This paper explores citizenship discourses empirically through upper secondary school student's understandings, as these emerge in and through their everyday experiences. Drawing on a post-structuralist theorisation inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, a discourse analysis of data from interviews with students is carried out. This analysis characterises three discourses of the active citizen – a knowledgeable citizen, a responsive and holistic citizen, and a self-responsible 'free' citizen. The analysis raises questions over the implications of contemporary efforts for the intensification of standardising forces through citizenship education. It also stresses the notion that engaging students actively does always also involve discourses other than those stressed through the curriculum, which nurtures the body and nerve of democracy itself.


ABSTRACT What is the Alt-Right? As a movement still taking shape ideologically and operationally, the Alt-Right demands a research framework for analyzing both what it believes and how it functions. Adopting a morphological approach to analyzing political ideologies, I advance a new criterion for ideological classification: masculinism. Alt-Right masculinism seeks to define and enforce forms of masculinity as normative and regulative ideals with far-reaching implications for the theoretical sources the movement appropriates, the discourses it articulates, and the organizational and operational modes it adopts. Proposing a Deleuzean approach to analyzing how radical movements operate, I argue the Alt-Right functions as a rhizome. In light of these analyses, contradictions within the Alt-Right come into view: the movement seeks to instantiate patriarchal, hierarchal, and phallocentric masculinities through leaderless, networked, and acentric strategies and practices. I conclude by reflecting on how Alt-Right ideology and practice differ from mainstream rightwing masculine ideals and practices—in nationalism, capitalism, militarism, and evangelicalism—and how the development of the Alt-Right sheds new light on the construction of contemporary political masculinities more broadly.


This Article examines the use of "bellwether settlements" in mass litigation. Bellwether settlements are different from "bellwether trials," a practice where parties choose a representative sample of cases for trial to determine how to resolve a much larger number of similar cases. In bellwether settlements, the parties instead rely on a representative sample of mediations overseen by judges and court-appointed mediators.
The hope behind bellwether settlements is that different settlement outcomes, not trials, will offer the parties crucial building blocks to forge a comprehensive global resolution. In so doing, the process attempts to (1) yield important information about claims, remedies, and strategies that parties often would not share in preparation for a high-stakes trial; (2) avoid outlier or clustering verdicts that threaten a global resolution for all the claims; and (3) build trust among counsel in ways that do not usually occur until much later in the litigation process.
The embrace of such bellwether settlements raises new questions about the roles of the judge and jury in mass litigation. What do bellwether settlements even mean when the procedures and outcomes lack any connection with a jury trial? What function do courts serve when large cases push judges outside their traditional roles as adjudicators of adverse claims, supervisors of controlled fact-finding, and interpreters of law?
This Article argues that, as in other areas of aggregate litigation, courts can play a vital "information-forcing" role in bellwether settlement practice. Even in a system dominated by settlement, judges can help parties set ground rules, open lines of communication, and, in the process, make more reasoned trade-offs. In so doing, courts protect the procedural, substantive, and rule-of-law values that aggregate settlements may threaten.


BACKGROUND
Several studies have pointed out the influence of nutritional parameters and/or indices of inflammation on morbidity and mortality. Often, these conditions coexist, and the relative importance of poor nutritional status and chronic inflammation in terms of predicting clinical outcomes in chronic hemodialysis (CHD) patients has not been clarified.

METHODS
We undertook a prospective cohort study analyzing time-dependent changes in several established nutritional and inflammatory markers, and their influence on mortality in 194 CHD patients (53% male, 36% white, 30% with diabetes mellitus, mean age 55.7 +/- 15.4 years) throughout a 57-month period. Serial measurements of serum concentrations of albumin, prealbumin, creatinine, transferrin, cholesterol, and C-reactive protein (CRP), as well as normalized protein catabolic rate, postdialysis weight, and phase angle and reactance by bioelectrical impedance analysis were performed every 3 months. Clinical outcomes were simultaneously assessed using indicators of mortality.

RESULTS
Serum albumin, serum prealbumin, serum creatinine, and phase angle were significant predictors of all-cause mortality, even after adjustment for serum CRP concentrations. Serum CRP concentrations were not significantly associated with mortality. Serum albumin concentrations and phase angle were also independent predictors of cardiovascular deaths in the multivariate model.

CONCLUSION
The nutritional status of CHD patients predicts mortality independent of concomitant presence or absence of inflammatory response. Prevention of, and timely intervention to treat uremic malnutrition by suitable means are necessary independent of the presence and/or therapy of inflammation in terms of improving clinical outcomes in CHD patients.


There is a close association between parthenogenesis and polyploidy. For this reason, we undertook a karyological analysis to test whether the parthenogenetic Marmorkrebs, Procambarus fallax forma virginalis, possesses an enlarged set of chromosomes. For this purpose, we karyotyped the Marmorkrebs, the sexual form of P. fallax (together called P. fallax complex), and the closely related species P. alleni. The latter shows 94 chromosomes in the haploid condition. In contrast to this, we found a haploid set of 92 chromosomes in individuals of the P. fallax complex. However, in mitotic metaphases the sexual form shows 184 chromosomes, whereas the Marmorkrebs possesses 276 chromosomes. Hence, the parthenogenetic Marmorkrebs reveals a triple amount of the haploid chromosome number. In addition, we detected a strikingly large subtelocentric chromosome which appears once in haploid and twice in diploid cells of sexual individuals of the P. fallax complex. In the parthenogenetic Marmorkrebs, this prominent chromosome occurs thrice. All this clearly reveals that the Marmorkrebs is a triploid organism. The applicability of the used methods, the significance of polyploidy in evolution of Decapoda, putative pathways to parthenogenetic triploidy, a possible hybrid origin and the scientific and ecological consequences of an increased chromosome set in Marmorkrebs are discussed.


Studies were undertaken to examine the ultrastructure and enzyme activities of peanut, Arachis hypogaea L. Var. Jumbo virginia root nodules induced by the nitrogen-fixing rhizobial strain, Bradyrhizobium sp. 32H1. Root nodules at different stages of development were assayed for their nitrogen-fixing ability using the acetylene reduction technique. Highest values for nitrogen fixation were obtained in 35 days old nodules. The bacteroids and the host cytosol/organelle fractions of root nodules were assayed for catalase activity. Catalase activity was present in all fractions, being highest in the bacteroids. The in vitro grown 32H1 were also assayed for catalase activity. There was negligible or no catalase activity in intact bacteria, but the supernatant from broken bacteria showed considerable catalase activity. -- Peanut root nodule anatomy differs considerably from the nodules of other nitrogen-fixing legumes. The central infected zone is devoid of any uninfected cells except for the rays of cortical cells running through the infected cells, which divide them into several masses. Sections fixed in a mixture of paraformaldehyde and glutaraldehyde were processed for ultrastructural studies. The 3,3'diaminobenzidine (DAB) reaction for localization of catalase was used. Controls were run by adding 3-amino-1,2,4-triazole (AT), potassium cyanide (KCN) in the incubation mixture and also by pre-boiling sections of incubating the sections without DAB and hydrogen peroxide. -- The characteristic ultrastructural arrangement and differentiation of rhizobia into large spherical bacteroids was observed within the host cells. Besides other organelles, lipid bodies were present in abundance and in close association with the bacteroids. Often they were seen attached to the peribacteroidal membrane envelope. Microbodies were observed in both uninfected and infected cells at all stages of nodule development unlike other nitrogen-fixing legumes where they are only found in uninfected cells. The microbodies in peanut root nodules were in close association and often in contact with the peribacteroidal membrane envelope and the bacteroids. Occasionally their membranes were seen fusing with the peribacteroidal membrane envelope. Microbodies were found to be DAB positive and the osmiophilic electron dense reaction product was found within its matrix. The presence of abundant lipid bodies, their physical contact with the peribacteroidal membrane envelope and with the bacteroids along with the microbodies and high catalase activity suggest that the lipids may be utilized as a carbon source during symbiosis through β-oxidation pathway. -- Besides the lipid bodies and the microbodies another osmiophilic DAB positive structure called the dense body was observed associated with the bacteroids. It resembled the central core of the microbody, lacked a membrane and was present at the interface between the peribacteroidal membrane envelope and the outer bacteroidal membrane and also within the matrix of the bacteroids. The DAB positive reaction shown by the dense bodies and their association with the bacteroids indicate that there is a possible role for them in the breakdown of hydrogen peroxide, produced during lipid utilization.


An environmental flow is the water regime provided within a river, wetland or coastal zone to maintain ecosystems and their benefits where there are competing water uses and where flows are regulated. Pioneering efforts in South Africa, Australia and the United States have shown that the process to establish them poses great challenges. Second in the series of the Water & Nature Initiative, this guide draws extensively on the experiences in these countries to offer hands-on advice and practical guidance on technical issues for this emerging issue on the water resource agenda.


Abstract. We examine climate change impacts on net primary production (NPP) and export production (sinking particulate flux; EP) with simulations from nine Earth system models (ESMs) performed in the framework of the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). Global NPP and EP are reduced by the end of the century for the intense warming scenario of Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5. Relative to the 1990s, NPP in the 2090s is reduced by 2–16 % and EP by 7–18 %. The models with the largest increases in stratification (and largest relative declines in NPP and EP) also show the largest positive biases in stratification for the contemporary period, suggesting overestimation of climate change impacts on NPP and EP. All of the CMIP5 models show an increase in stratification in response to surface–ocean warming and freshening, which is accompanied by decreases in surface nutrients, NPP and EP. There is considerable variability across the models in the magnitudes of NPP, EP, surface nutrient concentrations and their perturbations by climate change. The negative response of NPP and EP to increasing stratification reflects primarily a bottom-up control, as upward nutrient flux declines at the global scale. Models with dynamic phytoplankton community structure show larger declines in EP than in NPP. This pattern is driven by phytoplankton community composition shifts, with reductions in productivity by large phytoplankton as smaller phytoplankton (which export less efficiently) are favored under the increasing nutrient stress. Thus, the projections of the NPP response to climate change are critically dependent on the simulated phytoplankton community structure, the efficiency of the biological pump and the resulting levels of regenerated production, which vary widely across the models. Community structure is represented simply in the CMIP5 models, and should be expanded to better capture the spatial patterns and climate-driven changes in export efficiency.


The Supreme Court is broken. After cataloging its dysfunctions, this Article suggests a contributing cause and proposes a solution. The contributing cause is that Justices have become celebrities, and, like other celebrities, play to their fan base. The solution is to limit their opportunities to use their official status to do so: Congress should pass a law prohibiting concurring or dissenting opinions and requiring each case to be decided by an unsigned opinion that does not disclose the number of Justices who join it. The Article outlines the advantages of such a law and considers possible objections to it, including both constitutional and nonconstitutional objections. It ultimately concludes that it would be constitutional and that although there are significant risks, the probable benefits outweigh the probable costs. And because it is a statutory solution rather than a constitutional one, it can be viewed as an experiment that can easily be terminated if it does not work out. In the current climate it is a risk worth taking.


The strangeness contribution to the electric and magnetic properties of the nucleon has been under investigation experimentally for many years. Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (LQCD) gives theoretical predictions of these measurements by implementing the continuum gauge theory on a discrete, mathematical Euclidean space-time lattice which provides a cutoff removing the ultra-violet divergences. In this dissertation we will discuss effective methods using LQCD that will lead to a better determination of the strangeness contribution to the nucleon properties. Strangeness calculations are demanding technically and computationally. Sophisticated techniques are required to carry them to completion. In this thesis, new theoretical and computational methods for this calculation such as twisted mass fermions, perturbative subtraction, and General Minimal Residual (GMRES) techniques which have proven useful in the determination of these form factors will be investigated. Numerical results of the scalar form factor using these techniques are presented. These results give validation to these methods in future calculations of the strange quark contribution to the electric and magnetic form factors.


The problem of maximizing the determinant of a matrix subject to linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) arises in many fields, including computational geometry, statistics, system identification, experiment design, and information and communication theory. It can also be considered as a generalization of the semidefinite programming problem.
We give an overview of the applications of the determinant maximization problem, pointing out simple cases where specialized algorithms or analytical solutions are known. We then describe an interior-point method, with a simplified analysis of the worst-case complexity and numerical results that indicate that the method is very efficient, both in theory and in practice. Compared to existing specialized algorithms (where they are available), the interior-point method will generally be slower; the advantage is that it handles a much wider variety of problems.


The recent development of three dimensional (3D) display technologies has resulted in a proliferation of 3D video production and broadcasting, attracting a lot of research into capture, compression and delivery of stereoscopic content. However, the predominant design practice of interactions with 3D video content has failed to address its differences and possibilities in comparison the existing 2D video interactions. This paper presents a study of user requirements related to interaction with the stereoscopic 3D video. The study suggests that the change of view, zoom in/out, dynamic video browsing and textual information are the most relevant interactions with stereoscopic 3D video. In addition, we identified a strong demand for object selection that resulted in a follow-up study of user preferences in 3D selection using virtual-hand and ray-casting metaphors. These results indicate that interaction modality affects users' decision of object selection in terms of chosen location in 3D, while user attitudes do not have significant impact. Furthermore, the ray-casting based interaction using Wiimote can outperform the volume-based interaction technique using mouse and keyboard for object positioning accuracy.


Abstract Coupled Monte Carlo depletion systems provide a versatile and an accurate tool for analyzing advanced thermal and fast reactor designs for a variety of fuel compositions and geometries. The main drawback of Monte Carlo-based systems is a long calculation time imposing significant restrictions on the complexity and amount of design-oriented calculations. This paper presents an alternative approach to interfacing the Monte Carlo and depletion modules aimed at addressing this problem. The main idea is to calculate the one-group cross sections for all relevant isotopes required by the depletion module in a separate module external to Monte Carlo calculations. Thus, the Monte Carlo module will produce the criticality and neutron spectrum only, without tallying of the individual isotope reaction rates. The one-group cross section for all isotopes will be generated in a separate module by collapsing a universal multigroup (MG) cross-section library using the Monte Carlo calculated flux. Here, the term "universal" means that a single MG cross-section set will be applicable for all reactor systems and is independent of reactor characteristics such as a neutron spectrum; fuel composition; and fuel cell, assembly, and core geometries. This approach was originally proposed by Haeck et al. and implemented in the ALEPH code. Implementation of the proposed approach to Monte Carlo burnup interfacing was carried out through the BGCORE system. One-group cross sections generated by the BGCORE system were compared with those tallied directly by the MCNP code. Analysis of this comparison was carried out and led to the conclusion that in order to achieve the accuracy required for a reliable core and fuel cycle analysis, accounting for the background cross section (σ0) in the unresolved resonance energy region is essential. An extension of the one-group cross-section generation model was implemented and tested by tabulating and interpolating by a simplified σ0 model. A significant improvement of the one-group cross-section accuracy was demonstrated.


Cardiovascular diseases (CVD), defined as a spectrum of disorders primarily impacting the heart and the circulatory system, account for a substantial fraction of worldwide morbidity and mortality. Electrocardiograms (ECGs) are routinely implemented in a patient's diagnosis, both in hospitals and outpatient settings. They serve as one of the primary diagnostic tools as patients encounter medical personnel, particularly in suspected CVD. A cardiac holter monitor is a medical diagnostic device, connected to the patient via several conductive leads placed across the chest, and "worn" on a strap across the shoulder. A holter is applied to record continuous ECG data (typically 24 hours). With recently emerging applications of Machine Learning (ML) in data analysis techniques, the need for human expertise and potential human error could be minimized, and prediction accuracy optimized considerably. Hence, the objective of this research is to develop a machine learning frame-work to eventually aid physicians with their decisions as a powerful guiding/assisting tool to analyse the ECG information reported by holter monitors. Furthermore, we aim to develop a computer aided diagnostic system that can assists expert cardiologists by providing intelligent, cost effective, and time saving diagnosis. In this thesis, we implement a deep learning-based solution to analyse readings of the holter monitors. In our proposed solution, we train neural networks to extract high-level features from temporal signal recordings of holter monitors. We present a supervised neural network framework to predict the physician's final interpretations based on the holter recorded signals. The outputs of the network contain the likelihood of four possible scenarios of Normal and three types of arrhythmia. The high classification performance of the proposed methodology emphasizes the capability of this framework to be used as an assisting tool alongside the physicians to interpret holter reports.


This study investigates the effectiveness of metadata on websites. Specifically, the study investigated whether the extent of metadata use by a site influences the Web Impact Factor (WIF) of the site. The WIF is a Webometric measure of the recognition that a site has on the web. WIFs were calculated for two classes of sites: electronic journals and NZ University Web Sites. The most positive correlation was found between the substantive WIF of the electronic journal sites and the extent of Dublin Core metadata use. The study also indicates a higher level of metadata use than previous studies, but this may be due to the nature of the sites investigated.


Corpus luteum (CL) is a transient endocrine structure which develops from the remains of the Graffian follicle after ovulation in mammals. Prolongation of its function is required during pregnancy, while cessation of its function is a must for the initiation of a new reproductive cycle. In a number of farm animals including the bovine species, Prostaglandin F2a (PGF2a) is recognized as a physiological death signal/luteolysin for the regression of the corpus luteum. Despite the central role played by PGF2a in luteolysis, actual mechanisms during luteolysis are poorly defined. However, it is well established that regression of CL by PGF2a is brought about by the process of apoptosis. In the present study, CL from buffaloes (Bubalus bubalis) has been employed to examine whether PGF2a induces regression of CL by apoptosis as previously reported for the CL of dairy cow (Bos taurus). Also, the role played by the members belonging to the superfamily of mitogen activated protein kinases (MAPK) during luteal regression was investigated, since MAPK have been shown to play a very important role during growth, differentiation and cell death. Individual CL was collected from the buffaloes at 0, 4, 12 and 18 h after injection of luteolyzing dose of PGF2a and the CL was processed for morphological and biochemical characterization of the apoptosis. Administration of PGF2a to buffalo cows lead to a precipitous fall in serum progesterone concentrations within 4 h and the decrease was maximal by 18 h. DAPI staining of cryosections of the CL tissue collected 18 h post PGF2a injection showed increased nuclear condensation and loss of nuclei in some of the cells. To quantitate low molecular weight (LMW) DNA fragments, genomic DNA was end labeled using [a-32P] dATP by tdt enzyme. There was a 3-4 fold increase in the LMW DNA fragments 18 h post PGF2a injection. Western blot analysis of the CL tissue lysates was carried out for assessing the role played by MAP kinases and apoptotic factors during the PGF2a-induced luteolysis. There was a significant increase in the phospho-JNK levels (the active form of JNK), a decrease in the pBAD levels (the inactive form of BAD) and no change in the p38 MAPK, ERK1/2, JNK1/2, BAD and PP2A levels during the PGF2a-induced luteolysis. These results demonstrate that similar to the dairy cow CL, the buffalo CL undergoes apoptotic cell death during PGF2a-induced luteolysis and provide evidence that stress-activated protein kinases appear to be involved in the PGF2a-induced apoptosis of luteal cells.


Background Tecfidera (dimethyl fumarate, DMF) has recently been approved for multiple sclerosis. The most common adverse reactions reported in clinical trials are flushing and gastro-intestinal events. Indeed, dose reduction is necessary for the first 7 days from 240 mg to 120 mg bid to minimise the occurrence of these adverse effects. Purpose We report on a patient treated with DMF who experienced dyspnoea after the dose was increased. Material and methods An adverse reaction was reported from the Department of Neurology. The Naranjo algorithm was used to estimate the probability score. Results A 48-year-old woman with no medical or surgical history was given DMF for multiple sclerosis started at a dose of 120 mg bid. The dose was increased on day 7 to a dose of 240 mg bid. 24 h later, she experienced dyspnoea that required hospitalisation on day 20. Dyspnoea was classified as NYHA stage III. 93% oxygen saturation, 68 mmHg p02, 48 mmHg pCO2 were observed during hospitalisation while electrocardiogram was normal. Biological assessment with negative troponin, D-dimer, CRP and a normal pulmonary radiography excluded pulmonary embolism. DMF was reduced to 120 mg bid and complete resolution was achieved 24 h later. Two months later, pulmonary function tests were normal. New dose escalation led to a recurrence of dyspnoea with breathlessness in the next 24 h. DMF was finally stopped. The Naranjo score was 9 so this ADR was considered as definite. Conclusion This was the first case of dyspnoea reported to the French Pharmacovigilance system. Since this event, another case of dyspnoea involving DMF has been reported in our hospital. It seems important to monitor the tolerance of DMF treatment particularly after the dose escalation, whatever the symptoms. It may be necessary to manage some adverse reactions by reducing the dose. Reference Naranjo CA, Busto U, Sellers EM, et al. A method for estimating the probability of adverse drug reactions. Clin Pharmacol Ther 1981;30:239–45 No conflict of interest.


Enzymatic reactions are complex chemical processes taking place in complex dynamic environments. Theoretical characterization of these reactions requires the determination of the reaction coordinate and the transition state ensemble. This is not an easy task because many degrees of freedom may be involved in principle. We present recent efforts to find good enzymatic reaction coordinates and the implications of these findings in the interpretation of enzymatic efficiency. In particular, we analyze different strategies based on the use of minimum free energy paths and direct localization of the dividing surface on multidimensional free energy surfaces. Another strategy is based on the generation of reactive trajectories, using the transition path sampling method, from which transition state configurations can be harvested. Most of the applications carried out until now coincide to stress the change in the nature of the reaction coordinate, in terms of the participation of the chemical and environmental degrees of freedom, as the reaction advances. The degrees of freedom of the chemical system are dominant at the transition state while environmental participation can be more important at early or late stages of the process. WIREs Comput Mol Sci 2018, 8:e1329. doi: 10.1002/wcms.1329


The non-linear dielectric properties of single crystals of PbMg1/3Nb2/3O3 relaxer ferroelectric were investigated experimentally by using measurements of the dielectric permittivity of this material as a function of the DC bias and the AC driving fields. The results were analyzed using four models of the dielectric response of relaxors currently discussed in the literature, It was shown that among them only one model was consistent with the experimental data. This provides strong evidence that the mechanism of the dielectric response in PMN is controlled by the motion of the interphase boundaries of the polar regions. The analysis of the AC field dependence of non-linear dielectric permittivity showed that this dependence is described by a power law, with a temperature-dependent exponent. With decreasing temperature, the exponent exhibits a crossover, changing from 1 to 2, which is centered around the temperature of the onset of the frequency dispersion of the dielectric permittivity. The crossover was attributed to a change in the pinning regime of the polar region boundaries.


Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become core computation components within low latency Function as a Service (FaaS) prediction pipelines. Cloud computing, as the defacto backbone of modern computing infrastructure, has to be able to handle user-defined FaaS pipelines containing diverse DNN inference workloads while maintaining isolation and latency guarantees with minimal resource waste. The current solution for guaranteeing isolation and latency within FaaS is inefficient. A major cause of the inefficiency is the need to move large amount of data within and across servers. We propose TrIMS as a novel solution to address this issue. TrIMSis a generic memory sharing technique that enables constant data to be shared across processes or containers while still maintaining isolation between users. TrIMS consists of a persistent model store across the GPU, CPU, local storage, and cloud storage hierarchy, an efficient resource management layer that provides isolation, and a succinct set of abstracts, applicationAPIs, and container technologies for easy and transparent integration with FaaS, Deep Learning (DL) frameworks, and user code. We demonstrate our solution by interfacing TrIMS with the Apache MXNet framework and demonstrate up to 24x speedup in latency for image classification models, up to 210x speedup for large models, and up to8×system throughput improvement.


The present work has been designed to evaluate hepatoprotective&in vivo antioxidant effect of Methanol-Aqueous Extract of whole plant Polygonumglabrumwilld. (MAEP) against carbon tetrachloride(CCl4)induced hepatotoxicity in experimental rats. The levels of serum glutamate oxaloacetate transaminase (SGOT), serum glutamate pyruvate transaminase (SGPT), serum alkaline phosphatase (SALP), uric acid, total protein and total bilirubin were determined. Antioxidant status in liver was determined by measuring the activity of malonaldehyde (MDA), glutathione (GSH), total thiol and catalase (CAT). Total wet weight and histopathological study of isolated liver specimen was also carried out. . The oral pre-treatment with MAEP (200 and 400 mg/kg) showed significant hepatoprotective activity against CCl4 induced hepatotoxicity by decreasing the activities of serum marker enzymes, bilirubin and lipid peroxidation, and significant increase in the levels of uric acid, GSH, Total thiol, Catalase and protein in a dose dependent manner, which was confirmed by the decrease in the total weight of the liver and histopathological examinations. Data also showed that MAEP possessed strong antioxidant activity, which may probably leads to the promising hepatoprotective activities of MethanolAqueous Extract of whole plant Polygonum glabrum willd. (MAEP). These findings, therefore supported the traditional believes on hepatoprotective effect of the whole plant Polygonum glabrumwilld.(MAEP).


The marginal-median discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is used for estimation of complex sinusoidal signals embedded in an impulse noise environment. Expression for the marginal-median DFT of the sinusoidal signal in the neighborhood of the exact frequency is derived. Two specific displacement techniques are proposed in order to achieve an accurate estimation of frequency displaced from the frequency grid. They are based on specific ratio of the marginal-median DFT magnitudes for samples in the neighborhood of the marginal-median DFT maximum calculated over the frequency grid. Efficiency and accuracy of the proposed techniques is proved for mixed Gaussian and impulse noise environment


I. INTRODUCTION In September 1999, nearly six months after the Korean government announced the relaxation of barriers to the legal services market, Stephen Brown, the British ambassador to South Korea, aimed pointed criticism at the market's slow pace of change. "Foreign law firms are effectively unable to open offices in Korea, even to provide advice on non-Korean law, meaning that Korea has one of the most restrictive sectors in Asia, more so than China or Vietnam," Brown said.(2) Though he may have overstated the situation, Ambassador Brown's impatience is understandable. In the three years following the currency crash of 1997, the Korean economy has made a comeback worthy of Lazarus, but its fledging strength needs to be supplanted by continued structural reforms. As one of Asia's largest economies, South Korea plays an important role in the global market. The events of 1997, during which a fall in the Thai baht precipitated steep market declines in South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Japan, underscored how quickly a shift in one segment of the international market can affect other markets in the region and the world economy. Unprecedented political events focused global attention on Korea again in 2000, for more positive reasons--a historic summit between North and South Korea orchestrated by South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts(3)--but international views on the South Korean economy remain more cautious than confident. To maintain global financial stability and reduce the chances of a "repeat crash," South Korea needs the support of the international business and legal communities as it works to improve transparency in its legal, financial, and business systems. This Note reviews the background of the current economic situation in South Korea and explains how the 1997 International Monetary Fund ("IMF") relief program affected the Korean legal market. It then focuses on the challenges that international legal practitioners are likely to face regarding transactions in South Korea, points out the importance of recognizing the different points of view regarding the role of law in Korean business transactions, and outlines some of the substantive growth areas for practitioners interested in the Korean market. Finally, this Note argues that allowing international legal firms to offer a full range of services in the Korean market will help forge the kinds of long-term relationships--and draw the long-term capital investment--the country needs. II. BACKGROUND A. From Tiger to Octopus: South Korea's Economic Backslide Between 1961 and 1991, state control of industrial development and a fierce determination to modernize South Korea brought about unprecedented economic growth, but at a very high price: nearly every aspect of the South Korean market was under the tight control of distinctly authoritarian regimes.(4) After its first truly democratic election in 1992, South Korea continued to be counted among the strongest of the "Asian tigers," ahead of Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Thailand. The winner of the 1992 election, former political dissident Kim Young-sam, built a winning platform on a policy of globalization, or segyewha. President Kim's push to internationalize Korea was a welcome change from the growth-at-all-costs policies of the past thirty years under the administrations of Park Chung-hee, Chun Doo-hwan, Syungmun Rhee, and Noh Tae-woo. Under the Kim administration, family-owned corporations, or chaebol, continued to dominate the Korean economy as they had throughout the decades immediately following the Korean War. As the country's economic backbone, the chaebol had been carefully monitored by the Park and Chun governments. Companies were told where, when, and how to operate, and disobedience was not tolerated. In turn, the government protected the chaebols' markets through high tariffs and cheap loans until Korean industry became competitive internationally. …


This paper begins by noting some background issues concerning the linking of science and design and technological activities. Some theoretical difficulties in expressing ideas about design and technology are noted and the consequential merits of an empirical approach are exposed . Research findings are presented which help to support the development of a theoretical position in relation to technology for design , in particular introducing the notion of 'cognitive mismatches' . The evidence presented suggests that wh e"; ; - esignificant cognitive mismatches exist between the matters which the designer must resolve (e . g . some are qualitative and modelled visually and some are quantitative and modelled mathematically), then focused practical tasks are essential in order to ensure high quality design outcomes. An invitation is in c luded to participate in a broadly-based research programme in order to document good practice in relation to technology for design and explore associated issues.


Abstract. Regional analyses of atmospheric conditions that may cause flooding of important transport infrastructure (railway tracks, highways/roads, rivers/channels) and subsequent adaptation measures are part of topic 1 of the network of experts initiated by the German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI). As an example case study, the December 2014 flood in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, was investigated. Atmospheric conditions at the onset of the flood event are described and evaluated with respect to the general weather circulation, initial wetness, and event precipitation. Persistent, predominantly westerly general weather circulations (GWCs) directed several low-pressure systems over the North Sea to Schleswig-Holstein during December 2014, accompanied by prolonged rainfall and finally a strong precipitation event in southern Schleswig-Holstein, causing several inland gauges to exceed their, by then maximum, water levels. Results show that the antecedent precipitation index (API) is able to reflect the soil moisture conditions and, in combination with the maximum 3-day precipitation sum (R3d), to capture the two main drivers finally leading to the flood: (1) the initial wetness of north-western Schleswig-Holstein and (2) strong event precipitation in southern and eastern Schleswig-Holstein from 21 to 23 December; at the same time, both indices exceeded their respective 5-year return periods. Further, trend analyses show that both API and R3d have been increasing during recent years, while regional patterns match the north-eastward shift of cyclone pathways, leading to a higher risk of flooding in Schleswig-Holstein. Within the network of experts, investigations of these and further indices/drivers for earth system changes (e.g. wind surge and sea level rise) derived from observations, reanalyses, and regional climate model data are planned for all German coastal areas. Results can be expected to lead to improved adaptation measures to floods under climate change conditions wherever catchments have to be drained and infrastructures and ecosystems may be harmed.


The Adaptive Quality Control Phantom (AQCP) is the computer-controlled phantom which positions and moves a radioactive source in the Field of View (FOV) of an imaging nuclear medicine device on a definite path to produce any spatial distribution of gamma rays to perform the QC Tests such as the Collimator Hole Angulation (CHA) of Single Photon Emission Computer Tomography (SPECT). The collimator hole angulation for seven collimators were measured with the method by using a point source and computer-controlled cylindrical positioning. In this method the displacement of the image of a point source examined as the AQCP move point source vertically away from the collimator face. The results of the high-accuracy measurement method of CHA show that the measurement accuracy for absolute angulation errors is better than ±0.024°. The Root Mean Square (RMS) of CHA for LEHR, LEHS, LEUHR, MEGP-250, MEGP-300, MEGP-360 and HEPH collimators of SMV dual heads camera were measured to be 0.290°, 0.292°, 0.208°, 0.194°, 0.181°, 0.177°, 0.150°, respectively. The Root Mean Square (RMS) of CHA for LEGP, MEGP and HEGP collimators of GE Millennium MG were measured to be 0.154°, 0.220° and 0.202° respectively. It is to be added in this connection that the measured RMS of CHA for LEHR collimator with the distance variation from the collimator's surface +/– 1 mm has been varied +/– 0.04 degree.


Background: Both the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and the medial collateral ligament (MCL) bear load during athletic tasks of landing, cutting, pivoting, and twisting. As dynamic knee valgus is a purported mechanism for ACL injury, the MCL should bear significant strain load with valgus force. Hypothesis: The intact MCL will demonstrate a significant increase in strain upon failure of the ACL at 25° of knee flexion. Study Design: Controlled laboratory study. Methods: In vivo kinetics/kinematics of 44 healthy athletic participants were measured to determine stratification of injury risk (ie, low, medium, and high) in 3 degrees of knee forces/moments (knee abduction moment, anterior tibial shear, and internal tibial rotation). These stratified kinetic values were input into a cadaveric impact simulator to assess ligamentous strain during a simulated landing task. Uniaxial and multiaxial load cells and differential variable reluctance transducer strain sensors were utilized to collect mechanical data for analysis. Conditions of external loads applied to the cadaveric limbs were varied and randomized. Results: ACL strain increased with increased dynamic knee abduction moment (χ2[5] = 14.123, P = .0148). The most extreme dynamic knee abduction moment condition demonstrated significantly higher ACL strain compared with lower loaded trials (P≤ .0203). Similarly, MCL strain increased with dynamic knee abduction moment (χ2[5] = 36.578, P < .0001). Matched-pairs analysis compared ACL strain with MCL strain (maximum ACL strain – maximum MCL strain) and demonstrated high strain for the ACL versus the MCL (S177 = 6223.5, P < .0001). Conclusion: Although significant, MCL strain had minimal increase with increased dynamic knee abduction moment, and the event of ACL failure did not significantly increase MCL strain when compared with high dynamic knee abduction moment conditions in the cadaveric model. The ACL bears more strain than the MCL at increasing amounts of dynamic knee abduction moment at 25° of knee flexion, which may explain the limited concomitant MCL injury rate that can occur during a dynamic valgus collapse of the knee. Clinical Relevance: These characteristics of ACL and MCL strain are important to understand the mechanisms that drive these injuries at the knee and will improve rehabilitation and injury prevention techniques.


The absence of telomerase in many eukaryotes leads to the gradual shortening of telomeres, causing replicative senescence. In humans, this proliferation barrier constitutes a tumor suppressor mechanism and may be involved in cellular aging. Yet the heterogeneity of the senescence phenotype has hindered the understanding of its onset. Here we investigated the regulation of telomere length and its control of senescence heterogeneity. Because the length of the shortest telomeres can potentially regulate cell fate, we focus on their dynamics in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We developed a stochastic model of telomere dynamics built on the protein-counting model, where an increasing number of protein-bound telomeric repeats shift telomeres into a nonextendable state by telomerase. Using numerical simulations, we found that the length of the shortest telomere is well separated from the length of the others, suggesting a prominent role in triggering senescence. We evaluated this possibility using classical genetic analyses of tetrads, combined with a quantitative and sensitive assay for senescence. In contrast to mitosis of telomerase-negative cells, which produces two cells with identical senescence onset, meiosis is able to segregate a determinant of senescence onset among the telomerase-negative spores. The frequency of such segregation is in accordance with this determinant being the length of the shortest telomere. Taken together, our results substantiate the length of the shortest telomere as being the key genetic marker determining senescence onset in S. cerevisiae.


In this paper, we describe the results of an online field experiment examining the impacts of messaging about task novelty on the volume of volunteers' contributions to an online citizen science project. Encouraging volunteers to provide a little more content as they work is an attractive strategy to increase the community's output. Prior research found that an important motivation for participation in online citizen science is the wonder of being the first person to observe a particular image. To appeal to this motivation, a pop-up message was added to an online citizen science project that alerted volunteers when they were the first to annotate a particular image. Our analysis reveals that new volunteers who saw these messages increased the volume of annotations they contributed. The results of our study suggest an additional strategy to increase the amount of work volunteers contribute to online communities and citizen science projects specifically.


We review scenarios that have been proposed to solve the cosmological problem caused by moduli in string theory, the Postmodern Polonyi Problem (PPP). In particular, we discuss the difficulties encountered by the apparently " trivial " solution of this problem, in which moduli masses are assumed to arise from nonperturbative, SUSY preserving, dynamics at a scale higher than that of SUSY breaking. This suggests a powerful cosmological vacuum selection principle in superstring theory. However, we argue that if one eschews the possibility of cancellations between different exponentials of the inverse string coupling, the mechanism described above cannot stabilize the dilaton. Thus, even if supersymmetric dynamics gives mass to the other moduli in string theory, the dilaton mass must be generated by SUSY breaking, and dilaton domination of the energy density of the universe cannot be avoided. We conclude that the only proposal for solving the PPP that works is the intermediate scale inflation scenario of Randall and Thomas. However, we point out that all extant models have ignored unavoidably large inhomogeneities in the cosmological moduli density at very early times, and speculate that the effects associated with nonlinear gravitational collapse of these inhomogeneities may serve as an efficient mechanism for converting moduli into ordinary matter. As an important byproduct of this investigation, we show that in a postinflationary universe, minima of the effective potential with negative cosmological constant are not stationary points of the classical equations of scalar field cosmology. Instead, such points lead to catastrophic gravitational collapse of that part of the universe which is attracted to them. Thus postinflationary cosmology dynamically chooses nonnegative values of the cosmological constant. This implies that supersymmetry must be broken in any sensible inflationary cosmology. We suggest that further study of the cosmology of moduli will lead to additional important insights about cosmology, SUSY breaking, and the choice of the vacuum in superstring theory.


Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a chronic disease predicted to become the third leading cause of death by 2030. Patients with COPD are at risk of exacerbations in their symptoms, which have an adverse effect on their quality of life and may require emergency hospital admission. Using the results of a pilot study of an m-Health system for COPD self-management and tele-monitoring, we demonstrate a data-driven approach for computing personalised alert thresholds to prioritise patients for clinical review. Univariate and multivariate methodologies are used to analyse and fuse daily symptom scores, heart rate, and oxygen saturation measurements. We discuss the benefits of a multivariate kernel density estimator which improves on univariate approaches.


Variable-axial fiber-reinforced composites allow for local customization of fiber orientation and thicknesses. Despite their significant potential for performance improvement over the conventional multiaxial composites and metals, they pose challenges in design optimization due to the vastly increased design freedom in material orientations. This paper presents an anisotropic topology optimization (TO) method for designing large-scale, 3D variable-axial composite structures. The computational challenge for large-scale 3D TO with extremely low volume fraction is addressed by a tensor-based representation of 3D orientation that would avoid the 2π periodicity of angular representation such as Eular angles, and an adaptive meshing scheme, which, in conjunction with PDE regularization of the density variables, refines the mesh where structural members appear and coarsens where there is void. The proposed method is applied to designing a heavy-duty drone frame subject to complex multi-loading conditions. Finally, the manufacturability gaps between the optimized design and the fabrication-ready design for Tailored Fiber Placement (TFP) is discussed, which motivates future work toward fully-automated design synthesis.


The release of permafrost‐derived nitrogen (N) has the potential to fertilize tundra vegetation, which in turn may stimulate productivity and thus offset carbon (C) losses from thawing permafrost. Below‐ground plant traits may mediate ecosystem response to permafrost thaw and associated feedbacks to the atmosphere by differentially conferring access to deep, newly thawed permafrost N. Yet, identifying roots and quantifying root N uptake from deep, cold soils in complex plant communities has proved challenging to date. We investigated plant acquisition of experimentally added 15N isotope tracer applied at the permafrost boundary in graminoid‐ and shrub‐dominated tundra at Eight Mile Lake, Alaska, when the thaw front was close to its maximum depth, simulating the release of newly thawed permafrost N. We used molecular tools to verify species and estimate biomass, nitrogen, and isotope pools. Root biomass depth distributions follow an asymptotic relationship with depth, typical of other ecosystems. Few species had roots occurring close to the thaw front. Rubus chamaemorus, a short‐statured non‐mycorrhizal forb, and Carex bigelowii, a sedge, consistently had the deepest roots. Twenty‐four hours after isotope addition, we observed that deep‐rooted, non‐mycorrhizal species had the highest 15N enrichment values in their fine root tissue indicating that they access deep N late in the growing season when the thaw front is deepest. Deep‐rooted plants are therefore able to immediately take up newly thawed permafrost‐derived N. During the following growing season, herbaceous, non‐mycorrhizal plants allocated tracer above‐ground before woody, mycorrhizal plants. Ectomycorrhizal deciduous and ericoid mycorrhizal evergreen shrubs, by contrast, did not have immediate access to the deep N tracer and assimilated it into new foliar tissue gradually over the following growing season. Synthesis. Graminoids and forbs that have immediate access to deep N represent a modest C sink compared to C emissions from thawing permafrost. However, the effects of deep N fertilization on shrubs over longer time‐scales may stimulate productivity and account for a more considerable N and C sink, thus constraining the permafrost C‐climate feedback.


The Schwinger-Dyson equations for the gluon and quark propagators are investigated in the covariant gauge. The renormalization functions are approximated suitably and the value of the parameters are determined by requiring that the functions be numerically self-consistent solutions over appropriate ranges of momenta. In the case of the gluon the Schwinger-Dyson equation is truncated by neglecting the the two loop contributions and the triple gluon vertex is approximated by a form proposed by Mandelstam which has the same behaviour as the more complicated longitudinal vertex determined from the Slavnov-Taylor identity. The equation is then closed and the integrals are calculated by dimensional regularization and renormalized to remove a mass term. In the quark case the dominant part of the quark-gluon vertex is determined from the Ward-Takahashi identity to give, with the gluon, a closed equation. The angular integrals are then calculated by an appropriate choice of coordinate frame. The quark function is approximated by a power series in the non-perturbative regime and the usual perturbative result elsewhere. The radial integrals are then calculated with appropriate regularization and renormalization. It is found that the gluon propagator has approximately a singularity of the form 1/q(^4) which leads to a roughly linear confining potential. The effect of this enhanced singularity on the quark propagator is to suppress the propagation of quarks at low momenta.


The knowledge acquisition bottleneck has become the major impediment to the development and application of effective information systems. To remove this bottleneck, new document processing techniques must be introduced to automatically acquire knowledge from various types of documents. By presenting a survey on the techniques and problems involved, this paper aims at serving as a catalyst to stimulate research in automatic knowledge acquisition through document processing. In this study, a document is considered to have two structures: geometric structure and logical structure. These play a key role in the process of the knowledge acquisition, which can be viewed as a process of acquiring the above structures. Extracting the geometric structure from a document refers to document analysis; mapping the geometric structure into logical structure is regarded as document understanding. Both areas are described in this paper, and the basic concept of document structure and its measurement based on entropy analysis is introduced. Logical structure and geometric models are proposed. Both top-down and bottom-up approaches and their entropy analyses are presented. Different techniques are discussed with practical examples. Mapping methods, such as tree transformation, document formatting knowledge and document format description language, are described. >


John Brady is an enigmatic figure in Western Australian history. On 9 May 1845 Pope Gregory XVI appointed him as first Bishop of Perth. On return to the Swan River Colony, he was the first resident bishop of any denomination.1 During his episcopate Brady established Catholic schools, built churches, recruited religious orders, formed a productive relationship with the colonial government and was pivotal to the foundation of the Spanish Benedictine monastery of New Norcia. Yet these achievements, coupled with the complexity of being the founding bishop in a frontier society, have been understated by scholars who have written about Brady with an emphasis on his disagreements with religious orders and, in particular, his public battle with Bishop Jos Mar a Serra. Serra, who became Brady's long term rival, was one of the Spanish Benedictine monks who co-founded New Norcia. Brady's struggle to remain sole leader of the diocese left him in a state of anxiety, and the diocese in disarray. As a consequence, he was forced to resign as bishop of Perth. These tumultuous events have been reviewed by a small group of historians: Bourke, Covesi-Killerby, Dowd, Farrell, Garrad, O'Donoghue, Tiggeman, and Waldersee, who have focused their work on a narrow set of archival material.2 The overemphasis of ecclesiastical archives has resulted in little or no reference to state archives and their collection of colonial government papers which contain extensive correspondence to and from Brady.


abstract:How does political polarization occur under repressive conditions? Drawing on psychological theories of social identity, the author posits that the nature of repression drives polarization. Repression alters group identities, changing the perceived distance between groups and ultimately shaping the level of affective and preference polarization between them through differentiation processes. The author tests the proposed causal relationship using mixed-method data and analysis. The results of a laboratory experiment reveal that exposure to a targeted repression prime results in greater in-group identification and polarization between groups, whereas exposure to a widespread prime results in decreased levels of these same measurements. The effect of the primes appears to be mediated through group identification. Case-study evidence of polarization between political opposition groups that were differently repressed in Egypt and Tunisia reinforces these results. The findings have implications for understanding how polarization, as conditioned by repression, may alter the likelihood of the cooperative behavior among opposition actors necessary for the success of democratic politics.


Background —Type 2 long QT syndrome involves mutations in the human ether a-go-go–related gene ( hERG or KCNH2 ). T421M, an S1 domain mutation in the Kv11.1 channel protein, was identified in a resuscitated patient. We assessed its biophysical, protein trafficking, and pharmacological mechanisms in adult rat ventricular myocytes. Methods and Results —Isolated adult rat ventricular myocytes were infected with wild-type (WT)–Kv11.1– and T421M-Kv11.1–expressing adenovirus and analyzed with the use of patch clamp, Western blot, and confocal imaging techniques. Expression of WT-Kv11.1 or T421M-Kv11.1 produced peak tail current ( I Kv11.1 ) of 8.78 (cid:1) 1.18 and 1.91 (cid:1) 0.22 pA/pF, respectively. Loss of mutant I Kv11.1 resulted from (1) a partially trafficking-deficient channel protein with reduced cell surface expression and (2) altered channel gating with a positive shift in the voltage dependence of activation and altered kinetics of activation and deactivation. Coexpression of WT (cid:2) T421M-Kv11.1 resulted in heterotetrameric channels that remained partially trafficking deficient with only a minimal increase in peak I Kv11.1 density, whereas the voltage dependence of channel gating became WT-like. In the adult rat ventricular myocyte model, both WT-Kv11.1 and T421M-Kv11.1 channels responded to (cid:1) -adrenergic stimulation by increasing I Kv11.1 . Conclusions —The T421M-Kv11.1 mutation caused a loss of I Kv11.1 through interactions of abnormal protein trafficking and channel gating. Furthermore, for coexpressed WT (cid:2) T421M-Kv11.1 channels, different dominant-negative interactions govern protein trafficking and ion channel gating, and these are likely to be reflected in the clinical phenotype. Our results also show that WT and mutant Kv11.1 channels responded to (cid:1) -adrenergic stimulation. ( Circulation . 2012;126:2809-2818.) S1 domain mutation should alter both protein trafficking and gating properties of Kv11.1 channels. We overexpressed channels in a native adult rat ventricular myocyte (ARVM) model, and we studied WT-Kv11.1 or T421M-Kv11.1 homotetrameric channels as well as coexpressing genes for WT (cid:2) T421M-Kv11.1 subunits to create heterotetrameric channels that more closely simulate human heart. Because the patient experienced cardiac arrest after an acute auditory trigger, we also studied whether there was a link between (cid:1) -adrenergic stimulation and Kv11.1 channel activity. These studies demonstrate the feasibility of using ARVMs as a native myocyte model for Kv11.1 expression and regulation studies, and the complex mechanisms we found are likely to contribute to determin-Received or T421M Kv11.1 protein (AdT421M-Kv11.1) or green fluorescent protein (AdGFP) and, for coexpression studies, 0.5 (cid:4) 10 6 of AdWT-Kv11.1 and 0.5 (cid:4) 10 6 of AdT421M-Kv11.1 viral particles on the day of isolation for 24 hours, and experiments were conducted after 4 days of infection once the expression of GFP was confirmed. (cid:1) -adrenergic stimulation of wild-type–Kv11.1 and channels in adult ventricular myocytes. Wild-type–Kv11.1 and T421M-Kv11.1 channels responded to by increasing could a direct substrate for (cid:1) -blocker therapy. Our findings provide new into


An AI system that is to create a story (autonomously or in interaction with human users) requires capabilities from many subfields of AI in order to create characters that themselves appear to act intelligently and believably in a coherent story world. Specifically, the system must be able to reason about the physical actions and verbal interactions of the characters as well as their perceptions of the world. Furthermore it must make the characters act believably--i.e. in a goal-directed yet emotionally plausible fashion. Finally, it must cope with (and embrace!) the dynamics of a multiagent environment where beliefs, sentiments, and goals may change during the course of a story and where plans are thwarted, adapted and dropped all the time.  In this paper, we describe a representational and algorithmic framework for modelling such dynamic story worlds, Continual Multiagent Planning. It combines continual planning (i.e. an integrated approach to planning and execution) with a rich description language for modelling epistemic and affective states, desires and intentions, sensing and communication. Analysing story examples generated by our implemented system we show the benefits of such an integrated approach for dynamic plot generation.


Although much effort is made to prevent risks arising from food, food-borne diseases are an ever present-threat to the consumers' health. The consumption of fresh food that is contaminated with pathogens like fungi, viruses or bacteria can cause food poisoning that leads to severe health damages or even death. The outbreak of Shiga Toxin-producing enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) in Germany and neighbouring countries in 2011 has shown this dramatically. Nearly 4.000 people were reported of being affected and more than 50 people died during the so called EHEC-crisis. As a result the consumers' trust in the safety of fruits and vegetables decreased sharply. In situations like that food crisis managers from public authorities as well as from privately owned companies must react quickly: They have to identify and track back contaminated products and they have to withdraw them from the market. At the same time they have to inform the stakeholders' about potential threats and recent developments. This is a particularly challenging task because when an outbreak is just detected information about the actual scope is sparse and the demand for information is high. Thus, ineffective communication among crisis managers and towards the public can result in inefficient crisis management, health damages and a major loss of trust in the food system. This is why crisis communication is a crucial part of successful crisis management, whereas the quality of crisis communication largely depends on the availability of and the access to relevant information. In order to improve the availability of information, we have explored how information from public accessible internet sources like Twitter or Wikipedia can be harnessed for food crisis communication. In this paper we are going to report on some initial insight from a web mining and social media analysis approach to monitor health and food related issues that can develop into a potential crises. We have chosen Twitter and Wikipedia as sources for our study since it's publicly accessible and reveal what people state about certain topics and what people are looking for in order to answer their questions.


Traditionally, federated learning (FL) aims to train a single global model while collaboratively using multiple clients and a server. Two natural challenges that FL algorithms face are heterogeneity in data across clients and collaboration of clients with {\em diverse resources}. In this work, we introduce a \textit{quantized} and \textit{personalized} FL algorithm QuPeD that facilitates collective (personalized model compression) training via \textit{knowledge distillation} (KD) among clients who have access to heterogeneous data and resources. For personalization, we allow clients to learn \textit{compressed personalized models} with different quantization parameters and model dimensions/structures. Towards this, first we propose an algorithm for learning quantized models through a relaxed optimization problem, where quantization values are also optimized over. When each client participating in the (federated) learning process has different requirements for the compressed model (both in model dimension and precision), we formulate a compressed personalization framework by introducing knowledge distillation loss for local client objectives collaborating through a global model. We develop an alternating proximal gradient update for solving this compressed personalization problem, and analyze its convergence properties. Numerically, we validate that QuPeD outperforms competing personalized FL methods, FedAvg, and local training of clients in various heterogeneous settings.


The article deals with the issue of nihilism and non-sense starting from Emmanuel Levinas's thought and from his comparison between being and nothing as it is outlined, from the earliest works, in the concept of the il y a . This comparison will lead Levinas in search of escape from the non-sense of the il y a from otherwise than being, which is the responsibility towards the other man (the levinasian "ethics as first philosphy"). The focus of the article is the analysis of the concepts of non-indifference and disinterest, which are discussed in the last part of the article. The ultimate goal is to think of a dimension of sense that does not deny non-sense, but indicates its presence at the very bottom of the ethical relationship, danger and possibility of an authentic relationship of non-indifference with the other man.


Climate variability across three distinct spatial scales and the interannual changes of planktonic copepods and jellyfish were studied from November 1966 to December 1993. The results obtained identified a cascade of links between the large‐scale climate pattern playing out in the North Atlantic and the local climate variability governing the Ligurian Sea, northwestern Mediterranean. The chain of events appeared driven by the long‐term temperature anomalies that in turn played a key role in the relationship between copepods and jellyfish. Indeed, the increase in jellyfish outbreaks during the 1980s was largely favored by high positive anomalies observed in climate at large (North Atlantic), regional (Ligurian Sea), and local (Villefranche Bay) spatial scales and in water temperature. Linked to jellyfish abundance, the dynamics of the relationship between copepods and jellyfish showed a strong modification during the middle‐late 1980s, which highlight the top‐down effect exerted by jellyfish on copepods. The warming temperatures and the observed ecological changes, high abundance of jellyfish, and marked drop in the abundance of copepods are discussed in the framework of a potential change in the functioning of the planktonic ecosystem indicative of a more regeneration‐dominated production system in the Ligurian Sea. Overall, the cascade of links identified by these results should be considered and integrated into the assessment and modeling studies of pelagic ecosystem and biogeochemical fluxes in the northwestern Mediterranean Sea.


OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to evaluate Children's Village, a life safety education facility for children. SETTING: The study took place in Washington County, Maryland, a rural county. METHODS: Eight elementary schools with 20 second grade classrooms (410 students aged 7 and 8) were selected to participate. Using a quasiexperimental design, tests were administered to two cohorts of children before (pretest) and after (post-test) they attended the Children's Village during 1993-4. Parent and teacher surveys were also completed after the program. RESULTS: Among children who attended in December 1993-January 1994, there was a significant improvement in average test scores between the pretest (58% correct) and post-test (78%). Among children who attended in April 1994, there also was a significant improvement in test scores between pretest (74%) and post-test (85%). Among parents, 70% reported that their child learned a great deal at Children's Village and 33% reported having made changes in their home as a result. The parent survey also revealed that 25% of children and 35% of adults did not always wear their seat belts, and 74% of children did not always wear bicycle helmets. Teachers' responses to the program were generally positive. CONCLUSIONS: Children's Village brought together an extensive network of community leaders, parents, and teachers dedicated to safety education of children. The curriculum had a positive impact on children's knowledge and, to a lesser extent, on parents' safety practices. Program impact could be enhanced by more emphasis on automobile restraints and helmets (behaviors that parents reported were not consistently practiced) and by expanding the village services to parents as well as children. Others considering creating similar programs need to identify community leaders willing to commit the time, effort, and resources required to develop and sustain such programs.


We present a three dimensional (3D) microenvironment for on-chip cell culture, with engineered geometrical and mechanical properties. The device, named μ-flower, is based on micorfabricated cantilever beams bent out of plane by the intrinsic stresses of a bilayer structure. The use of Ti-SiO2 bilayers with various thicknesses allows spanning a large range of rigidities while keeping the size nearly constant. The geometrical and mechanical properties of the devices are thus decoupled, and the degrees of stiffness of several physiological tissues are matched. These characteristics make μ-flowers a microfabricated cell-culture substrate designed to mimic essential physical properties of the in vivo environment (dimensionality, shape and rigidity) in a precisely controlled way, at the single-cell scale, and with a high degree of parallelization.


In this article I examine the performances of black girlhood in two texts by Ntozake Shange—the choreopoem "for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf" (1977) and the novel Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo (1982). The black girls whom Shange portrays navigate anti-black racism in their communities, domestic violence in their homes, and explore their connections with spirit worlds. In both these works, Shange stages black girls who make decisions based on their understanding of the spheres of influence that their race, gender, and age afford them in an anti-black patriarchal world dominated by adults. I draw, too, from Patricia Hill Collins's work on feminist standpoint theory and black feminist thought to introduce the term black girl thought as a theoretical framework to offer insights into the complex lives of black girls who live in the post-civil rights era in the United States.


In late June, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ) published an article showing that elite male scientists hire fewer women (as postdocs and graduate students) than other male scientists or elite women do. Almost as striking as the article's main result is the makeup of its authorship team. They are a couple: Jason Sheltzer, a graduate student studying cancer biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, and Joan C. Smith, a software engineer in Twitter's Cambridge office. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

![Figure][1]

"Elite male faculty in the life sciences hire particularly few women."

ILLUSTRATOR: ROBERT NEUBECKER

> Q: Tell us about your backgrounds and how you met.

> A: Sheltzer : I majored in molecular biology at Princeton University and then went to grad school in biology at MIT. I'm studying how changes in chromosome number affect cell physiology and cancer progression. Joan and I met on OKCupid. We started chatting about our mutual love of Richard Feynman and hydrogen atoms. We met up at a local cafe and haven't looked back since!
>
> Smith : I have a Bachelor of Science in physics from MIT, and I'm a software engineer at Twitter. From just a few dates, it was obvious that we valued the same things (work, science, feminism), had complementary personality quirks, and got along exceptionally well.

> Q: How did you start working together?

> A: Sheltzer : I was analyzing some microarray data, and I reached the limit of what I knew how to do in terms of data analysis. So I described the scientific question to Joan, and in about 30 minutes, she had set up a Python script to answer it. Collaborating with Joan really expands the range of questions that I'm able to address.

> Q: Where did the data for your PNAS article come from?

> A: Sheltzer : Joan and I started counting the grad students and postdocs from the websites of a few biology labs. We soon found a striking pattern—elite male faculty in the life sciences hire particularly few women—but we also found that it would be difficult to get a large enough sample size to make the results robust and representative of the life sciences as a whole. I had recently sold my car, so we ended up spending the money I had made to hire freelance data scrapers to collect more lab information than we could on our own.

> Q: Are there any other important points buried in the article?

> A: Sheltzer : It's quite striking how a small number of "elite" labs function as gateways to the professoriate. We found that about 10% of all faculty members are members of the National Academy of Sciences, but about 60% of new faculty members did a postdoc with a member of the National Academy. I think that this says something about the insular nature of academic science. It probably limits the scope of scientific questions that new investigators study. They're mostly coming from established labs working on established topics.

> Q: What skills are needed to do data-intensive research?

> A: Smith : Since the data is effectively limitless, the primary bounds need to be imposed by your scientific question. Figuring out which pieces of data need to go next to each other in a table is a good chunk of the hard part of data analysis. Beyond that, you have to know at least the basics of programming, and you have to have enough of a background in math that you have the confidence to figure out some new statistical method or tool that you haven't seen before. But in the end, the only things you really need are a computer, Google, time, and the confidence it takes to figure stuff out.

> Q: How do you envision the future of your partnership?

> A: Sheltzer : Professionally, we're working on a paper together using Joan's data-analysis ability to parse through gene-expression data from more than 20,000 cancer patients. Personally, I'm hoping that we get a cat soon.

 [1]: pending:yes


BACKGROUND
Optimal diagnosis and timely treatment of patients with an acute coronary syndrome (ACS) depends on distinguishing differences between popular "myths" about ischemic symptoms in women and men. Chest pain or discomfort is regarded as the hallmark symptom of ACS, and its absence is regarded as "atypical" presentation. This review describes the presenting symptoms of ACS in women compared with men and ascertains whether women should have a symptom message that is separate or different from that for men.

METHODS
MEDLINE (1970-2005), bibliographies of articles, and pertinent abstracts were reviewed, focusing on studies of ACS presentation, especially those reporting differences in symptoms by sex. This analysis included 69 of 361 possible studies. Data regarding symptom presentation were recorded.

RESULTS
The published literature lacks standardization in characterizing ACS presentation, data collection, and reporting of symptoms. Approximately one-third of patients in the large cohort studies and one-quarter of patients in the smaller reports and direct patient interviews presented without chest pain or discomfort. The absence of chest pain or discomfort with ACS was noted more commonly in women than in men in both the cumulative summary from large cohort studies (37% vs 27%) and the single-center and small reports or interviews (30% vs 17%).

CONCLUSIONS
Women are significantly less likely to report chest pain or discomfort compared with men. These differences, however, are not likely large enough to warrant sex-specific public health messages regarding the symptoms of ACS at the present time. Further research must systematically investigate sex differences in the clinical presentation of ACS symptoms and must include standardized data collection efforts.


Switzerland makes more use of its human resources than most other OECD countries. Labour force participation is high and the unemployment rate low for most segments of society. This ensures a high standard of living for most Swiss people. Nevertheless, productivity growth is relatively slow. While this may in part be attributable to already being an advanced economy, it also means that Switzerland cannot be complacent with regard to education and skills. Its admirably low youth joblessness suggests that the transition from education to work is functioning soundly. However, there is mounting evidence that as the structure of industry is changing, due to globalisation and digitalisation for instance, vacancies and skills mismatches are spreading. The mix of skills being taught differs from those taught in most other high income OECD countries in which a common secondary school track predominates and the emphasis is on equipping young adults with academic tertiary qualifications. In this context, it is important that the system is flexible enough to respond to shifts in the demand for skills and that workers continue to learn. While the participation of women and immigrants in the economy compares relatively well, more can still be done to improve equity in the accumulation of skills. This Working Paper relates to the 2017 OECD Economic Survey of Switzerland (http://www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/economic-survey-switzerland.htm).


Although there is an increasing trend for attacks against popular Web browsers, only little is known about the actual patch level of daily used Web browsers on a global scale. We conjecture that users in large part do not actually patch their Web browsers based on recommendations, perceived threats, or any security warnings. Based on HTTP useragent header information stored in anonymized logs from Google's web servers, we measured the patch dynamics of about 75% of the world's Internet users for over a year. Our focus was on the Web browsers Firefox and Opera. We found that the patch level achieved is mainly determined by the ergonomics and default settings of built-in auto-update mechanisms. Firefox' auto-update is very effective: most users installed a new version within three days. However, the maximum share of the latest, most secure version never exceeded 80% for Firefox users and 46% for Opera users at any day in 2007. This makes about 50 million Firefox users with outdated browsers an easy target for attacks. Our study is the result of the first global scale measurement of the patch dynamics of a popular browser.


Career concerns of managers function as an important control mechanism in the context of corporate governance. They bear important motivating and disciplining effects. In Japan, where – in the absence of a well-functioning external market – management careers have been generally restricted to in-house promotions, career concerns also result in efforts by middle management to exert control over and influence top management decisions as they impact their career perspectives. Takaaki Eguchi's paper explains the background and implications of such internal control mechanisms in Japan and points to their limitations in recent years given the increasing need for a stronger top management function. The paper concludes by emphasizing the role institutional investors can play in amending such limitations.

Reviewing relevant empirical research, Franz Waldenberger shows that managerial careers in Germany have long been embedded in an external market. However, market based incentive and control mechanisms remain less important than in the US. The reason can be seen in "internal control" mechanisms specific to German corporate governance. They stem from (a) relatively narrow career paths in terms of fields of expertise requiring a close collaboration among the top management team, (b) the representation of employee representatives on the supervisory board providing the capital side on the board with an additional information channel, and (c) the existence of a major shareholder in most listed companies allowing for direct communication and intervention by the capital side.


Summaries The article addresses conflict management in contexts where pastoralists and agro‐pastoralists are engaged in multiple resource use systems. In these a resource is used by more than one owner, either for the same purposes (e.g. rangelands which are grazed by different herdowners or groups of herdowners), or for different purposes (e.g. wetlands which are used for both cropping and for grazing). In such situations conflicts and disputes and attempts to resolve, accommodate or manage conflict, have become increasingly important issues. The article examines the causes of conflict in these contexts, and discusses innovative approaches to its prevention and management. Also explored are the implications for conflict management of policies and programmes which promote decentralization and the empowerment of local decision makers.


Background The role of microorganisms in the etiology of periodontal disease is well understood. The association of specific organisms in the pathogenesis of periodontal disease was established by the specific plaque hypothesis. This study examined the effects of periodontal surgery on Aggregatibacteractinomycetemcomitans (Aa) levels in localized aggressive periodontitis before and after periodontal surgery. Method: A clinical study was done on 24 male and 16 female patients who underwent surgical periodontal therapy. Bacterial counts were assessed from the plaque samples and gingival specimens. Results: Mean reduction of pre and post operative bacterial counts were statistically significant at 1%.COnclusion: A reduction of bacterial count was observed in plaque and gingival tissue samples after surgery.


As information systems move out of the office into the wider world and are merged with mobile appliances, buildings and even clothing, the representations traditionally used in any one discipline may not be adequate for understanding these new domains. Design representations are 'ways of seeing and not seeing'. Despite the central role representations play in design, the information systems design community has little understanding of the relation, ideal or actual, between design practice and design representation. This paper reports on an extensive design case study that aims at increasing understanding of the nature and affordances of representations in the design process and argues for the need for information systems as a discipline to open up discussion of the design representations that may be required to effectively design systems that mix traditional IS with disciplines such as industrial design, architecture and fashion design.


Voronoi graphs and their hierarchical extensions have become a widely used tool for deriving abstract spatial representations from environmental data. They are currently being studied and applied in several subfields of computer science such as AI and robotics, computational geometry, and geoinformatics. This book investigates the application of hierarchical Voronoi graphs for the internal spatial memory of a mobile robot, focusing on the robot mapping problem of deriving the correct representation from uncertain data. The author develops and illustrates several fundamental techniques for constructing hierarchical Voronoi graph representations, employing a broad set of methods ranging from spatial abstraction approaches to graph matching, search, and qualitative spatial reasoning. It is further shown how the developed tools can be combined to form an overall robot mapping system. The presented material is intended for researchers, students, and practitioners with backgrounds in robotics, AI, or related fields who are engaged with spatial representations and reasoning.


Clinical, prognostic and therapeutic features of 54 primary cutaneous marginal zone B-cell lymphoma (pcMZL), follicle centre lymphoma (pcFCL) and diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, leg type (pcDLBL) were analysed applying the WHO-EORTC classification for cutaneous lymphomas and the new TNM staging scheme of the International Society of Cutaneous Lymphomas. Solitary (T1) or regionally clustered (T2) tumors were observed in pcMZL and pcFCL. Disseminated tumors (T3 stage) were found in 26% of patients with pcMZL and in one patient with pcDLBL. A complete remission was achieved in 41% of the patients. Three of 7 patients (43%) with pcDLBL died due to lymphoma. The new TNM staging system is easily applicable for disease documentation, but our relatively small number of patients in each T stage does not allow the assessment of its prognostic value. Surgical excision or radiotherapy is highly effective in pcMZL and pcFCL.


Although moving from institutional to home-like long-term care (LTC) settings can promote and sustain the health and well-being of older adults, there has been little research examining how home is perceived by older adults when moving between care settings. A qualitative study was conducted over a two-year period during the relocation of residents and staff from an institutional LTC home to a purpose-built LTC home in Western Canada. The study explored perceptions of home amongst residents, family members, and staff. Accordingly, 210 semistructured interviews were conducted at five time-points with 35 residents, 23 family members, and 81 staff. Thematic analyses generated four superordinate themes that are suggestive of how to create and enhance a sense of home in LTC settings: 1) physical environment features; 2) privacy and personalization; 3) autonomy, choice, and flexibility; and 4) connectedness and togetherness. The findings reveal that the physical environment features are foundational for the emergence of social and personal meanings associated with a sense of home, and highlight the impact of care practices on the sense of home when the workplace becomes a home. In addition, tension that arises between providing care and creating a home-like environment in LTC settings is discussed.


Distributed learning of probabilistic models from multiple data repositories with minimum communication is increasingly important. We study a simple communication-efficient learning framework that first calculates the local maximum likelihood estimates (MLE) based on the data subsets, and then combines the local MLEs to achieve the best possible approximation to the global MLE given the whole dataset. We study this framework's statistical properties, showing that the efficiency loss compared to the global setting relates to how much the underlying distribution families deviate from full exponential families, drawing connection to the theory of information loss by Fisher, Rao and Efron. We show that the "full-exponential-family-ness" represents the lower bound of the error rate of arbitrary combinations of local MLEs, and is achieved by a KL-divergence-based combination method but not by a more common linear combination method. We also study the empirical properties of both methods, showing that the KL method significantly outperforms linear combination in practical settings with issues such as model misspecification, non-convexity, and heterogeneous data partitions.


In underwater sensor networks (UWSNs), the unique characteristics of acoustic channels have posed great challenges for the design of medium access control (MAC) protocols. The long propagation delay problem has been widely explored in recent literature. However, the long preamble problem with acoustic modems revealed in real experiments brings new challenges to underwater MAC design. The overhead of control messages in handshaking-based protocols becomes significant due to the long preamble in underwater acoustic modems. To address this problem, we advocate the receiver-initiated handshaking method with parallel reservation to improve the handshaking efficiency. Despite some existing works along this direction, the data polling problem is still an open issue. Without knowing the status of senders, the receiver faces two challenges for efficient data polling: when to poll data from the sender and how much data to request. In this paper, we propose a traffic estimation-based receiver-initiated MAC (TERI-MAC) to solve this problem with an adaptive approach. Data polling in TERI-MAC depends on an online approximation of traffic distribution. It estimates the energy efficiency and network latency and starts the data request only when the preferred performance can be achieved. TERI-MAC can achieve a stable energy efficiency with arbitrary network traffic patterns. For traffic estimation, we employ a resampling technique to keep a small computation and memory overhead. The performance of TERI-MAC in terms of energy efficiency, channel utilization, and communication latency is verified in simulations. Our results show that, compared with existing receiver-initiated-based underwater MAC protocols, TERI-MAC can achieve higher energy efficiency at the price of a delay penalty. This confirms the strength of TERI-MAC for delay-tolerant applications.


An ellipse rotating rigidly about its center may appear to rotate rigidly or to deform nonrigidly so that it appears gelatinous. We use this ambiguous stimulus to study how motion information is propagated across space. We find that features that are quite far from the contour of the ellipse may have a strong influence on the percept of the ellipse, provided they move in a way consistent with the motion of the ellipse. We show that the percept cannot be accounted for by computational models that pool constraints over a local area only, or by models that propagate information along contours, or by models that indiscriminately propagate information across space. However, the percept can be accounted for by a class of models that assume smoothness in a layered representation.


BACKGROUND
This study evaluated the utility of several lower cost physical activity (PA) assessment instruments for detecting PA volume (steps) and intensity (time in MVPA or activity time) using convergent methods of assessment.

METHODS
Participants included 26 adults (9 male) age 27.3 ± 7.1 years with a BMI of 23.8 ± 2.8 kg/m2. Instruments evaluated included the Omron HJ-151 (OM), New Lifestyles NL-1000 (NL), Walk4Life W4L Pro (W4L), and ActiGraph GT1M (AG). Participants wore all instruments during a laboratory phase, consisting of 10 single minute treadmill walking bouts ranging in speed from 40 to 112 m/min, and immediate following the laboratory phase and during the remainder of their free-living day (11.3 ± 1.5 hours). Previously validated AG MVPA cutpoints were used for comparison with OM, NL, and W4L MVPA or activity time outputs during the laboratory and free-living phase.

RESULTS
OM and NL produced similar MVPA estimates during free-living to commonly used AG walking cutpoints, and W4L activity time estimates were similar to one AG lifestyle cutpoint evaluated.

CONCLUSION
Current findings indicate that the OM, NL, and W4L, ranging in price from $15 to $49, can provide reasonable estimates of free-living MVPA or activity time in comparison with a range of AG walking and lifestyle cutpoints.


SUMMARY Background: The successful healing of grafts is crucial in several plastic surgeries and platelet-rich plasma (PRP), which is a product used to stimulate wound healing, can help in grafts surgery. Objective: This study aimed to determine how best to apply the product in surgeries for skin grafts and evaluate their results. Methods: There were histological studies on skin grafts with PRP liquid, PRP gel and without PRP in rabbits, to evaluate the healing of grafts, severity of collagen and inflammatory response and the quantification of fibroblasts and macrophages. Results: There was an increase of 31.6% of fibroblasts (p = 0.045) and 57% macrophages (p = 0.046) and increased production of collagen and inflammatory response with the use of PRP. The grafts that used PRP in the liquid form showed better results than the other groups. Conclusion: PRP enhances the healing of skin grafts and their use in the liquid form, injected under the wound, is easier and gets better results than in gel form. Descriptors: Platelet-rich plasma. Wound healing. Skin transplantation.


Serious games are being developed at an exponential rate and have applications in management, education, defense, scientific research, health care, and emergency planning. In order to maximize the potential and profit of serious games, organizations, researchers, and developers must understand the opportunities and challenges presented by this new tool in all of its domains of application.Handbook of Research on Serious Games as Educational, Business and Research Tools: Development and Design collects research on the most recent technological developments in all fields of knowledge or disciplines of computer games development, including planning, design, development, marketing, business management, users and behavior. Including research on the technological aspects of serious games, user experience and serious games, serious games for social change, and business opportunities for serious games, this two-volume reference offers key perspectives on all aspects of social game design, development and implementation for researchers, managers, and computer game developers.


Scholars of the Atlantic slave trade have not systematically addressed the question of what material objects or personal belongings captive Africans took aboard the slave ships and what goods they may have acquired on the Middle Passage. This topic has implications for the archaeology of African descendant sites in the New World and the transmission of African material culture. This paper reviews the evidence for clothing, metal, bead, and other jewelry, amulets, tobacco pipes, musical instruments, and gaming materials. In so doing, the paper provides an empirical foundation for the severe limitations placed upon enslaved Africans in transporting their material culture to the New World.


This paper examines the link between value creation and transportation provision by conducting an examination of some of the projects financed and managed by Macquarie Bank, perhaps the worldwide leader in private infrastructure finance. Macquarie, an Australian firm, uses an infrastructure investment model that has been the subject of much imitation. The firm has been especially aggressive in expanding its operations into the United States, its latest acquisition being the Chicago Skyway. But in its home turf, where it has been operating the longest, its operations have increasingly become the subject of controversy. This controversy has not been just around policy, but also around finances, i.e., whether the Macquarie model really does create maximum value for both shareholders and transportation users. It is important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of this model since it is being proposed for adoption in many places worldwide. This paper is divided into 7 sections. Section 1 contains this introduction. Section 2 briefly discusses the recent history of private participation in transportation provision in the US. Section 3 reviews Macquarie Bank's growing involvement in that American private participation. Section 4 provides a framework for how privatization creates value. Section 5 summarizes the basic structure of the Macquarie infrastructure business model, while Section 6 analyzes the merits and demerits of that model by focusing on one of its key investments in its home country of Australia: Sydney airport. Section 7 draws policy conclusions and recommends steps for further research.


This thesis examines the scope of women's participation in politics both during communism and after its demise. It adopts a comparative framework of analysis in order to explore some of the differences and similarities in women's political activism in a variety of contexts. It reviews the participation of women in the national legislatures before reform, as well as examining the changes in women's share of representation following the introduction of new electoral laws in the Soviet Union, Russia and Central and Eastern Europe since the late 1980's. It outlines the implications of political change for women seeking to enter the new politics, and argues that, as under communism, women's experiences of political activity differ significantly to those of men. The legacy of the symbolic form of women's political articipation in the old systems is discussed in relation to the scope of women's activity since reform. An examination of the sharp fall in women's share of representation since 1989, for example, includes an evaluation of the way in which the negative perceptions of women deputies and party officials under communism, continued to throw a shadow on women seeking election in the new regimes. This thesis also evaluates the role of the official women's organisations before democratisation, as well as outlining the significance of the new women's groups now springing up throughout the region. The diversity and proliferation of these groups, it is argued, is helping to create an important base for women's politicisation and participation in informal politics. Women's capacity for influencing policy is explored throughout, including an examination of women's relationship to social policy, and the ways in which the structure of social provision reinforces women's disadvantage in the home, at work and in politics.