In Another Look at 401(k) Plan Investments in Employer Services, Professor Susan Stabile argues that more regulation of 401(k) plan investment in employer securities is warranted and that something more than expanded disclosure and education is required. This article explores the basis for that conviction and expands on some of her earlier work in the wake of the Enron and other related debacles. A growing emphasis on employee stock ownership is evident in recent years, owing to the belief of employers and investors that employee stock ownership enhances worker productivity and motivation by giving employees a stake in the performance of the company. In addition, managers have viewed favorably employee stock ownership. However, Stabile points out that building a retirement savings around a single company stock creates a tremendous risk to retirement security. Given the inherent risk associated with heavy 401(k) investment in employer securities, Stabile questions the wisdom of an employee's decision to invest such a large percentage of their retirement savings in that manner. The author offers several explanations for such heavy plan investments in employer securities, including context dependence, optimistic bias, loyalty, and pressure. Given these explanations for such heavy 401(k) investment in employment securities, Stabile reasons that improved educated is unlikely to be effective in reducing the concentration of employer securities in participants' 401(k) accounts. Stabile also points out that ERISA provides very little protection from the consequences of over investment in employer securities. Stabile concludes with a sober warning: an unacceptable environment of risk has been created wherein large numbers of employees will retire with account balances that will provide them with insufficient savings to support them during their retirement. She concludes that notwithstanding this danger, Congress appears intent on preserving individual freedom to invest in employer securities without adequate safeguards.


Accountability innovations often reflect the contemporary social, political and economic relationships, and they are not always made by accounting professionals. This article reports the contributions made to local government accountability in colonial New South Wales by a medical practitioner, Dr John Spark. His contributions relate specifically to the financial management and reporting practices of the Katoomba Municipal Council (NSW), during his tenure as Alderman and Mayor in 1893 and 1894. Spark's innovations included the regular reporting and reviewing of major expenditure items, separate reporting of extraordinary items, separation of capital expenditure and recurrent expenditure, the presentation of detailed comparative reports, and the attempted introduction of a sinking fund. The results support the proposition that socioeconomic variables influence the adoption of accountability mechanisms.


This study focuses on one of the most important processes in our society: daily mobility. Its importance has grown over the last decades. From the geographical point of view, the growing level of mobility has a whole array of geographical causes and impacts.In the rst phase, the study analyses the main features of daily mobility in the Czech Republic based on ofcial statistics. In the second phase, it evaluates detailed daily mobility research in selected regions of the Czech Republic through case studies. The monitored regions were Pisek and Bystrice nad Pernstejnem within their administrative regions. It brings new and original information about daily mobility, transport behaviour, modal split, average travel time, etc. and their differences evaluated by particular population groups (age, economic activity, gender, etc.) and by three main mobility measures. The study tries to ll a gap in the research of daily mobility and transport behaviour in the Czech Republic.


The upper Cimanuk drainage basin is an inter-mountain basin. It is surrounded by volcanoes such as Mt. Tampomas, Mt. Guntur, Mt. Dano, Mt. Kamasan, Mt. Papandayan, and Mt. Cikuray. The objective of this research is to identify the degree of tectonic activity based on quantitative geomorphology analysis. Data are obtained from a topographic map, Digital Elevation Model, geological map, and field observation. Various morphometric variables are bifurcation ratio (Rb), drainage density (Dd), and mountain front sinuosity (Smf) index. The integrated analysis of morphometric and field data provides evidence of tectonic activity in Cimanuk drainage basin. Their streams have 1st until seventh order. The research area is proved to be an active tectonic area. This is confirmed by values of Rb, Dd, and Smf showing that some area in Cimanuk drainage basin has been affected by the tectonic activity. Rb values are ranging from 0.74 to 3.99, Dd values are ranging from 0.53 to 7.20, and Smf index area ranged from 1.2 to 1.6. These values can be classified into a medium class of tectonic activity level. The geological structure can be found in the middle to downstream of Cimanuk drainage basin and showed by primarily northwest-southeast trends. On the other hand, drainage pattern such as rectangular and trellis can reflect geological structures. Rectangular control is by joint and fault structure whereas trellis by dipping or folded sedimentary rocks. The Jatigede Reservoir is located in a strongly deformed area, so monitoring is necessary to reduce the impact of the disaster if some of the faults in the area are active again.


Orientation: For any organisational change initiative to have a successful outcome, people need to contribute and be engaged in the process. Research purpose: The main objective of the research was to determine the relationship between barriers to change and work engagement. The secondary objectives of the research were to determine whether there are significant relationships between barriers to change, work engagement and demographic variables. Motivation for the study: Exploring and understanding the relationship between barriers to change and work engagement amongst different demographic groups will help organisations to predict which working environments and jobs are amenable to organisational change and which will alleviate, and maybe even eliminate, the negative effects of change. Research design, approach and method: The researchers used a cross-sectional survey research design. They drew a convenience sample of 234 employees (N = 234) from a South African property management company. They administered the Barriers to Change Questionnaire and the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale. Main findings: The results showed a practically significant relationship, with a large effect, between barriers to change and work engagement. In addition, the results showed significant differences between barriers to change and demographic groupings based on home language, ethnicity and organisational level. The results also showed significant differences between work engagement and demographic groupings based on home language, ethnicity and level of education. Practical/managerial implications: Managing barriers to change can increase the work engagement of employees. Contribution/value-add: The research adds to the knowledge about the adverse effects of organisational change initiatives on people.


Depending on the various models explaining the burnout syndrome, different questionnaires have been developed to asses this topic, the most widely-used is the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI). Moreover, in trying to asses this syndrome in a faster and more practical way, several authors have developed other instruments with fewer items. The present investigation aims: 1. Study the prevalence of burnout syndrome perceived using a simple measure of self-reported burnout, and to analyse its association with the scales of MBI. 2. Study demographic and work conditions associated with the perceived burnout. 3. Relate the burnout to personal and work evaluations. The sample consist of 6150 health professionals in Latin America (mainly from Argentina but with representation from Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Uruguay, Guatemala and Spain, among others. The mean age of the sample was 42.4 years, 52.7% were males. They were supplied with an online questionnaire through the health web page "Intramed" in order to measure characteristics, perceptions and professional opinions. The MBI and a simple question to assess perceptions of burnout (Do you feel burnt out ?) was also included. The results indicated that 36.3% of the sample has the perception of "burnt out" or burnout . The perceived burnout is closely related to emotional exhaustion and is independent of depersonalisation. The burnout is associated with the perceived sense of personal and family deterioration due to working conditions, and the idea of abandoning the profession


Diabetes is a pandemic that is growing globally, and by the year 2030 it is expected to effect three people every 10 minutes. In the UK, it is estimated that by 2025, 5 million people will have diabetes. Diabetes is currently costing the British National Health Service (NHS) over £1.5m an hour. This equates to 10% of the NHS budget for England and Wales or over £25,000 being spent on diabetes every minute. It is important to minimise these costs by employing new techniques to curtail existing cases and limit new cases. This goal will be accomplished through patient education and self-management. Self-management and self-monitoring play a significant role in restraining diabetes complications. A major component of self-management involves regular blood testing and detailed record keeping through comparative analysis, extensive surveying of diabetic's patients and medical professionals were carried out. The outcome of this research was used to determine how to best create a global and easily accessible diabetes management e-toolkit, that will help the diabetic community alongside the medical community to reduce the harmful effects of this disease. The e-toolkit, that has been formed successfully, can connect the patient to their doctor. It will provide the patient with a single means of recording every important vital health factor and simultaneously allowing the doctor to access real-time monitoring. The e-toolkit proposed in this paper would facilitate in bringing both the medical and diabetic group of people closer together resulting in a strengthened relationship. Patients will be able to record each imperative health factor whilst having the ability to communicate with their doctor and in turn, effectively managing their diabetes to their utmost potential.


Epilepsy is one of the most common neurologic diseases around the world and more significantly in Iran (0.4-1 % worldwide and 5% in Iran). Almost one-third of these patients suffer from treatment-resistant epilepsy, which reduces their quality of life by recurring epileptic onsets. There are different approaches for the treatment of both treatment-resistant and treatment-nonresistant epilepsy, including drug therapy (Carbamazepine, Diazepam, Eslicarbazepine, Felbamate…), surgery and diet therapy (ketogenic diet), most of which focusing on symptomatic or palliative treatments. Yet the main pathways leading to epilepsy attacks remaining intact. In recent year's evidence have been found suggesting inflammatory mediators might be involved in epileptogenesis. Dr.Vezzani have proved in epilepsy, inflammatory cytokines such as IL-1b, HMGB1 or S100beta are overexpressed in diseased tissues and IL-1b and HMGB1 act as pro-convulsant factors in various seizure models by decreasing the threshold.(Epilepsy and Inflammation in the Brain: Overview and Pathophysiology). In another study she states after a brain seizure, pro-inflammatory cytokines including IL-1β, TNF and IL-6 are over-expressed in micro-glia and astrocytes decreasing excitability threshold afterward. Walker and Sills also add Toll-like receptor signaling pathways as a key mediator resulting in epilepsy. In light of these new findings, a new approach for curing treatment-resistant epilepsy is making its way among other approaches. Inhibitory drug VX-765, an interleukin converting enzyme inhibits the formation of IL-1b, the cytokine involved in epileptogenesis. In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study enrolling 60 adults with treatment-resistant partial onset epilepsy, the end result showed a statistically insignificant difference. However, a 9-13% reduction in seizure rates were observed. To conclude, anti-inflammatory treatment approach to epilepsy and using inflammatory mediator affecting drugs seems to be a promising area, aiming to treat the main causes of epilepsy.


This paper considers the experiences of older self-funders in England in the context of policies promoting choice and control. Self-funders are people who are not state-funded; they pay for social care from their own resources. Choice and control have been operationalized through personal budgets, based on the assumption that managing resources enhances ability to access appropriate care and support. This paper uses data from 40 qualitative interviews with self-funders and their relatives, and 19 with professionals. It explores the impact of the financial and social capital that self-funders are assumed to have and asks how older selffunders experience choice and control. The study found that older self-funders drew on personal experiences, family, and friends for information; were reluctant to spend their wealth on care due to competing priorities; and felt they had more control over the timing of decisions than people who were state-funded. Personal wealth appears to be perceived differently to funds "gifted" to people through cash for care schemes


Ultrasonic vibration has been employed to improve the quality of machined surface in the grinding of brittle materials. In this report, we transplant the philosophy of ultrasonic vibration assisted grinding to chemo-mechanical bound-abrasive-pellet polishing in anticipation of the improvement in either surface roughness or material removal rate. The preliminary experimental results show that the ultrasonic vibration assisted chemo-mechanical pellet polishing can yield desired results that material removal rate can be significantly raised while surface roughness is not degraded. The experimental results also indicate different mechanisms between ultrasonic-vibration-assisted chemo-mechanical pellet polishing and conventional chemo-mechanical bound-abrasive polishing.


The Hamiltonian formalism plays a central role in classical and quantum physics. Hamiltonians are the main tool for modelling the continuous time evolution of systems with conserved quantities, and they come equipped with many useful properties, like time reversibility and smooth interpolation in time. These properties are important for many machine learning problems - from sequence prediction to reinforcement learning and density modelling - but are not typically provided out of the box by standard tools such as recurrent neural networks. In this paper, we introduce the Hamiltonian Generative Network (HGN), the first approach capable of consistently learning Hamiltonian dynamics from high-dimensional observations (such as images) without restrictive domain assumptions. Once trained, we can use HGN to sample new trajectories, perform rollouts both forward and backward in time and even speed up or slow down the learned dynamics. We demonstrate how a simple modification of the network architecture turns HGN into a powerful normalising flow model, called Neural Hamiltonian Flow (NHF), that uses Hamiltonian dynamics to model expressive densities. We hope that our work serves as a first practical demonstration of the value that the Hamiltonian formalism can bring to deep learning.


This dissertation investigates various aspects of the tone sandhi phenomena in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM). Previous studies have reported complete tonal neutralization between the two sandhi 33 variants derived respectively from citation 55 and 24 variants, leading to the claim that tone sandhi in this language is categorical. The fact that tone sandhi in TSM is assumed to possess a mixture of properties of lexical and postlexical rules gives rise to the debate over the status of this phonological rule. The findings of the dissertation shows incomplete neutralization between the two sandhi 33 variants with an indication of an ongoing sound change towards a nearor complete tonal merger, possibly led by female speakers. In addition, citation form is proposed to be more underlyingly represented on account of the fact that subjects, especially old speakers, have stronger association with citation variants than with sandhi variants in the priming experiment. The spontaneous corpus study suggests that the Tone Circle is merely a phonological idealization in light of the systematic subphonemic difference in f0 between citation X and sandhi X that are supposed to correspond even with some control of conceivable confounding factors. By comparing directand indirect-reference models, I argue that tone sandhi in TSM should be analyzed as a head-left Concatenation rule within a DM-based theoretical framework. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Linguistics First Advisor Mark Liberman


Object-oriented is the most successful programming paradigm. Relational database management systems are the most successful data storage components. In spite of their success and their tight binding, they always had different points of view on data and applications. They are not integrated, fostering some difficulties when applications and data storage components must collaborate. A platform based on wrappers has been proposed as a component interface between stored procedures and a user application. A maintainability assessment has also been carried into effect. This paper aims to disclose the performance assessment results for the same platform.


Surface runoff and interflow generated on riparian hillslopes concentrate along rills or topographic
depressions as they move downslope. This runoff concentration is an important factor that determines the effectiveness of
conservation practices such as vegetated filter strips and riparian buffers and needs to be accounted for while designing
such practices. Currently, routinely available DEMs are not detailed enough to capture the runoff concentration that
occurs at the hillslope scale. This article investigated the possibility of developing simple relationships that could be used
to quantify specific or total contributing areas in terms of hillslope attributes such as slope length or gradient. Riparian
hillslopes in the Ridge and Valley region of Virginia were surveyed. The bounds of the survey were defined by the size of
dissected hollows and spurs for these hillslopes. Surface elevations were recorded at a resolution of 0.5 to 2 m. Catchment
areas which were used as a surrogate for runoff concentration were determined using digital elevation models. Results
from this study suggest that although some of the measures of runoff concentration could be expressed in terms of slope
length and gradient, it is unlikely that complete probability distribution of catchment areas could be derived based simply
on slope gradients and lengths.


CYP2C9 is one of the most abundant CYP enzymes in the human liver ( approximately 20% of hepatic total CYP content). CYP2C9 metabolizes approximately 20% clinical drugs (>120 drugs), including a number of drugs with narrow therapeutic ranges. Some natural compounds are also metabolized, probably leading to the formation of toxic metabolites. CYP2C9 also plays a role in the metabolism of several endogenous compounds such as steroids, melatonin, retinoids and arachidonic acid. Typical substrates of CYP2C9 such as celecoxib, ibuprofen, flurbiprofen, and diclofenac are relatively small, lipophilic and contain acidic groupings with pK(a) values in the range 3.8-8.1 which will be ionized at physiological pH. The carboxylate groups of tienilic acid and diclofenac have been shown to be responsible for substrate preference and orientation in the active site of CYP2C9. Therefore, a typical CYP2C9 substrate should contain an anionic site and a hydrophobic site. However, neutral or positively charged compounds may also be substrates of CYP2C9. CYP2C9 is subject to inhibition by a number of drugs and other compounds and this may provide an explanation for some clinical drug-drug interactions. With regard to prodrugs that need CYP2C9 for activation, inhibition of CYP2C9 may cause a decrease in the amount of the active metabolite, leading to therapeutic failure. Pharmacophore models have revealed that hydrogen bonding, ion-pair interactions, and probably hydrophobic interactions play a major role in determining the substrate specificity and inhibitor selectivity of CYP2C9. A number of structure-activity relationship studies have identified the structural determinants of compounds for their binding affinity to CYP2C9 and inhibitory potency for CYP2C9. Given the critical role of CYP2C9 in drug metabolism and the presence of polymorphisms, it is important to identify drug candidates as potential substrates and/or inhibitors of CYP2C9 in drug development and drugs with minimal interactions with this enzyme should be chosen for further development. Further studies are warranted to explore the molecular determinants for ligand-CYP2C9 binding and the structure-activity relationships.


Paralleling the procedure used to maximize ESS of linear models derived using logistic regression analysis or Fisher's discriminant analysis, univariate optimal discriminant analysis (UniODA) is applied to the predicted response function values provided by a model derived by probit analysis (PA), and returns an adjusted decision criterion for making classification decisions. ESS obtains its theoretical maximum value with this adjusted decision criterion, and the ability of the PA model to return accurate classifications is optimized. UniODA-refinement of a PA model is illustrated using an example involving political science analysis of federal courts.


In Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, machines are wirelessly connected to accomplish collaborative tasks without human intervention, and provide ubiquitous solutions for real-time monitoring. The real-time monitoring application is one of the killer applications for M2M communications, where M2M nodes transmit sensed data to an M2M gateway, and then the M2M gateway can have real-time monitoring for each sensing region. In real-time monitoring application, the energy consumption for the M2M nodes to send sensed data to the M2M gateway is an important factor that significantly affects the performance of the system. In this paper, we first consider the energy consumption as well as the validity of sensed data to design either centralized or distributed energy-efficient reporting mechanisms. We then analyze the complexity of the reporting mechanisms. Simulation experiments are conducted to investigate the performance of the proposed mechanisms, and show that the distributed mechanism outperforms the centralized mechanism when the M2M nodes are mobile.


Testing is the process of evaluating a system or its component(s) with the intent to find whether it satisfies the specified requirements or not. Testing is executing a system in order to identify any gaps, errors, or missing requirements in contrary to the actual requirements. This tutorial will give you a basic understanding on software testing, its types, methods, levels, and other related terminologies.


By a tight tour in a $k$-uniform hypergraph $H$ we mean any sequence of its vertices $(w_0,w_1,\ldots,w_{s-1})$ such that for all $i=0,\ldots,s-1$ the set $e_i=\{w_i,w_{i+1}\ldots,w_{i+k-1}\}$ is an edge of $H$ (where operations on indices are computed modulo $s$) and the sets $e_i$ for $i=0,\ldots,s-1$ are pairwise different. A tight tour in $H$ is a tight Euler tour if it contains all edges of $H$. We prove that the problem of deciding if a given $3$-uniform hypergraph has a tight Euler tour is NP-complete, and that it cannot be solved in time $2^{o(m)}$ (where $m$ is the number of edges in the input hypergraph), unless the ETH fails. We also present an exact exponential algorithm for the problem, whose time complexity matches this lower bound, and the space complexity is polynomial. In fact, this algorithm solves a more general problem of computing the number of tight Euler tours in a given uniform hypergraph.


Active learning can lead to a dramatic reduction in labeling effort. However, in many practical implementations (such as crowdsourcing, surveys, high-throughput experimental design), it is preferable to query labels for batches of examples to be labelled in parallel. While several heuristics have been proposed for batch-mode active learning, little is known about their theoretical performance. We consider batch mode active learning and more general information-parallel stochastic optimization problems that exhibit adaptive submodularity, a natural diminishing returns condition. We prove that for such problems, a simple greedy strategy is competitive with the optimal batch-mode policy. In some cases, surprisingly, the use of batches incurs competitively low cost, even when compared to a fully sequential strategy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on batch-mode active learning tasks, where it outperforms the state of the art, as well as the novel problem of multi-stage influence maximization in social networks.


"How can anyone laugh who knows of old age, disease, and death?" Buddhacarita This question, so solemnly posed by the young Buddha, first led Lee Siegel to examine the hitherto unexplored realm of Indian comedy. "Laughing Matters" is Siegel's account of two intersecting journeys: a search for comic traditions created and preserved in Sanskrit literature and a journey through modern India in quest of a laughter that persists across time and culture. Hearing a boisterous and bawdy voice from India's past, Siegel has provided original and highly entertaining translations of Sanskrit literature that reveal a sparkling sensibility embedded in the texts. These translations are integrated with a detailed analysis of the types and structures of India's mirth. Siegel develops an original theory of comedy and laughter, applying it to reveal the humor in the ancient works. Defining sacred and profane comedy and the "taste" and "erotics" of laughter, he delineates two main Indian categories of comedy laughter at others and laughter at oneself which are roughly parallel to the Western traditions of satire and humor. He examines these categories in all of their forms and functions: satires of manners, social satire, and religious satire; and human and divine comedy. Siegel concludes by presenting his perceptions of humor in modern India as seen through cartoons, movies, books, and social gatherings. "Laughing Matters" is both a serious and a hilarious study of the Indian comic sense of life a vision formed in the convergence of the bitter insight of satire and the sweet outlook of humor. Past and present, the contextual and the universal, scholarship and the picaresque, are all interwoven in this original treatise on the aesthetics of comedy and the psychology of laughter."


The researcher investigated the effect of flipped method on students' achievement in computer science tertiary institutions in Enugu state of Nigeria using quasi-experimental design. The instrument for data collection was pretest posttest non equivalent control group. The population for the study comprised all higher institutions in Enugu state. Data were collected from a sample of 152 students selected from two secondary higher institutions. A reliability coefficient of 0.89 was obtained from the instrument through test retest. Mean and standard deviation scores were used to answer the research questions, while two-way analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significant. The findings show that students exposed to learning using flipped method achieved higher than those taught with traditional method. It was recommended that ministry of education should revisit the instructional materials used in teaching.


The chromosomal structures of mutant strains of Streptomyces ambofaciens which have arisen from genetic instability were investigated by using pulsed-field gel electrophoresis and probing with sequences cloned from the unstable region which maps near the ends of the linear chromosomal DNA. The chromosomal structures of seven mutant strains harboring large deletions were classified into three types. (i) Deletions internal to one chromosomal arm were characterized in two of the mutant strains. In these strains, a linear chromosomal structure was retained, as were parts of the terminal inverted repeats sequences (TIRs) and the proteins bound to them. (ii) Four of the mutants presented a deletion including all sequences from the TIRs. A junction fragment homologous to sequences originating from internal region of both arms was characterized. Consequently, the chromosomal DNA of these strains was deduced to be circularized. Furthermore, chromosomal stability was assessed in the progeny of these circular DNA mutants. Additional deletion events were detected in 11 mutants among the 13 strains isolated, demonstrating that circular chromosomes do not correspond to a stabilization of the chromosome structure and that the occurrence of deletion could be independent of the presence of chromosomal ends. (iii) A mutant with DNA amplification was shown to have a linear chromosome with a deletion of all sequences between the amplified region and the end of the chromosome. The other chromosomal arm remained unaffected by deletion and associated with protein.


As the nation watches the impact of the recent stimulus bill on job creation and economic growth, a group of academics continues to dispute the notion that the fiscal and job creation programs of the New Deal helped end the Depression. The work of these revisionist scholars has led to a public discourse that has obvious implications for the controversy surrounding fiscal stimulus bills. Since we support a new stimulus package—one that emphasizes jobs for the 9.8 percent of the workforce currently unemployed—we have been concerned about this debate. With Congress, the White House, pundits, and the press riveted on the all-important health care debate, we worry that they are also distracted by skirmishes over economic theory and history, while millions wait for a new chance to do meaningful work and effective, if imperfect, policy tools are readily at hand. (See also, Public Policy Brief No. 104.)


ABSTRACT A vaccine against congenital human cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection is a major public health priority. Congenital CMV causes substantial long-term morbidity, particularly sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL), in newborns, and the public health impact of this infection on maternal and child health is underrecognized. Although progress toward development of a vaccine has been limited by an incomplete understanding of the correlates of protective immunity for the fetus, knowledge about some of the key components of the maternal immune response necessary for preventing transplacental transmission is accumulating. Moreover, although there have been concerns raised about observations indicating that maternal seropositivity does not fully prevent recurrent maternal CMV infections during pregnancy, it is becoming increasing clear that preconception immunity does confer some measure of protection against both CMV transmission and CMV disease (if transmission occurs) in the newborn infant. Although the immunity to CMV conferred by both infection and vaccination is imperfect, there are encouraging data emerging from clinical trials demonstrating the immunogenicity and potential efficacy of candidate CMV vaccines. In the face of the knowledge that between 20,000 and 30,000 infants are born with congenital CMV in the United States every year, there is an urgent and compelling need to accelerate the pace of vaccine trials. In this minireview, we summarize the status of CMV vaccines in clinical trials and provide a perspective on what would be required for a CMV immunization program to become incorporated into clinical practice.


This is the first study to the characterization of proteins and peptides in the cell free broth of Candida tropicalis. We are reporting the presence of a highly specific proteolytic enzyme cleaving at valine. This has been confirmed by digesting B-lactoglobulin and a number of synthetic peptides. The enzyme has a carbohydrate moiety and a molecular weight of 40,000+7,000 as determined on SDS-plyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. Its optimum activity occurs at 37C at a ph between 8-9. We have named it Valinease because of its selective cleavage

The peptides separated on Dowex 50 have been tested against a number of pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria. At least four of the peptides have been found to be active against most of the bacterial strains. The amino acid composition and N-terminal residues of these peptides have been determined


Formation yields of ˙OH radicals were precisely determined in aqueous solutions of coumarin-3-carboxylic acid and ferrous sulfate (i.e., Fricke dosimeter) exposed to 253.7 nm radiation delivered from a continuous source. Quantum yield of ˙OH radicals was determined as ∼0.08, i.e., roughly one out of twelve photons, efficiently absorbed in UV-illuminated solutions, produced one ˙OH radical. Energetically, a water molecule should undergo a correlated action of at least two 4.9 eV photons delivering enough energy for direct H-OH dissociation (5.0-5.4 eV). We suggest a mechanism based on an interaction of two water molecules, both in long-living triplet states. An intermolecular transfer of excitation energy provided a sufficient amount of energy for the dissociation of one water molecule into ˙OH and H˙ radicals. In an aqueous solution of phospholipids, quantum yields of hydroperoxides formed under these irradiation conditions decreased with total effectively absorbed energy (i.e. a dose), similar to the radiation chemical yields obtained during an exposure to ionizing radiation, such as gamma rays from radionuclide sources. Under 253.7 nm irradiation, one ˙OH radical causes a peroxidation of 34 phospholipid molecules. This implicates chain mechanism of the reaction.


In the context of a national election, this study explores more than 69,000 Twitter messages containing mentions of political parties and about 2,500 related user profiles to investigate the network structure of political microbloggers with respect to, first, their party preference and, second, the topics they discuss. We find that political microbloggers tend to follow like-minded peers. Microbloggers in a cohesive group tend to have the same political preferences. In addition, we conduct a content analysis of the political debate on Twitter to explore which topics and politicians are discussed and whether this debate reflects an ideological divide among participating users. While there are some discussion topics that are dominated by politically like-minded microbloggers, the majority of topics is discussed by a diverse group of microbloggers with various political preferences.


Conversational systems are gaining popularity rapidly. Consequently, the believability of the conversational systems or chatterbots is becoming increasingly important. Recent research has proven that learning chatterbots tend to be rated as being more believable by users. Based on Raj's Model for Chatterbot Trust, we present a model for allowing chatterbots to determine the degree of contradictions in contradictory statements when learning thereby allowing them to potentially learn more accurately via a form of discourse. Some information that is learnt by a chatterbot may be contradicted by other information presented subsequently. Choosing correctly which information to use is critical in chatterbot believability. Our model uses sentence structures and patterns to compute contradiction degrees that can be used to overcome the limitations of Raj's Trust Model, which takes any contradictory information as being equally contradictory as opposed to some contradictions being greater than others and therefore having a greater impact on the actions that the chatterbot should take. This paper also presents the relevant proofs and tests of the contradiction degree model as well as a potential implementation method to integrate our model with Raj's Trust Model.


The 1990s witnessed the parallel forces of globalization and regionalization strongly at work. While seemingly contradictory, they are in fact complementary aspects of market development. This paper will focus on the latter, and its special aspects of regionalism; i.e., policy driven regional cooperation. Particular attention will be given to the recent advances and challenges in two crucial aspects of regionalism: regional trade and financial cooperation. The other important area of concern of the paper is how regional development banks are supporting regional initiatives and identifying emerging issues which they should be preparing to deal with.


The Android operating system (OS) is widely used within several types of embedded & mobile platforms, including mobile phones and tablets, and the industry is exploring the ability of Android within other embedded platforms, i.e., automotive or military, that require real-time guarantees and the ability to meet deadlines as a pre-requisite for reliable operation. In this paper, we present preliminary conclusions on Android's real-time behavior based on experimental measurements performed on a commercially available Android platform.


One monolayer Of C-60 on one monolayer of hexagonal boron nitride on nickel is investigated by photoemission. Between 150 and 250 K the work function decreases and the binding energy of the highest-occupied molecular orbital increases by \A 100 meV. In parallel, the occupancy of the-in the cold state almost empty-lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) changes by 0.4\P 0.1 electrons. This charge redistribution is triggered by the onset of molecular rocking motion, i.e., by orientation dependent tunneling between the LUMO Of C-60 and the substrate. The magnitude of the charge transfer is large and cannot be explained within a single-particle picture. It is proposed to involve electron-phonon coupling where C-60(-) polaron formation leads to electron self-trapping.


Abstract: This article analyzes the aspirations of miches, straight-identified Brazilian men who exchange sex for money with gay-identified male sex tourists from North America and Western Europe. In so doing, I contrast the exoticizing fantasies of the tourists with the consumerist daydreams of the miches, who often see sex work with men as one of the few routes available to them for consumer consumption and possible migration. Contrary to existing research on Brazilian sex workers, my findings demonstrate that, for the miches, the ability to participate in consumer culture occupies their minds far more than discussions of sex or AIDS. Introduction Gustavo has a nice phone. It has a large screen and a camera with more megapixels than he probably needs. He turns it to face me. "This is my daughter," he says, showing me a sleepy-eyed infant in a pink jumper. "Her name is Ana. She has a brother, Samuel, who's three." Gustavo flips to another photo to show me a picture of him, his common-law wife, and Samuel at nearby Copacabana beach together. The picture quality is good - better than my own phone's, in fact. He also has naked photos of himself and close-up shots of his erect penis on this phone, which he sends to prospective clients. We decide to do a follow-up interview in week, but he says his phone hasn't worked in months because of his cash flow problems so there's no point giving me the number. "But don't worry. You can find me at the sauna again no problem. I need to work if I am going to get the phone functioning again." Although straight-identified, Gustavo works in gay bath houses with brothel-style prostitution known as saunas. Working in a sauna can be lucrative. A successful garoto de programa2 in Rio can clear 2,000 U.S. dollars in a month, at least for the brief period when his is a fresh face on the scene, whereas a minimum wage worker earns around 270 U.S. dollars per month for the same hours. But Gustavo, like other garotos, doesn't want to work every day. He prefers working just two or three days, during which he'll try to do as many 40-minute programas (sessions with a client) in a shift as he can. He'll make a few hundred dollars, and then he won't work again until he runs out of money. Sometimes that means he's off for weeks. Often, though, he spends the money on expensive clothes, cologne, and electronics. He takes his friends to clubs and buys liquor by the bottle. He buys gifts for his wife and kids, and (I later come to suspect) his girlfriends. But Gustavo's hair is starting to recede. He looks closer to being 35 than the 25 he tells people. He still does quite well, but garotos de programa are part of a larger category of miches (hustlers) who work in parks, streets, bars, and other less lucrative venues - locales where sauna rentboys eventually find themselves as they age out and become less competitive. Outdoors, programas can turn dangerous for clients and miches alike and offer only subsistence wages. Gustavo knows street hustling may be in his future if he doesn't start saving in earnest soon. And he knows that he needs his expensive phone working again. Popular portrayals of male sex workers tend to dichotomize the men. On the one hand, newspapers, films, and television shows depict them as dangerous killers and thieves (see Mott & Cerqueira, 2003). But as Kerwin Kaye (2007) has observed in his analysis, they are also portrayed as youth in peril who can be rescued and mentored into being ideal and grateful young lovers. Both archetypes are premised on the assumption that the miche is desperate and dangerously destitute. Thus, clients often expressed surprise when a sex worker3 had an MP3 player, phone, or computer, especially because sex workers in saunas tend to come from and often continue to live in the poor periphery of the city. But even among the low end street miches with whom I've worked - men who use sex with gay tourists to scrape out a hand-to-mouth existence - there is a tendency to pass the time talking about the pricey items they plan to purchase one day. …


Many children in New Zealand spend at least part of their lives growing up in stepfamilies. Yet despite the prevalence of stepfamilies and indications that they are increasing, there is little certainty regarding the parenting role stepparents should adopt to benefit their stepchildren the most. This ambiguity is further reflected in the law; with stepparents having few legal responsibilities to their stepchildren. This research sought to identify how individuals define and negotiate the stepparent's role in newly formed stepfamilies in New Zealand. Previous research and clinical practice indicates that how this role is defined is closely tied to stepfamily well-being. However there is still a great deal we do not understand about how stepfamily members construct this role, the nature of change over time, and how it is negotiated among stepfamily members. One hundred and five stepfamilies that had been cohabiting full-time for less than four years completed questionnaires assessing individual perceptions of stepparent roles and stepfamily functioning. Three stepfamily members completed questionnaires at two points in time, twelve months apart– a target stepchild between the ages of seven and eleven, the resident biological parent, and stepparent. Results suggest that stepparents, parents and children perceive stepparents to play active roles in both the warmth and control aspects of the stepparent role and these perceptions change minimally over a twelve-month period. When discrepancies between actual and ideal role scores were examined (intra-role discrepancies), all stepfamily members reported wanting the stepparent to be more involved in warmth behaviours than they actually were. However, although parents and stepparents reported ideally wanting stepparents to be more involved in control behaviours as well, children wanted them to be less involved in control behaviours than they were currently. Role discrepancies at time 1 were associated with aspects of stepfamily functioning at time 2, particularly for children.There was some evidence that role discrepancies reduced over time. In particular, stepparents and children reported lower inter-role discrepancies (higher role agreement) and stepparents and children both reported lower intra-role discrepancies over time. When role discrepancies between stepfamily members were examined (inter-role discrepancies), stepchildren reported wanting stepparents to be less involved in warmth and control dimensions than either parents or stepparents. Regression analyses revealed that children's inter and intra role discrepancies were significantly associated with their reports of stepfamily functioning twelve months later, after taking into account the stepparent's actual involvement. Adults in stepfamilies used various strategies to negotiate the stepparent role; including partner discussions, talks with children, checking in for feedback with children and biological parents, and gate keeping behaviours by the biological parent. Role negotiation was more likely to occur in the following twelve months when stepfamily functioning was more problematic at time 1, and there was some evidence that this led to improvements in functioning over time. This was not the case for gate keeping behaviours—while these were reported to be more frequently used when stepfamily functioning was problematic; they had a detrimental effect on the quality of the stepparent-stepchild relationships. These findings have important implications for organisations that work with, and make decisions affecting stepfamilies.


Explosives manufacture in South Africa is a major component of the chemical and mining industry, and as an important producer of hazardous chemicals it is also a potential contributor to significant environmental impacts. Environmental authorisation of explosives manufacturing activities is based primarily upon the quality of information made available in the Environmental Impact Report (EIR), but the quality of EIR for explosives manufacturing projects has never been investigated. A modified version of the Lee and Colley review package was used to determine the EIR quality of a sample of four explosives projects. The findings reveal that the EIRs were of a generally satisfactory quality, but with some areas of weakness that are readily linked to potentially significant environmental impacts, pointing to limitations in the EIA process regarding the production of explosives. Recommendations include improved training of EIA practitioners, the use of quality review checklists and external specialist review, development of guidelines and the use of risk assessment as additional tools to the EIA regulations.


Introduction Fragility fractures are number growing. They reduced quality life and increased mortality. After 50 years, one woman and two men will have an osteoporotic fracture in their lifetime. The presence of a vertebral fracture (VF) multiplied by 4-5, the risk of new vertebral fracture occurrence, and by 3 the risk of hip fracture. They are pauci or asymptomatic. Study purpose Evaluate the prevalence of fragility vertebral fractures after 50 years, the number of asymptomatic fractures, and eventually other forms of spinal disease which may constitute a differential diagnosis. Materials and Methods Prospective study conducted at the rheumatology department at the Hospital University of Ibn Rochd in Casablanca. The study included 51 patients ≥ 50 years old. Stady was done between December 2012 and March 2013. Patients made thoracolumbar spine radiograph X-Rays requested among the 73 cases. Last history factors, personal or family bone fragility were research. After physical examination, analysis of radiographs was based on the semi-quantitative method of Genant, specifying the grade, the seat and the number of FV. They were correlated with clinical and laboratory data. The prevalence of FV was calculate,and the percentage of asymptomatic fractures. Results Our population was predominantly female (86.2%). The mean age was 61 years. 66.6% of patients had back pain. 19 cases had at least one VF. Among them, six were asymptomatic. In the FV group, 6 patients had a personal history of bone fragility factors. 2 cases had a history of non-traumatic fracture and one case among parents. One patient was treated and cured for breast neoplasis. The majorities of patients were in vitamin D or already supplemented. 5 cases treated for osteoporosis, 10 patients were under anti-osteoporotic, 4 unknown osteoporotic. 11 cases followed for osteoarthritis. 3 cases had the notion of loss in size between 2 and 5 cm. 13 had a fracture grade I, 4 grade II and two grade III. 10 patients had a single fracture, 8 two fractures, and only one patient, 3 fractures. All fractures were lumbar seat and attributed to osteoporosis. Treatment was symptomatic and by orthopedic immobilization. Regarding the group without VF, in the subgroup without back pain, one case had a degenerative spinal deformity and 10 had no spine abnormality. As for the subgroup with back pain, 10 had spinal scoliosis, 4 cases had a degenerative spine, and 8 normal spine. Discussion and Conclusion The clinical signs of vertebral fractures are not specific. Their severity is variable. They pose problem of differential diagnosis of vertebral deformities or neoplastic. View prognosis, research vertebral fractures after 50 years is essential.


We obtain an exact form of the virial theorem in general relativity, which is sufficiently general to be applied to charged, conducting, rotating perfect fluids in electromagnetic and gravitational fields. The case of infinite conductivity is of particular importance in astrophysics and we derive the relevant equations from the general results. We indicate how to calculate the post-Newtonian limits of various expressions and show that in the absence of both, the electric and magnetic fields, they lead to Chandrasekhar's post-Newtonian virial theorem in hydrodynamics. We also note that Chandrasekhar's (Newtonian) virial theorem in hydromagnetics may be derived from the Newtonian limit of the exact equations obtained. Some possible applications are pointed out. Finally, we use the exact form of the virial theorem to obtain, in co-moving coordinates, equilibrium conditions for bounded rotating charged dust.


BACKGROUND
Acute renal failure is believed to be caused, in some circumstances, by impaired oxygen delivery to the outer medulla. This study examined the effect of RSR13, a synthetic allosteric modifier of hemoglobin oxygen-binding affinity, on renal function in a setting of acute renal failure in rats.

METHODS
An in vivo model of acute renal failure in the rat produced by reduced renal mass, salt restriction, volume depletion, prostaglandin inhibition, and radiocontrast administration was used. A computer-based simulation of oxygen tensions along the nephron was utilized to interpret the findings. Mechanistic studies were subsequently performed using oxygen-sensitive electrodes and 31P nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to define the effect of RSR13 on renal function in the setting of compromised acute renal failure.

RESULTS
RSR13 did not attenuate acute renal failure in this model; rather, serum creatinine increased to a greater degree in the RSR13-treated rats than in rats receiving saline vehicle as the control (P < 0.05). Simulations explained this finding under conditions of severe medullary hypoxia. Mechanistic studies demonstrated marked worsening of medullary hypoxia following RSR13 under conditions similar to our experimental model. Furosemide pretreatment to reduce the imbalance between oxygen supply and demand markedly attenuated the basal-medullary hypoxia produced in the presence of indomethacin and RSR13 (P < 0.01). Additionally, 31P NMR studies demonstrated renal adenosine 5'-triphosphate (ATP) depletion in rats with acute renal failure treated with RSR13 (45% decrease, P < 0.01); again, this effect of RSR13 was completely prevented by pretreatment with furosemide.

CONCLUSIONS
Under conditions of severe renal medullary hypoxia, induced in part by indomethacin-mediated reductions in outer medullary blood flow, the administration of RSR13 can exacerbate acute renal dysfunction. However, reducing the rate of oxygen consumption by inhibiting sodium transport with furosemide pretreatment or post-treatment appears to be functionally protective.


The purpse of this paper is to demonstrate the basic feasibility of using pattern matching techniques to search raw narrative medical record text. We have developed a scheme for executing such a search and produced computer codes to implement this scheme at a simple level. Our ideas have teen tested by putting the computer to the task of searching actual medical records. All results are preliminary but they suggest feasibility. We briefly explore how our ideas might ultimately be incorporated into a database environment.


This paper addresses the question of how an institution might optimally manage the market risk of a given exposure. We provide an analytical approach to optimal risk management under the assumption that the institution wishes to minimize its Value-at-Risk (VaR) using options, and that the underlying exposure follows a geometric Brownian. The optimal solution speciies the VaR-minimizing level of moneyness of the option as a function of the asset's distribution, the risk-free rate, and the VaR hedging period. We nd that the optimal strike of the put is independent of the level of expense the institution is willing to incur for its hedging program. The costs associated with a suboptimal choice of exercise price, in terms of either the increased VaR for a xed hedging cost or the increased cost to achieve a given VaR, are economically signiicant. Comparative static results show that the optimal strike price of these options is increasing in the asset's drift, decreasing in its volatility for most reasonable parameterizations, decreasing in the risk-free interest rate, nonmonotonic in the horizon of the hedge, and increasing in the level of protection desired by the institution (i.e., the % of the distribution relevant for the VaR). We show that the most important determinant is the conditional distribution of the underlying asset exposure; therefore, the optimal exercise price is very sensitive to the relative magnitude of the drift and diiusion of this exposure.


The effects of five rates of nitrogen fertiliser applications on the performance of the cereal aphid Metopolophium dirhodum on winter wheat, within the range of rates recommended for UK crops, were investigated over two seasons in field-grown crops and also on plants grown in the glasshouse. Longevity was unaffected by the level of fertilisation, but aphid intrinsic rate of increase and fecundity increased with each level applied. In the second field season, when a higher upper limit was used, many of these increases were significant. A previously unreported finding for this species was that there was a significant decrease in fecundity for the highest rate of fertilisation. Results for the glasshouse-reared aphids followed a similar pattern to those in the field, and overall they underline recent reports in the literature of the negative effects of high nutrient concentrations on the performance of herbivorous insects. The underlying reasons for these are discussed.


There is an epidemic in children of type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome including individual diseases that form the components of metabolic syndrome. The epidemic resembles the epidemic of type 1 diabetes in children which has been linked to immunization. The epidemic of obesity in US children has a statistically significant positive correlation with the number of vaccine doses recommended. There is a similar trend with both hypertension and metabolic syndrome. The incidence of type 2 diabetes in Japanese children decreased significantly following the discontinuation of the BCG vaccine, a vaccine which is associated with an increased risk of type 1 diabetes. This paper describes two aberrant re- sponses to immunization. At one extreme immunization leads to progressive autoimmune diseases including type 1 diabe- tes. A second response to immunization, and an opposite extreme to autoimmunity, is for the body to suppress the im- mune system through increased cortisol activity and other counter measures leading to type 2 diabetes and metabolic syn- drome. Some vaccine recipients may have a mixed response, falling between the extremes, such as an incomplete auto- immune disorder or an intermittent autoimmune disorder. The propensity to develop a particular response relates to race. Japanese children produce large amounts of cortisol following immunization and have lower risk of type 1 diabetes but higher risk of type 2 diabetes than White children. Analysis using Austin Bradford-Hill criteria for causation support a causal relation between immunization and metabolic syndrome. Additional studies are needed to further characterize this risk.


Purpose
In Sweden, gender mainstreaming policies have a long political history. As part of the national gender equality strategy of the Swedish forest industry, the ten largest forestry companies committed themselves to gender mainstream their policies. Limiting the impact of policies and the agency of change, the purpose of this paper is to focus on the varied and conflicting meanings and constitution of the concepts, the problem and, in extent, the organisational realities of gender mainstreaming.

Design/methodology/approach
In both, implementation and practice, gender mainstreaming posse challenges on various levels and by analysing these documents as practical texts from the WPR-approach. This paper explores constructions of gender and gender equality and their implications on the practice and the political of gender mainstreaming in a male-dominated primary industry.

Findings
The results show that the organisations themselves were not constituted as the subject of the policy but instead some of the individuals (women). The subject position of women represented in company policy was one of lacking skills and competences and in the need of help. Not only men and the masculine norms but organisational processes and structures were also generally invisible in the material. Power and conflict were mainly absent from the understanding of gender equality. Instead, consenting ideas of gender equality were the focus. Such conceptualisations of gender equality are beneficial for all risk concealing power structures and thereby limit the political space for change.

Originality/value
By highlighting the scale of policy and the significance of organisational contexts, the results indicate how gender and gender equality are constitutive through the governing technologies of neoliberal and market-oriented ideologies in policy – emphasising the further limiting of space for structural change and politicalization within the male-dominated organisations of Swedish forest industry.


This new Routledge Handbook offers a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of the meanings and uses of the term 'peacebuilding', and presents cutting-edge debates on the practices conducted in the name of peacebuilding.

The term 'peacebuilding' has had remarkable staying power. Other terms, such as 'conflict resolution' have waned in popularity, while the acceptance and use of the term 'peacebuilding' has grown to the extent that it is the hegemonic and over-arching term for many forms of mediation, reconciliation and strategies to induce peace. Despite this, however, it is rarely defined and often used to mean different things to different audiences.

Routledge Handbook of Peacebuilding aims to be a one-stop comprehensive resource on the literature and practices of contemporary peacebuilding. The book is organised into six key sections:

Section 1: Reading peacebuilding
Section 2: Approaches and cross-cutting themes
Section 3: Disciplinary approaches to peacebuilding
Section 4: Violence and security
Section 5: Everyday living and peacebuilding
Section 6: The infrastructure of peacebuilding
This new Handbook will be essential reading for students of peacebuilding, mediation and post-conflict reconstruction, and of great interest to students of statebuilding, intervention, civil wars, conflict resolution, war and conflict studies and IR in general.


The King Range is a rugged coastal mountain range that parallels the San Andreas transform fault system just south of the Mendocino triple junction. Point Delgada is a small coastal headland that projects into the Pacific Ocean just southwest of the King Range. Apatite fission-track ages from parts of the King Range are remarkably young, averaging 1.2 Ma, indicating that a minimum of 2-5 km of uplift and unroofing have occured in the past 1.2 m.y. In contrast, ages from Point Delgada are about 12 Ma, and fission-track length data indicate that rocks there have resided at low temperatures ({le}50{degree}C) and thus at shallow depths since soon after 12 Ma. Therefore Point Delgada has experienced relative vertical stability. The contrast in uplift histories indicates that the two areas are separated by a major fault with a minimum of {approximately}1 km of Quaternary vertical offset. The fault is probably part of the San Andreas system and so may also have undergone major Quaternary strike-slip offset. The uplift in the King Range seems too great and too localized to have resulted from isostatic effects accompanying passage of the Mendocino triple junction and development of a slab-free window; rather, it is probably amore » local response to space problems among the various moving crustal blocks around the triple junction and San Andreas fault.« less


Sequence alignment is a common subtask in many applications such as genetic matching and music information retrieval. Crucial to the performance of any sequence alignment algorithm is an accurate model of the reward of transforming one sequence into another. Using this model, we can find the optimal alignment of two sequences or perform query-based selection from a database of target sequences with a dynamic programming approach. In this paper, we describe a new algorithm to learn the reward models from positive and negative examples of matching sequences. We develop a gradient boosting approach that reduces sequence learning to a series of standard function approximation problems that can be solved by any function approximator. A key advantage of this approach is that it is able to induce complex features using function approximation rather than relying on the user to predefine such features. Our experiments on synthetic data and a fairly complex real-world music retrieval domain demonstrate that our approach can achieve better accuracy and faster learning compared to a state-of-the-art structured SVM approach.


The purposes of this study were to explore the factors teachers believe influence students' decisions to drop out of instrumental music during the first year of study; to compare the beliefs of band and orchestra teachers, as well as teachers in different demographic regions, regarding these factors; and finally to compare the actual first-year attrition rates in regard to ensemble type, scheduling method, and demographic area. Fifty-one randomly selected instrumental music teachers in Ohio completed a researcher-designed questionnaire. The participants indicated that unwillingness to spend time practicing and poor academic performance were major causes of attrition. Rural teachers were significantly less likely to cite scheduling conflicts as a cause of attrition. No significant differences were found between the responses of band and orchestra teachers. Programs that pulled students out of the regular classroom for lessons had significantly higher attrition rates than those with a dedicated lesson time. Student participation in school instrumental music programs is a core concern for many music educators (Covington, 1983; Brown, 1996). Issues of recruiting, continuing involvement, and student attrition are of special interest to the instrumental music teacher, because most band and orchestra programs in United States public schools are elective. Furthermore, in order for an instrumental music program to be successful and provide high-quality musical experiences for its members, teachers need a strong base of returning students in order to spiral the development of their skills and knowledge year after year (Brown, 1996). The very survival of an instrumental music program may depend on the teacher's ability to recruit and retain a certain number of students. The elective nature of most instrumental music programs in the United States means that students may discontinue instruction at almost any time, although patterns do exist. It has been noted, for instance, that changes in building or grade level often result in elevated attrition rates (Hartley, 1996). Even highly successful music programs are plagued to some degree by attrition (Sandene, 1997). Dropout rates in a study by Brakel (1997) ranged from 23% to 75%. A clear understanding of how and why students make participation decisions regarding instrumental music instruction is vital for teachers striving to build and maintain programs at any level. While much of the extant research has focused on students who drop instrumental music instruction after long periods of involvement, there may be considerable numbers of students who drop out during the first year of instruction. Recruitment and Retention Many teachers experience little difficulty recruiting beginning instrumentalists, as young students are often enthusiastic to participate in band or orchestra (Covington, 1983). However, after the initial excitement of beginning an instrument, the first year of instruction may become quite challenging for students. Frequently, they are expected to learn to read music notation while simultaneously developing basic physical performance skills by committing to a disciplined practice schedule. This, combined with the end of the initial "honeymoon" period of excitement, can result in frustration and discouragement for the new student (Brown, 1996) and concerns of retention for the teacher. The vulnerability of beginning students was noted by Riddle (1995): "Prospective directors must realize that there will be students who will quit band as quickly as they joined" (p. 7). The problem of attrition is a complex one, further complicated by the fact that teachers, parents, and students often do not agree on which factors have the greatest influence on participation and dropout decisions (Brown, 1985; Martignetti, 1965; Sandene, 1997; Brown, 1996). In the Gemeinhardt Report 2 (1985), for instance, students usually cited loss of interest and schedule conflicts, both curricular and extracurricular, as the primary reasons for dropping out. …


Background Associations between Vitamin D3 [25(OH)D], vitamin D binding protein (VDBP) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are previously reported. We aimed to further investigate these associations on longitudinal outcomes. Methods 426 COPD patients from western Norway, GOLD stage II-IV, aged 40–76, were followed every six-month from 2006 through 2009 with spirometry, bioelectrical impedance measurements and registration of exacerbation frequency. Serum 25(OH)D and VDBP levels were determined at study-entry by high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry and enzyme immunoassays respectively. Yearly change in lung function and body composition was assessed by generalized estimating equations (GEE), yearly exacerbation rate by negative binomial regression models, and 5 years all-cause mortality by Cox proportional-hazard regression. Results 1/3 of the patients had vitamin D deficiency (<20ng/mL) and a greater decline in both FEV1 and FVC, compared to patients with normal levels; for FEV1 this difference only reached statistical significance in the 28 patients with the lowest levels (<10ng/mL, p = 0.01). Neither 25(OH)D nor VDBP levels predicted exacerbation rate, change in fat free mass index or risk of death. Conclusion Severe vitamin D deficiency may affect decline in lung function parameters in COPD. Neither 25(OH)D nor VDBP levels did otherwise predict markers of disease progression.


In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data to learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application‐specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constraints. For example, policies may be restricted to take the form of decision trees based on a limited set of easily observable individual characteristics. We propose a new approach to this problem motivated by the theory of semiparametrically efficient estimation. Our method can be used to optimize either binary treatments or infinitesimal nudges to continuous treatments, and can leverage observational data where causal effects are identified using a variety of strategies, including selection on observables and instrumental variables. Given a doubly robust estimator of the causal effect of assigning everyone to treatment, we develop an algorithm for choosing whom to treat, and establish strong guarantees for the asymptotic utilitarian regret of the resulting policy.


In this paper we utilize a three component model of the automotive industry to simulate the impacts of various trade policy scenarios, such as changes in tariffs and quotas, on the U.S. and Canadian motor vehicle sectors as compared to their Japanese competitors. The three components are a cost module, a mark-up module and a demand module. These models contain the features stressed by the "new" international trade literature: (I) economies of scale in production, (2) imperfect competition, and (3) product differentiation. As a result of these modelling details we are able to capture quantitatively a number of outcome characteristics stressed in the strategic trade literature. Scenarios which expand a country's output reduce unit costs of production, both in the short and long-run. Protectionist policies adopted by North American governments result in rent transfers to these countries. The price and output effects of scenarios which favour North American producers at the expense of Japanese producers however are moderated by the Japanese practices of partial pass-through and pricing-to-market. The welfare implications of the various scenarios are in accordance with the strategic trade literature, in the sense the protectionist policies can in some cases increase aggregate welfare in North America at the expense of Japan.


AbstractIt is valuable in large organization with multiple hierarchical levels that the general goals are communicated at all levels of the organization. Organizations usually have an overall business plan, which should serve as a guide and indicate the organization's direction. Middle managers have an important part in communicating the overall business plan since they are a link between upper management and employees. The purpose of this study was to examine how middle managers, in their role as a link between upper management and employees, communicate the overall business plan. The study was conducted at the County council in Varmland, which represents a large hierarchical organization. The overall business plan was landstingplanen. The theoretical framework used was primarily theories and previous research in organizational communication, communicative leadership and communication and structure. Eight middle managers were selected through a variety selection. The eight respondents were interviewed to examine in what way they are communicating and establishing the County council's overall business plan. The results showed that the overall business plan is established and communicated in the different levels of the organization since it is broken down in two steps. The overall business plan functions as a support and gives guidance in how to accomplish the goals that are conveyed. The balanced scorecard that is a part of the overall business plan fills an important role in what middle management choose to priorities and communicate to their employees. However, the results indicated that the general formulation in the overall business plan resulted in a relatively free interpretation among the middle managers. Furthermore, the results showed that the attitudes against the County council's vision among the respondents were fairly negative. The results also indicated that the middle managers are operating from a communicative leadership in communicating the overall business plan to their employees, but for this to be realized there must be a communicative empowerment. The results also showed that discrepancy between the upper management and the employees was perceived as large, which may obstruct the middle managers to establish the overall business plan.


Public digital displays are increasingly pervasive and an important enabling technology for many types of ubiquitous computing scenarios. Not only do they provide a simple and effective way of bringing digital information into our physical world, but their presence could also be a catalyst for situated interaction and the emergence of local user-generated content. This paper explores the role of presence, particularly as enabled by Bluetooth device discovery, as the driver for the system's behavior and its situational awareness.


ABSTRACT An enrichment of the neuston bacterium Nevskia ramosawas investigated by the cultivation-independent rRNA approach. N. ramosa was first described by Famintzin in 1892 as a rod-shaped, slightly bent bacterium forming typical flat rosettes on the surface of shallow freshwater habitats by unilateral slime formation. PCR in combination with cloning and sequencing was used for retrieving 21 partial and 5 nearly full-length 16S rRNA sequences forming three tight clusters. In situ hybridization with rRNA-targeted oligonucleotide probes allowed us to assign the three sequence clusters to three distinct bacterial populations abundant in the enrichment. The two probes that unambiguously identified the N. ramosamorphotype were derived from a 16S rRNA sequence that had similarities of 87.9 to 88.9% to the rRNA sequences of the most closely related group in the database, Xanthomonas sp. and relatives.N. ramosa currently is the only representative of an independent, deep branch of the gamma subclass of the classProteobacteria. The two other populations abundant in the enrichment were affiliated with the alpha subclass of the classProteobacteria. They were most closely related toBlastobacter sp. (97.2% similarity) and Mycoplana bullata (97.6% similarity) and might represent new species in the respective genera.


This is the last in a series of four articles

Recent high profile scandals in the United Kingdom have highlighted the changing values by which the National Health Service is judged.1 The public expects, and the government has promised to deliver, a health service that is ever safer, constantly up to date, and focused on patients' changing needs. Successful health services in the 21st century must aim not merely for change, improvement, and response, but for changeability, improvability, and responsiveness.

Educators are therefore challenged to enable not just competence, but also capability (box). Capability ensures that the delivery of health care keeps up with its ever changing context. Education providers must offer an environment and process that enables individuals to develop sustainable abilities appropriate for a continuously evolving organisation. Recent announcements in the United Kingdom of a "university for the NHS,"2 a "national leadership programme,"3 and "workforce confederations"4 raise the question of what kind of education and training will help the NHS to deliver its goals

#### Capability is more than competence

Competence —what individuals know or are able to do in terms of knowledge, skills, attitude

Capability —extent to which individuals can adapt to change, generate new knowledge, and continue to improve their performance

#### Summary points

Traditional education and training largely focuses on enhancing competence (knowledge, skills, and attitudes)

In today's complex world, we must educate not merely for competence, but for capability (the ability to adapt to change, generate new knowledge, and continuously improve performance)

Capability is enhanced through feedback on performance, the challenge of unfamiliar contexts, and the use of non-linear methods such as story telling and small group, problem based learning

Education for capability must focus on process (supporting learners to construct their own learning goals, receive feedback, reflect, and consolidate) and avoid goals with rigid and prescriptive content

The …


Larger predators can affect smaller predators through intraguild predation and competition, which in turn could have indirect effects on other consumers. We investigated whether gray wolves (Canis lupus) generate such effects by reducing predation by coyotes (Canis latrans) on snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus). We also examined whether wolves indirectly affect abundances of deer mice (Peromyscus spp.) as part of a wolf–coyote–fox cascade. We compared habitat use by consumers in the high- and low-wolf-use areas of a Great Lakes forest (Wisconsin and Michigan, United States). Coyotes frequented high-wolf-use areas about half as much low-wolf-use areas, which coincided with a tripling of hare browse on saplings in high-wolf-use areas. Foxes (Vulpes vulpes and Urocyon cinereoargenteus) frequented high-wolf-use areas almost exclusively. Fewer mice occurred in high-wolf-use areas than low-wolf-use areas in 2011 (approximately one-half) and 2013 (approximately two-fifths), but not in 2012, possibly due to increased food supply. We conclude that wolves may generate cascading effects through changes in coyote distribution that benefit hares and foxes, while also reducing the deer mouse population in some years.


Bacteremic infections are a major cause of mortality and morbidity in chronic hemodialysis patients. New developments in managing these patients (erythropoietin therapy, nasal mupirocin, long-term implanted catheters, and synthetic membranes) may have altered the epidemiologic patterns of bacteremia in dialysis patients. This multicenter prospective cross-sectional study was carried out to determine the current incidence of and risk factors for bacteremia in chronic hemodialysis patients in France. A total of 988 adults on chronic hemodialysis for 1 mo or longer was followed up prospectively for 6 mo in 19 French dialysis units. The factors associated with the development of at least one bacteremic episode over 6 mo were determined using the multivariate Cox proportional hazards model. Staphylococcus aureus (n=20) and coagulase-negative staphylococci (n=15) were responsible for most of the 51 bacteremic episodes recorded. The incidence of bacteremia was 0.93 episode per 100 patient-months. Four risk factors for bacteremia were identified: (1) vascular access (catheter versus fistula: RR=7.6; 95% CI, 3.7 to 15.6); (2) history of bacteremia (> or =2 versus no previous episode: RR=7.3; 95% CI, 3.2 to 16.4); (3) immunosuppressive therapy (current versus no: RR=3.0; 95% CI, 1.0 to 6.1); and (4) corpuscular hemoglobin (per 1 g/dl increment: RR=0.7; 95% CI, 0.6 to 0.9). Catheters, especially long-term implanted catheters, were found to be the leading risk factor of bacteremia in chronic hemodialysis patients. There was a trend toward recurrence of bacteremia that was not associated with chronic staphylococcal nasal carriage. Synthetic membranes were not associated with a lower risk of bacteremia in this population of well dialyzed patients, but anemia linked to resistance to erythropoietin appeared to be a possible risk factor for bacteremia.


Nowadays the problem of sustainable development became one of the topical issues. However, many authors point to conceptual complexity, which is that the concept " sustainable development " includes two terms " development " and " sustainability. " At the same time, each of these terms is treated not unambiguously. It leads to the emergence of different interpretations of sustainable development in relation to specific systems. A new concept of sustainable development of systems is proposed. According to this concept, the sustainable development of a complex multidimensional system will be understood as the dynamics consisting in the presence of a trend of balanced change in the entropies of randomness and self-organization while maintaining an acceptable risk level in multidimensional systems. The proposed concept is approved on practical examples. Dynamics of vector entropy and multidimensional risk of Yekaterinburg and Sverdlovsk regions in 1992 – 2017 is given.


Louise Newman reinterprets an important period (1870s-1920s) in the history of women's rights, focusing attention on a core contradiction at the heart of early feminist theory. At a time when white elites were concerned with imperialist projects and civilizing missions, progressive white women developed an explicit racial ideology to promote their cause, defending patriarchy for "primitives" while calling for its elimination among the "civilized." Exploring how progressive white women at the turn of the century laid the intellectual groundwork for the feminist social movements that followed, Newman's book thus speaks to contemporary debates concerning the effect of race on current feminist scholarship.


Fluid-mediated programmable stochastic self-assembly offers promising means to formation of target structures capable of a variety of functionalities. While miniaturized building blocks allow for finer resolutions in such structures, as well as access to unconventional environments, they can only be endowed with very limited on-board resources. In this paper we present the design, fabrication, and experimental results validating the key functionalities of the Lily robot as the building block in a programmable stochastic fluidic self-assembly system, capable of forming 2D structures. In particular, we aim at driving a system including an arbitrary number of Lilies to form target structures through parallel self-assembly, using exclusively local information and communication. While capable of wireless communication to a base station, Lilies are endowed with custom-designed electropermanent magnets to latch and also to communicate locally with their neighbors. Several experiments validate the reliability of the radio channel as well as the robustness of the local induction-based communication which allows for data transfer at 9600 bps with a success rate of 92.8% without repetition. The latches are shown to hold four times the weight of a single robot and to drag in another Lily from a distance of 4 mm in water.


In the last few short years, interconnectivity has brought about new levels of artistic collaboration. Businesses, schools and artists alike are now engaging in multimedia remote collaboration as a matter of course. The next generation of filmmakers, for example, will surely involve an ever-greater degree of remote collaboration, as more teams work together on projects across the planet. There are now many choices of tools and platforms available to link the world through connected devices. How these tools are strategically employed can mean the difference between a smooth, successful collaboration and one that's fallen short of its potential for full member involvement. So...is there such thing as a perfect recipe for an engaging international collaboration? This paper examines one evolving case study in international collaboration within an educational context, parsing the choices made and measuring them against student uptake and involvement. Entertainment Lab for the Very Small Screen (ELVSS) is an evolving experiment in remote collaboration by international student teams collectively making movies on their mobile phones. As the ELVSS project has expanded and grown more complex since its inception in 2011, so have the lessons to be learned from it. What light can this globally collaborative effort shed on all future international collaborations, particularly ones involving mobile moviemaking? To what extent did the combination of smart phones and Web 2.0 platforms assist or impede fluid communication, seamless workflow and creative contribution amongst the huge cohort? What were its successes, what were its lessons? How can we continue to improve the pedagogy of collaborative practice in mobile moviemaking?


The aim of this study was to characterize abnormalities of triglyceride-rich apolipoprotein (apo) B-containing lipoproteins in type I diabetic patients with elevated albumin excretion rates (AERs). Sixty-four patients (31 men, 33 women) with normoalbuminuria (AER <20 jjtg/min), 52 (35 men, 17 women) with microalbuminuria (AER 20–200 μg/min), and 37 (17 men, 20 women) with albuminuria (AER >200 (μg/min) and 56 healthy control subjects matched for age and body weight were studied. The major finding was increased mass concentrations of the highly atherogenic intermediate-density lipoprotein fraction in patients with microalbuminuria (P < 0.05) and albuminuria (P <0.05), compared with those with normoalbuminuria. Triglyceride, free cholesterol, cholesterol ester, and phospholipid concentrations in the VLDL, intermediate-density lipoprotein, and LDL (P <0.05-0.01), as well as total cholesterol, total triglyceride, and apoB concentrations were higher in patients with renal disease than in those without. Notably, there were no differences between patients with microalbuminuria and albuminuria. Only minor compositional changes could be detected. Postheparin plasma lipoprotein lipase (LPL) activities were identical, but hepatic lipase activities were higher in microalbuminuric and albuminuric patients than in normoalbuminuric patients (P < 0.01). LPL activity and VLDL1 (8f60–400) (r = −0.528; P < 0.001) and VLDL2 (8f20–60) mass concentrations (r = −0.471; P < 0.001) were negatively related. In conclusion, in type I diabetic patients with early renal disease, there are multiple lipoprotein changes, which are potentially atherogenic and may contribute to the excess of macrovascular complications seen in such patients.


With the exponential growth in volume of multimedia content on the internet, there has been an increasing interest for developing more efficient and scalable algorithms to learn directly from data without excessive restrictions on nature of the content. In the context of document images, many large scale digitization projects have called for reliable and scalable triage methods for enhancement, segmentation, grouping and categorization of captured images. Current approaches, however, are typically limited to a specific class of documents such as scanned books, newspapers, journal articles or forms for example, and analysis and processing of more unconstrained and noisy heterogeneous document collections has not been as widely addressed. Additionally, existing machine-learning based approaches for document processing need to be carefully applied to handle the challenges associated with large and imbalanced training data.
In this thesis, we address these challenges in three primary applications of document image analysis—low-level document enhancement, mid-level handwritten line segmentation, and high-level classification and retrieval. We first present a data selection method for training Support Vector Machines (SVM) on large-scale data sets. We apply the proposed approach to pixel-level document image enhancement, and show promising results with a relatively small number of training samples. Second, we present a graph-based method for segmentation of handwritten document images into text-lines which is more efficient and adaptive than previous approaches. Our approach demonstrates that combining results from local and global methods enhances the final performance of text-line segmentation. Third, we present an approach to compute structural similarities between images for classification and retrieval. Results on real-world data sets show that the approach is more effective than earlier approaches when the labeled data is limited. We extend our classification approach to a completely unsupervised setting, where both the number of classes and representative samples from each class is assumed to be unknown. We present a method for computing similarities based on learned structural patterns and correlations from the given data. Experiments with four different data sets show that our approach can estimate number of classes in large document collections and group structurally similar images with a high-accuracy.


To lift and keep millions out of poverty requires that smallholder agriculture be productive and profitable in the developing world. Do we know how to make this happen? Researchers and practitioners still debate how best to do so. The prevailing methodology, which claims causality from measures of statistical significance, is inductive and yields contradictory results. In this book, instead of correlations, Isabelle Tsakok looks for patterns common to cases of successful agricultural transformation and then tests them against other cases. She proposes a hypothesis that five sets of conditions are necessary to achieve success. She concludes that government investment in and delivery of public goods and services sustained over decades is essential to maintaining these conditions and thus successfully transform poverty-ridden agricultures. No amount of foreign aid can substitute for such sustained government commitment. The single most important threat to such government commitment is subservience to the rich and powerful minority.


Belemnites occur infrequently from the Upper Cenomanian through the Middle(Upper Coniacian in the Bohemian Cretaceous. Four species of the family Belemnitellidae PAVLOW, 1914 have been described so far. A typical boreal faunal incursion, represented by belemnites, happened five to six times in the Bohemian Cretaceous Basin (BCB).  Praeactinocamax plenus immigrated during the Late Cenomanian Metoicoceras geslinianum ammonite Zone (plenus Event); there were two short-term incursions of P. bohemicus in the Late Turonian ( Subplionocyclus neptuni to  Prionocyclus germari ammonite zones) and an incursion of Goniocamax lundgreni in the late Early Coniacian (below and intra- Cremnoceramus crassus inoceramid Zone). A single belemnite fragment was recorded from the "Chlomek Beds"; Middle to Upper Coniacian. Bohemian Cretaceous belemnite systematics, palaeobiogeography (including palaeobiogeographic maps reconstructed), palaeoecology (induding the relationship to other coleoid groups - i. e. teuthids) and stratigraphy are discussed.


This study considers competing theories concerning the role of mass media in hindering or facilitating the translation of personal experiences into political preferences. Using national survey and media content data that allow evaluations of both media coverage and individual patterns of media use, this study evaluates the influence of mass media on the direct impact of personal experiences on presidential performance as Ronald Reagan completed his second term in office, and on the indirect impact of personal experiences by means of their impact on collective-level issue judgments. Exposure to unemployment news appears to strengthen the impact of personal experiences on presidential performance ratings. Heavy unemployment coverage also increases the extent to which perceptions of national unemployment conditions are generalized from personal experience. Overall, results suggest that mass media may counter the tendency to morselize personal experiences and help legitimize the translation of private interests into political attitudes.


Information technologies that could be potentially used for the development of register system are currently highly advanced, but their practical adaptation in terms of register management is limited due to the void in the legal regulation. Therefore this article particularly focuses on analysis of legal regulation applied for the register system, by highlighting gaps, limitations in the legal acts regulating this area and offering resolutions of the problems. Author of the article reveals content of the category "system" and provides various definitions for the term "system". This article also includes various classification criteria for registers and revealing limitations of register classification. In addition underlining register system elements as well as general features of all the registers. The article lists register system as a complex, open, managable and purposeful system. Author concludes by stressing the importance of the register system interoperability and emphasizing that without it registers would be a "collection" of registers rather than a system.


The main purpose of this study was to examine how Social Services handle cases where people are affected by honour-related violence and which type of knowledge social workers have about honour-related violence. The study has been made with a qualitative and an inductive approach. Five social workers have been interviewed. All of them have experienced honour-related violence through their work but not to the same extent. The theoretical frame of reference has been consisted of three perspectives, the culture dependent, the radical feministic and the intersectional perspective. The results show that the social workers manage cases differently due to if the municipality they work in is bigger or smaller and depending on the amount of professional experience they have. The case management is bound to include discussions about cultural and religious background as potential causes to honour-related violence, even when that has not been the case. Social workers have knowledge about honour related vilolence, but the knowledge vary due to work experience and opportunities to education. Relatively prejudice and stereo typical conecptions as well as knowledge based on experince and theory has been noticed. Furthermore, a variation of the social workers outlook when managing cases has been noticed. The social workers working in a bigger municipality have a more obvious child perspective and the social workers working in a smaller municipality have an outlook where a child's best interest stems from a family perspective.


In physics, generation and annihilation is used for different processes. Annihilation mainly uses the energy of colliding systems to distribute the accepted energy newly. For instance, an electron colliding with an antineutrino can produce a W- boson carrying the common energy. The W- decay is then again into two particles. The article refers to known datas from physics, but is mostly from the book and many related articles of the same author. Involved are new symmetries or Gleason operators and different kinds of geometries. All sections of this article, not only the first one, are original research using. From physics for instance the early development of the universe is quoted, but physics has no explanation for this. The authors new method has for it detailed information, using matrix theory in form of Moebius transformations octonian projective and other (Hopf in section 2) geometries and Gleason measures with octonian spin-like GF triples (third section). The explanation of figures is kept short and the extended theory is found in the authors book and older publications not quoted here.


This paper discusses the potential role that SWFs could play in African economies, both as recipient countries and home countries. We use new hand collected data to document the landscape of African SWFs as well as SWFs interventions on the continent. Our analysis shows that African SWFs are small, suffer from poor governance structures and are mainly focusing on stabilizing local economies. This suggests that their potential role as long term institutional investors to foster economic growth is likely to be limited if current practices are maintained. Conversely, foreign SWFs are increasingly interested in Africa and are poised to play a bigger role in supporting the continent's growth if Africa uses the right strategies to attract their resources. Overall, the paper identifies opportunities that Africa offers for SWFs as well as challenges that need to be addressed in order to enhance SWFs role in supporting Africa's development.


Abstract : This paper describes a novel approach for handling translation divergences in a Generation- Heavy Hybrid Machine Translation (GHMT) system. The approach depends on the existence of rich target language resources such as word lexical semantics, including in- formation about categorical variations and subcategorization frames. These resources are used to generate multiple structural variations from a target-glossed lexico-syntactic representation of the source language sentence. The multiple structural variations account for different translation divergences. The overgeneration of the approach is constrained by a target-language model using corpus-based statistics. The exploitation of target language resources (symbolic and statistical) to handle a problem usually reserved to Transfer and Interlingual MT is useful for translation from structurally divergent source languages with scarce linguistic resources. A preliminary evaluation on the application of this approach to Spanish-English MT proves this approach extremely promising. The approach however is not limited to MT as it can be extended to monolingual NLG applications such as summarization.