The purpose of this study was to (a) objectively measure and analyze performance deviations from mechanical regularity for three jazz pianists via MIDI-based "groove quantize" procedures and (b) measure
 how experts rate musical examples incorporating these deviations as being representative of the swing style. The "groove quantize" software procedure was used to measure performance deviations from mechanical
 regularity for (a) note placements (timings), (b) note durations (articulations), and (c) note velocities (dynamics) contained in 281 measures from 33 performances by three professional jazz pianists. Differences
 among the performers and for relationships between the performance variables and tempi were measured. Performance models or "grooves" were developed representative of each performer9s style and a general
 swing style. For comparison, "mechanical" models were constructed on the basis of mathematical ratios. Forty-two judges rated the "swing representativeness" of an unaltered melody from each pianist and
 seven variations of each, four based on the derived performance models and three based on the mechanical model. Analysis revealed that four derived performance model variations were rated significantly
 more representative of the swing style than were the mechanical variations. Swing ratings did not differ significantly between an unaltered melody and variations based on individual performance models for
 two of the performers, suggesting that they were representative grooves.


Inactivation of the beta4 subunit of the calcium channel in the mouse neurological mutant lethargic results in a complex neurological disorder that includes absence epilepsy and ataxia. To determine the role of the calcium-channel beta4-subunit gene CACNB4 on chromosome 2q22-23 in related human disorders, we screened for mutations in small pedigrees with familial epilepsy and ataxia. The premature-termination mutation R482X was identified in a patient with juvenile myoclonic epilepsy. The R482X protein lacks the 38 C-terminal amino acids containing part of an interaction domain for the alpha1 subunit. The missense mutation C104F was identified both in a German family with generalized epilepsy and praxis-induced seizures and in a French Canadian family with episodic ataxia. These coding mutations were not detected in 255 unaffected control individuals (510 chromosomes), and they may be considered candidate disease mutations. The results of functional tests of the truncated protein R482X in Xenopus laevis oocytes demonstrated a small decrease in the fast time constant for inactivation of the cotransfected alpha1 subunit. Further studies will be required to evaluate the in vivo consequences of these mutations. We also describe eight noncoding single-nucleotide substitutions, two of which are present at polymorphic frequency, and a previously unrecognized first intron of CACNB4 that interrupts exon 1 at codon 21.


A 73 year old woman, Mrs K, presented to her general practitioner with a one month history of increasing breathlessness and fatigue. She had no other symptoms and no medical history. Mrs K was a non-smoker and was not taking any drugs.

On examination, Mrs K's respiratory rate was 14 breaths per minute and her heart rate was 64 beats per minute. Her blood pressure was 125/73 mm Hg and she was clinically euvolaemic. She was found to have a new systolic murmur, loudest at the apex, with bibasal fine crackles. Her elecrocardiogram showed sinus rhythm. Her C reactive protein level was raised at 12 mg/L (<10 mg/L).

Mrs K was referred to hospital because of her symptoms and the results of her examination. A transthoracic echocardiogram (figure⇓) showed a mobile mass in the left atrium, measuring 7 × 3.5cm . It was protruding through the mitral valve, resulting in moderate mitral regurgitation.

Transthoracic echocardiogram of Mrs K


Most societies depend on the willingness of community members to donate their time for the provision of essential services, such as delivering meals to homes of people with mobility issues, distributing food to the homeless, and protecting people's homes and lives in cases of natural disasters. However, somewhat alarmingly, recent figures indicate that after 15 years of consistent increases in the number of adults demonstrating civic participation through volunteering, rates fell from a high of 36 % in 2010 down five percentage points to 31 % in 2014. As a consequence, many organisations that rely on volunteers for the provision of a range of services are under substantial pressure to retain current, and recruit more, volunteers. This chapter discusses the potential benefits of marketing techniques for organisations that depend on individuals donating their time to help a social cause; elaborates on why market segmentation is a suitable approach to encourage civic participation and why it is likely to outperform mass marketing; and offers practical examples of how market segmentation has been applied to (1) increase the participation of community members from distinctly different cultural backgrounds in environmental volunteering, (2) identify different patterns of volunteering motivations which can be targeted with marketing messages to increase recruitment, and (3) determine which sections of the general population represent promising targets for foster carer recruitment. The key message of this chapter is that organisations with noble missions would benefit from overcoming the perception that marketing is not noble enough for them to engage in. Instead, they should embrace marketing in general, and market segmentation specifically, as effective tools which will help them achieve their goals. Disciplines Business Publication Details Randle, M. & Dolnicar, S. (2017). Increasing Civic Participation Through Market Segmentation. In T. Dietrich, S. Rundle-Thiele & K. Kubacki (Eds.), Segmentation in Social Marketing: Process, Methods and Application (pp. 129-142). Singapore: Springer Singapore. This book chapter is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/buspapers/1124


Findings are presented from analyses of mollusks collected from sites along the East and West Coasts of the United States, from 1986 through 1989, by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) National Status and Trends Program (NS&T). Contaminant levels in surface sediments and in the tissues of three species of mussels from 96 sites have been used as indicators of the status of coastal environmental quality. Generally, the greastest accumulations of organic contaminants are found in mussel tissues from urban areas. For instance, the highest levels of PAHs were found in samples from the Hudson-Raritan Estuary, NY, and Elliott Bay, WA. The highest levels of PCBs were found at Angelica Rock in Buzzards Bay, MA, followed by moderately high concentrations in the Hudson-Raritan Estuary, NY and NJ, and a second Buzzard's Bay site (Round Hill). Highest levels of DDT were found in mollusks from sites off Palos Verdes and San Pedro Harbor, CA. Uptake of metal contaminants by mollusks is variable among and within genera. Urban sites with high metal and organic contaminant concentrations in mussel tissues are shown to be associated by complete linkage cluster analyses. Comparisons between NS&T data (1986-88) and the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Mussel Watch data (1975-78) indicate significant decadal differences: lead and cadmium in mussel tissues are lower while copper concentrations are higher.


Many decisions we face are characterized by risk or uncertainty we must make choices prior to knowing the outcome. However, we often know the potential outcomes and even have some idea regarding the likelihood of each. While there are similarities in how people respond to risky decisions, there are also differences related to factors like gender (e.g. Levin et al., 1998) and culture (e.g., Kleinhesselink and Rossa, 1991; Weber et al., 1998). Understanding these similarities and differences can help our understanding of a range of economic phenomena. For example, why does entrepreneurship flourish in some countries while it stagnates in others? Risk perceptions and risk preferences are widely recognized by economist as the major factors influencing risky behavior. Risk perceptions characterize the likelihood of chance outcomes and are usually framed in terms of subjective probabilities. Risk preferences rank outcomes based on individual wants. An understanding of how to use public policy to positively influence risky behavior requires understanding to what extent differences in risky behavior are attributable to differences in risk perceptions versus differences in risk preferences. The purpose of this project is to develop a novel experimental protocol for measuring individual differences in risk perceptions and risk preferences. This experimental protocol will then be used to explore how individual differences in subjective probabilities and risk preferences relate to objective probabilities, demographic characteristics, wealth, and information. The experimental protocol consists of three tasks. Firstly, subjects will read a general interest news article. Secondly, subjects will be asked to complete a survey. The survey will ask general demographic questions (e.g. age, gender, and family background). It will also ask 20 questions designed to elicit cultural information based on Geert Hofstede (2001). Thirdly, subjects will be asked how much they are willing to pay to play a more favorable lottery. The question will be repeated with 30 different lottery combinations, which will vary in terms of how a favorable outcome is determined (e.g. drawing poker chips as illustrated in the example or randomly choosing of specific word from the general interest news article) and the scale of rewards.


In situ immobilization of copper and zinc using alum-treated drinking-water treatment residue (WTR) was selected for the remediation of sewage-sludge-amended soils. The WTR has a pH of 7.07 and, although its acid-neutralizing capacity (ANC) is low, utilization at high rates (>2.5%) can help to increase the pH of the soil system. The minerals present in WTR, such as kaolinite, gibbsite and Fe-oxides, provide surfaces for the adsorption of heavy metals. From the soil-solution study, results showed that application of WTR had reduced Zn concentrations in the soil solutions, as compared to the control treatment. Removal of Zn occurred via precipitation, adsorption and possibly organic-matter complexation or chelation. From the glasshouse study, results showed that by using WTR, Zn uptake by maize can be reduced. Although the decrease in Cu concentrations in the soil-solution study was not apparent, due to the very low concentrations of Cu present, the glasshouse study did indicate a reduction in Cu uptake by the maize plants; suitable rates of WTR application for maize growth should be less than or equal to 10%. In fact, there is an additional benefit of WTR application, whereby the rate of 2.5% can increase the dry weight of the maize plants. Thus, WTR can be recom-mended as a potential soil amendment to immobilize Zn in contaminated soil.


From the Foreword: "In this book Joscha Bach introduces Dietrich Dorner's PSI architecture and Joscha's implementation of the MicroPSI architecture. These architectures and their implementation have several lessons for other architectures and models. Most notably, the PSI architecture includes drives and thus directly addresses questions of emotional behavior. An architecture including drives helps clarify how emotions could arise. It also changes the way that the architecture works on a fundamental level, providing an architecture more suited for behaving autonomously in a simulated world. PSI includes three types of drives, physiological (e.g., hunger), social (i.e., affiliation needs), and cognitive (i.e., reduction of uncertainty and expression of competency). These drives routinely influence goal formation and knowledge selection and application. The resulting architecture generates new kinds of behaviors, including context dependent memories, socially motivated behavior, and internally motivated task switching. This architecture illustrates how emotions and physical drives can be included in an embodied cognitive architecture. The PSI architecture, while including perceptual, motor, learning, and cognitive processing components, also includes several novel knowledge representations: temporal structures, spatial memories, and several new information processing mechanisms and behaviors, including progress through types of knowledge sources when problem solving (the Rasmussen ladder), and knowledge-based hierarchical active vision. These mechanisms and representations suggest ways for making other architectures more realistic, more accurate, and easier to use. The architecture is demonstrated in the Island simulated environment. While it may look like a simple game, it was carefully designed to allow multiple tasks to be pursued and provides ways to satisfy the multiple drives. It would be useful in its own right for developing other architectures interested in multi-tasking, long-term learning, social interaction, embodied architectures, and related aspects of behavior that arise in a complex but tractable real-time environment. The resulting models are not presented as validated cognitive models, but as theoretical explorations in the space of architectures for generating behavior. The sweep of the architecture can thus be larger-it presents a new cognitive architecture attempting to provide a unified theory of cognition. It attempts to cover perhaps the largest number of phenomena to date. This is not a typical cognitive modeling work, but one that I believe that we can learn much from." --Frank E. Ritter, Series Editor Although computational models of cognition have become very popular, these models are relatively limited in their coverage of cognition-- they usually only emphasize problem solving and reasoning, or treat perception and motivation as isolated modules. The first architecture to cover cognition more broadly is PSI theory, developed by Dietrich Dorner. By integrating motivation and emotion with perception and reasoning, and including grounded neuro-symbolic representations, PSI contributes significantly to an integrated understanding of the mind. It provides a conceptual framework that highlights the relationships between perception and memory, language and mental representation, reasoning and motivation, emotion and cognition, autonomy and social behavior. It is, however, unfortunate that PSI's origin in psychology, its methodology, and its lack of documentation have limited its impact. The proposed book adapts Psi theory to cognitive science and artificial intelligence, by elucidating both its theoretical and technical frameworks, and clarifying its contribution to how we have come to understand cognition.


Undergraduate students of English find poetry particularly challenging as it requires a knowledge of rhyming patterns, metre and diction. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) is one of the most famous poems in the English language. It is also one of the most difficult to analyse. As a foundation text of Modernism, it presents special challenges for students due to the complexity of its language, allusions and images. I introduce two contrasting methods of analysis: contextual, in which I apply historical criticism to the poem, and textual, where I demonstrate the advantages of New Critical close reading. In the course of my analysis of The Waste Land, I provide guidelines for analysis and research. Some of the most important Eliot critics are also mentioned in order to suggest topics for research as well as class discussions.


A 58-year-old woman presented with a palpable mass at the base of the left neck which she had first noticed 12 years previously, shortly after abdominal surgery. The mass had progressively enlarged, resulting in dysphagia, dyspnea and occasional pain. Imaging showed a septated but otherwise simple cystic mass extending into the mediastinum and containing lymphocytic fluid on aspiration. A diagnosis of the rare entity of a thoracic duct cyst with supraclavicular extension was made. The patient opted for percutaneous sclerotherapy of the lesion, which was performed using glacial acetic acid. This resulted in complete resolution of the mass with one treatment. After exclusion of other causes of cystic left supraclavicular masses including cystic neoplasms and pseudoaneurysms of the carotid or subclavian arteries, direct puncture sclerotherapy can be safe and effective.


Measurement is a key mechanism to characterize, evaluate, and improve software development, management, and maintenance processes. Nowadays, software organizations use metrics for very different purposes. Data is collected to describe, monitor, understand, assess, compare, validate, and appraise very diverse attributes related to software processes or products. Improving data collection and better using the existing data are important problems for software organizations.
This dissertation proposes an approach for improving measurement and data use when a large number of diverse metrics are already being collected by a software organization. The approach combines two methods. One looks at an organization's measurement framework in a top-down fashion and the other looks at it in a bottom-up fashion.
The top-down method, based on the Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) Paradigm, is used to identify the measurement goals of data users and map them to the metrics being used by the organization. This allows the measurement practitioners to: (1) identify which metrics are and are not useful to the organization; and (2) check if the goals of data user groups can be satisfied by the data that is being collected by the organization.
The bottom-up method is based on a data mining technique called Attribute Focusing (AF). It is used to identify useful information in the existing data that the data users were not aware of.
To validate the approach and to assess its usefulness, a case study was performed in a real industrial environment. The top-down and bottom-up methods were applied in the customer satisfaction measurement framework at the IBM Toronto Laboratory. The top-down method was applied to improve the customer satisfaction (CUSTSAT) measurement from the point of view of three data user groups. The bottom-up method was used to gain new insights into the existing CUSTSAT data.
The top-down method identified several new metrics for the interviewed user groups. It also contributed to better understanding the data user needs and led to modification of some of the data analyses and presentations done for those groups. The bottom-up method produced important insights on both the customer satisfaction domain and the measurement framework itself. Unexpected associations between key variables prompted new insights on their importance for the organization. Some of these associations have also revealed problems with the metrics being used to collect the data.


Underground coal mining operations in the United States continue to increase productivity as mining equipment and practices are improved. Unfortunately, increased production also results in the potential for increased respirable dust generation and worker exposure. In response, US operations are applying basic controls at elevated levels and looking to emerging technologies in an effort to better control respirable dust levels. Ventilating air and water sprays remain the basis of dust control strategies for both longwall and continuous mining operations, and the level of application for these controls continues to increase. In addition, new technologies are emerging that have the potential to further reduce dust levels. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has been conducting research into methods to optimize existing control technologies and evaluate emerging control technologies. This paper will summarize control technologies routinely being used in underground coal mine operations, as well as provide a review of new controls that are being pursued.


Syria is home to half a million Palestinian refugees who enjoy unparalleled rights when compared to other Palestinian refugee communities in Arab host states. This article examines how the events in Syria over the past year have impacted the Palestinians in the country and assesses the possible implications of the ongoing upheaval and uncertainty for this particular community. It concludes by arguing that the fate of the Palestinians, like that of the Syrian people and the country as a whole, not only remains uncertain, but is also particularly precarious given their refugee politico-legal status in Syria.


Atwo-dimensional single particle finite element model was used to examine the effects of particle fragmental pattern on the average molecular weights, polymerization rate and particle overheating in heterogeneous Ziegler-Natta olefin polymerization. A two-site catalyst kinetic mechanism was employed together with a dynamic two-dimensional molecular species in diffusion-reaction equation. The initial catalyst active sites distribution was assumed to be uniform, while the monomer diffusion coefficient was considered to be different inside the fragments and cracks. In other words, the cracks were distinguished from fragments with higher monomer diffusion coefficient. To model the particle temperature a lumped heat transfer model was used. The fragmentation pattern was considered to remain unchanged during the polymerization. A Galerkin finite element method was used to solve the resulting two-dimensional (2-D) moving boundary value, diffusion-reaction problem. A two-dimensional polymeric flow model (PFM) was implemented on the finite element meshes. The simulation results showed that the fragmentation pattern had effects on the molecular properties, reaction rate and the particle temperature at early stages of polymerization. Polyolefins J (2014) 1:77-91


The benefits of taking part in adventurous activities are many; particularly, for people with visual impairments. Sports such as rock climbing can improve feelings of skillfulness, autonomy, and confidence for people with low or no vision as they strive to overcome environmental and personal challenges. In this late-breaking work we present Climb-o-Vision, a novel sensory substitution software that utilizes YOLOv5 computer vision object-detection architecture, to aid navigation for rock climbers with visual impairments. Climb-o-Vision uses commercially available and cost-effective hardware to detect, track, and convert climbing hold spatial locations on to the surface of the tongue, via an electrotactile tongue interface. Preliminary testing of the device highlights the possibility of using sensory substitution as a sporting aid for people with visual impairments. Furthermore, it demonstrates the potential for adapting and improving current sensory substitution systems by employing computer vision techniques to filter useful task-specific information to users with visual impairments.


»Gescheiterte Indikatorisierung: Definition, Vergleich und Quantifizierung von Sozialpolitik durch den International Survey of Social Services der Internationalen Arbeitsorganisation in der Zwischenkriegszeit«. Despite social policy being one of the most quantified policy fields today, there is no singular indicator or set of indicators of social policy quality or performance on the global level that is universally accepted and influential, comparable to GDP in the economy. The article analyses and explains the unsuccessful indicatorisation in the ILO's International Survey of Social Services of the interwar years. During this first elaborate study of social policies worldwide by an international organisation, difficult issues of defining, comparing, and quantifying social policy had to be solved for the first time. Theoretically, a sociology of knowledge approach on indicatorisation is utilised that highlights how social policy was questioned and evaluated. This illustrates the demanding work of comparing including a politicized knowledge production, identifying conditions and hindrances of defining and quantifying the 'social'. It is observed that different interests of participants, epistemic cultures, and practices, as well as bureaucratic procedures resulted in the mere inclusion of a provisional indicator of cost and little quantified data in the final Survey. Empirically, the article relies on an in-depth analysis of historical ILO documents.


The thesis of this brief paper is straightforward, although not uncontroversial: The moral foundation of property, both as a concept and as an institution, is human flourishing. In the remainder of my remarks I will explain what I mean by human flourishing, as I use the term, and I will distinguish human flourishing from welfare as that term is commonly used today by economists and legal analysts. I will then briefly illustrate the approach through an example.Private property ordinarily triggers notions of individual rights, not social obligations. After all, the core function of private property, at least according to conventional lore, is to insulate individuals from the demands of society both in its organised political form and its non-political collective form. Of course, the common law has long recognised limits on the exercise of property rights, limits that grow out of the needs of others in cases of conflicting land uses. The obvious example is the common law of nuisance, which courts developed using the ancient maxim sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas ("use your land in such a way as not to injure the land of others") as their guiding principle. But such limits on property rights are considered the exception, not the rule, the periphery rather than the core. The core image of property rights, in the minds of many people, is that the owner has a right to exclude others and owes no further obligation to them. On this view trespass is the paradigmatic cause of action in the law of property. Hence if another intentionally commits trespass upon my land after I have refused permission to pass across it, the trespasser is properly liable for punitive damages even though only trivial damage was done to my property. That image is highly misleading. The right to exclude itself, thought by many to be the most important twig in the so-called bundle of rights, is subject to many exceptions, both at common law and by virtue of statutory or constitutional provisions. For example, the common law requires landowners to permit police to enter privately owned land to prevent a crime from being committed or to make an arrest. More generally, property owners owe far more responsibilities to others, both owners and non-owners, than the conventional imagery of property rights suggests. Property rights are inherently relational, and because of this characteristic, owners necessarily owe obligations to others. But the responsibility, or obligation, dimension of private ownership has been sorely under-theorised. In this brief paper I shall outline a theory of property that emphasises the obligations that owners owe to others, specifically, to certain members of the various communities to which they belong. These obligations vary in different contexts and at different times. As society has grown more complex and more interdependent, the obligations have thickened. Capturing all of these obligations under one theoretical umbrella, one may speak of a social-obligation norm that the law does and should impose on owners. This norm, I want to stress, in inherent in the concept of ownership itself. This is an important point because it means that when the law, whether by way of statutes, administrative action, or judicial decisions, announces some restriction on an owner's use of her land or building, insofar as that announcement restates what is already part of the social-obligation norm, it is simply a legal recognition of a restriction that is inherent in the concept of ownership rather than being externally imposed and engrafted upon the owner's bundle of right. The basis of this norm is human flourishing. The social-obligation theory builds on the claim that the basic purpose of property is to enable individual to achieve human flourishing. The theory further builds on Amartya Sen's famous insight that flourishing is a matter of what a person is able to do rather than what he has. That is, the well-lived life should be measured by a person's capabilities rather than by a person's possession or by the satisfaction of his subjective preferences. Before developing the social obligation of ownership, I must first explain the foundational norm of human flourishing a bit further.


A certain class of methods to select suitable models of dynamical stochastic systems from measured input-output data is considered. The methods are based on a comparison between the measured outputs and the outputs of a candidate model. Depending on the set of models that is used, such methods are known under a variety of names, like output-error methods, equation-error methods, maximum-likelihood methods, etc. General results are proved concerning the models that are selected asymptotically as the number of observed data tends to infinity. For these results it is not assumed that the true system necessarily can be exactly represented within the chosen set of models. In the particular case when the model set contains the system, general consistency results are obtained and commented upon. Rather than to seek an exact description of the system, it is usually more realistic to be content with a suitable approximation of the true system with reasonable complexity properties. Here, the consequences of such a viewpoint are discussed.


Theories of multilateral bargaining and coalition formation applied to legislatures predict that parties' seat shares determine their bargaining power. We present findings that are difficult to reconcile with this prediction, but consistent with a norm prescribing that "the most voted party should form the government". We first present case studies from several countries and regression discontinuity design-based evidence from twenty-eight national European parliaments. We then focus on 2,898 Spanish municipal elections in which two parties tie in the number of seats. We find that the party with slightly more general election votes is substantially more likely to appoint the mayor. Since tied parties should (on average) have equal bargaining power, this identifies the effect of being labeled the most voted. This effect is comparable to that of obtaining an additional seat, and is also present when a right-wing party is the most voted and the second and third most voted parties are allied left-wing parties who can form a combined majority. A model where elections both aggregate information and discipline incumbents can rationalize our results and yields additional predictions we take to the data, such as voters punishing second most voted parties that appoint mayors.


On March 1, 1954, the U.S. exploded a hydrogen bomb at Bikini in the South Pacific. The fifteen-megaton bomb was a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, and its fallout spread far beyond the official "no-sail" zone the U.S. had designated. Fishing just outside the zone at the time of the blast, the Lucky Dragon #5 was showered with radioactive ash. Making the difficult voyage back to their home port of Yaizu, twenty-year-old Oishi Matashichi and his shipmates became ill from maladies they could not comprehend. They were all hospitalized with radiation sickness, and one man died within a few months. The Lucky Dragon #5 became the focus of a major international incident, but many years passed before the truth behind U.S. nuclear testing in the Pacific emerged. Late in his life, overcoming social and political pressures to remain silent, Oishi began to speak about his experience and what he had since learned about Bikini. His primary audience was schoolchildren; his primary forum, the museum in Tokyo built around the salvaged hull of the Lucky Dragon #5. Oishi's advocacy has helped keep the Lucky Dragon #5 incident in Japan's national consciousness. Oishi relates the horrors he and the others underwent following Bikini: the months in hospital; the death of their crew mate; the accusations by the U.S. and even some Japanese that the Lucky Dragon #5 had been spying for the Soviets; the long campaign to win government funding for medical treatment; the enduring stigma of exposure to radiation. The Day the Sun Rose in the West stands as a powerful statement about the Cold War and the U.S.-Japan relationship as it impacted the lives of a handful of fishermen and ultimately all of us who live in the post-nuclear age.


The interoperability of classification schemes is an urgent need for information organization & retrieval. Now, it is often to recognize and build up the mapping relationship between classes by hand in EU project Renardus and other projects. Each class of CLC or DDC can be looked as a concept, and the integrity of concept can be divided into several concept elements expressed by words. We can computer the word similarity of concept elements to reflect the similarity of the integrity of class concept on the hypothesis that the integrities are similar if all the parts of them are similar. In the automatic mapping system between CLC4 and DDC21, the concept of class can be divided into concept elements expressed by class headings, note terms, lower-class terms and upper-class terms, then rank these matched concept elements of the classes between CLC and DDC according to the principle of maximum similarity. We formulated detailed mapping regulation according to three parameters: word similarity value of concept elements, margin of concept elements and kind of equivalent concept elements of class. The article introduced the structure, functions and use of the automatic mapping system.


Nutrition scientists are currently facing a substantial challenge: to feed the world population sustainably and ethically while supporting the health of all individuals, animals and the environment. The Nutrition Society of Australia ' s 2022 Annual Scienti fi c meeting theme ' Sustainable nutrition for a healthy life ' was a timely conference focusing on the environmental impact of global, national and local food systems, how nutrition science can promote sustainable eating practices while respecting cultural and culinary diversity and how to ensure optimal nutrition throughout life to prevent and manage chronic diseases. Comprehensive, diverse, collaborative and forward-thinking research was presented in a 3 d programme of keynote presentations, oral and poster sessions, breakfast and lunch sym-posiums, ending with a panel discussion to answer the question of how we can best achieve a nutritious food supply that supports human and planetary health. We concluded that this complex issue necessitates coordinated efforts and multi-faceted responses at local, national and global levels. Collaboration among consumers, scientists, industry and government using a systems approach is vital for fi nding solutions to this challenge.


Super-Earths are by far the most dominant type of exoplanet, yet their formation is still not well understood. In particular, planet formation models predict that many of them should have accreted enough gas to become gas giants. Here, we examine the role of the protoplanetary disc in the cooling and contraction of the protoplanetary envelope. In particular, we investigate the effects of (1) the thermal state of the disc as set by the relative size of heating by accretion or irradiation, and whether its energy is transported by radiation or convection, and (2) advection of entropy into the outer envelope by disc flows that penetrate the Hill sphere, as found in 3D global simulations. We find that, at 5 and 1 au, this flow at the level reported in the non-isothermal simulations where it penetrates only to ∼0.3 times the Hill radius has little effect on the cooling rate since most of the envelope mass is concentrated close to the core, and far from the flow. On the other hand, at 0.1 au, the envelope quickly becomes fully radiative, nearly isothermal, and thus cannot cool down, stalling gas accretion. This effect is significantly more pronounced in convective discs, leading to envelope mass orders of magnitude lower. Entropy advection at 0.1 au in either radiative or convective discs could therefore explain why super-Earths failed to undergo runaway accretion. These results highlight the importance of the conditions and energy transport in the protoplanetary disc for the accretion of planetary envelopes.


Historically illustrated Persian manuscripts, with several miniatures, clearly demonstrate foreign influences included Sasanian, Arab and significantly Chinese. This research briefly investigates presence of Chinoiserie motifs that are frequently applied by the Persian artists from 13 th century to 15 th century when Chinese influence was apparent in Persian illustrated manuscript. Investigation will be justified by highlighting various influences and continuation of Chinese influence in Persian manuscripts paintings from Mongols to Safavids. After Mongol conquest, Persian illustrated manuscripts have perceptible Chinese influence and many motifs derivative from Chinese arts, popularly known as Chinoiserie motifs were adapted by the Persian artists into their arts. On Persian manuscript painting Chinese influence was noticed in various manuscripts such as Manafi al Hayawan, Shahname, Jami al Tavarikh, and Mirajnama which were illustrated during the reign of the Il-Khanids, Timurids and Safavids. During these periods Persia was in direct contact with China via trade routes through Central Asia. Persian paintings unquestionably reflect a spiritual intelligence beyond reason. Persians through their artistic talent created such an art that is highly aesthetical revealing natural beauties of this world as well as inspirational nature of spiritual world. Through mellow richness of artistic and poetic expressions these illustrations convey meanings that are beyond visual description.


This Article analyzes the concept of racial stigma in Justice Kennedy's controlling opinion in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. The Article reveals that Kennedy's fundamental concern is that using racial classifications to achieve voluntary desegregation racially stigmatizes students. In particular, he assumes that the classifications undermine individualism and reduce children to "racial chits." He fails, however, to recognize the purpose of voluntary desegregation and the unique characteristics that distinguish it from other race-conscious programs. Kennedy is not alone. Commentators and schools may have "over-defended" voluntary desegregation, articulating multiple justifications rather than focusing on the core justification. Thus, this Article refines voluntary desegregation's purpose. Voluntary desegregation is not an attempt to obtain the benefits of diversity. It is an attempt to manage an educational crisis that undermines equal and quality education. The lingering effects of past school segregation continue to stigmatize predominantly minority schools. As a result, quality teachers and middle-income students flee to other schools, depriving minority schools of the key resources for success. Money cannot solve this problem. The only way to solve the problem is to create a racially balanced system where race is irrelevant in parents' and teachers' school choices. To do so, voluntary desegregation must use creative measures, including some that incorporate racial classifications. Relying on Supreme Court precedent and leading scholarship, this Article assesses whether voluntary desegregation stigmatizes students by: (1) promoting notions of racial inferiority, whites as racists, or any other stereotypes; (2) inciting racial politics; (3) undermining individuality; (4) relying on inappropriate racial labels; or (5) subordinating relevant values. The Article concedes that Kennedy raises a valid concern in regard to the particular racial labels, but concludes that the labels can easily be remedied without affecting desegregation. In regard to the more substantive concerns, this Article demonstrates that rather than reinforcing stigma, voluntary desegregation actually sends an antistigmatic message. Kennedy's drive to secure compromise between competing ideologies causes him to miss the distinct characteristics and message of voluntary desegregation. Nonetheless, lower courts must respect the compromise to ensure that schools are not unduly constrained in their effort to deliver basic educational opportunities.


We propose a new partial-observability model for online learning problems where the learner, besides its own loss, also observes some noisy feedback about the other actions, depending on the underlying structure of the problem. We represent this structure by a weighted directed graph, where the edge weights are related to the quality of the feedback shared by the connected nodes. Our main contribution is an efficient algorithm that guarantees a regret of O(√ α * T) after T rounds, where α * is a novel graph property that we call the effective independence number. Our algorithm is completely parameter-free and does not require knowledge (or even estimation) of α *. For the special case of binary edge weights, our setting reduces to the partial-observability models of Mannor & Shamir (2011) and Alon et al. (2013) and our algorithm recovers the near-optimal regret bounds.


Liposarcoma is the most common soft-tissue malignancy in adults, but the appearance of a liposarcoma in the head and neck region is distinctly unusual. Intraoral liposarcomas represent a particularly interesting subset of this tumor in that (1) they are exceedingly rare and (2) affected patients tend to have a better prognosis than do patients with a similar lesion located elsewhere in the head and neck. An understanding of the histologic subtypes and corresponding clinical behavior of liposarcomas will assist physicians in appropriately managing these patients. Most of these tumors can be effectively treated with conservative surgery. We report the rare case of a well-differentiated liposarcoma arising in the tongue of a 55-year-old man. We also discuss the typical pathologic findings in these malignancies and review the diagnosis, associated controversies, management, and prognosis.


Perhaps it is not possible to experience all the mysterious sounds, the unfamiliar smells, and the spectacular sights of a tropical rainforest without ever visiting one. But this exhilarating and honest book comes wondrously close to taking the reader on such a journey. Bruce M. Beehler, a widely traveled expert on birds and tropical ecology, recounts fascinating details from twelve field trips he has taken to the tropics over the past three decades. As a researcher, he brings to life the exotic rainforests and the people who inhabit them; as a conservationist, he makes a plea for better ways of managing rainforests--"a resource that the world cannot do without." Drawing on his experiences in Papua New Guinea, India, Madagascar, Indonesia, the Philippines, Panama, and the Ivory Coast, Beehler describes the surprises--both pleasant and unpleasant--of doing science and conservation in the field. He explains the role that rainforests play in the lives of indigenous peoples and the crucial importance of understanding local cultures, customs, and politics. The author concludes with simple but tough solutions for maintaining rainforest health, expressing fervent hope that his great-grandchildren and others may one day also hear the rainforest whisper its secrets.


PURPOSE
To evaluate the effect of artificial aging on the bond durability of fissure sealants in vitro.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Twenty bovine incisors received 4 different sealant treatments and were divided into four groups: 1. Ultraseal XT plus (UX); 2. Enamel Loc (EL); 3. 35% phosphoric acid plus Enamel Loc (PEL); 4. Adper Prompt L-Pop plus Clinpro (PPC). Beam-shaped specimens were prepared and randomly divided into three subgroups. One subgroup underwent the microtensile bond strength (µTBS) test after 24-h storage in 37°C water. The other two subgroups were also subjected to the microtensile bond strength test after 5000 and 10,000 thermal cycles, respectively. Another twelve intact human third molars were sealed using 1 of 3 methods and were divided into 3 groups of 4 each: 1. Ultraseal XT plus; 2. Adper Prompt L-Pop plus Clinpro; and 3. Enamel Loc. Two specimens from each group were immersed in a 50% silver nitrate solution for 24 h, followed by exposure to fluorescent light for 8 h, before being scanned in a micro-CT (microcomputer tomography) machine. The other two were handled in the same way after undergoing 10,000 thermal cycles. The CT images obtained were evaluated.

RESULTS
All samples from the EL group were broken during preparation, so no µTBS results were available. After 5000 thermal cycles, the bond strengths of the three other groups (UX, PEL, PPC) decreased significantly (p < 0.05). Longer thermocycling (10,000 cycles) resulted in more decreases in µTBS for group PEL and PPC, while the strength of the UX group remained relatively unchanged. After thermocycling, considerable silver penetration could be seen at the sealant/enamel interface of the EL group in micro-CT images.

CONCLUSIONS
The etch-and-rinse procedure for sealant application promotes higher bond strength under artificial aging. Micro-CT, a nondestructive analytical tool, may be used to evaluate the sealant/enamel interface effectively.


A-kinase anchoring proteins (AKAPs) function to target protein kinase A (PKA) to specific locations within the cell. AKAPs are functionally identified by their ability to bind the type II regulatory subunits (RII) of PKA in an in vitro overlay assay. We previously showed that follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) induces the expression of an 80-kDa AKAP (AKAP 80) in ovarian granulosa cells as they mature from a preantral to a preovulatory phenotype. In this report, we identify AKAP 80 as microtubule-associated protein 2D (MAP2D), a low molecular weight splice variant of the neuronal MAP2 protein. MAP2D is induced in granulosa cells by dexamethasone and by FSH in a time-dependent manner that mimics that of AKAP 80, and immunoprecipitation of MAP2D depletes extracts of AKAP 80. MAP2D is the only MAP2 protein present in ovaries and is localized to granulosa cells of preovulatory follicles and to luteal cells. MAP2D is concentrated at the Golgi apparatus along with RI and RII and, based on coimmunoprecipitation results, appears to bind both RI and RII in granulosa cells. Reduced expression of MAP2D resulting from treatment of granulosa cells with antisense oligonucleotides to MAP2 inhibited the phosphorylation of cAMP-response element-binding protein. These results suggest that this classic neuronal RII AKAP is a dual RI/RII AKAP that performs unique functions in ovarian granulosa cells that contribute to the preovulatory phenotype.


By the sixth week of the Irish Civil War, all eyes turned to Cork, as the National Army readied its climactic attack on the 'rebel capital'. At 2 a.m. on a Bank Holiday Monday, Emmet Dalton and 450 soldiers of the National Army landed at Passage West, in one of the most famous surprise attacks in Irish military history. Their daring amphibious assault knocked the famed Cork IRA onto the back foot, though three more days of stubborn fighting was required for the National Army to secure the city. The retreating IRA left destruction in their wake, setting the stage for Michael Collins' final fatal visit to his home county. For the first time, 'The Battle for Cork' tells the full story of the battle for Cork, showing all the chaos, bravery, humour and misery of the largest engagement of the Irish Civil War and the final defeat of Republican Cork.


Solid-state NMR techniques have been used to measure the proton lineshapes, Knight shifts, and relaxation times in several transition metal hydrides. The objective of these studies is to obtain a better understanding of the roles of host metal structure and substitutional alloying on the hydrogen site occupancy, the electronic structure properties, and diffusion mechanisms.

An improved method for observing the rigid-lattice proton lineshapes and extracting the second moments has been developed. Comparisons of the experimental second moments for polycrystalline samples with the values calculated from Van Vleck formulas for nuclear dipolar interactions have indicated that only tetrahedral interstitial sites are occupied by the protons in TiH[subscript x], ZrH[subscript x], crystalline TiCuH[subscript 0.94], Ti[subscript 2]CuH[subscript 1.9], and Zr[subscript 2]PdH[subscript x](with x 2).

The proton Knight shifts and low-temperature spin-lattice relaxation times have been related to the local densities of electron states at the Fermi levels N(E[subscript F]) in Ti[subscript 1-y]V[subscript y]H[subscript x], TiCr[subscript 1.8]H[subscript x], TiCr[subscript 1.9]H[subscript x], TiCuH[subscript x], Ti[subscript 2]CuH[subscriptx], ZrH[subscript x], and Zr[subsript 2]PdH[subscript x]. The dominant conduction electron hyperfine interaction for protons is a transferred "core-polarization" of the paired hydrogen 1s electrons through spin exchange with the unpaired metal d electrons. The proton NMR parameters have confirmed that decreases in N(E[subscript F) through a Jahn-Teller type mechanism are associated with the temperature and composition dependent tetragonal distortions in Ti[subscript 1-y]V[subscript y]H[subscript 1.95] and ZrH[subscript x] (where 1.75 < x < 2.0). The proton NMR results are consistent with recent band theory calculations and photoemission spectra. Unusual N(E[subscript F]) increases with hydrogen content, which are supported by independent magnetic susceptibility data, have been observed in TiCr[subscript 1.8]H[subscript x], TiCr[subscript 1.9]H[subscript x], and Ti[subscript 2]CuH[subscript x]. The proton parameters suggest that significant differences in N(E[subscript F]) for the crystalline and amorphous phases of TiCuH[subscript x] and Zr[subscript 2]PdH[subscript x] may reflect a smearing of energy levels in the disordered phases.

The proton rotating-frame relaxation times for Ti[subscript 1-y]Cu[subscript y]H[subscript x] indicate both crystal structure and hydrogen site occupancies greatly influence diffusion behavior. A significant enhancement in hydrogen mobility for amorphous a-TiCuH[subscript 1.4] has been confirmed; but, short range order is probably retained in the structure of a-TiCuH[subscript 1.4]. Reductions in activation energies are observed when octahedral sites exist in the diffusion paths between tetrahedral sites.


Development of a four hazard-specific toolkit (drought, flood, landslide and chronic kidney diseases of unknown aetiology) for needs and vulnerability assessment in the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector included community consultations with district, divisional and community stakeholders in four selected districts of Sri Lanka, which are highly prone to the respective hazards. Existing global WASH tools such as sphere and global WASH cluster indicators are contextualized, and the toolkit covers three different displacement scenarios: no displacement, temporary displacement (short and medium term), and camp-based displacement. This toolkit focuses on four key sections of WASH: water supply, sanitation, waste management and control, and hygiene practices and promotion. The toolkit consists of a set of indicators in the areas of WASH that are relevant to the selected scenario in the Sri Lankan context for the specific hazard, a checklist for initial and rapid assessment before and after disasters, and some guide notes for the field works.


Modulation of voltage-dependent potassium currents can alter the shape and timing of action potentials, thereby altering neurotransmitter release. To examine the effect of a cAMP analog on potassium currents in metabolically intact cells, perforated-patch and cell-attached patch recordings were carried out using the GH4C1 pituitary cell line. A major component of voltage-dependent potassium current in these cells inactivates slowly, with a time constant of several seconds. Application of dibutyryl cAMP decreased this current at voltages positive to -10 mV and increased the rate of inactivation by approximately twofold. Single channel recordings revealed two channel types whose voltage dependence and kinetics of inactivation match those of the macroscopic current. One of these, the smaller conductance (7.5 pS) channel, was sensitive to the cAMP analog, which decreased the latency of the channel to enter a long-lasting inactivated state. Ensemble averages of the activity of this channel showed that, consistent with its effect on the macroscopic current, dibutyryl cAMP increased its rate of inactivation. Somatostatin, an agent that is known to activate a serine/threonine phosphatase in these cells, completely reversed the effect of dibutyryl cAMP on the channel, while the cyclic GMP analog, dibutyryl cyclic GMP was without effect. In contrast, the rate of inactivation of the larger conductance (approximately 19 pS) channel was not accelerated by dibutyryl cAMP. These studies indicate that different channel subtypes expressed in a single cell respond differently to elevations of cAMP, and suggest that the overall response of potassium currents to second messengers may be determined by the ratio of different channel subtypes.


An integrity team prepared a Plan of study (POS) that represents the first comprehensive effort on the Upper Mississippi River (UMR), to identify and quantify impacts associated with commercial and recreational traffic. The Plan of study consists of a series of work units comprised of both laboratory and field studies which will identify and quantify impacts to the following biological resources: adult fish, larval fish, freshwater mussels, aquatic macrophytes, macroinvertebrates, waterfowl, algae, side channels and backwaters. However, these biological impacts can generally be determined only if the hydraulic forces producing them are also measured and better understood. An interagency coodinating committee has been proposed to oversee the study process and to monitor study results annually. The results of these studies should be directly usable in current and future planning activities within the UMR and, to some extent, could be used to identify vessel related physical and biological impacts throughout the nation's entire inland waterway system.


This paper draws on discursive analytic techniques to explore the perceived material outcomes of elearning. Specifically it examines an e-learning portal provided to a particular set of talented individuals within professional services firm based in Australia. To explore the perceived contributions of this example of e-HRM for talent management we consider two different sets of actors; the human resource function and the organisation. Our findings illustrate that the perceived material outcomes of this technology are contested and influenced by the different actors who are involved in the receipt, delivery and management of this e-learning portal. Despite the presence of an agreed dominant discourse, Leadership Online was seen to have material outcomes which centered upon the themes of flexible learning; skills development; demonstrating investment and employer branding. Publication Details Wiblen, S. L., Grant, D. & Dery, K. (2012). Linking leadership and talent: a discursive analysis of e-learning in a professional services firm. Fourth International e-HRM conference (pp. 1-18). This conference paper is available at Research Online: https://ro.uow.edu.au/buspapers/951 LINKING LEADERSHIP AND TALENT: A DISCURSIVE ANALYSIS OF E-LEARNING IN A PROFESSIONAL SERVICES FIRM


Photospheric magnetic flux cancellation on the Sun is generally believed to be caused by magnetic reconnection occurring in the low solar atmosphere. Individual canceling magnetic features are observationally characterized by the rate of flux cancellation. The specific cancellation rate, defined as the rate of flux cancellation divided by the interface length, gives an accurate estimate of the electric field in the reconnecting current sheet. We have determined the specific cancellation rate using the magnetograms taken by the Solar Optical Telescope (SOT) aboard the Hinode satellite. The specific rates determined with SOT turned out to be systematically higher than those based on the data taken by the Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) aboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. The median value of the specific cancellation rate was found to be 8 × 106 G cm s-1—a value four times that obtained from the MDI data. This big difference is mainly due to a higher angular resolution and better sensitivity of the SOT, resulting in magnetic fluxes up to five times larger than those obtained from the MDI. The higher rates of flux cancellation correspond to either faster inflows or stronger magnetic fields of the reconnection inflow region, which may have important consequences for the physics of photospheric magnetic reconnection.


The Wavelet Transform has stimulated research that is unparalleled since the invention of the Fast Fourier Transform and has opened new avenues of applications in signal processing, image compression, radiology, cardiology, and many other areas. This book grew out of a short course for mathematics students at the ETH in Zurich; it provides a solid mathematical foundation for the broad range of applications enjoyed by the wavelet transform. Numerous illustrations and fully worked out examples enhance the book.


Rationale: Long chain fatty acids (LCFAs) are the preferred substrate for energy provision in hearts. However, the contribution of endogenous triacylglyceride (TAG) turnover to LCFA oxidation and the overall dependence of mitochondrial oxidation on endogenous lipid is largely unstudied. Objective: We sought to determine the role of TAG turnover in supporting LCFA oxidation and the influence of the lipid-activated nuclear receptor, proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR)&agr;, on this balance. Methods and Results: Palmitoyl turnover within TAG and palmitate oxidation rates were quantified in isolated hearts, from normal mice (nontransgenic) and mice with cardiac-specific overexpression of PPAR&agr; (MHC-PPAR&agr;). Turnover of palmitoyl units within TAG, and thus palmitoyl-coenzyme A recycling, in nontransgenic (4.5±2.3 &mgr;mol/min per gram dry weight) was 3.75-fold faster than palmitate oxidation (1.2±0.4). This high rate of palmitoyl unit turnover indicates preferential oxidation of palmitoyl units derived from TAG in normal hearts. PPAR&agr; overexpression augmented TAG turnover 3-fold over nontransgenic hearts, despite similar fractions of acetyl-coenzyme A synthesis from palmitate and oxygen use at the same workload. Palmitoyl turnover within TAG of MHC-PPAR&agr; hearts (16.2±2.9, P<0.05) was 12.5-fold faster than oxidation (1.3±0.2). Elevated TAG turnover in MHC-PPAR&agr; correlated with increased mRNA for enzymes involved in both TAG synthesis, Gpam (glycerol-3-phosphate acyltransferase, mitochondrial), Dgat1 (diacylglycerol acetyltransferase 1), and Agpat3 (1-acylglycerol-3-phospate O-acyltransferase 3), and lipolysis, Pnliprp1 (pancreatic lipase related protein 1). Conclusions: The role of endogenous TAG in supporting &bgr;-oxidation in the normal heart is much more dynamic than previously thought, and lipolysis provides the bulk of LCFA for oxidation. Accelerated palmitoyl turnover in TAG, attributable to chronic PPAR&agr; activation, results in near requisite oxidation of LCFAs from TAG.


In this article, we argue that Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard, likely presented a personality disorder known as malignant narcissism, and then we establish that this disorder probably contributed to his creation of organizational policies against perceived enemies that reflected his narcissistic rage. We illustrate our argument by discussing Hubbard's creation of an internal Scientology organization called the Guardian's Office, which carried out a sustained and covert attack against a Scientology critic, Paulette Cooper. This attack, and the Scientology policies that Hubbard created to 'handle' critics like her, demonstrate how Hubbard translated narcissistic rage into organizational policies that loyal members enacted on his behalf. By using psychological insights about the leader's personality, and then showing how that personality translated into socially deviant and sometimes criminal policies and actions by his organization, we hope to encourage criminologists to examine other groups by applying similar theories.


Network management is viewed as a way of dealing with uncertainty in complex policy networks but little is known about the types of network management strategies employed by regional actors to manage vertical and horizontal relations. Two central questions guide this paper (i) What network management strategies were employed to manage complexity and uncertainty in regional governance networks in England? (ii) How can past lessons be harnessed to inform future network strategies for managing territorial networks? The paper concludes that regional network management strategies were effective in securing 'process' outcomes but that 'content' outcomes, in the form of genuine discretion over policy, were unattainable without the authorization of central government.


According to the standard objection to backward induction in games, its application depends on highly questionable assumptions about the players' expectations as regards future counterfactual game developments. It seems that, in order to make predictions needed for backward reasoning, the players must expect (i) each player to act rationally at each node that in principle could be reached in the game, and also to expect (ii) that this confidence in the future rationality of the players would be kept by each player come what may: even at the game-nodes that could only be reached by irrational play. Both expectations seem to be rather unreasonable: a player's initial disposition to rational behaviour may be weakened by a long stretch of irrational play on his part and, even more importantly, his initial confidence in the other players' future rationality may be undermined by an irrational play on their part. For different formulations of this objection see Binmore (1987), Reny (1988) and (1989), Bicchieri (1989), Pettit and Sugden (1989). (For defences of backward induction see Sobel (1993) and Aumann (1995) and (1996).)


We consider the problem of query optimization in distributed data stream systems where multiple continuous queries may be executing simultaneously. In order to achieve the best performance, query planning (such as join ordering) must be considered in conjunction with deployment planning (e.g., assigning operators to physical nodes). In our scenario, the large number of network nodes, query operators, and opportunities for operator sharing between queries means that brute force and traditional techniques are too expensive. We propose two algorithms the Bottom-Up algorithm and the Top-Down algorithm, which utilize hierarchical network partitions to provide scalable query optimization. We present analysis that establishes the bounds on the search-space and sub-optimality achieved by our algorithms. Finally, through simulations and experiments using a prototype deployed on Emulab [1] we demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms. The Top-Down algorithm, for instance, was able to achieve, on an average, solutions that were sub-optimal by only 10% while considering less than 1% of the search space.


Background/Context There is a deep and yawning chasm between the world of tests and testing practices as they ought to be and the actual tests and testing practices now imposed on American students, educators, and schools. That chasm of theory and practice is a function of the dominant paradigm of educational reform, with its theory of action that schools must be remade in the image and likeness of a corporation. Purpose To explore the role, development, and implications of assessment use in the market model of education reform. Research Design Analysis of the recent publication of the value-added measurements found in the Teacher Data Reports of the New York City Department of Education. Conclusions Since standardized tests provide data for a "bottom line," they have been widely embraced in some circles as a basis for making "high stakes" decisions that hold individuals and schools accountable. In the market model of education reform, questions about the validity and reliability of the tests and of their use for "high stakes" decisions are dismissed as efforts to avoid accountability.


The rise of Castilian-Romance to a national and a standard language status in Spain and its relationship with other languages and its own varieties in the territory have been heavily studied. A close examination of the literature, however, reveals such problems as diachronic segmentation and a subtle polarization into "pro-Castilianist" and "anti-Castilianist" camps; hence the need for a relatively neutral approach. The present study examines the historical sociolinguistic situation in Spain by filtering a number of pertinent facts through classic macro-sociolinguistic (Garvin & Mathiot 1953; Haugen 1966) and socio-political (Fishman 1968, 1972) theoretical parameters. It draws conclusions that point to a more objective understanding of the present-day coexistence of a standard ideology with the practice of multilingualism in Spain.


Abstract The contention over the quantity and quality of regional missile defenses forward-deployed by the United States in the Asia-Pacific region animates much of the US–China disagreement about strategic stability. The Chinese argue that the deployed assets exceed reasonable defensive requirements and suggest that if these missile-defense deployments continue, they will be forced to increase the size of their nuclear arsenal. In disagreement, the United States claims that regional missile defenses are defensive by design, limited in scope, and necessary to defeat a North Korean missile campaign. In this article, a series of simulation experiments were developed to empirically test these opposing arguments over missile defenses and strategic stability. The simulations indicate that current deployments are necessary for defense and proportional to the threat. The analysis also argues that current deployments do not possess the ability to alter the US–China strategic nuclear balance significantly. The article concludes with a discussion of other subjective aspects of national security that may explain Chinese concerns and explore possible ways to reassure China.


Abstract The present study of Brassica cretica had two objectives. First, we compared estimates of population structure (Qst) for seven phenotypic characters with the corresponding measures for allozyme markers (Fst) to evaluate the supposition that genetic drift is a major determinant of the evolutionary history of this species. Secondly, we compared the genetic (co)variance (G) matrices of five populations to examine whether a long history of population isolation is associated with large, consistent differences in the genetic (co)variance structure. Differences between estimates of Fst and Qst were too small to be declared significant, indicating that stochastic processes have played a major role in the structuring of quantitative variation in this species. Comparison of populations using the common principal component (CPC) method rejected the hypothesis that the G matrices differed by a simple constant of proportionality: most of the variation involved principal component structure rather than the eigenvalues. However, there was strong evidence for proportionality in comparisons using the method of percentage reduction in mean‐square error (MSE), at least when characters with unusually high (co)variance estimates were included in the analyses. Although the CPC and MSE methods provide different, but complementary, views of G matrix variation, we urge caution in the use of proportionality as an indicator of whether genetic drift is responsible for divergence in the G matrix.


Written from a neo-Marxist point of view by a prominent Italian architectural historian, Architecture and Utopia leads the reader beyond architectural form into a broader understanding of the relation of architecture to society and the architect to the workforce and the marketplace. It discusses the Garden Cities movement and the suburban developments it generated, the German-Russian architectural experiments of the 1920s, the place of the avant-garde in the plastic arts, and the uses and pitfalls of seismological approaches to architecture, and assesses the prospects of socialist alternatives.


The current effort aims to analyze traffic operations empirically at merge-influence areas positioned inside recurrent freeway bottlenecks. Four years of data at four bottlenecks in the Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, freeway system were used in the analysis. Bottlenecks were ranked on the basis of merge-area capacity use and were treated individually. The study evaluated how merge-area traffic mix influenced freeway breakdown characteristics such as prebreakdown flow (PBF), queue discharge flow (QDF), queue discharge speed, and congestion duration (CD). Merge-area traffic mix was evaluated with the ramp volume ratio (RVR), which was defined as the percentage of the ramp flow in the total merge-area traffic flow. For bottlenecks with heavily used merge areas, both capacities (PBF and QDF) and queue discharge speed were reduced when RVR increased in value. The value of CD appeared to be sensitive to RVR. The value of CD was found to double, triple, or almost quadruple when ramp flow composed a higher percentage of merge-area flow. Bottlenecks with lightly used merge areas sometimes showed different or even contradictory results. The study also modeled two capacity flows (PBF and QDF) stochastically at merge areas with the three-parametric Weibull distribution. From the current analysis, it appears that the maximum merge-area flow (4,600 passenger cars per hour) recommended by the Highway Capacity Manual is not a conservative design value.


Based on the intrinsic temperature dependence of permanent magnet (PM) materials, the changing magnetic characteristics of three Nd-Fe-B magnet configurations with temperature were studied. A single PM, a traditional permanent magnet guideway (PMG) with steel as the flux collector in the center of the guideway (PMG A), and a Halbach-type PMG (PMG B) were investigated in cooling experiments. Liquid nitrogen was used to cool the PM and the PMGs from room temperature to the low temperature of 77 K, while the temperature and magnetic field signals were collected simultaneously. The results show that, with the temperature decrease, both the single PM and PMGs have a significant increase in their magnetic fields, which reach peak values. The magnetic flux density of the traditional PMG A shows a more significant increase of 20.3%, while the growth rates of the single cylinder PM and PMG B are 11.1% and 8.4%, respectively. As the temperature drops below a certain value, a spin-reorientation effect takes place inside the PM and causes a rapid decline of the magnetic flux density. Finally, compared with the magnetic field value at room temperature, the magnetic field variation of the single PM, PMG A, and PMG B were 5.7% decrease, 4.3% increase, and 0.7% decrease, respectively. The results provide basic data on the variation of magnetic characteristics of PM and PMG with temperature and contribute to research on superconducting levitation systems.


This paper describes how the San Francisco Department of Parking and Traffic (DPT) conducted an intensive pedestrian-safety engineering study, the PedSafe Study. PedSafe was funded by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), which also funded companion studies in Las Vegas and Miami. The paper was designed to analyze pedestrian injuries by zones (i.e., neighborhoods or districts) and to identify those most amenable to prevention efforts. The DPT expects to utilize the methodology and information from the PedSafe study to help shape a citywide pedestrian master plan. This paper describes the technical procedures and the pedestrian countermeasure plan that resulted. The paper analyzes pedestrian injury problems both citywide and in study zones, using crash data and field observations. It also compares two software packages that can be used to analyze crash patterns: PBCAT1 (Pedestrian and Bicycle Crash Analysis Tool), which is available for no charge, and the CrossroadsTM2 package, available commercially. The countermeasure plan is described for multiple funding levels, and a plan is outlined for evaluation and public outreach. The countermeasure plan proposes basic traffic engineering countermeasures including advance limit lines, curb bulbs, impactable YIELD TO PEDESTRIAN signs, median refuge island improvements, modified signal timing, pavement stencils, pedestrian head start, pedestrian scramble, and vehicle left-turn phases. In addition, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) countermeasures are recommended that include animated eyes signals, automated detection of pedestrians to adjust signal timing, modern flashing beacons, pedestrian countdown signals, radar speed display signs, roadway lighting improvements and smart lighting, and signal visibility improvements.


Background Steroid 5β-reductase (AKR1D1) plays important roles in hepatic glucocorticoid clearance and bile acid synthesis. Glucocorticoids and bile acids are potent metabolic regulators, but whether AKR1D1 controls metabolic phenotype in vivo is unknown. Methods Akr1d1-/-mice were generated on a C57BL/6 background. Liquid chromatography / mass spectrometry, metabolomic and transcriptomic approaches were used to determine effects on glucocorticoid and bile acid homeostasis. Metabolic phenotypes including body weight and composition, lipid homeostasis, glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity were evaluated. Molecular changes were assessed by RNASeq and western blotting. Male Akr1d1-/-mice were challenged with a 60% high fat diet. Results Akr1d1-/-mice had a sex specific metabolic phenotype. At 30-weeks of age male, but not female, Akr1d1-/-mice were more insulin sensitive and had reduced lipid accumulation in the liver and adipose tissue, concomitant with hypertriglyceridemia and increased intramuscular triacylglycerol. This phenotype was underpinned by sexually dimorphic changes in bile acid metabolism and composition, but without overt effects on glucocorticoid action. Male Akr1d1-/-mice were not protected against diet induced obesity and insulin resistance. Conclusion This study shows that AKR1D1 controls bile acid homeostasis in vivo and that altering its activity can affect insulin sensitivity and lipid homeostasis in a sex dependent manner.


The Widening Circle of Genocide, the third volume of an award-winning series, combines an encyclopedic summary of knowledge of the subject with annotated citations of literature in each field of study. It includes contributions by R.J. Rummel, Leonard Glick, Vahakn Dadrian, Rosanne Klass, Martin Van Bruinessen, James Dunn, Gabrielle Tyrnauer, Robert Krell, George Kent, Samuel Totten, and a foreword by Irving Louis Horowitz. This volume presents scholarship on a variety of topics, including: Germany's records of the Armenian genocide; little-known cases of contemporary genocide in Afghanistan, East Timor, and of the Kurds; a provocative new interpretation of the psychic scarring of Holocaust survivors; and nongovernmental organizations that have undertaken the beginnings of scholarship on the worldwide problems of genocide. The Widening Circle of Genocide embodies reverence for human life; its goal is the search for new means to prevent genocide. This work is distinguished by its excellence, originality, and depth of its scholarship. The first volume was selected by the American Library Association for its list of "Outstanding Academic Books of 1988-89." It is both compelling reading and an invaluable tool for scholars and students who wish to pursue specific fields of study of genocide. It will also be of interest to political scientists, historians, psychologists, and religion scholars.


OBJECTIVE. Budesonide is an inhaled steroid with a strong topical effect but with minimal systemic effects; it has been effectively delivered to animal lungs using surfactant as a vehicle. The purposes of this study were to determine whether early intratracheal instillation of budesonide using surfactant as a vehicle would improve pulmonary status, reduce mortality, and reduce chronic lung disease morbidity. PATIENTS AND METHODS. We conducted a prospective, randomized blind trial in 116 very low birth weight infants (<1500 g) who had severe radiographic respiratory distress syndrome and required mechanical ventilation with fraction of inspired oxygen ≥0.6 shortly after birth: 60 were in the treated group (intratracheal instillation of a mixture of 0.25 mg/kg of budesonide and 100.00 mg/kg of survanta, every 8 hours) and 56 were in the control group (100 mg/kg of survanta only, every 8 hours). The end point assessment was the number of infants who would die or develop chronic lung disease at 36 weeks' postconceptional age. RESULTS. Infants in the treatment group required significantly lower mean airway pressure on day 1 and day 3 and had significantly lower oxygen index and Pco2 during the first 3 days than infants in the control group. More infants were extubated in the treatment group than controls at 1 and 2 weeks. The combined outcome of deaths or chronic lung disease was significantly lower in the treatment group than in the control group (19 of 60 vs 34 of 56). No clinically significant adverse effects were observed during the study. CONCLUSIONS. This pilot study indicated that early postnatal intratracheal instillation of budesonide using surfactant as vehicle significantly improved the combined outcome of death or chronic lung disease in small premature infants without causing immediate adverse effects. The results are encouraging, and a large sample multicenter trial is warranted.


This report is part of a project being undertaken by the Charles Sturt University Johnstone
Centre and the Department of Natural Resources and Environment (DNRE). The research
examined ways in which salinity mitigation and biodiversity conservation can be achieved in
the dryland portion of the Goulburn Broken Catchment.
The project had four main stages.
1. A literature review and interviews with key stakeholders were undertaken to identify
social factors affecting the implementation of the Goulburn-Broken Dryland Salinity
Management Plan (GBDSMP), particularly with respect to the poor adoption rates for best
management practices (BMPs).
2. Landholders were surveyed to explore the social factors identified in Stage 1, including
the constraints that have prevented landholders adopting BMPs. The results of the survey
have been published in Curtis et al. (2001).
3. A literature review of natural resource management policy approaches in Australia and a
workshop with experts were used to identify policy options that would improve the
adoption of BMPs in a revised GBDSMP. The review has been published as MacKay et
al. (2000) and a summary of the workshop is given in Lockwood & Hawke (2000). A
review was also undertaken of the potential of carbon credits to contribute to salinity
mitigation (Hawke 2000a).
4. One of the requirements for salinity mitigation is to increase the area of perennial
vegetation in the catchment. If this can be achieved, at least in part, through re-establishing
native vegetation, then biodiversity objectives will also be addressed. A survey was
undertaken to assess the extent to which the required level of revegetation could be
achieved through re-establishment of native vegetation, and the amount of public
investment that would be required.
This report addresses the fourth stage.


Multiparametric Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has emerged as an essential clinical tool for assessing the severity of focal ischemic stroke, determining treatment goals and forecasting outcomes. While tissue viability in the vicinity of the stroke is the focus of imaging during the acute phase, the evaluation of distributed structural and functional connectivity is the focus of imaging during recovery. Preclinical MRI of experimental stroke models provides a translational platform for the evaluation of potential therapies and validates noninvasive biomarkers in terms of cellular and molecular mechanisms. The transition from acute to chronic imaging, the fundamentals of common MRI techniques used in stroke research, and experimental results obtained by clinical and preclinical imaging to determine tissue viability, vascular remodeling, structural connectivity of major white matter tracts, and functional connectivity using task based and resting state fMRI during the stroke recovery process are all discussed in this brief overview of translational stroke imaging.


In November 2007, Oregonians defeated Measure 50, an 84.5-cent cigarette tax increase to fund children's health insurance, by a vote of 59% no to 41% yes. This ballot measure would have established the Healthy Kids Program for otherwise uninsured children. Measure 50 revenues would also expand the Oregon Health Plan (Oregon's health care coverage for low-income residents) and provide additional funding for rural health and safety net clinics. Only 5% of the new revenues were dedicated to tobacco control. Measure 50 was a legislative referral of a bill that failed to pass as a statute during the regular legislative session. The Governor's Office and health and labor advocates tried several times to secure the three-fifths majority vote needed to pass a revenue-raising measure. Deprived of crucial votes with a Republican lockdown in the House, the Governor's Office and local contract lobbyist for the American Cancer Society (ACS) decided to support a legislative referral of the Healthy Kids Plan as a constitutional amendment, which only required the approval of a simple majority in the Legislature, to the ballot in the 2007 special election. Campaign spending for Measure 50 was the costliest in Oregon's history. The Yes on Healthy Kids PAC spent $3.7 million. The tobacco industry spent $12.1 million opposing the measure ($7.1 million from Philip Morris' Stop the Measure 50 Tax Hike PAC and $5.0 million from RJR's Oregonians Against the Blank Check PAC). From the outset, the Yes campaign faced several issues that put them at a disadvantage: the short timeline of less than five months from referral to election for a public education and media campaign, the unfavorable recourse of amending the constitution, and relatively low initial levels of public support (59% in March, falling to 53% in August). During the campaign, leadership was concentrated among three individuals who had experience in Oregon initiatives and politics, but who lacked the ability to effectively communicate and mobilize other advocates and volunteers involved in the campaign. RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris ran separate campaigns against Measure 50. Their combined $12 million directed at defeating the measure went to paid media and continuous polling that allowed the tobacco companies to define messages and hone in on issues that resonated most with voters throughout the state. The RJ Reynolds campaign had an effective spokesperson who was visible and stayed on message, unlike the Yes on Healthy Kids campaign, which lacked a strong identity with several speakers and changing messages. Measure 50 supporters blamed massive tobacco industry spending for their loss. This conclusion ignored flaws in the legislation itself; its small allocation to tobacco control and amendment to the constitution made it susceptible to attack from the tobacco industry. The Yes campaign also suffered from a lack of communication and cooperation within the campaign and did not learn lessons from other cigarette tax increase initiatives throughout the United States. The tobacco control community will continue to be disappointed with their campaign efforts to increase tobacco taxes until they begin to learn from these repeated past mistakes.


In this article, the author reviews the application of a computer-assisted decision support system to their formulary decision-making process. Basic information is presented describing expert systems, which are a type of computer-assisted decision support system, and their advantages and disadvantages. A specific example of an expert system, 'RXPERT', is described. 'RXPERT' is a prototype expert system that models the decision-making process for an ambulatory (nonhospital) formulary. This formulary is the underpinning of the prescription drug benefit programme for the nearly 1 million residents of Saskatchewan, Canada. In the current formulary decision process, each drug product is evaluated by 2 separate committees, with the third and final decision resting with the Ministry of Health. The first committee, the Drug Quality Assessment Committee (DQAC), comprises members with expertise in medicine, pharmacology, clinical pharmacy, pharmaceutics, statistics, and regulatory processes. The DQAC evaluates information from the drug manufacturer and other independent sources, and makes an initial assessment with respect to clinical aspects of alternative therapies and generic interchangeability. The committee then makes its recommendation to the Saskatchewan Formulary Committee (SFC). The SFC reviews the recommendation of the DQAC and considers the administrative and economic implications of accepting the product for the patient, the programme, and healthcare professionals' practice. The SFC either reaffirms the recommendation of the DQAC or modifies it based on further review, and forwards its recommendation to the Ministry of Health. Finally, the Ministry of Health reviews the evaluation and determines the drug's formulary status.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)


This article analyses studying law as a factor making a systematic and positive influence on legal consciousness. The aim of law studies is to nourish a person's willingness to obey the law and motivate him/her to remain law obeyant in the future. It also presents the possibilities of teaching law in Lithuania, in view of the scholarly literature and curriculum at schools. The object of this study is teachers' attitudes towards studies of law at secondary school. The study employed methods like as analysis of scientific data and teachers' written quiz. 149 teachers from Kupiskis district primary, secondary, and high schools were surveyed. The survey, suggests the following conclusions: a) studying law is a systematic and positive factor for a person's legal consciousness as the main element of legal culture; b) in contemporary Lithuanian secondary schools only separate subjects on law are taught, e.g. morals, history, civic education etc.), and only in high schools (gymnasiums) curriculum it is possible to develop an independent legal education as a separate discipline; c) law is a rather important subject at secondary schools. The quality of teaching it is mostly influenced by teachers' professional readiness to develop the curriculum, the possibilities to improve their knowledge and educational competences in this area, and legal education environment establishment of both specific school context and in the society in general, d) it was also established that, according to the teachers, 62% of all problems related with legal studies, were linked to communicational issues among students, teachers, and parents.


This paper is about using multiple types of information for classification of networked data in a semi-supervised setting: given a fully described network (nodes and edges) with known labels for some of the nodes, predict the labels of the remaining nodes. One method recently developed for doing such inference is a guilt-by-association model. This method has been independently developed in two different settings-relational learning and semi-supervised learning. In relational learning, the setting assumes that the networked data has explicit links such as hyperlinks between webpages or citations between research papers. The semi-supervised setting assumes a corpus of non-relational data and creates links based on similarity measures between the instances. Both use only the known labels in the network to predict the remaining labels but use very different information sources. The thesis of this paper is that if we combine these two types of links, the resulting network will carry more information than either type of link by itself. We test this thesis on six benchmark data sets, using a within-network learning algorithm, where we show that we gain significant improvements in predictive performance by combining the links. We describe a principled way of combining mUltiple types of edges with different edge-weights and semantics using an objective graph measure called node-based assortativity. We investigate the use of this measure to combine text-mined links with explicit links and show that using our approach significantly improves performance of our classifier over naively combining these two types of links.


Basic fibroblast growth factor 2 (bFGF) is a potent mitogen for mesenchymal cells, and the local application of recombinant bFGF accelerates bone union and defect repair. However, repeated dosing is required for sustained therapeutic effect as the efficacy of bFGF decreases rapidly following its diffusion from bone defect sites. Here, we attempted to develop a collagen-based bone formation system using a fusion protein (collagen binding-bFGF, CB-bFGF) consisting of bFGF and the collagen-binding domain (CBD) of Clostridium histolyticum collagenase. The addition of the CBD to bFGF did not modify its native biological activity, as shown by the capacity of the fusion protein to promote the in vitro proliferation of periosteal mesenchymal cells. The affinity of the fusion protein towards collagen and demineralized bone matrix (DBM) was also confirmed by collagen-binding assays. Moreover, in vivo periosteal bone formation assays showed that the combination of CB-bFGF with a collagen sheet induced periosteal bone formation at protein concentrations lower than those required for bFGF alone. In addition, grafts of DBM loaded with CB-bFGF accelerated new bone formation in rat femurs compared to the same concentration of bFGF administered alone. Taken together, these properties suggest that the CB-bFGF/collagen composite is a promising material for bone repair in the clinical setting. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res Part A: 102A: 1737–1743, 2014.


We consider the task of assigning experts from a portfolio of specialists in order to solve a set of tasks. We apply a Bayesian model which combines collaborative filtering with a feature-based description of tasks and experts to yield a general framework for managing a portfolio of experts. The model learns an embedding of tasks and problems into a latent space in which affinity is measured by the inner product. The model can be trained incrementally and can track non-stationary data, tracking potentially changing expert and task characteristics. The approach allows us to use a principled decision theoretic framework for expert selection, allowing the user to choose a utility function that best suits their objectives. The model component for taking into account the performance feedback data is pluggable, allowing flexibility. We apply the model to manage a portfolio of algorithms to solve hard combinatorial problems. This is a well studied area and we demonstrate a large improvement on the state of the art in one domain (constraint solving) and in a second domain (combinatorial auctions) created a portfolio that performed significantly better than any single algorithm.


This volume compares the Spanish and Latin American 'double transitions' to liberal democracy and an open-market economy. Spain's transitions in the 1960 to 1980s have become the paradigmatic case of successful institutional transformation, and thus the standard for the evaluation of the economic and political change in Latin America and Central/Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. Even though most Latin American countries have transformed their economies and polities in recent decades, and the outcomes of this transformation have been variable, few of these countries have so far established solid liberal democracies and dynamic open economies. The essays in this book, written by distinguished specialists, examine the different trajectories in Spain and several nations in Latin America, and seek to explain the different outcomes. In the large recent literature on transitions, this is the first systematic comparison between Spain and the Latin American cases.


Objective Mutations in the aryl hydrocarbon receptor-interacting protein (AIP) gene are associated with pituitary adenoma, acromegaly and gigantism. Identical alleles in unrelated pedigrees could be inherited from a common ancestor or result from recurrent mutation events. Design and methods Observational, inferential and experimental study, including: AIP mutation testing; reconstruction of 14 AIP-region (8.3 Mbp) haplotypes; coalescent-based approximate Bayesian estimation of the time to most recent common ancestor (tMRCA) of the derived allele; forward population simulations to estimate current number of allele carriers; proposal of mutation mechanism; protein structure predictions; co-immunoprecipitation and cycloheximide chase experiments. Results Nine European-origin, unrelated c.805_825dup-positive pedigrees (four familial, five sporadic from the UK, USA and France) included 16 affected (nine gigantism/four acromegaly/two non-functioning pituitary adenoma patients and one prospectively diagnosed acromegaly patient) and nine unaffected carriers. All pedigrees shared a 2.79 Mbp haploblock around AIP with additional haploblocks privately shared between subsets of the pedigrees, indicating the existence of an evolutionarily recent common ancestor, the 'English founder', with an estimated median tMRCA of 47 generations (corresponding to 1175 years) with a confidence interval (9–113 generations, equivalent to 225–2825 years). The mutation occurred in a small tandem repeat region predisposed to slipped strand mispairing. The resulting seven amino-acid duplication disrupts interaction with HSP90 and leads to a marked reduction in protein stability. Conclusions The c.805_825dup allele, originating from a common ancestor, associates with a severe clinical phenotype and a high frequency of gigantism. The mutation is likely to be the result of slipped strand mispairing and affects protein–protein interactions and AIP protein stability.


Background The cerebellum is rich in cannabinoid receptors and implicated in the neuropathology of schizophrenia. Long-term cannabis use is associated with functional and structural brain changes similar to those evident in schizophrenia, yet its impact on cerebellar structure has not been determined. We examined cerebellar grey and white matter in cannabis users with and without schizophrenia. Method Seventeen patients with schizophrenia and 31 healthy controls were recruited; 48% of the healthy group and 47% of the patients were long-term heavy cannabis users (mean 19.7 and 17.9 years near daily use respectively). Cerebellar measures were extracted from structural 3-T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans using semi-automated methods, and examined using analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) and correlational analyses. Results Cerebellar white-matter volume was reduced in cannabis users with and without schizophrenia compared to healthy non-users, by 29.7% and 23.9% respectively, and by 17.7% in patients without cannabis use. Healthy cannabis users did not differ in white-matter volume from either of the schizophrenia groups. There were no group differences in cerebellar grey matter or total volumes. Total cerebellar volume decreased as a function of duration of cannabis use in the healthy users. Psychotic symptoms and illness duration correlated with cerebellar measures differentially between patients with and without cannabis use. Conclusions Long-term heavy cannabis use in healthy individuals is associated with smaller cerebellar white-matter volume similar to that observed in schizophrenia. Reduced volumes were even more pronounced in patients with schizophrenia who use cannabis. Cannabis use may alter the course of brain maturational processes associated with schizophrenia.


This article compares the heights of 1,000 Irish and English men recruited for service in India by the East India Company in the late 1770s and early 1780s. The height data serves as a guide to determining the economic conditions of various regions in Ireland and England. Despite the law against Irish recruitment, Robert Brooke, an Irish soldier, entrepreneur and administrator, "turned a blind eye" to recruiting Irish men for the East India Company. Many had native Irish surnames, suggesting a "strong catholic representation" among Brooke's recruits. Included are various tables and graphs, which show the Irish in each age group to be taller and to have reached adult height at an earlier age than the English. Furthermore, the height data suggests that despite coming from a conventionally poorer socio-economic background, the Irish recruits were healthier than the English recruits. The article includes biographical background on Brooke, a letter from the East India Company to the British government asking for Irish recruitment, and statistics of deaths, desertion and transfers among Brooke's men.