The industrial Midwest, sometimes referred to disparagingly as the ?Rust Belt,? has long been recognized as a distinct economic region and an important contributor to the US economy. Prior research has emphasized the role that losses in the manufacturing sector have played in the plight of several Midwestern states and cities, particularly in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We identify a hypothetical industrial heartland region consisting of MSAs that have high concentrations of 1969 earnings in manufacturing relative to the US average and that are located within the geography often associated with the Rust Belt. For comparison purposes we also identify a set of manufacturing-intensive MSAs outside the region and a set of MSAs with low manufacturing concentrations (service-intensive MSAs). We then identify cross-sectional correlations in the economic performance of MSAs during and following losses in manufacturing employment and evaluate whether the industrial heartland region has a distinct response to those losses. We identify two major shocks to manufacturing employment: 1979 to 1983 and 2001 to 2010. While the second episode was slower to develop, the employment losses in manufacturing that were sustained during it are nearly as large as in the first episode. The size of manufacturing loss is reliably correlated across MSAs during and following these two manufacturing shocks with measures of economic performance including nonmanufacturing employment, unemployment, population, and per capita income levels. In addition, we find that manufacturing employment losses typically are associated with larger declines in economic performance in the MSAs of the industrial heartland than in other manufacturing-intensive MSAs or in service-intensive MSAs. Despite substantially lower shares of employment and earnings of manufacturing within the industrial heartland in 2001, the effect of the second manufacturing employment shock is substantial (particularly for real per capita income) and similar in magnitude to the first manufacturing shock.

https://www.clevelandfed.org/~/media/content/newsroom and events/publications/working papers/2017/wp 1712 economic performance of industrial heartland.pdf


Obesity and overweight have closely considered with several chronic diseases. Evidence of this field has demonstrated that significantly impact on the multiple cancers progression, such as breast cancer, prostate cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma, pancreatic cancer and cervical cancer. Epidemiological studies have shown that there is about 20% of cancer related to obesity, which were affected by lifestyle including dietary behavior and physical activity. Based on these findings, obesity is considered as one of most harmful factors for the breast cancer in women, especially after menopause. Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain how obesity contributes to breast cancer development. The inflammatory cytokines produced from adipocytes is one of main reason triggers tumor microenvironment and tumor progression. Better understanding the association between adipocytes and inflammation implanting breast tumor development could apply to develop new alternative methods for prevention/cure. In this review, we summarize the concept and evidence associated to interaction of obesity-driven changes and inflammation in breast cancer microenvironment.


Members of the Runx family of transcription factors play essential roles in the differentiation and development of several organ systems. Here we address the contribution of the osteoblast-related Runx gene, Runx2 , to the osteogenic and chondrogenic differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells. Using a transgenic mouse model, we observe Runx2 transcription through one of its two known promoters (designated P1 in pre-cartilaginous mesenchymal condensations as early as E9.5. Runx2 gene activity is later repressed at the onset of cartilage formation, both in vivo and in vitro , necessitating examination of the regulation and function of Runx2 in mesenchymal stem cells. We demonstrate that Runx2 gene activity is repressed by the direct interaction of the homeodomain transcription factor Nkx3.2 with the proximal Runx2 P1 promoter. This repression was found to be required for the progression of BMP-induced chondrogenesis, thereby identifying Runx2 as a modulator of BMP activity in the chondrogenic as well as osteogenic differentiation program. To further understand the regulation of the Runx2 P1 promoter and to determine the contribution of P1-derived gene product, Runx2 Type II, to the formation of mineralized tissue, we have generated a Runx2 Type II- LacZ gene replacement mouse model in which the initial coding sequences and splice donor sites of the Type II isoform are replaced with the LacZ reporter gene. Activity of the endogenous P1 promoter can therefore be monitored by β-galactosidase production. Analysis of Runx2 Type II-LacZ mice demonstrates that the P1 promoter is transcriptionally most active in mature osteoblasts, but its product, Runx2 Type II is dispensable for embryonic skeletal formation. Lastly, we examine the link between growth control and osteogenic differentiation by tissue-specific deletion of the Mdm2 proto-oncogene in developing skeletal tissues of the mouse embryo. Loss of Mdm2 results in impaired bone formation, with skeletal elements exhibiting lower bone mineral content and higher porosity. Ex vivo cultures of calvarial osteoprogenitor cells exhibit severely decreased osteoblastogenesis and bone nodule formation accompanied by a failure to activate Runx2 gene activity. These findings suggest that Mdm2 is required for inhibition of p53 activity that ultimately allows for post-confluent proliferation and induction of Runx2 during maturation of the osteogenic phenotype. Taken together, our findings suggest that Runx2 modulates the commitment of progenitor cells to the osteogenic and chondrogenic lineages, and that Runx2 activity is inextricably linked to mechanisms that control cellular proliferation.


There have been numerous claims that the negative perception of agriculture among secondary school students may be related to the students' lack of knowledge of the importance of agriculture and the lack of awareness of the range of career opportunities within this sector. The purpose of this study was to determine the knowledge and perception of secondary school students toward agriculture and to determine the influence of an agricultural promotion programme to broaden students' perception. In order to achieve this, a pre-test was administered among 3rd Form students in four randomly selected Secondary schools (n=100) in Trinidad and Tobago, to garner a sense of their knowledge and perception of agriculture, followed by an intervention which sought to inform them of the "New agriculture" and the various career paths in agriculture. A post-survey was done to determine changes in their perception of agriculture. Results show that the majority of students agreed that agriculture was very important but did not agree to make it a career choice. However, significant differences in perceived knowledge levels were found between the pre- and post- survey results; students perceived that most farmers are men and that farmers in Trinidad and Tobago make a lot of money. The authors suggest that future research should include a variety of agricultural knowledge assessment methods, procedures, and settings to better understand the role of increasing one's knowledge of agricultural facts and its possible effects on career decision making processes.


Implicit techniques for construction and representation of the reachability set of a high-level model have become quite efficient for certain types of models. In particular, previous work developed a "saturation" algorithm that exploits asynchronous behavior to efficiently construct the reachability set using multiway decision diagrams, but using a Kronecker product expression to represent each model event. For models whose events do not naturally fall into this category, use of the saturation algorithm requires adjusting the model by combining components or splitting events into subevents until a Kronecker product expression is possible. In practice, this can lead to additional overheads during reachability set construction. This paper presents a new version of the saturation algorithm that works for a general class of models: models whose events are not necessarily expressible as Kronecker products, models containing events with complex priority structures, and models whose state variables have unknown bounds. Experimental results are given for several examples


Displacement ventilation (DV) is an air distribution system, which supplies cool fresh air at floor level and extracts exhausted air at the ceiling. Air draught is reduced as heat sources - like aircraft passengers - generate the vertical air movement in the room. Of current interest is the question whether ordinary mixed air systems in an aircraft can be replaced by or combined with displacement ventilation systems without risking a decrease in thermal comfort. A reduction of energy consumption seems to be a valuable gain. Three different versions of displacement ventilation were analysed in the research project "Innovative Cabin Systems"(1). For this purpose, new air outlets were installed in an aircraft mock-up of a Dornier 728. Outlets were integrated into the existing air conditioning system and fixed under the passenger seats. They were suitable to supply a sufficient amount of cool air with low speed to the cabin. Studies were conducted in the mock-up using 40 subjects each. They were aimed at analysing the thermal comfort of a) Study 1: 100% displacement ventilation, b) Study 2: a 70:30% hybrid solution combining DV and mixed ventilation (MV) and c) Study 3: a 50:50 % hybrid solution of DV and MV. Two climate scenarios corresponding to cruise flight conditions (23 °C and 24 °C) were tested. Objective and subjective data were gathered to gain a differentiated image of the climate situation. Various sensors were used to quantify the intensity of air velocity and temperature next to the subjects? bodies. Further, psychological questionnaires were filled out by the subjects, by which they evaluated intensity and comfort of the climate parameters. Measurement data revealed a comparatively strong vertical temperature gradient for hybrid systems; the smallest temperature difference between feet and head was found for 100% DV. Air velocity was altogether low and increased with the amount of mixed air that was provided. Regarding subjective evaluations, temperature, air movement and humidity were rated as being most comfortable in 100 % DV and in the 50:50 hybrid system. The overall satisfaction with the climate was highest in the 50:50 hybrid system. In sum, displacement ventilation can be used to provide a comfortable climate in an aircraft cabin. Even though known constraints as e.g. large vertical temperature differences are measurable, these did not have any negative influence on climate satisfaction ratings.


Background and objective: A single session of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over motor cortex had been reported to produce short term relief of some types of chronic pain. The present study investigated whether five consecutive days of rTMS would lead to longer lasting pain relief in unilateral chronic intractable neuropathic pain. Patients and methods: Forty eight patients with therapy resistant chronic unilateral pain syndromes (24 each with trigeminal neuralgia (TGN) and post-stroke pain syndrome (PSP)) participated. Fourteen from each group received 10 minutes real rTMS over the hand area of motor cortex (20 Hz, 10×10 s trains, intensity 80% of motor threshold) every day for five consecutive days. The remaining patients received sham stimulation. Pain was assessed using a visual analogue scale (VAS) and the Leeds assessment of neuropathic symptoms and signs (LANSS) scale, before, after the first, fourth, and fifth sessions, and two weeks after the last session. Results: No significant differences were found in basal pain ratings between patients receiving real- and sham-rTMS. However, a two factor ANOVA revealed a significant "± TMS" × "time" interaction indicating that real and sham rTMS had different effects on the VAS and LANSS scales. Post hoc testing showed that in both groups of patients, real-rTMS led to a greater improvement in scales than sham-rTMS, evident even two weeks after the end of the treatment. No patient experienced adverse effects. Conclusion: These results confirm that five daily sessions of rTMS over motor cortex can produce longlasting pain relief in patients with TGN or PSP.


The urban food system addressed here centers on urban food processing, distribution and consumption (including food packaging and waste disposal) and as such addresses how food moves from processing and distribution centers to points of consumption and ultimately waste disposal within cities. The Food‐Energy‐Water Systems (FEWS) Nexus extends to and through urban boundaries. Energy and water resource use are vital along these routes and are interdependent with one another and with food processing in ways that differ from those in agricultural production systems outside urban boundaries. This paper addresses how the urban food system affects the intensity of energy and water resource use and how these interdependencies can be altered by abrupt changes or extreme events. The urban food system is significantly affected by resource disruptions such as power outages, water contamination or disruption due to droughts or distribution line breakages. The system must be able to be resilient to these changes to be sustainable. FEWS flows and usage concepts presented in this paper are based on system characteristics analogous to one of the largest food distribution centers in the U.S. and the largest city, the Hunts Point Distribution Center in New York City. The Center handles a large share of the perishable food supply, involves numerous utilities that support one another, and a wide range of products, and thus provides a framework for evaluating urban FEWS relationships. In addition to direct energy for refrigeration, lighting, heating and cooling, indirect energy resources consumed by transportation systems that deliver food to Hunts Point exemplify interdependencies. Network models are used to describe scenarios for the interrelationships in the urban food system, including changes in the mix of resources due to conservation and other resource decisions as well as disruption of those resources in an extreme event. Selected food consumption and production practices are also considered. The modeling framework provides a generalizable network model that captures extreme weather event effects and enables the quantitative static and resilience analysis and planning. The extreme weather event component uses both static and dynamic formulations for resilience to portray changes in network topology and network changes over time respectively. The nodes of the network capture urban FEWS resources and the linkages between the nodes capture network characteristics. The network models that correspond to different scenarios are integrated to understand the interdependencies from processing through resource consumption as a basis to identify the patterns of interdependencies that lead to cascading failures, pinpoint nodes and links that are the weakest components of the network, and support resilience planning for the disruptive events. The analysis and design of the network will inform the planning and recovery policies to enhance the resiliency of the FEW critical infrastructures of New York City and potentially transferrable to other large urban areas and prepare them for future anticipated and unanticipated extreme events. The modeling used for the scenarios is considered generalizable to other areas and scalable to urban food systems of different sizes and configurations. © 2017 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environ Prog, 37: 122–131, 2018

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"Volume I of Interdisciplinary Treatment Planning" paved the way to a higher level of proficiency in case planning by introducing and illustrating essential principles employed by master clinicians in their quest for predictability and excellence. This second volume takes readers to the next important step: learning by repetition through the presentation of additional cases treated by master clinicians from every specialty. Each is introduced by the clinician, who provides the rationale for choosing the particular case, a suggested focus in treatment plan design, key elements to consider when planning the case, and what the reader can expect to learn from the process. The case presentations follow the format established in the first volume: Diagnostic findings and pretreatment images are presented first to allow the reader to develop a treatment plan, then the master clinician's proposed treatment plan and account of actual treatment provided are detailed, accompanied by treatment and posttreatment images.Continuing the innovative educational approach of the best-selling first volume, this book provides the opportunity to learn through the experience of developing comprehensive treatment plans under the guidance of master clinicians.


Professor Adela Yarbro Collins brings to bear on the text of the first Gospel the latest historical-critical perspectives, providing a full treatment of such controversial issues as the relationship of canonical Mark to the "Secret Gospel of Mark" and the text of the Gospel, including its longer endings. She situates the Gospel, with its enigmatic portrait of the misunderstood Messiah, in the context of Jewish and Greco-Roman literature of the first century. Her comments draw on her profound knowledge of apocalyptic literature as well as on the traditions of popular biography in the Greco-Roman world to illuminate the overall literary form of the Gospel.The commentary also introduces an impressive store of data on the language and style of Mark, illustrated from papyrological and epigraphical sources. Collins is in constructive dialogue with the wide range of scholarship on Mark that has been produced in the twentieth century. Her work will be foundational for Markan scholarship in the first half of the twenty-first century.


The 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) treatment induces DNA damage and stalling of DNA replication forks. These stalled replication forks then collapse to form one sided double-strand breaks, leading to apoptosis. However, colorectal cancer (CRC) stem cells rapidly repair the stalled/collapsed replication forks and overcome treatment effects. Recent evidence suggests a critical role of checkpoint kinase 1 (Chk1) in preventing the replicative stress. Therefore, Chk1 kinase has been a target for developing mono or combination therapeutic agents. In the present study, we have identified a novel orphan molecule NSC30049 (NSC49L) that is effective alone, and in combination potentiates 5-FU-mediated growth inhibition of CRC heterogeneous bulk and FOLFOX-resistant cell lines in culture with minimal effect on normal colonic epithelial cells. It also inhibits the sphere forming activity of CRC stem cells, and decreases the expression levels of mRNAs of CRC stem cell marker genes. Results showed that NSC49L induces 5-FU-mediated S-phase cell cycle arrest due to increased load of DNA damage and increased γ-H2AX staining as a mechanism of cytotoxicity. The pharmacokinetic analysis showed a higher bioavailability of this compound, however, with a short plasma half-life. The drug is highly tolerated by animals with no pathological aberrations. Furthermore, NSC49L showed very potent activity in a HDTX model of CRC stem cell tumors either alone or in combination with 5-FU. Thus, NSC49L as a single agent or combined with 5-FU can be developed as a therapeutic agent by targeting the Chk1 pathway in 5-FU-resistant CRC heterogeneous bulk and CRC stem cell populations.


Using a range of case-studies, this book analyzes corporate governance relationships between several African countries and the international community, providing an ethical assessment of issues surrounding globalization and adherence to external governance mechanisms. Employing a methodological approach, Corporate Governance in Africa critiques occidental perspectives of corporate governance in relation to the needs of separate states, and the contradictions that arise when local cultures are not taken in to consideration. With case studies from Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and The Gambia the book presents a comprehensive view of North, East, West and South Africa with contributions from global experts in the field. The authors critique the transformations deemed necessary for governance procedures in order to facilitate confidence and inward investment for these African states.


Taking the highly-institutionalized, socio-technical domain of airport security as its empirical basis, the article focuses on interorganizational workplaces marked by public/private dialectics, and their impact on changing work practices, identity processes, and power-resistance relations. The empirical material stems from the ethnography that I conducted at an Italian international airport (April 2013–March 2015). Data include fieldnotes, interviews, and video recordings. Having described the institutional and operational scenario, I outline the contradictory pressures characterizing the considered setting, and the way security personnel make sense of and cope with them. Then I discuss a case of techno-organizational change concerning a technology in use at security checkpoints (Threat Image Projection). I show how the interorganizational context produces unforeseen and undesigned 'second order' change effects, and how such effects may escalate workers' resistance. I close with some general reflections on ambivalent interorganizational working orders.


Economics is the 'study of how society uses its scarce resources' or, more snappily, 'the science of choices' that helps people make decisions about how to use such scarce things as land, labour, raw materials, capital, entrepreneurial spirit and time. An understanding of economics can therefore help people in politics and public service, in business and the professions, and even in their private life make decisions that will produce the results they are seeking to achieve. This book is a clear and lively guide to the essentials of economics, with entries that stretch from A to Z and cover such topics, terms and jargon as: Animal spirits, Barter, Cannibalise, Dumping, Economic man, First-mover advantage, Gresham's Law, Hypothecation, Inequality, J-curve, Kleptocracy, Lump of labour fallacy, Money illusion, New economy, Opportunity cost, Positional goods, Queueing, Random walk, Satisficing, Tragedy of the commons, Utility, Value at risk, Winner-takes-all markets, X-efficiency, Yield gap and Zero-sum game.


Deep learning has seen a movement away from representing examples with a monolithic hidden state towards a richly structured state. For example, Transformers segment by position, and object-centric architectures decompose images into entities. In all these architectures, interactions between different elements are modeled via pairwise interactions: Transformers make use of self-attention to incorporate information from other positions; object-centric architectures make use of graph neural networks to model interactions among entities. However, pairwise interactions may not achieve global coordination or a coherent, integrated representation that can be used for downstream tasks. In cognitive science, a global workspace architecture has been proposed in which functionally specialized components share information through a common, bandwidth-limited communication channel. We explore the use of such a communication channel in the context of deep learning for modeling the structure of complex environments. The proposed method includes a shared workspace through which communication among different specialist modules takes place but due to limits on the communication bandwidth, specialist modules must compete for access. We show that capacity limitations have a rational basis in that (1) they encourage specialization and compositionality and (2) they facilitate the synchronization of otherwise independent specialists.


The importance of good teaching is one of few areas of consensus in current educational debates. There is no significant educational goal whose attainment does not require a growing number of highly capable teachers. However, the debate in the United States about how best to develop an increasing supply of quality teachers has increasingly rejected traditional teacher training in which candidates receive pedagogical foundations followed by supervised student teaching, in favor of alternative pathways to teacher certification. While alternative pathways vary in design, scope, and requirements they typically reduce course requirements in pedagogical preparation and place post-baccalaureate candidates in charge of classrooms during their training period (Rosenberg, Boyer, Sindelar, & Misra, 2007). Teacher quality is inextricably tied to every aspect of school and student learning (Berry, 2010). In the No Child Left Behind Act (U. S. Department of Education, 2002). Congress defines highly qualified teachers as individuals who not only possess full state certification but also have solid content knowledge. According to the U.S. Secretary of Education (Office of Postsecondary Education, 2002), solid verbal abilities and content knowledge are highlighted as the most important criteria in identifying "highly qualified teachers." In addition, a large body of research has examined the relationship between teaching and subsequent student learning. For example, good teachers are also skilled in teacher-student interactions, instructional decision making, engaging students of diverse abilities and backgrounds, and classroom management (Jones & Jones, 2010; Sleeter & Grant, 2007). Since students respond in widely divergent ways to learning environments, curriculum, and instructional procedures, highly competent teachers engage in using layered decision trees and complex strategies to assess and construct effective learning processes for all of their students (Kozleski, Sobel, & Taylor, 2003). The problem of teacher preparation has become acute as the national government has raised the stakes for student learning at the same time that the supply and retention of highly qualified teachers is in question (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 2003). Do differences in preparation matter? In particular, how do beginning teachers who have experienced very different approaches to professional preparation perceive their training and its relationship to the demands of teaching? Rosenberg, Boyer, Sindelar, and Misra (2007) maintain little is known about how different types of teacher education programs contribute to teacher supply, retention, or quality. Maier and Youngs (2009) also note a lack of studies exploring how teachers' preparation programs affect teachers' initial decisions about where to teach. Research on beginning teachers has detected significant differences in the perceptions of graduates of extended, formal teacher preparation programs in contrast to teachers entering the classroom through alternative licensure (Darling-Hammond, Chung & Frelow, 2002; Junor Clarke & Thomas, 2009). In a survey of 2,956 teachers in New York City with four or fewer years in the classroom, Darling-Hammond et al. (2002) found that graduates of professional preparation programs felt more prepared to promote student learning, teach critical thinking, understand learners, and develop instructional leadership than teachers without formal preparation. However, surveys have not asked teachers to elaborate on how particular aspects of their professional program prepared them for the realities of the classroom. To further examine these issues, we interviewed beginning teachers from three preparation models regarding their perceptions of their first through second years of teaching. We acknowledge that there can be extreme differences even within each of the three types of programs. The three that we chose, however, do seem to be fairly typical examples of each type of program. …


Waste water discharge into a temporary open/closed estuary (TOCE) system introduces two main concerns namely (1) the effects on the water balance of the system (quantity) and (2) the effects on the nutrient dynamics (water quality). Changes to mouth breaching patterns can severely impact the hydrological and ecological functioning of TOCEs, while excessive nutrient loading can lead to eutrophic conditions and algal blooms. Algal blooms occur when residence times during closed mouth conditions exceed the time scale for growth of the microalgal community. The aim of this study was to formulate a model in order to predict eutrophication events using the Mhlanga Estuary as a case study. The Mhlanga Estuary is situated approximately 19 km northeast of Durban and has a small catchment «100km2 ). The Phoenix and Mhlanga waste water treatment works (WWTW) collectively discharge approximately 20MI of treated effluent into the Mhlanga River per day. A simple daily-time-step water balance model was selected to model the hydrodynamics of the system. The model included various inputs and outputs of the system, residence time, storage, breaching water levels and time for mouth closure to occur. The result of the water balance model was a daily prediction of the mouth state and volume, and an indication of the breaching frequency. Observed mouth state data and measured water levels were used to test the model. In order to predict eutrophication events and trends at the Mhlanga Estuary, it was required that the conditions at which this would occur be investigated. This included the collection of samples (physico-chemical and chlorophyll-a) on a weekly basis for three months, a period that included three breaching events. Due to the complexity required in developing a nutrient dynamics model, a simpler approach was selected. The grey water index (GWI) was formulated in order to account for nutrient loadings into the estuary. WWTW discharge data were provided by eThekwini Municipality Water and Sanitation (EMWS). Initial results showed that under ideal conditions, an algal bloom would occur approximately fourteen days following re-closure of the Mhlanga mouth. The eutrophication index (E j ) was then formulated to account for both residence time and nutrient concentrations. The Ej at which eutrophic conditions can be expected was found to be about 50 %. It is important to note that this value for Ej is expected to be site specific and only accounts for the Mhlanga Estuary, but the concept can be generalized to other similar estuaries. Water levels simulated using the water balance model and observed mouth state data produced similar levels to those measured by DWAF. Following simulations of different flow scenarios (75% and 150% increase in WWTW discharges), it was found that an increase in capping flows resulted in more frequent breaching events and longer open mouth conditions. The risk of eutrophic conditions also increased with an increase in WWTW capping flows. Algal blooms are predicted to continue despite more frequent…


Title of document: THE RELATIONSHIP OF INTERNALIZED STIGMA WITH SYMPTOMS, SOCIAL BEHAVIOR, AND EMOTIONAL RESPONDING IN SCHIZOPHRENIA Stephanie Grace Park, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Dissertation directed by: Professor Jack J. Blanchard Department of Psychology Internalized stigma refers to the process by which affected individuals endorse stereotypes about mental illness, expect social rejection, apply these stereotypes to themselves, and believe that they are devalued members of society (Corrigan et al., 2005; Corrigan et al., 2006; Ritsher & Phelan, 2004). Studies in clinical populations have found that internalized stigma is associated with a host of negative psychosocial variables, including decreased self-esteem and self-efficacy, hopelessness, demoralization, poor quality of life, and reduced motivation to work towards recovery goals (e.g., Livingston & Boyd, 2010; Ritsher, Otilingam, & Grajales, 2003). However, the relationship between internalized stigma and symptoms in schizophrenia is still unclear. Further, though evidence suggests that individuals with schizophrenia who are high in internalized stigma tend to actively avoid others, have reduced social contact, and maintain insular support networks (e.g., Yanos, Roe, Markus, & Lysaker, 2008), actual behavior and emotional responding during social interactions have not been explored. Thus, the current study examined 50 outpatients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder on a battery of self-report measures, clinician-administered interviews, and a social affiliation interaction task to examine the associations between internalized stigma and symptoms, functioning, and emotional responding. Results showed that lower levels of Stigma Resistance were significantly correlated with greater deficits in clinician-rated experiential but not expressive negative symptoms. The present study replicated previous findings of a significant relationship between internalized stigma and other psychiatric symptoms, including depression. Using a multi-method approach to assess functioning, this study found that individuals with higher levels of internalized stigma and lower Stigma Resistance demonstrated impairments in communicative functional capacity and immediate social network relationships. Further, individuals lower in Stigma Resistance were rated as less affiliative and less overall socially skilled during a social affiliation interaction task. However, internalized stigma was not associated with positive or negative affect after the interaction controlling for affect before the task, and there were no differences in willingness to interact or reactions to partner. Importantly, these findings may ultimately contribute to the further development of psychosocial interventions that target internalized stigma. THE RELATIONSHIP OF INTERNALIZED STIGMA WITH SYMPTOMS, SOCIAL BEHAVIOR, AND EMOTIONAL RESPONDING IN SCHIZOPHRENIA


Juan Jose Saer's novel El Entenado (1982) takes place at the imaginary river that shapes the Argentine writer's work. This article illustrates how the running water exemplifies the moment of forgetting. Yet the river manifests itself, via the narrator, as a lifelong process of remembering and, through written recordings, the memories become part of the cultural memory. Being the only one to survive a tragic accident in which all his companions die, a young Spanish sailor runs ashore and lives with a native tribe from then on. However, his identity is shattered by the long stay with this tribe and him witnessing its later extinction. It is not until he returns to Europe that he learns to write, which enables him to organize his memories from his years as a stranger. The witness, named def-ghi in the ambiguous language of the Indians, realizes, however, that these memories, as well as the reminiscent (indigene) and the remembered (Spanish) language, prove to be unreliable and he is unable to access them. It is through this life, engraved by two incompatible ways of living, that the aging protagonist understands his assigned role as a witness who has to tell posterity about the greatly different and extinct native tribe.


Abstract In this introductory article to the volume of the South African Journal of Philosophy in tribute of Hans-Georg Gadamer, the author, first, makes a few remarks about the nature of hermeneutics and Gadamer's views on the universality of the hermeneutical experience. This universality is, in particular, explained from the perspective of the "linguistic turn" in Gadamer's thought. Secondly, there is a brief discussion of certain particular aspects of Gadamer's contribution. Aspects of that contribution that are emphasized are: Gadamer's reevaluation of prejudice, authority and tradition, his idea of "Wirkungsgeschichte", his idea of meaning as a process rather than a given entity, his analogy between game-playing and the interpretation of art, and his dialogical conception of interpretation. The author concludes by developing his own estimate of the main thrust of Gadamer's contribution. This contribution consists of the way in which Gadamer's thought, on the one hand, represents a demonstration and embodiment of the kind of historical consciousness so typical of our times, but, on the other hand, also accomplishes this exemplification of historical consciousness while imaginatively avoiding the kind of relativistic historicism so typical of many other manifestations of the same trend.


This book is designed for all those with a scientific interest in drug treatment and the older population. The authors have all been chosen for their expertise in the field and have been drawn from both sides of the Atlantic and South Africa. The contents fall into two parts — general principles of drug use as they apply to the elderly, and specific chapters dealing with common clinical areas. The editors aim to provide a concise up to date, evidence-based, resource book.


The analysis of physical datasets using modern methods developed in machine learning presents unique challenges and opportunities. These datasets typically feature many degrees of freedom, which tends to increase the computational cost of statistical methods and complicate interpretation. In addition, physical systems frequently exhibit a high degree of symmetry that should be exploited by any data analysis technique. The classic problem of Rayleigh Benard convection in a periodic domain is an example of such a physical system with trivial symmetries. This article presents a technique for analyzing the time variability of numerical simulations of two-dimensional Rayleigh-Benard convection at large aspect ratio and intermediate Rayleigh number. The simulated dynamics are highly unsteady and consist of several convective rolls that are distributed across the domain and oscillate with a preferred frequency. Intermittent extreme events in the net heat transfer, as quantified by the time-weighted probability distribution function of the Nusselt number, are a hallmark of these simulations. Nonlinear Laplacian Spectral Analysis (NLSA) is a data-driven method which is ideally suited for the study of such highly nonlinear and intermittent dynamics, but the trivial symmetries of the Rayleigh-Benard problem such as horizontal shift-invariance can mask the interesting dynamics. To overcome this issue, the vertical velocity is averaged over parcels of similar temperature and height, which substantially compresses the size of the dataset and removes trivial horizontal symmetries. This isothermally averaged dataset, which is shown to preserve the net convective heat-flux across horizontal surfaces, is then used as an input to NLSA. The analysis generates a small number of orthogonal modes which describe the spatiotemporal variability of the heat transfer. A regression analysis shows that the extreme events of the net heat transfer are primarily associated with a family of modes with fat tailed probability distributions and low frequency temporal power spectra. On the other hand, the regular oscillation of the heat transfer is associated with a pair of modes with nearly uniform probability distributions. Physical mechanisms for the regular oscillation and the extreme heat transfer events are hypothesized based on an analysis of the spatio-temporal structure of these modes. Finally, proposals are made for this approach to be applied to the study of other problems in turbulent convection, including three-dimensional Rayleigh-Benard convection and moist atmospheric convection. Expert in the data analysis of dynamical systems Daan Crommelin email@example.com This manuscript presents an algorithm for the analysis of a numerical simulation of Rayleigh Benard convection …


We study how the choice of visual perspective affects learning and generalization in the context of physical manipulation from raw sensor observations. Compared with the more commonly used global third-person perspective, a hand-centric (eye-in-hand) perspective affords reduced observability, but we find that it consistently improves training efficiency and out-of-distribution generalization. These benefits hold across a variety of learning algorithms, experimental settings, and distribution shifts, and for both simulated and real robot apparatuses. However, this is only the case when hand-centric observability is sufficient; otherwise, including a third-person perspective is necessary for learning, but also harms out-of-distribution generalization. To mitigate this, we propose to regularize the third-person information stream via a variational information bottleneck. On six representative manipulation tasks with varying hand-centric observability adapted from the Meta-World benchmark, this results in a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning agent operating from both perspectives improving its out-of-distribution generalization on every task. While some practitioners have long put cameras in the hands of robots, our work systematically analyzes the benefits of doing so and provides simple and broadly applicable insights for improving end-to-end learned vision-based robotic manipulation.


PURPOSE
In CT-based prostate High-Dose-Rate (HDR) brachytherapy, catheter (needle) placement is commonly performed under the guidance of intra-operative transrectal ultrasound (TRUS), while treatment planning is based on post-operative CT images. The main challenge for CT-based treatment planning is to accurately define target (prostate) volume in CT images due to the poor soft-tissue contrast. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel approach that integrates intra-operative ultrasound-based prostate volume into treatment planning through TRUS-CT fusion based on the catheter locations.

METHODS
Our approach requires acquisition of 3D TRUS prostate images in the operating room right after the HDR catheters are inserted, which takes 1-3 minutes. These TRUS images are then used to create prostate contours. The HDR catheters are reconstructed from the intra-operative TRUS and post-operative CT images, and subsequently used as landmarks for the TRUS-CT image fusion using a fuzzy-to-deterministic algorithm. After TRUS-CT fusion, the TRUS-based prostate volume is deformed to the CT images for treatment planning. This technique was evaluated through two studies: a prostate-phantom study and a pilot study with 9 patients undergoing HDR treatment for prostate cancer. The accuracy of our approach is assessed through the locations of 3 implanted fudicial (gold) markers, as well as previous T2-weighted MR images of patients.

RESULTS
For the phantom study, the mean gold-marker displacement was 0.41±0.11 mm. For the 9 patients, the mean gold-marker displacement of was 1.09±0.25mm; the prostate volume difference between our approach and the MRI-based volume was 6.99±0.68%, and the prostate volume Dice Overlap Coefficient was 92.66±1.17%.

CONCLUSION
We have developed a novel approach to improve prostate contours utilizing intra-operative TRUS-based prostate volume in CT-based prostate HDR treatment planning, demonstrated its clinical feasibility, and validated its accuracy with MRIs. This technique will improve prostate delineation, enable accurate dose planning and delivery, and potentially enhance prostate HDR treatment outcome.


This paper examines the effectiveness of entrepreneurship development programs (EDP) of Ghanaian Polytechnics in achieving some objectives. Using a case study methodology the research tracked the entrepreneurship intentions and entrepreneurial tendencies of some Ho Polytechnic students at different stages of their studies over three years. The analysis revealed a very high increase in interest in business proprietorship after the EDP but showed quite a weak link between the programs and most of the entrepreneurial tendencies. The study also noted that the proportion of students who intend to move from school directly into business, though rising after the programs, remained very low.The study finally concluded that the gap between the high level of interest and the willingness to move directly from school into business is a strong case for more policy efforts to initiate programs and projects which can trigger graduates to undertake entrepreneurial activities.


EACS 2016 Paper No. 199The inerter is a novel dynamic device that is the subject of substantial research interest as a passive vibration control device. In this paper we present results from the design and testing of a novel type of fluid inerter system where the inertance can be varied. This variable inertance is achieved by having a fluid filled cylinder that induces flow in a helical pipe system. The parameters of the helical pipe system can be adjusted to give different amounts of inertial force depending on the requirements. Tests were carried out on the inerter system, and it was shown that with the maximum inertance set-up for this system, the sensitivity of output force to input velocity was approximately 500N force for a 1Hz increase in excitation frequency.


University of Hyogo This paper examines how Japanese contemporary fashion has been accepted globally, especially in the case of London. The popularity of Japanese fashion in the West started in the 19th century with kimono-style dressing gowns, but for the true design influence known as Japan-shock, we had to wait for the appearance of the avantgarde Japanese fashion designers who participated in the Paris collection in the 1970s and 1980s. A new keyword for 'fashionable Japan' today is kawaii, the notion of cute. This is intimately linked to street fashion and subculture and has been established and received as part of 'cool Japan' through the worldwide popularity of Japanese manga and anime. Moreover, it could be said that Japan is fashionable and the Japanese are thought of as fashionable people, but who is described as fashionable, and by whom? To reflect upon this statement, 'the Japanese are fashionable', as ideology, picking up the globally popular Japanese street fashion magazine FRUiTS, I would like to investigate the double meaning of fashion in the present and also what it means to be fashionable.


This paper reports the performance of drop-on-demand piezo-activated microdroplet generation investigated using microdroplet cavity enhanced fluorescence spectroscopy. Aqueous microdroplets, doped with a fluorescent dye, exhibit fluorescence spectra that are dominated by cavity resonances (termed whispering gallery modes) that, when analysed using Mie theory, allow for the determination of the radius of each microdroplet. The effect of controlled changes in the square-wave droplet generator voltage waveform on droplet size is investigated as well as the size reproducibility of successive microdroplets. Furthermore, using custom square-wave waveforms, microdroplet radii spanning ∼10 to 30 μm are produced from the same droplet dispenser. These non-standard waveforms do not sacrifice the reproducibility of microdroplet generation with <1% size variation. Tuning the single square-wave pulsewidths induces predictable changes in the microdroplet radius and steps on the order of tens of nanometers are detectable. With finer voltage adjustments the microdroplet size is essentially tunable. These results confirm the extremely high stability and reproducibility of on-demand microdroplet generation and that precise size control is possible, rendering them suitable platforms for many applications in fundamental and applied research in areas including mass spectrometry, aerosol investigations and liquid-phase chemistry.


Raising agricultural productivity remains a major challenge in developing countries. Farm productivity is especially low in Sub-Saharan Africa, where fertilizer use lags far behind the rest of the world. Identifying effective strategies for raising fertilizer use in Africa has been a longstanding policy priority. While most of the region has struggled to raise fertilizer use in a sustainable manner, several countries have recorded impressive steady growth in fertilizer use, suggesting that there may be important success stories from which to learn.


A generalized differential operator on the real line is defined by means of a limiting process. When an additional fractional parameter is introduced, this process leads to a locally defined fractional derivative. The study of such generalized derivatives includes, as a special case, basic results involving the classical derivative and current research involving fractional differential operators. All our operators satisfy properties such as the sum, product/quotient rules, and the chain rule. We study a Sturm–Liouville eigenvalue problem with generalized derivatives and show that the general case is actually a consequence of standard Sturm–Liouville Theory. As an application of the developments herein we find the general solution of a generalized harmonic oscillator. We also consider the classical problem of a planar motion under a central force and show that the general solution of this problem is still generically an ellipse, and that this result is true independently of the choice of the generalized derivatives being used modulo a time shift. The generic nature of phase plane orbits modulo a time shift is extended to the classical gravitational n-body problem of Newton to show that the global nature of these orbits is independent of the choice of the generalized derivatives being used in defining the force law. Finally, restricting the generalized derivatives to a special class of fractional derivatives, we consider the question of motion under gravity with and without resistance and arrive at a new notion of time that depends on the fractional parameter. The results herein are meant to clarify and extend many known results in the literature and intended to show the limitations and use of generalized derivatives and corresponding fractional derivatives.


This study finds a strong relationship at the firm level between differences in the rates of return reported for the financial and tax consolidated groups on one hand and differences in tax return and financial statement capital structure measures on the other. In particular, after controlling for size, profitability, global character (domestic or multinational), industry, and the lack of eliminating entries for intercompany transactions, the authors find that the more the rate of return for the financial group exceeds the rate of return for the tax group, the more the tax measures of leverage, debt, interest, and assets exceed financial measures for the same items. Their results, they note, are consistent with several explanations, including the use of special purpose entities, hybrid financing arrangements, state tax reporting, deconsolidating from worldwide to U.S. reporting, transfer pricing, and the foreign tax credit limitation. The results are also consistent with the premise that taxpayers may be taking advantage of differences in the financial and tax consolidation rules to overreport income performance and underreport risk to shareholders relative to what they report to the IRS. This report is based in part on confidential tax return data obtained from the IRS Statistics of Income Division. The data are protected by nondisclosure requirements under the Internal Revenue Code, and all statistics are presented in an aggregated form.


'I see on your web page a nice photo with futuristic things, I like the future!' [Hanna Dis Whitehead in reply to Claire Anderson, January 2014].

In 2014 the Icelandic product designer Hanna Dis Whitehead and Scottish textile designer Claire Anderson began working on their international collaboration Weaving DNA. This paper reports on their ongoing project and the connectivity of their imagination with the traditional craft skills and materials of partner Icelandic and Scottish heritage textile manufacturers.

Through the exchange and sharing of knowledge and ideas toward purposeful combinations of traditional textile heritages with the contemporary and with the future this project is rooted in a desire for improved sustainability. As explained by Professor of Design Daniel Charny, Kingston University, 'One of the biggest problems we have is that there's a wall in perception: traditional crafts are not seen as part of our future' [Franklin 2018: 115].

In 2016 the designers collaborated with historic Knockando Woolmill in the Spey Valley and designed the 'Esja' herringbone cloth, named after the Volcanic mountain range which can be seen from Reykjavik. The colours of the cloth are inspired by the buildings and landmarks of the city and surrounding areas of Reykjavik and imagine the possibilities of tribal camouflage for Weaving DNA's futuristic Nordic-Scottish tribe in this urban environment.

The Esja cloth was first shown at The Hiding Colour exhibition at Hverfisgalleri, Reykjavik as part of Iceland's design festival 'Design March 2016' and challenged audiences perceived notions of traditional textiles and their applications through a futures facing narrative and interactive display. New work in this regard can only help inform and enhance our understanding of the role which our textile heritages can play in reevaluating what we already have and how this can help overcome disconnections between past and future


Behavioral economics combines economics and psychology to produce a body of evidence that individual choice behavior departs from that predicted by neoclassical economics in a number of decision-making situations. Emerging close on the heels of behavioral economics over the past thirty years has been the "behavioral law and economics" movement and its philosophical foundation — so-called "libertarian paternalism." Even the least paternalistic version of behavioral law and economics makes two central claims about government regulation of seemingly irrational behavior: (1) the behavioral regulatory approach, by manipulating the way in which choices are framed for consumers, will increase welfare as measured by each individual's own preferences and (2) a central planner can and will implement the behavioral law and economics policy program in a manner that respects liberty and does not limit the choices available to individuals. This Article draws attention to the second and less scrutinized of the behaviorists' claims, viz., that behavioral law and economics poses no significant threat to liberty and individual autonomy. The behaviorists' libertarian claims fail on their own terms. So long as behavioral law and economics continues to ignore the value to economic welfare and individual liberty of leaving individuals the freedom to choose and hence to err in making important decisions, "libertarian paternalism" will not only fail to fulfill its promise of increasing welfare while doing no harm to liberty, it will pose a significant risk of reducing both.


Though several studies have demonstrated the usefulness of pictures in multimedia learning, memory, cognitive load and visual search, there have been very few attempts to study their impact in the web-navigation scenario. Also, cognitive models of web-navigation (like CoLiDeS, CoLiDeS+) ignore the information from visual modality and focus solely on the information from text. We conducted an experiment to study the extent to which providing icons next to hyperlinks facilitates information retrieval tasks on the web. Three different versions of navigation styles were created: Hyperlinks with Icons, Hyperlinks alone and Icons alone. Users took significantly less time, were significantly less disoriented and made fewer clicks to finish their tasks when icons were provided along with hyperlink text. These results suggest that it is important for a cognitive model on web-navigation to include information from pictures. An important practical implication is to provide meaningful icons next to hyperlinks for better navigation.


WOMEN Voices from Iran: The Changing Lives of Iranian Women, by Mahnaz Kousha. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002. 228 pages. Notes to p. 238. Bibl. to p. 244. $19.95 paper. The most appealing aspects of the book under review are the author's empathy with her subjects and her serious engagement with their concerns; the attempt to get beyond Western stereotypes; the interest in what women themselves want to say; and the presentation of such a controversial topic at all. These are considerable achievements. In eight chapters, Mahnaz Kousha, a sociologist living in the United States, writes about her interviews with 15 women in Tehran in 1995 and 1997. One chapter sketches the interviewees; two more deal with mother-daughter relationships, one with father-daughter relationships; one is on issues of marriage; one on paid work (titled, for some reason, "Women's Lives, Women's Words"); the next discusses if men are "better off than women; and the last one (again, "Women's Words"), deals with individuation. No clear structure is discernible in the titles or in the content. The Introduction describes Western stereotypes of Iranian women, but neither it nor a short autobiographical chapter ("Starry Nights") furnishes much insight into the author's methodology or theory, or a solid cultural/social background for the women's experiences. Instead, we get sentences like, "These images...have enshrouded reality. A thick white fog has fallen..."(p. 4). Indeed, it is not clear who the intended readership is. Social scientists usually look for more theory, analysis, and presentation of data (even in a postmodern text) than are provided here - there isn't even an index. Non-professional readers might find the book appealing but will get many of their stereotypes about women in Iran confirmed. I see the shortcomings not so much as the author's fault than as examples of trends in the social sciences generally. I will address five. 1. The appropriation of ethnographic methodologies by various professions has led to "quick ethnographies" based on journalistic data. This book, for example, is based on only 36 hours of interviews. There is little background, virtually no analysis, no summary of themes or shared concerns to help us place these women in a wider context. Instead, we get "explanations" based on unidentified premises and unreflected assumptions. This falls short of good journalism and good science. 2. The tendency of publishers to favor popular non-fiction over straight ethnographies, for example, easily leads to shallow social science-writing. Here, unique but relatively little information is spun into 228 pages containing much fluff. The author's apparent goal to write in a popular style made her avoid bringing either sociology to bear on her data or her presumed knowledge as an Iranian about the society that produced the women. Instead, we get quotes from interviews followed by long restatements of the quotes in different words (e.g., pp. 115, 131). 3. Together with the trend towards quick-read writing runs one towards minimal editing. Only this can explain the disheartening amount of redundancy in this book. …


The information technology sector in Europe, comprising the production of computer hardware and software, is disproportionately located on the continent's western periphery. The vast bulk of computers sold in Europe in the 1990s were assembled either in Ireland or Scotland, while Ireland also accounted for over 40 percent of all packaged software and 60 percent of all business software sold in Europe. As the sector in both these locations is largely foreign owned, the question arises as to whether EU enlargement might impact on the geography of the sector by diverting information technology FDI from the western to the new eastern periphery. This issue is explored in the present paper by analysis of five individual sub-segments: computer assembly and electronic components, R&D, mass market packaged software and the remainder of the software sector.


In the early modern period, the theatrical stage offered one of the most popular forms of entertainment and aesthetic pleasure. It also fulfilled an important cultural function by displaying modes of behaviour and dramatizing social interaction within a community. Flaunting argues that the theatre in late sixteenth-century England created the conditions for a subculture of style whose members came to distinguish themselves by their sartorial extravagance and social impudence. Drawing on evidence from legal documents, economic treatises, domestic manuals, accounts of playhouse practices, and stage plays, Amanda Bailey critiques standard accounts maintaining that those who flaunted their apparel were simply aspirants, or gaudy versions of the superiors they sought to emulate. Instead, she suggests that what mattered most was not what these young men wore but how they wore their clothes. These young men shared a distinctive sartorial sensibility and used that sensibility to undermine authority at all levels of society. Flaunting therefore, examines male style as a visual form of subversion against the norms of Renaissance England with the stage as the primary source of inspiration for collective identification. A glimpse into both the celebration of and opposition to social irreverence in the early modern period, Flaunting is a fascinating historical account of drama, fashion, and rebellion with surprisingly close parallels to the contemporary world.


Porokeratosis (PK) is an uncommon disorder of epidermal keratinization characterized by annular plaques with an atrophic center surrounded by a raised, keratotic wall, with unknown aetiology and an unpredictable outcome. It has several clinical forms including porokeratosis of Mibelli, giant porokeratosis, linear porokeratosis, disseminated superficial actinic porokeratosis, palmoplantar porokeratosis and punctate porokeratosis. Genital porokeratosis is a rare and probably underestimated subset of PK that mostly affects middle-aged men. Although there are many clinical variants, coexistence of different variants of porokeratosis in a single patient has been regarded as a rare occurrence. Here we report a rare variant of porokeratosis , genital or ptychotropica porokeratosis, accompanied by superficial actinic porokeratosis in a patient and his family members. (Iran J Dermatol 2008;11: 126-128)


Two different methods were applied to estimate long-term precipitation trends representative for regions in Norway. A new method, comparative trend analysis (CTA), was applied on 142 homogeneous precipitation series of 70-100 years. In this way 12 precipitation trend regions were identified. Principal component analysis (PCA) was applied on a subset of 30 series during the period 1896-1994 The results from both analyses were used to estimate precipitation trend series at several locations. The estimates based upon the PCA were of same quality as the estimates based upon the CTA. However, by CTA it is possible to visualize the trend in a distinct region by using just one trend curve, while trend curves based on PCA are composed of contributions from 5 principal components. The resulting trend curves document that the annual precipitation level has increased by 8-14% throughout this century in most Norwegian regions. The increase occurred not simultaneously all over the country. The regional differences in precipitation trends and variability are probably connected to variations in the atmospheric circulation patterns.


This article considers a recent decision by the Supreme Court of Israel dealing with the right to family unification of Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCI). By situating the decision in the broader debate on Israel's constitutional definition as a Jewish and democratic state, the article examines patterns where the definition plays an important role in defining the nature of the citizenship held by PCI and the limits of their rights. This examination focuses on three main issues that arose in the case: the scope of the protection of the right to family life, the comparative method used by some of the Justices to limit that right, and statements about the legitimacy of demographic considerations in devising immigration policies. This analysis demonstrates how the arguments and justifications used by the Court may provide building blocks for a legal framework that is proceeding in the direction of institutionalizing separate hierarchical categories of citizenship.


Abstract 'If governments allow themselves to be entirely bound to the decisions of their parliament, without protecting their own freedom to act, a break up of Europe would be a more probable outcome than deeper integration.' The statement of the Italian Prime Minister and head of the so-called 'governo tecnico words have to be seperated ' is one remarkable instance for colliding visions of representation in EU member states affected by the financial crisis. It exposes an old problem of representation: that is, representation of the whole versus representation of the parts. National parliaments are called to endorse the European decisions of their governments and simultaneously to sell the sacrifices to their constituencies. This development is conducive to clashes between parliaments and governments. The collision occurs between governments representing the Euro and Europe and national parliaments representing national voters' interests. Nevertheless in the period of analysis (2010–2012) the governments generally succeeded in commanding the majority needed to pass relevant legislation, whereby most intriguingly majorities were repeatedly formed by government and opposition parties. We are interested in the analysis of how this came about, how MPs argued over and negotiated the outcome. The hypothesis is twofold: First, we expect that despite reservations the majority consents because entrapped in a European discourse, building on arguments of how the rescue mechanisms are in the best European as well as national interests. Second, budget competence being the 'crown jewel' of parliaments these are anxious to keep control of decisions taken at the European level and have to be satisfied through side-payments or constitutional concessions strengthening their control function. To test our hypothesis we analysed parliamentary debates and negotiations of national parliaments in three member states: Germany, Italy and Austria.


Standard agreement measures for interannotator reliability are neither necessary nor sufficient to ensure a high quality corpus. In a case study of word sense annotation, conventional methods for evaluating labels from trained annotators are contrasted with a probabilistic annotation model applied to crowdsourced data. The annotation model provides far more information, including a certainty measure for each gold standard label; the crowdsourced data was collected at less than half the cost of the conventional approach.


Audio-visual speech recognition promises to improve the performance of speech recognizers, especially when the audio is corrupted, by adding information from the visual modality, more specifically, from the video of the speaker. However, the number of visual features that are added is typically bigger than the number of audio features, for a small gain in accuracy. We present a method that shows gains in performance comparable to the commonly-used DCT features, while employing a much smaller number of visual features based on the motion of the speaker's mouth. Motion vector differences are used to compensate for errors in the mouth tracking. This leads to a good performance even with as few as 3 features. The advantage of low-dimensional features is that a good accuracy can be obtained with relatively little training data, while also increasing the speed of both training and testing.


This article examines the role of evidence in influencing food and nutrition-related public health policy, and starts to chart a way through the political economy of knowledge and evidence within this nexus. We propose an analytical framework for untangling the influence of food industry interests and public health concerns in the policy process, presenting a guiding structure for how an issue might move between contested and uncontested policy spaces, finding that the inherent uncertainty in public health research on complex food systems presents opportunities for contestation by different interest groups. We then use our framework to understand the political economy of the recent sugar-sweetened beverage tax in Mexico, in which public health policies have been adopted despite going against an apparent interest of elements in the food industry. This kind of evidence, given the right framing, has the potential to break some current deadlocks in creating healthier food systems.


We study the effect of surface polarization on the distribution of free carriers in a wide bandgap semiconductor ferroelectric (FE) film using a thermodynamic approach. We show that free carriers, namely, holes and electrons from ionizable impurities or atomic vacancies can accumulate near the film-electrode interface, if FE polarization profile has a very steep change near the surface that is specified by the extrapolation length. Such an outcome is just the opposite of what happens in a Schottky junction in a partially or fully depleted film. This is also an entirely different effect than what has been often studied in similar structures, where the work function and screening length of the electrode metal determines the electronic character of the interface. Even for low-to-moderate densities of ionizable defects with states within the bandgap close to the band edges, high densities of carriers can localize close to the electrodes in a single domain state FE film when above a critical thickness. For very low densities of such ionizable defects, short extrapolation lengths cause electrical domain formation with minimal carrier accumulation because of the already weak depolarizing fields. This is also true for films below a critical thickness with low-to-moderate densities of ionizable impurities, i.e., electrical domains get stabilized regardless of defect density. The implications of our findings for polarization controlled Schottky to Ohmic-like transition of an interface and experimental results are discussed. It is also found that interfaces of an n-type FE heterostructure can behave like a p-type depending on the barrier heights and impurity density. We conclude that, for low-to-moderate ionizable impurity densities, it is the rate of change of polarization at the interface with position rather than solely its presence that leads to carrier accumulation and that both interfaces can become Ohmic-like with opposite signs of carriers.


During the 1920s the French army benefited from a surplus of Renault FT-17 light tanks, whose capabilities had been assessed on the battlefields of 1917 and 1918. Following the First World War, these machines were used in operations during the Russo-Polish conflict in 1919—1920, and subsequently during the Druze uprising in Syria and the Rif War in Morocco in the mid-1920s. Writing in the pages of published military periodicals, enthusiastic officers could consider the future capabilities of the tank, and assess its capacities with reference to those conflicts. In Poland, the Renault FT was considered to have shown a surprising robustness. In Syria and Morocco, French officers were able to consider the utility of the tank in acting against a general rebellion, rather than against a European-style opponent. Moreover, in these theatres the tank's potential to act both in conjunction with the infantry and independently could be demonstrated. Thus French officers were drawn to the conclusion that in some circumstances the tank could be used as a true `armoured infantryman': a substitute for the regular soldier and a means to avoid casualties. Nevertheless, the exceptionality of the colonial theatre, and in particular the lack of enemy anti-tank capabilities there, meant that officers were cautious when attempting to apply these conclusions to the future European theatre. Rather, their approach was pragmatic, and in keeping with the idea of the `methodical battle' which was developed towards the end of the First World War.


Influential reports combined with media attention on directors' remuneration has sparked academic and practitioner interest in the whole area of corporate governance. Cadbury's suggestion to strengthen the independent governance role has led to particular interest in non‐executive directors (NEDs). More recently, the role of NEDs in the governance of small and medium‐size enterprises (SMEs) has started to generate attention, and a number of registers of NEDs are established. Indeed, the role of NEDs in SMEs received special attention in the recent Hampel report (1998). Until recently, only two papers directly addressed the role of NEDs in SMEs; both papers were by Mileham and used data obtained from a survey concerned with the role of NEDs carried out with Institute of Management members. This research made a useful contribution, but had a number of limitations. More recently, the increased interest in the role of NEDs in SMEs has sparked further research, but there is still a need for an overall picture of NED and mentor involvement in UK SMEs. The research in this paper addresses this need by presenting the results from a survey sent to 5,279 UK SMEs selected from the Yellow Pages Business Database. The questionnaire was designed to provide a general overview of NED and mentor involvement in SMEs and to allow the following questions to be answered: How many SMEs have NEDs, and are there any firm size patterns? Are there firm age patterns? Are there firm sector patterns? Does firm size influence the formality of NED procedures? What does the managing director believe NEDs add? Are firms with NEDs more successful than those without a NED? Does the profile of the managing director matter? Does a firm's size influence NED involvement? How do firms acquire NEDs? Why do some SMEs not have NEDs? The paper presents these findings and explores the implications for SMEs and policy advisors.


Lymphocytic Response and Inducible Nitric Oxide Synthase in WTC-Exposed Chronic Rhinosinusitis
Background: A significant number of people exposed to the World Trade Center (WTC) site following the terrorist attacks suffer from sinonasal symptoms. We hypothesize that patients who were acutely exposed but developed chronic symptoms may have a unique lymphocytic profile to sinonasal inflammation.
Population: Retrospective review of pathology specimens from WTC-exposed subjects that underwent endoscopic sinus surgery at the Mount Sinai Medical Monitoring and Treatment Programs.
Methods: Following approval from the WTC Population Protection Committee and the Mount Sinai Human Subjects Committee, pathology specimen blocks were obtained from 26 WTC-exposed and 26 non-WTC-exposed (control) subjects who underwent sinus surgery. Hematoxilyn & Eosin (H&E) stains were obtained, along with immunohistochemistry (IHC) for inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS), CD3, CD4, CD8 and CD20 lymphocytes. Slides were graded by 3 blinded trained raters on a scale of 0 to 3.
Results: H&E staining was consistent among all specimens for acute and chronic inflammation. A Mann-Whitney U test was conducted, and the average rank of lymphocyte subpopulations (Controls vs. WTC-exposed) were: CD3 27.23 vs. 23.63 (z = -0.97, p = 0.33), CD4 27.54 vs. 23.29 (z = -1.27, p = 0.20), CD8 25.37 vs. 25.65 (z = -0.07, p = 0.94), CD20 27.15 vs. 23.71 (z = -0.98, p = 0.33), and iNOS 25.20 vs. 24.80 (z = 0.07, p = 0.94). There was no statistically significant difference in grading between the raters (linear-by-linear association, p = 0.18).
Discussion: WTC-exposed patients with chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS) have demonstrable disease. Immune response by identification of lymphocytic subpopulation and inflammatory contributions from reactive oxygen species appear comparable to the standard patient with CRS.
Clinical Significance: Chronic rhinosinusitis is present in the WTC-exposed population. Although anecdotal experience suggests a unique pattern of disease, the lymphocyte response in this population confirms the need for standardized care.


Abstract This research is performed to determine how gaseous impurities affect the evacuation of tritium from a fusion reactor chamber by using a cryosorption pump. The amounts of H2O and CH4 remaining on activated carbon during repeated cycles between adsorption for evacuation and desorption for regeneration are related to the partial pressures of the H2O and CH4 and to temperature and are correlated in terms of Henry's law. It is experimentally investigated how the impurities remaining on the activated carbon after rough evacuation by elevating the temperature affect the adsorption of H2 and He at cryogenic temperature. The amount of CH4 remaining on activated carbon is smaller than that of H2O, and it was found that the former's effect is comparatively smaller than the latter's. Discussion is made based on the surface coverage and pore distribution that are determined by the BET measurement. An important conclusion is that the bulk of the H2O and CH4 can be released from activated carbon by heating to 373 K.


Excerpt] The main form of flexible employment in Spain is temporary contracts. In 1984, when a legal change was introduced to allow their use (in particular, the so-called temporary contract for employment promotion, TCEP) for any type of job, including the performance of permanent tasks, the 'causality principle' was broken (this legal principle states that the firm can only hire workers using open-ended contracts for permanent tasks and should use fixed-term contracts for temporary needs). This break was considered as transitory and exclusively justified by the poor economic outcomes of the Spanish labour market at that historical moment. However, it remained until 1994. Although the causality principle was formally restated, firms had learnt to use temporary contracts as an easy and swift way to adapt to business cycle changes and preferred to keep on using other forms of temporary contracts (as the per-task or the eventual contracts) when the TCEP was abolished, circumventing legal regulation modifications. The model of 'flexibility at the margin' hinged on a dual economic structure between jobs prone to stability and jobs prone to instability. The introduction and wide use of temporary contracts probably helped reinforce such structure, creating incentives for the segmentation of jobs, especially in large firms. Therefore, employers intensified the adaptation of their whole production process to the existence of a group of workers in low-paid, high-rotation jobs, hired through temporary contracts, while using open-ended contracts for high-paid, low-rotation jobs.


Abstract. The decomposition of an atmospheric time series into its constituent parts is an essential tool for identifying and isolating variations of interest from a data set, and is widely used to obtain information about sources, sinks and trends in climatically important gases. Such procedures involve fitting appropriate mathematical functions to the data. However, it has been demonstrated that the application of such curve fitting procedures can introduce bias, and thus influence the scientific interpretation of the data sets. We investigate the potential for bias associated with the application of three curve fitting programs, known as HPspline, CCGCRV and STL, using multi-year records of CO2, CH4 and O3 data from three atmospheric monitoring field stations. These three curve fitting programs are widely used within the greenhouse gas measurement community to analyse atmospheric time series, but have not previously been compared extensively. The programs were rigorously tested for their ability to accurately represent the salient features of atmospheric time series, their ability to cope with outliers and gaps in the data, and for sensitivity to the values used for the input parameters needed for each program. We find that the programs can produce significantly different curve fits, and these curve fits can be dependent on the input parameters selected. There are notable differences between the results produced by the three programs for many of the decomposed components of the time series, such as the representation of seasonal cycle characteristics and the long-term (multi-year) growth rate. The programs also vary significantly in their response to gaps and outliers in the time series. Overall, we found that none of the three programs were superior, and that each program had its strengths and weaknesses. Thus, we provide a list of recommendations on the appropriate use of these three curve fitting programs for certain types of data sets, and for certain types of analyses and applications. In addition, we recommend that sensitivity tests are performed in any study using curve fitting programs, to ensure that results are not unduly influenced by the input smoothing parameters chosen. Our findings also have implications for previous studies that have relied on a single curve fitting program to interpret atmospheric time series measurements. This is demonstrated by using two other curve fitting programs to replicate work in Piao et al. (2008) on zero-crossing analyses of atmospheric CO2 seasonal cycles to investigate terrestrial biosphere changes. We highlight the importance of using more than one program, to ensure results are consistent, reproducible, and free from bias.


Water retention curves approaching infinitely negative matric potentials at residual water content are widely employed to model soil moisture dynamics. When used in numerical simulations, these retention curves fail to satisfactorily describe evaporation from arid soil (moisture‐limited regime) because they do not allow the soil to dry below residual water content. We show that simple modifications can be introduced to prevent unrealistic water retention at residual water content and predict more physically sound moisture dynamics. Modified retention models that allow drying below residual predict a moisture‐limited regime characterized by a thin subsurface evaporation zone and produce vapor fluxes up to 3 times larger than classical retention models. This might reduce the need to introduce empirical enhancement factors and improve the capability of modeling evaporation into the atmosphere and runoff in arid regions.


As Brazil becomes a visible player in international development, questions about accountability resonate loudly amidst wider scrutiny of the country's cooperation programme. This article takes the case of Brazil's flagship ProSAVANA programme in Mozambique to analyse changing accountability practices in Brazilian development cooperation. It documents the emergence of a transnational civil society movement contesting ProSAVANA, and analyses the interaction of this transnational movement with evolving domestic political contests surrounding Brazilian cooperation. This transnational mobilisation exposed weaknesses in Brazilian cooperation regarding transparency of action and lines of responsibility – contributing to shifts in both understanding and practices of accountability within Brazil. Campaigners called for the Brazilian government to accept greater responsibility vis‐a‐vis Mozambican constituents, and established direct lines of interaction between Mozambican and Brazilian civil society actors. To some extent, these links have enabled ProSAVANA target populations to communicate their preferences to Brazilian taxpayers, who can then call the Brazilian government directly to account. Such domestic‐transnational accountability interfaces can contribute to tackling 'broken information feedback loops' between donors and affected populations. However, the enduring significance of such changes will depend on the ability of emerging accountability practices to connect a broader range of stakeholders, both in Brazil and in Mozambique, and to establish constructive dialogue among competing visions and interests.


Monotonic neural networks have recently been proposed as a way to define invertible transformations. These transformations can be combined into powerful autoregressive flows that have been shown to be universal approximators of continuous probability distributions. Architectures that ensure monotonicity typically enforce constraints on weights and activation functions, which enables invertibility but leads to a cap on the expressiveness of the resulting transformations. In this work, we propose the Unconstrained Monotonic Neural Network (UMNN) architecture based on the insight that a function is monotonic as long as its derivative is strictly positive. In particular, this latter condition can be enforced with a free-form neural network whose only constraint is the positiveness of its output. We evaluate our new invertible building block within a new autoregressive flow (UMNN-MAF) and demonstrate its effectiveness on density estimation experiments. We also illustrate the ability of UMNNs to improve variational inference.


We employ picosecond laser multiple scribing to fabricate oblique sidewalls of AlGaN-based deep ultraviolet light-emitting diode (LED) chips for enhanced light extraction. The multiple scribing lines in the sapphire substrate are intentionally aligned to guide the wafer to be diced along oblique sidewalls with designed angles. Compared with a conventional LED chip having vertical sidewalls, one with sidewalls inclined at 60° exhibits a 13.8% higher light output power at 50 mA without any deterioration of the laser-induced electrical characteristics. Finite-difference time-domain simulation reveals the optimized sidewall inclination angle and indicates that the inclination of the sidewall is effective for TM-polarized light extraction.


The paper deals with the new algorithm of estimation of large 3D motion of the human head by using the optical flow and the model Candide. In the algorithm prediction of 3D motion parameters in a feedback loop and with multiple iterations was applied. The prediction of 3D motion parameters does not require creating of the synthesized frames but directly uses the frames of input videosequence. Next the algorithm does not need extracting of feature points inside the frames because they are given by the vertices of the used calibrated model Candide. As achieved experimental results show, the iteration process in prediction of 3D motion parameters increased the accuracy of estimation above all the large 3D motion. Such a way the estimation error is decreased without its accumulation in long videosequence. Finally the experimental results show that for 3 iterations a state of saturation was achieved what means that by next increasing of the number of iterations practically no significant increasing of the accuracy of estimation of 3D motion parameters is occurred.


The image quality is a crucial property of each image when it comes to successful recognition. There are many methods of image quality assessment which use both objective and subjective measures. The most desirable situation is when we can evaluate the quality of an image prior to recognition.

It is well known that most of classical objective image quality assessment methods, mainly based on the Mean Square Error, are poorly correlated with the way humans perceive the quality of digital images. Recently some new methods of full-reference image quality assessment have been proposed based on Singular Value Decomposition and Structural Similarity, especially useful for development of new image processing methods e.g. filtration or lossy compression.

Despite the fact that full-reference metrics require the knowledge of original image to compute them their application in image recognition systems can be also useful. In the remote controlled systems where lossy compressed images are transferred using low bandwidth networks, the additional information related to the quality of transmitted image can be helpful for the estimation of recognition accuracy or even the choice of recognition method.

The paper presents a problem of recognizing visual textures using two-dimensional Linear Discriminant Analysis. The image features are taken from the FFT spectrum of gray-scale image and then rendered into a feature matrix using LDA. The final part of recognition is performed using distance calculation from the centers of classes. The experiments employ standard benchmark database-Brodatz Textures.

Performed investigations are focused on the influence of image quality on the recognition performance and the correlation between image quality metrics and the recognition accuracy.


Previous Australian records of Ascothoracida are summarised. In the Synagogidae, three new species of Gorgonolaureus Utinomi are described from primnoid (Pterostenelia plumatilis (Rousseau», paramuriceid (unidentified), and gorgoniid (Eunicelia sp.) gorgonacean hosts off Western Australia, Vietnam, and New Caledonia, respectively. The first two species are from unusually shallow depths, 80 to 100 m, the third from bathyal depths. Flatsia n.gen., with one species from 73 to 82 m depth off New South Wales, host unknown, is provisionally assigned to the Synagogidae. In the Lauridae, two new species of Baccalaureus Broch are described from the subtidal zoanthid Isaurus tuberculatus Gray on the Great Barrier Reef and the solitary zoanthid Sphenopus marsupialis Steenstrup at several shallow sites (40-86 m) off Queensland and Western Australia and in the Andaman Sea. In the Petrarcidae, morphological and ecological notes on Petrarca okadai Grygier infesting the coral Heteropsammia cochlea (Spengler) at Lizard Island, Queensland, are presented. Two new species of Petrarca Fowler are described infesting the solitary coral Fungiacyathus sp. off Moreton Bay, Queensland, and the hermatypic reef coral Turbinaria reniformis Bernard at Lizard Island. An unnamed species of Petrarca from the solitary coral Anthemiphyllia dentata A1cock collected between 110 and 350 m off Queensland is partly described. A list and some photographs of other new records of galls caused by petrarcid ascothoracidans in various Indo-Pacific sc1eractinians, especially Turbinaria spp. and other dendrophylliids, are presented. GRYGIER, M.J., 1991. Additions to the ascothoracidan fauna of Australia and South-east Asia (Crustacea, Maxillopoda): Synagogidae (part), Lauridae and Petrarcidae. Records of the Australian Museum 43(1): 1-46.


Purpose: The purpose of our study was to describe the morphological features of gastrointestinal vascular malformations (VM) and of hemangiolymphangiomas (HLA) and to establish correlations with clinical characteristics. Significant findings: Fifteen VMs and 12 HLAs that were encountered over a period of 22 years, were retrospectively analyzed. The VMs often involved the colon, small intestine, but also the stomach, whereas none of the HLAs arose in the stomach. VMs were more frequently associated with gastrointestinal bleeding, ulcer and were larger than HLAs (p<0.01 for all comparisons). Intralesional hemorrhage and thrombosis were associated with VM (p=0.02 and p=0.05). Surgical resection was performed for 1 HLA and 14 VMs. Vessel abnormalities such as shunt vessels, wall tufts (excrescences) and arterialized veins were more frequent in VMs (p=0.01, p=0.04 and <0.01, respectively) whereas aneurysm-like cavities were observed in both lesion types. Mucosal abnormal vessels were observed only in VMs, whereas HLAs were associated with mucosal lymphatic clusters (p<0.01). Most HLAs contained a D2-40 hetero- geneously positive lymphatic component, were Glut-1 negative and CD31 reactive. There was no statistical difference in occurrence of associated autoimmune, tumoral and cardiovascular conditions between the two patient groups. Conclusions: The results of our study suggest that morphological features such as increased size, ulcer, thrombosis, hemorrhage and presence of aberrant mucosal vessels favor the diagnosis of VM. Co-existence of other clinical con- ditions such as cardiovascular disease, encountered in association with both lesion types, might exacerbate a ten- dency towards hemorrhage.


Projections of future climate for the Southwestern U.S. and other semi-arid regions globally include reductions in mountain snow accumulation and increased summer potential evapotranspiration. These changes may significantly alter runoff production, evapotranspiration, and gross primary productivity in mountain forests. Analysis of remotely sensed vegetation greenness data indicate strong forest and understory growth dependencies associated with snow accumulation and snowmelt with peak snow water equivalent explaining 40-50% of inter-annual variability in forest greenness in the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains. Examples of these dependencies will be presented based on the 2012 drought in the Southwestern US whereby near record low snow accumulation and record high potential evapotranspiration have resulted in record low forest greening as evident in the 30+ year satellite record. Forest response to aridity in 2012 was exacerbated by forest disturbance with greenness anomalies 90% greater in magnitude in Bark Beetle and Spruce Budworm affected areas versus undisturbed areas and 182% greater in magnitude in areas impacted by fire. Given potential future changes in the hydroclimatology of mountainous regions, the results of these measurements may identify tipping points regarding ecosystem responses to water availability across gradients in physiography.


Background: A sudden decline of renal function occurring during pregnancy or postpartum is defined as Pregnancy-related acute kidney injury (PRAKI) includes all the causes not only the obstetric one. The incidence and etiology of PRAKI varies greatly between different regions. Data for the prevalence and prognosis cannot be interpreted without taking into account the geographic and economic context of the country in which they have been obtained. In developed countries, obstetric AKI has become a rare complication of pregnancy. However, in developing countries, AKI remains a frequent and grave complication of pregnancy. Aim: to demonstrate the demographic, clinical and laboratory characteristic of the pregnant women with AKI. Materials and Methods: A Cross-sectional study was carried out among pregnant women who were admitted to obstetrics & gynecology department in collaboration with nephrology unit in internal medicine department during a six months. This study is a part of a large study on the prevalence and outcome of AKI in pregnancy by the same authors in the same center that will be published soon. The demographic, clinical and laboratory data was obtained and analyzed Results: During the period of the study, a total of 4130 obstetric cases were admitted to the hospital. In total, 33 patients met the diagnostic criteria of pregnancy related acute kidney injury. The mean age of the patients was 29 ± 4.58 years, and gestational age was 31.46 ± 6.34 weeks. Eleven of the 33 women (21%) were primiparous and twelve of them (79%) were multipara. There was a significant findings between the patients who were suffering from hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (Group 1) and who didn't suffer (Group 2) as regarding low hemoglobin level and low arterial blood pressure and in group 2, while group 1 showed higher uric acid level and low albumin level with a significant finding.


This paper provides a description of the Nuclear Analytical Techniques Group of the Argentine National Atomic Energy Commission, at the Ezeiza Atomic Center. In 1963, this laboratory performed the first application of neutron activation analysis in Argentina and currently employs the technique to analyse a variety of matrices, including archaeological ceramics. The group has collaborated on different research projects since the 1980s, when the first characterization of archaeological ceramics was performed. A brief history of the laboratory and the results from the analysis of potsherds and raw materials from northwestern Argentina are presented below.


Abstract. Recently it has been shown that climate estimates derived from tree rings often tend to show erroneous long-term oscillations, i.e. there are spectral biases at low frequencies. The result is independent of parameter studied (precipitation or temperature) or measured proxy (tree ring widths or maximum latewood densities). In order to find reasons for such universal errors, a new reconstruction method is introduced where no age dependence of the tree rings is determined. The aim, however, is not to generate better reconstructions but to study error variances of long-term oscillations. It is shown that paucities and data gaps due to missing trees increase the risk for erroneous low-frequency variability. A general approximate formula is introduced in order to estimate the presence of such a risk. A case study using Tornetrask data from Northern Sweden illustrates how longer periods with missing trees cause paucities and gaps leading to erroneous climatic oscillations. Systematic underestimation of the temperature around AD 1600 and after 1950 ("divergence") is in the study case explained by such data gaps and paucities.