Patterns of brain evolution have been widely studied across vertebrates, with the bulk of studies using mammals and/or birds as model systems. Within these groups, species occupying different habitats have been shown to have divergent neuroanatomy, particularly with regard to differences in the relative size of different brain structures, correlated with differences in habitat complexity. We examined the pattern of allometric scaling across the telencephalon, dorsal cortex, dorsomedial cortex, medial cortex, dorsal ventricular ridge, medulla and cerebellum in six species of Puerto Rican Anolis lizards, which are grouped in three distinct ecomorphs (i.e. ecological types) according to interspecific differences in preferred habitat type. The differences in habitat preferences are accompanied by morphological and behavioral adaptations for effective use of each habitat type. Our results challenge this trend and demonstrate a lack of convergence in the relative size of different brain structures between species belonging to the same ecomorph type. Overall brain volume explained between 92.5 and 99.8% of the variance in the volume of each of the brain regions measured and 93.8 and 98.5% of the variance in the volume of each component measured within the telencephalon. This pattern of brain allometry is consistent with concerted brain evolution. However, in the case of the cerebellum, interspecific differences in volume exhibit a trend in accordance with mosaic brain evolution. This suggests that both concerted and mosaic brain evolution have shaped the anole brain, with the former playing a dominant role. Concerted brain evolution is the primary mechanism shaping the brain in mammals and cartilaginous fishes, and its presence in Anolis lizards provides additional evidence supporting the hypothesis that concerted brain evolution might result from a conserved pattern of brain development common to all vertebrates. More generally, our findings highlight the necessity of further studies of brain evolution in reptiles as they can provide valuable insights into the mechanisms underlying vertebrate brain evolution.


In this paper, two algorithms have been presented to enhance the infrared (IR) images. Using the autoregressive moving average model structure and Hinfin optimal bounds, the image pixels are mapped from the IR pixel space into normal optical image space, thus enhancing the IR image for improved visual quality. Although Hinfin-based system identification algorithms are very common now, they are not quite suitable for real-time applications owing to their complexity. However, many variants of such algorithms are possible that can overcome this constraint. Two such algorithms have been developed and implemented in this paper. Theoretical and algorithmic results show remarkable enhancement in the acquired images. This will help in enhancing the visual quality of IR images for surveillance applications.


An online exhibition about John Curtin's home in Cottesloe, Western Australia. The site includes images, audio and video clips to tell the story of the prime minister's modest home.


If the reader were to access the 1981 case of People v. Bartolomeo (1) on Westlaw, there is a prominent red flag to the left of the citation, meaning that at least one legal proposition in Bartolomeo is no longer good or current law. In fact, the Bartolomeo portion of the Rogers-Bartolomeo Rule, which is the subject of this article, was overruled by the New York State Court of Appeals in 1990 in the case of People v. Bing. (2) Although the history of the Rogers-Bartolomeo Rule was relatively brief, spanning only a single decade, its impact was significant to defendants, crime victims, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and legal academicians alike. The Rogers-Bartolomeo Rule was controversial during its time. The rule was launched into New York State's jurisprudence as a significant expansion to the state's criminal exclusionary laws, and was shot at during the decade that followed until it crashed and burned in 1990. The purpose of this article is not to necessarily debate whether the Rogers-Bartolomeo Rule was a wise or unwise expansion of the exclusionary rule and New York State's right to counsel. Rather, this article chronicles the history of well-intentioned efforts to assure the greatest degree of constitutional protections for persons confronted by the law enforcement arm of the state, and the courts' ultimate recognition that the expansion of the exclusionary rule proved to be impractical and unworkable for a variety of reasons, leading to its reversal. More than two additional decades have passed since Bartolomeo was reversed by the Court of Appeals. With hindsight and the perspectives that come with time, we may revisit the rise and fall of this controversial constitutional and evidentiary rule. I. GENERAL EXCLUSIONARY RULES FOR VIOLATIONS OF THE RIGHT TO COUNSEL The Rogers-Bartolomeo Rule arises out of the federal Sixth Amendment right to counsel. (3) The Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides that, "[i]n all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall ... have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence." (4) The right to counsel is the last of several rights contained in the Sixth Amendment, including the rights to speedy and public trials, impartial juries, information about crimes charged, the confrontation of witnesses, and compulsory process. (5) The New York State Constitution contains language that is arguably less expansive about the right to counsel than its federal counterpart. (6) The state constitution provides that, "[i]n any trial in any court whatever the party accused shall be allowed to appear and defend in person and with counsel as in civil actions and shall be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation and be confronted with the witnesses against him or her." (7) Nevertheless, New York's constitutional protections in favor of the accused are generally more expansive than their federal counterparts, as New York's interpretation of the right to counsel is defined within the broader constitutional context of the state's Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and the right to due process. (8) In New York, a statement to law enforcement personnel is not admissible against the defendant at trial if it is "involuntarily made." (9) The state's Criminal Procedure Law ("CPL") section 60.45(2) defines an involuntarily made confession, admission, or other statement as including those obtained: (a) [b]y any person by the use or threatened use of physical force upon the defendant or another person, or by means of any other improper conduct or undue pressure which impaired the defendant's physical or mental condition to the extent of undermining his ability to make a choice whether or not to make a statement; or (b) [b]y a public servant engaged in law enforcement activity or by a person then acting under his direction or in cooperation with him: (i) by means of any promise or statement of fact, which promise or statement creates a substantial risk that the defendant might falsely incriminate himself; or (ii) in violation of such rights as the defendant may derive from the constitution of this state or of the United States. …


Rainbow trout fry syndrome (RTFS) is a septicaemic infection of young rainbow trout Oncorhynchus mykiss occurring at low temperatures and responsible for severe economic losses in European fish farming. The causative agent, Flavobacterium psychrophilum, is a gliding bacterium, and difficulties in culturing it have long been an impediment to investigations on pathogenesis and immunity. Successful attempts at experimentally inducing the disease have been reported, but no experimental model resulting in well-controlled and quantitatively reproducible effects has been described. Recent improvements in F. psychrophilum cultivation made it possible to produce bacterial suspensions with nearly constant viability and to complete challenge injections in rainbow trout fingerlings, using accurately adjusted infective doses. Parenteral injection resulted in significant mortality, which was higher when administered intramuscularly (IM) than intraperitoneally (IP). Lethal doses 50 % lower than 10(3) colony forming units were consistently obtained in trout weighing 3 to 5 g, and the regular shape of the cumulative mortality curves appeared to lend itself to quantitative analyses. Bath experiments produced milder effects, although mortality ranging between 45 and 60 % was obtained in 6 g trout when skin lesions or stressors were induced along with bacterial exposure. Temperature, salinity and the process of preserving isolates (at least over short periods of time) did not seem to be associated with the severity of infection. Nevertheless, infection trials performed at 2 different locations differing both in water quality and in the system of fish maintenance resulted in different mortalities. These findings notwithstanding, the proposed IM model appears easy to apply under standardized experimental conditions and should contribute to effective advances in the study of the disease.


This article examines a relatively unexplored aspect of integral ecology in Laudato Si' called "the ecology of daily life" and considers how living a healthy ecology of daily life relates to the unique vocation of humans to care for creation. Specifically, what does the Pope intend by "the ecology of daily life"? What are some obstacles to living it? How can living the ecology of daily life help build a culture of care? Based upon the principles articulated in the encyclical, the article proposes an examen for assessing progress in living the ecology of daily life. This examen is applied to two case studies in order to discern a fruitful practice of the ecology of daily life. The case studies represent environmental situations that, while affected by larger scale industrial/commercial processes, are primarily driven by micro-scale decision-making and small daily actions of individuals and local communities. The first case study focuses on endocrine disrupting chemicals as an example of a polluted ecology of daily life, and the second highlights a zero waste initiative as an exemplar of an integral ecology of daily life. The article concludes with comments on lessons learned from the exercise of applying the examen to two concrete situations. This approach can help individuals and communities discern how to build a culture of care based upon the principles of the ecology of daily life as they are presented in Laudato Si' .


The highly prized ability to make financial plans with some certainty about the future comes from the core fields of economics.  In recent years the availability of more data, analytical tools of greater precision, and ex post studies of business decisions have increased demand for information about economic forecasting. Volumes 2A and 2B, which follows Nobel laureate Clive Granger's Volume 1 (2006), concentrate on two major subjects.  Volume 2A covers innovations in methodologies, specifically macroforecasting and forecasting financial variables.  Volume 2B investigates commercial applications, with sections on forecasters' objectives and methodologies.  Experts provide surveys of a large range of literature scattered across applied and theoretical statistics journals as well as econometrics and empirical economics journals.  The Handbook of Economic Forecasting Volumes 2A and 2B provide a unique compilation of chapters giving a coherent overview of forecasting theory and applications in one place and with up-to-date accounts of all major conceptual issues.

 Focuses on innovation in economic forecasting via industry applications

 Presents coherent summaries of subjects in economic forecasting that stretch from methodologies to applications

 Makes details about economic forecasting accessible to scholars in fields outside economics


The article argues that academic art history, as it is taught in undergraduate courses throughout the Western world, is based on an obsolete assumption. The very heart of art-historical education - the grand narrative tour of the survey course - amounts to the student's inculcation and symbolic duplication of the great journey of Art through the ages. The curriculum's tacit goal is typically to establish a habitus for responding to art, and to expose the student to a certain kind of experience, rather than a proper education in the "art of art history" (Preziosi) or the analysis of visual culture, old and new. The latter task would arguably serve today's students better, regardless of whether or not they will pursue academic careers. My brief proposal for a reformation of the conventional education aims to subsume historiography, in an extended sense of the word, as well as meta-historical reflection into the art history introductory course. The key pedagogical strategy, which reflects elementary research procedures, would be to begin each carefully selected historical inquiry with what is considered - or contested - knowledge of the object of study (work of art, period, artist, problem, etc.) today. To proceed, one could, for instance, compare a current position (alluding to both place and point of view) with an older position or "historiotopy," in order to systematically dramatize the discursive production of art-historical objects through history, as well as convey the fact that knowledge is situated, perspectival and essentially preliminary. The point is, ultimately, to exchange a largely passive reception of a quasi- Hegelian meta-narrative overview for meta-historical insight, and to initiate active, critical engagement with the production/interpretation of images, contemporary as well as historical.


We introduce COMO (Compositional Morphosyntactic Ontology), a classification of part-of-speech categories and their associated grammatical features, which aims to be valid across languages of very different typology. The work has been carried out within the context of the Oxford Global Languages programme, which has the goal of developing language knowledge for 100 languages, particularly those under-represented in the digital space. The requirements around this project are: to be able to describe languages of different typeS while respecting their grammatical tradition, and to be able to serve two main use cases that define our typical work, namely, the labelling of linguistic information in lexicographic products, and the provision of support for language processing tools and corpus annotation processes. These requirements determined the conception and design of COMO, created as a reference model within a broader data architecture in order to address issues of syntactic and semantic interoperability. Our proposal builds on top of previous initiatives in the field aiming at the same goals, but incorporates different features in order to accommodate for the requirements in the project.


Abstract Detailed descriptions and stratigraphic analysis of 159 species of foraminifers recovered from six existing wells drilled in the Tofino Basin, offshore Vancouver Island support the establishment of 10 zones, ranging from upper Eocene to Pleistocene-Recent. The newly refined stratigraphic ages improve correlations between the offshore Tofino Basin and onshore outcrops of the Carmanah Group on western Vancouver Island and to other areas in the Pacific North-west and Canadian Arctic. Paleobathymetric estimates from interpreted biofacies changes indicate a shallowing upward trend throughout the Oligocene, with deep biofacies encountered during the early Miocene and early Pliocene, reflecting a major transgression or basin subsidence. Late Pliocene-Pleistocene inner to outer neritic biofacies, cool-water faunal assemblages and coarser-grained lithology indicate a regressive phase and regional onset of glaciation. The TB represents a complex tectono-stratigraphy, which has undergone episodic uplift, tectonic underthrusting, climatic cooling and eustatic fluctuations resulting in complex facies changes, stratigraphic breaks and structural complexities. The new, updated biostratigraphy has constrained many of these regional geological events, with improved/high resolution analysis of correlations and paleoenvironmental interpretations. Proposed lifting of federal and provincial moratoriums on offshore exploration and development has renewed interest in offshore energy resource potential, reassessment of existing data, and interpretations of the Tofino Basin (TB) and adjacent shelf architecture. This study provides baseline data for future taxonomy, biostratigraphy, basin modeling and energy resource assessments.


This paper analyzes the performance of a large-scale multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) system with amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying in the presence of co-channel interference. Each user terminal (UT) has a single antenna while the relay is equipped with very large antenna arrays. To evaluate the impact of large number of relay antennas on the performance of the considered system, we derive a lower bound on the achievable rate. We also perform a large system analysis in the regimes of high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), large number of relay antennas and large number of UTs. Numerical results are presented to verify the theoretical analysis.


Water quality deterioration in buildings poses risks to human health and infrastructure. As such, this research tracked the concentrations of copper and chlorine in the tap water of a new, multi-story, LEED Platinum building over its first six months of occupancy to gain new insights into the building water quality. The building is typical of a university research building, which contains laboratory, office, and common spaces, and is representative of commercial and institutional (CI) buildings in general. Twice weekly, first and second draw grab samples of domestic cold water were collected from breakroom faucets on each floor of the five-story building. Grab samples were analyzed for dissolved copper (Cu) and free chlorine. Building occupancy was approximated using Wi-Fi access point connections that provided hourly counts of wireless devices on each floor. The access point counts showed occupancy patterns typical of university buildings, such as higher counts on weekdays than on Saturday and Sunday, and higher counts during the workday compared to other times. Overall building occupancy was low during the first 3 months of the study and then increased during the second 3 months. The total building occupancy over the study duration ranked by floor was 1st > 3rd > 2nd > 4th > 5th, which followed move-in schedules for the building. The 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th floors showed statistically significant difference from each other except for the relationship between the 2nd and 4th and the 2nd and 5th floors. Maximum copper concentrations were in the range of 1.2–1.7 mg L−1 and occurred during the first three months of the study. Cu concentrations decreased on all floors over the six months and showed a moderately strong negative correlation with occupancy by floor. Although building occupancy was increasing throughout the study, chlorine was almost never detectable in all samples over the six months.


We propose a method for the decomposition of modal formulae on processes with nondeterminism and probability with respect to Structural Operational Semantics. The purpose is to reduce the satisfaction problem of a formula for a process to verifying whether its subprocesses satisfy certain formulae obtained from the decomposition. To deal with the probabilistic behavior of processes, and thus with the decomposition of formulae characterizing it, we introduce a SOS-like machinery allowing for the specification of the behavior of open distribution terms. By our decomposition, we obtain (pre)congruence formats for probabilistic bisimilarity, ready similarity and similarity.


This study investigates advice-giving in the context of a Japanese internet discussion forum on the topic of divorce. The first part presents an analysis of the form and content of advice messages in terms of the discursive moves that comprise them. Discursive moves are described in terms of their frequency, sequencing and the syntactic forms associated with them. The second part deals with the relational aspects of advice-giving: how an advice-giver expresses a stance and establishes a relationship with an advice-recipient. Distinctive characteristics of advice-giving in Japanese are identified, and their occurrence is related to cultural values and aspects of the discussion forum discourse context


This paper explores the links between the theory and practices of marketing and small business. The review of the literature highlights the close association of the more advanced conceptualisations of marketing, especially relationship marketing, and those of small business, particularly entrepreneurial small business. Given these theoretical similarities and the ensuing symmetry of actions and behaviours described in theory, the research question is posed, how does an appreciation of these links aid our understanding of entrepreneurial practices? The question is addressed by employing a participant observation methodology to create a case study of one small rural firm and by inductive analysis techniques. The findings show that it is difficult to disentangle or even to distinguish, the practice of relationship marketing from entrepreneurial action. This leads one to suggest that it may be useful to reconsider relationship marketing as a facet of entrepreneurship.


Governance adjustments via stable rules in reaction to financial crises are inevitably followed by relaxation, revision, and retraction. The economic conditions and the corresponding requirements for optimal and stable rules are constantly evolving, suggesting that a different set of rules could be optimal. Despite the risk of future crises, anticipation of future developments and preemption of possible future crises do not play a significant role in the regulatory framework and academic literature. Dynamic elements in financial regulation as a supplemental optimization process for rulemaking could help facilitate rulemaking when it is most needed – ex-ante before crises – to curtail the effects of crises and suboptimal regulatory outcomes – ex-post after crises. By including dynamic elements, the regulatory sine curve of financial regulation could be optimized in relation to the phase-shifted first derivative (cosine curve) that describes common elements of financial crises. Dynamic regulation could help dampen the degree of volatility of both the cosine curve and the regulatory sine curve by creating an anticipatory regulatory response to financial crises.


This dissertation presents a study of Chinese diasporic narratives from Canada and Australia and examines the formation and negotiation of diasporic cultural identity and consciousness. Drawing upon theoretical discussions on diasporas in general, it investigates how the Chinese diaspora is imagined and represented, as a visible minority group, within the context of the multicultural nation state.

This dissertation begins with a taxonomy of the modes of explaining diaspora and offers three ways of theorising diasporic consciousness. In analysing the filmic and fictional narrative forms of the Chinese in Canada and Australia, the practices of cultural self-representation and of minority group participation and enjoyment of the nation are foregrounded in order to advance critical analysis of the Chinese diaspora. While taking into account the heterogeneity of the imagined diasporic Chinese community, this study also contends that the formation and negotiation of diasporic consciousness and diasporic cultural identity politics is strongly and invariably affected by the multicultural conditions and policies of their host countries. The adaptation and manifestation of minority groups' cultural practices are thus a matter of social, cultural and political contingencies more often aligned with dominant cultural expectations and manipulations than with the assertiveness of more empowered minority group participation. This dissertation therefore argues for a broader and more complex understanding of diasporic cultural and identity politics in the widespread attempts to merge and incorporate minority group narratives into the key foundational ('grand') narratives of the white nation state. The importance of reinscribing Chinese diasporic histories into the cultural landscapes of their receiving countries is moreover increasingly propelled by the speed and momentum of globalisation that has resulted in the growing number of multicultural societies on the one hand but also led to the homogenisation of cultural differences and diversities.

In focussing on the fictional and filmic narratives from Canada and Australia, the diversity of the Chinese diasporic community and their conditions are emphasised in order to reflect upon the differences in the administration and practice of multiculturalism in these two countries. The comparative reading of Chinese-Canadian and Chinese-Australian novels and films locates its analysis of notions of 'homeland' and belonging, community and national and cultural citizenship within the context of the development and negotiation of diasporic identity politics.


This research analyzes the convergence properties of a discrete implementation of the Hull and White two-factor model. It compares caplet prices using both the discrete valuation algorithm and the analytic solution. Quality of the results depends crucially on the properties of the model parameters. The valuation algorithm may be improved while preserving its computational efficiency. An application of the modified algorithm to the caplet pricing problem indicates that substantially reduced valuation errors.


Abstract The dynamic drivers of interfirm interactions across space have rarely been explored in the context of disaster recovery; therefore, the mechanism through which shocks propagate is unclear. This paper uses stochastic actor-oriented modeling to examine how trade networks among the 500 largest Japanese companies evolved during 2010 and 2011, i.e. before and after the Great East Japan Earthquake to identify sources of vulnerability in the system. In contrast to previous reports on broken supply chains, the network displayed only modest change even in the directly affected areas. Controlling for distance and for firm size, we find that when firms changed their partners, they preferred firms that were popular among other firms, that had partners in common with them and that also bought some products or services from them. These findings concur with a criticism that Japanese firms avoid external actors and exhibit inflexibility in reorganizing their networks in times of need, which contrasts with the non-cliquish network structures observed in high-performing economic sectors. The results also highlight the role of energy firms in disaster resilience. Unlike other large Japanese companies that cluster in major urban centers, energy firms are distributed across Japan. However, despite their peripheral physical locations, energy firms are centrally located in trade networks. Thus, while a disaster in any region may affect some energy firms and lead to large-scale temporary shocks, the entire network is unlikely to be disconnected by any region-specific disaster because of the spatial distribution of the topological network core formed by energy companies.


Expansion of agricultural activities has led to farms being cultivation throughout the years which, has led to reduction in soil fertility. Use of commercial inorganic fertilizers in these farms tends to be ultimate solution in maintaining high yield. Too much use of inorganic fertilizers has led to low soil pH. Low soil pH reduces availability of essential nutrients to plants, results in formation of toxic chemicals in the soil and leads to low rate of decomposition of organic matter which is required to increase buffering capacity of the soil and also release nutrients. Soil acidity is reduced by liming which, is an expensive exercise and does not add fertility to the soil. There was need to look for alternative to liming materials which would at the same time be adding essential nutrients to the soil. This study was aimed at identifying potential plants whose leaves may be used to raise soil pH. The pH trends of leaf water extracts and the volume of 0.05M sulphuric acid required to reduce pH of the water extracts to 5.0 was determined. The pH of leaf water extract ranged from 3.85 to 8.08 for the 90 days it was monitored. The volume of acid required to reduce pH to 5.0 ranged from 0.1 to 20.7 ml. It was found that leaves of cassia, sunflower, Markhamia lutea, Croton macrostachyus, meru oak, Cordia africana, peacock flower and mexican sunflower produces extracts of high pH and these extracts accommodate large amount of acid before their pH goes below 5.0. These plants should therefore be planted in farms so that their leaves will spread in farms, be used to make manure or make leaf water extracts to be applied in farms.


We seek to evaluate the potential for archaeological purposes of a set of LiDAR data, with a density of 0,5 points per square meter, made publically available by the Spanish National Geographic Institute (IGN) in the framework of the PNOA (Plan Nacional de Ortofotografia Aerea) project. This data will be compared with other available LiDAR datasets with a higher point density. Different case studies in Northwest Iberia will be presented.


The behavior of herbicides in surface waters is a function of many variables, including scale of the watershed, physical and chemical properties of the herbicide, physical and chemical properties of the soil, rainfall intensity, and time of year. In this study, the transport of 6 herbicides and 12 herbicide degradates was examined during the 2004 growing season in an intermediate-scale agricultural watershed (146 ha) that is drained by a first-order intermittent stream, and the mass load for each herbicide in the stream was estimated. The herbicide load during the first week of storm events after application ranged from 17% of annual load for trifluralin to 84% of annual load for acetochlor. The maximum weekly herbicide load in the stream was generally within the first 3 weeks after application for those compounds that were applied within the watershed during 2004, and later for herbicides not applied within the watershed during 2004 but still detected in the stream. The apparent dominant mode of herbicide transport in the stream--determined by analysis amongst herbicide and conservative ion concentrations at different points in the hydrograph and in base flow samples--was either overland runoff or shallow subsurface flow, depending on the elapsed time after application and type of herbicide. The load as a percentage of use (LAPU) for the parent compounds in this study was similar to literature values for those compounds applied by the farmer within the watershed, but smaller for those herbicides that had rainfall as their only source within the watershed.


Local decisions with global consequences Some estimates suggest that humanity has already exceeded our sustainable global water footprint: the balance between fresh water use and supply. It seems that the situation may be more unsustainable than we realize. Jaramillo and Destouni analyzed hydroclimatic data for 100 large basins dating back to 1901. Better accounting of local water use revealed larger than anticipated effects on the global water cycle. For example, local regulation of surface water flow and expanded regional irrigation activities have increased global evapotranspiration rates. Science, this issue p. 1248 Local alteration of the water cycle by human activities has led to global overuse of water resources. Flow regulation and irrigation alter local freshwater conditions, but their global effects are highly uncertain. We investigated these global effects from 1901 to 2008, using hydroclimatic observations in 100 large hydrological basins. Globally, we find consistent and dominant effects of increasing relative evapotranspiration from both activities, and decreasing temporal runoff variability from flow regulation. The evapotranspiration effect increases the long-term average human consumption of fresh water by 3563 ± 979 km3/year from 1901–1954 to 1955–2008. This increase raises a recent estimate of the current global water footprint of humanity by around 18%, to 10,688 ± 979 km3/year. The results highlight the global impact of local water-use activities and call for their relevant account in Earth system modeling.


Fine-tuning from pre-trained ImageNet models has become the de-facto standard for various computer vision tasks. Current practices for fine-tuning typically involve selecting an ad-hoc choice of hyper-parameters and keeping them fixed to values normally used for training from scratch. This paper re-examines several common practices of setting hyper-parameters for fine-tuning. Our findings are based on extensive empirical evaluation for fine-tuning on various transfer learning benchmarks. (1) While prior works have thoroughly investigated learning rate and batch size, momentum for fine-tuning is a relatively unexplored parameter. We find that picking the right value for momentum is critical for fine-tuning performance and connect it with previous theoretical findings. (2) Optimal hyper-parameters for fine-tuning in particular the effective learning rate are not only dataset dependent but also sensitive to the similarity between the source domain and target domain. This is in contrast to hyper-parameters for training from scratch. (3) Reference-based regularization that keeps models close to the initial model does not necessarily apply for "dissimilar" datasets. Our findings challenge common practices of fine- tuning and encourages deep learning practitioners to rethink the hyper-parameters for fine-tuning.


Incremental sheet forming is an emerging manufacturing technique in which sheet metal is formed into desired shape through the application of localized force using a hemispherical tool. Potential advantages of the process are its relatively low cost and small lead times, and these have to be balanced against the disadvantages of low dimensional accuracy and a limited understanding of the process' internal mechanics. Incremental sheet forming system can be classified as positive, or negative, depending on whether the sheet material is progressively deformed onto a protrusion or a cavity. In negative systems, the work piece is held on a static fixture; whereas, in positive incremental sheet forming, the fixture must be incrementally lowered onto a protruding die. Although the vertical movement of positive incremental sheet forming fixtures is easily illustrated schematically, its implementation is challenging; if the descent is actuated, the motion has to be carefully coordinated with those of the forming tool; if free sliding on vertical columns, the rig must move without jamming or rocking. This article reports the development and testing of a positive incremental sheet forming fixture design that uses nylon sleeve bushes. Symmetric and asymmetric components were formed using the designed fixture, modular wooden dies and a rotating tool with multiple diameters and the results are discussed.


Soil erosion and vegetation destruction have reached serious proportions in disturbed areas of the montane grasslands of the Natal Drakensberg. Little is known of the inherent ability of indigenous grasses to produce viable seed and establish seedlings for rehabilitation programmes. This study examined the effects of fire and small-scale disturbance on the seedling dynamics of the dominant grass, Themeda triandra Forssk. Annual seed production of T. triandra increased with length of burning rotation, ranging from 21 seeds min the annual winter burn to 485 seeds m 2 in the five-year burn. High predation of seeds (70-98%) and low viability (37% in 15 month-old seeds) contributed to the poor representation of T. triandra in the seed bank when compared to the aboveground vegetation. Seedling densities and survival were monitored by mapping quadrats at six-weekly intervals from November 1986 to September 1989. Highest establishment of T. triandra was recorded in the biennial spring burn treatment « 184 seedlings m-2). Microclirnatic studies of the seedling environment demonstrated that increases in photosynthetically active radiation following burning, and high soil moisture associated with accumulation of litter, favour seedling establishment. The mam constraint to seedling establishment was high mortality in winter which resulted in a 1% survival of seedlings of T. triandra during the three-year study. This indicates that in the fire-climax grasslands of the study, seedlings contribute little to the . population structure. The most significant factor contributing to low survivorship is intraspecific competition between seedlings. Spacing of seedlings in rehabilitation programmes is therefore a critical factor in optimizing seedling establishment.


Cost Estimation and Production Evaluation for Hopper Dredges. (May 2010) Thomas Elliot Hollinberger, B.S., United States Coast Guard Academy Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Robert E. Randall Dredging projects are expensive government funded projects that are contracted out and competitively bid upon. When planning a trailing suction hopper dredge project or bidding on the request for proposal for such a project, having an accurate cost prediction is essential. This thesis presents a method using fluid transport fundamentals and pump power characteristics to determine a production rate for hopper dredges. With a production rate established, a number of financial inputs are used to determine the cost and duration of a project. The estimating program is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet provided with reasonable values for a wide arrange of hopper dredging projects. The spreadsheet allows easy customization for any user with specific knowledge to improve the accuracy of his estimate. Results from the spreadsheet were found to be satisfactory using the default values and inputs of 8 projects from 1998 to 2009,: The spreadsheet produced an estimate that was an average of a 15.9% difference from the actual contract cost, versus a 15.7% difference for government estimates of the same projects.


PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY HAD AN ABIDING INTEREST IN THE CHEMICAL RESEARCHES of Humphry Davy (1778-1829). (1) Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat attribute Ione's allusion to "fire that is not brightness" (2) in Prometheus Unbound (1820) to Davy. "As Shelley knew from Sir Humphry Davy's account of the findings of Herschel (1800), there are 'dark rays'--infrared emanations that produce heat without light--which, Davy suggested, might be given off by the moon" (276n.). And in a letter of 29 July i812 to Hookham, Shelley, eager to learn of Davy's recent work, placed an advance order for his Elements of Chemical Philosophy. (3) One readily apparent reason for Shelley's interest in Davy's work has to do with what the former must have seen as an intellectual and metaphysical affinity with the latter with respect to understanding how causation operates in the world. As Christopher Lawrence has observed of Davy, "Anyone who reads Davy's works cannot fail to be struck by his repeated use of the word 'power' in every conceivable context, whether in his discussions of chemistry, poetry, the mind or society." (4) To restrict the field to Davy's "discussions of chemistry": in his Bakerian Lecture of 19 November 1807, "On Some New Phenomena of Chemical Changes Produced by Electricity, Particularly the Decomposition of the Fixed Alkalies ..." Davy announces the results of "the course of a laborious experimental application of the powers of electro-chemical analysis, to bodies [i.e., chemical unknowns] which have appeared simple when examined by common chemical agents...." (5) And in his Bakerian Lecture of 15 December 1808, "An Account of some New Analytical Researches on the Nature of Certain Bodies ... with Some General Observations on Chemical Theory," Davy proposes "laying before the Royal Society, an account of the results of different experiments, made with the hopes of extending our knowledge of the principles of bodies by the new powers and methods arising from the applications of electricity to chemistry...." (6) To see the affinity, one need only look to Shelley's "Mont Blanc" (1816). (7) There, he figures "power" as an unmoved mover, something which "dwells apart in its tranquility / Remote, serene, and inaccessible" (96-97), yet is the seat and source of causative agency for all the deployed and articulate forms in the world. Or one might look to the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (1816). There, "The awful shadow of some unseen Power / Floats though unseen among us," an adumbrative presence suggesting that "Power" itself is somehow responsible for "This various world" (1-3). Shelley's use of the term power to denote causative agency that, while not fully understood itself, nevertheless gives rise to articulate form and the understanding consequent upon the observation of such form, seems thoroughly consonant with Davy's use of the term. As the titles of the lectures cited above suggest, much of Davy's early fame stemmed from his isolation and identification of elements--alkaline earths such as calcium, barium, strontium, and magnesium, and halogens such as chlorine, fluorine, and iodine among these. With specific reference to the halogens, in a series of papers beginning with the second of the Bakerian Lectures cited above, Davy discovered and elaborated the elementary nature of chlorine. And while in Paris in 1813, Davy received a sample of an unknown substance from A. M. Ampere, Nicholas C1emont, and his father-in-law, C. B. Desormes. That substance, as Davy discovered by working on it at M. E. Chevreuil's laboratory, assisted by the young Michael Faraday, was iodine. The result of Davy's researches, as David Knight (99-100) reports, was the paper on the subliming and the elemental nature and behavior of iodine dated 10 December 1813, subsequently published as "Some Experiments and Observations on a new Substance which becomes a violet coloured Gas by Heat." In that paper, Davy, basing his nomenclature on the Greek etymology for the word violet, confers the name iodine on the new element. …


This thesis assumes that the narrative form of the Fourth Gospel is important for understanding the Gospel's meaning. Narrative is a communicative transaction whereby meaning is transmitted from author to reader via the way the story is told. Meaning is also established by overt speech-acts, and the 'act' performed in the overall structuring of the story. It arises within a context of rule-governed speech behaviour which determines parameters and implications that inform understanding. The Gospel's narrative form meets with readers' conventional expectations about how it relates to ostensive historical reality. Factors internal and external help determine genre. Part one examines aspects of the Gospel's narrative art. The way in which the narrative situation varies over the course of the narrative is outlined. The implied author manipulates the narration to create a close association in the reader's mind between the narrator and the beloved disciple. In John 3 the voice of the narrator merges with those of Jesus and John. These strategies have implications for the Gospel's theological meaning and the relationship of the implied author to the story world. Speech-act theory elucidates the narrative act by which the implied author conveys the Gospel's message and seeks to induce belief in the reader. Part two considers the Gospel's relationship to historical reference. Factors which influence a decision as to whether or not the Gospel is to be taken as fictional are examined, for example, whether aspects of the narration suggest fictional discourse and whether the speech-acts operate within a 'pretended' world. Descriptive categories for the Gospel as natural narrative and 'display text' are proposed, as is a flexible model of genre, which modulates the poles of 'fiction' and 'history'. An analysis of the Temple Cleansing pericope provides illustration of the Gospel's status as an historically-based, theological display text.


Bridges are mainly made of steel and concrete. Researchers have been working towards exploring the potential of such new natural fiber composite materials and their adequate application to structural engineering design. Oil palm empty fruit bunch (OPEFB) fiber, oil palm frond (OPF) fiber mat and sugar cane (SC) husk, which is rich in cellulose, relatively inexpensive and have fairly good possibilities in waste management due to their biodegradability has the potential for polymer-reinforced composite. Fiber reinforced plastics are used whenever there is the need for very high mechanical properties combined with low weight. In that respect natural fibers are of basic interest since they do not only have the functional capability to substitute the widely used manmade fibers but also possess advantages from the point of view of weight and fibermatrix adhesion. The composites were produced by pouring compounding into the mould and let it cured for at least one day. Two different values of fiber mass fraction, mf, namely 10% and 20% were studied for OPEFB fiber composite. Other composites samples were made from OPF fiber mat and 10% mass fraction SC husk. The matrix used in the experiments was epoxy with two to one epoxy-hardener ratio. The mechanical properties of each fiber-matrix combination have been investigated by conducting mechanical tests using ASTM standards. Results indicate that the most important factors for determining impact toughness were the interface behavior. This behavior determined the fiber debonding and pullout behavior. The impact strength of the composites was found to be increasing with fiber content. The tensile strength of the composites containing 10% mass fraction was found to be higher than that of homogeneous epoxy resin by 35%. Other composites had a lower tensile strength than the homogeneous epoxy resin. There are no improvement in flexural strength of epoxy composite. Increasing the density of fibers in the composite resulted in reduction of flexural strength, which OPF fiber mat composite has the lowest flexural strength compared to the other composites that being studied. Optical camera microscopic were used to examine the fiber-matrix adhesion and fiber breakage. The fiber pullout behavior and its effects on mechanical properties with different types of fiber as well as fiber mass fraction were investigated.


Over the last two decades, moves toward 'inclusion' have prompted change in the formation of education policies, schooling structures and pedagogical practice. Yet, exclusion through the categorisation and segregation of students with diverse abilities has grown, particularly for students with challenging behaviour. This paper considers what has happened to inclusive education by focusing on three educational jurisdictions known to be experiencing different rates of growth in the identification of special educational needs: New South Wales (Australia), Alberta (Canada) and Finland (Europe). In our analysis, we consider the effects of competing policy forces that appear to thwart the development of inclusive schools in two of our case study regions.


Aim: The financial crisis that hit Europe in 2007–2008 and the corresponding austerity policies have generated concern about increasing health inequalities, although impacts have been less salient than initially expected. One explanation could be that health inequalities emerged first a few years into the crisis. This study investigates health trends in the wake of the financial crisis and analyses health inequalities across a number of relevant population subgroups, including those defined by employment status, age, family type, gender, and educational attainment. Methods: This study uses individual-level panel data (EU-SILC, 2010–2013) to investigate trends in self-rated health. By applying individual fixed effects regression models, the study estimates the average yearly change in self-rated health for persons aged 15–64 years in 28 European countries. Health inequalities are investigated using stratified analyses. Results: Unemployed respondents, particularly those who were unemployed in all years of observation, had a steeper decline in self-rated health than the employed. Respondents of prime working age (25–54 years) had a steeper decline than their younger (15–24) and older (55–64) counterparts, while single parents had a more favorable trend in self-rated health than dual parents. We did not observe any increasing health inequalities based on gender or educational attainment. Conclusions: Health inequalities increased in the wake of the financial crisis, especially those associated with employment status, age, and family type. We did not observe increasing health inequalities in terms of levels of educational attainment and gender.


Background There are no drugs presently available to treat traumatic brain injury (TBI). A variety of single drugs have failed clinical trials suggesting a role for drug combinations. Drug combinations acting synergistically often provide the greatest combination of potency and safety. The drugs examined (minocycline (MINO), N-acetylcysteine (NAC), simvastatin, cyclosporine A, and progesterone) had FDA-approval for uses other than TBI and limited brain injury in experimental TBI models. Methodology/Principal Findings Drugs were dosed one hour after injury using the controlled cortical impact (CCI) TBI model in adult rats. One week later, drugs were tested for efficacy and drug combinations tested for synergy on a hierarchy of behavioral tests that included active place avoidance testing. As monotherapy, only MINO improved acquisition of the massed version of active place avoidance that required memory lasting less than two hours. MINO-treated animals, however, were impaired during the spaced version of the same avoidance task that required 24-hour memory retention. Co-administration of NAC with MINO synergistically improved spaced learning. Examination of brain histology 2 weeks after injury suggested that MINO plus NAC preserved white, but not grey matter, since lesion volume was unaffected, yet myelin loss was attenuated. When dosed 3 hours before injury, MINO plus NAC as single drugs had no effect on interleukin-1 formation; together they synergistically lowered interleukin-1 levels. This effect on interleukin-1 was not observed when the drugs were dosed one hour after injury. Conclusions/Significance These observations suggest a potentially valuable role for MINO plus NAC to treat TBI.


For the past decade, the dominant transformational theory of syntax has produced the most interesting insights into syntactic properties. Over the same period another theory, systemic grammar, has been developed very quietly as an alternative to the transformational model. In this work Richard A. Hudson outlines "daughter-dependency theory," which is derived from systemic grammar, and offers empirical reasons for preferring it to any version of transformational grammar. The goal of daughter-dependency theory is the same as that of Chomskyan transformational grammar to generate syntactic structures for all (and only) syntactically well-formed sentences that would relate to both the phonological and the semantic structures of the sentences. However, unlike transformational grammars, those based on daughter-dependency theory generate a single syntactic structure for each sentence. This structure incorporates all the kinds of information that are spread, in a transformational grammar, over to a series of structures (deep, surface, and intermediate). Instead of the combination of phrase-structure rules and transformations found in transformational grammars, daughter-dependency grammars contain rules with the following functions: classification, dependency-marking, or ordering. Hudson's strong arguments for a non-transformational grammar stress the capacity of daughter-dependency theory to reflect the facts of language structure and to capture generalizations that transformational models miss. An important attraction of Hudson's theory is that the syntax is more concrete, with no abstract underlying elements. In the appendixes, the author outlines a partial grammar for English and a small lexicon and distinguishes his theory from standard dependency theory. Hudson's provocative thesis is supported by his thorough knowledge of transformational grammar."


Background COVID-19 has rapidly emerged as a global public health threat with infections recorded in nearly every country. Responses to COVID-19 have varied in intensity and breadth, but generally have included domestic and international travel limitations, closure of non-essential businesses, and repurposing of health services. While these interventions have focused on testing, treatment, and mitigation of COVID-19, there have been reports of interruptions to diagnostic, prevention, and treatment services for other public health threats. We conducted a scoping review to characterize the impact of COVID-19 on HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, sexual and reproductive health, and malnutrition. Methods A scoping literature review was completed using searches of PubMed and preprint servers (medRxiv/bioRxiv) from January 1st to October 31st, 2020, using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms related to SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 and HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, sexual and reproductive health, and malnutrition. Empiric studies reporting original data collection and mathematical models were included, and available data synthesized by region. Studies were excluded if they were not written in English. Results A total of 1604 published papers and 205 preprints met inclusion criteria, including 8.2% (132/1604) of published studies and 10.2% (21/205) of preprints: 7.3% (68/931) on HIV, 7.1% (24/339) on tuberculosis, 11.6% (26/224) on malaria, 7.8% (13/166) on sexual and reproductive health, and 12.1% (16/132) on malnutrition. Thematic results were similar across competing health risks, with substantial indirect effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and response on diagnostic, prevention, and treatment services for HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, sexual and reproductive health, and malnutrition. Discussion COVID-19 emerged in the context of existing public health threats that result in millions of deaths every year. Thus, effectively responding to COVID-19 while minimizing the negative impacts of COVID-19 necessitates innovation and integration of existing programs that are often siloed across health systems. Inequities have been a consistent driver of existing health threats; COVID-19 has worsened disparities, reinforcing the need for programs that address structural risks. Data reviewed here suggest that effective strengthening of health systems should include investment in public health with adequate funding to ensure continuity of care for emergent and existing public health threats.


Femi Osofisan tackles graft and corruption: A reading of his socially committed plays Graft and corruption have become endemic and insidious in the Nigerian society that governance and leadership have continued to lack integrity and legitimacy. Femi Osofisan, a dedicated and committed apostle of change and social justice, has skilfully utilized the platform of drama to expose and ridicule the prevalence, pervasiveness and debilitating effects of graft and corruption as social vices in Nigeria. Following the tradition of African Drama's commitment to social issues, Osofisan berates all the tiers of government and the public office holders for the country's economic woes and the general poverty level of Nigerians. The concern of this paper is, therefore, an intense sociological exploration of Osofisan's plays that satirize and lampoon the seemingly legalized practice of bribery and corruption in Nigeria. A contextual and theoretical framework is provided for the paper to enable readers to have a clear conceptual understanding of the discourse. The paper also balances the pejorative and optimistic views of Osofisan on a decadent society. It concludes with his encomiums on those who have remained resolute and unwavering and his prognosis that the society will become better when such distinguished men and women are emulated and celebrated. Keywords: Femi Osofisan, dramaturgy, graft and corruption,


PurposeFood waste is one of the most challenging issues humanity is currently facing. Therefore, there has been a growing interest in the prevention of food waste because of world hunger, environmental impacts, resource scarcity and economic costs. The purpose of the study is to investigate the factors that influence food waste and the role of technology in tackling food waste in India and the Netherlands.Design/methodology/approachIn order to explore differences in food loss and waste further this study will examine a number of practices on both the production and the consumer side, in a developing country and a developed country with different culture/economic backgrounds: India and the Netherlands. The factors that influence food waste were examined with a preliminary qualitative study, which consists of semi-structured interviews, and quantitative research that comprises a survey. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in both India and the Netherlands, which consists of five interviews. The survey data was collected from 78 individuals from India and 115 individuals from the Netherlands.FindingsOne of the main findings of the research is food waste is divided into waste within agricultural production (i.e. food loss) and final household consumption (i.e. food waste). Different factors influence food loss in different stages in the supply chain. Some of these factors include wastage during processing, storage, transportation and at the market-place. New technologies can utilize food loss for new purposes, so food loss is reduced to the minimum. Food waste is mainly influenced by food passing expiry date, food that is left too long in the fridge and consumers buying too much food. In final household consumption, technologies such as digital platforms enable individuals or organizations to share and donate their food, thereby creating awareness on food waste prevention and the environmental and ethical benefits.Originality/valueThe authors examine to what extent and in which ways supporting consumers to minimize food waste can be achieved via three stages: (1) understanding and evaluating food loss and waste, (2) identifying the factors that influence food loss and waste, (3) understanding consumer behaviors to encourage food waste reduction and (4) identifying the technological impact that would reduce food waste. As such, this paper contributes to ongoing debates about food waste by looking at the role of context and culture and by exploring differences between developed and developing countries. Also, the authors advance the debate by exploring both the role of advanced technology such as blockchain and drones in both preventing loss and waste as well as non-technological mechanisms.


Abstract. Increasing deoxygenation (loss of oxygen) of the ocean, including
expansion of oxygen minimum zones (OMZs), is a potentially important
consequence of global warming. We examined present-day variability of
vertical distributions of 23 calanoid copepod species in the Eastern
Tropical North Pacific (ETNP) living in locations with different water
column oxygen profiles and OMZ intensity (lowest oxygen concentration and
its vertical extent in a profile). Copepods and hydrographic data were
collected in vertically stratified day and night MOCNESS (Multiple Opening/Closing Net and Environmental Sensing System) tows (0–1000 m)
during four cruises over a decade (2007–2017) that sampled four ETNP
locations: Costa Rica Dome, Tehuantepec Bowl, and two oceanic sites further
north (21–22∘ N) off Mexico. The sites had different
vertical oxygen profiles: some with a shallow mixed layer, abrupt
thermocline, and extensive very low oxygen OMZ core; and others with a more
gradual vertical development of the OMZ (broad mixed layer and upper
oxycline zone) and a less extensive OMZ core where oxygen was not as low.
Calanoid copepod species (including examples from the genera Eucalanus,
Pleuromamma, and Lucicutia) demonstrated different distributional strategies (implying different
physiological characteristics) associated with this variability. We
identified sets of species that (1) changed their vertical distributions and depth of maximum abundance associated with the depth and intensity of the
OMZ and its oxycline inflection points; (2) shifted their depth of diapause;
(3) adjusted their diel vertical migration, especially the nighttime upper
depth; or (4) expanded or contracted their depth range within the mixed
layer and upper part of the thermocline in association with the thickness of
the aerobic epipelagic zone (habitat compression concept). These
distribution depths changed by tens to hundreds of meters depending on the
species, oxygen profile, and phenomenon. For example, at the lower oxycline,
the depth of maximum abundance for Lucicutia hulsemannae shifted from ∼600 to
∼800 m, and the depth of diapause for Eucalanus inermis shifted from
∼500 to ∼775 m, in an expanded OMZ compared
to a thinner OMZ, but remained at similar low oxygen levels in both
situations. These species or life stages are examples of "hypoxiphilic"
taxa. For the migrating copepod Pleuromamma abdominalis, its nighttime depth was shallow
(∼20 m) when the aerobic mixed layer was thin and the low-oxygen OMZ broad, but it was much deeper (∼100 m) when the mixed
layer and higher oxygen extended deeper; daytime depth in both situations
was ∼300 m. Because temperature decreased with depth, these
distributional depth shifts had metabolic implications. The upper ocean to mesopelagic depth range encompasses a complex interwoven
ecosystem characterized by intricate relationships among its inhabitants and
their environment. It is a critically important zone for oceanic
biogeochemical and export processes and hosts key food web components for
commercial fisheries. Among the zooplankton, there will likely be winners
and losers with increasing ocean deoxygenation as species cope with
environmental change. Changes in individual copepod species abundances,
vertical distributions, and life history strategies may create potential
perturbations to these intricate food webs and processes. Present-day
variability provides a window into future scenarios and potential effects of
deoxygenation.


Given the importance of well-designed and well-executed training programs, it is important to learn more about the content and design of effective training programs for new employees, particularly those that have been implemented in the hospitality industry. Through a field study assessment of pre-opening training programs that have been implemented by fifteen hotel firms and sixteen restaurant companies, we found that hotels and restaurants spend approximately the same time on pre-opening training for new staff, with the exception of restaurant managers, who receive significantly more days of training than do their hotel counterparts. In addition, there were substantive differences in the amount of pre-opening training based on firm size and whether the company was publicly traded or privately held. We also found that the majority of pre-opening training is designed and delivered by corporate staff, and a balance of active and passive training methods are used for facilitation. Finally, although our survey methodology did not allow us to determine the costs associated with pre-opening training (and therefore the return on these efforts), we noted that the firms used guest satisfaction measures and measured the employees' content mastery, among other metrics.


In recent years, significant advancements have taken place in human activity recognition using various machine learning approaches. However, feature engineering have dominated conventional methods involving the difficult process of optimal feature selection. This problem has been mitigated by using a novel methodology based on deep learning framework which automatically extracts the useful features and reduces the computational cost. As a proof of concept, we have attempted to design a generalized model for recognition of three fundamental movements of the human forearm performed in daily life where data is collected from four different subjects using a single wrist worn accelerometer sensor. The validation of the proposed model is done with different pre-processing and noisy data condition which is evaluated using three possible methods. The results show that our proposed methodology achieves an average recognition rate of 99.8% as opposed to conventional methods based on K-means clustering, linear discriminant analysis and support vector machine.


In the world of the Second Sophistic, elites forged connections across the Greek and Roman divide traveling across the Empire. The  Metamorphoses depicts this world as a place of uncertainty for the traveler, in which inns were a dangerous option. The practice of  hospitium offered an alternative means for facilitating long distance trade and travel. Despite the prominence of  hospitium as a facilitating factor in the cosmopolitan world of the High Imperial period, little work has been done on either its literary use, or its larger social function. For Apuleius, the ability to play with readers' expectations concerning the practice of  hospitium is as important to the  Metamorphoses as is the resonance of the practice in contemporary society. The rules of  hospitium provide the reader with a set of criteria on which to evaluate the behavior and transformation of Lucius. This paper traces Apuleius' use of  hospitium relationships as a literary  topos throughout the  Metamorphoses . The paper focuses on a pair of  hospitium relationships employed by Apuleius (the Milo-Lucius relationship and Isis-Lucius relationship). The text of the  Metamorphoses can be read as a story about a quest for suitable  hospitium . Apuleius plays with the conventions of  hospitium in order to drive the readers' perception of Lucius' physical and spiritual journey and transformation. Such a willingness to deconstruct and rearrange the conventions of daily life and relationships are indicative of Apuleius' fluency with Second-Sophistic style. Robert E. Vander Poppen is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Duke University. Robert earned a B.A. in History and Classical Archaeology from the University of Michigan in 2000. He earned his M.A. from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2003, and received a Ph.D. from the same institution in 2008 with a dissertation on the changing dynamics of village communities in Roman Etruria. His primary research interests include the ar-chaeology and social history of Pre-Roman Italy and the multi-cultural environment of the Second Sophistic movement. He is currently the Assistant Director of Archaeological Survey for the Mugello Valley Archaeological Project and served as the Assistant Field Director for the Poggio Colla Field School from 2004-2006.


Social Security is the largest social insurance program in the U.S., and has been shown to be a major determinant of the labor supply decisions of older workers. As such, reforming the Social Security system can have two fiscal impacts: a "mechanical" effect through changing the rules on benefits entitlements or taxation, and a "behavioral" effect through individual responses to these changes in benefits or taxes. We build a simulation model that computes these effects for major reforms to the system, building on estimated retirement responses to changing net Social Security entitlements. We then estimate the fiscal impact of reform for the 1931-1941 cohort of workers represented by the Health and Retirement Survey. We find that raising the early and normal retirement age by three years would reduce net costs for this cohort by roughly 30%, and that moving to a much higher benefit level would raise net costs by roughly 55%. Importantly, we find that in both cases the behavioral impacts on net costs are relatively small, at most one-third, and generally less than one-fifth of the total. The reason for these small effects is that the U.S. Social Security system is roughly actuarially fair, so that delaying or inducing retirement has relatively little impact on system balances; most of the effects that do arise are due to changes in general income and consumption taxes.


Not for Profit Organizations (NPOs) are the subject of a relevant debate by scholars, politicians and public opinion. The European Commission issued ten years ago a Communication regarding the promotion of associations' and foundations' role, the problems and the challenges they have to face to improve their actions and to be able to better operate in a European context. Some efforts were done to measure economic dimensions of third sector by Research centres and international institutions while there is a remarkable lack of homogeneity concerning NPOs' accounting regulation in the European Union. Each country has its own accounting regulatory system, strongly depending by civil and tax laws; this reduces both NPO's disclosure and prevents scholars to comprehend the real state of social economy system at European level and their financial performance. Moreover it makes NPOs' chance to operate in a foreign country into the enlarged EU very difficult and make difficult an homogeneity in NPOs treatment at European level. A European agenda to support the accountability development in the third sector should define a minimum common framework for institutional and governance features, financial accounting and social accountability for different kinds of NPO, beginning starting from the different national regulations. In particular an hypothesis of European NPOs' framework for financial reporting (a first step to a better accountability) has to consider different regulations in order to: a) legal entities form in which NPOs have constituted instituted in EU countries end and their regulations (specific for NPOs or general for commercial entities); b) accounting and auditing obligations (keep accounting records, prepare annual accounts, provide financial reporting) and audit them; c) mandatory annual report provided by the NPOs (mission statement, asset and liability statement, statement of financial activities, explanatory notes, trustees report); d) disclosure of accounts disclosure (make the accounts available to the public on request or deposit it in a public register); e) accounting principles for NPOs (cash or accrual basis, light regulation for smaller entities, IFRs implementation); f) a model for NPOs financial performance evaluation based on financial statement (significant ratio in accounting aggregates). To define a common framework we start from a comparison matching between Spanish, Italian, and English regulations (law and practice) applied to NPOs to highlight similarities and differences. The paper is the first step of a wider research whose final goal is a meeting path to a common accounting framework for non profit organizations in European Union.


Since March 2007, dozens of newspapers have gone out of business entirely, and still others, like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Capital Times, and the Christian Science Monitor have moved to the internet to stay afloat. Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared. Despite its three hundred year existence, the American newspaper is being devastated in the span of a decade. Meanwhile, the internet is becoming the go-to source for news, information, weather, movie reviews, and classified advertisements. Congress and the courts can no longer afford to relegate internet journalism to a second-class news medium. In Consumers Union v. Periodical Correspondence Association, the question arose as to the constitutionality of certain rules governing the issuance of press credentials to the congressional press galleries. In that case, based on separation of powers concerns, the court avoided the issue with the political question doctrine. Since then, many courts have taken a similar path when faced with the exclusion of a journalist from an established press facility. Given the switch from traditional print media to websites and Kindles, the question of who has access to the news becomes extremely important. This article will address several issues relating to the freedom of access to the Periodical Press Gallery. The first part of the article will briefly describe the history of the press and the history of congressional reporting leading up to the passage of the Periodical Press Gallery Rules. Part two of the article will describe the rules that govern admission to the Periodical Press Gallery as they exist today. Part three will describe the nature of the right afforded to journalists to access government buildings which have already been opened up to the press. Cases within this section challenge the denial of access to the White House, the Periodical Press Galley, and the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Discussion in this section will reveal how the D.C. Circuit Court has used the political question doctrine to avoid deciding these press gallery cases on their merits, while taking a deferential approach to denials from other established press pools. Because I believe that Consumers Union was wrongly decided, the final section will address how the courts should decide cases which stem from a denial of admission to the galleries. If the courts still refuse to decide these cases on nonjusticiability grounds, I will argue why Congress should unilaterally refine its rules to cabin the discretion of the Executive Committee and permit more online journalists to enter the Periodical Press Gallery. This section will describe how the current Press Gallery Rules act as an unconstitutional obstacle to the First Amendment rights of online journalists, as well as a Fifth Amendment violation of Due Process. Lastly, I will detail a few substantive amendments to the existing Rules which would provide for a fairer review of an online-journalist's application.


This paper examines the relationship between episodic framing and the construction and maintenance of social realities in English-language reporting about Indonesian politics during the nation's transition to democracy in 1998 and 1999. It evaluates framing in terms of context and frequency across 478 Australian, American and British newspaper reports primarily about PDI-P (Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle) leader Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of former president Sukarno. How Megawati was framed in the English-language news media provides theoretical and empirical links between episodic framing and its function in shaping social realities. Findings indicate that an overreliance on episodic framing led to a lack of critical journalism in relation to Megawati's agency and value to democratic Indonesia in the Post-Suharto period, and constructed influential narratives that privileged Megawati over her adversaries.


Markov reward models have interesting modeling applications, particularly those addressing fault-tolerant hardware/software systems. In this paper, we consider a Markov reward model with a reward structure including only reward rates associated with states, in which both positive and negative reward rates are present and null reward rates are allowed, and develop a numerical method to compute the distribution function of the cumulative reward till exit of a subset of transient states of the model. The method combines a model transformation step with the solution of the transformed model using a randomization construction with two randomization rates. The method introduces a truncation error, but that error is strictly bounded from above by a user-specified error control parameter. Further, the method is numerically stable and takes advantage of the sparsity of the infinitesimal generator of the transformed model. Using a Markov reward model of a fault-tolerant hardware/software system, we illustrate the application of the method and analyze its computational cost. Also, we compare the computational cost of the method with that of the (only) previously available method for the problem. Our numerical experiments seem to indicate that the new method can be efficient and that for medium size and large models can be substantially faster than the previously available method.


Background: The HIV and Infant and Young Child Feeding (IYCF) guidelines in the revised IYCF policy of 2013 encouraged HIV-positive mothers to breastfeed exclusively for six months. In the case of HIV, the 2013 recommendation was that breastfeeding should continue for a year with the introduction of appropriate complementary feeding at six months while children receive antiretroviral treatment. The aim of this study was to determine the knowledge and practices of primary health care (PHC) nurses related to the implementation of the revised IYCF policy, with a specific focus on HIV breastfeeding recommendations, in Blouberg Municipality, Limpopo province. Methods: A quantitative, descriptive study design was conducted and included 103 conveniently selected PHC nurses. Data were collected using a questionnaire with closed ended questions. Data were analysed using SPSS® software v23.0, and using both descriptive and inferential statistical analysis. Results: Some 97.1% (n = 100) of the participants displayed good knowledge of IYCF recommendations in the context of HIV. In all, 68% (n = 70) of participants were not trained on the HIV and IYCF guidelines in the revised IYCF policy of 2013, resulting in only 32% (n = 33) of participants correctly implementing these guidelines. Also, 44.7% (n = 46) of the participants reported that they were not aware whether clinics had a copy of this policy. The results further revealed that 92.2% (n = 95) of the participants reported that clinics still received, kept and issued infant formula to HIV-positive mothers, which may be the reason why dietitians still received requests for infant formulas to be delivered to HIV-positive mothers. Conclusion: PHC nurses need to be trained, monitored and evaluated when updated HIV and IYCF guidelines are issued in order to ensure their correct implementation.


BACKGROUND
Inpatient falls are associated with significant morbidity and increased healthcare costs. Zolpidem has been reported to decrease balance and is associated with falls. Yet, it is a commonly used hypnotic agent in the inpatient setting. Zolpidem use in hospitalized patients may be a significant and potentially modifiable risk factor for falling.

OBJECTIVE
To determine whether inpatients administered zolpidem are at greater risk of falling.

DESIGN
Retrospective cohort study.

SETTING
Adult non-intensive care unit (non-ICU) inpatients at a tertiary care center.

METHODS
Adult inpatients who were prescribed zolpidem were identified. Electronic medical records were reviewed to capture demographics and other risk factors for falls. The fall rate was compared in those administered zolpidem versus those only prescribed zolpidem. Multivariate analyses were performed to determine whether zolpidem was independently associated with falls.

RESULTS
The fall rate among patients who were prescribed and received zolpidem (n = 4962) was significantly greater than among patients who were prescribed but did not receive zolpidem (n = 11,358) (3.04% vs 0.71%; P < 0.001). Zolpidem use continued to remain significantly associated with increased fall risk after accounting for age, gender, insomnia, delirium status, dose of zolpidem, Charlson comorbidity index, Hendrich's fall risk score, length of hospital stay, presence of visual impairment, gait abnormalities, and dementia/cognitive impairment (adjusted odds ratio [OR] 4.37, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 3.34-5.76; P < 0.001). Additionally, patients taking zolpidem who experienced a fall did not differ from other hospitalized adult patients who fell in terms of age, opioids, antidepressants, sedative-antidepressants, antipsychotics, benzodiazepine, or antihistamine use.

CONCLUSION
Zolpidem use was a strong, independent, and potentially modifiable risk factor for inpatient falls.


Written for the IT professional and business owner, this book provides the business and technical insight necessary to migrate your business to the cloud using Microsoft Office 365. This is a practical look at cloud migration and the use of different technologies to support that migration. Numerous examples of cloud migration with technical migration details are included. Cloud technology is a tremendous opportunity for an organization to reduce IT costs, and to improve productivity with increased access, simpler administration and improved services. Those businesses that embrace the advantages of the cloud will receive huge rewards in productivity and lower total cost of ownership over those businesses that choose to ignore it. The challenge for those charged with implementing Microsoft Office 365 is to leverage these advantages with the minimal disruption of their organization. This book provides practical help in moving your business to the Cloud and covers the planning, migration and the follow on management of the Office 365 Cloud services. What youll learn-Overview of Microsoft Office 365's operation and usage for any size enterprise -Methods of planning and migration -Office 365 management best practices -Using Office 365 SharePoint to improve business processes -Troubleshooting Office 365 installations -Using Compliance, eDiscovery and Data Loss Prevention tools -Office 365-site management best practices for IT administrators and business ownersWho this book is for Small-enterprise IT professionals and business owners who have the admin responsibilities for their business-IT needs. These people need refined reference information on basic set-up and configuration for their Office 365 installations, as well as best-practice-driven instruction on managing and troubleshooting their systems.


Throughout the past five years, the susceptibility of neural networks to minimal adversarial perturbations has moved from a peculiar phenomenon to a core issue in Deep Learning. Despite much attention, however, progress towards more robust models is significantly impaired by the difficulty of evaluating the robustness of neural network models. Today's methods are either fast but brittle (gradient-based attacks), or they are fairly reliable but slow (score- and decision-based attacks). We here develop a new set of gradient-based adversarial attacks which (a) are more reliable in the face of gradient-masking than other gradient-based attacks, (b) perform better and are more query efficient than current state-of-the-art gradient-based attacks, (c) can be flexibly adapted to a wide range of adversarial criteria and (d) require virtually no hyperparameter tuning. These findings are carefully validated across a diverse set of six different models and hold for L0, L1, L2 and Linf in both targeted as well as untargeted scenarios. Implementations will soon be available in all major toolboxes (Foolbox, CleverHans and ART). We hope that this class of attacks will make robustness evaluations easier and more reliable, thus contributing to more signal in the search for more robust machine learning models.


While the use of technology has increased in education, much of that technology, such as use of PowerPoint, SmartBoards and use of the Internet, has been used in the same pedagogical approach, which is lecture in the class, followed by homework outside of the classroom. While student engagement through active learning has been demonstrated to enhance learning, one of the challenges to faculty is how to include these active learning methods while still trying to cover sufficient material. Over the last few years, the use of technology has opened up another instructional strategy, called flipping the classroom. In this strategy, students take on a greater responsibility for their learning, and lectures that would normally be given by the professor in the classroom are now available online. Therefore, the classroom time can be used to engage students in problem solving activities, while the professor acts more like a facilitator of learning rather than a lecturer. In a four year Electrical and Computer Engineering Technology program, one of the sections of a junior level circuits course was converted to a flipped course as a beta test for this concept. Over the last few years, lectures in the course by the author have been converted into smaller learning objects, resulting in videos of less than 10 minutes. In many cases, a lesson may be comprised of 3-4 of these videos. The videos were created using Camtasia Relay, and uploaded to a Course Management System webpage (using Moodle), in a structured sequence. While many of these videos were created from previous PowerPoint slides developed by the author, many others were created using a specialized paper tablet called PAPERSHOW, which enables screen capture and video while writing on this tablet. Over 50 videos were created for this course, and each week students were expected to review the videos related to the upcoming week's topics. Assessments were developed for learning outcomes for each week, along with assessments on the students' perception of the effectiveness on the video material. This paper will describe the process of creating these videos, the structure of the course, and a summary of the assessments of both the student learning and the perceived effectiveness of this process.


Objective: The determinants of subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) volume and an atypical pattern of blood are not clear. Our objective was to determine if reduced platelet activity on admission and abnormal venous drainage are associated with greater SAH volume. Methods: We prospectively identified noncomatose patients with SAH without an identifiable aneurysm. We routinely measured platelet activity on admission and recorded aspirin use. SAH volumes were calculated with a validated technique. CT angiograms were reviewed by a certified neuroradiologist for venous drainage. Patients were followed for clinical outcomes through 3 months with the modified Rankin Scale (mRS). Data are Q1–Q3. Results: There were 31 patients in the cohort. Thirty (97%) underwent an angiogram on admission, and 25 (81%) an additional delayed angiogram. SAH volume was lowest with normal venous drainage bilaterally (4.4 [3.7–16.4] mL) and higher with 1 (12.9 [3.7–20.4]) or 2 (20.9 [12.5–34.6] mL, p = 0.03) discontinuous venous drainages. Patients with reduced platelet activity had more SAH on the diagnostic CT (17.5 [10.6–20.9] vs 6.1 [2.3–15.3] mL) (p = 0.046). SAH volume was greater for patients requiring drainage for hydrocephalus (16.4 [11.5–20.5] vs 5.4 [2.7–16.4] mL) (p = 0.009). Outcomes at 3 months were generally excellent (median mRS = 0, no symptoms). Conclusions: Discontinuous venous drainage and reduced platelet activity were associated with increased SAH volume and hydrocephalus. These factors may explain thick SAH and reduce the need for repeated invasive imaging in such patients.


A significant ontological commitment is required to sustain metaphysical realism—the view that there is a single, objective way the world is—in order to defend it from common sense objections. This involves presupposing the existence of properties (or tropes, or universals) and relations between them which define the objective structure of the world. This paper explores the grounds for accepting this ontological assumption and examines a sceptical argument which questions whether, having assumed the world is objectively divided into fundamental properties, we could ever know which properties these are. It then assesses the responses available to the metaphysical realist, arguing that the sceptical difficulty cannot merely be dismissed by means of another assumption in the manner of radical scepticism, as David Lewis suggests, but that the sceptic's argument might be defused by the non-question-begging success of some form of strong scientific realism which links the predicates of our scientific theories directly to the fundamental properties the world contains. It remains unclear however whether this widely accepted metaphysical theory can find principled philosophical support.


Temporal-difference learning (TD), coupled with neural networks, is among the most fundamental building blocks of deep reinforcement learning. However, due to the nonlinearity in value function approximation, such a coupling leads to nonconvexity and even divergence in optimization. As a result, the global convergence of neural TD remains unclear. In this paper, we prove for the first time that neural TD converges at a sublinear rate to the global optimum of the mean-squared projected Bellman error for policy evaluation. In particular, we show how such global convergence is enabled by the overparametrization of neural networks, which also plays a vital role in the empirical success of neural TD. Beyond policy evaluation, we establish the global convergence of neural (soft) Q-learning, which is further connected to that of policy gradient algorithms.


This paper reports the findings of the Polish case study in which population projections by age, marital status and region of residence have been calculated by use of the LIPRO model. That multidimensional dynamic projection model was developed at NIDI by Van Imhoff and Keilman (1991) to study population and households dynamics. The course of the demographic processes in Poland differs significantly for urban and rural subpopulations, so it was decided to apply that model to project changes in the marital composition of Poland's population by place of residence (urban/rural areas). The data necessary to run the model have been prepared using publications of the Central Statistical Office of Poland (CSO) and unpublished CSO materials. Several assumptions regarding the components of population dynamics were formulated. In the scenarios, special attention was given to internal migration and its possible influence on population composition (age and marital status) and population dynamics (births, deaths, marriages and divorces).


Process capability is the performance of a process under normal and in-control conditions. Its indices are to measure the inherent variability of a process and thus to reflect its performance. To calculate the capability indices for key characteristics, most industries normally assume that the distribution of their process output is normal. However, in practice, most key quality characteristics do fails the normality test and thus the accuracy of normal based process capability indices becomes doubtful and hence they cannot really reflect the performance of a process. This paper proposes the determination of the common process capability indices based on the median absolute deviation. The median absolute deviation is a robust estimate of variability when the sample data are non- normal or are skewed. Real process data and simulated process data from heavily skewed distributions are presented to demonstrate the application of the proposed indices and the results were compared with the existing indices for non-normal and skewed process data.


Constipation is a common public health problem nationally and internationally. Most constipation sufferers would prefer regular intake of some natural food-stuff that prevents the disorder rather than over-the-counter remedies. Papaya (Carica papaya L.) fruit is usually consumed to prevent and manage constipation because it has laxative effect. Development of functional drink based on foam-mat dried papaya has been done. First step was optimisation the foam-mat drying process. Papaya slurry was foamed by adding egg white of 10%, 15% and 20% w/w. The foamed papaya slurry was dried by using hot air drying method at 60°C for 5 hours. Drying yield increased with increasing of egg white concentration. Moisture content, reconstitution and water holding capacity of the products were in range from 2.91 to 3.09%, from 81.34 to 83.42% and from 6.19 to 6.34 g/g, respectively. The second step was formulation of functional drink based on foam-mat dried papaya. Foam-mat dried papaya was dry blended with other ingredients at different ratio of foam-mat dried papaya and skim milk powder of 6:4; 5:5; 4:6 w/w. The different
ratio of foam-mat dried papaya and skim milk powder affected the physicochemical properties (moisture content, reconstitution, viscosity, turbidity, water holding capacity and stability) and sensory properties (colour, viscosity, aroma and taste) of the product. Consuming of the formulated-product twice a day could supply 9.54% of recommended daily intake of dietary fiber. The developed product has a great potential as a functional drink to prevent and manage constipation.


Exploration of the potential energy surfaces (PESs) of various microsolvated species associated with the microsolvation of the nitrate anion using density functional theory methods uncovers a rich and complex structural diversity previously unnoticed in the scientific literature for the [NO3(H2O)n]−, n = 1–6 clusters. Two types of interactions are at play in stabilizing the clusters: traditional water to water and charge assisted nitrate to water hydrogen bonds (HBs). The formal negative charge on oxygen atoms in nitrate strengthens hydrogen bonding among water molecules. There is outstanding agreement between available experimental data (sequential hydration enthalpies, IR spectra, and vertical detachment energies) and the corresponding expectation values obtained from our structures. Each PES is heavily populated in the vicinities of the corresponding global minimum with multiple structures contributing to the experimental properties. The last two statements, in conjunction with results from other works (see for example Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 2014, 16, 19241) place a warning on the generalized and naive practice of assigning experimental observations to individual structures.


It is shown that the volume operator of a quantum tetrahedron is, in the sector of large eigenvalues, accurately described by a quantum harmonic oscillator. This result relies on the fact that (i) the volume operator couples only neighboring states of its standard basis, and (ii) its matrix elements show a unique maximum as a function of internal angular momentum quantum numbers. These quantum numbers, considered as a continuous variable, are the coordinate of the oscillator describing its quadratic potential, while the corresponding derivative defines a momentum operator. We also analyze the scaling properties of the oscillator parameters as a function of the size of the tetrahedron, and the role of different angular momentum coupling schemes.


Drawing inspiration from sleight-of-hand magic tricks, we developed an experimental paradigm to investigate whether magicians' misdirection techniques could be used to induce the misperception of "phantom" objects. While previous experiments investigating sleight-of-hand magic tricks have focused on creating false assumptions about the movement of an object in a scene, our experiment investigated creating false assumptions about the presence of an object in a scene. Participants watched a sequence of silent videos depicting a magician performing with a single object. Following each video, participants were asked to write a description of the events in the video. In the final video, participants watched the Phantom Vanish Magic Trick, a novel magic trick developed for this experiment, in which the magician pantomimed the actions of presenting an object and then making it magically disappear. No object was presented during the final video. The silent videos precluded the use of false verbal suggestions, and participants were not asked leading questions about the objects. Nevertheless, 32% of participants reported having visual impressions of non-existent objects. These findings support an inferential model of perception, wherein top-down expectations can be manipulated by the magician to generate vivid illusory experiences, even in the absence of corresponding bottom-up information.


This special issue of Television & New Media brings together current research on media technologies, society, and culture in the Middle East from diverse methodological and analytical perspectives. The topics addressed cover a wide spectrum: circulation of Arab music videos and public discourse; Lebanese bloggers and mediated public spheres; transnational television audiences and ontological security; social media, TV talk shows, and political change in Egypt; youth-generated Arab media and cultural politics; and the Arab Spring as an ephemeral communicative space. Together, the articles provide a panorama of how today's multimodal media geographies and engaged actors reinscribe public cultures and politics in the Middle East.


As soon as it was clear that Pope Francis's 2015 Encyclical, Laudato Si': On Care for Our Common Home, would discuss, among other issues, the moral imperative to address global climate change, U.S. scholars and research institutions rushed to collect data surrounding its release. These groups aimed to determine whether there would be a "Francis Effect," in which U.S. Conservatives (and Conservative Catholics in particular) would show greater concern about the negative effects of global climate change. Here, we first provide context by discussing the history of political polarization in the U.S. over global climate change. Then, we review the published literature and publicly available data that aimed to examine potential influences of Laudato Si' on people's climate change attitudes. Taken together, the available scholarship provides strong evidence that U.S. publics were differentially responsive to the Pope's messaging (with political Conservatives expressing less climate change concern and viewing Pope Francis as less credible), but there is correlational evidence of an overall "Francis Effect." U.S. population data collected following the encyclical's release show small, potentially temporary, increases in perceptions of papal credibility, climate change concern, and the perspective that global climate change is a moral issue.