The oomycete vegetable pathogen Phytophthora capsici has shown remarkable adaptation to fungicides and new hosts. Like other members of this destructive genus, P. capsici has an explosive epidemiology, rapidly producing massive numbers of asexual spores on infected hosts. In addition, P. capsici can remain dormant for years as sexually recombined oospores, making it difficult to produce crops at infested sites, and allowing outcrossing populations to maintain significant genetic variation. Genome sequencing, development of a high-density genetic map, and integrative genomic or genetic characterization of P. capsici field isolates and intercross progeny revealed significant mitotic loss of heterozygosity (LOH) in diverse isolates. LOH was detected in clonally propagated field isolates and sexual progeny, cumulatively affecting >30% of the genome. LOH altered genotypes for more than 11,000 single-nucleotide variant sites and showed a strong association with changes in mating type and pathogenicity. Overall, it appears that LOH may provide a rapid mechanism for fixing alleles and may be an important component of adaptability for P. capsici.


While growing up in Port-au-Prince in the sixties, I would travel quite often on the Avenue John Brown which runs in the middle of the city. It was a hard thing back then to pronounce the name of the avenue and understandably, I knew nothing about its significance. I had never even questioned the reason people gave the street such a name. Only after I migrated to the United States did I discover that everyone associated John Brown's name with the struggle of the people of the United States-the land of the free and the home of the brave-to remove the hideous stain of slavery from the face of America. It was something of a surprise to discover that John Brown was born in 1800, the very year Toussaint L'Ouverture was winning decisive battles in his war against the French slaveholders. But my most exciting discovery was that John Brown, when he began his own crusade to liberate all of the slaves in the United States, turned to Toussaint L'Ouverture for guidance. David Reynolds, his biographer, explained: "The society of blacks that was by far the greatest inspiration for John Brown was the one created in Haiti by Toussaint L'Ouverture."1 This should not be surprising for what Toussaint and his followers demonstrated to John Brown-and the test of the world-was that people of African descent in Haiti not only could work together to break the chains of slavery, but that they possessed the ability, the discipline, and the skills to win their freedom on the battlefield. Even Napoleon's 60,000 troops dispatched to Haiti in 1802 were no match for the tenacity and military prowess of Toussaint's soldiers. Despairing over their inability to achieve a military victory, the French resorted to despicable, shameless trickery to defeat Toussaint. Their heinous plan was to promise him absolute and total safety if he would meet with them to discuss terms for peace. Unfortunately, Toussaint trusted them. When he appeared to discuss ways of ending the conflict, the treacherous French put him in chains, shipped him to a dungeon in France and kept him there until he died in 1803. When William Wordsworth, England's famous poet, learned of Toussaint's death, he glorified his life with these words: There is not a breathing of the common wind that will forget this, thou hast great allies; thy friends are exultations, agonies, and love and man's unconquerable mind.2 Outraged over France's duplicity the Haitian soldiers mercilessly drove all of their troops from Haiti. Soon after, in 1804, the Haitians issued their declaration of independence and drew up a political framework for what would be the world's first Black Republic. When John Brown began his crusade to emancipate America's slaves, this period in Haitian history did indeed inspire him. Yet, unlike other nineteenth century abolitionists who used moral persuasion to win converts to their cause, John Brown chose the path of direct action. A strong supporter of the Underground Railroad, he assisted slaves to escape to Canada by directing a way-station in Pennsylvania for them. In the Kansas territory he led the brutal attack against proslavery supporters who settled there. Many saw John Brown to be an enigmatic figure who perceived himself to have a divine mission to end the vicious, inhumane institution of slavery . Since John Brown's plan for the emancipation of slaves envisioned the creation of a separate colony in the southern region of Appalachian mountains, he convened in May of 1858 a convention to meet in Chatham, a small town in Canada not far from Detroit, Michigan, to draw up a provisional constitution. Its Prelude enunciated the reasons for this action: ...slavery throughout its entire existence in the United Sates, is none other than the most barbarous, unprovoked and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion, the only conditions of which are perpetual imprisonment and hopeless servitude or absolute extermination, in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set fourth in our Declaration of Independence. …


Tremendous research efforts have been made to thrive deep domain adaptation (DA) by seeking domain-invariant features. Most existing deep DA models only focus on aligning feature representations of task-specific layers across domains while integrating a totally shared convolutional architecture for source and target. However, we argue that such strongly-shared convolutional layers might be harmful for domain-specific feature learning when source and target data distribution differs to a large extent. In this paper, we relax a shared-convnets assumption made by previous DA methods and propose a Domain Conditioned Adaptation Network (DCAN), which aims to excite distinct convolutional channels with a domain conditioned channel attention mechanism. As a result, the critical low-level domain-dependent knowledge could be explored appropriately. As far as we know, this is the first work to explore the domain-wise convolutional channel activation for deep DA networks. Moreover, to effectively align high-level feature distributions across two domains, we further deploy domain conditioned feature correction blocks after task-specific layers, which will explicitly correct the domain discrepancy. Extensive experiments on three cross-domain benchmarks demonstrate the proposed approach outperforms existing methods by a large margin, especially on very tough cross-domain learning tasks.


Colpodean ciliates potentially pose a problem to macro-organismic theories of evolution: they are putatively asexual and extremely ancient, and yet there is one apparently derived sexual species. If macro-organismic theories of evolution also broadly apply to microbial eukaryotes, though, then most or all of the colpodean ciliates should merely be secretively sexual. Here we show using de novo genome sequencing, that colpodean ciliates have the meiotic genes required for sex and these genes are under functional constraint. Along with these genomic data, we argue that these ciliates are sexual given the cytological observations of both micronuclei and macronuclei within their cells, and the behavioral observations of brief fusions as if the cells were mating. The challenge that colpodean ciliates pose is therefore not to evolutionary theory, but to our ability to induce microbial eukaryotic sex in the laboratory. Contact: email@example.com


Oman is a stunningly beautiful country with a rich history and bountiful heritage set in a breathtaking landscape. As an ancient seafaring country, Oman has always been open to the world, and is now increasingly popular with discerning travellers and tourists. Since the accession of His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said in 1970, Oman has thrived, adopting the best features of modern technology while keeping its own heritage and unique culture very much alive. In this book, Ozzie Newcombe s vibrant photographs capture the most enchanting of the country s sights, from the natural wonders of its soaring mountains, stark deserts, plunging coastal cliffs and lush green valleys, to the man-made achievements of ancient crafts and modern engineering. Oman s astonishing variety will surprise and delight both residents and visitors alike, and this book is a lasting celebration of one of the most fascinating countries in the world.REVIEWS The Heritage of Oman, with its full-color photographs and explanatory text, succeeds delightfully Ozzie Newcombe captures the special quality of Oman, its wide skies, haunting desolation and old traditions. Cedar Wings"


The mechanical strength for composite joint structure is of great importance for its application in aerospace engineering. The traditional bolt connection introduces extra stress concentration due to the drilling of hole, and will result in earlier failure of the composites structure. Based on nature suture joint mechanics, a composite suture joint is introduced to improve the loading capability of composite joint structures. In this work, finite element models for various designs of suture joint connection are developed and analyzed to study the interaction between geometric parameters (tooth angle, tooth density and complexity etc.) and structure performance. Cohesive element model is applied to model the interface failure of the suture joint. The progressive damage behavior of the suture joint structure is studied. The numerical results show the capability of this suture joint structure in reducing stress concentration factor and improving the structural damage tolerance. Through this work, we will achieve understandings of the correlation between mechanical strength, damage mechanism and suture geometries, which is of great important for the design and optimization of novel high performance composite joint structures.


OBJECTIVES
This study aimed to examine the bilateral effect of 4 weeks of unilateral electroacupuncture on leg muscle strength.

DESIGN
The effect of unilateral electroacupuncture at two selected acupoints, Zusanli (ST-36) and Xiajuxu (ST-39), which are located on the anterior tibialis muscle, on dorsiflexion strength was evaluated by statistical analyses of the interactions between the muscle strength pre and post 4 weeks of intervention, between the two legs, and between an experimental and a control group.

SETTINGS/LOCATION
The trial was carried out in the exercise rehabilitation laboratory at Tianjin University of Sport.

SUBJECTS
Thirty (30) healthy men with an average age of 20.9 +/- 2.98 (SD) years were randomly allocated into an electroacupuncture group (EG) and a control group (CG). They were physically active, but without specific strength training or previous experience of acupuncture.

INTERVENTIONS
Participants in the EG were given 3 sessions of electroacupuncture per week. In each session, the electroacupuncture was applied to the right leg at the acupoints with 8 duty cycles of 1 minute on and 1 minute off, pulse width of 1 millisecond, frequency of 40 Hz, and intensity of 30-40 V. Participants in the CG group kept their normal daily activities without additional intervention.

OUTCOME MEASURES
The maximum strength in dorsiflexion of each leg was examined by having participants lift weights in the range of motion of approximately 20 degrees at the ankle joint.

RESULTS
Repeated-measures analysis of variance with Bonferroni adjustment detected significant increase in strength of both legs (right 21.3%, left 15.2%) in the EG (p<0.05) and the increase was significantly higher than that of the CG (p<0.05). The CG showed no significant change (right 3.0%, left 4.8%), post-treatment.

CONCLUSIONS
Unilateral electroacupuncture at the selected acupoints improved muscle strength of both limbs. These findings may have implications in physical therapy and rehabilitation settings.


Population ageing affects most countries, especially developed ones. The elderly have increased in number as a result of increased longevity and a parallel decline in fertility. This phenomenon is placing an increasing burden on the young to finance intergenerational transfers to the old, which is creating a threat to the stability of the pension system and the long-run viability of society as a whole. One possible solution is to permit more immigration, which will both increase the labor force and broaden the tax base. Increasing immigration has a variety of effects on the local population, which vary according to age and wealth. One of these is the threat to local social norms and culture since immigrants tend to maintain the culture of their country of origin. This effect increases with the number of immigrants and reduces the attractiveness of immigration as a solution to population ageing. This paper examines immigration as a solution to the problem of ageing population, while considering the implication of immigration on social norms.


Unlike defined benefit pensions that provide participants with steady benefits for as long as they live, 401(k) plans and Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) provide little guidance on how to turn accumulated assets into income. As a result, retirees have to decide how much to withdraw each year and face the risk of either spending too quickly and outliving their resources or spending too conservatively and consuming too little. Surveys of individuals' plans and several recent studies suggest that people will not draw down their accumulations for fear that they will exhaust their money and be unable to cover end-of-life health care costs. They also must consider how to invest their savings after retirement. These are difficult decisions.

Better strategies are possible that will ensure a higher level of lifetime income, reduce the likelihood that people will outlive their resources, and alleviate some of the anxiety associated with post-retirement investing. Workers could use a portion of their 401(k) and IRA assets to purchase an immediate annuity that pays a fixed amount throughout their lives, typically starting at age 65. Or they could purchase an advanced life deferred annuity (ALDA) that requires a smaller share of accumulated assets and begins payments at a later age like 85. Alternatively, they could use their assets to delay claiming Social Security – essentially purchasing an inflation-indexed annuity. Right now, none of these three options is commonly used. Very few workers choose to purchase immediate or deferred annuities (the first two options). And few retirees appear to be deferring claiming in order to receive the maximum annuity income from Social Security – most people simply retire earlier and claim immediately.

Increasing annuitization in a meaningful way would require embedding annuities in 401(k) plans, with annuitization as the default. Recent proposed federal legislation, such as the SECURE Act (Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement), encourages plan sponsors to offer annuities in their plans by establishing a fiduciary safe harbor when specific statutory conditions are followed in selecting an insurance company. This legislation does not address, however, the question of defaults or the possibility of using 401(k) assets to purchase additional Social Security benefits. Moving forward on these fronts would require some consensus about the appropriate share of 401(k) assets to be annuitized and the best method for annuitizing them.

To address these issues, this paper compares the level of lifetime utility generated by alternative annuitization approaches – immediate annuities, deferred annuities, and additional Social Security through delayed claiming. The analysis also tests different assumptions for the share of initial wealth that participants use to purchase these products.


In this article, I discuss the potential of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) for empowering women and minority users in computing, and how the current status of women and minority users in the FLOSS development can be improved through engaging in the process of the FLOSS development. Though taking a "techno-feminist" perspective (Wajcman 2004), I am not going to reduce the complex gender issues emerging within and across the FLOSS community to a numeric question, i.e. how few women in the FLOSS community. Also, I do not consider the question as a battle between men and women. Staying away from such dichotomies, the issues I attempt to address include not only the inequality that women face in computing, but also other inequalities end users face that usually emerge from the power relationships between expert and lay (namely, developer and user) in software design. Instead of splitting women and men in the FLOSS development, this analysis helps motivate both men and women to work together, reduce the gender gap, and improve the disadvantaged statuses of women and a wider users community in the FLOSS development. I also provide three examples on how both women and men are encouraged to become mobile grassroots IT workers who support organisations and individuals with advises on technology with non-technical lay language, rather than completing technical tasks such as bugs fixing.


Interview with jazz musician Robert "Bob" Stewart. In the interview, Steward speaks about his early interest in music, his first drum set, first professional job with the Shorty Clements Band, attending college, his employment as a disk jockey, his definition of jazz, playing with the Charles Scott Band in fort Worth, after-hours clubs in Fort Worth, jazz's role in bringing together black and white musicians, various jazz clubs and venues in Fort Worth, musicians unions, the lack of full-time employment opportunities for jazz musicians in Fort Worth, the Fort Worth jazz scene, and peculiarities of Texas jazz and the "Texas Sound." The interview includes an appendix with photographs.


The paper investigates the determinants of the US$/€ exchange rate since its introduction in 1999, with a special focus on the recent subprime mortgage and sovereign debt financial crises. The econometric model is grounded on the asset pricing theory of exchange rate determination, which posits that current exchange rate fluctuations are determined by the entire path of current and future revisions in expectations about fundamentals. In this perspective, we innovate the literature by conditioning on Fama-French and Charart risk factors, which directly measures changing market expectations about the economic outlook, as well as on new financial condition indexes and a large set of macroeconomic variables. The macro-finance augmented econometric model has a remarkable in-sample and out of sample predictive ability, largely outperforming a standard autoregressive specification neglecting macro-financial information. We also document a stable relationship between the US$/€-Charart momentum conditional correlation (CCW) and the euro area business cycle, potentially exploitable also within a system of early warning indicators of macro-financial imbalances. Comparison with available measures of economic sentiments shows that CCW yields a more accurate assessment, signaling a progressive weakening in euro area economic conditions since June 2014, consistent with the sluggish and scattered recovery from the sovereign debt crisis and the new Greek solvency crisis exploded in late spring/early summer 2015.


Abstract The Miocene rhyolites of the Spor Mountain Formation host Earth's largest beryllium deposit, which produced 85% of the world's beryllium in 2010. The fresh lava is extremely enriched in Be (up to 75 ppm in matrix glass). We have examined the rhyolite to better understand the Be enrichment. The Spor Mountain rhyolite contains ~40% quartz, ~40% sanidine, ~10% biotite, and ~10% plagioclase, along with accessory fluorite, columbite, euxenite, fergusonite, monazite, thorite, and zircon. Two types of rhyolite are present within the Spor Mountain Formation, a less-evolved magma (1150 ppm Rb, 42 ppm Be, 0.7 wt% F in glass) and a more-evolved magma (1710 ppm Rb, 75 ppm Be, 1.6 wt% F in glass). Eruption temperatures estimated using two-feldspar (Elkins and Grove 1990; Putirka 2008; Benisek et al. 2010), plagioclase-liquid and alkali feldspar-liquid (Putirka 2008), Ti-in-quartz (Thomas et al. 2010, 2015; Huang and Audétat 2012), biotite (Righter and Carmichael 1996), and zircon saturation (Boehnke et al. 2013) geothermometers converge on 718 °C for the less-evolved magma and 682 °C for the more-evolved magma. Using the Ti-in-Qz equation of Huang and Audétat (2012), the pre-eruptive pressure of the Spor Mountain rhyolite system is estimated to be about 2 kbar at 700 °C. Water content of the rhyolite melt was less than <5 wt%, based on the co-crystallization of all four major mineral phases at 700 °C, and the magma was water undersaturated (Webster et al. 1987). Viscosity of the rhyolite was about 106.2 Pa·s for the less-evolved rhyolite and 105.8 Pa·s for the more-evolved rhyolite. Fluorine lowered the melt viscosity, though not by a large amount (less than 0.5 log units at 1.6 wt% F). Partition coefficients for Be and other trace elements were determined for biotite, sanidine, plagioclase, and quartz from laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry analyses. Partition coefficients for trace elements in feldspars from the Spor Mountain rhyolite are generally higher than for feldspars from other silicic magmas and lower for biotite. The enrichment of beryllium in the Spor Mountain rhyolite was aided by its high incompatibility in the major mineral phases, with a bulk partition coefficient <0.1. Trace element models using the measured partition coefficients are inconsistent with accumulation of increments of melt formed by different degrees of partial melting and cannot explain the great depletion of compatible elements. Rather, the trace element abundances and Nd and Sr isotopic compositions are consistent with derivation of rhyolite by ~25% partial melting of crust hybridized with mantle-derived components, followed by extensive fractional crystallization (75%). The combination of these magmatic processes set the stage for the formation of a world-class beryllium deposit.


-Transgenic mouse models have been developed to manipulate beta-adrenergic receptor (betaAR) signal transduction. Although several of these models have altered betaAR subtypes, the specific functional sequelae of betaAR stimulation in murine heart, particularly those of beta2-adrenergic receptor (beta2AR) stimulation, have not been characterized. In the present study, we investigated effects of beta2AR stimulation on contraction, [Ca2+]i transient, and L-type Ca2+ currents (ICa) in single ventricular myocytes isolated from transgenic mice overexpressing human beta2AR (TG4 mice) and wild-type (WT) littermates. Baseline contractility of TG4 heart cells was increased by 3-fold relative to WT controls as a result of the presence of spontaneous beta2AR activation. In contrast, beta2AR stimulation by zinterol or isoproterenol plus a selective beta1-adrenergic receptor (beta1AR) antagonist CGP 20712A failed to enhance the contractility in TG4 myocytes, and more surprisingly, beta2AR stimulation was also ineffective in increasing contractility in WT myocytes. Pertussis toxin (PTX) treatment fully rescued the ICa, [Ca2+]i, and contractile responses to beta2AR agonists in both WT and TG4 cells. The PTX-rescued murine cardiac beta2AR response is mediated by cAMP-dependent mechanisms, because it was totally blocked by the inhibitory cAMP analog Rp-cAMPS. These results suggest that PTX-sensitive G proteins are responsible for the unresponsiveness of mouse heart to agonist-induced beta2AR stimulation. This was further corroborated by an increased incorporation of the photoreactive GTP analog [gamma-32P]GTP azidoanilide into alpha subunits of Gi2 and Gi3 after beta2AR stimulation by zinterol or isoproterenol plus the beta1AR blocker CGP 20712A. This effect to activate Gi proteins was abolished by a selective beta2AR blocker ICI 118,551 or by PTX treatment. Thus, we conclude that (1) beta2ARs in murine cardiac myocytes couple to concurrent Gs and Gi signaling, resulting in null inotropic response, unless the Gi signaling is inhibited; (2) as a special case, the lack of cardiac contractile response to beta2AR agonists in TG4 mice is not due to a saturation of cell contractility or of the cAMP signaling cascade but rather to an activation of beta2AR-coupled Gi proteins; and (3) spontaneous beta2AR activation may differ from agonist-stimulated beta2AR signaling.


In this paper, we present a method for animating multiphase flow of immiscible fluids using unstructured moving meshes. Our underlying discretization is an unstructured tetrahedral mesh, the deformable simplicial complex (DSC), that moves with the flow in a Lagrangian manner. Mesh optimization operations improve element quality and avoid element inversion. In the context of multiphase flow, we guarantee that every element is occupied by a single fluid and, consequently, the interface between fluids is represented by a set of faces in the simplicial complex. This approach ensures that the underlying discretization matches the physics and avoids the additional book-keeping required in grid-based methods where multiple fluids may occupy the same cell. Our Lagrangian approach naturally leads us to adopt a finite element approach to simulation, in contrast to the finite volume approaches adopted by a majority of fluid simulation techniques that use tetrahedral meshes. We characterize fluid simulation as an optimization problem allowing for full coupling of the pressure and velocity fields and the incorporation of a second-order surface energy. We introduce a preconditioner based on the diagonal Schur complement and solve our optimization on the GPU. We provide the results of parameter studies as well as a performance analysis of our method.


Abstract This article takes up Talal Asad's suggestion that studies of law and religion should reject the modern/non-modern binary and instead consider the "fragmented cultures" and "hybrid selves" associated with constantly changing social circumstances. The article begins with a seemingly bizarre incident that occurred during Thai street protests in March 2010. Tens of thousands of rural demonstrators splashed their own blood on Bangkok's public buildings to curse the ruling government and its legal and political institutions. An explanation of the demonstrators' controversial actions is found in their reaction against efforts of the central Thai ruling elite over the past century to modernize Thai law, rationalize its religious administration, and eliminate rival systems in outlying regions. These efforts, in turn, are placed in the context of a centuries-old tradition of law, kingship, and religious purification through which Thai rulers centralized their power and demonstrated their legitimacy. The street protests in 2010 represented a failed attempt by rural workers simultaneously to claim their place in the Thai nation and to challenge its hegemony, to assert their rights under modern law, and to invoke pre-modern legal norms and identities.


Bridged thiazolium salts 16b and c have been synthesized in a short procedure starting with ω-amino acids. Condensation with carbon disulfide and α-chloro ketone 19 provided thiazole-2(3H)-thiones 14b and c and the bridge was then formed by standard macrolactonization procedures. Oxidation of the thiones with hydrogen peroxide then gave the thiazolium salts. The same cyclization procedures failed to yield the shorter bridged compound 15a but gave the cyclic dimer and trimer. Starting with protected lysine derivatives 31b and c, thiazole-2(3H)-thiones 36b and c were obtained. In both cases the cyclization reaction yielded two separable atropisomers depending on which side of the ring the bridge was formed. The catalytic reactions of thiazolium salts 16b and c were compared with unbridged analogues and it was found that, whereas the longer bridged one behaved normally, the shorter bridged salt was unable to catalyse the benzoin condensation. A novel 2-benzoyl-2,3-dihydrothiazole 44 was isolated from this reaction mixture.


I. INTRODUCTION Nearly all interesting legal issues require accurate predictions about human behavior to be resolved satisfactorily. Judges, policymakers, and academics invoke mental models of individual and social behavior whenever they estimate the desirability of alternative rules, policies, or procedures. Contemporary legal scholarship has come to recognize that if these predictions are naive and intuitive, without any strong empirical grounding, they are susceptible to error and ideological bias. Something more rigorous is thus expected when normative claims are advanced, and the place of the social sciences has expanded in legal discourse to satisfy this expectation.l Three branches of the social sciences-economics, psychology, and sociology-offer the most obvious assistance in predicting everyday human behavior, and each has a well-recognized history of influence on legal scholarship. The legal realists-most notably, Jerome Frank-took psychology quite seriously half a century ago; "sociological jurisprudence" came to prominence shortly thereafter, and law and society studies are still highly visible. But as many have said so often, both psychology and sociology have suffered from the inability to generate a unified behavioral model rivaling the simplicity, elegance, and testability of the economist's utilitymaximizing rational actor. For this reason (and probably a host of otherss), the rational actor model came to dominate predictions about how "normal" persons and groups respond to legal incentives. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, law and economics was the one social science-based approach to have a truly pervasive effect on legal thinking. "Law and psychology" for some time was largely the study of either marginal segments of the population, such as the criminally insane, or specialized procedural subjects like jury behavior and eyewitness recall.4 At roughly the same time that economics was rapidly diffusing into law,5 work by cognitive and social psychologists challenging the orthodox presumption of rational human behavior was becoming more prominent in the social sciences. To be sure, psychology has long claimed that human behavior is complex and contingent, and theories like cognitive dissonance (not to mention a broad range of psychoanalytic constructs) have for some time been available to question the decision making of otherwise normal members of society.e But the mid to late 1970s and early 1980s brought distinct focus and attention to the new subdiscipline of "behavioral decision theory" within cognitive and social psychology. Work by researchers such as Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Hillel Einhorn, Robin Hogarth, Arie Kruglanski, Lee Ross, Richard Thaler, and many others suggested that there are heuristics, biases, and other departures from rational decision-making processes that are systematic and predictable and can thus be modeled and tested with a fair degree of rigor.7 The challenge to orthodox economic theory was plain, and a debate between the disciplines quickly began.8 This debate is still far from resolved.9 Conventional economics remains an extraordinarily powerful discipline, but within economics there is an increasing willingness (sometimes grudging, sometimes not) to take the psychologists' empirical claims seriously-even in market settings. Transaction cost economics accepts that the rationality of economic actors is "bounded," to use Herbert Simon's phraseology, and bounded rationality can include cognitive imperfection as well as informational limits.lo "Behavioral economics" has become an accepted subdiscipline within economics, and papers in the best economics and finance journals are more and more apt to make unsarcastic reference to the psychological literature. A pointed illustration of this interdisciplinary accomodation is the venerable Quarterly Journal of Economics' dedication of its May 1997 issue to the work of the late Amos Tversky, who pioneered behavioral decision theory. …


This study presents a wireless energy and data transfer system for neural implants with an emphasis on epilepsy monitoring. A wireless uplink data transmission system is built upon a remote powering system based on magnetic coupling which has been implemented previously. Uplink communication from the implant unit to the external base station is realized by shifting the resonance frequency of the load coil in the implant side. Effect of different detuning capacitances on power transfer efficiency and energy per bit is investigated. The in-vitro measurements of the system exhibits 32% power transfer efficiency while transferring 1 Mbit/s data from 10 mm distance at 8.5 MHz using a detuning capacitance of 120 pF. Furthermore, an optimization based on data rate, energy per bit, and power transfer efficiency has been proposed for the resonance frequency shift keying method.


In more than 30 years of studies on marine birds in Arctic Canada, we have observed numerous instances of mortality of adults, eggs, and chicks that seem unusual when compared to known sources of mortality for seabirds breeding in temperate or tropical regions. The extreme cold weather and ice conditions of the Arctic might intuitively be expected to be a significant factor in mortality for these Arctic birds. While weather conditions led directly to seabird mortality, other factors, perhaps facilitated by typical Arctic climate features, caused more deaths. In this paper, we summarize mortality incidents that we have witnessed for nine species of Arctic marine birds, as a baseline against which future observations can be made. We also speculate on mechanisms by which climate change could increase mortality of breeding Arctic seabirds in the future.


The taste system monitors the chemical environment to detect carbohydrates, proteins, fats and salt to be consumed and toxins to be avoided. It activates reflexes for swallowing or rejection, and powerful hedonic mechanisms of pleasure or disgust. Electrophysiological and neural imaging studies are revealing taste's neural organisation. The weight of evidence implies that reflexive responses to tastants are orchestrated in the hindbrain, that a cognitive analysis of taste quality and intensity is completed in primary taste cortex, and that the reward value of a taste is added in secondary taste cortex and in ventral forebrain areas. Taste signals are also integrated with those from touch, smell, vision and the viscera to compose a sense of flavour.

Key Concepts:

The taste system protects us from ingesting toxins through rejection reflexes and a sense of disgust; it encourages us to consume nutrients through swallowing reflexes and a sense of pleasure.

A cognitive identification of taste is most likely made in primary taste cortex in the insula.

Taste information is integrated with that from other senses in cortical and ventral forebrain areas to create a sense of flavour.

Taste and flavour are imbued with hedonic tone – pleasure or disgust – in orbitofrontal cortex and ventral forebrain.

Keywords:

taste;
nucleus of the solitary tract;
thalamic taste area;
insula;
orbitofrontal cortex;
amygdala;
hypothalamus;
functional MRI;
PET scan;
electrophysiology;
hedonics


Abstract Many local scale studies have shown that bats respond to water quality degradation or urbanization in a species‐specific manner. However, few have separated the effects of urbanization versus water quality degradation on bats, in single city or single watershed case studies. Across North Carolina, USA, we used the standardized North American Bat Monitoring Program mobile transect protocol to survey bat activity in 2015 and 2016 at 41 sites. We collected statewide water quality and urban land cover data to disentangle the effects of urbanization and water quality degradation on bats at the landscape scale. We found that statewide, water quality degradation and urbanization were not correlated. We found that bats responded to water quality degradation and urbanization independently at the landscape scale. Eptesicus fuscus and Lasiurus cinereus negatively responded to water quality degradation. Lasiurus borealis and Perimyotis subflavus positively responded to water quality degradation. Lasionycteris noctivagans did not respond to water quality degradation but was more active in more urbanized areas. Tadarida brasiliensis positively responded to urbanization and was less active in areas with degraded water quality. We show that bat–water quality relationships found at the local scale are evident at a landscape scale. We confirm that bats are useful bioindicators for both urbanization and water quality degradation. We suggest that water quality can be used to predict the presence of bat species of conservation concern, such as P. subflavus, in areas where it has not been studied locally.


Background Chronic pain conditions, such as fibromyalgia(FM), are among the most common health problems managed by general practitioners, rheumatologists, clinical psychologists.FM is characterised by multifocal pain, fatigue, non-restorative sleep, cognitive complaints high levels of distress, associated with greater affect intensity. There's evidence from randomised controlled trials that some treatments like pharmacotherapy, patient education,behavioural therapy and physiotherapy are effective in reducing symptoms;however the majority of the patients aren't satisfied with the current treatments.HBOT showed some clinical effects that may induce a significant improvement of the FM symptoms. Objectives The goal of this work was to evaluate the effect of HBOT on FM symptoms. Methods 33 female patients aged 29–63 y, with FM were included in this work. Patients initially pharmacologically treated(Pregabalin 150 mg/die, Duloxetine 60 mg/die) with unsatisfactory clinical improvement, were enrolled at the Rheumatology Unit San Cesario-Italy. The HBOT protocol comprised 20 sessions,3d/w,90 min,100% oxygen at 2.5ATA. Patients were randomly assigned to treated and control groups and evaluated every month for the next 4 months:patients in group A were treated with 20 sessions of HOBT in the first 2 months and evaluated for the following 2 months;patients in group B used the pharmacological treatment for the first 2 months and then were treated with 20 session of HOBT in the last 2 months. During HOBT no pharmacological treatment was allowed. The treated group patients were evaluated at baseline and after 10 and 20 HBOT sessions. Evaluations consisted of physical examination, including tender point count, and socio-demographic and clinimetric questionnaires:Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire(FIQ), Functional Assessment of Chronic IllnessTherapy, Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, Quality of life, Beck Depression Inventory, State Trait Anxiety Inventory, Pain Catastrophizing Scale. Results 5 patients withdrew from the HBOT treatment for claustrophobia.HBOT led to significant amelioration of all FM symptoms, with significant improvement in life quality.HOBT leads to a reduction in the number of tender points in the 2 groups. This reduction occurs in the group A without changing during the following 2 months of osservation. In the group B the improvement is more related to the HOBT than to the therapy. The FIQ score improves in group A. No improvement was observed in the control group. Conclusions The analgesic effects of HBOT have been studied in nociceptive, in inflammatory and neuropathic pain models, and may be useful for the treatment of various chronic pain syndromes. Excessive pain in FM may be due to hyperexcitability of the pain processing pathways and under-activity of the pain inhibiting pathways in the brain. It has been shown that HBOT increases cell metabolism, reduces apoptosis, alleviates oxidative stress, increases neurotrophin and nitric oxide levels by enhancing mitochondrial function in neurons and glial cells, it may even promote the neurogenesis of endogenous neural stem cells.HBOT-induced neuroplasticity also leads to the repair of chronically impaired brain functions. Our data confirm the effecicy of HBOT in treating FM. Further studies are required to evaluate the protocol and to understand the duration of the clinical effect. Disclosure of Interest None declared


An arteriovenous malformation is an abnormal tangle of blood vessels in the brain or spine. Some AVM's have no specific symptoms and little or no signs to one's life or health, while others cause severe and devastating effects when they bleed. Treatment options range from conservative watching to aggressive surgery, depending on the type, symptoms and location of the AVM.


This paper describes an approach to integrate knowledge base via converting predicates into Semantic networks and in frames. A knowledge base can be represented in a tabular form, a rule form, a tree form or any other form suitable for knowledge representation. Form conversion can be accomplished at all times. Unification of knowledge always overcome individual limitations and has synergetic effects in knowledge extraction. The graphical representation of knowledge base has more understandability than any other representation. Aim of this paper is to develop a system which accepts input from the user in the form of predicates and generates outputs with graphical representation of semantic networks as well as of frames.


We present preliminary results from a small-scale natural field experiment aimed at exploring online social contagion, with an application to charitable giving. We worked in partnership with Heifer International, a non-profit organization aimed at fighting poverty in developing countries, and HelpAttack!, the developer of a Facebook application that facilitates donations to charities while broadcasting such activities to the donors' Facebook contacts. We ran a series of marketing campaigns, and randomized the broadcasting of users' pledges, thereby creating exogenous variation in the information that users' contacts were receiving. Although our campaigns reached as many as about 13 million Facebook users, 6,000 users clicked on the ad and only 18 pledges were made, without any subsequent pledge from these users' contacts. We offer potential explanations for this finding on the absence of network effects, and outline our plans for future developments of this on-going project.


In this paper, we study optimization methods consisting of iteratively minimizing surrogates of an objective function. By proposing several algorithmic variants and simple convergence analyses, we make two main contributions. First, we provide a unified viewpoint for several first-order optimization techniques such as accelerated proximal gradient, block coordinate descent, or Frank-Wolfe algorithms. Second, we introduce a new incremental scheme that experimentally matches or outperforms state-of-the-art solvers for large-scale optimization problems typically arising in machine learning.


Abstract Multi-proxy analyses from floodplain deposits in the Colne Valley, southern England, have provided a palaeoenvironmental context for the immediately adjacent Terminal Upper Palaeolithic and Early Mesolithic site of Three Ways Wharf. These deposits show the transition from an open cool environment to fully developed heterogeneous floodplain vegetation during the Early Mesolithic. Several distinct phases of burning are shown to have occurred that are chronologically contemporary with the local archaeological record. The floodplain itself is shown to have supported a number of rare Urwaldrelikt insect species implying human manipulation of the floodplain at this time must have been limited or episodic. By the Late Mesolithic a reed-sedge swamp had developed across much of the floodplain, within which repeated burning of the in situ vegetation took place. This indicates deliberate land management practices utilising fire, comparable with findings from other floodplain sequences in southern Britain. With similar sedimentary sequences known to exist across the Colne Valley, often closely associated with contemporary archaeology, the potential for placing the archaeological record within a spatially explicit palaeoenvironmental context is great.


Perovskite oxides are a fascinating class of materials owing to their ability to display diverse functional properties while retaining similar crystal structures. In the past decades intense research efforts was focused on achieving novel/enhanced functionalities in perovskite films and interfaces, requiring also the development of new patterning technologies for structuring high quality hetero-interfaces and epitaxial multilayers. This thesis demonstrates the development of a novel lithographic technology, termed as "epitaxial lift-off patterning strategy", for in situ patterning of high temperature grown epitaxial complex perovskite oxide multilayers and detailed investigations of various lift-off fabricated functional devices.

Employing the epitaxial lift-off strategy, precise patterns of the conducting heterointerface between LaAlO3 and SrTiO3 (001) were successfully fabricated without using any physical ion etching step and preserving the high quality interfacial transport properties. It was also demonstrated that the lift-off pathway can precisely pattern even more complex interface systems such as SrCuO2-LAO-STO(001), containing high mobility carriers. In addition, the patterning process was modified and integrated with e-beam lithographic process, enabling fabrication of nano-scale devices to enable the future studies of low-dimensional confinement on high mobility interface conductivity as well as interfacial magnetism.

To demonstrate the versatility of the method, the thesis includes detailed discussion on the fabrication of all-oxide freestanding piezo-MEMS devices which are capable of functioning as very high sensitivity mass sensors. The fabrication is enabled by the lift-off pathway, facilitating a single step lift-off patterning of heteroepitaxial oxide multilayers. These freestanding epitaxial devices were studied in detail to characterize different intrinsic (material mediated) and extrinsic (from the operational medium) mechanisms causing vibrational damping, which were optimized to achieve a high quality factor of the electromechanical resonance leading to enhanced mass sensitivity. These results establish that the developed lift-off patterning strategy is a potential pathway to accomplish high performance micro and nano-devices incorporating delicate perovskite heterointerfaces and/or functional epitaxial perovskite multilayers.


In the United States, media that is politically fragmented, distrusted, or labeled as "fake" has amplified an atmosphere of uncertainty surrounding the current moment of partisan division and demographic change. This study uses a communication ecology framework to examine how audiences grapple with pervasive ambiguity as they navigate their media and communication resources. Drawing from a series of 13 focus groups looking at news and social media habits in four U.S. regions, this study explores how residents are adapting their media and communication practices within their communication ecologies. It reveals how residents cycle between verifying information and disengaging from news to relieve stress, and it explores possible pathways to resolve ambiguity.


We examine whether a simple quantitative measure of language can be used to predict individual firms' accounting earnings and stock returns. Our three main findings are: (1) the fraction of negative words in firm-specific news stories forecasts low firm earnings; (2) firms' stock prices briefly underreact to the information embedded in negative words; and (3) the earnings and return predictability from negative words is largest for the stories that focus on fundamentals. Together these findings suggest that linguistic media content captures otherwise hard-to-quantify aspects of firms' fundamentals, which investors quickly incorporate into stock prices. Copyright (c) 2008 by The American Finance Association.


Structural damage identification is fundamentally important for ensuring bridge safety and improving the pertinence of maintenance work. This paper proposes a new hybrid method for structural damage identification, which integrates the stepwise regression model based on uniform design and the intelligent optimization algorithm based on chaotic search. A numerical example is studied to investigate the efficiency and correctness of the proposed method. The simulation results demonstrated that the hybrid model can accurately identify the damage location and degree of the structure, the identification accuracy of the proposed method is satisfactory with 7.332% of mean relative percentage error and 9.878% of maximum relative percentage error. This paper provides a new way for damage identification of bridge structures.


BACKGROUND
Normal saline bolus is commonly used in clinical practice for treating hypotension in very preterm infants during resuscitation at an early age despite the paucity of high quality evidence supporting this practice.

OBJECTIVES
To determine the effects of early (<7 days after birth) saline boluses given to very preterm infant (VPI) from 23 to 31 weeks GA.

METHOD
This is a population-based cohort analysis of the use of normal saline boluses given to VPI. The outcomes were extracted from the Perinatal Follow-Up Program Database which included all VPI from Halifax County admitted to the NICU at the IWK Health Centre, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada between January 2006 to December 2010. We excluded infants with major congenital anomalies and those not offered resuscitation in the delivery room. Our primary outcome was the composite of death or disability by 18-36 months while secondary outcomes were neonatal death, BPD, CP, IVH, PVL, ROP, BSITD III (Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development®, Third Edition) Cognitive, Motor and Language score.

RESULTS
Death or disability in those who received saline bolus occurred in 15 (53.6%) compared with 9 (32.1%) in non saline group. Significantly higher rates of CP (p = 0.04), lower scores on the BSITDIII for motor (p = 0.04) and language scales (p = 0.03) were noted for infants who received saline boluses. Cognitive scores approached significance (p = 0.05) with lower scores in the saline bolus group.

CONCLUSION
Significant differences were found between the two groups in terms of long term neurodevelopmental outcome and one of the short-term outcome (i.e. BPD). Given the limitations of this retrospective study and the small sample size, a larger cohort from Canadian Neonatal Network database is warranted to evaluate the effects of using normal saline boluses during early life on neurodevelopmental.


Pleistocene Yedoma permafrost contains nearly a third of all organic matter (OM) stored in circum-arctic permafrost and is characterized by the presence of massive ice wedges. Due to its rapid formation by sediment accumulation and subsequent frozen storage, Yedoma OM is relatively well preserved and highly biologically available (biolabile) upon thaw. A better understanding of the processes regulating Yedoma degradation is important to improve estimates of the response and magnitude of permafrost carbon feedbacks to climate warming. In this study, we examine the composition of ice wedges and the influence of ice wedge thaw on the biolability of Yedoma OM. Incubation assays were used to assess OM biolability, fluorescence spectroscopy to characterize the OM composition, and potential enzyme activity rates to examine the controls and regulation of OM degradation. We show that increasing amounts of ice wedge melt water in Yedoma-leached incubations enhanced the loss of dissolved OM over time. This may be attributed to the presence of low-molecular weight compounds and low initial phenolic content in the OM of ice wedges, providing a readily available substrate that promotes the degradation of Yedoma OC. The physical vulnerability of ice wedges upon thaw (causing irreversible collapse), combined with the composition of ice wedge-engrained OM (co-metabolizing old OM), underlines the particularly strong potential of Yedoma to generate a positive feedback to climate warming relative to other forms of non-ice wedge permafrost.


Purpose - Haldane has suggested that modularity would add sustainability to the financial system. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a route by which such modularity might be achieved. Design/methodology/approach - The paper attempts to explore the micro-foundations of regulatory regimes as rule bound orders and demonstrate that externally imposed rules may not be absolutely necessary to constrain the behaviour of individuals or organisations. Voluntarily self-agreed rules may allow for greater communication and monitoring among the participants in a group. This in turn can result in greater sustainability. The paper uses examples from the work of Ostrom on sustainable common-pool resources to support this view. Examples are also given from the financial services industry. Findings - The paper suggests that non-legislative, informal rules of behaviour may be a useful source of constraining unsustainable behaviour in the financial services industry. In turn these self-enforcing rule-bound regimes may facilitate one feature of sustainable systems – modularity. Practical implications - The paper suggests that stakeholders in financial systems may find it useful, on a bottom-up basis, to facilitate the creation of groups of financial institutions that would create and then adhere to self-enforcing rules that could result in sustainable practices. Originality/value - The originality of the paper is on the focus on self-created and self-enforced rule-following and on using the work of Ostrom in a financial services setting.


With the rise of multi-socket multi-core CPUs a lot of effort is being put into how to best exploit their abundant CPU power. In a shared memory setting the multi-socket CPUs are equipped with their own memory module, and access memory modules across sockets in a non-uniform access pattern (NUMA). Memory access across socket is relatively expensive compared to memory access within a socket. One of the common solutions to minimize across socket memory access is to partition the data, such that the data affinity is maintained per socket. In this paper we explore the role of memory mapped storage to provide transparent data access in a NUMA environment, without the need of explicit data partitioning. We compare the performance of a database engine in a distributed setting in a multi-socket environment, with a database engine in a NUMA oblivious setting. We show that though the operating system tries to keep the data affinity to local sockets, a significant remote memory access still occurs, as the number of threads increase. Hence, setting explicit process and memory affinity results into a robust execution in NUMA oblivious plans. We use micro-experiments and SQL queries from the TPC-H benchmark to provide an in-depth experimental exploration of the landscape, in a four socket Intel machine.


The alleged misuse of scientific information to support public policy decisions has become one of the most prominent and controversial topics in American politics. Perceived government misuse of scientific data in highly controversial areas such as global warming, environmental protection, stem cell research, and contraception threatens to lead us not only toward policy positions that are inconsistent with scientific reality, but perhaps more importantly into a political environment where science-based policy decisions are no longer viewed as legitimate within our constitutional democracy. Due in part to these concerns about scientific integrity in administrative decisions, there is also a significant amount of attention being paid to scientific peer review in the administrative process ("administrative peer review"), a movement highlighted by a 2005 OMB bulletin mandating that administrative agencies obtain peer review of all important scientific information that they disseminate to the public.This article addresses the cross-section of these two issues through a normative analysis of peer review's impact on administrative legitimacy. To date, commentary on peer review in the administrative context has been limited to treating peer review either descriptively or as a largely monolithic enterprise. This article departs from that approach by asking the next logical questions - what model(s) of peer review are available to administrative agencies, and which of these is best suited to promote legitimacy in administrative decisions - and by creating a framework for answering them, first through the development of four distinct models of administrative peer review, and then by establishing a series of normative approaches, including a cost-benefit analysis, through which to evaluate each of the models. In addition to providing a new theoretical context in which to consider peer review, the results of the analyses are interesting in that they overwhelmingly support the multifaceted treatment of peer review developed here and raise serious questions about the most commonly used model of administrative peer review.


A number of civil rights activists have called for the defunding or abolition of American police departments. These activists claim that the United States overinvests in police, leaving fewer scarce resources to support other government services. Activists also claim that overinvestment in policing contributes to higher rates of police misconduct and unnecessary criminalization, particularly in communities of color.

This Article considers these calls for the defunding of police. It ultimately cautions against widespread defunding of police and offers an alternative proposal. Part I brings together multiple national databases on local government expenditures to evaluate empirically how states and municipalities fund policing. It shows that local police funding varies remarkably across jurisdictions. Much of this variation exists because police departments derive funding primarily from local sales and property taxes. Because of this funding mechanism, economically disadvantaged communities most in need of public-safety services can often least afford them.

Part II argues that the defunding of police departments on a wide scale may have significant and unintended consequences. This Article argues that defunding could increase crime rates, hamper efforts to control officer misconduct, and reduce officer safety. Faced with smaller budgets, defunded agencies may also seek additional revenue through potentially harmful means like excessive ticketing and civil asset forfeitures. Defunding could push the delivery of public-safety services to the private sector. And defunded agencies may ultimately lower officer salaries, thereby limiting recruitment and retention of qualified personnel.

Given these drawbacks, this Article remains skeptical that defunding will improve policing in many jurisdictions. Instead, this Article argues that states should fundamentally reimagine how they fund the police. States should view policing as a public good that ought to be equitably distributed across the population according to need. Just as some state legislatures have passed revenue-sharing initiatives designed to equalize the availability of public goods such as education, so too should states act to equalize the funding of local police departments according to need. This would ensure that all localities have minimally sufficient resources to investigate crime and promote public safety regardless of the strength of the local tax base. Additionally, to ensure the quality of policing services, states should require that each local police department earmark a specified percentage of its budget for officer training and accountability. Combined, these regulations of police funding could ensure that localities have sufficient resources to promote the public good without drawing limited resources away from other community initiatives.


AIM
The aim of this study was to evaluate the use of Resovist in perfusion-weighted imaging (PWI) of rat hyperacute cerebral infarction.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
30 Wistar rats were randomly divided into 2 groups. Group A was intravenously injected with 8 μmol Fe/kg body weight of Resovist, whilst Group B was injected with 0.2 mmol/kg body weight of Gd-DTPA. These dosages were chosen to provide comparable maximum signal changes in normally perfused brain. CBV, CBF and MTT parameter profiles were obtained for the core diseased region and the penumbra of brain ischemia and compared between the two groups. These results were then correlated with pathological findings and TTC staining.

RESULTS
In our rat stroke model, signal-time curves were similar between Gd-DTPA and Resovist, both in the core area with severe ischemia and in the penumbra area with moderate ischemia. The CBV, MTT, and TTP values of PWI for ischemic penumbra in Groups A and B showed no statistical disparity.

CONCLUSION
The efficacy of Resovist in MR PWI is similar to Gd-DTPA in the diagnosis of perfusion reduction in the rat stroke model.


BACKGROUND
The under five mortality rate (U5MR) is measure of wellbeing and decreasing the U5MR by two thirds is the target towards the achievement of the millennium development goal number four (MDG4).

OBJECTIVE
To describe the changes in U5MR in Uganda from 1954 to 2000 and use them to project future trends up to 2015.

METHODS
We did a retrospective analysis of the Uganda national censuses of 1969, 1991 and 2002. We calculated the percentage of the annual average reduction rate (AARR) of U5MR between the years 1954-1966, 1966-1975, 1975-1988 and from 1988 to 2000. The AARRs of U5MR between 1954 and 2000 were then compared to that of 4.4% required to achieve MDG4.

RESULTS
The U5MR in Uganda between 1954 and 1966 decreased from 261 to 180 deaths per 1000 live births with an AARR of 3.05%. Between 1975 and 1988, the U5MR increased with AARR from 1966 to 1975 being -1.05% while the AARR from 1976 to 1988 was -0.11%. From 1988 to 2000 U5MR decreased from 205 to 152 deaths per 1000 live births with an AARR of 2.46%.

CONCLUSIONS
The AARRs for the U5MR of -1.05-3.05% were below the 4.4% required to achieve MDG4.


Abstract The export participation of SMEs in the Swedish computer and business service industries has increased rapidly over the last decade. Despite this, export participation rates—including those of micro enterprises—remained low at 13 per cent in computer services and 8 per cent in business services in 2010. Based on uniquely linked firm-level datasets with full coverage of micro enterprises, this study investigates the determinants of the export participation of Swedish SMEs in the computer and business service industries. Exports include both goods and services. Estimates based on the conditional fixed-effects logit model show a significantly positive relationship between initial labour productivity and the decision to export. One new and interesting finding is that the magnitude of the relationship between the probability to export and initial labour productivity is low when controlling for firm effects. Surprisingly, the impact of labour productivity on exporting in computer services does not differ between micro enterprises and other SMEs (10–249 employees). In business services, the relationship between export probability and labour productivity on the one hand and skill intensity on the other is significant for micro enterprises, but not for other SMEs (10–249 employees).


Investment arbitration decisions are often inconsistent. In particular, complaints about the unpredictability of NAFTA Chapter 11 jurisprudence and the difficulties in balancing foreign investors' interest and public policy are common and unresolved. An examination of the role of interest groups may shed important light on the resolution of that problem as they are involved in the social construction of the meaning and use of NAFTA Chapter 11 through arbitration and public debate. This work discusses the extent to which amici curiae empower public interest groups that seek to protect citizen-consumers. It argues that currently amici curiae provides an extremely narrow list of participation rights to public interest groups that, coupled with economic and political disadvantages in many cases, result in censoring the views of such groups and playing the political role of symbolic accountability. This work proposes an expansive view of amici curiae for public interest groups in light of the potential of the latter to counter the influence of corporate interest groups and to contribute to both minimize NAFTA Chapter 11 inconsistencies and strike a more realistic balance between the public interest and foreign investors' interest. The overall impact of such expansive amici curiae will probably be the defragmentation of NAFTA Chapter 11, that is to say, public interest groups will be empowered to introduce public interest considerations such as human rights, environmental protection and public health into NAFTA analysis, that are likely to protect the interest of local citizen-consumers. However, that requires not only greater legal powers for public interest groups, but also favorable financial and political conditions for an effective participation of public interest groups in NAFTA disputes. The argument is illustrated with a brief discussion of amici curiae in the context of anti-smoking groups and tobacco policies in Canada affecting particularly vulnerable groups with high rates of tobacco consumption such as aboriginal communities and low-income groups.


This contribution to a symposium marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of Erie Railroad Company v. Tompkins is part of a larger project in which I seek to demystify a decision that has enchanted, entangled, and enervated commentators for decades. In prior work I contended that the "Erie doctrine" is a misleading label encompassing four distinct inquiries that address the creation, interpretation, and prioritization of federal law and the adoption of state law when federal law is inapplicable. This article builds from that premise to argue that courts pursuing Erie's four inquiries would benefit from default rules that establish initial assumptions and structure judicial analysis. Considering the potential utility of default rules leads to several conclusions that could help clarify and improve decision-making under Erie. First, courts deciding whether a state rule has priority over a conflicting judge-made federal rule in diversity cases should default to federal law despite the intuitive appeal of state law. Second, when courts are considering whether to create federal common law, the proponent of a federal solution should bear the burden of persuasion. Third, the Supreme Court should replace the rule from Klaxon v. Stentor Electric, which requires federal courts to identify applicable nonfederal law by using the forum state's choice of law standards, with a default rule that favors forum standards while authorizing federal choice of law standards in appropriate circumstances. Reconsidering how federal courts choose applicable nonfederal laws would also provide an opportunity to reconcile Klaxon's irrebuttable preference for intrastate uniformity with the more flexible default rule in United States v. Kimbell Foods, which requires courts crafting federal common law to incorporate state standards unless there is a good reason to create nationally uniform standards. Finally, courts should develop a default rule — which one might label an "Erie canon" — to determine whether federal statutes and rules should be interpreted broadly or narrowly to embrace or avoid conflict with otherwise applicable state laws.


Field investigations of phenotypic variation in free living organisms are often limited in scope owing to time and funding constraints. By collaborating with online communities of amateur naturalists, investigators can greatly increase the amount and diversity of phenotypic data in their analyses while simultaneously engaging with a public audience. Here, we present a method for quantifying phenotypes of individual organisms in citizen scientists' photographs. We then show that our protocol for measuring wing phenotypes from photographs yields accurate measurements in two species of Calopterygid damselflies. Finally, we present results from two case studies: (1) an analysis of wing pigmentation in male smoky rubyspots (Hetaerina titia) showing previously undocumented geographical variation in a seasonal polyphenism, and (2) an analysis of variation in the relative size of the wing spots of male banded demoiselles (Calopteryx splendens) in Great Britain questioning previously documented evidence for character displacement. Additionally, we show that, while most observations of our target species were made by members of the large and established community of amateur naturalists at iNaturalist.org, our efforts to increase recruitment through various outreach initiatives were successful. Our results demonstrate that our protocol can be used to create high quality phenotypic datasets using citizen scientists' photographs, and, when combined with metadata (e.g., date and location), can greatly broaden the scope of studies of geographical and temporal variation in phenotypes. Our analyses of the recruitment and engagement process also demonstrate that collaborating with an online community of amateur naturalists can be a powerful way to conduct hypothesis-driven research aiming to elucidate the processes that impact trait evolution at landscape scales.


DENISE BEATTIE: Evaluation of the Impact of a Mentor-Based Induction Program on Teacher Retention Feelings of isolation and defeat experienced by many novice teachers during their initial years have caused them to leave the profession before they are able to impact students' academic performance. The School District of Palm Beach County, afflicted by the cyclic trend of having to recruit and retrain beginning teachers, partnered with the New Teacher Center in 2009 to implement a mentor-based induction program. The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of the support provided by the district's mentor-based program on teacher retention as it compared to the support provided by school-based mentoring. A quasi-experimental design was used to determine whether there were any differences between teachers who participated in the district's mentor-based program and those who participated in a school-based program; specifically, teachers' induction program experiences and the likelihood of teacher retention. The results of the study suggest that demographics had no significance on the teachers' perception of their induction program. Furthermore, data from the survey indicate that although teachers who were assigned full-release mentors had a more positive experience during their beginning years as professionals their decision to remain in the profession was not greater than those who were assigned school-based mentors. On the contrary, results fiom the focus group imply that mentees with full-released mentors were more content with their work environment and were more likely to remain in the classroom longer in comparison to their colleagues supported by school-based mentors.


The loss of small streams and lack of open green spaces is the result of urban sprawl and traditional development. Many developers view stormwater treatment and mitigation as an onerous requirement that adds cost but not value. The result is that the stormwater management methods often lack connection to the surrounding environment and fail to connect communities to water. Synergizing with developers, architects and landscape architects during the early stages of development facilitates the design of stormwater treatment and mitigation with the potential to enhance amenity value. The resulting creation of green space in an urban environment can increase property values and livability. This paper presents 4 different developments that seek to achieve stormwater management that creates amenity, drawing upon some new technologies adapted to New Zealand's unique environment. The first development is a retirement village where the traffic loading was expected to be low. The local territorial authority requirements included treatment and mitigation for the 1% AEP rainfall event to the equivalent of grass runoff. The objective was met by providing stormwater flow-through planters incorporated into the overall landscape design. The flow-through planters employ a river stone surface which behaves as a rocky-river bed removing suspended solids and providing visual balance. The second project required flood protection and pre-treatment for a highly urbanised commercial environment. The design provides detention storage for the 1% AEP rainfall event and pre-treatment in a device analogous to a rocky-river valley. The third development used a banded wetland to replace a pond design which was initially consented by the territorial authority. The wetland was designed to allow community interaction with the habitat. The fourth project takes a fresh approach to vegetated swales as a community amenity. The vegetated swale design involved tying it to the native landscape, providing low maintenance and longevity.


Abstract The European Commission requested the EFSA Panel on Plant Health to prepare and deliver risk assessments for commodities listed in Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2018/2019 as 'High risk plants, plant products and other objects'. Momordica fruits originating from countries where Thrips palmi is known to occur qualify as high risk plants. This Scientific Opinion covers the introduction risk for T. palmi posed by fruits of Momordica charantia L. imported from Mexico, taking into account the available scientific information, including the technical information provided by the National Service of Health, Safety and Agrifood Quality (Senasica) of Mexico. The risk mitigation measures proposed in the technical dossier from Mexico were evaluated taking into account the possible limiting factors. An expert judgement is given on the likelihood of pest freedom taking into consideration the potential pest pressure in the field, the risk mitigation measures acting on the pest in the field and in the packinghouse, including uncertainties associated with the assessment. For T. palmi on M. charantia fruits from Mexico, an expert judgement is given on the likelihood of pest freedom following the evaluation of the risk mitigation measures acting on T. palmi, including any uncertainties. The Expert Knowledge Elicitation indicated, with 95% certainty that between 9,492 and 10,000 M. charantia fruits per 10,000 will be free from T. palmi.


The growing market of biopharmaceuticals and the constant developments in upstream fermentation have generated a strong demand for new downstream purification methods. Magnetic separation in combination with functional magnetic particles has been known for many years as a promising candidate for a direct capturing tool in protein purification but the lack of suitable GMP-compliant purification equipment has prevented the launch of this technology in large scale bioprocessing. To tackle this bottle-neck, the principle of a "rotor-stator" high-gradient magnetic separator is fully redesigned to meet the rigorous requirements of modern cGMP biotechnology purification processes. In order to fulfill regulatory requirements, the separation chamber is reengineered to allow effective cleaning and sterilization in place while maintaining excellent separation capacities and efficiencies. Two kinds of commercially available magnetic particles are used to validate key performance data and determine system related parameters in order to calculate process performance figures for process optimization of the new magnetic separation device. With separation capacities of over 400 g of magnetic particles per liter of separation chamber volume and separation efficiencies as well as recovery rates over 99%, the system is able to process more than 200 l crude feedstock per day and capture more than 1.6 kg target compounds.


The bioreactivity or susceptibility of dissolved organic matter (DOM) to microbial degradation in streams and rivers is of critical importance to global change studies, but a comprehensive understanding of DOM bioreactivity has been elusive due, in part, to the stunningly diverse assemblages of organic molecules within DOM. We approach this problem by employing a range of techniques to characterize DOM as it flows through biofilm reactors: dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations, excitation emission matrix spectroscopy (EEMs), and ultrahigh resolution mass spectrometry. The EEMs and mass spectral data were analyzed using a combination of multivariate statistical approaches. We found that 45% of stream water DOC was biodegraded by microorganisms, including 31–45% of the humic DOC. This bioreactive DOM separated into two different groups: (1) H/C centered at 1.5 with O/C 0.1–0.5 or (2) low H/C of 0.5–1.0 spanning O/C 0.2–0.7 that were positively correlated (Spearman ranking) with chromophoric and fluorescent DOM (CDOM and FDOM, respectively). DOM that was more recalcitrant and resistant to microbial degradation aligned tightly in the center of the van Krevelen space (H/C 1.0–1.5, O/C 0.25–0.6) and negatively correlated (Spearman ranking) with CDOM and FDOM. These findings were supported further by principal component analysis and 2‐D correlation analysis of the relative magnitudes of the mass spectral peaks assigned to molecular formulas. This study demonstrates that our approach of processing stream water through bioreactors followed by EEMs and FTICR‐MS analyses, in combination with multivariate statistical analysis, allows for precise, robust characterization of compound bioreactivity and associated molecular level composition.


The activity of 736 single neurons was recorded from the hippocampal formation (HF), the rhinal cortex (RH), the medial and anterior inferior temporal cortex (TE), or areas TF and TH of the parahippocampal gyrus (PHG) of monkeys during the performance of a delayed matching to sample task. The results indicate differences between the areas in their contributions to sensory processing and memory. Of the neurons, 55% responded to either the first (S1) and/or the second (S2) of the two successively presented visual stimuli. The proportion of responsive neurons and the proportion of neurons that responded selectively on the basis of shape or color (but not size) were significantly higher in areas TE + RH than in HF + PHG. The responses to S1 differed from those to S2 for 18% of the total sample: of these differentially responsive neurons, 66% of the TE + RH neurons responded more strongly to S1 (the sample presentation, allowing stimulus acquisition), whereas 71% of the HF + PHG neurons responded more strongly to S2 (the match/nonmatch comparison, when the behavioral decision could be made). Of 239 TE + RH neurons recorded during the delayed matching task or when objects were shown, 12% displayed evidence of memory for the previous occurrence of stimuli by responding strongly to the first, but significantly less strongly to subsequent presentations of visual stimuli that were novel or had not been seen recently. In contrast, none (0%) of 328 neurons so tested in HF and PHG had a response that declined significantly on stimulus repetition. For six (86%) of seven TE + RH neurons tested, the decrement in response persisted even after distraction by intervening presentations of other stimuli. Further evidence of information storage was found for 7 (33%) of 21 neurons for which responses to the first presentations of unfamiliar objects were significantly greater than to the first presentations of very familiar objects, even though the familiar objects had not been seen for greater than 15 min.


Incorporating risk consideration in access control systems has recently become a popular research topic. Related to this is risk awareness which is needed to enable access control in an agile and dynamic way. While risk awareness is probably known for an established access control system, being aware of risk even before the access control system is defined can mean identification of users and permissions that are most likely to lead to dangerous or error-prone situations from an administration point of view. Having this information available during the role engineering phase allows data analysts and role engineers to highlight potentially risky users and permissions likely to be misused. While there has been much recent work on role mining, there has been little consideration of risk during the process. In this thesis, we propose to add risk awareness to role mining. We aggregate the various possible risk factors and categorize them into four general types, which we refer to as risk metrics, in the context of role mining. These risk metrics are Similarity, Compliance to Policies, Trust and Sensitivity and Permission Misuse and Abuse. Next, we propose a framework that incorporates some specific examples of each of these risk metrics before and after role mining. We have implemented a proof-of-concept prototype, a Risk Awareness system for Role Mining (aRARM) based on this framework and applied it to two case studies: a small organizational project and a university database setting. The aRARM prototype is automatically able to detect different types of risk factors when we add different types of noise to this data. The results from the two case studies draw some correlation between the behavior of the different risk factors due to different types and amounts of noise. We also discuss the effect of the different types and amounts of noise on the different role mining algorithms implemented for this study. While the detection rating value for calculating the risk priority number has previously been calculated after role mining, we attempt to find an initial estimate of the detection rating before role mining.


At the University of Minnesota, under the supervision of one staff surgeon, both the jejunoileal bypass (JIB) and gastric bypass (GIB) operations have been done for weight reduction in morbidly obese individuals. Over the past 11 years, end-to-end (40 to 4 cm) JIB performed for 727 patients. In addition, antecolic GIB was performed for 364 patients over the past 6 years. This report is based primarily on a comparison of 205 JIB and 106 GIB patients with surgery between July 1975 and July 1979. Adequate weight loss was seen in 75% of each group. The percentage of excess body weight loss was similar for the first year (65% for JIB and 62% for GIB); however, the JIB patients started at 214% of ideal weight and GIB patients at 197% of ideal weight. The operative mortality rate for either operation was well below 1%, and the immediate operative morbidity rate was low and only rarely delayed discharge from the hospital. The long-term complications for JIB were 37.7% arthralgia or arthritis, 7.1% oxalate urolithiasis, 5.6 incisional hernia, and 1.4% liver failure; complications of GIB were 10.2% nausea and/or vomiting, 1.9% reflux esophagitis, and 2.8% anastomotic problems. At 1 year, plasma cholesterol reductions for JIB patients averaged 42% (P less than 0.001), whereas for the GIB patients it ws only 14% (P less than 0.001). At 1 year after operation, 49% of 88 JIB patients showed progression of liver disease on sequential biopsies, with 31% unchanged and 20% improved. In 43 GIB patients, the biopsies showed improvement in 58%, an unchanged status in 30%, and worsening in 12%. The levels of serum glutamic oxaloacetic transaminase and alkaline phosphatase increased after JIB and eventually returned to normal, while GIB patients had only minor fluctuations of liver function tests. Comparable therapeutic weight results occurred with JIB and GIB; however, the GIB was associated with far fewer serious long-term complications and the JIB with a far greater cholesterol lowering. A percentage of the GIB patients showed progression of liver disease at 1 year after bypass.


Abstract The ageing process in the European society will become one of the key driving forces of change over the next decades. The specific demands of older generations constitute a key market of the future, and the pressure to improve and expand health services increases, especially as far as chronic diseases, such as cancer. Availability of cost effective cancer early detection protocols, based on predictive biomarkers, will improve patients management reducing consequently the high costs associated to treating patients when the disease is at an advanced stage.


Walking, getting lost, and finding that home is half way between refuge and a place to look out from at the unsettling and unsettled world, are the dominant themes in Sarah Corbett's fifth collection. Written from an intimate knowledge of the countryside of the Calder Valley, many of these poems respond to a landscape as beautiful as it is disquieting, troubled by a warming climate and by violence and loss both public and private. A central sequence – part found poem, part assemblage – draws on the Grasmere Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, poems that question the nature of the visionary, the in- between worlds that this poet claims as her territory; here nature is held up as a mirror where we might see ourselves and our actions reflected. Over all haunts the presence-in-absence of Sylvia Plath, whose burial place the author can see from her bedroom window. Throughout, interior lights – a train on a dark morning, a sudden snowfall, moonlight and starlight, sun on lake water, the love between a parent and child – attempt to balance the darkness.


In this paper, we present a simple costing model supported by three case studies to demonstrate the ways in which a technology intervention"s ability to deliver cost savings through efficiency gains is conditional on the local economic environment. Examining a set of information collection and processing transaction tasks that are part of a microfinance institution"s workflow, we find that technology-enabled gains depend critically on the technology"s impact on labour productivity and variable capital costs, in the context of the local wage rate for adequately skilled labour. In certain contexts, the per-transaction gains from using capital-intensive technologies are overwhelmed by the fixed and operating resources required to generate and sustain these gains.


Study Design. Biomechanical tensile testing of perinatal, neonatal, and pediatric cadaveric cervical spines to failure. Objective. To assess the tensile failure properties of the cervical spine from birth to adulthood. Summary of Background Data. Pediatric cervical spine biomechanical studies have been few due to the limited availability of pediatric cadavers. Therefore, scaled data based on human adult and juvenile animal studies have been used to augment the limited pediatric cadaver data. Despite these efforts, substantial uncertainty remains in our understanding of pediatric cervical spine biomechanics. Methods. A total of 24 cadaveric osteoligamentous head-neck complexes, 20 weeks gestation to 18 years, were sectioned into segments (occiput-C2 [O-C2], C4–C5, and C6–C7) and tested in tension to determine axial stiffness, displacement at failure, and load-to-failure. Results. Tensile stiffness-to-failure (N/mm) increased by age (O-C2: 23-fold, neonate: 22 ± 7, 18 yr: 504; C4–C5: 7-fold, neonate: 71 ± 14, 18 yr: 509; C6–C7: 7-fold, neonate: 64 ± 17, 18 yr: 456). Load-to-failure (N) increased by age (O-C2: 13-fold, neonate: 228 ± 40, 18 yr: 2888; C4–C5: 9-fold, neonate: 207 ± 63, 18 yr: 1831; C6–C7: 10-fold, neonate: 174 ± 41, 18 yr: 1720). Normalized displacement at failure (mm/mm) decreased by age (O-C2: 6-fold, neonate: 0.34 ± 0.076, 18 yr: 0.059; C4–C5: 3-fold, neonate: 0.092 ± 0.015, 18 yr: 0.035; C6–C7: 2-fold, neonate: 0.088 ± 0.019, 18 yr: 0.037). Conclusion. Cervical spine tensile stiffness-to-failure and load-to-failure increased nonlinearly, whereas normalized displacement at failure decreased nonlinearly, from birth to adulthood. Pronounced ligamentous laxity observed at younger ages in the O-C2 segment quantitatively supports the prevalence of spinal cord injury without radiographic abnormality in the pediatric population. This study provides important and previously unavailable data for validating pediatric cervical spine models, for evaluating current scaling techniques and animal surrogate models, and for the development of more biofidelic pediatric crash test dummies.


Purpose
An alliance of schools and researchers formed a collaborative community of practice in order to understand and improve the sensory school environment for pupils on the autistic spectrum, and incorporate the findings into school improvement planning. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Design/methodology/approach
Representatives of special and mainstream schools in South London and a team of researchers formed the project team, including an autistic researcher. The researchers and a named staff member from each of the schools met regularly over the course of 18 months in order to work on an iterative process to improve the sensory experience pupils had of the school environment. Each school completed sensory audits and observations, and was visited by members of the research team. Parents were involved via meetings with the research team and two conferences were organised to share findings.

Findings
Useful outcomes included: developing and sharing of good practice between schools; opportunities for parents of autistic pupils to discuss their concerns, particularly with someone with insider perspective; and exploration of creative ways to achieve pupil involvement and the idea that good autism practice has the potential to benefit all pupils. A resource pack was produced for the schools to access. Plans are in place to revisit the initiative in 12 months' time in order to ascertain whether there have been long-term benefits.

Originality/value
Projects building communities of practice involving autistic people as core team members are rare, yet feedback from those involved in the project showed this to be a key aspect of shared learning.


Security researchers agree that security control is a difficult to observe credence quality of online services that Internet users cannot easily assess through research or experience. Yet there is evidence that users form perceptions of security control that strongly determine how much trust they put in online services. This study investigates whether users' security control perceptions arise solely from their predispositions or whether online service providers can influence them. The study also examines whether these seemingly undependable perceptions of security control lead to trust or whether more traditional factors might offer a better explanation of trust under security risks. To address these issues, this study proposes a new theory of security assurance that integrates the frameworks of trust and quality signals. The results show that rather than being guided by predispositions, users appear to mainly assess security control based on indirect cues controlled by service providers. Importantly, Internet users do not treat the credence quality of security the same way they treat qualities that can be understood through search and experience. Although returning users develop security control perceptions and trust from the usual heuristics of ongoing relationships, they also continue to evaluate market information about service providers like they do in new relationships. The proposed model offers a new perspective of how users respond to the uncertain and technically challenging qualities prevalent in online services.


This article investigates whether the process of globalisation, through trade and financial liberalisation, benefits economic growth in emerging market
economies in general and in South Africa in particular. The analysis of trade
openness and liberalisation in emerging market economies reveals that trade volume has a relative small impact on GDP per capita, while trade liberalisation
led to an approximate 50 per cent increase on GDP per capita. The analysis of the financial dimension showed that capital account openness is associated with a 34 per cent increase in real GDP per capita growth over the period, while financial liberalisation seems to have a dramatic impact of approximately 136 per cent. In South Africa approximately 98 per cent of the current growth performance in the country can be explained by the forces of globalisation.


The Lower Cretaceous (Berriasian) Valdeprado Formation (Cameros Basin, northern Spain) contains more than 900 m of laminated carbonates and pseudomorphs after sulfates. Traditionally, many sedimentary packages of different ages and lithologies have been interpreted as deep-water deposits based essentially on the abundance of laminations and the absence of subaerial exposure features. In contrast, the Valdeprado Formation provides an example of a shallow-water deposit dominated by laminations with scarce evidence of subaerial exposure, and gives criteria to solve the challenge of distinguishing
shallow-water and deep-water, ancient laminated deposits.
The two most abundant facies all along the Valdeprado Formation are: a) parallel-laminated limestone, formed by
alternating carbonate mudstone and calcite and quartz pseudomorphs after displacive gypsum, and b) graded-laminated limestone, consisting of quartz, mica, ostracodes, and pseudomorphs after detrital gypsum grains at the base, which changes gradually upwards to carbonate mudstone. Parallel-laminated limestone and graded-laminated limestone could have been deposited in either deep or shallow environments as a result of salinity fluctuations driven by alternation of flooding and
evaporation and by sediment resuspension processes, respectively. Subaerial exposure features, such as desiccation mudcracks, are scarce in most of the succession, except in a few meter-scale stratigraphic intervals where they are very abundant. Interestingly, in these intervals desiccation cracks are present at the tops of several successive laminae (up to 25 mudcracked
laminae per meter of deposit), indicating that, at least during those periods of time, deposition occurred in shallow water bodies that were desiccated frequently. In the upper part of the stratigraphic section, parallel-laminated and graded-laminated limestones are associated with current-ripple and wave-ripple cross-laminated arenites, and ostracode mudstone to wackestone with centimeter-size pseudomorphs after lenticular gypsum, and abundant desiccation mudcracks and tepees, which also suggest
sedimentation in shallow-water environments. Moreover, the laminated carbonates display continuous, parallel layering, and the same facies along the 40-km-long outcropping area. These deposits are directly interbedded with, and pass laterally to, siliciclastic sandy–muddy flat deposits in the western area of the basin, without clinoforms, slump structures, or slide masses in between. All of these features suggest deposition in shallow, perennial carbonate–sulfate water bodies and their peripheral mudflats, developed in a flat-bottomed basin with no marked gradients.


Scientific Workflow Managements Systems (SWfMSs), such as our own
research prototype e-BioFlow, are being used by bioinformaticians to design
and run data-intensive experiments, connecting local and remote (Web)
services and tools. Preserving data, for later inspection or reuse,
determine the quality of results. To validate results is essential for
scientific experiments. This can all be achieved by collecting provenance
data. The dependencies between services and data are captured in a
provenance model, such as the interchangeable Open Provenance Model
(OPM). This research consists of the following two provenance related goals:

 1. Using a provenance archive effectively and efficiently as cache for
 workflow tasks.
 2. Designing techniques to support browsing and navigation through
 a provenance archive.

The use case identified is called OligoRAP, taken from the life science
domain. OligoRAP is casted as a workflow in the SWfMS e-BioFlow. Its
performance in terms of duration was measured and its results validated
by comparing them to the results of the original Perl implementation. By
casting OligoRAP as a workflow and using parallelism, its performance
is improved by a factor two.

Many improvements were made to e-BioFlow in order to run OligoRAP,
among which a new provenance implementation based on the OPM, enabling
provenance capturing during the execution of OligoRAP in e-BioFlow.
During this research, e-BioFlow has grown from a proof-of-concept
to a powerful research prototype.
For the OPM implementation, a profile for the OPM to collect provenance
data during workflow execution has been proposed, that defines
how provenance is collected during workflow enactment. The proposed
profile maintains the hierarchical structure of (sub)workflows in the
collected provenance data. With this profile, interoperability of the
OPM for SWfMS is improved.
A caching strategy is proposed for caching workflow tasks and is
implemented in e-BioFlow. It queries the OPM implementation for previous
task executions. The queries are optimised by formulating them
differently and creating several indices. The performance improvement of
each optimisation was measured using a query set taken from an OligoRAP
cache run. Three tasks in OligoRAP were cached, resulting in an additional
performance improvement of 19%. A provenance archive based on the
OPM can be used to effectively cache workflow tasks.
A provenance browser is introduced that incorporates several techniques
to help browsing through large provenance archives. Its primary
visualisation is the graph representation specified by the OPM.