Regional lithostratigraphic and structural mapping of the Piermont allochthon of northwestern New England at its type locality indicates that the Foster Hill fault, the supposed sole thrust, is a stratigraphic boundary. Rather, the allochthon lies above the Bean Brook fault, covers a much smaller area than suggested previously, and is limited to the vicinity of Piermont, western New Hampshire. The allochthon, which primarily consists of rocks correlated with the Silurian age Rangeley Formation of Maine, has horizons of metamorphosed polymictic conglomerate at its base. Rocks directly below the allochthon are correlated with the metasedimentary, Ordovician-aged Albee Formation and contain abundant metamorphosed dykes and sills that do not cross the sole detachment of the allochthon. Analysis of macro- and mesoscale structures indicates local preservation of fold hinges and overprinting foliations oblique to and later than those previously described and has allowed the deformation history to be significantly extended by several events. Emplacement of the allochthon early in the deformation history at metamorphic conditions caused NW-SE elongation lineations of clasts in conglomerate at the base of the allochthon. The relict foliations and fold hinges are commonly preserved below the allochthon, suggesting that these rocks have had a more protracted deformation history relative to rocks in the allochthon. The new interpretation of the Piermont area provides a framework to build a more thorough tectonic history for this part of the New England Appalachians.


Developing countries fear that a proposed treaty to harmonize patent laws globally could have a devastating impact on their access to essential medicines, diagnostics and vaccines. A passionate and fractious debate around the proposed treaty underscores the vital role of trade and intellectual property for public health. Indian HIV/AIDS activists and an international lawyers' group lodged an objection in late March 2006 to a patent application for an AIDS drug filed by a multinational company in India, arguing the patent would restrict access to this medicine. The case illustrates the impact that global harmonization of patent law could have on public health in developing countries, as it could remove the legal basis for such objections in future. Last year, India, an important global provider of cheap generic medicines to other developing nations, adopted a new law on patents to bring the country in line with the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Under the new law, the Indian Government retained the right of its people or companies to oppose new applications for patents in India prior to approval by national patent offices. Now, groups fighting to improve access to medicines say proposals for global patent harmonization could strip national patent offices of this and other responsibilities. The TRIPS Agreement established minimum standards for patents in WTO member states, but left room for each country to decide which patents to grant. In addition, TRIPS provided flexibilities, which were reinforced in the 2001 WTO Doha Ministerial Declaration, so that countries could escape some provisions in a public health emergency. Countries have barely used these flexibilities (see story on pp. 342-343) and now the work of another Geneva-based international body--the UN World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) threatens to eliminate them entirely. Some TRIPS provisions were first proposed when WIPO started working on global patent harmonization in the 1980s. In 2000, some procedures for patent filing worldwide were streamlined under the WIPO Patent Law Treaty. Since then, the European Union, Japan and the United States have pushed for further harmonization by reviving WIPO's efforts to harmonize substantive aspects of patent processing, i.e. aspects that go beyond procedure. But most of WIPO's 183 members stand firmly opposed to this. The primary vehicle for harmonization at WIPO is the proposed Substantive Patent Law Treaty (SPLT), which is being negotiated by the WIPO Standing Committee on the Law of Patents. But since it was first proposed in 2001, the SPLT has snagged year after year, partly because its chief promoters, the European Union, Japan and the United States--the "trilateral" countries-- cannot agree, but also because developing countries see little advantage in proceeding with it. Developing countries fear that the proposed treaty would mean less autonomy in national decision-making with regard to patents, loss of TRIPS flexibilities, and higher prices for medicines. "Quite clearly, it is not in the interests of developing countries to seek either a 'light' SPLT or a more comprehensive SPLT, since they have little to gain from a broader harmonization of substantive patent law," said Professor Carlos Correa, Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies on Industrial Property and Economics Law at the University of Buenos Aires. Correa and Sisule Musungu, Acting Coordinator of the Programme on Innovation, Access to Knowledge and Intellectual Property at the Geneva-based South Centre, argue that harmonization will lead to a situation where the United States' definition of patent law is imposed on all countries. They have called for an assessment--governmental or independent--of the impact patent harmonization would have on developing countries. Trilateral industry groups, meanwhile, are stepping up the pressure on WIPO to make progress towards harmonization. …


Abstract On the 30 May 1929, a massive earthquake occurred in the San Rafael area (southern Mendoza province) leading to the destruction of the Villa Atuel and Las Malvinas towns. The region affected by the ground shaking covers a large part of southern South America. Although no surface breaks have been detected on the surface, several authors have pointed out active faults that could be related to the event of 1929. Using satellite imagery and field observations, we investigated two active faults situated on the eastern border of the San Rafael Block (SRB) close to or within the epicentral area. The most prominent faults are the c. 40 km long Las Malvinas and c. 30 km long Cerro Negro reverse faults which are located near the epicentral area. Geological and morphological observations allow us to describe late Pleistocene activity and estimate the long-term slip rates of these faults. Possible ruptures that match our observations and which are compatible with the cartographic length of these faults would account for a seismic moment magnitude of M 0 = 2.8×1019 N m and a moment magnitude of M W = 6.9. The morphological signatures of these fault segments and the occurrence of the San Rafael earthquake suggests that the southern Mendoza Province is still currently submitted to shortening.


Breast cancer cell lines provide a useful starting point for the discovery and functional analysis of genes involved in breast cancer. Here, we studied 38 established breast cancer cell lines by comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) to determine recurrent genetic alterations and the extent to which these cell lines resemble uncultured tumors. The following chromosomal gains were observed: 8q (75%), 1q (61%), 20q (55%), 7p (44%), 3q (39%), 5p (39%), 7q (39%), 17q (33%), 1p (30%), and 20p (30%), and the most common losses were: 8p (58%), 18q (58%), 1p (42%), Xp (42%), Xq (42%), 4p (36%), 11q (36%), 18p (33%), 10q (30%), and 19p (28%). Furthermore, 35 recurrent high-level amplification sites were identified, most often involving 8q23 (37%), 20q13 (29%), 3q25-q26 (24%), 17q22-q23 (16%), 17q23-q24 (16%), 1p13 (11%), 1q32 (11%), 5p13 (11%), 5p14 (11%), 11q13 (11%), 17q12-q21 (11%), and 7q21-q22 (11%). A comparison of DNA copy number changes found in the cell lines with those reported in 17 published studies (698 tumors) of uncultured tumors revealed a substantial degree of overlap. CGH copy number profiles may facilitate identification of important new genes located at the hotspots of such chromosomal alterations. This was illustrated by analyzing expression levels of 1236 genes using cDNA microarrays in four of the cell lines. Several highly overexpressed genes (such as RCH1 at 17q23, TOPO II at 17q21-q22, as well asCASand MYBL2 at 20q13) were involved in these recurrent DNA amplifications. In conclusion, DNA copy number profiles were generated by CGH for most of the publicly available breast cancer cell lines and were made available on a web site (http://www.nhgri.nih.gov/DIR/CGB/CR2000). This should facilitate the correlative analysis of gene expression and copy number as illustrated here by the finding by cDNA microarrays of several overexpressed genes that were amplified.


In this work, we analyze Jovian Trojans in the space of suitable resonant elements and we identify clusters of possible collisional origin by two independent methods: the hierarchical clustering and a so-called "randombox". Compared to our previous work (Bro\v{z} and Rozehnal 2011), we study a twice larger sample. Apart from Eurybates, Ennomos and $1996\,\rm RJ$ families, we have found three more clusters --- namely families around asteroids (20961)~Arkesilaos, (624)~Hektor in the $L_4$ libration zone and (247341)~$2001\,\rm UV_{209}$ in $L_5$. The families fulfill our stringent criteria, i.e. a high statistical significance, an albedo homogeneity and a steeper size-frequency distribution than that of background. In order to understand their nature, we simulate their long term collisional evolution with the Boulder code (Morbidelli et al. 2009) and dynamical evolution using a modified SWIFT integrator (Levison and Duncan, 1994). Within the framework of our evolutionary model, we were able to constrain the the age of the Hektor family to be either 1 to 4 Gyr or, less likely, 0.1 to 2.5 Gyr, depending on initial impact geometry. Since (624) Hektor itself seems to be a bilobed--shape body with a satellite (Marchis et al. 2014), i.e. an exceptional object, we address its association with the D--type family and we demonstrate that the moon and family could be created during a single impact event. We simulated the cratering event using a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH, Benz and Asphaug, 1994). This is also the first case of a family associated with a D--type parent body.


Theologies in India Over the years, theological thinking in the South Asian context has undergone many changes. At the beginning of the Indian philosophical schools, it was mainly Brahminical texts and thoughts that influenced the theological framework. (1) Later, contextual theologies emerged and critiqued some of the dominant Brahminical influences on Indian Christian theologies, because many South Asian Christians were from a non-Brahminical background. (2) Thus, on the one hand, Christian theologies in India have not often emerged from the theological seminaries and moved toward the churches and grassroots Christians because of the sophistication or ideological influence of these theologies. On the other hand, the churches are exposed to charismatic and evangelical theologies from parachurch organizations and preachers. It is quite likely that a parallel system of theological institutions, with evangelical and popular support, may emerge (and in many contexts have already emerged) to counter established theological colleges, thereby challenging the established churches in their basic theological and ministerial training. One of the reasons might be the strong emphasis on contextual theologies and a narrow academic approach to biblical texts on the part of these parachurch organizations and preachers. The aim of this essay is to go beyond such theologies and to explore a new methodology of "doing theology" in a South Asian context. This new approach has to take into account both people's experiences in multicultural and pluralistic contexts and the diverse competing narratives and their religious interpretations. The approach addresses how people can be committed to their own faith, tradition, and culture while recognizing, engaging, and interacting with the presence of the faith, tradition, and cultures of those around them. The aim is to create a dialogic space at the grassroots level to enable communities both to coexist and also to work toward a mutual coexistence involving respecting and recognizing one another's religious faith. Considering the present realities of religious conflicts, this approach becomes very important and relevant, particularly for South Asian contexts. Interreligious Dialogue Often, interreligious discussions at the leadership and intellectual levels have failed either due to a fear of accepting syncretism or due to an exclusive or pluralistic position taken by the participants. What may prevent Christian lay members from holding a dialogue with other religious communities is misunderstanding that dialogue is against their evangelistic mission or that they may have to give up their claims of uniqueness. Some Hindus may believe that dialogue is only for intellectuals who deal with Sanskrit texts and understand the relationships among religious texts and so on. Others may even think that dialogue means accepting the position that all religions lead people to the same God. (3) Interreligious dialogue is often misunderstood at the grassroots level for one or another of these reasons. I therefore want to highlight the need for an alternative method for engaging in dialogue among different religious communities. My aim is to promote dialogue, at the grassroots level, among people who are strong believers living a simple faith of theft own, for previous attempts at dialogue have been carried out mainly at an intellectual or leadership level. Interreligious dialogue at the grass roots refers to establishing contact, presence, communication, relationships, and understanding between two persons or communities of different religions. This dialogue could enrich the process that already exists in many contexts such as tea shops, where dialogue among people of different faiths is already happening. Such a dialogic process may become the means to address many areas of religious conflict and social unrest. Instead of confronting one another, communities could work together to find a way to live in harmony. …


AbstractSeismic stratigraphy is not only a geometric understanding of a stratigraphic succession, but it also has a close link to the space-time continuum started by H. E. Wheeler (1907–1987). The science follows the fundamental principles of stratigraphy, and the norms that govern seismic interpretation play a fundamental role due to their practical significance. The birth of computer-aided algorithms paved a new platform for seismic interpretation. The ideas from A. W. Grabau (1870–1946) and Wheeler were brought to a new level when space-time continuum was represented using 3D seismic data. This representation is commonly referred to as the Wheeler transformation, and it is based on flattening theories. Numerous algorithms have been introduced. Each suffers from its own problem and follow some assumption. The hydrocarbon industry, as well as academia, should seek a solution that is globally applicable to a stratigraphic succession irrespective of resolution, geologic challenges, and depositional setting...


Insulin maintains glucose homeostasis through its binding of the insulin receptor and activation of the insulin signalling cascade in insulin sensitive tissues. Skeletal muscle is a major endocrine organ, and is responsible for the majority of post-prandial glucose disposal. The maintenance of glucose homeostasis is a delicate balance and impairments in glucose disposal can have significant physiological effects, resulting in the onset of metabolic diseases such as diabetes mellitus.
Insulin stimulated glucose uptake involves a number of signalling proteins to enable uptake to occur. In order to understand the complexities associated with the insulin signalling cascade, cell culture models have provided a controlled and easily manipulated environment in which to investigate insulin stimulated glucose uptake in skeletal muscle. While the majority of these experiments have been conducted in conventional monolayer cultures, the growing field of three-dimensional tissue engineering provides an alternative environment in which skeletal muscle cells can be grown to investigate their physiological function.
The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the use of different cell culture models for investigating the effects of acute and chronic insulin exposure on skeletal muscle.
Initial investigations aimed to establish glucose uptake in tissue engineering skeletal muscle constructs using tritium labelled (H3) 2-deoxy-d-glucose. Monolayer cultures were used to developed base line conditions. In these cultures, concentrations greater than 0.5 µCi for 15 minutes of insulin stimulation suggested an initial assay window for investigating insulin stimulated glucose uptake. However, the duration of insulin stimulation was not effective in measuring uptake in tissue engineered skeletal muscle constructs based upon western blot experiments of Akt phosphorylation, therefore insulin stimulation in skeletal muscle tissue engineered constructs was increased to 30 minutes.
Glucose uptake is mediated via specific glucose transporter protein, GLUT1 and GLUT4. Therefore, the transcriptional profile of these transporters was elucidated in monolayer culture and tissue engineered skeletal muscle constructs. Time course experiments showed an increase in GLUT4 transcription in tissue engineered and monolayer culture systems which is associated with an increase in the transcription of skeletal muscle development and myogenic genes.
In two dimensional culture, skeletal muscle cells were exposed to insulin during differentiation and in post-mitotic skeletal muscle myotubes to investigating the potential effects upon metabolic genes and proteins involved in insulin signalling. Chronic exposure to insulin during skeletal muscle differentiation reduced insulin signalling and resulted in an increase in basal glucose uptake and ablated insulin stimulated glucose uptake. In contrast, post-mitotic skeletal muscle myotubes did not shown similar changes and were not as responsive to acute insulin exposure. Therefore future experiments exposed skeletal muscle to insulin during differentiation.
Using the previous findings as a basis for experimentation, the effects of chronic and acute insulin exposure upon three dimensional skeletal muscle constructs were investigated. Fibrin and collagen constructs were grown for a total period of 14 days. Constructs were exposed to insulin during differentiation and acutely stimulated for 30 minutes at day 14. Although there was a mean increase in Akt protein phosphorylation in both types of tissue-engineered constructs, these changes were not significant following acute insulin stimulation. In addition, glucose uptake in fibrin skeletal muscle constructs increased as a result of acute insulin stimulation however was not significantly difference to unstimulated constructs.
The work presented in this thesis provides initial experimental data of the use of different skeletal muscle cell culture models for investigating insulin signalling and glucose uptake. Further research should further characterise these in vitro models for investigating skeletal muscle metabolism.


This study was performed off the southern coast of Yassica Island in the Izmir Bay on the Turkish coast of the Aegean Sea to investigate the mortality of red mullet ( Mullus barbatus , Mullidae) escaping through 40-mm square-mesh and 44- and 50-mm diamond-mesh codends attached to a conventional demersal trawl net. In total, 48 replicate experimental hauls were performed in the summer and winter of 2011 and 2012. Mean escape mortality for all hauls in winter (33.2%±6.51) was significantly higher (p<0.0001) than that in summer (26.5%±6.19). Furthermore, mortality was also highest among the smallest fish, particularly during winter. Irrespective of season, the escape mortality of red mullet was lowest from the 40-mm square-mesh codend (mean, 25.5%±4.58). These observations emphasize the importance of investigating the survival potential of escaping fish when considering the benefits of different selective devices in the management of a fishery.


We have developed a new IR optical system that consists of three mirrors and four lenses, and that operates in the temperature range 8°C-32°C. This temperature range can induce thermoelastic deformation in the lenses and their mounting subassembly, leading to a large defocus error associated with the displacement of the lenses inside the barrel. We suggest using a new three-shell-based athermalization structure composed of two materials with different coefficients of thermal expansion (Invar and aluminum). A finite element analysis and the experiment data were used to confirm that this new athermalization barrel had a defocus error sensitivity of 11.6 nm/°C; this is an improvement on the widely used conventional single-shell titanium barrel model, which has a defocus error sensitivity of 29.8 nm/°C. This paper provides the technical details of the new athermalization design, and its computational and experimental performance results.


Frozen debris lobes (FDLs) are large masses of soil, rock, incorporated organic material, and ice moving down permafrost-affected slopes in the south-central Brooks Range, Alaska. In this paper, we focus on FDL-A, which is an impending geohazard to the Dalton Highway, located just under 40 m away from the highway embankment. We present the results of multi-faceted research, including field-based studies, laboratory testing of soil samples, slope stability analysis, and a GIS analysis. Subsurface instrumentation indicates that major movement of FDL-A occurs in a shear zone 20.6 to 22.8 m below the ground surface, with temperature-dependent internal flow as a secondary movement mechanism. Surface measurements show an overall average rate of movement of 1.2 cm per day, which is an increase over historic rates. The slope stability analysis required a back analysis to determine soil strength parameters at failure, resulting in cohesion values between 43 to 53 kPa and friction angles between 10° and 16°. The modeling results indicated a high sensitivity to pore water pressure and cohesion. This is critical since the melting of massive ice and thawing of frozen soil will increase pore water pressure and lower shear strength, resulting in the acceleration of FDL-A towards the Dalton Highway. The GIS analysis also provided insight into the movement and instability of FDL-A, and provided groundwork for a GIS protocol to examine catchment and lobe features of all FDLs along the highway corridor.


Moving target search (MTS) or the game of cops and robbers has a broad field of application reaching from law enforcement to computer games. Within the recent years research has focused on computing move policies for one or multiple pursuers (cops). The present work motivates to extend this perspective to both sides, thus developing algorithms for the target (robber). We investigate the game with perfect information for both players and propose two new methods, named TrailMax and Dynamic Abstract Trailmax, to compute move policies for the target. Experiments are conducted by simulating games on 20 maps of the commercial computer game Baldur's Gate and measuring survival time and computational complexity. We test seven algorithms: Cover, Dynamic Abstract Minimax, minimax, hill climbing with distance heuristic, a random beacon algorithm, TrailMax and DATrailMax. Analysis shows that our methods outperform all the other algorithms in quality, achieving up to 98% optimality, while meeting modern computer game computation time constraints.


After the turbulent labor history of America in the early to mid twentieth century, there has been a general decline of unions. Nevertheless, many graduate school teaching assistants are unionizing in attempts to gain better pay and benefits and remove themselves from an 'Ivory Sweatshop.' This article discusses a history of unions within graduate schools and the arguments of graduate assistants as student or employee. Also, an exploratory, quantitative based inquiry found that the drive is not omnipresent. A major Southwestern university was sampled and found that unions are not wanted even if they are needed. Introduction Get a good education and the world is your oyster. This is what has been preached to the millions of pubescent teens in high school. Counselors offer a plethora of ways to get into college. Everything from scholarships to military service can offer a good education and the opportunity of a successful life. When reaching the point of becoming a college graduate, the onset of institutionalization, which also affects many prisoners, and the desire to continue education drives many students to graduate school. Here the glamorous promises of a great life fail, and the world becomes something of an ivory sweatshop. Many graduate students are offered assistantships in turn for a waiver of fees and a stipend. It is not called a salary, for to call it that would infer an amount of money. In assistantships, graduate students teach introductory classes and assist professors in their research and large classes. The research assistants, in return for their effort, get a good workout from running down books and articles. A quest that would often leave Sherlock Holmes baffled. When all is said and done, their name might appear as the 17th author of a published work. Some teaching assistants routinely grade up to 200 papers of such quality that makes them return to their undergraduate professors and apologize for any such work that they might have produced. This task often leaves very little time and motivation for the assistants to work on their own studies. This article aims not to say that such abuses are not necessary, but that graduate assistants can have a voice about their working conditions. Graduate students often make less that one-half of the lowest paid University employee and work twice as much, which is often beneficial as it keeps them from spending money they do not have. The noneconomic factors are comparatively quite good, but improvements can be made. That is, if the message can get out. Hopefully, a group of communication graduate students can get out the answer to the question 'if education is so central to the new economy, why are they not rewarded for their work?' The Graduate Student is a Person too.. The graduate student assistant (hereafter GSA) often handles sections of 15 to 30 students in introductory courses at universities and often receives very little instruction in teaching and is often only a few years older than their students (Ubiquitos TA 49). As the satirical newspaper The Onion published an article entitled "Teaching Assistant Spotted at Bar." The article humorously relates a fictional episode in which a handful of Western Civilization students spotted their GSA at a bar and stated, "Holy shit, its our TA ... it's so weird to see him out in the world, at a bar, you just never think of him as being interested in anything besides Western Civ." The GSA performs a valuable service to the university. By breaking up larger classes into smaller sections, students receive more individual attention, which humanizes the institution (50). The GSA often offers an energetic and driven interest in their respected field. They also possess the characteristics that they wished for in an instructor. One example is the ability to keep the class from becoming a one to three hour nap for the student. Also, with the advances in technology, many classes are becoming 'virtual' classes. …


This paper reports on a study aimed at exploring the benefits of an international service-learning experience for teachers employed in a rural primary school in Africa. The primary school, where these teachers are employed was the focal point of an international visit in December 2012 by twenty-four undergraduate primary education students from the University of Notre Dame, Australia. Teachers were interviewed and their responses analysed qualitatively. Explorations of teacher benefits of this visit were articulated in themes that emerged including benefits to the children at the school and the impact the visit had on teacher pedagogy. Teacher responses revealed that the teachers valued the visit immensely as it provided a balance to the school curriculum which teachers articulated as having its primary focus on the country's national standardised testing regime. The article serves as an initial investigation into the gap that exists in current service learning literature, namely the impact of international service learning experiences for members of the host community. Limitations of this study and future implications of this specific visit are also explored.


In this study, microcapsules containing α-Tocopherol (α-TP) have been prepared by complex coacervation technique and applied to cotton fabric by padding method. Characterization of the capsules is determined by scanning electron microscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and particle size measurement. Yield of microencapsulation process is found in the range of 41.63 - 62.20%. Antioxidant capacity of capsule loaded textiles has been examined according to DPPH free radical scavenging method, and α-TP existence in ethyl cellulose capsules is found as 65.218 - 330.722 µM. α-TP activity in capsule treated fabric is determined as 61.73 µg. Presence of the capsules on fabric and also α-TP activity has been found to remain effective even after twenty washes at 40°C.


This short history of history is an ideal introduction for those studying or teaching the subject as part of courses on the historian's craft, historical theory and method, and historiography. Spanning the earliest known forms of historical writing in the ancient Near East right through to the present and covering developments in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, it also touches on the latest topics and debates in the field, such as 'Big History', 'Deep History' and the impact of the electronic age. It features timelines listing major dynasties or regimes throughout the world alongside historiographical developments; guides to key thinkers and seminal historical works; further reading; a glossary of terms; and sample questions to promote further debate at the end of each chapter. This is a truly global account of the process of progressive intercultural contact that led to the hegemony of Western historiographical methods.


In the mid-1990s, Congress fundamentally altered the public safety net when it passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996, otherwise known as welfare reform. Under the PRWORA, cash assistance was no longer an entitlement for income-qualifying families; instead, recipients faced work requirements and lifetime limits on receiving benefits. Bipartisan reformers sought to transform welfare from a program believed to trap poor mothers in a "culture of dependence" into a program that would promote a culture of "self-sufficiency" and "personal responsibility." This shift in culture, it was argued, would ultimately lead to upward mobility. This Article shows how, ironically, over twenty years after welfare reform, the private safety net that many struggling families rely on—the credit system—disincentivizes the very self-sufficient behavior that welfare reformers had hoped to promote. Using the sociological concept of narratives, the Article shows how parents who have most internalized narratives of self-sufficiency are particularly at risk of financial ruin under the new regime. On a broader scale, this Article argues that, to better understand the relationship between law, inequality, and poverty, we need to further investigate how people experience and internalize structural conditions and how these structural conditions become sources of personal meaning and determinants of behavior. Such inquiries can lead to unexpected connections between seemingly disparate areas of law and policy, and ultimately to innovative policy interventions.
Finally, this Article moves to the prescriptive. It argues for a public financial services program, Financial Services for Family Security (FSFS). FSFS would provide services such as financial advising, no- interest small loans, and debt management help, all aimed at increasing the financial resilience of struggling families.


A localization of moving reinforced sound source is described. A sound reinforcement system, in which microphones and loudspeakers are installed in the same sound field such as a conference room, has a drawback of insufficient reproduced sound pressure due to an adjustment to prevent howling. The fundamental technique of howling suppression that decreases coupling between microphones and loudspeakers is well known. The algorithm for decreasing coupling proposed here is based on a synthesis of directivity of microphone arrays to meet its dips in the directions of loudspeakers automatically. The direction of loudspeaker includes not only direct propagation but propagation through reflection and diffraction. In order to localize the direction in real time, a reference signal that is superposed on the speech signal is continuously detected by microphone. As a result, the reference signal whose sound pressure is low enough to be the same as the room noise of a typical broadcasting studio, will be detected without interference for speech communication by using spread spectrum technology.


Amyloid diseases are a world-wide problem causing great human suffer and large economical costs. Although amyloid deposits, a common denominator in all amyloid disorders, are detrimental to the surrounding tissue, there is a poor correlation between total amyloid burden and clinical symptoms. Soluble oligomers are much more potent to exert a tissue damaging effect. Alzheimer's disease (AD) is strongly linked to self-assembly of the amyloid-β (Aβ) peptide. Antibodies selectively targeting cytotoxic Aβ-species are useful both for understanding oligomer formation and for their therapeutic abilities. We hypothesized that the effect of avidity would compensate for a low single site affinity and be enough to selectively target oligomers. To evaluate this hypothesis, we focused on the IgM isotype having ten antigen-binding sites. In accordance with the hypothesis, the IgM isotype effectively bound oligomeric Aβ also in presence of a vast excess of its monomeric counterpart, clearly illustrating the potentiating effect of avidity. As a continuation of this work, we have shown that the avidity effect from a bivalent binding is enough to induce oligomer specificity. This finding facilitates a direct application on the clinically more useful IgG isotype, where the binding properties now can be controlled in detail. The method is general and we have, using this technique, also designed oligomer specific antibodies targeting α-synuclein. Transthyretin (TTR) is an amyloidogenic protein involved in both hereditary and sporadic amyloidosis. The cytotoxicity of TTR is intriguing since studies have shown cytotoxic potential from oligomers, tetramers and even monomers. Elucidation of the molecular properties associated with TTR cytotoxicity is hence of interest. By preventing tetramer dissociation, TTR aggregation and TTR-induced cytotoxicity is abolished. Based on this rationale, a current therapeutic strategy is to stabilize the TTR tetramer with small molecules. The kinetic stability within the spectra of known TTR mutations spans more than three orders of magnitude. However, although the most stable mutants are inert, a poor correlation within the group of cytotoxic variants exists where the cytotoxic effect is not potentiated in proportion to their kinetic stability. Through analysis of a large spectra of TTR variants, our results indicate that TTR induced cytotoxicity requires an intermediate stability of the TTR molecule. The kinetic stability should be low enough to permit tetramer dissociation and the thermodynamic stability high enough to prevent instant aggregation and to allow formation of the cytotoxic fold.


This publication explores all of these aspects of library consolidation through commentary, research, and case studies written by librarians with experience navigating these events. Individual chapters address either the entire process of a consolidation or closure, multiple aspects of one or more experiences, or one aspect that is particularly important such as communicating with faculty or using data to make decisions about collections. Difficult Decisions: Closing And Merging Academic Libraries is a comprehensive resource for library administrators faced with making these decisions, librarians asked to assist with these challenging projects, and anyone working in a library undergoing a merger.

Difficult Decisions: Closing And Merging Academic Libraries is appropriate for all types of academic libraries as well as for schools of library and information science.


After being known as the 'murder capital of the world' in the 1990s, Medellin has pioneered innovative forms of city planning and management and was acclaimed the most innovative city in the world by the Urban Land Institute (ULI) in 2013. Hosting the World Urban Forum in 2014 allowed it to showcase its approach, key elements of which have been: creation of innovative transport infrastructure linking poorer peripheral districts to the city centre; culture-led regeneration; strong support of local development from the local business sector; and a successful municipally-owned utilities company. However, the city is spreading outwards without services and employment being provided; new low-income developments are replicating high-rise models which failed worldwide; there is limited intervention in the existing informal areas, many being in highly vulnerable locations where the level of risk is likely to increase with climate change; development has little regard for topography, ecological and environmental considerations; investment in accessible and good quality public space is restricted to some areas; the quality of the public realm does not always support health and wellbeing of the ageing population. This paper explores the institutional and socio-economic context in which Medellín has achieved the internationally recognized status of an 'innovative city'. It questions to what extent social equity, environmental sustainability and citizen empowerment have been promoted as per the ULI claims when it conferred the prize. The paper queries the extent to which 'urban innovation' is happening in Medellín, which has considerable implications given its recently found role as a 'model' city in Latin America and beyond.


A novel semiconductor, the small molecule C6-NTTN, was used to fabricate organic thin film transistors (OTFTs). Different architectures and deposition techniques were employed, together with various surface treatments of the substrate, insulator and metal contacts, whose effect is analyzed through atomic force microscopy. The aim is to investigate the relationship between the process parameters and the electrical performance, with a particular attention to the quality of interfaces between active layers. The proportionality between the charge carrier mobility and the interface trap density was studied.


We present the first analysis of extended stellar kinematics of elliptical galaxies where a Yukawa-like correction to the Newtonian gravitational potential derived from f(R)-gravity is considered as an alternative to dark matter. In this framework, we model long-slit data and planetary nebula data out to 7 Reff of three galaxies with either decreasing or flat dispersion profiles. We use the corrected Newtonian potential in a dispersion–kurtosis Jeans analysis to account for the mass–anisotropy degeneracy. We find that these modified potentials are able to fit nicely all three elliptical galaxies and the anisotropy distribution is consistent with that estimated if a dark halo is considered. The parameter which measures the "strength" of the Yukawa-like correction is, on average, smaller than the one found previously in spiral galaxies and correlates both with the scale length of the Yukawa-like term and the orbital anisotropy.


MUSI 103: 3 s.h. Language of Music (D, G1) A course designed to develop a keen sensitivity to the language of musical sounds through creating, performing, conducting music and listening with sensitive awareness. The use of a broad range of musical materials, active exploration and personal discovery will lead the student to grasp the nature of the interactions and relationships that bring meaning to music. Language of music is structured to provide the student with a means to developing greater awareness and accuracy in musical reading and hearing. Designed for students with little or no academic musical background. Offered in fall, spring.


This article extends the methodological and empirical scope of public administration research and applies two Bayesian-inspired computational research methods – unsupervised latent trait scaling and topic modeling. The article uses these methods to examine government budgeting in thirteen Western countries, utilizing budgetary legislation as the research material. The empirical research question is: How are legal system traditions present in the words of texts of legislation on government budgeting? According to the results, at one end of the latent trait scale we find overseas inheritors of Britain's common law legal system, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and at the other end two representatives of civil law of the Napoleonic subtype, Italy and Spain. The other countries situate themselves in intermediate positions between the extremes. The topic modeling indicates three reasonably homogeneous groups of countries: the three overseas inheritors of common law andmore weakly the United Kingdom, three countries representing the Napoleonic heritage, and, more weakly German-speaking and Nordic countries. In general, the article and its results emphasize the opportunities to extend Bayesian-inspired research in this research field.


Background: Several prospective studies suggest that use of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs is inversely associated with advanced stage and possibly high-grade prostate cancer. One study reported that men with low cholesterol had a lower risk of high-grade prostate cancer. Given these findings, we investigated the association between low serum cholesterol and prostate cancer risk in the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial. Methods: We conducted a cohort study of 5,586 men ages ≥55 years who were randomized to the placebo arm of the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial between 1993 and 1996. Serum cholesterol was measured enzymatically at entry. By the end of follow-up, 1,251 prostate cancer cases were confirmed. We used logistic regression to calculate the multivariable odds ratio (OR) of total, and Gleason 2 to 6 (n = 993), 7 (n = 199), and 8 to 10 (n = 59) prostate cancer comparing low serum (normal, <200 mg/dL) to high-serum (borderline and elevated cholesterol, ≥200 mg/dL) cholesterol. Results: Men with low cholesterol had a lower risk of Gleason 8 to 10 prostate cancer [OR, 0.41; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.22-0.77] than men with high cholesterol. No association was present for prostate cancer overall (OR, 0.97; 95% CI, 0.85-1.11), Gleason 2 to 6 disease (OR, 1.03; 95% CI, 0.89-1.18), or Gleason 7 disease (OR, 0.93; 95% CI, 0.69-1.24). Conclusion: These prospective results support that men with low cholesterol have a reduced risk of high-grade prostate cancer. These and other contemporary data that suggest that cholesterol metabolism should be investigated further in the etiology of prostate cancer. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2009;18(11):2807–13)


Objective. To assess the effect of clinical enthesitis by body site in patients with psoriatic arthritis (PsA). Methods. Adults with PsA enrolled in the Corrona Psoriatic Arthritis/Spondyloarthritis Registry (March 2013–March 2018) were included. Enthesitis at enrollment was assessed by the Spondyloarthritis Research Consortium of Canada Enthesitis Index and classified by affected sites (upper, lower, or both). Disease activity (e.g., Clinical Disease Activity Index, Clinical Disease Activity Index for PsA), patient-reported outcomes (PRO; e.g., patient-reported pain and fatigue), and work productivity were compared between those with and without enthesitis using t- or Wilcoxon rank-sum tests for continuous variables and chi-square or Fisher exact tests for categorical variables. The association of enthesitis with disease activity and PRO measures versus no enthesitis was modeled using multivariable-adjusted linear or logistic regression. Results. Of 2003 patients with PsA, 391 (19.5%) had enthesitis: 80 (20.5%) in upper sites only; 137 (35.0%) in lower sites only; and 174 (44.5%) in both. Regardless of location, disease activity and PRO were worse in patients with versus without enthesitis. In adjusted models, the presence of enthesitis at any site was significantly associated with worse disease activity versus no enthesitis. Enthesitis in lower or both upper and lower sites was associated with higher pain and fatigue scores and greater work impairment versus no enthesitis. Conclusion. Patients with clinical enthesitis had worse disease activity regardless of enthesitis location versus those without enthesitis, and patients with enthesitis in lower or both upper and lower sites had worse pain, fatigue, and work impairment.


Groundwater is the main source of irrigation in India, but there is a huge uncertainty about the number of groundwater structures. This paper compares data from four government sources on wells and tubewells, diesel pumps and electric pumps for time periods from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s. There is a wide divergence in data, which is not attributable to mere time lags or definitional differences. This is a cause for concern, because lack of reliable estimates of these numbers affects realistic calculations of important variables such as groundwater extraction, electricity subsidies, and the carbon footprint of agricultural groundwater use.


Human resources development in society or organization is a necessity to secure progress. Without such development societies or organizations fail to achieve their objectives. Human resources development is a three-stage measure to meet the requirements of each society or organization. These three stages are: a) planning and programming: at this stage qualitative and quantitative needs are determined; b) education and training: this stage sees human resources shape up to meet needs and to secure stated goals; c) implementation and evaluation: at this stage trained individuals are given assignments in the society. Their performance is under supervision and evaluation and they may receive training if necessary.

Looking at pharmacy education as part of an overall human resources development makes you wonder whether education system is in line with this three-stage plan or not. This article aims to encourage policy makers to launch a probe to see whether or not pharmacy education in Iran is in line with the objectives associated with development of human resources. Can Iranian pharmacists who are fresh out of university meet social demands?

History of pharmacy education in Iran

Foundation of Dar-uL Fonoon (house of skills, polytechnics) in Tehran almost 150 years ago saw modern training emerge. Dar-uL fonoon hired an Austrian pharmacist to launch its pharmacy education. In 1922, a pharmacy department was set up at the school of medicine. In 1926, the first group of Iranian students who had completed pharmacy programs in France returned home. That ushered in introduction of the French method that featured 90-credit courses to be completed in 3 years. In 1939 the number of credits to be taken in a 4-years program jumped to 140. Twelve years later another development came around. The number of years rose to five. Under new arrangements all students were required to go through the 4-years program. Only those with better averages could take an extra one-year of courses to prepare a dissertation and secure a doctorate degree in pharmacy.

During all these years pharmacy programs were offered at the medical faculty. In 1956 a pharmacy faculty independent of the medical faculty came into being. In the 17 years that followed the formation of the pharmacy school, slight changes were introduced. The French method was replaced by the French one, and each academic year was turned into two semesters. In 1973, regulations offered in two semesters during each academic year and students would get their doctorate degree after writing theses and taking an oath.

What draws the attention of a person as far as developments in the education system are concerned is an increase or decreases the credit hours of a program. Unfortunately these changes have taken no account of social needs or the role that pharmacists should play in the society after graduation. There has been no overhaul in the pharmacy education system in Iran since 1973. Only in recent years, have a number of professors at pharmacy faculties across the nation taken measures to reform pharmacy education in line with social needs, a suitable definition of who a pharmacist is and objectives of pharmacy education as part of a national plan to develop human resources.

Expectation from pharmacy education

Introduction of drastic economic, social and cultural changes of late have prompted governments to focus their efforts on development and better living conditions for citizenry. This has left a major impact on the health care system and the role of people who are involved in this system. Consequently, pharmacists have a more active role to play. For instance they have to formulate new medication, offer better clinical services and produce radioactive drugs and biological products. Recent developments have given pharmacists a more active role to play in the health care system. Naturally the pharmacy education system should adapt itself to the new atmosphere to be able to train pharmacists who can take care of tasks required in the modern health system. Pharmacy education is a dynamic process, which should make optional use of science and technology to train pharmacists who can play an active role in the national health care system. They should be a reliable source for physicians, nurses and patients. Pharmaceutical care can be a lofty goal of pharmacy education to shed the traditional responsibility of pharmacists, that is dispensing the prescriptions, and turn them into a cornerstone of the heath system. That doctors prescribe and pharmacists dispense their prescription is now a thing of the past. The medical science has made a lot of headway. Physicians can no longer take care of all responsibilities associated with medicine by them. The health system now necessitates rational prescription rather than blind prescription. Pharmacists are now required to look into legal and health-related aspects of prescription. Besides they should see whether or not the items on a prescription are proportionate to one another.

So pharmacists who leave pharmacy schools should meet the requirements of the national plan to develop human resources and those of health care system. In addition they need to have ability to take care of a number of responsibilities such as:

scientific ability to answer the questions of customers (physicians, dentists, nurses and patients)
technical ability to integrate theoretical knowledge with what one learns at work
contribution to and supervision of the prescription process
contribution to clinical efforts in hospital
supervision of the dosage and selection of the best formula
monitoring the patient after consumption to make sure intake methods are correct
assessment of surveys involving patients and registration of possible complication
preparation of combined drugs on a small scale
dispensation of rational and scientific advice to patients on how to use herbal and supplementary medicine
communication skill to forge a sound relation with patients and medical teams
efforts to instill rational use of drug into the society

Besides pharmacists should be faithful and good-natured and keep the patients' secrets. To secure such features, a 2 or 3-credit courses is by far less than what is needed. The whole education system should be devised in a way to instill the idea of serving the patients and promoting the health system into students from the very first moment they are admitted. To fulfill such an objective good manners are of paramount importance. Ethical features should be coupled with technical ability to meet pharmacy education needs. In fact efforts to create such ability should be the hallmark of the pharmacy education across the nation.

Conclusion

A quick look at the curriculum of pharmacy education progress and pharmaceutical services in Iran shows the education is not in line with social needs. So a serious scientific review of the pharmacy education, including the system and its curriculum is not a mere idea but a vital necessity. We should design a comprehensive curriculum to meet the changing national health care environment. The primary objective of the pharmaceutical doctorate program should be to train individuals who provide and promote excellent inpatient and outpatient-focused care base. The fact that medical education and the health system are run by a single management in Iran (ministry of health and medical education) provide us with a golden opportunity to bring pharmacy education into line with social needs and train pharmacists capable of rendering services at home, rural, and urban levels.


Adapting fiction into film is, as author Cristina Della Coletta asserts, a transformative encounter that takes place not just across media but across different cultures. In this book, Della Coletta explores what it means when the translation of fiction into film involves writers, directors, and audiences who belong to national, historical, and cultural formations different from that of the adapted work. In particular, Della Coletta examines narratives and films belonging to Italian, North American, French, and Argentine cultures. These include Luchino Visconti's adaptation of James M. Cain's "The Postman Always Rings Twice", Federico Fellini's version of Edgar Allan Poe's story "Never Bet the Devil Your Head," Alain Corneau's film based on Antonio Tabucchi's "Notturno indiano", and Bernardo Bertolucci's take on Jorge Luis Borges' "Tema del traidor y del heroe." In her framework for analyzing these cross-cultural film adaptations, Della Coletta borrows from the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and calls for a "hermeneutics of estrangement," a practice of mediation and adaptation that defines cultures, nations, selfhoods, and their aesthetic achievements in terms of their transformative encounters. Stories travel to unexpected and interesting places when adapted into film by people of diverse cultures. While the intended meaning of the author may not be perfectly reproduced, it still holds, Della Coletta argues, an equally valid and important intellectual claim upon its interpreters. With a firm grasp on the latest developments in adaptation theory, Della Coletta invites scholars of media studies, cultural history, comparative literature, and adaptation studies to deepen their understanding of this critical encounter between texts, writers, readers, and cultural movements.


Over 80 stunning, ingenious and absorbing sport infographics! Infographic Guide to Sport presents unique, witty and surprising facts about every type of sport, from badminton to karate, cricket to ice hockey, football to zorbing. Fascinating stats and all the facts on your favourite sporting legends, it features infamous tales from behind the scenes of the sporting world. More than just a book of words, with graphs, Venn diagrams and charts, this book provides a unique overview of the all your favourite sports, boasting over 100 original artworks and illustrations and at-a-glance facts to amaze and astound readers. Discover: The world's most dangerous sports That shuttlecocks are faster than Ferraris Niche European sports from oina to pesapallo The toughest marathons Why cheerleading is more dangerous than boxing


Many loss functions in representation learning are invariant under a continuous symmetry transformation. For example, the loss function of word embeddings (Mikolov et al., 2013) remains unchanged if we simultaneously rotate all word and context embedding vectors. We show that representation learning models for time series possess an approximate continuous symmetry that leads to slow convergence of gradient descent. We propose a new optimization algorithm that speeds up convergence using ideas from gauge theory in physics. Our algorithm leads to orders of magnitude faster convergence and to more interpretable representations, as we show for dynamic extensions of matrix factorization and word embedding models. We further present an example application of our proposed algorithm that translates modern words into their historic equivalents.


Context. The international Whole Earth Blazar Telescope (WEBT) consortium planned and carried out three days of intensive micro-variability observations of S5 0716+714 from February 22, 2009 to February 25, 2009. This object was chosen due to its bright apparent magnitude range, its high declination, and its very large duty cycle for micro-variations. Aims. We report here on the long continuous optical micro-variability light curve of 0716+714 obtained during the multi-site observing campaign during which the Blazar showed almost constant variability over a 0.5 mag range. The resulting light curve is presented here for the first time. Observations from participating observatories were corrected for instrumental differences and combined to construct the overall smoothed light curve. Methods. Thirty-six observatories in sixteen countries participated in this continuous monitoring program and twenty of them submitted data for compilation into a continuous light curve. The light curve was analyzed using several techniques including Fourier transform, Wavelet and noise analysis techniques. Those results led us to model the light curve by attributing the variations to a series of synchrotron pulses. Results. We have interpreted the observed microvariations in this extended light curve in terms of a new model consisting of individual stochastic pulses due to cells in a turbulent jet which are energized by a passing shock and cool by means of synchrotron emission. We obtained an excellent fit to the 72-hour light curve with the synchrotron pulse model.


Over the past two and a half decades, the computer industry has grown accustomed to the spectacular rate of increase in microprocessor performance. The industry accomplished this without fundamentally rewriting programs in parallel form, without changing algorithms or languages, and often without even recompiling programs. Instruction level parallel processing achieves high performance without major changes to software. However, computers have thus far achieved this goal at the expense of tremendous hardware complexity-a complexity that has grown so large as to challenge the industry's ability to deliver ever-higher performance. The authors developed the Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) style of architecture to enable higher levels of instruction-level-parallelism without unacceptable hardware complexity. They focus on the broader concept of EPIC as embodied by HPL-PD (formerly known as HPL PlayDoh) architecture, which encompasses a large space of possible EPIC ISAs (instruction set architectures). In this article, the authors focus on HPL-PD because it represents the essence of the EPIC philosophy while avoiding the idiosyncracies of a specific ISA.


This study investigates adolescents' use of standard English in situations requiring careful speech. An account is given of the historical, political, linguistic and educational development of the concept of standard English, with particular emphasis on spoken standard English. Popular conceptions of 'correct speech' are also considered, and all of these are related to requirements in the National Curriculum for England and Wales for the teaching of spoken standard English. This is related to a specific case, namely that of Tyneside English. This variety is described, and an account is given of the area and its main social and econornIc characteristics. Twenty four adolescents are chosen from two schools which contrast highly in terms of socioeconomic profile. The individuals are also selected to provide a spread of levels of attainment, and both sexes are equally represented. M Phonological, grammatical, lexical and discourse variables are quantified using Labovian quantification techniques and approaches which involve counting non-standard variants over a period of time. Principal linguistic variables are: glottalised variants of (p) (t) and (k); non standard verb and pronoun forms; non-standard lexical items, and certain kinds of discourse markers. This process provides evidence of the extent to which young people use or do not use spoken standard English. It is shown that in more careful speech young people from more and less privileged backgrounds use only small frequencies of non-standard variants, but that within this relatively small number differences do exist: certain items are used mainly by less privileged boys, others mainly by girls, others by more privileged individuals in general. Use of non-standard speech is shown to differ for different groups at different linguistic levels. Important differences in gender and in social class emerge, but attainment also appears to have a significant bearing on children's use of spoken standard English. The study concludes by discussing pedagogical approaches which might increase awareness of issues associated with standard English.


Background: Thyroid hormones are essential and have various effects. For instance, they maintain normal growth and regulate metabolism. Hypothyroidism is a condition where the body doesn't make enough thyroid hormones and people with hypothyroidism usually have a slower metabolism. The serum ferritin levels and vitamin D levels have been changed in patients with Hypothyroidism. Objective: a study has been carried out to investigate the association among thyroid disorder and the levels of both vitamin D and ferritin. Materials and Method: The BMI was calculated using the formula BMI= weight (kg)/ height2 (m)2. Vitamin D (25-hydroxyvitamin D), ferritin, T3, T4 and TSH levels were measured using the ELFA (Enzyme Linked Fluorescent Assay, Model: bioMérieux). the results were analysed using SPSS package (version 18). Results: The results indicated that the age of participants played an ignorable role in this investigation, while significant increases (P<0.05) differences were noticed between the patients and controls in terms of BMI, 25(OH) vit D, ferritin, TSH, T3 and T4. There was also a significant difference(P<0.05) between male and female patients in terms of ferritin, TSH, T3 and T4 in comparison with the controls. Conclusion: The low levels of Vitamin D and Ferritin concentration were associated with the Patients of hypothyroidism .


Over the years, much ink has been spilled in the debate on standing of NGOs before the EU courts. This issue has been the object of particular consideration following the ruling in the Greenpeace case where the General Court denied the NGO in question standing on the basis that it did not 'adduce any special circumstances to demonstrate the individual interest of their members'. Considering that environmental NGOs tend to represent the interests of society as a whole, or that of the environment in particular, imposing this kind of conditioning seems unreasonable. Indeed, this judgment, coupled with the more general case law on standing of non-privileged applicants, ignited fierce criticism of the judiciary's narrow interpretation of the standing provisions, covering also debates on possible treaty amendments that could lead to more lenient judicial interpretation, as well reasons as to why no such reforming action is required. Several decades have passed since these discussions first took the centre stage of EU law forums – so why revisit them here? To start with, a number of things have changed following the initial debate on standing of environmental NGOs. First, there has been a Treaty amendment that modifies the standing test. The question that arises is to what extent the new treaty provisions – codified in Article 263(4) TFEU – and the EU Courts' interpretation thereof, alter the standing requirement of non-privileged litigants. Moreover, in 2005, the Arhus Convention – an international instrument on the access to information, public participation in decision-making and access to justice in environmental matters – was adopted in the EU legal order. In this context, the so called Arhus Regulation – Regulation No 1367/2006 – is of particular importance, as it allows certain NGOs initiate proceedings before the EU courts against acts and decisions of EU institutions and bodies. The degree to which this implementing body of international law has managed to broaden the judicial road of NGOs to the EU Courts is another question worthy of anew analysis. (Less)


How can we research and retell colonial era stories of transgression in service of queer, feminist and decolonial worldmaking? This dissertation argues for deploying multiple genres of research practice to answer this question. The argument is performed through attention to the case of Esther Brandeau / Jacques La Fargue, known as the first, or among the first Jewish people to arrive to Canada. They did so in 1738 as a purportedly female Jewish subject passing as a Christian male, after years working across France as, or often as, male. Doubly outed at or en route to Quebec City and held for a year in New France, they are deported for refusing to convert to Christianity and thereafter disappear from the record. This first major scholarly project centring this eighteenth century figure enters Brandeau / La Fargue into gender crossing histories; complicates the story's place in Canadian culture; offers it as a rich case within Atlantic and Diaspora studies; puts forth a focus on gender in Sephardic Jewish and converso diasporic studies of the colonial period; contributes to scholarship on transgender themes in children's literature; and proposes links between literary Sephardism, queer Indigenous and settler colonial studies. Methodological innovation yields insights at the intersection of historical practice and performance; and new archival evidence is uncovered. The case is established as an antecedent to contemporary discourse about belonging, difference and settler colonialism. An intersectional orientation provides a path for leveraging the story's "queer disruptive potential." The research contributes to Gender, Queer, Canadian, Atlantic, Jewish and Diaspora Studies, Queer Historiography, Arts Practice as Research and Performance Studies. In Part I, "multicrossing" is elaborated as passing across multiple, simultaneous co-inscribing axes of signification. Through analysis of anachronies of moving between the 18th and 21st centuries, and an analysis of eruptions of the story within Canadian culture, the story's visibility is shown to be conditional and coincident with moments of preoccupation with national belonging. Analysis shows how sociopolitical forces constrain accounts of Brandeau / La Fargue as multicrosser. In Part II, the roles of desire and haunting in historical research are attended to through immersion in archival labour. Narration of this research process and its findings serves to elaborate a "heretic methodology"—a queer historiography where error, doubt, desire and haunting enable production of a texture of the historical subject's living in the absence of conclusive evidence. This reveals how affective connection can be operationalized in historical practice, and how transtemporal touch underpinning queer historiography produces "on the ground." In Part III, the author's historical reenactments of Brandeau / La Fargue further our understanding of the relationship between body, memory and historical knowledge. The relationship between the performance practice of historical reenactment, and the performative nature of historical research is elaborated. An overarching contribution is "multigenre," an epistemological intervention featuring dramatically different yet interinanimate research approaches and genres of outcome, distinct from inter- and transdisciplinarity. Multigenre offers one answer to the project's central concern: how to retell colonial era stories as queer, feminist, decolonial gesture.


Process modelling has been used for many years in the chemical engineering field and more recently has become well established for as a tool for analysing and optimising the performance of wastewater treatment works. In the clean water area, models are routinely used for simulating distribution networks. In contrast, however, the use of modelling tools on potable water treatment works is relatively new and has yet to become well established. A range of tools have been suggested, including artificial neural networks, computational fluid dynamics and process simulation. WRc have developed a dynamic simulation package for predicting the performance of water treatment works, via models of individual processes. The software has a range of uses, including process and works optimisation, operational decision support, as a design aid and for training engineers and operators. The models are dynamic so that they predict the response of the treatment works to changes in flow, raw water quality and process operating conditions. The software has been used in a wide variety of applications, including optimising process plant operation to minimise cost and to investigate the reasons why a treatment works failed to meet its design criteria at the maximum design throughput.


Neuronal networks often express coherent oscillatory activity. These rhythms can provide a temporal reference for the activity of single neurons and allow the formation of spatiotemporal activity-patterns with defined phase-relationship of action potentials. In a single brain nucleus, oscillations at different frequencies might be simultaneously generated, but isolated rhythms might also be characteristic for specific functional brain states. During the last two decades the mammalian hippocampus has become an important model-system for the study of neuronal network-oscillations. In this brain area, cellular mechanisms underlying neuronal synchronization have been described, but also models were developed to explain the contribution of oscillations in encoding, consolidation and recall of memories. Neuronal rhythmic activities provide an important field of analysis bringing together cellular mechanisms and systemic functions of the brain. Here, we use a particularly fast type of neuronal oscillation, hippocampal 'ripples', as an example to outline current knowledge and open questions related with this research field.


I. INTRODUCTION Corporate laws that govern derivative suits attempt to dictate the type of lawsuit a shareholder may file on behalf of a corporation. These laws often protect the corporation at the expense of individual shareholders. A problem arises when a closely held corporation, operated and controlled by the majority shareholders, suffers a harm caused by its own board members. A strict interpretation of corporate law requires a shareholder that wants to pursue this claim on behalf of the corporation to make demand on the board of directors. The board then has to agree to instigate an action against itself on behalf of the corporation for the harm it caused.1 As a result of this problem, a conflict of interest arises for the board members to maintain their fiduciary duty to look after the corporation's best interests, but at the same time not agree to put themselves in a position to be held liable for the damages that they have caused. Hence, most directors or officers of closely held corporations do not agree to instigate the action demanded by the shareholder, and thus, the minority shareholders are left with little remedy. To resolve this concern, some courts have recognized "the right of a close corporation shareholder to sue directly, as an individual, on a cause of action which would normally have to be brought derivatively."2 In Aurora Credit Services, Inc. v. Liberty West Development, Inc.,3 the Utah district court faced this exact problem. The court dismissed Aurora Credit Services' ("Aurora") direct claims against Liberty West Development ("LWD") and granted LWD's motion for partial summary judgment regarding the derivative claims. The Utah district court stated that Aurora did not have standing to sue derivatively. However, on November 24, 1998, the Utah Supreme Court reversed the lower court's decision and adopted an approach promulgated by the American Law Institute, which holds that under certain circumstances a minority shareholder in a closely held corporation can sue directly "on a cause of action which would normally have to be brought derivatively."4 In the process of deciding the Aurora case, the Utah Supreme Court also held for the first time that a shareholder who sues a corporation directly has to satisfy the contemporaneous ownership requirement of Utah Rule of Civil Procedure 23.1.(5) This Note will discuss why the Utah Supreme Court correctly decided to provide minority shareholders with a method of recourse other than a derivative suit, but will also illustrate the flaws in the court's holding that a direct action must now satisfy the contemporaneous ownership requirement. One such flaw is that the language the Utah Supreme Court used in fashioning the contemporaneous ownership requirement for direct actions was too broad and can be interpreted to apply not only to situations in which a minority shareholder is suing a closely held corporation directly, but also to any other direct action that a shareholder may file for unique wrongs sustained by that individual shareholder. Another problem with the court's holding is that the purpose of the contemporaneous ownership requirement in avoiding strike suits is not applicable to closely held corporations. This Note proposes that a shareholder of a closely held corporation should not be required to satisfy the contemporaneous ownership requirement when a direct action is substituted for a derivative action. The analysis of the two Aurora holdings will proceed as follows: Part II of this Note provides a brief overview of corporate law, explains the distinguishing differences between a shareholder derivative suit and direct actions by shareholders against the corporation, and also provides an overview of the contemporaneous ownership requirement. Part III sets forth the facts of Aurora and briefly discusses the significance of the Utah Supreme Court's decision to allow minority shareholders to sue corporate officers directly. …


Japanese corporations and American and European corporations take different approaches when it comes to business in China in general : (i) American corporations are concentrated in the music, motion picture, and software industries, so they have a particular interest in solving copyright infringement problems; (ii) American and European corporations have started to actively use China as a base for research and development; and (iii) many American corporations have clear China-specific technological strategies. The systems for managing intellectual property in China also differ among Japanese corporations and American and European corporations : (i) whether American and European corporations have an IP department depends on the individual corporations overall management policies; (ii) locally hired employees managing intellectual property in American and European corporations are usually the ones entrusted with important IP-related duties; (iii) there are many requirements for employment and the remuneration is high for locally hired employees managing intellectual property in American and European corporations; nd (iv) relatively few Japanese corporations attribute intellectual property rights to their subsidiaries in China. Various aspects also differentiate Japanese corporations and American and European corporations in terms of the measures they take to combat counterfeit products : (i) American and European corporations show a similar trend as Japanese corporations toward taking administrative enforcement measures or civil proceedings, but a trend toward using criminal proceedings is emerging among American and European corporations; (ii) in American and European corporations, internal employees often prepare warning letters, conduct research, and collect evidence; (iii) the budget of American and European corporations for measures to combat counterfeit products is far greater than that of Japanese corporations; (iv) American and European corporations are active in exchanging information with and collecting information from governments; and (v) American corporations emphasize using estimated amounts of damages and quantifying the effectiveness of their measures to combat counterfeit products. Two key points stand out as being essential when considering measures to combat leakages of technology and infringements of trade secrets : (A) that good personnel management is effective as a measure for combating the leakage of technology and the infringement of trade secrets; and (B) that good information management is essential for preventing technology leakages and trade secret infringements. Many differences are evident between Japanese corporations and Americanand European corporations with respect to these measures : (i) American and European corporations are more active than Japanese corporations in willfully transferring technology to China; (ii) Japanese corporations are considerably less popular in China than American and European corporations; (iii) American and European corporations are more progressive in terms of assigning managerial powers to Chinese management personnel; (iv) the level of compensation offered at Japanese corporations in China is considerably lower than that offered at American and European corporations in China; (v) American and European corporations in China engage in corporate PR in many different ways, but Japanese corporations in China do not do enough; (vi) American and European corporations employ various initiatives to increase the motivation of Chinese personnel; and (vii) Regulations at American and European corporations provide severe punishment for personnel who divulge secrets. Japanese corporations and American and European corporations take different approaches when it comes to strategies for intellectual property and preventing technology leakage in China. But it is important that Japan adopts the good aspects of the methods used by American and European corporations at the same time as it continues to collaborate and cooperate with international institutions, governments, and anti-counterfeiting organizations.


A generalization of the original peridynamic framework for solid mechanics is proposed. This generalization permits the response of a material at a point to depend collectively on the deformation of all bonds connected to the point. This extends the types of material response that can be reproduced by peridynamic theory to include an explicit dependence on such collectively determined quantities as volume change or shear angle. To accomplish this generalization, a mathematical object called a deformation state is defined, a function that maps any bond onto its image under the deformation. A similar object called a force state is defined, which contains the forces within bonds of all lengths and orientation. The relation between the deformation state and force state is the constitutive model for the material. In addition to providing a more general capability for reproducing material response, the new framework provides a means to incorporate a constitutive model from the conventional theory of solid mechanics directly into a peridynamic model. It also allows the condition of plastic incompressibility to be enforced in a peridynamic material model for permanent deformation analogous to conventional plasticity theory.


Overfishing of urchin predators, in combination with natural disturbances, has been linked to an increase in the occurrence of urchin barrens. Marine reserves have been proposed as a means to re-establish the interactions between urchins and their predators in California kelp forests. Whether increased densities of lobsters and other predators in reserves are sufficient to convert barrens back to kelp forests depends on the degree to which predators avoid urchins from barren habitats. Urchins from these barrens may be less appealing to predators due to their diminished gonad production and thus decreased quality. In this study, we compared consumption rates of California spiny lobster Panulirus interruptus on purple urchins Strongylocentrotus purpuratus that were collected from kelp forests or from urchin barrens. All size classes of lobster prefer urchins from kelp forests relative to those from barrens and will actively select kelp-bed urchins when given a choice. Lobsters also showed higher consumption rates of kelp-bed urchins when either kelp-bed or barren urchins were presented alone. The large size class of lobsters consumed more and larger urchins than did smaller size classes of lobsters. These results suggest a potential mechanism for the persistence of urchin barrens despite high lobster densities and indicate that lobster foraging preferences may delay phase shifts from barrens back to kelp forests. The results also suggest that preferential foraging by lobsters on kelp-bed urchins may increase the resistance of kelp-beds to changes in state.


Today, jurisdiction over immigration law is by no means well defined by clear limits. Limitations on jurisdiction have bred a multitude of litigation. The number of federal court cases reviewing removal orders has increased 970% in the past ten years. As of September 2005, the immigration cases represented 18% of the appellate civil docket.Congress and the courts are not alone in augmenting the number of immigration cases in the federal courts. Congress has also urged the agencies enforcing the immigration laws to increase enforcement, to reduce backlogs and to make removal more swift and certain. At the same time that Congress was shearing away at the forms of judicial review, the Department of Justice and its Executive Office for Immigration Review ("EOIR") together with the Department of Homeland Security ("DHS") were increasing the number, rate and speed of adjudication of removal cases.For these men, women and children in removal proceedings, the incentives to litigate beyond the agency have partially increased as a reaction to the narrowing and elimination of prior forms of relief. Prior to 1996, the immigration statutes provided many people with a way to regularize their status, to become "legal" through the removal process. Now, statutory bars on relief are very strict and other forms of relief have been entirely eliminated. Thus, the individual fights harder either to defeat the government assertion that he or she is subject to removal or in the hope that litigation or time will somehow prevent removal.In this paper, I argue that many of the reforms taken by Congress or by the agency, although designed to increase efficiency have, in essence, backfired. I explore some of the statutory and administrative sources that are contributing to the increase in immigration-related federal court cases. I also discuss substantive immigration law issues and litigation strategies that, in combination with the statutory/regulatory architecture, are adding to the growth in the number of cases. I look at the interrelationship of these factors. Only by examining these interconnections can we seriously understand the nature of the "problem." In fact, depending on our goal for the immigration adjudication system, we might conclude that judicial review of removal orders, even at this significant rate, is both manageable and essential for the development of our immigration law and policy.


We report on the study of the magnetization dynamic of a single micrometric spin-valve element. by high-frequency giant magnetoresistance measurement. We have combined transport measurements in the microwave range and large band ferromagnetic resonance with microantennas. The spin valve is used as an in situ demodulator to probe the individual dynamics of each layer and the relative phase of their oscillations. We deduce the conditions for coupling the hard and free layer dynamics and show the influence of a static magnetic configuration on the sensitivity of spin valves in the microwave range. This work offers a different approach for studying the dynamics of single isolated micron-sized systems.


Coccolithophores are essential primary producers and the most important calcifiers in the ocean. Since primary production and calcification are affected by the concentration and form of nitrogen in the sea, we investigated the effects of low (5-15 μM) and high (300 μM) NO3- on carbon and nitrogen assimilation in the marine coccolithophore Emiliania huxleyi under saturating irradiance and present pCO2. Particulate organic carbon (POC) and inorganic carbon (PIC), as well as particulate organic nitrogen (PON), was determined by mass spectrometry. Kinetics of nitrate reductase (NR) for NO3- and nitrite reductase (NiR) for NO2- were estimated by means of colorimetric methods. In vivo activities of photosynthetic O2 evolution, CO2 and HCO3- uptake rates were derived by membrane inlet mass spectrometry. Although growth rates remained equal between low and high NO3- cells, coccoliths were mostly incomplete and malformed in low nitrate cells. Cellular POC and PIC, as well as cellular PON decreased under low NO3-. In agreement to this, lower cellular NR and NiR enzyme activities were found under low NO3-. Lower Km values of NR for NO3- and NiR for NO2- were observed in low NO3- cells. Whereas HCO3- uptake and photosynthesis decreased in low NO3- cells, net CO2 uptake rates were similar between high and low NO3- cells. Our data suggests that low NO3- decreases HCO3- uptake and photosynthesis in E. huxleyi, but cells compensate for the lower NO3- supply, by increasing the affinities of NR for NO3- and NiR for NO2-.


For many reasons, different perspectives on music and the arts are of great importance to the field of music education. For example essential both to aesthetical education research, and to music and art teachers everyday work, because it can improve teaching and learning qualities and contribute to knowledge in society at large. The aim is to discuss various actors' constructions of music and art by examining the handling of ontology in different texts. The ambition is to problematize and discuss the consequences of these constructions related to research and to musical praxis. The theoretical approach is founded in social constructionism and poststructuralism, and a combination of discourse psychology and discourse theory is used as a methodological framework. Four excerpts have been chosen for the analysis, two research articles and two interviews with professionals from two contexts of practice; the opera and the community school of music and art. The result shows that the ontology of music and art is continually being redefined. Ontological perspectives with epistemological claims are on the battlefield with more relativized perspectives. A critical discussion is made where the ontology of music and art is related to everyday praxis and research.


We present a measurement of the energy spectrum of the light mass group of
cosmic rays (protons and helium) with the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC)
Observatory in the energy interval from $10$ TeV to $200$ TeV. The spectrum
covers the energy range between direct and indirect measurements, where
precision data on the composition of cosmic rays are needed. The spectrum was
constructed by applying an unfolding technique on a proton plus helium
enriched sub-sample ($>90\%$ abundance) of cosmic ray air showers selected
from the HAWC cosmic-ray data. The subset contains $3.8 \times 10^{9}$ air
shower events with primary energies in the interval $1$ TeV to $300$ TeV
and zenith angles less than $16.7$ degrees. Mass selection was performed
using an analysis of the lateral age parameter of air shower events, based
on both CORSIKA/QGSJET-II-03 simulations and event-by-event measurements
on the lateral structure of the shower front and the primary energy of
the showers.


Among all possibilities to combat global warming, CO2 capture and sequestration (CCS) is presented as a great alternative to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emission. Several strategies for CCS from industrial and power plants are being considered. The concept of combined oxy-fuel combustion has been the most alternative solution. Nevertheless, due to the high cost of pure O2 production, additional ways recently emerged. In this paper, an innovative combustion process for a gas turbine cycle was studied: it was composed of methane combustion with oxygen enhanced air (OEA), exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) and H2O issuing from STIG (Steam Injection Gas Turbine), and the CO2 capture was realized by membrane separator. The effect on this combustion process was emphasized, and it was shown that a study of the influence of H2O dilution on the combustion parameters by experimental and numerical approaches had to be carried out. As a consequence, the laminar burning velocities measurements were performed in a stainless steel spherical combustion from atmospheric pressure to high pressure (up to 0.5 MPa), at 473 K for an equivalence ratio at 1. These experimental results were satisfactorily compared with Chemical Workbench v.4.1 package in conjunction with GRIMech 3.0 reaction mechanism. The good correlations so obtained between experimental and calculated flame speed velocities showed the validity of the GRIMech 3.0 mechanism in this domain of combustion: high H2O dilution, low N2, medium pressure. Finally, good estimations of flame speed and pollutant emissions were determined in other conditions compatible with real gas turbine. In particular, mixtures (composed of CH4/O2/N2/H2O/ or CO2) leading to the same adiabatic temperature were investigated. Influences of oxygen enrichment and H2O dilution (compared to CO2) were disused.


Motivated by the observation that overexposure to unwanted marketing activities can lead to customer dissatisfaction, we consider a setting where a platform offers a sequence of messages to its users and is penalized when users abandon the platform due to marketing fatigue. We propose a novel sequential choice model to capture multiple interactions taking place between the platform and its users: upon receiving a message, a user decides on whether to accept or reject the message. If she chooses to reject, she would then decide to either receive the next message in the sequence or abandon the platform. Based on user feedback, the platform dynamically learns users' abandonment distribution and the relevance of the recommended content. With a goal to maximize the cumulative payoff over a horizon of length T, the platform dynamically adjusts the sequence of messages and the order in which the messages are shown to a user. We refer to this online learning task as the sequential choice bandit (SC-Bandit) problem. For the offline combinatorial optimization problem, we show a polynomial-time algorithm. For the online problem, we consider two variants, depending on whether contexts are included, and propose algorithms that balance exploration and exploitation. Lastly, we evaluate the performance of our algorithms with both synthetic and real-world datasets.


We live in an era of unprecedented biodiversity loss, affecting the taxonomic composition of ecosystems worldwide. The immense task of quantifying human imprints on global ecosystems has been greatly simplified by developments in high-throughput DNA sequencing technology (HTS). Approaches like DNA metabarcoding enable the study of biological communities at unparalleled detail. However, current protocols for HTS-based biodiversity exploration have several drawbacks. They are usually based on short sequences, with limited taxonomic and phylogenetic information content. Access to expensive HTS technology is often restricted in developing countries. Ecosystems of particular conservation priority are often remote and hard to access, requiring extensive time from field collection to laboratory processing of specimens. The advent of inexpensive mobile laboratory and DNA sequencing technologies show great promise to facilitate monitoring projects in biodiversity hot-spots around the world. Recent attention has been given to portable DNA sequencing studies related to infectious organisms, such as bacteria and viruses, yet relatively few studies have focused on applying these tools to Eukaryotes, such as plants and animals. Here, we outline the current state of genetic biodiversity monitoring of higher Eukaryotes using Oxford Nanopore Technology's MinION portable sequencing platform, as well as summarize areas of recent development.


A fully autonomous agent recognizes new problems, explains what causes such problems, and generates its own goals to solve these problems. Our approach to this goal-driven model of autonomy uses a methodology called the Note-Assess-Guide procedure. It instantiates a monitoring process in which an agent notes an anomaly in the world, assesses the nature and cause of that anomaly, and guides appropriate modifications to behavior. This report describes a novel approach to the note phase of that procedure. Adistance, a sliding-window statistical distance metric, is applied to numerical vector representations of intermediate states from plans generated for two symbolic domains. Using these representations, the metric is able to detect anomalous world states caused by restricting the actions available to the planner.


We tested the hypotheses that variability in soluble reactive phosphorus (SRP) loading from the hypolimnion to the epilimnion of a small, eutrophic, temperate zone lake is significant at both interannual and subannual scales, and that this variability is influenced by changes in lake thermal structure. We calculated weekly hypolimnetic fluxes of SRP, during the stratified periods of 2008 and 2009 in Esthwaite Water, U.K., and compared them with the SRP fluxes from external sources. As a result of variations in the supply of SRP from the hypolimnion, which differed by c. 80% between years, we found a 30% difference in overall SRP loading to the epilimnion between the 2 years. Despite similarities in mean summer meteorological conditions, relatively subtle differences in weather conditions during the midsummer of only 0.7 m s−1 in wind speed and 8 W m−2 in solar radiation between the 2 years resulted in two diverging trajectories of hypolimnetic SRP loading. In the first year, there was a high thermal lake stability of 102 J m−2 on average, and a relatively shallow epilimnion until the late summer, giving rise to prolonged deep-water anoxia and a large accumulation of SRP that was mixed into the surface waters at the end of the summer. In contrast, 30% lower thermal stability and 20% deeper epilimnetic mixing in the second year resulted in the arrest and early decline of deep-water anoxia and SRP accumulation, leading to lower SRP fluxes to the epilimnion. Understanding this meteorologically driven variability in SRP supply is crucial for predicting nutrient loading in lakes. It is likely to become especially relevant to lakes around the globe for which the importance of internal loading is predicted to increase due to the effects of climate change.


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The ability to timely process significant amounts of continuously updated spatial data is mandatory for an increasing number of applications. Parallelism enables such applications to face this data-intensive challenge and allows the devised systems to feature low latency and high scalability. In this paper we focus on a specific data-intensive problem, concerning the repeated processing of huge amounts of range queries over massive sets of moving objects, where the spatial extents of queries and objects are continuously modified over time. To tackle this problem and significantly accelerate query processing we devise a hybrid CPU/GPU pipeline that compresses data output and save query processing work. The devised system relies on an ad-hoc spatial index leading to a problem decomposition that results in a set of independent data-parallel tasks. The index is based on a point-region quadtree space decomposition and allows to tackle effectively a broad range of spatial object distributions, even those very skewed. Also, to deal with the architectural peculiarities and limitations of the GPUs, we adopt non-trivial GPU data structures that avoid the need of locked memory accesses and favour coalesced memory accesses, thus enhancing the overall memory throughput. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work that exploits GPUs to efficiently solve repeated range queries over massive sets of continuously moving objects, characterized by highly skewed spatial distributions. In comparison with state-of-the-art CPU-based implementations, our method highlights significant speedups in the order of 14x-20x, depending on the datasets, even when considering very cheap GPUs.