The rapid expansion of the mineral and metal mining sector in the past decade was accompanied by an increase in social conflicts. What are the impacts of large-scale mining operations? What are the strategies used by transnational corporations to gain access to underground resources and legitimize their activities? And how do local and indigenous communities confronted with mining react to, negotiate with and resist these activities? This book covers 13 case studies of copper, gold, uranium and other mining operations, situated in Latin America, Africa, Asia, Australia and Switzerland. With an extensive introduction to the subject and a systematic comparison across mining operations in different phases of development and social contexts, it serves as a primer and reference book for activists, students and researchers alike.


CD4+CD25+ regulatory T cells can prevent and resolve intestinal inflammation in the murine T cell transfer model of colitis. Using Foxp3 as a marker of regulatory T cell activity, we now provide a comprehensive analysis of the in vivo distribution of Foxp3+CD4+CD25+ cells in wild-type mice, and during cure of experimental colitis. In both cases, Foxp3+CD4+CD25+ cells were found to accumulate in the colon and secondary lymphoid organs. Importantly, Foxp3+ cells were present at increased density in colon samples from patients with ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease, suggesting similarities in the behavior of murine and human regulatory cells under inflammatory conditions. Cure of murine colitis was dependent on the presence of IL-10, and IL-10-producing CD4+CD25+ T cells were enriched within the colon during cure of colitis and also under steady state conditions. Our data indicate that although CD4+CD25+ T cells expressing Foxp3 are present within both lymphoid organs and the colon, subsets of IL-10-producing CD4+CD25+ T cells are present mainly within the intestinal lamina propria suggesting compartmentalization of the regulatory T cell response at effector sites.


As part of the regulatory compliance process and the streamlining of public administration, the Peruvian government has implemented the National E-Government Plan in all state institutions with the aim of providing citizens with solid services based on the use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). As part of the regulations, the requisites to be met by public institutions have been submitted. However, the lack of an implementation model was detected, one that can serve as a guide to such institutions in order to materialize the organizational and technological structures needed, which allow them to provide the required digital services. This paper develops an implementation model of electronic government (egovernment) for Peru's state institutions, in compliance with current regulations based on a COBIT 5.0 framework. Furthermore, the paper introduces phase 1 of this model: business and IT goals, the goals cascade and the future model of processes. Keywords—E-government, implementation, model, COBIT 5.0, digital services, u-government, m-government.


This work studies the ultrasensitivity of multisite binding processes where ligand molecules can bind to several binding sites. It considers more particularly recent models involving complex chemical reactions in allosteric phosphorylation processes and for transcription factors and nucleosomes competing for binding on DNA. New statistics-based formulas for the Hill coefficient and the effective Hill coefficient are provided and necessary conditions for a system to be ultrasensitive are exhibited. It is first shown that the ultrasensitivity of binding processes can be approached using sharp-threshold theorems which have been developed in applied probability theory and statistical mechanics for studying sharp threshold phenomena in reliability theory, random graph theory and percolation theory. Special classes of binding process are then introduced and are described as density dependent birth and death process. New precise large deviation results for the steady state distribution of the process are obtained, which permits to show that switch-like ultrasensitive responses are strongly related to the multi-modality of the steady state distribution. Ultrasensitivity occurs if and only if the entropy of the dynamical system has more than one global minimum for some critical ligand concentration. In this case, the Hill coefficient is proportional to the number of binding sites, and the system is highly ultrasensitive. The classical effective Hill coefficient I is extended to a new cooperativity index Iq, for which we recommend the computation of a broad range of values of q instead of just the standard one I  =  I0.9 corresponding to the 10%–90% variation in the dose-response. It is shown that this single choice can sometimes mislead the conclusion by not detecting ultrasensitivity. This new approach allows a better understanding of multisite ultrasensitive systems and provides new tools for the design of such systems.


ABSTRACT This article explains Internet users' self-help activities in protecting their privacy online using structural equation modeling. Based on a representative survey of Swiss Internet users, it reveals past experiences with privacy breaches as a strong predictor of current protective behavior. Further, in line with the 'privacy paradox' argument, caring about privacy (privacy attitudes) alone does not necessarily result in substantial self-protection. Most strikingly, however, general Internet skills are key in explaining users' privacy behavior. These skills enable users to reduce risks of privacy loss while obtaining the benefits from online activities that increasingly depend on the revelation of personal data. Consequently, Internet skills are an essential starting point for public policies regarding users' self-help in privacy protection.


We develop techniques for learning the meanings of unknown words in context. Working within a compositional semantics framework, we write down equations in which a sentence's meaning is some combination function of the meaning of its words. When one of the words is unknown, we ask for a paraphrase of the sentence. We then compute the meaning of the unknown word by inverting parts of the semantic combination function. This technique can be used to learn word-concept mappings, decomposed meanings, and mappings between syntactic and semantic roles. It works for all parts of speech.


We investigate the degree of discontinuity of several solution concepts from non-cooperative game theory. While the consideration of Nash equilibria forms the core of our work, also pure and correlated equilibria are dealt with. Formally, we restrict the treatment to two player games, but results and proofs extend to the n-player case. As a side result, the degree of discontinuity of solving systems of linear inequalities is settled.


With declining faith in the retributive and rehabilitative models of the criminal justice system, the restorative justice (RJ) model has become increasingly favored. Most countries that practice RJ do so for juvenile offenders, and most of these are western countries. It is believed that the illegal acts of most juvenile offenders are committed impulsively. Hong Kong, as an international Asian city that is predominantly Chinese, may want to follow the global trend in adopting some types of RJ practice to deal with juvenile offenders. As public sanction/endorsement is one of the crucial criteria for the implementation of RJ, this article presents the findings of a telephone survey in Hong Kong to explore public support for the idea. It was found that the general public is in favor of the idea of RJ even though their knowledge of the local juvenile justice system is typically inadequate. Some preliminary recommendations are offered.


Indices of recruitment are often derived from trap surveys. If legal-sized lobsters inhibit smaller ones from entering traps, the overall catch-rate may depend on population composition and not just on overall abundance, and recruitment strength can be overestimated as average length decreases in a population. A controlled field experiment was used to examine whether trapping inhibition of Jasus edwardsii occurred during spring (November) or summer (February) in south-eastern Tasmania. Four treatments were applied. Baited traps were seeded with either: one large female, one large male or two sublegal-sized female lobsters. Baited traps with no seed were used as a control. Seeded traps always caught fewer sublegal-sized lobsters than control traps. When catches in both seasons were examined by sex of entrants, seeded traps caught fewer small lobsters than control traps in 11 of 12 comparisons. However, a strong inhibitory effect was observed only for female-seeded traps during summer. The data obtained in the present study suggest that sublegal-sized indices of recruitment are likely to be influenced in summer by the number of large females present. Spring trials suggest that corrections to a sublegal-catch index may be unnecessary during this season, but more work is required in order to better understand the complex, sex-specific and seasonal patterns of interactions of this species.


Overlay design for topic-based publish/subscribe (pub/sub) systems is of primary importance because the overlay forms the basis for the system and directly impacts its performance. This paper focuses on the MinAvg-TCO problem: Use the minimum number of edges to construct a topic-connected overlay (TCO) such that all nodes that are interested in the same topic are organized in a directly connected dissemination suboverlay. Existing algorithms for MinAvg-TCO suffer from three key drawbacks: 1) prohibitively high runtime cost; 2) reliance on global knowledge and centralized operation; and 3) nonincremental operation by reconstructing the TCO from scratch. From a practical point of view, these are all severe limitations. To address these concerns, we develop algorithms that dynamically join multiple TCOs. Inspired by the divide-and-conquer character of this idea, we derive a number of algorithms for the original MinAvg-TCO problem that accommodate a variety of practical pub/sub workloads. Both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluations demonstrate that our divide-and-conquer algorithms seek a balance between time efficiency and the number of edges required: Our algorithms cost a fraction (up to 1.67%) of the runtime cost of their greedy alternatives, which come at the expense of an empirically insignificant increase in the average node degree. Furthermore, in order to reduce the probability of poor partitioning at the divide phase, we develop a bulk-lightweight partitioning scheme on top of random partitioning. This more refined partitioning imposes a marginally higher runtime cost, but leads to improvements in the output TCOs, including average node degrees and topic diameters.


Background: Patient simulations have become a basis of training for numerous health care professions. In the field of Respiratory Therapy (RT), it has been proven to influence and motivate the students in proactively participating in learning through the use of clinical demonstrations and technology. However, there remains a limited number of studies that investigate the impact of simulation in RT. PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to determine the perceptions of RT students at an urban university on what they have learned from their patient simulation sessions. METHODS: A self-reporting descriptive survey was used. It was a modification of the Student Satisfaction and Self-confidence in Learning NLN/Laerdal Research tool. The participants included 34 undergraduate and graduate RT students from the Georgia State University. RESULTS: With a response rate of 88.2%, the majority of the RT students were satisfied with their present learning and felt supportive of simulation experience, availability and access to various learning materials and activities, simulation as their motivation, and the way instructors taught the simulation. It also revealed that self-confidence and enthusiasm in learning increased with simulation activities. Majority of RT students perceive simulation education as a helpful and effective teaching method (x 3.13 SD ± 0.73). RT students perceive developing the skills and obtaining the required knowledge from simulation to perform necessary tasks in the clinical setting as the most important clinical benefit they acquire from simulation education (x 3.16, SD ± 0.74). The RT students also believe it is their responsibility to learn what is needed to know from simulation activity and they agree that they know how to get help when they do not understand the concepts covered in the simulation (x 3.53, SD ± .50). CONCLUSION: RT students agree that patient simulations are beneficial and effective as a supportive learning method in their learning. They also agreed that simulation activities increase their self-confidence and enthusiasm in learning, but further research and studies about simulations should be encouraged in order to determine its future importance in preparing future RT professionals in real clinical settings and clinical exploration.


The approaches taken in these articles for this Special Issue are interdisciplinary and seek to be innovative by offering public and private solutions to globalization and protectionism in the cultural industries We believe that it will be useful to practitioners and policy makers while also providing meaningful results to academics In particular, it is our aim that the articles in this Special Issue will open a new forum to discuss approaches toward developing effective cultural policies


The post 9/11 era has been marked by heightened anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States as revealed by a 2006 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center (1) in which 53% of the public said they believed illegal immigrants should be mandated to return to their native countries. The results of the survey also revealed that the public does not favor maintaining current levels of legal immigration, 37% favored keeping with present level and 40% declared it should be reduced. The period following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon coincides with the War on Terror. In the context of war, there is one group of immigrants that is commonly embraced by the public regardless of their immigration status: Foreign-born Soldiers serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. In the last six years, the White House, Congress, the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security have implemented policies to expedite the naturalization process of eligible servicemen and women. Yet, some contend that most of these soldiers are only truly embraced by the public after they have sacrificed life or limb for their adoptive country. With the backdrop of negative attitudes toward immigrants following the attacks of September 11, 2001, granting citizenship to fallen soldiers is often perceived by their surviving relatives as hypocritical on the part of the government; "on one side, they're sending them to war. On the other, they want higher fences on the border so Mexicans don't come." (2) According to a report by Jeanne Batalova (3) of the Migration Policy Institute, there are currently over 65,000 foreign-born individuals serving in the U.S. Armed Services. The presence of foreign-born Soldiers in the U.S. military creates a convergence of human migration and national interests that forces us to look at immigration and citizenship through different lenses than those most commonly employed by policy makers and the media. At play are, the definition--or redefinition--of citizenship, the role of the U.S. military as an agent of social change, and the development of immigration policies informed by honest appraisals of the needs and desires of immigrants and the American socio-economic system. Foreign-born soldiers have served with distinction in every American armed conflict since the Revolutionary War. In most instances, people agree that the mere willingness to die for the country warrants the efforts of streamlining the naturalization process for those who serve honorably in the U.S. Armed Forces (4) but were born on foreign soil and are categorized as immigrants by the definitions contained in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) (5). Nonetheless, others warn of the dangers of presenting citizenship as a bounty thus creating an Army of mercenaries (6) or a disguised draft aimed at non citizens, a vulnerable sector in American society. (7) For the purpose of this paper, the terms immigrant, non-citizen, and foreign-born will be used interchangeably to denote those Soldiers who were born in a country other than the United States and who enlisted in the Armed Services prior to filing for naturalization. Citizenship and Military Service In the United States, citizenship has been traditionally tied to the birth right principles of Jus sanguinis--blood right--or Jus soli--land right. The first acknowledges one's lineage and the second the geographic location of one's birth. For those who were not born in the territory belonging to the United States nor to an American parent, the law affords the possibility of becoming a citizen that as first proposed in 1790 was very closely tied to the principle of Jus soli in that it required permanent presence in the land for a given period of time. (8) Wong and Cho (2006) (9) propose that the criteria for adjudicating citizenship and nationality through naturalization is now marked by a third guiding principle which the authors address as Jus Meritum; citizenship acquired in exchange for service, more specifically, military service. …


The topic is wheat leaf rust caused by the fungus Puccinia
recondita Rob. ex. Desm. f. sp. tritici, which is potentially one of the most devastating foliar diseases of wheat in North Dakota. A leaf rust epidemic can seriously reduce the production of the North Dakota wheat crop. Large yearly losses from leaf rust have been avoided in North Dakota by growing leaf rust resistant varieties and using fungicide sprays. In order to develop and maintain leaf rust resistant wheat varieties for the North Dakota growers, studies must be conducted each year to determine the specific virulences of the predominant races of rust occurring in the state and to ascertain the reaction of the commonly grown varieties to these races. The article addresses such type of study conducted in 1972. Apparent change in the rust
population suggests the need for continued cooperation between pathologists and plant breeders in testing, evaluating and screening breeding lines for
resistance to both the predominant races as well as isolates from natural populations with unusual or new virulences.


The assumption of a direct and positive relationship between engagement of stakeholders and responsibility towards stakeholders within both practitioner and academic literature is a dilemma. There is an apparent soundness of logic to the assumption that the more an organisation engages with its stakeholders the more responsible and accountable the organisation is likely to be towards these stakeholders. This concurrence could exist, and perhaps we believe should exist, but to assume it necessarily does exist is highly problematic. It is problematic not just because it is may be inaccurate but, more importantly, because it may be misleading. I intend to make this case by firstly illustrating that this assumption exists in the literature though it is rarely made explicit. Next I will make a case for why it may not necessarily hold. I will show why it is essential to consider that the relationship between stakeholder engagement and responsibility may be a neutral relationship or, even more importantly, a negative relationship. Finally I will argue that, by erroneously assuming convergence, thus disallowing separation, the writer or practitioner is at risk of, intentionally or unintentionally, deceiving their audience.


Enhanced backscattering (EBS) is investigated for a converging-beam geometry. We find that the functional form of the enhanced backscattering cone is preserved under a change of variables that involves the focal length of the lens and the lens-to-sample distance. In absolute terms, the effect of the lens is that the EBS enhancement cone is lowered in magnitude and narrowed in angle. The experimental data show good agreement with the theory presented, even for tightly focused beams, as long as the illuminated area is larger than the transport mean free path for the random medium.


Flotillin-1 is a lipid raft-associated protein that has been implicated in various cellular processes. We examined the subcellular distribution of flotillin-1 in different cell types and found that localization is cell type-specific. Flotillin-1 relocates from a cytoplasmic compartment to the plasma membrane upon the differentiation of 3T3-L1 adipocytes. To delineate the structural determinants necessary for its localization, we generated a series of truncation mutants of flotillin-1. Wild type flotillin-1 has two putative hydrophobic domains and is localized to lipid raft microdomains at the plasma membrane. Flotillin-1 fragments lacking the N-terminal hydrophobic stretch are excluded from the lipid raft compartments but remain at the plasma membrane. On the other hand, mutants with the second hydrophobic region deleted fail to traffic to the plasma membrane but are instead found in intracellular granule-like structures. Flotillin-1 specifically interacts with the adaptor protein CAP, the Src family kinase Fyn, and cortical F-actin in lipid raft microdomains in adipocytes. Furthermore, CAP and Fyn associate with different regions in the N-terminal sequences of flotillin-1. These results furthered our understanding for how flotillin-1 can function as a molecular link between lipid rafts of the plasma membrane and a multimeric signaling complex at the actin cytoskeleton.


In the late 1990s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducted what the agency considered to be a "bold experiment" in regulatory reinvention, bringing representatives from six industrial sectors together with government officials and NGO representatives to forge a consensus on innovations in public policy and business practices. This paper assesses the impact of the agency's "experiment" -- called the Common Sense Initiative (CSI) -- in terms of the agency's goals of improving regulatory performance and technological innovation. Based on a review of CSI projects across all six sectors, the paper shows how EPA achieved, at best, quite modest accomplishments. The paper explains how EPA's decision to rely on consensus as a procedural rule contributed to CSI's failure to meet the agency's ambitious goals. Faced with delays, CSI participants tended to work on projects over which agreement was possible, such as on the development of training manuals or production of case studies, instead of tackling more significant issues. These information-gathering and educational projects avoided the kind of conflicts that would have arisen over more ambitious efforts, but at the expense of making more meaningful economic or environmental improvement. The EPA's experience with CSI provides cautionary lessons for regulators in any policy area who might contemplate using consensus as a decision rule.


This Article exposes an inconspicuous, categorically wrong movement within antidiscrimination law. A band of federal courts have denied Title VII protection to individuals who allege "categorical discrimination": invidious, differential treatment on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, or sex. Per these courts, a plaintiff who self-identifies as Christian but is misperceived as Muslim cannot assert an actionable claim under Title VII if she suffers an adverse employment action as a result of this misperception and related animus. Though Title VII expressly prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion, courts have held that such a plaintiff's claim of "misperception discrimination" is beyond Title VII's scope. Accordingly, Title VII protection is only extended to such a plaintiff if she is "actually" Muslim or brings forth allegations of invidious, differential treatment based upon her actual Christian identity. This Article argues that these judicially created prerequisites to Title VII protection are categorically wrong. They impose a new "actuality requirement" on Title VII plaintiffs in intentional discrimination cases that engenders unfathomable results. Plaintiffs who suffer from invidious, differential treatment animated by either their self-ascribed or misperceived protected status will be denied statutory protection against discrimination if they fail to prove their actual religious, gender, ethnic, racial, or color identity upon defendant-employers' challenge. Though this Article primarily examines the imposition of an actuality requirement in mispercepion discrimination cases, this Article also demonstrates that courts have considered and imposed an actuality requirement in conventionally framed discrimination cases as well. Accordingly, this Article is the first to enumerate the development of, and myriad justifications for, the actuality requirement in cases of categorical discrimination. This Article argues that some courts' imposition of an actuality requirement in misperception and conventionally framed discrimination cases denotes the birth of an unorthodox interpretation of Title VII's reach and meaning nearly fifty years after its enactment — an interpretative methodology that this Article is first to describe as "anti-anticlassificationist." This Article also highlights a few critical, negative implications of courts' anti-anticlassificationist interpretation of antidiscrimination law. Namely, it examines the emergence of a minimalist "actuality defense" and resulting identity adjudication, which obfuscates the chief issue in intentional discrimination cases: whether the plaintiff suffered unlawful, invidious, differential treatment. Additionally, this Article illuminates that courts' anti-anticlassificationist interpretation and attendant actuality requirement have in fact resuscitated age-old trials of racial determination. They have thereby produced an additional destructive consequence by reifying race as a stable, biological construct. Consequently, this Article proposes fresh, practical, and theoretical interventions to cease the continued anti-anticlassificationist interpretation of Title VII. In doing so, this Article excavates previously unexplored Title VII statutory provisions, longstanding EEOC directives, Fifth and Third Circuit precedent, and recent Supreme Court precedent. Properly read, these sources will show that a prerequisite showing of actuality in cases of categorical discrimination under Title VII is wrong. Thus, this Article affirms that all categorical discrimination plaintiffs — that is, all individuals who have allegedly suffered discriminatory treatment on the basis of their actual or mistaken religious, gender, ethnic, racial, or color identity — are entitled to vindicate their statutory rights to be free from unlawful discrimination.


Canada's performance in attracting foreign direct investment faces serious headwinds, according to a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute. In "Foreign Direct Investment in Canada – The Case for Further Openness and Transparency" author Daniel Schwanen makes a case for more open and transparent foreign investment rules in Canada.


This paper addresses the derivation of chemical ersatz recipes for use in the evaluation of development hardware designed for advanced spacecraft water recovery systems. The recipes simulate characteristics of wastewater generated on a transit mission and on an early planetary base (EPB). In addition, recipes are provided which simulate the water quality of the early planetary base wastewater as it moves through a combination biological and physical-chemical water recovery system. These ersatz are considered to be accurate representations of the wastewater as it passes through primary, secondary, and tertiary processing stages. The EPB ersatz formulas are based on chemical analyses of an integrated water recovery system performance test that was conducted over a period of one year. The major inorganic and organic chemical impurities in the raw wastewater, and in the effluent from the various subsystems, were identified and quantified. Procedures for preparation of ersatz are discussed in detail, and analyses techniques used for measuring the chemical species are presented.


A new edition of the best-selling vocabulary practice title. Whether you're studying on your own or in class, English Vocabulary in Use Pre-intermediate and Intermediate covers all the words and phrases you need at this level to understand and be understood in English. This new edition is fully updated to make the book even more relevant and accessible. The updated CD-ROM provides hundreds of extra practice activities, an in-built dictionary and interactive games.


Background and purpose Metastatic melanoma remains one of the most invasive and highly drug resistant cancers. The over expression of anti-apoptotic protein Mcl-1 has been associated with inferior survival, poor prognosis and chemoresistance of malignant melanoma. A BH3 mimetic, ABT-737, has demonstrated efficacy in several forms of cancers. However, the efficacy of ABT-737 depends on Mcl-1. Because the over expression of Mcl-1 is frequently observed in melanoma, specifically targeting of Mcl-1 may overcome the resistance of ABT-737. In this study, we investigated the effects of Maritoclax, a novel Mcl-1-selective inhibitor, alone and in combination with ABT-737, on the survival of human melanoma cells. Experimental approach For cell viability assessment we performed MTT assay. Apoptosis was determined using western blot and flow cytometric analysis. Key results The treatment of Maritoclax reduced the cell viability of melanoma cells with an IC50 of between 2.2–5.0 µM. Further, treatment of melanoma cells with Maritoclax showed significant decrease in Mcl-1 expression. We found that Maritoclax was able to induce apoptosis in melanoma cells in a caspase-dependent manner. Moreover, Maritoclax induced Mcl-1 degradation via the proteasome system, which was associated with its pro-apoptotic activity. We also found that Maritoclax treatment increased mitochondrial translocation of Bim and Bmf. Importantly, Maritoclax markedly enhanced the efficacy of ABT-737 against melanoma cells in both two- and three-dimensional spheroids. Conclusions and implications Taken together, these results suggest that targeting of Mcl-1 by Maritoclax may represent a new therapeutic strategy for melanoma treatment that warrants further investigation as a single therapy or in combination with other agents such as Bcl-2 inhibitors.


of the Dissertation The objective of this dissertation is to account for some aspects of the prosodic phonology and morphology of Casablanca Moroccan Arabic within the framework of Optimality Theory as conceived in Prince and Smolensky (1993) and McCarthy and Prince (1993a) and developed in the Correspondence model of McCarthy and Prince (1995, 1999) and other related works. It is argued that prosodic aspects such as the syllable structure and the stress system and morphological aspects such as the nisba adjective, the causative, the passive participle and the diminutive are better understood as cases involving interaction between two types of conflicting universal constraints: markedness constraints and faithfulness constraints. It is shown that a division must be established between two types of syllables: a major syllable whose nucleus is one a schwa or one of the full vowels [i, u, a], and a minor syllable which consists solely of a moraic consonant. Granting a moraic status to this consonant is allowed for the purpose of achieving the foot binarity requiring, especially in nonderived trisegmental words on the pattern CCV, CCəC or CəCC, where the first consonant of the initial cluster and the second consonant of the final cluster form minor syllables on their own. The fact that the schwa is epenthesized before the final consonant of nonderived trisegmental verbs, adjectives and a class of nouns follows from the requirement that the right edge of the stem be aligned with a prominent syllable, which corresponds to a major syllable. The nominal class showing the CəCC pattern is shown to abide by markedness constraints favoring schwa syllables with a higher sonority coda. The dissertation also offers an adequate analysis of the problematic cases of cyclic schwa syllabification in terms of a subset of output-output constraints, one of which demanding phonological identity between a derived form and its morphologically-related base form. The theoretical framework herein conceptualized gives a straightforward answer to the puzzling stress system of the language which shows both trochaic and iambic feet. In particular, it is argued that in both isolation words, where the foot is trochaic and context words, where the foot is iambic, the location of stress and consequently the foot types that emerge depend on the hierarchical organization of prosodic words into phonological phrases. A unitary account of the stress system is offered to the effect that both trochaic and iambic feet occur in the language. Trochaic feet surface as optimal when the word is in isolation (i.e. when it is a phonological phrase); iambic feet arise when the word is in context . The dissertation also argues that morphological classes such as the causative, the passive participle and the diminutive are governed by a prosodic constraint requiring that their output conform to an iambic foot. The causative form, which has previously been analyzed as involving prosodic circumscription, is now reanalyzed as a case of partial reduplication which can be accounted for by constraints demanding correspondence between the base and its reduplicant. In particular it is shown that the constraint calling for an iamb consisting of a sequence of two light syllables takes priority over the constraint on the base and reduplicant identity and therefore block total reduplication. The passive participle and the diminutive are two instances that resort to augmentation to achieve an iambic foot type. In the case of the passive participle, it is argued that the prefinal vowel that appears in certain classes of non derived verbs is the result of the constraint requiring that the output conform to an iambic foot consisting of a sequence of light


We present Aggregate G-Buffer Anti-Aliasing (AGAA), a new technique for efficient anti-aliased deferred rendering of complex geometry using modern graphics hardware. In geometrically complex situations, where many surfaces intersect a pixel, current rendering systems shade each contributing surface at least once per pixel. As the sample density and geometric complexity increase, the shading cost becomes prohibitive for real-time rendering. Under deferred shading, so does the required framebuffer memory. AGAA uses the rasterization pipeline to generate a compact, pre-filtered geometric representation inside each pixel. We then shade this at a fixed rate, independent of geometric complexity. By decoupling shading rate from geometric sampling rate, the algorithm reduces the storage and bandwidth costs of a geometry buffer, and allows scaling to high visibility sampling rates for anti-aliasing. AGAA with 2 aggregate surfaces per-pixel generates results comparable to 8x MSAA, but requires 30% less memory (45% savings for 16x MSAA), and is up to 1.3x faster.


591 ABSTRACT: Vibration of normal apartment, office and production buildings, which are excited by technically induced ground vibrations are considered. Many wavelengths of the Rayleigh waves of the soil fit into the foundation dimensions. The related high discretization effort can nowadays be realized with detailed soil-structure interaction method. The combined finite-element boundary-element method is used here as a detatiled method. Simplified method can be used with less computation time, but these methods must be calibrated by exact results. One simplification is to extent the structure to infinity and to solve the problem by wavenumber domain methods. Another simplification is the use of a Winkler soil instead of the continuous soil. Usually, the Winkler parameters are not only soil parameters but depend also on the rigid or flexible foundation structure. Substructure methods use commercial FEM software for the building part. The contribution will show some detailed and some simplified results on large structural elements such as foundation plates, walls, storey plates on columns as well as results on complete buildings. The reduction of the ground vibration by stiff elements and the amplification due to floor or building resonances are discussed which are the most important phenomena of the soil-building interaction.


Identifying the sources of variation in traits of larvae is one of the first steps in interpreting
the role of phenotypic variation in recruitment. We examined the contributions of geographic
source and parentage to phenotypic variation in offspring traits in a gadid, Microgadus tomcod, from
2 contrasting yet nearby locations. Adults were collected from the Hudson River (HR), a polluted
riverine estuary with strong freshwater and tidal fluxes, and Shinnecock Bay (SB), a relatively clean
barrier beach and lagoon system with minimal freshwater inflows. Eggs were stripped from fish in
the laboratory and incubated in a common environment. Female and offspring traits varied substantially
between populations. Females from SB had a higher ovary weight and gonado-somatic index
(GSI) relative to body length, and produced larger eggs. Contrary to expectation, higher female condition
did not result in larvae of better condition. SB offspring had smaller yolk reserves at hatch and
were less resistant to starvation than offspring from HR, though size at hatching did not differ
between the 2 populations. SB offspring took 25% longer to hatch, thereby increasing dependence
on yolk reserves as embryos. This may represent a trade-off in time to hatching versus quality at
hatching in tomcod from different environments. Geographic source accounted for more variance
than maternal effects in time to hatch (90%) and yolk volume at hatch (42%). Maternal influence
accounted for more variance in egg diameter (90%), length at hatch (33%) and starvation resistance
(30%), though none of these measures was correlated to female size or age. These results emphasize
differences in early life history traits across a small geographic scale and the extent to which offspring
differences due to maternal effects depend on the local environment.


Nowadays, the question no longer is whether children should participate in the decision-making process of issues that affect their lives; the focus lies, instead, on how to ensure that children can participate in a meaningful way. Participation in child protection proceedings has proved difficult to achieve. Where children indicate that the attitude and relationship with the case manager is an important barrier, case managers refer to their responsibility to protect vulnerable children. They feel they miss tools to facilitate child participation within such a complicated process. Instead of developing participation tools with case managers, we decided to start by asking children what they believed would be helpful to make themselves heard. Children, with the help of an industrial designer, developed several tools that they believe can facilitate participation in family meetings. Interestingly, the tools the children designed were all directed at who is talking when, to whom and how, and not at what they want to say. This shows that the conditions children say they need for effective participation comprise different aspects than the conditions mentioned in literature and by professionals, underpinning the value of involving children in creating solutions.


Cryptography as a service is becoming extremely popular. It eases the way companies deal with securing their information without having to worry about their customer's information being accessed by someone who should not have access to it. In this overview, we will be taking a closer look at Cryptography as a Service. The ground we will be examining is the effectiveness of it for mobile/wireless and desktop computing. Since we will be looking at something that operates as a service, we will need to first cover the application program interface (API) basics [1] or standard software as a service (SaaS) [2]. Next, what exactly cryptography as a service means for each of the aforementioned platforms. Lastly, other possible solutions and how they compare to CaaS. For the purpose of this review, we will be looking at CaaS in a cloud environment since typical SaaS is used that way. Subsequently most cloud environments utilize a UNIX based operating system or similar solution, which will be the target environment for the purpose of this paper. Popular algorithms that are used in CaaS will be the final part that will be examined on the grounds of how they perform, level of security offered, and usability in CaaS. Upon reading this paper the reader will have a better understanding of how exactly CaaS operates and what it has to offer for mobile, desktop, and wireless users in the present and future.


This working paper provides a longitudinal perspective on the business history of solar energy between the nineteenth century and the present day. Its covers early attempts to develop solar energy, the use of passive solar in architecture before World War 2, and the subsequent growth of the modern photovoltaic industry. It explores the role of entrepreneurial actors, sometimes motivated by broad social and environmental agendas, whose strategies to build viable business models proved crucially dependent on two exogenous factors: the prices of alternative conventional fuels and public policy. Supportive public policies in various geographies facilitated the commercialization of photovoltaic technologies, but they also encouraged rent-seeking and inefficiencies, while policy shifts resulted in a regular boom and bust cycle. The perceived long-term potential of solar energy, combined with the capitalintensity and cyclical nature of the industry, led to large electronics, oil and engineering companies buying entrepreneurial firms in successive generations. These firms became important drivers of innovation and scale, but they also found solar to be an industry in which achieving a viable business model proved a chimera, whilst waves of creative destruction became the norm.


With the weakening of the Ottoman government from the end of the sixteenth century onwards, the Bedouin took over the control of the entire Country of Palestine. As the Bedouin were present across the country, western travelers and researches visiting the Holy Land as tourists, visitors, and investigators often met the Bedouin, especially during the robbery and plunder executed by the Bedouin upon travelers, and when hiring them as tour guides, renting their camels, or employing them as guards. On their return to their countries, these travelers reported on their experiences in the East in the form of books. These western travelers and researchers, in their writings, dealt with the Bedouin. They described them as providers of services to caravans, transporters of luggage, tour guides, and robbers. The writers and researchers explicitly described the traits, characters, food habits, clothing, residences, and occupations of the Bedouin.


Abstract A prominent dike of camptonite cuts the Middle Ordovician Tetreauville Formation of the Trenton Group in the Montreal-Est quarry operated by Lafarge Canada Inc. The "Lafarge" dike is strikingly porphyritic, with largely anhedral macrocrysts of unzoned calcic amphibole up to 13 cm across. The macrocrysts are rimmed with ferri-kaersutite resembling the amphibole in the fine-grained matrix of the camptonite. The magnesio-hastingstite macrocrysts have virtually the same composition as the matrix; they thus grew without much of a boundary layer. The magma crystallized in a disequilibrium way as a pseudo-unary system. The macrocrysts are unusually enriched in Fe 3+ (approximately 44% of the total iron), yet locally enclose globules of immiscible sulfide melt. The magma became oxygenated owing to preferential loss of hydrogen upon the dissociation of aqueous gas bubbles. The amygdaloidal macrocrysts have a relatively high δD value because of this loss of H 2 ; the values of δ 18 O are typical of an upper mantle source. Camptonite dikes are very common on Mont Royal. Like the Lafarge dike, they likely arose by the disequilibrium crystallization of batches of the parental melt of asthenospheric origin.


Our Partners The Peterson Center on Healthcare collaborates with a wide range of stakeholders to transform U.S. healthcare into a highperformance system that delivers higher quality care at a lower cost. To achieve maximum system impact, we partner with likeminded leaders and innovators who share our goals and can provide proven expertise toward our collective mission of accelerating the adoption of innovative solutions that improve quality and lower cost. We are privileged to work with some of the top academic institutions, healthcare leaders, and government organizations to set healthcare on a sustainable path of higher quality care at a lower cost. These strategic partnerships include the following organizations:


Is it always good to be courageous? We have proposed elsewhere that the subjective nature of judging the worth of a goal may on occasion lead to bad courage: When an actor voluntarily assumes personal risk for a goal he or she believes is noble but society views as a wrong. Twenty publicly available first person written statements or transcripts made before or during a suicide attempt (n = 12) or a terrorist action or spree killing (n = 8) were coded for the presence or absence of key defining features of courage (Volition, Risk, and Value of the Goal). Volition was found in 75% of the narratives, Risk in 50%, and Value of the Goal in 80%. All three types of statements were present in 40% of narratives, providing evidence that bad courage can and does occur. Implications for courage interventions are discussed.


This paper provides an overview of the current status and future potentials of nature-based tourism in the Sultanate of Oman with particular focus on sea turtles at Ras Al Hadd. The paper uses objective yardsticks such as inbound tourist arrivals, nationality and spending patterns, seasonality, employment, as well as gross domestic product contribution derived from secondary data from national and international sources to appraise the current situation. Additionally, based on the review of relevant literature, a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis is used to summarize relevant socioeconomic, political, environmental, and regulatory issues. While there is strong evidence of government commitment to develop nature-based tourism in the country, a number of key issues related to tourist facilities, human activities, environmental conditions, economic research, and capacity development are highlighted for further attention. Most importantly, the analysis suggests a potential to increase the contribution of sustainable sea turtle tourism to Oman's gross domestic product. To realize this potential the sector needs to (1) consider the seasonal variation of tourists, (2) develop its accommodation capabilities especially at sites with ecological uniqueness while ensuring minimum negative impacts on biodiversity, (3) increase the number of Omani nationals employed in the tourism industry and improve their skills through training, (4) develop marketing tools to attract the dominant inbound ecotourism groups to the country, (5) enhance sustainable planning implementation in the Omani tourism sector, and (6) most importantly ensure an effective implementation of legislation protecting sea turtles and their habitats. It is hoped that policymakers can use these findings to set a direction on sustainable sea turtle tourism in Oman, while promoting the effective conservation of these species.


Background Prevailing perceptions of Asian Americans as model minorities have long situated this population within postracial discourse, an assumption that highlights their educational success as evidence of the declining significance of race and racism, placing them as models of success for other people of color. Despite evidence to repudiate the model minority thesis, the visibility of Asian Americans in higher education continues to reinforce essentialist paradigms about their presumed success while rendering invisible the educational experiences and diminished educational earning power of low-income, women, and noncitizen Asian populations. Purpose The purpose of this article is to situate the most recent data on the mobility of Asian American students within the K–Ph.D. educational system in the new so-called colorblind postracial America. This article presents the most recent national educational outcomes for Asian Americans by looking at differences in attainment across race, class, gender, citizenship, and educational earning power. Research Design Drawing from the March Supplement of the Census' 2010 Current Population Survey (CPS), we carried out multiple cross-tabulations that allowed us to disaggregate the educational attainment and earning power for Asian Americans across various social categories. The March Supplement of the CPS, referred to as the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC), is given once a year over 3 months—the 2010 ASEC was given to 77,000 households, with a response rate of over 91.5%. This quantitative analysis of the intersectional effect of race, class, gender, and citizenship provides a more nuanced examination of their interactional impact on educational attainment. Findings/Results Our intersectional analysis of educational attainment and earning power reveals the multiplicity of experiences and heterogeneity among Asian Americans. There is a clear positive relationship between class and educational attainment, but the intersectional impact of gender with class, and gender with citizenship points to a nonlinear relationship between these constructs and educational attainment when they are examined together. The data also make evident important gaps in earning power for Asian Americans compared with White Americans, and an especially disproportionate burden of diminished earnings for Asian American women. Conclusions/Recommendations This study sounds the alarm as postracial discourse has created several new challenges on issues related to Asian Americans, affirmative action policies, and the vitality of ethnic studies in the K–Ph.D. system. As a result of this study, the authors warn that the model minority thesis inaccurately depicts Asian Americans in policy discussions on education, race relations, poverty, and civil rights. This article makes important recommendations for coalition building, research approaches, and a new educational policy framework that can mediate current policy failures to include Asian Americans in discussions of equity.


Reverse transcription of the retroviral genome is thought to start after virions enter target cells. Purified preparations of human immunodeficiency virus were found to contain virus-specific DNA, detectable by polymerase chain reaction amplification. This DNA resulted from reverse transcription in newly assembled virus particles and not from contamination by cellular DNA, because virions contained a striking excess of early versus late transcripts and because the accumulation of these products was sensitive to 3'-azido-3'-deoxythymidine (zidovudine) treatment of producer cells. A similar observation was made with murine amphotropic retrovirus particles. It is therefore likely that all retroviruses contain partial reverse transcripts.


Programming-by-example technologies empower end-users to create simple programs merely by providing input/output examples. Existing systems are designed around solvers specialized for a specific set of data types or domain-specific language (DSL). We present a program synthesizer which can be parameterized by an arbitrary DSL that may contain conditionals and loops and therefore is able to synthesize programs in any domain. In order to use our synthesizer, the user provides a sequence of increasingly sophisticated input/output examples along with an expert-written DSL definition. These two inputs correspond to the two key ideas that allow our synthesizer to work in arbitrary domains. First, we developed a novel iterative synthesis technique inspired by test-driven development---which also gives our technique the name of test-driven synthesis---where the input/output examples are consumed one at a time as the program is refined. Second, the DSL allows our system to take an efficient component-based approach to enumerating possible programs. We present applications of our synthesis methodology to end-user programming for transformations over strings, XML, and table layouts. We compare our synthesizer on these applications to state-of-the-art DSL-specific synthesizers as well to the general purpose synthesizer Sketch.


In this work we further extend the investigation of holographic gauge theories in external magnetic fields, continuing earlier work. We study the phenomenon of magnetic catalysis of mass generation in 1+3 and 1+2 dimensions, using D3/D7- and D3/D5-brane systems, respectively. We obtain the low energy effective actions of the corresponding pseudo Goldstone bosons and study their dispersion relations. The D3/D7 system exhibits the usual Gell-Mann–Oakes–Renner (GMOR) relation and a relativistic dispersion relation, while the D3/D5 system exhibits a quadratic non-relativistic dispersion relation and a modified linear GMOR relation. The low energy effective action of the D3/D5 system is related to that describing magnon excitations in a ferromagnet. We also study properties of general Dp/Dq systems in an external magnetic field and verify the universality of the magnetic catalysis of dynamical symmetry breaking.


The Stephen Lawrence Symposium held in London in 2013 provided an opportunity for academics and educators to reflect on changes in education and wider society resulting from the legacy of Stephen Lawrence over the 20 years since his racist murder. A Black African trainee teacher and a Black Caribbean trainee teacher in post-16 teacher training at a large university in the North of England participated in a series of lunchtime discussion groups as part of their university-based training. This led to them presenting a workshop at the Stephen Lawrence Symposium in London based upon artefacts that conjured up memories of racism for them. Reflections on their experiences of engaging with the Stephen Lawrence symposium suggested that family-support and support from the wider Black community was important to them in sustaining their engagement. Such family and community support may ameliorate the sense of alienation that Black trainees may experience from their predominantly White-British peers in university-based teacher training. Whilst such support may be more significant for Black trainee teachers than that provided through formal student support systems, it is not widely recognised as such by universities and may be seen as contrary to university-culture. Personal experiences and memories of racism were key to the Black trainees' engagement with the Stephen Lawrence Symposium. Capturing those memories through the writing of personal narratives was more problematic than presenting at the Symposium itself. Structured support with collaborative writing is needed if the 'student-voice' on student-engagement is to be heard. Keywords : Stephen Lawrence; Black trainee teachers; memories of racism; family/community support; student voice; student engagement.


The Aptian hydrocarbon-producing reservoirs, in the onshore Semmama and Douleb oil fields of west-central Tunisia are characterized by a heterogeneous flow with continuous decline. Petroleum exploration in this area requires detailed knowledge of the structural development of the basin and its relationship to the reservoir sequence and the source rock distribution. The structural configuration of west-central Tunisia is characterized by NE-SW, NW-SE and N-S deep-seated faults, which outline tectonic structures and it is influenced by Triassic salt intrusions. During the Aptian period, the basin was extensive and shallow at the center, though moderately deep to the North. The northeast-southwest dominated synsedimentary extensional tectonics induced high and subsiding zones and thus controlled sedimentary deposition.
The Aptian reservoir is characterized by the lateral variation of sedimentary facies. The first zone, dominated by dolomitic lithofacies has been proven as a petroleum reservoir. The second zone corresponds to carbonate reef and para-reef facies. The third zone, trending north-south is characterized by shallow marine sedimentation, punctuated by episodes of detrital influx. The early Aptian is outlined by the emergence of Kairouan Island that took place in central Tunisia. This study facilitated mapping of the areas exhibiting hydrocarbon reservoir potential which resulted from the conjunction of extensional tectonics and salt ascension.


AIMS: To evaluate the visual function of infants with perinatal cerebral infarction in whom the site and size of the lesion has been determined using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). METHODS: Twelve infants with cerebral infarction on MRI were studied with a battery of tests specifically designed to evaluate visual function in infancy. This included tests: for visual attention (fixation shifts); of cerebral asymmetry (optokinetic nystagmus, visual fields); for assessment of acuity (forced choice preferential looking); and neurophysiological measures of vision (phase reversal and orientation reversal visual evoked potential). RESULTS: A considerable incidence of abnormalities on at least one of the tests for visual function used was observed. The presence or severity of visual abnormalities could not always be predicted by the site and extent of the lesion seen on imaging. CONCLUSIONS: Early focal lesions affecting the visual pathway can, to some extent, be compensated for by the immature developing brain. These data suggest that all the infants presenting with focal lesions need to be investigated with a detailed assessment of various aspects of vision.


Chikungunya and dengue are mosquito-borne, viral, acute febrile illnesses that can be difficult to distinguish clinically. Whereas dengue is endemic in many countries in the Caribbean and the Americas, the first locally acquired chikungunya case in the Western Hemisphere was reported from the Caribbean island of St. Martin in December 2013 and was soon followed by cases in many parts of the region. In January 2014, the Puerto Rico Department of Health (PRDH) and CDC initiated chikungunya surveillance by building on an existing passive dengue surveillance system. To assess the extent of chikungunya in Puerto Rico, the severity of illnesses, and the health care-seeking behaviors of residents, PRDH and CDC analyzed data from passive surveillance and investigations conducted around the households of laboratory-positive chikungunya patients. Passive surveillance indicated that the first locally acquired, laboratory-positive chikungunya case in Puerto Rico was in a patient with illness onset on May 5, 2014. By August 12, a total of 10,201 suspected chikungunya cases (282 per 100,000 residents) had been reported. Specimens from 2,910 suspected cases were tested, and 1,975 (68%) were positive for chikungunya virus (CHIKV) infection. Four deaths were reported. The household investigations found that, of 250 participants, 70 (28%) tested positive for current or recent CHIKV infection, including 59 (84%) who reported illness within the preceding 3 months. Of 25 laboratory-positive participants that sought medical care, five (20%) were diagnosed with chikungunya and two (8%) were reported to PRDH. These investigative efforts indicated that chikungunya cases were underrecognized and underreported, prompting PRDH to conduct information campaigns to increase knowledge of the disease among health care professionals and the public. PRDH and CDC recommended that health care providers manage suspected chikungunya cases as they do dengue because of the similarities in symptoms and increased risk for complications in dengue patients that are not appropriately managed. Residents of and travelers to the tropics can minimize their risk for both chikungunya and dengue by taking standard measures to avoid mosquito bites.


Occupying the role of primary consumer and having an early–middle Permian age range, caseids (Caseasauria, Synapsida) are fundamental to the interpretation of the early history of terrestrial vertebrate ecosystems. Despite this importance, no comprehensive, species‐level phylogenetic study of Caseidae has yet been performed. Herein, we present a phylogenetic analysis of the group, using gap weighting to include poorly known taxa. Besides the description and comments on the resultant topologies, some more general issues concerning cladistic methodologies are briefly addressed. This study highlights the importance of a total‐evidence approach, including as many within‐group taxa and characters as possible. Continuously varying characters, in the form of indices derived from measurement of individual skeletal elements, proved to be highly important, adding significantly to the resolution of, and support for, recovered trees. The utility of the postcranial skeleton in understanding relationships among basal synapsids is highlighted.


The study assessed the status of the Rapu-Rapu Minerals, Incorporated (RRMI) and the Filminera Resources Corporation (FRC) which are the polymetallic and mineral mining sites, respectively in the Bicol Region, Philippines regarding their mine closure and decommissioning procedures in relation to the impact communities that they engaged. It is in this context that the study was implemented to set a management direction in the inevitable event of mine closure and decommissioning. The study utilized the qualitative and quantitative methods of research. Respondents consisted of the key officials of government agencies and municipal and barangay officials as well as households of the host and impact communities covering the two mining sites of Rapu-Rapu and Aroroy as well as community organizations and mining company representatives. Findings showed that both mining sites extract similar resources and have been paying taxes to the Philippine government. Although the RRMI has initiated its mine closure process, decommissioning is underway and still needs to undergo its standard procedure with various stakeholders, while FRC has its operations ongoing. It is recommended that mine closure planning must be integrated within the overall mine operations plan, and should be integral to the operational life cycle of the mine sites.


The aim of this study was to profile patients' satisfaction with information they have received about HAART in relation to treatment uptake. As part of a prospective investigation into uptake and adherence to HAART, 115 participants, comprising predominantly gay men, completed validated questionnaires investigating their satisfaction with information relating to practical aspects and potential problems of HAART, perceptions of information from different sources and beliefs about HAART, following a clinically recommended treatment offer. There was a wide range of total satisfaction scores indicating variation in patients' information requirements. Those who declined HAART were less satisfied with the information they had received than those who accepted the treatment recommendation (p<0.05). Lower levels of satisfaction were associated with stronger concerns about the potential adverse effects of HAART (p<0.05). Furthermore, concerns about HAART were related to uptake of HAART with those declining treatment being significantly more concerned about potential adverse effects than those who accepted the treatment offer (p<0.001). The most helpful sources of information were specialist HIV staff: hospital consultants, pharmacists and nurses, as well as other people with HIV. This study improves our understanding of how information about HAART is perceived by people faced with treatment decisions. It emphasizes the importance of providing information tailored to meet the needs of individual patients and address their specific concerns, in order to support informed decision making.


Eric Voegelin's Israel and Revelation is the opening volume in his monumental Order and History, which traces the history of order in human society. This volume examines the ancient near eastern civilizations as a backdrop to a discussion of the historical locus of order in Israel. The drama of Israel mirrors the problems associated with the tension of existence as Israel attempted to reconcile the claims of transcendent order with those of pragmatic existence and so becomes paradigmatic. According to Voegelin, what happened in Israel was a decisive step, not only in the history of Israel, but also in the human attempt to achieve order in society. The uniqueness of Israel is the fact that it was the first to create history as a form of life, that is, the recognition by human beings of their existence under a world-transcendent God, and the evaluation of their actions as conforming to or defecting from the divine will. In the course of its history, Israel learns that redemption comes from a source beyond itself. Voegelin develops rich insights into the Old Testament by reading the text as part of the universal drama of being. His philosophy of symbolic forms has immense implications for the treatment of the biblical narrative as a symbolism that articulates the experiences of a people's order. The author initiates us into attunement with all the partners in the community of being: God and humans, work and society. This may well be his most significant contribution to political thought: "the experience of divine being as world transcendent is inseparable from an understanding of man as human."


The paper discusses bounds on the nullity number of graphs. It is proved in [B. Cheng and B. Liu, On the nullity of graphs. Electron. J. Linear Algebra 16 (2007) 60--67] that $\eta \le n - D$, where $\eta$, n and D denote the nullity number, the order and the diameter of a connected graph, respectively. We first give a necessary condition on the extremal graphs corresponding to that bound, and then we strengthen the bound itself using the maximum clique number. In addition, we prove bounds on the nullity using the number of pendant neighbors in a graph. One of those bounds is an improvement of a known bound involving the domination number.


This article introduces a systems biology model of the psycho-immune-neuroendocrine (PINE) network. It provides a comprehensive synthesis of the network of biological mechanisms which link major depressive disorder (MDD) with several diseases including hypertension, atherosclerosis, coronary heart disease (CHD), cerebrovascular accident (CVA) and type 2 diabetes. The first part of this article provides an overview of concepts such as the PINE physiome and pathome, as well as the application of a systems biology framework to explain the significant reciprocal associations of MDD with the above named medical illnesses. The second part describes the normal physiological pathways of immune mechanisms, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, autonomic pathways and central nervous system function, which form the PINE physiome. The third section describes how homeostasis of the PINE physiome is disrupted by chronic stress, on a background of genetic and developmental diathesis factors, resulting in a network of pathophysiological pathways called the PINE pathome. MDD, CHD, type 2 diabetes, CVA, hypertension and atherosclerosis can act to maintain the PINE network in a stable pathological state. This article presents comprehensive topographical maps of both the PINE physiome and the PINE pathome. Implications of the model and the importance of adopting a systems approach to understanding the relationship between these diseases is discussed in the last section, including the possibility of novel treatments for MDD and areas of future research.


The COVID-19 pandemic has caused millions of deaths and disastrous consequences around the world, with lasting repercussions for every field of law, including privacy and technology. The unique characteristics of this pandemic have precipitated an increase in use of new technologies, including remote communications platforms, healthcare robots, and medical AI. Public and private actors are using new technologies, like heat sensing, and technologically-influenced programs, like contact tracing, alike in response, leading to a rise in government and corporate surveillance in sectors like healthcare, employment, education, and commerce. Advocates have raised the alarm for privacy and civil liberties violations, but the emergency nature of the pandemic has drowned out many concerns.

This Article is the first comprehensive account of privacy impacts related to technology and public health responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Many have written on the general need for better health privacy protections, education privacy protections, consumer privacy protections, and protections against government and corporate surveillance. However, this Article is the first comprehensive article to examine these problems of privacy and technology specifically in light of the pandemic, arguing that the lens of the pandemic exposes the need for both widescale and small-scale reform of privacy law. This Article approaches these problems with a focus on technical realities and social salience, and with a critical awareness of digital and political inequities, crafting normative recommendations with these concepts in mind.

Understanding privacy in this time of pandemic is critical for law and policymaking in the near future and for the long-term goals of creating a future society that protects both civil liberties and public health. It is also important to create a contemporary scholarly understanding of privacy in pandemic at this moment in time, as a matter of historical record. By examining privacy in pandemic, in the midst of pandemic, this Article seeks to create a holistic scholarly foundation for future work on privacy, technology, public health, and legal responses to global crises.


This paper presents the development of a novel adaptive wearable ankle robot for the treatments of ankle sprain through physical rehabilitation. The ankle robot has a bioinspired design, devised after a careful study of the improvement opportunities in the existing ankle robots. Robot design is adaptable to subjects of varying physiological abilities and age groups. Ankle robot employs lightweight but powerful pneumatic muscle actuators (PMA) which mimics skeletal muscles in actuation. To address nonlinear characteristics of PMA, a fuzzy-based disturbance observer (FBDO) has been developed. Another instance of an adaptive fuzzy logic controller based on Mamdani inference has been developed and appended with the FBDO to compensate for the transient nature of the PMA. With the proposed control scheme, it is possible to simultaneously control four parallel actuators of the ankle robot and achieve three rotational degrees of freedom. To evaluate the robot design, the disturbance observer, and the adaptive fuzzy logic controller, experiments were performed. The ankle robot was used by a neurologically intact subject. The robot-human interaction was kept as active-passive while the robot was operated on predefined trajectories commonly adopted by the therapists. Trajectory tracking results are reported in the presence of an unpredicted human user intervention, use of compliant and nonlinear actuators, and parallel kinematic structure of the ankle robot.


Title of Document: ESSAYS ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INCOME AND LIFE SATISFACTION IN THE UNITED STATES Kendall Swenson, Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Directed By: Carol Graham School of Public Policy and Brookings Institution This dissertation presents three essays concerning the relationship between income and life satisfaction in the United States. The first essay examines whether the receipt of income assistance from public and private sources predicts life satisfaction. It identifies a negative association between the receipt of income assistance from government and private sources and life satisfaction, and finds that the association remains significant even after controlling for family income and other factors. The negative association between the receipt of income assistance and life satisfaction continues to exist across most of the income distribution, although the correlation is more uncertain for respondents in the very lowest income quartile. Another noteworthy finding from this essay is that income assistance from nongovernmental sources is just as predictive of lower life satisfaction scores as is assistance from government means-tested welfare programs The second essay examines whether consumption is a better predictor of life satisfaction than is income. The essay finds that income and consumption are both predictors of life satisfaction, but that several other factors are even more predictive of well-being. In the full regression models health, marriage, and unemployment are much more predictive of life satisfaction than either income or consumption. The third essay examines the link between childhood family incomes and future life satisfaction. To analyze this topic, longitudinal data from the PSID is used to obtain mean family incomes when people were ages 13 to 17 between 1968 and 1994 and examines the life satisfaction of these individuals as adults in 2011. The primary finding from this essay is that the family incomes of youths are not strongly predictive of their future life satisfaction scores. ESSAYS ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INCOME AND LIFE SATISFACTION IN THE UNITED STATES


Although football is one of the most popular sports worldwide, there have been very few studies on injuries suffered at university level. The aim of this study was to collate a wide range of epidemiological findings representative of the injuries suffered by those who play football at this level; while also comparing those injuries suffered between males and females. An electronic retrospective questionnaire was completed by 183 British University level footballers (males n=99, females n=84) who had sustained an injury during the 2011-12 season. The dominant lower limb (ankle: 29.5%, knee: 19.7%) was found as the most common site of injury occurrence with sprains (36. 6%) and muscle strains (23%) reported as the most common types of injury. University players are most often exposed to risk of injury in the autumnal period (20%), whilst playing a competitive match (58.5%) on a grass surface (66.1%) and the severity of injury is high (44.8%). Males reported more groin/thigh and muscle strain injuries compared to females. This study provides a landscape of information in relation to UK university football injuries. There is a need for an injury surveillance initiative to be implemented prospectively involving team doctors and a database of players' medical records. This, in combination with the results found in this study, will help produce a better evidence base of the epidemiology of injuries at this level which will pave the way for producing preventative strategies that aim to improve the safety of university football participation.


Clinics in Developmental Medicine Well over 200 illustrations, many in colour Co-authored by two experts in neuropathology and neuroimaging Takes a quantitative approach to brain growth in weight, gyrus formation, myelination, and spectroscopy of the developing brain. The only book in this field to include chapters in angiogenesis, fetal behaviour, and reactions to chronic illness. This book is about human brain development, focusing on the last half of gestation and the neonatal and infant periods. These periods bring the greatest risk for the acquisition of childhood functional neurologic deficits, including cerebral palsy, developmental delay and intellectual disability. Section 1 covers typical development, including growth in brain weight, ventricular surfaces, gyral development, myelinated tract development, magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and angiogenesis, all serving as reference points for section 2, which deals with common acquired brain abnormalities, some of which are often underemphasized or overlooked. The topics in section 2 include retrocerebellar cysts, abnormal events in fetal brain, white-matter abnormalities, lesions of gray and white matter, hemorrhage, ventriculomegaly and hydrocephalus, late expressions of fetal brain disease, and reactions of the developing brain to chronic disease. Between sections 1 and 2 is a chapter on embryonic and fetal physiologic reactions to external stimuli. Where appropriate, the authors have combined pathologic with neuroimaging examples to help the reader better understand the neuroimages that they encounter. Much of the information in the book is based on data from the National Collaborative Perinatal Project, still the only large autopsy survey of late fetal brain lesions. Readership Developmental neurobiologists, neuroscientists, paediatricians, neuropathologists, pediatric neuroradiologists, pediatric neurologists, neonatologists, perinatologists.


Bundle discounts are used by retailers in many industries. Optimal bundle pricing requires learning the joint distribution of consumer valuations for the items in the bundle, that is, how much they are willing to pay for each of the items. We suppose that a retailer has sales transaction data, and the corresponding consumer valuations are latent variables. We develop a statistically consistent and computationally tractable inference procedure for fitting a copula model over correlated valuations, using only sales transaction data for the individual items. Simulations and data experiments demonstrate consistency, scalability, and the importance of incorporating correlations in the joint distribution.


AIM: It is controversial whether patients with non-ulcer dyspepsia (NUD) respond differently to Helicobacter pylori(Hpylon) eradication treatment than those with peptic ulcer disease (PUD). To review the evidence for any difference in Hpylorieradication rates between PUD and NUD patients.METHODS: A literature search for full articles and meeting abstracts to July 2004 was conducted. We included studies evaluating the efficacy of a proton pump inhibitor(P) or ranitidine bismuth citrate (RBC) plus two antibiotics of clarithromycin (C), amoxicillin (A), metronidazole (M),or P-based quadruple therapies for eradicating the infection.RESULTS: Twenty-two studies met the criteria. No significant difference in eradication rates was found between PUD and NUD patients when treated with 7-d RBCCA, 10-d PCA or P-based quadruple therapies. When the 7-d PCA was used, the pooled H pylori eradication rate was 82.1% (431/525) and 72.6% (448/617) for PUDand NUD patients, respectively, yielding a RR of 1.15(95%CI 1.01-1.29). However, the statistically significant difference was seen only in meeting abstracts, but not in full publications.CONCLUSION: There is no convincing evidence to suggest that NUD patients respond to Hpylori eradication treatments differently from those with PUD, although a trend exists with the 7-d PCA therapy.


WORK HOPE AND THE SOCIOEMOTIONAL FUNCTIONING OF OFFENDERS By David B. Guion, M.S. A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2013. Major Director: Victoria A. Shivy Associate Professor Department of Psychology For offenders returning to society at record levels, securing work looms as one of the most crucial factors in successful reentry. Work hope is a construct that seeks to measure the relative presence of goals of securing desired work, thoughts about how to achieve those goals, and agency to achieve those goals, even in the presence of obstacles. This study sought to examine relationships among work hope, the socioemotional variables of attachment, emotion regulation, physical, relational, and workplace victimization, and coping, and the career-related variables of perceptions of career-related barriers and complexity level of career goals. The sample comprised cohorts from eight different correctional centers (N = 111, 72.1% male, M = 37.97, SD = 10.02), who participated in three waves of a longitudinal study. Four path models were run to model the relationship among work hope and the socioemotional variables, but none of the models satisfied all designated fit indices. The model with the combination of the most adequate fit and theoretical support found significant direct effects from Time 1 anxious attachment, but not avoidant attachment, to Time 1 difficulties with emotion regulation. Significant direct effects were found from Time 1 avoidant attachment and difficulties with emotion regulation, but not anxious attachment, to Time 3 avoidant coping. Significant direct effects were also found from Time 3 avoidant coping to Time 3 work hope. Relational, physical, and workplace victimization were not significantly related to work hope or other socioemotional variables. This study also found that work hope was significantly related to perceptions of career-related barriers (r = -.30). Overall, study findings add to the construct validity of work hope and highlight the importance of addressing socioemotional variables such as attachment, emotion regulation, and coping in preparing offenders for successful reentry and obtaining work.


Five 3rd order depositional sequences were recognized within
Neogene infill of the Carpathian Foredeep. Individual sequences
are characterized by the diverse shape and extent of the basin,
by characteristic depositional architecture and lithofacies.
Their deposition was controled by the principal ruling factors,
namely eustasy, tectonics, sediment supply, and basement
morphology. 4th order depositional sequences
(transgressive-regressive cycles) are also identified within
the 3rd order depositional sequences. Depositional sequences
are related to three distinct stages of the geodynamic history
of the basin. The pre (main) collisional stage
(Egerian/Eggenburgian) is represented by sequence I and was
ruled by eustasy, sediment supply rate and basement relief. The
collisional stage (Eggenburgian Late Karpatian) is represented
by three sequences. Sequence II (Eggenburgian Early Karpatian)
reflects the initiation of thrusting due to loading of the West
Carpathian accretionary wedge. This process was mainly
responsible for creation of accommodation space, while the
other factors were supplementary. Sequence III (Karpatian) was
ruled mainly by interactions between tectonic/flexural
subsidence and isostatic rebound associated with the forebulge
migration toward the foreland and thrust front. Sequence IV
(Late Karpatian) is the upper part of the clastic wedge and
reflects the main collision and rapid subsidence in the
foreland basin. The depositional architecture was dominantly
driven by tectonic processes. The post (main) collisional stage
(Early Badenian) is identical with sequence V, which was ruled
both by eustasy and tectonics. Accommodation space (incised
valley?) developed in the internal parts of the basin.


This document describes a protocol for automating the process of
creating Network Address Translation (NAT) port mappings. Included in
the protocol is a method for retrieving the external IPv4 address of a
NAT gateway, thus allowing a client to make its external IPv4 address
and port known to peers that may wish to communicate with it. From
2005 onwards, this protocol was implemented in Apple products
including Mac OS X, Bonjour for Windows, and AirPort wireless base
stations. In 2013, NAT Port Mapping Protocol (NAT-PMP) was superseded
by the IETF Standards Track RFC "Port Control Protocol (PCP)", which
builds on NAT-PMP and uses a compatible packet format, but adds a
number of significant enhancements.


Objective. Several published formulas exist for the determination of estimated fetal weight (EFW), with limited data on their comparative accuracies. The aims of our study were to assess and compare the performance of different EFW formulas in predicting actual birth weight (BW) in an urban population. Methods. Patients with an EFW determined within 7 days of delivery were considered eligible for the study. Fourteen published formulas, derived from populations comparable to ours, were used to recalculate EFWs from the same initial measurements. The accuracy of the EFWs obtained from the different formulas were compared by percentage error methods using bias and precision and Bland‐Altman limits of agreement methods. Sensitivity and specificity for prediction of being small for gestational age (SGA) were calculated. Results. Eighty‐one fetuses were included in the study. Formula C of Hadlock et al [Hadlock C; log10 BW = 1.335 − 0.0034(abdominal circumference [AC])(femur length [FL]) + 0.0316(biparietal diameter) + 0.0457(AC) + 0.1623(FL); Am J Obstet Gynecol 1985; 151:333–337] had the best performance according to the bias and precision method. Bland‐Altman limits of agreement confirmed these results. Among the formulas, the sensitivity for detection of SGA ranged from 72% to 100%, and specificity was 41% to 88%. Hadlock C had the optimal sensitivity/specificity trade‐off for detection of SGA. Conclusions. Fourteen formulas showed considerable variation of bias and precision in our population as well as a wide range of sensitivities and specificities for SGA. The choice of the appropriate formula for EFW in a given population should be based on objective and explicit criteria. Consideration of bias and precision for the formula in the population being assessed is critical and may affect clinical care.


Power density has grown to be the dominant challenge for continued complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology scaling. Together with recent improvements in microrelay design and process technology, this has led to renewed interest in mechanical computing for ultralow-power integrated circuit (IC) applications. This paper provides a brief history of mechanical computing followed by an overview of the various types of micromechanical switches, with particular emphasis on electromechanical relays since they are among the most promising for IC applications. Relay reliability and process integration challenges are discussed. Demonstrations of functional relay logic circuits are then presented, and relay scaling for improved device density and performance is described. Finally, the energy efficiency benefit of a scaled relay technology versus a CMOS technology with comparable minimum dimensions is assessed.


Carbon dioxide (CO2) flux is important for agriculture and carbon cycle studies. Only a small proportion of the land is currently covered by proper equipment to directly collect CO2 flux data. The CO2 flux data has an obvious annual cycle with the phase changing from year to year. How to build a model to estimate the annual effect and seasonal dynamics is a challenging task. With the help of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) which is carried by NASA satellites, corresponding data, such as normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), is freely available from NASA. Our goals are modeling the seasonal dynamics to generate reasonable predictions, and building a model using MODIS data to predict the CO2 flux data at any location. In modeling single sites, we treat each year as a multivariate observation. We use functional data analysis (FDA) to smooth the CO2 flux data for each year separately. Then we use the landmark registration to standardize the seasonal dynamics. On the registered time scale, we build a model of the curves using a multivariate normal distribution. We use Dirichlet regression to model the seasonal dynamics and map the registered curves back to the natural time scale. These steps allow us to simulate CO2 flux on the natural time scale. For our spatial study, we study three models. In the first model, we decompose the CO2 flux data into different components, and build a model based on the spatial correlations of each component. The second model is a functional linear regression model (FLRM), where we use NDVI as the covariate. Both CO2 flux and NDVI are annual multivariate observations treated as functional objects. In the third model, we use a generalized additive model (GAM) to analyze the data as a time series indexed by day, with covariates such as NDVI, latitude, longitude etc. We use parametric bootstrap to validate our single location modeling on 55 flux sites. The local and the majority of global coverage rate are around 95%. Among the three spatial models, the GAM performed best in that it had the lowest out of sample prediction mean square error. The FLRM also shows a great potential for modeling with limited information. i


Hydro electrical energy is the most important renewable energy resource in Turkey. Both environmental suitability and low unit energy cost are the principal reasons of its frequent use for energy production in the world, as well as in Turkey. According to the statement of DSI (State Hydraulic Works) and EIEI (Electrical Power Resources Survey and Development Administration) for the year 2002, Turkey will develop its whole hydro energy potential until the year 2050. In this study, the energy use projection of Turkey for the period of 1980–2050 is calculated based on the population increase and energy consumption increase rates per capita. The study also includes the evaluation of energy requirement in the year 2050 in the case of whole hydro energy potential usage.


Is the Internet an Event? Does it constitute, as Žižek argues an Event should, a reframing of our experience, a retroactive re-ordering of everything we thought we knew about the social but were afraid to ask Facebook? In this contribution, Clint Burnham engages with Žižek's recent work (Less than Nothing, Event, Absolute Recoil) as a way to argue, first, that in order to understand the Internet, we need Žižek's "immaterial materialism," and, in turn, to understand Žižek's thought and how it circulates today, we need to think through digital culture and social media.

As regards the Internet, then, no cynical disavowal, no Facebook cleanses, no shutting off the wifi: les non-dupes errent, or those who distance themselves from social media and the like are the most deceived. Next: the Internet's two bodies: digital culture is both the material world of servers, clouds, stacks and devices and the virtual or affective world of liking, networking, and the mirror stage of the selfie. And here we must confront the "obscene underside" of digital culture: not only the trolls, 4chan porn, and gamergate bro's, but also the old fashioned exploitation of labour, be it iPhone assembly-line workers at Foxconn, super-exploited "blood coltan" miners in the Congo, "like farmers" in India, or social media scrubbers in the Phillipines, who ensure your feeds are "clean" of porn, beheadings, and other #NSFW matter. These last concerns, then, mean we also have to think about what Žižek calls the "undoing of the Event" of the Internet, the betrayal of the Internet, its diseventalization. This podcast is a recording of a CAMRI research seminar that took place at the University of Westminster on January 28, 2015.


This paper examines the perspectives of Health Sciences and Technology Academy (HSTA) participants as they navigate through their West Virginia (WV) high school learning environments (i.e., in-person, blended/hybrid, complete virtual) during the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-19 (COVID-19) pandemic. In March of 2020, the participants in this out-of-school-time (OST) academic enrichment program for exceptionally driven, yet underprivileged, at-risk students, with over 70% living in rural areas, started receiving remote learning instruction through learning management systems or via paper packets. In August of 2020, school systems provided parents and caregivers alternative learning environments for their student(s). In order to understand the learning experiences of HSTA students during these unprecedented times, HSTA released the 2020 Learning Outcomes Survey to participants in December of 2020. We performed chi-square test of independence to test the relationship between participants' learning environments, their satisfaction with the education they were receiving, their ability to keep up with their school-work, teacher availability to help when needed and teacher feedback supporting them in their learning environment. The results show significant differences between the learning environments and keeping up with school-work as well as teacher feedback supporting them in their learning; however, Phi and Cramer's V tests for effect size show weak correlations. This study provides a small glimpse into HSTA students' learning experiences as they attempted to continue to learn in their regular school environment during the COVID-19 pandemic while in HSTA.


Abstract. An approach is presented to solve the problem of spatial shift wrapping associated with spatial shift estimation-based fringe pattern profilometry (FPP). This problem arises as the result of fringe reuses (that is, use of fringes with periodic light intensity variance), and the spatial shift can only be identified without ambiguity within the range of a fringe width. It is demonstrated that the problem is similar to the phase unwrapping problem associated with the phase-detection-based FPP, and the proposed method is inspired by the existing ideas of using multiple images with different wavelengths proposed for phase unwrapping. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by comparing experimental results against several objects, with the last object consisting of more complex surface features. We conclude by showing that our method is successful in reconstructing the fine details of the more complex object.


Accurate prediction of exons locations in deoxyri-bonucleic acid (DNA) sequences is an important issue for geneticists. Time-domain periodogram (TDP) and average magnitude difference function (AMDF) are two time-domain approaches previously proposed for this purpose. These two approaches employ a second-order infinite impulse response (IIR) resonant filter as a preprocessing stage so as to emphasize the period-3 behavior exhibited by the exonic segments of DNA strands. The major drawback of IIR filters is their non-linear phase response, which results in a delay distortion experienced by the spectral components of the genomic signal at the filter output. This type of distortion affects the exons prediction accuracy of the TDP/AMDF classifier. This paper proposes the use of zero-phase filtering technique in the preprocessing stage so as to eliminate the phase distortion introduced by the traditional filtering. MATLAB simulation conducted on the ASP67 genomic dataset shows that the proposed modified time-domain approaches using zero-phase filtering reveal better performance, compared with the traditional approaches, in terms of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, precision-recall curve and F-measure.


Abstract The circular economy concept has gained momentum both among scholars and practitioners. However, critics claim that it means many different things to different people. This paper provides further evidence for these critics. The aim of this paper is to create transparency regarding the current understandings of the circular economy concept. For this purpose, we have gathered 114 circular economy definitions which were coded on 17 dimensions. Our findings indicate that the circular economy is most frequently depicted as a combination of reduce, reuse and recycle activities, whereas it is oftentimes not highlighted that CE necessitates a systemic shift. We further find that the definitions show few explicit linkages of the circular economy concept to sustainable development. The main aim of the circular economy is considered to be economic prosperity, followed by environmental quality; its impact on social equity and future generations is barely mentioned. Furthermore, neither business models nor consumers are frequently outlined as enablers of the circular economy. We critically discuss the various circular economy conceptualizations throughout this paper. Overall, we hope to contribute via this study towards the coherence of the circular economy concept; we presume that significantly varying circular economy definitions may eventually result in the collapse of the concept.


New opportunities for crimes of acquisition grew significantly in the second half of the twentieth century, but the criminological consequences of this development are poorly charted. We examine offenders who have stepped forward to exploit one category of the new opportunities. Drawing from interviews with 47 criminal telemarketers, we present a picture and interpretation of them, their pursuits and their lifestyles. As vocational predators, they share several important characteristics with the professional thieves sketched by earlier generations of investigators. Like the latter, they pursue a hedonistic lifestyle featuring illicit drugs and conspicuous consumption, and they acquire and employ an ideology of legitimation and defence that insulates them from moral rejection. Unlike professional thieves, however, telemarketing criminals disproportionately are drawn from middleclass, entrepreneurial backgrounds. They are markedly individualistic in their dealings with one another and with law enforcement. Finally, their work organizations are more permanent and conventional in outward appearance than the criminal organizations created by blue-collar offenders, which were grounded in the culture of the industrial proletariat. Our findings show how the backgrounds and pursuits of vocational predators reflect the qualities and challenges of contemporary lucrative criminal opportunities. Like the markets that they seek to manipulate and plunder, the enacted environments of professional criminals embrace infinite variations, and are largely indistinguishable from the arenas that capacitate legitimate entrepreneurial pursuits.