention campaigns can promote drinking instead of dissuading consumption. Removing advertising near schools can contribute to reducing underage drinking; however, community mobilization and law enforcement are most effective. Finally, reducing alcohol consumption is more likely to occur if there are incentives such as making lower-strength alcohol products cheaper.

CONCLUSIONS
The most effective evidence-based strategies to reduce alcohol-related harm are not reflected consistently in the RD alcohol pledges. The evidence is clear that an alcohol control strategy should support effective interventions to make alcohol less available and more expensive.


Human-robot collaborative work has the potential to advance quality, efficiency and safety in manufacturing. In this paper we present a gestural communication lexicon for human-robot collaboration in industrial assembly tasks and establish methodology for producing such a lexicon. Our user experiments are grounded in a study of industry needs, providing potential real-world applicability to our results. Actions required for industrial assembly tasks are abstracted into three classes: part acquisition, part manipulation, and part operations. We analyzed the communication between human pairs performing these subtasks and derived a set of communication terms and gestures. We found that participant-provided gestures are intuitive and well suited to robotic implementation, but that interpretation is highly dependent on task context. We then implemented these gestures on a robot arm in a human-robot interaction context, and found the gestures to be easily interpreted by observers. We found that observation of human-human interaction can be effective in determining what should be communicated in a given human-robot task, how communication gestures should be executed, and priorities for robotic system implementation based on frequency of use.


Thirteen genera representing 30 legume species, two weed species (Abutilon theophrasti and Cynanchum laeve), and five cultivars of soybean were inoculated with Septoria glycines in the field and/or greenhouse. Of these, 29 legume species and A. theophrasti had leaf symptoms. Only Cicer arietinum was symptomless under field and greenhouse inoculations. C. laeve was found to be infected in its natural state in the field, but symptoms could not be reproduced when it was inoculated in the greenhouse. Leaf symptoms on the legume species and A. theophrasti were separated into three types. All Glycine spp. except one accession of G. tabacina (PI440994) had lesions typical of soybean brown spot. Ten legume species with green cotyledons had small lesions. Six legume species and A. theophrasti had atypical symptoms. Incubated leaf samples from inoculated field and greenhouse-grown plants were used to count pycnidia with cirrhi. Species with small lesions and atypical symptoms had fewer pycnidia with cirrhi than those plants with typical brown spot lesions. Septoria was isolated from leaf lesions of field-grown noninoculated A. theophrasti and C. laeve plants. These isolates were similar in culture to an isolate of S. glycines from soybean and, like the soybean isolate, caused typical brown spot lesions on soybeans and A. theophrasti.


Enlightenment botany was replete with sexual symbolism-to the extent that many botanical textbooks were widely considered pornographic. Carl Linnaeus's controversial new system for classifying plants based on their sexual characteristics, as well as his use of language resonating with erotic allusions, provoked intense public debate over the morality of botanical study. And the renowned Tahitian exploits of Joseph Banks-whose trousers were reportedly stolen while he was inside the tent of Queen Oberea of Tahiti-reinforced scandalous associations with the field. Yet Linnaeus and Banks became powerful political and scientific figures who were able to promote botanical exploration alongside the exploitation of territories, peoples, and natural resources. Sex, Botany, and Empire explores the entwined destinies of these two men and how their influence served both science and imperialism. Patricia Fara reveals how Enlightenment botany, under the veil of rationality, manifested a drive to conquer, subdue, and deflower-all in the name of British empire. Linnaeus trained his traveling disciples in a double mission-to bring back specimens for the benefit of the Swedish economy and to spread the gospel of Linnaean taxonomy. Based in London at the hub of an international exchange and correspondence network, Banks ensured that Linnaeus's ideas became established throughout the world. As the president of the Royal Society for more than forty years, Banks revolutionized British science, and his innovations placed science at the heart of trade and politics. He made it a policy to collect and control resources not only for the sake of knowledge but also for the advancement of the empire. Although Linnaeus is often celebrated as modern botany's true founder, Banks has had a greater long-term impact. It was Banks who ensured that science and imperialism flourished together, and it was he who first forged the interdependent relationship between scientific inquiry and the state that endures to this day.


Impacts of Residential Relocation on Stress, Coping and Quality of Life among Older Persons in Hong Kong by CHAN Siu Pan Benny Master of Philosophy Residential relocation could potentially be injurious to older persons. Indeed, much of the research literature in Western societies points out that involuntary residential relocation may exert undesirable impacts on older persons' lives. Those impacts could be even greater if the relocation was forced upon the individual one person. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to investigate the impacts of involuntary residential relocation on older persons' quality of life, stress and coping in Hong Kong. From a review of the literature, it was hypothesized that there will be perceived stress during and after the process of residential relocation, and satisfaction with relocation arrangement and quality of elderly life are related. This research method adopted was a one-shot group pretest-posttest experimental design with a panel study, having the dual purposes of explanation and description. Structured and semi-structured questionnaires were used to collect quantitative data and qualitative data in order to test the hypotheses, and provide subsequent policy information for the service and care providers. A total of 85 and 74 older persons were interviewed in the pretest (male=19 and female=66) and the posttest (male=15 and female=59) respectively. They were recruited from two public housing estates: Valley Road Estate and Ho Man Tin Estate, and almost all of them were finally relocated to Ho Man Tin South, effectively a relatively short-distance intra-urban relocation. Most of the hypotheses of the study could be supported. The findings indicate that the respondents perceived stress from the relocation and associated financial strains from the costs. The greatest stress they faced was the processes before the actual move. Moreover, the results also revealed that their quality of life, both in the pretest and posttest studies, was statistically and significantly correlated to their stress, coping strategies and satisfaction with the existing housing. In addition, more than half of the respondents expressed the view that the non-government organizations gave them the greatest help or assistance in this stressful life event. Nonetheless, the respondents showed that they experienced higher levels of stress and lower satisfaction with new estate after the move in spite of the objectivity better living conditions. They also indicated that they had a lower quality of life and poorer coping strategies after the move. Thus, it appears that residential relocation is not generally favorable for successful ageing. Furthermore, the female respondents and older persons who lived alone reported that they experienced more problems in the move than other respondents. The older residents from Valley Road Estate had greater satisfaction with the new housing than those from Ho Man Tin Estate perhaps because their residential environmental improvement were greater, offsetting some stresses of the move. Last but not least, some constructive suggestions were offered to all players, including the Housing Authority, the NGOs, the older persons and their families. I declare that this thesis <<Impacts of Residential Relocation on Stress, Coping and Quality of Life among Older Persons in Hong Kong>> is the product of my own research and has not been published in any other publication. CHAN Siu Pan Benny September 2001