Dear editor,

Psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia, are the most disabling mental illnesses affecting, usually, young people. Several projects have recently focused on people with prodromal symptoms but not frankly psychotic. There is evidence that interventions in early stages of the disease could result in better outcomes.1 In 1987, the DSM-III-R (American Psychiatric Association) provided a list of nine observable behavioral or subjectively experienced changes for the diagnosis of the "schizophrenia prodrome", but the list of criteria dropped from DSM-IV (1994). The ICD-10 (World Health Organization, 1994) acknowledges a prodrome as part of schizophrenia but this is not included in the description of the disorder because of its poor reliability and low sensitivity.2 A workgroup in the American Psychiatric Association has recently recommended inclusion of a new diagnostic category entitled "Attenuated Psychosis Syndrome" in the forthcoming DSM-5. However, the group is examining the evidence as to whether inclusion is merited in the main manual or in an appendix for further research.

It should be noted that subthreshold conditions, which are common in everyday practice, are characterized by symptoms likely below the threshold according to which categorical diagnosis is made; these conditions could progress or not to major psychiatric disorders.3,4 During the last decade, there was a vivid debate as to whether "Attenuated Psychosis Syndrome" should be included or not in DSM-5.5 Those in favor claim that subjects with the syndrome exhibit deficits at a psychological, behavioral and cognitive level (possibly subthreshold), have the right and need to be treated. The widely accepted "neurodevelopmental theory" of schizophrenia provides an implicit theoretical foundation for early intervention during the pre-psychotic stage of the illness. The identification of individuals carrying unexpressed genetic liability to psychosis will be crucial for both etiological research and clinical risk stratification. Moreover, according to the "clinical stage model", the earlier in the course of illness treatment is offered the greater remission and recovery rates are.1,6 Those against emphasize the risk of stigmatization of people with minor psychopathology, the fact that only a minority will convert to psychosis in the following years and that antipsychotic medication in non-psychotic populations may be unethical. However, antipsychotic medication has already been used with good results in non-psychotic conditions, such as personality disorders (schizotypal, borderline, etc.) or behavioral disturbances (impulsivity, aggression, etc.).7

Stigmatization of people with the syndrome could be avoided if the word "psychosis" dropped from the title. Therefore, our proposal is that this condition could be included in DSM-5 as a new category for further research with the title "Subthreshold Prodromal State". "Subthreshold" because of the decreased severity of psychotic symptoms, "Prodromal" both because the term has been associated with psychosis and because the subjects could manifest major psychopathology in the future and "State" because diagnosis may change with time.


The present study investigated avoidant attachment orientation differences in emotion processing biases under different conditions of attachment schema activation (subliminal, supraliminal or no-activation). After completing a dimensional assessment of adult attachment, 97 participants were randomly assigned to one of the three activating conditions and subsequently performed an Emotional Stroop Task including attachment and emotion positive and negative words. Consistently, in the supraliminal activation condition, avoidant participants demonstrated higher interference of attachment-related and emotional stimuli compared to the no-activation condition; they focused on the task-relevant processes (colour naming), ignoring the semantic meaning of the words (lower interference). The results of the present study suggest that avoidant individuals use both pre-emptive and post-emptive strategies under different activating conditions in the processing of emotion information. The results also highlight interpretation of latencies in the Emotional Stroop Task for avoidant participants.


This article presents a critique of the economic substance doctrine and suggests an alternative. The economic substance doctrine under certain circumstances overrides the technical provisions of the Internal Revenue Code. Congress recently incorporated into the Code a version similar to the court-developed doctrine. Whether authorized by the court or authorized by statute, however, the doctrine makes our tax laws vague, uncertain, and fallacious. Therefore, the doctrine should be abandoned. A more appropriate tool for curbing questionable tax planning is the use of statutory risk requirements. This article provides some suggestions for developing such requirements. The article concludes that statutory risk requirements would help break the tax system's addiction to economic substance and restore long overdue rationality.


Organ transplantation is a thrilling new option for modern surgery giving hope for chronically ill patients, and, at the same time, stirring controversial ethical questions on human identity and the meaning of the human body. Being a global and transnational endeavor, organ transplantation raises universal ethical concerns and, yet, has to be adapted to culturally mediated believes. In this book, 30 case studies collected from all over the world illustrate the range of global and local, ethical, social, and cultural problems associated with this new form of treatment. Together with a list of relevant movies, the collection provides a unique resource for ethics education in medicine, health care, philosophy, and religious studies. The authors have completed the teaching material by a systematic introduction into the field of transplantation ethics.


During the last several decades, research concerning the developmental trajectories, experiences, and behaviors of college men as "gendered" persons has emerged. In this article, we first critically review literature on Black men's gender development and expressions within college contexts to highlight certain knowledge gaps. We then conceptualize and discuss progressive Black masculinities by relying on Mutua's germinal work on the subject. Further, we engage Black feminist scholarship, both to firmly situate our more pressing argument for conceptual innovation and to address knowledge gaps in the literature on Black men's gender experiences. It is our belief that scholars who study gender development and expressions of masculinities among Black undergraduate men could benefit from employing autocritography, and its built-in assumptions, to inform several aspects of their research designs. Autocritography is a critical autobiography that some Black profeminist men engage to invite readers into their gendered lifeworlds.


The structure and evolution of primate societies are generally shaped by ecological and social forces of natural selection. The habitat and feeding ecology of primate populations, in particular, largely determine the size of the existing social groups and the pattern of interactions between individuals within and across such groups. The bonnet macaque (Macaca radiata), an Old World monkey endemic to peninsular India, usually lives in seasonal tropical deciduous forests and occurs in typically large multimale multifemale associations. This species, however, appears to have evolved, in recent years, a fairly high proportion of small, but reasonably stable, unimale troops within one particular population in the Bandipur-Mudumalai wildlife sanctuaries of southern India. Demographic analyses indicate that, as compared to multimale troops, unimale groups are relatively depleted insubadult and juvenile males, exhibit a unique female-biased birth sexratio and display extensive female dispersal, all of which may havearisen in response to reproductive monopolization by the solitaryresident male. Several ecological factors, including food provisioning,may have led to the evolution of this social organization, unique for aseasonally breeding cercopithecine primate. Provisioning of primategroups also leads to a significant increase in intra-troop competitionamong individuals for the newly available resources. Do suchindividuals, however, exhibit altered behavioural strategies toalleviate social tension? Changing patterns of social interactionsbetween adult males were also analysed for one particular troop ofbonnet macaques in the Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary under twoecological situations - as they foraged on their natural diet and whenthey gathered provisioned food from tourists visiting the sanctuary.Although feeding competition increased markedly as these individualsalternated between natural foraging and competing for provisioned food,individual macaques were able to adopt appropriate social strategiesunder such rapidly changing ecological regimes. These studiesdemonstrate the behavioural and social plasticity of a primate speciesand the value of demographic studies of multiple groups and populationsin different ecological environments.


A large data set containing coincident in situ chlorophyll and remote sensing reflectance measurements was used to evaluate the accuracy, precision, and suitability of a wide variety of ocean color chlorophyll algorithms for use by SeaWiFS (Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor). The radiance-chlorophyll data were assembled from various sources during the SeaWiFS Bio-optical Algorithm Mini-Workshop (SeaBAM) and is composed of 919 stations encompassing chlorophyll concentrations between 0.019 and 32.79 μg L−1. Most of the observations are from Case I nonpolar waters, and ∼20 observations are from more turbid coastal waters. A variety of statistical and graphical criteria were used to evaluate the performances of 2 semianalytic and 15 empirical chlorophyll/pigment algorithms subjected to the SeaBAM data. The empirical algorithms generally performed better than the semianalytic. Cubic polynomial formulations were generally superior to other kinds of equations. Empirical algorithms with increasing complexity (number of coefficients and wavebands), were calibrated to the SeaBAM data, and evaluated to illustrate the relative merits of different formulations. The ocean chlorophyll 2 algorithm (OC2), a modified cubic polynomial (MCP) function which uses Rrs490/Rrs555, well simulates the sigmoidal pattern evident between log-transformed radiance ratios and chlorophyll, and has been chosen as the at-launch SeaWiFS operational chlorophyll a algorithm. Improved performance was obtained using the ocean chlorophyll 4 algorithm (OC4), a four-band (443, 490, 510, 555 nm), maximum band ratio formulation. This maximum band ratio (MBR) is a new approach in empirical ocean color algorithms and has the potential advantage of maintaining the highest possible satellite sensor signal: noise ratio over a 3-orders-of-magnitude range in chlorophyll concentration.


The number of systems that collect vast amount of data about users rapidly grow during last few years. Many of these systems contain data not only about people characteristics but also about their relationships with other system users. From this kind of data it is possible to extract a social network that reflects the connections between system's users. Moreover, the analysis of such social network enables to investigate different characteristics of its users and their linkages. One of the types of examining such network is key users extraction. Key users are these who have the biggest impact on other network users as well as have big influence on network evolution. The obtained knowledge about these users enables to investigate and predict changes within the network. So this knowledge is very important for the people or companies who make a profit from the network like telecommunication company. The second important issue is the ability to extract these users as quick as possible, i.e. developed the algorithm that will be time-effective in large social networks where number of nodes and edges is equal few millions.


This study examines the discursive act found in the writing and reading of trauma literature and argues for a theory of empathetic reading based on an ethical-aesthetic approach. An ethical-aesthetic approach offers an interpretive theory that examines how writers and readers may construe textual depictions of trauma that generate emotional response. I apply Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic theories to demonstrate how readers and writers, alike, make meaning through a self-conscious awareness of their relationships toward the text. Empathetic readers come to the act of reading from an ethical stance that respects both the sites of the writer and of the text. This process yields a critical aesthetic interpretation through cognitive (identification) and ethical value judgments that illuminate a reader's reaction with the work. This study analyzes various genres of trauma literature that represent varying perspectives of truth: life narratives represented in testimony, autobiographical fiction with its blurred boundaries, and fictional novels depicting historical traumas. Each genre's features define the means of textual representation, thus readers make cultural assumptions about representations of truth represented in the genre. They expect testimonials to deliver words-equal-truth as in Elie Wiesel's Night or the narrative embellishments of memoir found in Ishmael Beah's use of pathetic fallacy in A long way gone: memoirs of a boy soldier . When addressing each genre, I consider how the writer employs literary narrative devices that evoke a cognitive-emotional response in the reader. Moreover, I examine the ethical implications found in fictionalized representations of real atrocities in the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Toni Morrison, as these authors of fiction respect the sites of trauma while not trivializing nor dishonoring its victims. Both Foer and Morrison use concepts of co-creating, by inviting the reader to fill in the gaps or participate in the formation of the text, as a means to amplify a moral awareness of handling difficult representations. My analysis of these works illustrates Bakhtin's discursive theory of co-experiencing an utterance, or "utterance-as-text," that demonstrates the personal chaos brought about through the lived experience of writing and reading trauma literature. This co-experience, whether through writing or reading, leads one to a self-reflective positioning of an ethical secondary witness via the text.


A novel series of soluble alternating conjugated copolymers, comprised of 9,9-dihexylfluorene and thiophene or substituted thiophene moieties (P1−P5), were synthesized via the palladium-catalyzed Suzuki coupling reaction. Substitutents on the thiophene include the electron-donating groups of hexyl and hexyloxymethyl group and the electron-withdrawing groups of hexyl carboxylate and cyano. The steric effects of the bulkier substituents outweigh the electronic effects of the substituents on the observed absorption and photoluminescence properties of the copolymers. Therefore, only the cyano substituted copolymer (P4) exhibits a red shift of the electronic spectra with 1.6 times enhancement in the fluorescence quantum yield as compared with the unsubstituted copolymer (P5). The substituents slightly reduce the values of Tg and Td of P5, but all of the reported copolymers have a Td larger than 300 °C.


Everybody would agree that treating children with bacterial meningitis promptly is a good thing. However, there is little data on how promptly antibiotic treatment should be given. Children with the rash of meningococcal disease can be given antibiotics within an hour of presentation. Suggesting the same target for children with bacterial meningitis is probably over simplistic, not evidence based and has not been reported in any study over the past 25 years. To achieve this would require a fundamental change in the way children with possible meningitis are assessed. What does a paediatric trainee think of this suggestion?

Recognising cases of acute bacterial meningitis in children of all ages is crucially important in order to ensure prompt effective treatment and thus optimise outcome.1 The primary investigation for children with suspected meningitis is a lumbar puncture (LP)2; however, these can often be delayed, particularly if the child is unwell or if there is diagnostic uncertainty. Ramasamy et al 3 looked at a large cohort of children who were being investigated for meningitis, in order to quantify the time to investigation and treatment. They studied time to LP, time to antibiotic treatment and length of hospital stay in children presenting to three large paediatric centres in the UK.

Overall results showed that median time from initial hospital assessment for possible meningitis to LP was 4.8 hours for all age groups (3 hours when LP times were documented accurately). Many children had also been seen prehospital, mostly by a general practitioner, although the authors did not make attempts to include this in their time to …


In this paper we present an approach for the sta- tistical analysis of multi-model ensemble results. The mod- els considered here are operational long-range transport and dispersion models, also used for the real-time simulation of pollutant dispersion or the accidental release of radioactive nuclides. We first introduce the theoretical basis (with its roots sink- ing into the Bayes theorem) and then apply this approach to the analysis of model results obtained during the ETEX-1 exercise. We recover some interesting results, supporting the heuristic approach called "median model", originally intro- duced in Galmarini et al. (2004a, b). This approach also provides a way to systematically re- duce (and quantify) model uncertainties, thus supporting the decision-making process and/or regulatory-purpose activities in a very effective manner.


A general parametric framework is developed for pricing S&P500 options. Skewness and leptokurtosis in stock returns as well as time-varying volatility are priced. The parametric pricing model nests the Black-Scholes model and can explain volatility smiles and skews in stock options. The data consist of S&P500 options traded on select days in April, 1995, a total sample of over 500,000 observations. A number of performance criteria are used to evaluate the alternative models. The empirical results show that pricing higher order moments yield improvements in the pricing of options over the Black-Scholes model as well as other models.


A weldable material's system design includes optimization of base metal (BM), heat-affectedzone (HAZ) and weld metal (WM) microstructure, for a given welding process condition, to achieve target mechanical properties. Traditional research focused on single-pass weld thermal cycles with different HAZ peak temperatures and mostly ignored the effect of initial microstructure. In this research, weldable materials system design methodology is applied to thick plate steels (up to 25 mm) made with niobium microalloying additions. The overarching goal of this research is to optimize the HAZ microstructure evolution to minimize the degradation of properties achieved by original thermomechanical processing, irrespective of the number of weld passes. Two niobium microalloyed steels with different initial microstructures were studied. The samples were subjected to simulated multipass weld HAZ thermal cycles typically utilised in linepipe production using a Gleeble thermomechanical simulator. Concurrent dilatometric measurements provided insight into phase transformation kinetics. Two sets of experiments were performed and the samples were characterized with optical and scanning electron microscopy, electron back scattered diffraction and microhardness testing. In the first experiment, for a given composition, samples with different initial microstructures (ferrite + pearlite or bainite + martensite) but the same initial composition were subjected to two pass thermal cycles. In both cases, the final microstructures in these two samples were found to be a mixture of ferrite and small fractions of martensite-austenite (MA) constituents. However, differences in MA content were observed. In the second experiment, steels with different initial microstructure and different compositions were subjected to multipass weld thermal cycles with peak temperatures above and below Ac1 and Ac3 temperatures. These thermal cycles are similar to those expected during multi-pass welding of a thick plate. Interestingly, the final microstructure was found to be invariant (polygonal ferrite) in both the samples. The differences in hardness between these samples were found to be small. This demonstrates that the effect of initial microstructure attained during original thermo-mechanical processing is minimal on the intercritical HAZ in multipass welds.


Requirements engineering (RE) is a necessary part of the software development process, as it helps customers and designers identify necessary system requirements. If these stakeholders are separated by distance, we argue that a distributed groupware environment supporting cooperative requirements engineering process must be supplied that allows them to negotiate software requirements. Such a groupware environment must support aspects of joint work relevant to requirements negotiation: synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, telepresence, and teledata. It should also add explicit support for a structured RE process, which includes the team's ability to discuss multiple perspectives during requirements acquisition and traceability. We chose the TeamWave software platform as an environment that supplied the basic collaboration capabilities, and tailored it to fit the specific needs of RE.


We study the effects of California's Tax and Expenditure Limitations, especially Proposition 13. We find that Proposition 13 was indeed effective at reducing both ad valorem property taxes per capita and total state and local taxes per capita, at least in the short run. We further argue that there have been unintended secondary effects that have resulted in an increased tax burden, undermining the aims of Proposition 13. To circumvent the limits imposed by Proposition 13, the state has drastically increased nonguaranteed debt, has privatized the public fisc, and has devolved the authority to lay and collect taxes and to spend the proceeds so gained. The devolution of authority has been among the swiftest growing aspects of government finance in California, to a far greater extent than in other states. Lastly, we argue that the new tax and spending authorities that have been created to circumvent Proposition 13 have led to a reduction in government transparency and accountability and pose an increasing threat to our democracy.


The nature of cosmic ray electrons and their radiation in the Universe has been studied. A convection associated diffusion model is proposed to describe the main characteristics of the large-scale distribution of cosmic ray electrons in the Galaxy: (1) a small Galacto-centric radial gradient; (2) spectral flattening with Galactic latitude; and (3) an extensive halo above the Disk. A new derivation of the interstellar radiation field indicates the existence of an inverse Compton γ -ray halo. This γ -ray halo can contribute up to 60% of the observed diffuse Galactic γ-ray flux at intermediate latitudes and also accounts for the spectral flattening with latitude. This result leads to a new estimate of the extragalactic γ -ray background flux. An energy equipaxtition theory is proposed for the global correlation between radio power and far-infrared luminosity for spiral galaxies, in which the dynamical role of cosmic rays in galactic evolution is implied. The model successfully explains the non-unity slope of the correlation and predicts the escape of cosmic ray electrons from our Galaxy. The interstellar flux of MeV cosmic ray electrons is derived from γ -ray data. The flux is found to be surprisingly high and a new type of source is required. The lower hybrid plasma instability initiated by stellar winds is suggested to be the acceleration mechanism. This high flux of electrons is sufficient to account for the interstellar ionization and heating in HI regions. Features of the local Galactic magnetic field are revealed by analysing pulsar rotation measure data. The large scale regular field is found to be in a bisymmetric configuration and to be stronger in the interarm region (3 µG) than in the arm region (1 µG). The derived small-scale irregular field is shown to have a dominant strength of 6 µG.


Nowadays, wind power has been developed very fast in the world and the installed capacity of wind turbine has been increased rapidly. Doubly Fed Induction Generator (DFIG) has been applied very popularly for its many advantages. When the grid voltage dip occurs, a crowbar beside the Rotor Side Converter (RSC) is usually activated. In this paper the effect of the active crowbar resistance are studied and analysed. The active crowbar is control to limit the rotor current and dc-link voltage. Simulation results based on MATLAB/SIMULINK are discussed.


Background Theory, methods, and knowledge gained from years of study in psychological science and human development apply to the understanding and improvement of teacher quality and, ultimately, student achievement and social and emotional outcomes. With these applications, educational research has stronger potential to make more effective and systematic contributions to the improvement of teaching in American schools. This potential can be realized by linking the scientific study of psychology and teachers' development (social, relational, psychological, and cognitive) to teachers' classroom behaviors (the mechanisms and processes underlying quality) and student achievement of educational and social and emotional objectives (the outputs of quality). New funds of knowledge in developmental and psychological science can serve as a basis for future research on inputs into teacher quality. Purpose The present article advances an interdisciplinary perspective on the factors influencing teacher quality, specifically defined as teachers' practices and their interactions with students that can be shown to relate to student achievement. The article (1) offers a view of teacher quality focused on teacher–child interactions that serve as explanatory mechanisms in predicting children's achievement; (2) introduces key principles of human adult development that offer insights to link developmental research on teachers to teacher quality and, ultimately, to student achievement and social and emotional outcomes; and (3) discusses two bodies of research from psychological science that illustrate the ways in which psychological principles and an overarching view of teachers as developing people may contribute to current debates about teacher quality. Research Design The article synthesizes research from the fields of education and psychology. Conclusions The article closes with recommendations for basic, developmentally oriented research on teacher quality and student achievement.


Positron creation in crossed-beam collisions of high-energy, fully stripped heavy ions is investigated within the coupled-channel formalism. In comparison with fixed-target collisions of highly stripped heavy-ion projectiles positron production probabilities are enhanced by more than one order of magnitude. The increase results from the possibility to excite electrons from the negative energy continuum into all bound states. The positron spectrum is shifted towards higher energies because of the absence of electron screening. Rutherford scattering as well as nuclear collisions with time delay are investigated. We also discuss the filling of empty bound states by electrons from pair-production processes.


This note introduces the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database (ETD), which provides time series of employment and real and nominal value added by 12 sectors in 51 countries for the period 1990–2018. The ETD includes 20 Asian, 9 Latin American, 4 Middle-East and North African, and 18 sub-Saharan African countries at varying levels of economic development. The ETD is constructed on the basis of an in-depth investigation of the availability and usability of statistical sources on a country-by-country basis. The ETD provides researchers with data to analyse the variety and determinants of structural transformation and supports policies aimed at sustained growth and poverty reduction.


To foster responsible research and innovation, research communities, institutions, and funders are shifting their practices and requirements towards Open Science. Open Science skills are becoming increasingly essential for researchers. Indeed general awareness of Open Science has grown among EU researchers, but the practical adoption can be further improved. Recognizing a gap between the needed and the provided training offer, the FOSTER project offers practical guidance and training to help researchers learn how to open up their research within a particular domain or research environment. Aiming for a sustainable approach, FOSTER focused on strengthening the Open Science training capacity by establishing and supporting a community of trainers. The creation of an Open Science training handbook was a first step towards bringing together trainers to share their experiences and to create an open and living knowledge resource. A subsequent series of train-the-trainer bootcamps helped trainers to find inspiration, improve their skills and to intensify exchange within a peer group. Four trainers, who attended one of the bootcamps, contributed a case study on their experiences and how they rolled out Open Science training within their own institutions. On its platform the project provides a range of online courses and resources to learn about key Open Science topics. FOSTER awards users gamification badges when completing courses in order to provide incentives and rewards, and to spur them on to even greater achievements in learning. The paper at hand describes FOSTER Plus' training strategies, shares the lessons learnt and provides guidance on how to reuse the project's materials and training approaches.


An Upland Cotton Breeding Program was initiated in 2001 by the Arizona Cotton Growers Association (ACGA). Major objectives of the breeding program are to develop varieties that produce a superior fiber quality package, high yields, and under a wide range of environmental conditions. In 2004, the seed committee of the ACGA decided to begin an independent testing program in order to quantify the performance of chosen lines developed to date that were meeting the program's goals. Forty one lines were chosen and evaluated in replicated small plots at two locations including Yuma and Maricopa, AZ. The final data was sorted according to lines that at both locations had a fiber micronaire of 4.9 or less, staple length of 37 or greater, strength of 30 g/tx or greater, a uniformity index of 80 or greater, and yielded in the top 25% of all tested materials. One line was identified according to this criteria, 0122-2033-304.


A rapid review of academic and grey literature revealed that the links between poverty, poaching and trafficking are under-researched and poorly understood. Yet, the assumption that poaching occurs because of poverty is omnipresent, with little 'hard evidence' to support the claim. Despite this, the authors are confident that the links are there, based on the evidence gathered. However, their understandings are hampered by a series of factors: trafficking and poaching are overwhelmingly framed as an issue of conservation/biodiversity loss rather than of poverty and development; it is difficult to collect clear and detailed data on poaching precisely because of its illicit nature; and many of the cases examined are also linked in with conflict zones, making research even more challenging.


Guide beginning programmers through the fundamentals of the C# language using its most recent features with Farrell's MICROSOFT VISUAL C# 2017: AN INTRODUCTION TO OBJECT-ORIENTED PROGRAMMING, 7E. Approachable examples and a clear presentation help students build a strong background in both structured and object-oriented programming concepts. Students master critical fundamental skills that easily transfer to other programming languages. This edition incorporates the most recent versions of both C# and Visual Studio to ensure students have the latest skills necessary for professional success. Hands-on features, video lessons, new debugging exercises, programming exercises, and running case studies keep students actively engaged. Now available with MindTap, the digital learning solution that powers students from memorization to mastery. Give your students hands-on skill practice with auto-graded lab assignments in a live integrated development environment directly within MindTap. A full selection of instructor support provides the tools to reinforce the solid programming skills your students need.


Risk assessment has become a prominent part of the criminal justice system in many jurisdictions, typically relying on structured questions and an interview. This approach, however, may not accurately assess certain psychological concepts correlated with reoffense, such as executive functioning, ability to plan, impulse control, risk-taking, aggression, and empathy. We hypothesized that using rapid-tablet-based neurocognitive tests would pay off in terms of objectivity, precision, and scalability when added to the existing risk assessment structure. We analyzed 240 observations from adult felony offenders from a large urban county in the South assessed by the Texas version of the Ohio Risk Assessment System (ORAS) risk tool. We identified significant differences in impulse control, planning, and reactive aggression between offenders and reoffenders. By combining these variables with the Texas Risk Assessment System (TRAS), we yielded significant improvements in risk prediction. We hope this will provide new inroads for actuarial assessments of reoffense risk that incorporate direct measurements of individual decision making.


Transient-evoked otoacoustic emissions (TEOAEs) were measured in 113 normal-hearing and hearing-impaired ears to examine repeatability within a test session, which TEOAE parameter (level, TEOAE level-to-noise or reproducibility) best identified hearing loss and if the TEOAE separated into frequency-specific bands identified hearing loss in a corresponding frequency region. TEOAEs and stimulus levels were found to be very repeatable. For broadband TEOAEs, TEOAE level, TEOAE-to-noise, and % reproducibility were found to identify hearing loss equally well, based on measurement of the area underlying relative operator characteristic curves. Analysis for frequency-specific bands showed that separation of normal-hearing and hearing-impaired ears depended on frequency, with best identification at 2000 and 4000 Hz, identification at 1000 Hz slightly worse, and virtually no separation between normal-hearing and hearing-impaired ears at 500 Hz. Again, all three parameters were essentially equal in identifying hearing loss. Subjective evaluations of presence or absence of TEOAEs was highly correlated between two judges, with good agreement for TEOAEs at 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz. The findings from this study suggest that TEOAEs will be valuable for clinical use because of their repeatability and identification of hearing-impaired ears.


In this paper, we present an integrated human-in-the-loop simulation paradigm for the design and evaluation of a lower extremity exoskeleton that is elastically strapped onto human lower limbs. The exoskeleton has 3 rotational DOFs on each side and weighs 23kg. Two torque compensation controllers of the exoskeleton are introduced, aiming to minimize interference and maximize assistance, respectively. Their effects on the wearer's biomechanical loadings are studied with a running motion and predicted ground reaction forces (GRFs). It is found that the added weight of the passive exoskeleton substantially increases the wearer's musculoskeletal loadings. The maximizing assistance controller reduces the knee joint torque by 31% when compared to the normal running (without exoskeleton) and by 50% when compared to the passive exoskeleton case. When compared to the normal running, this controller also reduces the hip flexion and extension torques by 31% and 38%, respectively. As a result, the peak activations of the biceps short head, gluteus maximus, and rectus femoris muscles are reduced by more than a half. Nonetheless, the axial knee joint reaction force increases for all exoskeleton cases due to the added weight and higher GRFs. In summary, the results provide sound evidence of the efficacy of the proposed controllers on reducing the wearer's musculoskeletal loadings. And it is shown the human-in-the-loop simulation paradigm presented here can be used for virtual design and evaluation of powered exoskeletons and pave the way for building optimized exoskeleton prototypes for experimental evaluation.


Problems in data analysis often require the unsupervised partitioning of a data set into classes. Several methods exist for such partitioning but many have the weakness of being formulated via strict parametric models (e.g., each class is modeled by a single Gaussian) or being computationally intensive in high-dimensional data spaces. We reconsider the notion of such cluster analysis in information-theoretic terms and show that an efficient partitioning may be given via a minimization of partition entropy. A reversible-jump sampling is introduced to explore the variable-dimension space of partition models.


Optimizing compilers rely upon program analysis techniques to detect data dependences between program statements. Data dependence information captures the essential ordering constraints of the statements in a program that need to be preserved in order to produce valid optimized and parallel code. Data dependence testing is very important for automatic parallelization, vectorization, and any other code transformation. In this paper, we examine the impact of data dependence analysis in practice. A number of data dependence tests have been proposed in the literature. In each test, there are different trade offs between accuracy and efficiency. We present an experimental evaluation of several data dependence tests, including the Banerjee test, the I-Test, and the Omega test. We compare these tests in terms of data dependence accuracy, compilation efficiency, effectiveness in parallelization, and program execution performance. We analyze the reasons why a data dependence test can be inexact and we explain how the examined tests handle such cases. We run various experiments using the Perfect Club Benchmarks and the scientific library Lapack. We present the measured accuracy of each test and the reasons for any approximation. We compare these tests in term's of efficiency and we analyze the trade offs between accuracy and efficiency. We also determine the impact of each data dependence test on the total compilation time. Finally, we measure the number of loops parallelized by each test and we compare the execution performance of each benchmark on a multiprocessor. Our results indicate that the Omega test is more accurate, but also very inefficient in the cases where the other two tests are inaccurate. In general, the cost of the Omega test is high and uses a significant percentage of the total compilation time. Furthermore, the difference in accuracy of the Omega test over the Banerjee test and the l-Test does not improve parallelization and program execution performance.


Abstract. While guides in mechanized skiing operations use a well-established terrain selection process to limit their exposure to avalanche hazard and keep the residual risk at an acceptable level, the relationship between the open/closed status of runs and environmental factors is complex and has so far only received limited attention from research. Using a large data set of over 25 000 operational run list codes from a mechanized skiing operation, we applied a general linear mixed effects model to explore the relationship between acceptable skiing terrain (i.e., status open) and avalanche hazard conditions. Our results show that the magnitude of the effect of avalanche hazard on run list codes depends on the type of terrain that is being assessed by the guiding team. Ski runs in severe alpine terrain with steep lines through large avalanche slopes are much more susceptible to increases in avalanche hazard than less severe terrain. However, our results also highlight the strong effects of recent skiing on the run coding and thus the importance of prior first-hand experience. Expressing these relationships numerically provides an important step towards the development of meaningful decision aids, which can assist commercial operations to manage their avalanche risk more effectively and efficiently.


There is extensive literature about the role of the principal in creating a school culture that fosters a positive school climate. How the principal addresses staff culture is among the many issues that affect lasting change. The purpose of this investigation is to examine the activities and behaviors of four suburban high school principals and how they influence change. Cross-case site analysis utilizing ethnographic method of investigation was conducted in four suburban high schools to examine how principals influence change. The culture of each school site was examined from the perspective of principals and department chairpersons concerning elements of change. Data were collected through interviews with principals and department chairpersons. The Developmental Research Sequence (D.R.S.) model was used to identify a set of specific dimensions for more in-depth investigation. This process of analysis provided a method for focusing the study to discover cultural themes and patterns about how principals influence change in high schools. Triangulation of data was addressed by using multiple data sources and multiple method data analysis. The major findings of this study were that principals who influenced change demonstrated a high degree of interest and care for school community members on a professional and personal level. Principals who valued what and how people thought were recognized as being connected to the school culture. It was through this awareness that principals could then channel ideas and provide opportunities to involve people in the change process. Principals recognized for using this type of approach cultivated and nourished a culture that was open to examining and entertaining change for both personal and professional growth and improvement. These results will have implications for educational practitioners who recognize the significance of change as a fundamental ingredient in today's educational climate and modern day society. .


A lock-free bag data structure supporting unordered buffering is presented in this paper. The algorithm supports multiple producers and multiple consumers, as well as dynamic collection sizes. To handle concurrency efficiently, the algorithm was designed to thrive for disjoint-access-parallelism for the supported semantics. Therefore, the algorithm exploits a distributed design combined with novel techniques for handling concurrent modifications of linked lists using double marks, detection of total emptiness, and efficient memory management with hazard pointer handover. Experiments on a 24-way multi-core platform show significantly better performance for the new algorithm compared to previous algorithms of relevance.


A noncontact and compact optical displacement sensor is proposed and demonstrated. The principle of this system is based on the differential optical-fiber displacement sensor [Appl. Opt. 38, 1103 (1999)]. The waveguide of the sensor consists of three thin plate glasses. This approach can miniaturize and lighten the system. The performance of the sensor is geometrically analyzed. The linearity and working range of the sensor are significantly improved compared with those of the optical fiber.


Chalcogenide glass is made up of many elements from the Chalcogenide group. The glass is transparent to infrared light and is useful as a semiconductor in many electronic devices. For example, chalcogenide glass fibers are a component of devices used to perform laser surgery. The properties of chalcogenide glass result not only from their chemical composition and atomic structure, but also from the impact of numerous external factors. A comprehensive survey is presented of the properties of chalcogenide glass under various external impacts. Practical recommendations are presented for a wide range of applications. Part II is the second part of a three-volume work within the "Semiconductors and Semimetals" series. This is the first collective monograph written by Eastern European scientists on the electrical and optical properties of chalcogenide vitreous semiconductors (CVS). It includes contributions by B.G. Kolomiets, who discovered the properties of chalcogenide glass in 1955. It provides objective evidence and discussion by authors from opposing positions.


Translation of
 scientific and technical text is a multidimensional and multifaceted
 process determined by the System and norm of the two languages
 involved. It is not only dependant on the two cultures and the
 communicative situations, but also directly dependant on the
 referential situation and the functional parameters, of the source /
 target text. The process of translation is not only a speech act,
 but also an act of cross-cultural communication and this fact is
 borne out by the interdisciplinary status of translation studies and
 its close link with contrastive and text-linguistics; socio and
 psycholinguistics and semiotics. The 21st century witnessed the
 emergence of scientific and technical translation as an independent
 field of study on the international level. The Intercultural and
 Intercontinental communications made it mandatory for human beings
 to understand scientific, technical and environmental issues in the
 world, and to leave their cocoons behind. It only served to
 underscore the significance that translation studies was to hold in
 the times to come. There is hardly a Translator or an Interpreter
 today who has not to deal with translation of scientific and
 technical materials. Translation of technical text puts a premium on
 the translator's knowledge of the subject-matter of Source Text. He
 must take great pains to get familiar with the system of terms in
 the appropriate field and make good use of technical dictionaries
 and other books of reference.When new words come into being to
 denote news object or phenomena, they naturally cannot have regular
 equivalents in another language. Such equivalents may only gradually
 evolve as the result of extensive contacts between the two nations.
 Therefore the translator coming across a new coinage has to
 interpret its meaning and to choose the appropriate way of rendering
 it in his translation. It has been observed that many phenomenon,
 words and terminologies of Urdu language have no regular
 equivalents, and a number of techniques has been suggested for
 transformation of such units of translation in Russian. New words
 are coined in the language to give names to new objects, or
 phenomena which become known to the people.Thus, research has been
 conducted in the background of the ever changing in scientific and
 technological scenario. The fast-track changes and rapid
 breakthrough in almost all fields in science and technology has made
 it mandatory for technical and scientific texts to translate into
 languages, other than the one in which the study or work has been
 conducted. Selecting this area to work in, the researcher has tried
 to focus on the problems encountered during the translation of
 technical and scientific texts from Urdu into Russian. The
 researcher is seemed mindful of the magnitude of the task, and has
 therefore delimited the study to focusing on the lexico-semantic
 peculiarities of translation of scientific and technical text from
 Urdu into Russian. Russian and Urdu are difficult languages to
 learn/teach, yet the geographical proximity has made it important
 for learners and teachers to recognize and identify the issues
 involved in translating the text. The major problems, in rendering
 Urdu scientific/technical texts into
 Russian, lie in the domain of lexico-semantics. Thus, the researcher
 has made a comparison of the two languages. But in keeping with the
 nature of the study, has focused only on the major differences the
 foremost being the fact that Urdu lexicon suffers from a dearth of
 scientific and technical terminology. These and other points have
 been discussed in detail in this study. The parameters of the
 research demand a theoretical framework, and this has been discussed
 in the preliminary chapters12. Chapter 3 comprises general
 scientific and technical lexicon; word-building; structure and
 features of translation of terminological units and ways of
 translating multi-component terms etc. Chapter 4 deals with the
 fundamentals of translation, focusing on the contrastive analysis of
 translation material. The concluding chapter gives the findings and
 recommends that the study be used to further explore and exploit the
 Russian market, in order to give a boost to our economy.This study
 discusses translation studies, from a variety of perspectives and
 not merely the pedagogical aspects. The nature of the research
 combined with the significance of the language in the global
 scenario, makes this study the first of its kind, and the
 researcher, without idle boasting, is hopeful that he has begun to
 set a new trend in Pakistan. Hopefully, this study would be utilized
 to its utmost and in the spirit in which it has been conducted.


This paper contends that international Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have
played a substantial role in developing financial services for the poor (or microfinance). Their
influence has been greatest in:
• Pursuing a broader common vision and mission, particularly towards the poorest;
• Offering clients a larger range of products and services;
• Better engaging with industry regulators;
• Advocating for microfinance generally and conducting research.
Furthermore, even in cases where the role of these NGO Networks is no greater than other microfinance
network support organizations, it appears the former are more willing to subsidise
the costs of these benefits, such as with respect to innovation and creativity.
Secondly, the financial performance of the NGO networks and the NGO microfinance institutions
themselves do not suffer as a result. Based on the available evidence, there is no significant
variation in the performance of NGO MFIs around the world compared to the average for all
MFIs. In Asia, the NGOs perform slightly worse than the average in three out of four indicators.
Therefore, whilst the long-term trend is likely to see more formal and regulated financial institutions
delivering microfinance, the NGO Networks themselves will retain a crucial role in
the sector as a whole.


To cope with the huge amount of incoming information, the visual system has to assign priorities to each stimulus in the visual field. Which stimulus is prioritized depends on bottom-up factors that are defined by physical properties inherent of the visual stimuli, e.g., local feature contrast, and top-down factors that are set 'in the observer', e.g., current intentions or goals. Recent results have challenged the classic dichotomy of bottom-up vs. top-down as control mechanisms and have suggested past selection history, e.g. evident in learning experience, as a third source of selection bias that can neither be accounted for by physical stimulus properties nor by goal-driven selection (Awh, Belopolsky, & Theeuwes, 2012). The present study used event-related potentials (N2pc and its subcomponents NT and PD) to examine the relationship between learning experience and selective attention. Participants performed a visual learning task which was combined with a visual search task in the course of the experiment. Results showed that color distractors impaired behavioral performance in the visual search task more when color rather than shape was learned as being predictive in the learning task. ERP results showed that this was due to differential attention deployment: when color was predictive in the learning task, color distractors captured attention also in the search task before they could be actively suppressed. When shape was predictive in learning, color distractors did not capture attention in the search task and suppression was possible earlier in time. These results revealed common underlying mechanisms of visual learning and selective attention and suggest that apart from bottom-up and top-down processing, learning experience changes the way the visual environment is perceived when different stimuli compete for priority. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


Blends of Poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) and bisphenol-A-polycarbonate (PC) have been made by solution and melt blending and these blends were subject to isothermal heating to induce a transesterification reaction. The raw materials and products of this reaction have been studied by a variety of different methods to ascertain the chemical, physical and mechanical properties they possess. The conclusions drawn are listed below. PET and PC are immiscible but are compatibilised by transesterification. Transesterification is a second order reversible process and is fast only when water is present, when absent the rate of transesterification is so slow that little or no reaction is observed in after 60 minutes at 300 c. When water is present in the blend significant chain scission and degradation takes place, this is not observed in the absence of water• The material obtained from melt blending has a molecular weight higher than that of commercial PET and it is possible to increase it further by standard solid state polymerization techniques. The PC concentration in PET is critical to the existence and extent of crystallisation. PET blends containing 10% PC are not significantly stronger or weaker than commercial PET and perform very similarly to the yield point. PET blends containing 10% PC are less ductile than commercial PET and will therefore fail sooner when they have yielded under tension. PET blends containing 10% PC do not injection mould as well as commercial PET under conventional procedures for PET, surface crazing and voiding is observed


A one-dimensional canopy model was developed to study photochemical processes inside and above a mixed deciduous forest in southern Ontario. The Eulerian model made use of Lagrangian dispersion principles with a correction factor to incorporate the average ensemble time since emission to calculate atmospheric mixing; traditional diffusion methods were found to provide insufficient mixing to match the measurements. Neglecting chemical losses while making isoprene emission estimates was found to underestimate emission rates up to 40%. The ozone oxidation of biogenic and anthropogenic alkenes was found to be a potential source of hydroxyl (OH) and hydroperoxy (HO2) radicals during the morning and night. Reactions of HO2 with organic peroxy radicals formed by the OH oxidation of isoprene during the day were shown to be a significant source of organic peroxide formation above the canopy. The primary pathways of methacrolein and methylvinylketone formation were shown to be ozone oxidation of isoprene and hydroxyl radical oxidation of isoprene, respectively. Local ozone formation was shown to be limited by low mixing ratios of nitrogen oxides, despite high levels of isoprene present at the site.


Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, Decentralised Sanitation and Reuse places public sanitation in a global context and provides a definitive discussion of current state-of-the-art sanitation technologies. It shows how these technologies can be implemented to integrate domestic waste and wastewater treatment in order to maximize resource recycling in domestic practice. Decentralised Sanitation and Reuse presents technical solutions for on-site collection and transport of concentrated waste streams, and focuses on the compromise between reliability and minimal water wastage. A whole range of available sustainable technologies, both low and high-tech, to treat concentrated (black water) and diluted (grey water) streams are addressed in detail from the fundamental scientific and engineering points of view. Sociological, economic and, particularly, environmental and public health aspects are essential issues within this book. The necessity of new infrastructure implementation and the resulting challenges for a good number of economic branches are illustrated with examples from architecture and town planning. Decentralised Sanitation and Reuse will be an invaluable resource for a wide academic and professional readership active in the fields of environmental protection and public sanitation. Contents The DESAR concept for environmental protection Waste and wastewater characteristics and its collection on the site Technological aspects of DESAR Environmental and public health aspects of DESAR Sociological and economic aspects of DESAR Architectural and urbanistic aspects of DESAR


BACKGROUND
Obesity rates in long-haul truck drivers have been shown to be significantly higher than the general population. We hypothesized that commercial drivers with the highest levels of general obesity and abdominal adiposity would have higher concentrations of high sensitivity C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of inflammation.

METHODS
Survey and anthropometric data were collected from 262 commercial drivers. Weight, circumference measures, and blood analysis for CRP (N = 115) were conducted and compared to National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data. CRP values were non-normally distributed and logarithmically transformed for statistical analyses.

RESULTS
BMI, waist circumference, sagittal abdominal diameter, and CRP were significantly higher than in the general population. Anthropometric indices that included height (BMI, waist-to-height ratio, and sagittal diameter-to-height ratio), were most predictive of CRP values.

CONCLUSIONS
Abdominal obesity is prevalent in commercial vehicle drivers and is an important indicator of the presence of inflammation in this population. Am. J. Ind. Med. 59:665-675, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.


While organizations in software industry want to portray themselves as professional in terms of following standards and methods, they may also have needs for improvising and short-cutting when necessary. Such dilemmas of dual logics are sometimes internally resolved by evolving a false belief of what is done (practice) being in correspondence to what is said (standards), regardless of what an empirical investigation might show, something that can have poor business implications and also poor social implications. Particularly focusing on this latter point, the meta-methodology of total systems interventions (TSI) has been used for integrating critical systems theory with total quality management, improving social conditions in parallel with improving business processes. Although TSI is not designed for liberating organizations where nobody see themselves in need of liberation, the hypothesis of this paper is that it is possible to design quality management systems as "conflict machines", causing sufficient social tension for more or less automatically changing "fake quality" into "real quality". The hypothesis is investigated by applying design research in a Scandinavian public sector organization. The findings consist of statistical and interpretative evidence for the success of the approach, making a contribution to how TSI can be applied in the software industry.


The generalization ability of deep person re-identification networks is subject to inadequate person data and occlusions. To relieve this dilemma, we propose a feature-level augmentation strategy, Adversarially Erased Learning Module (AELM), using two adversarial classifiers. Specifically, we utilize a classifier to identify discriminative regions and erase them to increase the variant of features. Meanwhile, we input the erased feature maps to another classifier to discover new body regions, which effectively resist occlusion of key parts. To easily perform end-to-end training for AELM, we propose a novel Identity model based on Fully Convolutional Networks (IFCN) to directly obtain body response heatmap during the forward pass by selecting corresponding class-specific feature map. Thus, the discriminative regions can be identified and erased in a convenient way. Moreover, to capture discriminative region for AELM, we present a Complementary Attention Module (CoAM) combined with channel and spatial attention to automatically focus on which feature types and positions are meaningful in the feature maps. In this paper, CoAM and AELM are cascaded into one module which is applied to the outputs of different convolutional layers to integrate mid- and high-level semantic features. Experimental results on three challenging benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.


Hollifield for many helpful comments and discussions. Telmer is grateful to CREI, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, for generous hospitality while some of this work was completed. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. ABSTRACT High interest rate currencies tend to appreciate. This is the uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) puzzle. It is primarily a statement about short-term interest rates and how they are related to exchange rates. Short-term interest rates are strongly affected by monetary policy. The UIP puzzle, therefore, can be restated in terms of monetary policy. Do foreign and domestic monetary policies imply exchange rates that violate UIP? We represent monetary policy as foreign and domestic Taylor rules. Foreign and domestic pricing kernels determine the relationship between these Taylor rules and exchange rates. We examine different specifications for the Taylor rule and ask which can resolve the UIP puzzle. We find evidence in favor of a particular asymmetry. If the foreign Taylor rule responds to exchange rate variation but the domestic Taylor rule does not, the model performs better. A calibrated version of our model is consistent with many empirical observations on real and nominal exchange rates, including Fama's negative correlation between interest rate differentials and currency depreciation rates.


Popular consent is an essential element for success and stability of democracies. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that "electoral winners" (i.e. voters casting a ballot for government parties) are more satisfied with democracy than supporters of the opposition parties. However, little is known about the dynamics of satisfaction during the electoral cycle: Do winners become happier and losers even more discontent over time? We approach this question by utilizing an interview date in the European Social Survey (rounds 1–8) to position individuals within the different stages of electoral cycle. The results based on 199,207 responses from 199 surveys in 31 countries suggest that satisfaction with democracy stays relatively stable during the electoral cycle across various electoral systems if the political development is predictable. However, if actions of the parties are uncertain, namely the alternations of governments tend to be frequent, partial, and opened to all parties, and hence neither winners nor losers know how steady their status is with respect to the political development in the country, their satisfaction tend to fluctuate over time. Therefore, the conclusion reached is the more stable West European democracies have limited generalizability to the low-predictable systems in Central and Eastern Europe.


Simulated data were used to investigate the relationships between image properties and change detection accuracy in a systematic manner. The image properties examined were class separability, radiometric normalization and image spectral band-to-band correlation. The change detection methods evaluated were post-classification comparison, direct classification of multidate imagery, image differencing, principal component analysis, and change vector analysis. The simulated data experiments showed that the relative accuracy of the change detection methods varied with changes in image properties, thus confirming the hypothesis that caution should be used in generalizing from studies that use only a single image pair. In most cases, direct classification and post-classification comparison were the least sensitive to changes in the image properties of class separability, radiometric normalization error and band correlation. Furthermore, these methods generally produced the highest accuracy, or were amongst those with a high accuracy. PCA accuracy was highly variable; the use of four principal components consistently resulted in substantial decreased classification accuracy relative to using six components, or classification using the original six bands. The accuracy of image differencing also varied greatly in the experiments. Of the three methods that require radiometric normalization, image differencing was the method most affected by radiometric error, relative to change vector and classification methods, for classes that have moderate and low separability. For classes that are highly separable, image differencing was relatively unaffected by radiometric normalization error. CVA was found to be the most accurate method for classes with low separability and all but the largest radiometric errors. CVA accuracy tended to be the least affected by changes in the degree of band correlation in situations where the class means were moderately dispersed, or clustered near the diagonal. For all change detection methods, the classification accuracy increased as simulated band correlation increased, and direct classification methods consistently had the highest accuracy, while PCA generally had the lowest accuracy.


Evaluation of professional development programme for early career teachers (ECTs) who are teaching key stage 1 (KS1) pupils in schools in disadvantaged areas cvonducted for the Education endowment Foundation (EEF), which aimed to enhance ECTs' knowledge and use of evidence-informed practices and to retain ECTs in the profession. The mixed methods theory-based evaluation gathered data from interviews, focus groups and surveys of participants and stakeholders to examine evidence of promise and the plausibility of the theory of change. ECTs' knowledge and understanding of approaches to teaching disadvantaged students, self-efficacy, confidence and research-use increased and they made changes in their classroom practice. The absence of a comparison group means that it is not possible to estimate the level of improvement that may have occurred without the programme. Most ECTs perceived that RETAIN was beneficial to their professional and career development and none left the profession during the pilot. Overall, RETAIN was positively received. ECTs found it easier to apply the learning from RETAIN in schools which were open to changing existing school practices and willing to support ECTs in implementing new approaches. Qualitative evidence indicates that the most important components of RETAIN were the taught sessions underpinned by research evidence, coaching by an external coach and peer collaboration, which combine to achieve positive outcomes.


Abstract In every democracy, established political parties are challenged by other parties. Established parties react in various ways to other parties' presence. A key hypothesis in the relevant literature is that established parties can decrease another party's electoral support by parroting it, i.e. adopting its core policy issue position. This article argues, and demonstrates empirically, that this hypothesised effect mainly occurs in the event that a critical prerequisite is in place. Parroting a party decreases its support only if that party is ostracised at the same time. The article classifies a party as ostracised if its largest established competitor systematically rules out all political cooperation with it. Analysing 296 election results of 28 West European parties (1944–2011), evidence is found for a parrot effect – however, concerning ostracised parties only. On several occasions established parties have substantially decreased another party's support by simultaneously parroting that party and ostracising it.


GonaCon  is a single-shot immunocontraceptive vaccine that targets the reproductive hormone gonadotropin releasing hormone (GnRH). The GnRH peptide used in the vaccine is secreted by the hypothalamus of the brain and is specifically known as luteinizing hormone releasing hormone. This peptide stimulates the synthesis and secretion of luteiniz- ing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone by the anterior pituitary gland. These hormones in turn stimulate hormone and gamete production by the ovary. In earlier studies with deer, we showed that antibodies produced in response to a single shot of GonaCon  inactivated endogenous GnRH and greatly reduced fertility, reproductive steroids, and associated behaviors for at least 2 years. In the present study, we report on contraceptive efficacy and behavioral observations up to 6 years after female white-tailed deer were given a single shot of one of several formulations of GonaCon  . We compared the standard GonaCon  made by conjugating the GNRH peptide to keyhole limpet hemocyanin (GonaCon  -KLH) to one with the GnRH peptide conjugated to a blue mollusk protein (GonaCon  -Blue) and to a 2-shot regimen with GonaCon  -KLH. All GonaCon  prepa- rations were made into an emulsion with AdjuVac  and administered to 5 mature female deer per treatment. The results showed that the GonaCon  -Blue preparation significantly out-performed the other single-shot vaccines, as well as the 2-shot regimen of GonaCon  -KLH, with efficacy of 80-100% for each of the 5 years in the study. Interestingly, expression of estrous behavior was minimal in Years 1-2 following treatment for all groups, but expression of estrus increased in later years of the study, even though does remained infertile. This expression of estrus and fertility was reversed with follicle stimulating hormone releasing hormone (FSH-RH) peptide conjugated to a mollusk protein and mixed as an emulsion with AdjuVac  . This suggests that does possess an FSH-RH peptide, secreted by the hypothalamus, which modulates follicle development and resulting estrogen production and reproductive behavior.


The shadow banking system played a major role in the recent financial crisis but remains largely unregulated. We propose principles for its regulation and describe a specific proposal to implement those principles. We document how the rise of shadow banking was helped by regulatory and legal changes that gave advantages to three main institutions: money-market mutual funds (MMMFs) to capture retail deposits from traditional banks, securitization to move assets of traditional banks off their balance sheets, and repurchase agreements (repos) that facilitated the use of securitized bonds as money. The evolution of a bankruptcy safe harbor for repos was crucial to the growth and efficiency of shadow banking; regulators can use access to this safe harbor as the lever to enforce new rules. History has demonstrated two successful methods for regulating privately created money: strict guidelines on collateral, and government-guaranteed insurance. We propose the use of insurance for MMMFs, combined with strict guidelines on collateral for both securitization and repos, with regulatory control established by chartering new forms of narrow banks for MMMFs and securitization, and using the bankruptcy safe harbor to incentivize compliance on repos.


Anna Williams »Fictional truth: the case of Agnes von Krusenstjerna« The article deals with the attention in recent biographical research on agency and strategy concerning the individual's prospects to shape her public image in relation to existing opportunities and constraints. The approach invites new per- spectives on biographical writing that focus on change and progression. The biography of the Swedish writer Agnes von Krusenstjerna serves as an example of how the theories can be applied. The article furthermore touches upon subjectivity in modern autobiographical literature, a subjectivity that reinfor- ces the claims of conveying the truth, but also points toward an external reality of gender-related social structures.


We study effects of the physical realization of quantum computers on their logical operation. Through simulation of physical models of quantum computer hardware, we analyse the difficulties that are encountered in programming physical implementations of quantum computers. We discuss the origin of the instabilities of quantum algorithms and explore physical mechanisms to enlarge the region(s) of stable operation.


The marginality of the Teenek Indians of Mexico gives rise to discourses among this group that serve to justify its relegation to the fringes of modern life. Those discourses reflect a concrete, inexorable, social, economic, and political situation that is reformulated in the Teenek system of representation. This article explores the problem of constructing an ethnic identity as it is reflected in the realities and world views of the indigenous microcosm facing national society. (Mexico, Teenek [Huastec] Indians, ethnicity, world view) ********** The Teenek Indians in northeastern Mexico are notable for a peculiar attitude that combines a state of apparent deculturation with a particularly self-deprecating discourse: "We are less than nothing," "stinking," "dirty Indians," "ugly idiots," "cowards," etc. These rather unexpected opinions were collected during my fieldwork in several Teenek villages, particularly the village of Loma Larga-San Lorenzo, near the town of Tantoyuca, in the northern part of the State of Veracruz. (2) Two and a half years' residence in the area, from March 1991 to September 1993, was augmented by shorter visits up to November 1995. Teenek self-denigrating indigenous discourses are recurrent and common to people of both sexes, different ages, and in different places. The startling contrast they offer to the assertions of ethnic identity and the search for roots so prevalent today around the world invites analysis of the discursive construction of the social categories they express. Indeed, as Levine (1999) suggests, ethnicity stems above all from a cognitive method of classifying human beings. Accordingly, my research explores the elaboration of a disconcerting ethnic identity by examining the realities and conceptions of the indigenous microcosm vis-a-vis national society (Ariel de Vidas 2002). The self-denigrating remarks such as those mentioned tend to justify the social and spatial marginality of the Teenek with respect to their mestizo neighbors. Most of these non-Indians, whom the Teenek consider to be better off than themselves, live in the town nearby, and represent for the Indian population both the positive aspects (modernity, power, money, etc.) and negative aspects (betrayal of tradition, immorality, greed, etc.) of Western culture. Although the Teenek lack such emblematic Indian traits as traditional clothing, agricultural rituals, distinctive ceremonies, and a system of religious offices (the cargo system), their situation is not one of anomie, since as a group they have preserved their language and a cosmology rooted in the Mesoamerican tradition. Thus, while the Teenek are primarily negative in their remarks about themselves, this discourse does not imply a weak sense of belonging. In a way, these autochthonous comments justify the group's marginal position and reflect a cultural construction of Teenek identity in which the disparities between social groups, which in the Teenek view arise from ontological differences, are negotiated. Thus, the Teenek possess a strong ethnic identity that does not appear, a priori, to be based on any validating, reclaimed heritage, but which, on the contrary, seems to derive from negatively perceived values. The construction of an ethnic identity has long been dominated in the anthropological literature by the essentialist point of view, which emphasized self-definition and ethnogenesis as the factors that demarcated a specific culture, language, and customs (Geertz 1963; Shils 1957; Francis 1976). With Barth's critical revision (1969) of the ways ethnic groups maintain their ascription, the subject took on a perspective that permits an analysis of ethnification (Pitt-Rivers 1965, 1967; Casagrande 1974). In this approach, the formation of ethnic groups was seen to be a function of the political, economic, or ideological domination of one group by another, and a constantly renewed codification of cultural differences between distinct social groups (Cardoso De Oliveira 1992). …


The spermatozoon of the basal frog Leiopelma hochstetteri Fitzinger, 1861 is examined and compared with previously investigated lissamphibian spermatozoa. L. hochstetteri spermatozoa share with those of urodeles and Ascaphus the plesiomorphic (primitive) features of an elongate conical acrosome, and an elongate nucleus, with distinct nuclear shoulders, which tapers to a point (as the nuclear rostrum) in the subacrosomal space. The spermatozoon of L. hochstetteri, alone among the Anura, resembles those of urodeles in having a juxta-axonemal fibre at doublet 8. L. hochstetteri shares with Ascaphus truei (homoplastically) the reduction of the undulating membrane to a short, thick paraxonemal rod. L. hochstetteri spermatozoa have the plesiomorphic condition, also seen in dipnoans, of a cytoplasmic collar, containing mitochondria, around the axoneme. Although the sperm of L. hochstetteri lacks the endonuclear perforatorium seen in Ascaphus, Bombinidae, urodeles and caecilians, it has what may be remnants of an endonuclear perforatorium within the nuclear rostrum. No synapomorphic spermatozoal characters are present to support the placement of Leiopelma and Ascaphus in the same family. Spermatologically, Leiopelma is the plesiomorph sister taxon of all other anurans and is thus confirmed as the most basal (primitive) anuran. A further finding is that the Pelodytidae, sometimes considered basal archaeobatrachians, share the synapomorphy of a conical perforatorium divided into fibres with the Bufonoidea.


The purpose of this study was to evaluate renographic parameters obtained from healthy renal units (RUs) in newborns and infants with unilateral kidney condition. Thirty three children including twenty newborns, referred to Technetium-99m mercaptoacetyltriglycine (Tc-99m MAG3) diuretic scintigraphy due to unilateral kidney condition entered the study. Only contralateral, healthy RUs were analyzed. Since many children returned for follow up, there were altogether 78 dynamic studies included. Kidney length was compared to ultrasound measurements. Renographic curve parameters (time to maximum counts, T max and time to half maximum counts, T1/2 max) were evaluated. The results showed that the kidney length measured on Tc-99m MAG3 scintigraphy correlated well with ultrasound measurements. Regarding the renographic curve parameters, in the newborn period a significantly shorter T max (mean T max 3.65 +/- 1.2 min, p = 0.026) was found compared to the group of two months old infants (5.12 +/- 2.2 min). In older age groups mean T max gradually shortened again. On the contrary, T1/2 max was significantly longer in newborn and early infant period than in older age groups (16.7 +/- 8.2 min, p = 0.018), but generally showed variable values until the age of three years. It can be concluded that it is important to be aware of possible diversities of renographic curve pattern of healthy kidneys in early childhood, especially in the elimination part. Therefore, when interpreting a dynamic renal study, one should also consider other parameters like kidney growth, morphology and differential function, which can be reliably monitored with repeated Tc-99m MAG3 scintigraphy, to discern between normal and pathologic finding.


The number of connected devices is expected to soar in the coming years, each one of them collects and distributes real-world information though various systems. As the number of such connected devices grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to store and share all these new sources of information. Several context representation schemes try to standardize this information, however none of them have been widely adopted. Publish/subscribe paradigm has proven to be an adequate abstraction for large scale information dissemination, but none of current variations is well suited for context information. In a previous publication we addressed these challenges, however our solution has some drawbacks: poor scalability and semantic extraction. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we discuss an efficient way to deal with representation schemes diversity and propose a d-dimensional context organization model. Second, we propose a semantic-based publish/subscribe system that is well suited for M2M scenarios. Our evaluation shows that d-dimensional organization model outperforms our previous solution in both speed and space requirements.


Cretaceous plant fossils were collected in the context of sedimentary facies at 34 localities along the Kukpowruk River, north-western Alaska. The river transects three mapped units: the predominantly marine Torok Formation, the transitional Kukpowruk Formation and the predominantly non-marine Corwin Formation. Fifty-seven taxa, mostly leaves but including several reproductive structures, were recognised and compared to similar aged fossil plants from north-eastern Russia and Alaska. Although divisible into upper and lower regional floral suites, most of the flora represents a single stage in floral evolution (we refer to these two plant suites together as the Kukpowruk flora). There are strong similarities to the very rich (more than 150 species) early–middle Albian flora of the Buor-kemuss floral type in north-eastern Russia. However, because several taxa are quite long-ranging those plants from the upper delta plain environments of the Corwin Formation are likely to be late Albian in age. A second, smaller, component of the flora (which we here refer to as the Corwin flora) contains angiosperms and is similar both to the Grebenka floral type of north-eastern Russia and the Upper Killik and Niakogon floras from the central and eastern North Slope of Alaska. From consistent associations between specific taxa and sedimentary facies distinct plant communities have been recognised: a marginal marine and early successional marsh/heath community dominated by Equisetites andBirisia ferns, shrubby to forested river margin communities dominated by Ginkgo, and mire forest communities dominated by Pityophyllum and Podozamites.


Empirical Likelihood (EL) and other methods that operate within the Empirical Estimating Equations (E3) approach to estimation and inference are challenged by the Empty Set Problem (ESP). ESP concerns the possibility that a model set, which is data-dependent, may be empty for some data sets. To avoid ESP we return from E3 back to the Estimating Equations, and explore the Bayesian infinite-dimensional Maximum A-posteriori Probability (MAP) method. The Bayesian MAP with Dirichlet prior motivates a Revised EL (ReEL) method. ReEL i) avoids ESP as well as the convex hull restriction, ii) attains the same basic asymptotic properties as EL, and iii) its computation complexity is comparable to that of EL.


Background: Physical activity programs have shown a positive effect on health but also on depression that increases worldwide. Purpose: The purpose was to study perceived health and rated depression score with a physical activity project for persons with diagnosed depression or anxiety. Methods: Eighty-four persons (56 women, 28 men) with depression or anxiety disorders, recruited from psychiatric out-patient clinic participated. Mean age and BMI were 46 (21-80) yrs and 26 (17-41) kg/m2, respectively. Guided physical activity was given, in groups of 10-15, 1 hour twice a week for 8-12 weeks. Results: A significant improvement (p<0.05*) was seen regarding perceived physical health, several aspects of mental health and waking up thoroughly rested. Depression score significantly improved, both self-rated (PHQ-9, n=55) and by experts (MADRS, n=13), expect PHQ-9 for those with overweight. Conclusions: The project showed that patients with depression and anxiety can improve, in addition to increased physical activity level, both their perceived physical and several aspects of mental health and also depression score by joining a physical activity program.


This research is based on the phenomenon of the glowing condition of TV programs which apply Islamic symbol, that is veil. Whereas, in the end of 1980s decade the veil was still viewed discriminately. Veiled women were identical with oldfashioned and conservative styles. Veiled pupils, university students, and also lecturers were identical with fundamental things which is interpreted into radical and fanatism thought then it must be impeached and eradicated at all. Movie or film which is actually is an expression of entertainment has capability to bring morality values so the existence of the veil is not strange anymore in our society. The interaction between religion and mass media is getting more increase and increase day to day because of the changing era. Ayat-Ayat Cinta The Movie is the pioner of Islamic renaissanc. The islamic morality values movie is so attractive for its audience. This movie is the wonder drug when the Islamic image is identical with the war and terorism. However, is it the real Islamic phenomenon? In the fact, even the women are wearing the veil they are still wearing tight clothes. The arising of mass media which cause the increasing of commercial culture and entertainment has created so many kinds of problems and business so commercialization is considered as a more important than any intellectual quality and challenge. There is a paradox which is found here, that is a time when anything is able to sell into a modern capitalism frame. A certain time when pop culture as a keyword of all of these conditions. Alhtough it happen, there is no a kind of paradox which we face nowadays. Moslem fashion do not only place on respectable position but also drag anyone into typically consumptive life style of capitalism. Islamic policy is on the contrary position of luxurious life style which is identical with capitalism. Nowadays the veil has similar position with Japanese hair style, "Harajuku", "leging" trousers or shirts, and punk style. It means that it is as the trendsetter and commodity. Capitalism of pop culture is successful to take a golden opportunity. The veil is created commercial market for pop culture by creating any kinds of the interesting veil even they are not based Islamic veil standard such as the type of veil which has cutting in side style until the shoulder and back. It may show indentation of side body (whereas in fact by open little by little of the body, it will make the body more interesting). Every type of the veil has its own values such as "instant" which is easy to wear and put off it until it creates anecdote "the veil for many mankind because so many people wear it. There is one more extreme phenomenon which is worried about the veil that it will plunge into more dangerous pop culture so it creates smattering meaning. Through research strategy which applies semiotics analyze technique, based on one of the Saussure theory's follower, Roland Barthles, which formulates one systematical model in analyzing the meaning of signs. Barthes focuses on concept of two levels significance. By using Roland Barthes semiotics, it is based on several considerations. Barthes divides those two conceptual systems. They are denotation and connotation. By dividing them, which the first step is called by primary system (denotation) and the second system is namely secondary system (connotation), then both of them will be applied to interpreted the meaning of veil in Ayat-Ayat Cinta The Movie. The result of Ayat-Ayat Cinta The Movie which presents the entering of veil in the film industy creates the veil into two intersecting street, they are Islamic idealism and capitalism. Capitalism does not hold peace. Islam is the only one religion with the biggest obeyers. It is a chance for capitalism to change the veil as their commodity. They undermine anoher meaning of the veil. It seems in the movie which shows the longer size (covering the chest) as it may be seen in appendix of the Islamic veil criteria. Besides, it often appears the short veil (just covering the neck) which Aisyah and Nurul wear it. Then there is contradiction between idealism and capitalism on a sheet of the actress' veil, each type of them maintain its self. The needs to be Islamic, religious, well behaved, not being free of "aurat" style is gone down before by the needs to be stylish, sexy, modern, and glamourous women. Based on those result, it may be recommended to the movie directors in order to show the wisdom of the Islamic true veil and to the people in order to have critical awareness and thought in selecting and watching TV programs which show the veil styles. It is also suggested to the people in order to have the right understanding about the Islamic veil so they are not the blind followers. The whole understanding may create sincere behaviors. It is so necessary to have the needs of being beatiful and modern women but it have to be based on the true Islamic standard.


Paradoxostoma ? cretacea Bonnema (1941), is shown to belong to the deep sea cyprid genus Aratrocypris Whatley et al (1985). The implications of the discovery of this genus, hitherto known only from the Palaeocene to Recent, in the Upper Cretaceous of the Netherlands are discussed with respect to the palaeodepth of the Dutch Chalk Sea and to the origin and palaeozoogeographical history of Aratrocypris. The new species Aratrocypris gigantea, from the Recent and Aratrocypris maddocksae from the Cainozoic, are described from the North Atlantic and other, nomina nuda species are described or discussed from the same area.


Autism seems to be on the increase. This at least is the feeling of many professionals in the field of child development in Britain, who believe that in recent years they have been seeing more children with autistic spectrum disorders. Autism was first characterised in 1943 by Kanner,1 who described a group of children with an unusual pattern of behaviour present from birth or before 30 months. He called this "early infantile autism." His essential criteria for diagnosis were social aloofness and elaborate repetitive routines.2 Subsequent epidemiological studies have shown that autism is not, as Kanner first thought, a unique and separate condition occurring in children of otherwise normal development but that it is closely related to a range of developmental disorders.3 4 These include Asperger's syndrome,5 a condition characterised by borderline or normal IQ; social isolation or naive, inappropriate social interaction; intensive interest in only one or two subjects; a narrow, repetitive life style; limited or inappropriate intonation and body language; and poor motor coordination.

Autistic spectrum disorders share a triad of impaired social interaction, communication, and imagination, associated with a rigid, repetitive pattern of behaviour. Onset is usually at birth or during the first three years of life, but problems can begin later in childhood. The triad can be recognised at all levels of intelligence and can …


Local windows are routinely used in computer vision and almost without exception the center of the window is aligned with the pixels being processed. We show that this conventional wisdom is not universally applicable. When a pixel is on an edge, placing the center of the window on the pixel is one of the fundamental reasons that cause many filtering algorithms to blur the edges. Based on this insight, we propose a new Side Window Filtering (SWF) technique which aligns the window's side or corner with the pixel being processed. The SWF technique is surprisingly simple yet theoretically rooted and very effective in practice. We show that many traditional linear and nonlinear filters can be easily implemented under the SWF framework. Extensive analysis and experiments show that implementing the SWF principle can significantly improve their edge preserving capabilities and achieve state of the art performances in applications such as image smoothing, denoising, enhancement, structure-preserving texture-removing, mutual-structure extraction, and HDR tone mapping. In addition to image filtering, we further show that the SWF principle can be extended to other applications involving the use of a local window. Using colorization by optimization as an example, we demonstrate that implementing the SWF principle can effectively prevent artifacts such as color leakage associated with the conventional implementation. Given the ubiquity of window based operations in computer vision, the new SWF technique is likely to benefit many more applications.


The question addressed by this research was, "When structural circumstances make revolutionary action likely, under what conditions will a cooptation strategy prevent subordinate revolts?" Experimental procedures established a group status hierarchy consisting of a leader and two subordinates. Groups earned collective outcomes, and the leader usurped an inequitable portion of these outcomes. In this context, the first experiment shows that a cooptation strategy (i.e., offer of a promotion to one of two subordinates) inhibits subordinate revolts. Two additional experiments indicate that the cooptation strategy is most effective (a) if the offer (strategy) provides the target of cooptation a source of personal gain; (b) if theoffer (strategy) is a result of the leader's own volition, rather than situational constraints; and (c) if the leader converys a strong commitment to follow through on the promotion offer. The results are interpreted with reference to subjective-expected-utility and reciprocity theories.


We used immunoblotting to ascertain if toxoplasma encephalitis in disease caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) could be diagnosed by the appearance of characteristic antibodies recognizing specific Toxoplasma antigens. The profile of antibodies to Toxoplasma was examined in human serum and cerebrospinal fluid from patients with chronic and acute toxoplasmosis with or without HIV infection. Many Toxoplasma antigens were recognized by all sera; the majority were presumably surface proteins, as determined by 125I labeling. All sera recognized antigens at 38, 35, 28, and 26 kilodaltons. No specific antibody or pattern of antibodies distinguished between groups of patients. A 120-kilodalton antigen recognized by sera from Atlanta was not, however, seen in most sera from New York. Study of the recognition of the antigens of different strains of Toxoplasma gondii (RH, C56, T100) by the same human sera demonstrated strain-specific antigenic differences. These strain variations may account for the antibody diversity among the patients studied.


Surface properties of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) copolymer films were studied by contact angle measurements and optical and atomic force microscopy. We prepared a series of copolymers of N-isopropylacrylamide with N-tert-butylacrylamide (NtBA) in order of increasing hydrophobicity. The measurements of the advancing contact angle of water at 37 degrees C were hampered by the observation of a distinct stick/slip pattern on all polymers in the series with the exception of poly(NtBA) (PNtBA). We attributed this behavior to the film deformation by the vertical component of liquid surface tension leading to the pinning of the moving contact line. This was confirmed by the observation of a ridge formed at the pinned contact line by optical microscopy. However, meaningful contact (without the stick/slip pattern and with a time-independent advancing contact angle) angles for this thermoresponsive polymer series could be obtained with carefully selected organic liquids. We used the Li and Neumann equation of state to calculate the surface energy and contact angles of water for all polymers in the series of copolymers and van Oss, Chaudhury, and Good (vOCG) acid-base theory for PNtBA. The surface energies of the thermoresponsive polymers were in the range of 38.9 mJ/m2 (PNIPAM) to 31 mJ/m2 (PNtBA) from the equation of state approach. The surface energy of PNtBA calculated using vOCG theory was 29.0 mJ/m2. The calculated contact angle for PNIPAM (74.5 +/- 0.2 degrees ) is compared with previously reported contact angles obtained for PNIPAM-modified surfaces.