Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry is a commonly used clinical assessment tool for body composition and bone mineral density, which is gaining popularity in athletic cohorts. Results from body composition scans are useful for athletic populations to track training and nutritional interventions, while bone mineral density scans are valuable for athletes at risk of developing stress fractures due to low bone mineral density. However, no research has ascertained if a novice technician (accredited but not experienced) could produce similar results to an experienced technician. Two groups of recreational athletes were scanned, one by an experienced technician, one by a novice technician. All participants were scanned twice with repositioning between scans. The experienced technician's reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient = .989-.998; percentage change in mean = -0.01 to 0.10), precision (typical error as coefficient of variation percentage = 0.01-0.47; SEM% = 0.61-1.39), and sensitivity to change (smallest real difference percentage = 1.70-3.85) were similar; however, superior to those of the novice technician. The novice technician results were reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient = .985-.997; percentage change in mean = -0.03 to 0.23), precision (typical error as coefficient of variation percentage = 0.03-0.75; SEM% = 1.06-2.12), and sensitivity to change (smallest real difference percentage = 2.73-5.86). Extensive experience, while valuable, is not a necessary requirement to produce quality results when undertaking whole-body dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry scanning.


American chestnut restoration depends on a multitude of biological, administrative, and technological factors. Germplasm traditionally bred for resistance to the chestnut blight disease caused by the exotic pathogen Cryphonectria parasitica has been deployed on national forests in the Eastern and Southern Regions of the National Forest System (NFS) since 2009. Trees were challenged by biological factors, primarily deer browse and ink disease (caused by Phytophthora cinnamomi). Because of these problems, inferences regarding resistance or tolerance to blight are premature. Mitigation to improve success includes improved technology in seedling production for planting and selection of appropriate test sites with limited management restrictions. We suggest that chestnut restoration within the USDA Forest Service be conducted through deployment of a series of long-term multidisciplinary tests. Limitations in resources required for this effort necessitate partnership building both within and outside the agency. Vegetation establishment targets that include chestnut test plantings within the NFS should be developed.


Searching for Trust explores the intersection of trust, disinformation, and blockchain technology in an age of heightened institutional and epistemic mistrust. It adopts a unique archival theoretic lens to delve into how computational information processing has gradually supplanted traditional record keeping, putting at risk a centuries-old tradition of the 'moral defense of the record' and replacing it with a dominant ethos of information-processing efficiency. The author argues that focusing on information-processing efficiency over the defense of records against manipulation and corruption (the ancient task of the recordkeeper) has contributed to a diminution of the trustworthiness of information and a rise of disinformation, with attendant destabilization of the epistemic trust fabric of societies. Readers are asked to consider the potential and limitations of blockchains as the technological embodiment of the moral defense of the record and as means to restoring societal trust in an age of disinformation.


ABSTRACT Defective function of the von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) tumor suppressor ablates proteolytic regulation of hypoxia-inducible factor α subunits (HIF-1α and HIF-2α), leading to constitutive activation of hypoxia pathways in renal cell carcinoma (RCC). Here we report a comparative analysis of the functions of HIF-1α and HIF-2α in RCC and non-RCC cells. We demonstrate common patterns of HIF-α isoform transcriptional selectivity in VHL-defective RCC that show consistent and striking differences from patterns in other cell types. We also show that HIF-α isoforms display unexpected suppressive interactions in RCC cells, with enhanced expression of HIF-2α suppressing HIF-1α and vice-versa. In VHL-defective RCC cells, we demonstrate that the protumorigenic genes encoding cyclin D1, transforming growth factor alpha, and vascular endothelial growth factor respond specifically to HIF-2α and that the proapoptotic gene encoding BNip3 responds positively to HIF-1α and negatively to HIF-2α, indicating that HIF-1α and HIF-2α have contrasting properties in the biology of RCC. In keeping with this, HIF-α isoform-specific transcriptional selectivity was matched by differential effects on the growth of RCC as tumor xenografts, with HIF-1α retarding and HIF-2α enhancing tumor growth. These findings indicate that therapeutic approaches to targeting of the HIF system, at least in this setting, will need to take account of HIF isoform-specific functions.


During the 1987 AASHTO Bridge Committee Meeting, recommendations from NCHRP Project 20-7/31 regarding the development of a probability-based LRFD bridge specification were accepted. NCHRP Project 12-33 was initiated to actually develop the specification and a suitable commentary. Project 12-33 was officially started in July of 1988. Since that time, a core-group of design professionals from the Principal Investigator's staff and a group known as the Code Coordinating Committee have been defining the basic philosophy, content and organization of the specification through the development of a 'strawman' document. This paper presents an overview of the preliminary content of the proposed specification and provides a general update on status.


The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a popular model for density estimation and representation learning. Canonically, the variational principle suggests to prefer an expressive inference model so that the variational approximation is accurate. However, it is often overlooked that an overly-expressive inference model can be detrimental to the test set performance of both the amortized posterior approximator and, more importantly, the generative density estimator. In this paper, we leverage the fact that VAEs rely on amortized inference and propose techniques for amortized inference regularization (AIR) that control the smoothness of the inference model. We demonstrate that, by applying AIR, it is possible to improve VAE generalization on both inference and generative performance. Our paper challenges the belief that amortized inference is simply a mechanism for approximating maximum likelihood training and illustrates that regularization of the amortization family provides a new direction for understanding and improving generalization in VAEs.


In its March 2016 Opinion in the Genentech case, Advocate General Wathelet raised the complex question of the standard of review that should be applied by domestic courts when asked to set aside or declare unenforceable arbitral awards on the ground that they breach EU competition rules, which in the EU legal order have a public policy nature. Although the Court of Justice of the EU eventually did not take position on this question in its subsequent judgment, Advocate General Wathelet's Opinion brought once again the complex interface between competition law, arbitration and public policy to the fore. The objective of this paper is to discuss this interface from a competition law practitioner's standpoint. The existing literature on the relationship between competition law, arbitration and public policy has been essentially authored by arbitration experts or at least academics or practitioners whose primary area of expertise lies in arbitration. As a result, the existing literature tends to treat competition law in a fairly abstract manner and often fails to sufficiently take into account its objectives, intricacies and the intensely factual analysis its enforcement requires. As a competition law practitioner involved in arbitral proceedings, I attempt to give a competition-law oriented perspective of the questions raised by the interface between arbitration and public policy.


This theoretical work discovers four new dispersive shear-horizontal (SH) waves propagating in the transversely isotropic piezoelectromagnetic plate of class 6 mm. In this work, the following mechanical, electrical, and magnetic boundary conditions at both the upper and lower free surfaces of the piezoelectromagnetic plate are utilized: the mechanically free surface, continuity of both the electrical and magnetic potentials, and continuity of both the electrical and magnetic inductions. The solutions for the new SH-wave velocities (dispersion relations) are found in explicit forms and then graphically studied. The graphical investigation has soundly illuminated several interesting peculiarities that were also discussed. The piezoelectromagnetic materials, also known as the magnetoelectroelastic media, are famous as smart materials because the electrical subsystem of the materials can interact with the magnetic subsystem via the mechanical subsystem, and vice versa. Therefore, it is very important to know the wave characteristics of such (composite) materials because of possible constitution of new technical devices with a high level of integration. It is obvious that the plate waves can be preferable for further miniaturization of the technical devices and used for the nondestructive testing and evaluation of thin piezoelectromagnetic films.


The study of the genetic and selective landscape of immunity genes across primates can provide insight into the existing differences in susceptibility to infection observed between human and non-human primates. Here, we explored how selection has driven the evolution of a key family of innate immunity receptors, the Toll-like receptors (TLRs), in African great ape species. We sequenced the 10 TLRs in various populations of chimpanzees and gorillas, and analysed these data jointly with a human data set. We found that purifying selection has been more pervasive in great apes than in humans. Furthermore, in chimpanzees and gorillas, purifying selection has targeted TLRs irrespectively of whether they are endosomal or cell surface, in contrast to humans where strong selective constraints are restricted to endosomal TLRs. These observations suggest important differences in the relative importance of TLR-mediated pathogen sensing, such as that of recognition of flagellated bacteria by TLR5, between humans and great apes. Lastly, we used a population genetics-phylogenetics method that jointly analyses polymorphism and divergence data to detect fine-scale variation in selection pressures at specific codons within TLR genes. We identified different codons at different TLRs as being under positive selection in each species, highlighting that functional variation at these genes has conferred a selective advantage in immunity to infection to specific primate species. Overall, this study showed that the degree of selection driving the evolution of TLRs has largely differed between human and non-human primates, increasing our knowledge on their respective biological contribution to host defence in the natural setting.


The following work involves the study of electromagnetic properties at the microwave
frequency range of a class of materials called Metamaterials. A metamaterial is an
artificial composite material that exhibits an electromagnetic response unlike any
that have been observed in nature or constituent materials themselves. Usually, the
response results from artificially fabricated, extrinsic or low dimensional inhomogeneities.
In the last decade, metamaterials have provided scientists with an alternative
and reliable way to experimentally study effects that could have never been
achieved using conventional materials. The most astonishing of these effects was
the concept of negative refraction, which was first theorized by the Russian scientist
Victor Veselago in 1968. Since then, the publications of milestone works by
Eli Yablonovitch and Sajeev John (in 1987), and Sir John Pendry (in 1999),
have triggered enormous interest in metamaterials research, and have resulted in a
tremendous number of theoretical and experimental works in field of metamaterials
worldwide.
This study focuses on how metamaterials can be integrated into the process of molding
the flow of light. This dissertation is divided into two main parts. It will begin
with an introduction to the world of metamaterials and their applications, and will
then branch out into two sections, with each section devoted to a specific type of
periodic metamaterial, Photonic Crystals (PCs), and Split Ring Resonators (SRRs).
The first part of the thesis will investigate Photonic Crystals. Photonic Crystals are
made of a periodic, or quasi-periodic, arrangement of dielectric elements that show
unique properties in a diffraction regime when a wavelength is comparable to the unit cell size. For this study, I will investigate, both numerically and experimentally,
the electrodynamic properties of photonic crystals, focusing the attention first, to the
anomalous diffraction phenomena of two-dimensional (2D) PCs proving at microwave
the Pendell¨osung effect, which is a physical effect of the Dynamical Diffraction Theory.
Positive agreement between the numerical simulations and measurements carried
out in a parallel plate waveguide have been found. Second, I will focus extensively
on the subwavelength properties of one-dimensional PCs made with slanted dielectric
bars by experimentally demonstrating, for the first time, the superlensing capabilities
of 1D structures in the microwave regime. Finally, I will numerically analyze the
improvement of the focusing capacity induced by the introduction of a proper surface
corrugation.
Part two of the dissertation will focus on Split Ring Resonators (SRRs) which are
made of arrays of metallic resonant elements that show their anomalous properties in
the effective regime when the wavelength is much larger than the unit cell dimension.
I will examine, from the numerical and experimental point of view, the electromagnetic
properties of metamaterial media made with split ring resonators, focusing the
attention on a full comprehension of their transmission properties. I will also discuss
the Slow Light properties of a planar waveguide made with a dielectric core, and a
single negative index cladding made with SRRs. Today, the concept of slowing light
is popular because of the potential benefits it could have on a variety of real life applications.
In fact, low group velocities control light propagation from microwave to
optical frequencies, and could lead to several more applications including delay line
filters and phase shifters. Moreover, the field of slow light, such as those belonging
to the properties of PCs used for manipulating light, is fundamental for the future of
integrated photonic chips.
All the experimental characterizations presented in this dissertation have been
done at microwave wavelengths by sandwiching the samples in a parallel plate waveguide.
The characterization of the metamaterials transmission properties was accomplished by using antennas connected to a Vector Network Analyzer that serviced in
measuring the phase and amplitude of the signal. Finally, the slow light properties
were analyzed by measuring the electromagnetic pulse delay using a Microwave Transition
Analyzer. The results outlined in the first part of this dissertation were carried
out at the University of Naples "Federico II" during the first year and a half of my
PhD studies, while the results from part two were made possible at the Electronic
Material Research Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, where I spent the
second half of my PhD. This dissertation is the result of a long term scientific collaboration
between the two above mentioned universities, which are both interested in
investigating the properties of metamaterials. As a result of this collaboration, the
scholarship that supported me during the three years of my PhD was cofunded by
both institutions.


For several decades researchers have searched for possible inefficiencies in sports gambling markets. Most profitable strategies have failed to produce profits over the long run. The one consistently profitable strategy that has been studied extensively involves taking advantage of differences between contracts offered in different regional gambling markets. The main purpose of this paper is to explain why and how these differences affect the profitability of wagers. I describe two ways that one could take advantage of these different contracts, loosely defining one of these opportunities as "arbitrage." This paper examines the circumstances under which inter-market gambles in the NFL can be made with an expected profit. Of course, it is expected that as with all arbitrage opportunities, such circumstances are expected to be rare and short-lived, except when betting against a local team.


The three traditional failure classes are system, media, and transaction failures. Sometimes, however, modern storage exhibits failures that differ from all of those. In order to capture and describe such cases, single-page failures are introduced as a fourth failure class. This class encompasses all failures to read a data page correctly and with plausible contents despite all correction attempts in lower system levels.Efficient recovery seems to require a new data structure called the page recovery index. Its transactional maintenance can be accomplished writing the same number of log records as today's efficient implementations of logging and recovery. Detection and recovery of a single-page failure can be sufficiently fast that the affected data access is merely delayed, without the need to abort the transaction.


The stock of firms that issue equity has, on average, performed poorly in subsequent years, while the stock of firms that repurchase has typically done well. One explanation for this pattern is that firms are exploiting their superior knowledge about the value of their stock by buying it when it is undervalued and selling it when it is overvalued. This paper presents supporting evidence for this explanation of the excess returns: The change in shares outstanding is positively correlated with proxies for the deviation of current stock prices from fundamental value; the excess returns following the change in shares remain significant after controlling for these proxies; and the changes in shares that can be explained by the proxies predict stock returns more powerfully than changes in shares explained by other reasons.


Abstract Scientists and engineers seek to discover and disseminate knowledge so that it can be used to improve the human condition. Style and Ethics of Communication in Science and Engineering serves as a valuable aid in this pursuit—it can be used as a textbook for undergraduate or graduate courses on technical communication and ethics, a reference book for senior design courses, or a handbook for young investigators and beginning faculty members. In addition to presenting methods for writing clearly and concisely and improving oral presentations, this compact book provides practical guidelines for preparing theses, dissertations, journal papers for publication, and proposals for research funding. Issues of authorship, peer review, plagiarism, recordkeeping, and copyright are addressed in detail, and case studies of research misconduct are presented to highlight the need for proactive attention to scientific integrity. Ample exercises cause the reader to stop and think. Style and Ethics of Communication ...


BACKGROUND
The cognitive effects of postmenopausal hormone therapy (HT) have been studied extensively, but little is known about the relationship between premenopausal hormone use and cognition. Hormonal contraceptive use vs. nonuse may be a potential factor influencing cognitive processes in midlife. The aim of this study is to explore the effect of modification of hormone milieu through use of hormonal contraception in premenopausal women and midlife cognitive function.

METHODS
Subjects were 261 cognitively normal women, aged 40-65 (mean μ=52), enrolled in the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer's Prevention. All women completed the Women's Health History Questionnaire and a self-report health history questionnaire and were administered a battery of neuropsychologic tests. Cognitive results were analyzed using summary scores for the domains of Verbal Ability, Visuo-spatial Ability, Working Memory, Verbal Learning & Memory, and Speed & Flexibility derived using a confirmatory factor analysis.

RESULTS
Hormonal contraceptive ever users performed significantly better than never users in the domains of Visuo-spatial Ability (μ=0.75, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.23-1.28, p=0.005) and Speed & Flexibility (μ=0.52, 95% CI -0.16-1.04, p=0.007), with duration-dependent increases in performance, especially in ever users with ≥ 15 years of use.

CONCLUSIONS
These data provide preliminary evidence that hormonal contraceptive use may influence cognitive outcomes, even years after use is discontinued. Hormonal contraceptive users scored better in domains of Visuo-spatial Ability and Speed & Flexibility than never users, with a duration-dependent trend. Further research is needed to explore the use of hormonal contraceptives to prevent or delay cognitive decline and to clarify the physiologic basis of this phenomenon.


Anticipating changes to public transportation ridership demand is important to planning for and meeting service goals and maintaining system viability. These changes may occur in the short- or long-term; extensive academic work has focused on bettering long-term forecasting procedures while improvements to short-term forecasting techniques have not received significant academic attention. This dissertation combines traditional forecasting approaches with multivariate regression to develop a transferable shortterm public transportation ridership forecasting model that incorporates fuel price as a prediction parameter. The research herein addresses 254 US transit systems from bus, light rail, heavy rail, and commuter rail modes, and uses complementary methods to account for seasonal and non-seasonal ridership fluctuations. Models were built and calibrated using monthly data from 2002 to 2007 and validated using a six-month dataset from early 2008. Using variable transformations, classical data decomposition techniques, multivariate regression, and a variety of forecasting model validation measures, this work establishes a benchmark for future research into transferable transit ridership forecasting model improvements that may aid public transportation system planners in an era when, due to fuel price concerns, global warming and green initiatives, and other impetuses, transit use is seeing a resurgence in popularity.


Carbon materials, especially Vulcan XC-72 carbon black, are the most widely used catalyst support in low temperature fuel cells. Several disadvantages of these catalyst supports, however, limit the catalyst performance leading to reduced fuel cell performance and durability: low resistance to corrosion at high potentials, micropores leading to limited accessible surface, impermeability to gases and liquids, and no proton conductivity. Therefore, development of novel supports or modified carbon materials is essential to commercialization of low temperature fuel cell technology. Due to unique metallic/semiconductor characteristics along with excellent environmental stability, facile synthesis and high conductivity, polypyrrole (PPy), a member of the conjugated heterocyclic conducting polymers, has been considered the most promising alternative to carbon supports in fuel cells. Extensive research on PPy-containing catalysts has been reported in the last twenty years. This paper systematically and critically reviews the progress and main achievements of PPy use in both anode and cathode catalysts for low temperature fuel cells. Insight into the remaining challenges and future research directions is also discussed.


A collaborative network is a network consisting of a variety of autonomous actors (e.g. enterprises, organizations and people) that collaborate to better achieve common or compatible goals. A collaborative network starts with a contract and then the collaboration partners conduct business as described in the contract. Before engaging in such a collaboration, partners need to reach an agreement regarding their responsibilities in the collaboration and develop a shared understanding regarding the endurability and the profitability of the collaboration. Here in this paper, we aim at analysing the endurability of collaborative networks based on the trust relations between collaboration partners and also introducing a new approach to do profitability analysis for collaborative networks. Therefore, we enrich the value models of business collaborations with information about trust, endurability and profitability.


During an interview, the author Rudolf Herter in Harry Mulisch's novel Siegfried states that Hitler would only be comprehended if an imaginative experiment is conducted by capturing him in a net of fiction. This is indeed what Mulisch does in this novel. The combination of historical and fictional data resulting from this strategy is typical of the conventional historical novel, while Siegfried also manifests modernist characteristics. In this study, however, special attention is paid to aspects such as metafictionality, selfreflexivity, subjectivity and an emphasis on ideology which Siegfried shares with other postmodern historical novels, with specific reference to Linda Hutcheon's view on historiographic metafiction and Lies Wesseling's definition of uchronian fiction. The focus in this study lies, inter alia, on the ways in which Mulisch utilizes open spaces in history and fits the fictitious data like pieces into the puzzle of the history of the Second World War in general and specific events surrounding Hitler in particular. Mulisch's play with autobiographical data in the novel further diminishes the boundaries between fact and fiction. Of particular importance is the metafictional statements about the nature of history which Mulisch delivers in the process. Not only the political side of history, but also its subjective and one-sided nature is emphasised. Finally a question is posed about Mulisch's intentions and aspirations in writing another novel about Hitler, who as a character in this novel awakens sympathy on the one hand and on the other is demonized as inhuman with superhuman qualities. This demonstrates the problems involved in gaining insight into the real Hitler. My opinion is that, in the final instance, Mulisch intentionally magnifies the enigma surrounding Hitler in his characterization of the man who can be regarded as one of the most destructive people of the 20 century.


In recent years, with the formation of organisations such as the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre, social science interest in the Australian desert has re-surfaced with a research emphasis that is focused on creating sustainable futures for the region. One consequence of this is a demand for detailed demographic information to allow an assessment of different quanta of need in social and economic policy, and for assessment of the impact of these in environmental policy. However, demographic analysis on human populations in the desert to date has attracted very little research attention. In this paper we begin to address this lack of analysis by focusing on the populations, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal, of the arid and semi-arid zones of Australia. We extend earlier analysis by including for the first time demographic information on the semi-arid as well as the arid zone to establish the spatial pattern of population growth within the whole desert area drawing attention to the resulting settlement structure as an outcome of prevailing social, cultural and economic conditions. By examining population structure and demographic components of population change we also present for the first time population projections for the semi-arid zone and, therefore, in combination with the arid zone, for the entire Australian desert. All of this provides a basis for considering social and economic policy implications and the nature of underlying processes that drive change in this region.


The City of Fredericton is the capital of New Brunswick, located in eastern Canada. Right-turn-on-red (RTOR) is a general practice at any traffic intersection in this maritime province. Many collisions between pedestrians and vehicles have been recorded at signalized intersections in the downtown area of the city. Due to the number of collisions, the City of Fredericton was interested in investigating how a restriction against RTOR could affect vehicular traffic. The purpose and goal of this project was to develop a calibrated traffic model of the downtown area of Fredericton that could be used for simulation studies. Two main changes were investigated: 1) a restriction against RTOR for each of eleven key intersections in the downtown area, and 2) a restriction against left-turns at one selected intersection. The traffic simulation model was also used for analyzing how factors such as pedestrian volumes, lane channelization, and turning proportions affect the changes in traffic conditions due to permitting, or prohibiting, right-turn-on-red.The traffic simulation model was created in the TSIS/CORSIM software. Several different scenarios were generated for analysis. The results of the simulation show that the traffic conditions in the whole downtown area will be affected when introducing a restriction against RTOR. Certain intersections show a relatively high change while others show no significant change at all. Several different factors were seen to affect the number of RTOR that could be performed at an intersection. One main factor was lane channelization. With a shared lane, the proportion of right-turning vehicles at the intersection was found to highly affect how many RTOR can be performed. Pedestrian volumes prove to be a third factor affecting the number of RTOR at an intersection.Overall results demonstrate that there are only a few intersections where it is suitable for the City of Fredericton to implement a restriction against RTOR.


In Pax8-/- mice the thyroid anlage disappears around E11.5. At birth the gland appears as a rudimentary structure composed only of C cells while thyroid follicular cells are undetectable. Thus, this model does not allow the study of Pax8 function in the postnatal thyroid.
To address the role of Pax8 in the differentiated thyroid, I established novel strains amenable to thyroid follicular cell-specific conditional knockout of Pax8 gene using the Cre/lox system. A genetically modified mouse strain (Pax8fl/fl) harbouring a floxed allele of Pax8 was generated. These mice were crossed with two different Cre mice, a Pax8Cre/+ strain expressing constitutively Cre recombinase by embryonic day 8.5 and a Tg-CreER strain in which Cre is active in thyroid follicular cells following tamoxifen injection.
Pax8Cre/fl mice do not display an overt phenotype during embryonic life. However, 3-week old Pax8Cre/fl pups show a hypothyroid phenotype characterized by both an increased serum TSH value and a significant reduction in body weight when compared with their wild type littermates. In Pax8Cre/fl animals the thyroid gland is hypoplastic and shows the absence of the follicular structure; moreover, the expression of many thyroid specific genes, required for both hormone production and regulative functions, is completely abolished. In addition, survival of follicular cells is impaired.
The disruption of Pax8 in adult life (Pax8ko/fl;Tg-CreER strain) seems to be not efficient and thyroid structure appears comparable to that of wild type. However, the absence of a clear phenotype in the Pax8ko/fl;TgCreER thyroid could be due to the compensatory proliferation of cells in which Pax8 has not been inactivated.
In conclusion, in my thesis work I demonstrated in vivo that Pax8 plays a key role in controlling both the expression of many thyroid specific genes and the survival of thyroid follicular cells.


I attend to two areas of increasing significance in relation to Web 2.0 since its announcement in 2005. The first is a focus on the non-human in digital media research, and the second is the normalisation of dating apps in society. Building upon ideas from speculative design and speculative method, I introduce the idea of speculative devices, those things that are set in place based on a conjecture of an outcome. Drawing upon a case study of Ashley Madison, generated using a walkthrough method and analysis of media coverage, I demonstrate how the speculative devices of bots and profiles can operate, and why. I argue we need to give careful thought to how our research and practice is understood, and conducted where speculative devices are concerned.


In this study, the effect of the infrared radiative heating (IRH) was investigated on the film formation from composites of polystyrene (PS) latex particles and poly vinyl alcohol (PVA). The films were prepared as a pure PS and a mixture of PS and PVA particles at equal compositions at room temperature and they were annealed at elevated temperatures above the glass transition temperature (Tg) of PS for 10 min by using IRH technique. Identical experiments were performed by using standard convectional heating technique in oven as comparison. It was shown that the activation energy for the film formation from PS latex particles decreased considerably in IRH annealing technique. Photon transmission (PT) and steady state fluorescence (SSF) techniques were used to monitor the film formation process at each sintering step. Minimum film formation temperature, To, and healing temperature, Th, were determined by the data obtained from the SSF and the PT measurements for each heating processes. The film formation was modeled as a void closure and as an interdiffusion stage below and above Th, respectively. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was used to examine the variation in morphological structure of annealed composite films. It was observed that IRH heating causes more homogenous and more flat film surface than films annealed in the oven. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2016, 133, 43289.


Songbirds have emerged as powerful experimental models for the study of auditory processing of complex natural communication signals. Intact hearing is necessary for several behaviors in developing and adult animals including vocal learning, territorial defense, mate selection and individual recognition. These behaviors are thought to require the processing, discrimination and memorization of songs. Although much is known about the brain circuits that participate in sensorimotor (auditory-vocal) integration, especially the "song-control" system, less is known about the anatomical and functional organization of central auditory pathways. Here we discuss findings associated with a telencephalic auditory area known as the caudomedial nidopallium (NCM). NCM has attracted significant interest as it exhibits functional properties that may support higher order auditory functions such as stimulus discrimination and the formation of auditory memories. NCM neurons are vigorously driven by auditory stimuli. Interestingly, these responses are selective to conspecific, relative to heterospecific songs and artificial stimuli. In addition, forms of experience-dependent plasticity occur in NCM and are song-specific. Finally, recent experiments employing high-throughput quantitative proteomics suggest that complex protein regulatory pathways are engaged in NCM as a result of auditory experience. These molecular cascades are likely central to experience-associated plasticity of NCM circuitry and may be part of a network of calcium-driven molecular events that support the formation of auditory memory traces.


Feature selection is fundamental to knowledge discovery from massive amount of high-dimensional data. In an effort to establish theoretical justification for feature selection algorithms, this paper presents a theoretically optimal criterion, namely, the discriminative optimal criterion (DoC) for feature selection. Compared with the existing representative optimal criterion (RoC, [CHECK END OF SENTENCE]) which retains maximum information for modeling the relationship between input and output variables, DoC is pragmatically advantageous because it attempts to directly maximize the classification accuracy and naturally reflects the Bayes error in the objective. To make DoC computationally tractable for practical tasks, we propose an algorithmic framework, which selects a subset of features by minimizing the Bayes error rate estimated by a nonparametric estimator. A set of existing algorithms as well as new ones can be derived naturally from this framework. As an example, we show that the Relief algorithm [CHECK END OF SENTENCE] greedily attempts to minimize the Bayes error estimated by the k-Nearest-Neighbor (kNN) method. This new interpretation insightfully reveals the secret behind the family of margin-based feature selection algorithms [CHECK END OF SENTENCE], [CHECK END OF SENTENCE] and also offers a principled way to establish new alternatives for performance improvement. In particular, by exploiting the proposed framework, we establish the Parzen-Relief (P-Relief) algorithm based on Parzen window estimator, and the MAP-Relief (M-Relief) which integrates label distribution into the max-margin objective to effectively handle imbalanced and multiclass data. Experiments on various benchmark data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.


Between 1900 and 1939 the Greek-Catholic parish clergy in
Galicia underwent a transformation of its social, national, political
and cultural consciousness. In part this was the result of the
political changes taking place in the province, as its Ruthenian
population developed a Ukrainian national consciousness expressed
during the interregnum between Austrian and Polish rule by the
creation of the Western Ukrainian Popular Republic, and later, in the
increasingly restrictive atmosphere of inter-war Poland, by the
activity of both moderate and radical nationalist groups. In part this
transformation was conditioned by the decline of the priestly caste
and the rise of a new type of priest, usually a celibate of village origin.
The transformation was also the result of a conscious programme
initiated by Metropolitan Andrei Sheptyts'kyi to raise the moral and
educational level of the clergy. To this end he reformed the L'viv
seminary, established a theological academy, and organised full
seminaries in Stanyslaviv and Peremyshl'. This prepared the parish
priest to deal with a growingly nationalistic and often anti-clerical
intelligentsia, and a village coming increasingly under its influence.
At the same time, the parish clergy evolved a new sense of its
identity, gradually abandoning the Russophile orientation of the Old
Ruthenians and adopting first Ruthenian populism, then Ukrainian
nationalism. Thus they found common cause with the secular
intelligentsia. However, the Ukrainian orientation forced them to
redefine the Eastern Ukrainian tradition in a manner compatible
with Catholicism, and to formulate their stance towards Orthodoxy
and the Kievan Byzantine tradition. Though split between
Byzantinists and Westernisers, the clergy developed a strong sense of
their place as leaders of Galician Ukrainian society, albeit in
occasional competition with the nationalist intelligentsia, and of
their mission as bearers of Catholicism in the East.


The law of preferential transfers permits the trustee of a bankruptcy estate to avoid transfers made by the debtor to a creditor on account of a prior debt in the 90 days leading up to the bankruptcy proceeding. The standard for avoiding these preferential transfers is one of strict liability, on the rationale that preference actions exist to ensure that all general creditors of the bankruptcy estate recover the same proportional amount, regardless of the debtor's intent to favor any one creditor or the creditor's intent to be so favored. However, preference law also permits certain exceptions to strict preference liability and gives the estate trustee discretion in pursuing preference actions. These exceptions and the use of discretion permit the continuation of preferences to certain creditors. Such practices undermine the policy of equal distribution by permitting some creditors to fare better than others in the bankruptcy distribution. However, these practices are arguably necessary to promote conflicting bankruptcy policies that seek to maximize the estate for the benefit of creditors and encourage the survival of struggling businesses. As a result, the law of preferences is internally inconsistent and controversial, attempting unsuccessfully to serve multiple policy masters at the same time. Much of the analysis on preferences up to now has proposed amending preference law generally in an attempt to satisfy these often conflicting demands. This article recommends consideration of a more dramatic approach; returning preference law to a mechanism of equal distribution in liquidation proceedings by eliminating true exceptions to the rule, and doing away with preference law altogether in the context of bankruptcy reorganization.


Modern machine translation techniques typically incorporate both a translation model, which guides how individual words and phrases can be translated, and a language model (LM), which promotes fluency as translated words and phrases are combined into a translated sentence. Most attempts to inform the translation process with linguistic knowledge have focused on infusing syntax into translation models. We present a novel technique for incorporating syntactic knowledge as a language model in the context of statistical phrase-based machine translation (Koehn et al., 2003), one of the most widely used modern translation paradigms.
The major contributions of this work are as follows: * We present a formal definition of an incremental syntactic language model as a Hierarchical Hidden Markov Model (HHMM), and detail how this model is estimated from a treebank corpus of labelled data. * The HHMM syntactic language model has been used in prior work involving parsing, speech recognition, and semantic role labelling. We present the first complete algorithmic definition of the HHMM as a language model. * We develop a novel and general method for incorporating any generative incremental language model into phrase-based machine translation. We integrate our HHMM incremental syntactic language model into Moses, the prevailing phrase-based decoder. * We present empirical results that demonstrate substantial improvements in perplexity for our syntactic language model over traditional n-gram language models; we also present empirical results on a constrained Urdu-English translation task that demonstrate the use of our syntactic LM.
A standard measure of language model quality is average per-word perplexity. We present empirical results evaluating perplexity of various n-gram language models and our syntactic language model on both in-domain and out-of-domain test sets. On an in-domain test set, a traditional 5-gram language model trained on the same data as our syntactic language model outperforms the syntactic language model in terms of perplexity. We find that interpolating the 5-gram LM with the syntactic LM results in improved perplexity results, a 10% absolute reduction in perplexity compared to the 5-gram LM alone.
On an out-of-domain test set, we find that our syntactic LM substantially outperforms all other LMs trained on the same training data. The syntactic LM demonstrates a 58% absolute reduction in perplexity over a 5-gram language model trained on the same training data. On this same out-of-domain test set, we further show that interpolating our syntactic language model with a large Gigaword-scale 5-gram language model results in the best overall perplexity results—a 61% absolute reduction in perplexity compared to the Gigaword-scale 5-gram language model alone, a 76% absolute reduction in perplexity compared to the syntactic LM alone, and a 90% absolute reduction in perplexity compared to the original smaller 5-gram language model.
A language model with low perplexity is a theoretically good model of the language; it is expected that using an LM with low perplexity as a component of a machine translation system should result in more fluent translations. We present empirical results on a constrained Urdu-English translation task and perform an informal manual evaluation of translation results which suggests that the use of our incremental syntactic language model is indeed serving to guide the translation algorithm towards more fluent target language translations.


Backscatter absorption gas imaging (BAGI) is a technique that uses infrared active imaging to generate real-time video imagery of gas plumes. We describe a method that employs imaging at two wavelengths (absorbed and not absorbed by the gas to be detected) to allow wavelength-differential BAGI. From the frames collected at each wavelength, an absorbance image is created that displays the differential absorbance of the atmosphere between the imager and the backscatter surface. This is analogous to a two-dimensional topographic differential absorption lidar or differential optical absorption spectroscopy measurement. Gas plumes are displayed, but the topographic scene image is removed. This allows a more effective display of the plume image, thus ensuring detection under a wide variety of conditions. The instrument used to generate differential BAGI is described. Data generated by the instrument are presented and analyzed to estimate sensitivity.


Programming is inherently a problem solving exercise: A programmer has to create an understanding of the situation, externalize and contextualize thoughts and ideas, develop strategies on how to proceed with the task, enact changes according to the most appropriate strategy, and reflect to learn from each problem. Therefore, programming is clearly more than just code input, testing, and maintenance. However, modern development environments largely focus on the "writing code" parts of programming. To support all aspects of problem solving in programming, we propose a new Integrated Development Environment (IDE) which uses a dynamic, expressive, and human-centric cards and canvas paradigm.


Marine pCO2 enrichment via ocean acidification (OA), upwelling and release from carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities is projected to have devastating impacts on marine biomineralisers and the services they provide. However, empirical studies using stable endpoint pCO2 concentrations find species exhibit variable biological and geochemical responses rather than the expected negative patterns. In addition, the carbonate chemistry of many marine systems is now being observed to be more variable than previously thought. To underpin more robust projections of future OA impacts on marine biomineralisers and their role in ecosystem service provision, we investigate coralline algal responses to realistically variable scenarios of marine pCO2 enrichment. Coralline algae are important in ecosystem function; providing habitats and nursery areas, hosting high biodiversity, stabilizing reef structures and contributing to the carbon cycle. Red coralline marine algae were exposed for 80 days to one of three pH treatments: (i) current pH (control); (ii) low pH (7.7) representing OA change; and (iii) an abrupt drop to low pH (7.7) representing the higher rates of pH change observed at natural vent systems, in areas of upwelling and during CCS releases. We demonstrate that red coralline algae respond differently to the rate and the magnitude of pH change induced by pCO2 enrichment. At low pH, coralline algae survived by increasing their calcification rates. However, when the change to low pH occurred at a fast rate we detected, using Raman spectroscopy, weaknesses in the calcite skeleton, with evidence of dissolution and molecular positional disorder. This suggests that, while coralline algae will continue to calcify, they may be structurally weakened, putting at risk the ecosystem services they provide. Notwithstanding evolutionary adaptation, the ability of coralline algae to cope with OA may thus be determined primarily by the rate, rather than magnitude, at which pCO2 enrichment occurs.


Pests, Diseases and Beneficials helps gardeners to identify and deal with those common insects and small animals (such as bugs, beetles, caterpillars, thrips and mites) that are found in every Australian garden.

It offers clear descriptions and full colour images to aid in identifying insects or other organisms, and provides useful advice on how to recognise and treat problems. The book also covers feeding habits, life cycles and insect biology.

Based on the 1980 book Friends and Foes of Australian Gardens, this new work has been revised and expanded to include general garden situations as well as Australian native plants, and provides further information on plant diseases, harmless and beneficial fungi, bacteria and viruses, physiological disorders and problems caused by horticultural mismanagement.


Responding to calls for accountability, transparency and better evidence, police departments have rapidly adopted body cameras. Recording policies require the police to record more law enforcement encounters than ever before. But what happens if officers do not record? This is an important growing area of controversy. Based on the collection and coding of police department body camera policies, this article reveals widespread detection and enforcement gaps regarding failures to record as required. More than half of the major-city departments in the sample have no provisions on consequences for not recording as required — and several have protections against discipline.
The article discusses how the labor-management structure of departments and the individual-blame nature of disciplinary processes render internal departmental enforcement of recording rules challenging. As the central framers of conduct rules for police and gatekeepers of evidence, courts have an important role to play in addressing the missing video problem. The challenge is how to frame remedies that avoid judicial inquiry deterrence — reluctance to address missing video issues because it would entail messy and costly collateral mini-trials on whether recordings are missing for legitimate reasons or due to officer malfeasance. This article proposes three judicial pretrial remedies that proceed from a more administrable evidentiary fairness perspective: exclusion of partial recordings, favorable inferences, and pattern and practice detection harnessing systemic facts accumulated by courts across criminal cases.


In sculpture practice, artists are challenged by a 3D digital medium within which digital data intangibility also embeds a tangible form. The focus of this study is to understand how a 3D technological context extends spatial and medium boundaries in sculpture practice and affects artists' conceptual and practical approaches to the creative process. The study explores the sculptors' relation to space, time, and the medium inside a gravity-free spatial context, which proposes a re-defined concept-process relationship. The research methods include a Research Creation experiential mode of inquiry and a case study interview approach. The Research Creation project documents the artist-researcher as sculptor's conceptual investigations (which are focused on environmental concepts). The main sculpture installation work, Vulnerable: The Salmon Project, conveys a concept of memory and proposes a visual metaphor of the vulnerability of the living condition. The data collection method is informed by the artist-researcher's creative exploration guided by an experiential learning of 3D scanning, in-depth investigations into the structure of digital objects, and applied knowledge of 3D modelling and rapid prototyping processes. The case study focuses on three professional sculptors: Kiki Smith, Evan Penny, and Trevor Gould. The artist-researcher presents an interpretation of how the artists' conceptual explorations, professional backgrounds, and experience play a role in the way they approach 3D technology in their creative process. This research examines how artists engage with a digital medium and the ways in which it influences their visual language and artwork aesthetics. The research outcomes indicate that explorative and innovative perspectives lead to a convergence of digital mediums. Artists experience a medium that encourages the crossing over from 2D to 3D. Collaboration, or a shared knowledge approach, stimulates creative freedom inside a 3D software environment. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of artists' interactions with extended spatial dimensions and a digital medium through which technology becomes a way of engaging, perceiving, sensing, and experiencing creativity.


We present an cross-correlation frequency-resolved optical gating (XFROG) measurement of a megahertz IR supercontinuum generated in a step-index ZBLAN fiber. The resulting spectrogram gives the dispersion characteristics of the fiber and reveals that it has three zero-dispersion wavelengths. A comparison of the measured spectrogram with numerical simulations shows that this dispersion profile allows a notable dispersive-wave generation toward long wavelengths. Furthermore, the sum-frequency generation process in the XFROG measurement gives the possibility of measuring the IR light with fast Si-based detectors, such as CCD arrays.


In the European Social Survey (ESS) contact rates differ across countries. These differences are broadly due to (1) differences in survey implementation, (2) differences in population characteristics associated with contact propensity and (3) differences in the association between 1 or 2 and contact propensity. This paper investigates correlates of contact within and across ESS countries by decomposing cross-country differences in predicted mean contact propensities into (population and fieldwork) characteristics effects, coefficients effects and a pseudo-interaction effect. The findings shed light on the cross-national comparability of the manipulable aspects of the contacting process. In addition, we distinguish factors explaining withincountry contact propensity from factors explaining cross-country differences.


Obesity occurs when energy expenditure is outweighed by energy intake. Tuberal hypothalamic nuclei, including the arcuate nucleus (ARC), ventromedial nucleus (VMH), and dorsomedial nucleus (DMH), control for food intake and energy expenditure. Here we reported that, contrary to females, male mice lacking circadian nuclear receptors REV-ERB alpha and beta in the tuberal hypothalamus (HDKO) gained excessive weight on an obesogenic high fat diet due to both decreased energy expenditure and increased food intake during the light phase. Moreover, rebound food intake after fasting was markedly increased in HDKO mice. Integrative transcriptomic and cistromic analyses revealed that such disruption in feeding behavior was due to perturbed REV-ERB-dependent leptin signaling in the ARC. Indeed, in vivo leptin sensitivity was impaired in HDKO mice on an obesogenic diet in a diurnal manner. Thus, REV-ERBs play a crucial role in hypothalamic control of food intake and diurnal leptin sensitivity in diet-induced obesity.


Previous studies indicate that 25–45% of chronic urticaria patients have an autoimmune etiology. Autologous serum skin test (ASST) and autologous plasma skin test (APST) are simple tests for diagnosing chronic autoimmune urticaria (CAU). However, there are still some questions about the specificity of these tests. This study consisted of 50 patients with chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU) and 50 sex- and age-matched healthy individuals aged 18 years, and older. A total of 31 (62%) patients and 5 (10%) control patients had positive ASST; 21 (42%) patients and 3 (6%) control patients had positive APST. Statistically significant differences were noted in ASST and APST positivity between the patient and control groups (ASST P < 0.001; APST P < 0.001). Thirteen (26%) patients and 5 (10%) control patients had antithyroglobulin antibodies or antithyroid peroxidase antibody positivity. No statistically significant differences were noted in thyroid autoantibodies between the patient and control groups (anti-TG P = 0.317; anti-TPO P = 0.269). We consider that the ASST and APST can both be used as in vivo tests for the assessment of autoimmunity in the etiology of CSU and that thyroid autoantibodies should be checked even when thyroid function tests reveal normal results in patients with CSU.


As a contribution towards understanding the impact of free-stream perturbations on laminar-to-turbulent boundary layer transition, we calculate the signature of unsteady disturbances engendered by the interaction of free-stream vortical fluctuations with a laminar boundary layer over a flat and a curved plate. We concentrate on low-frequency perturbations which, in the case of a flat plate, induce strong streamwise-elongated components of the boundary-layer signature, known as Klebanoff modes or streaks. In boundary layers over suitably curved concave walls, Klebanoff modes are expected to develop into Gortler vortices. The generation and nonlinear evolution of the induced perturbations, which acquire an O(1) magnitude, are described on a self-consistent and first-principle basis using the mathematical framework of the nonlinear unsteady boundary-region equations (NUBREs), subject to appropriate upstream and far-field boundary conditions. The nonlinear response of a compressible flat-plate boundary layer to free-stream vorticity is investigated first.
The problem is governed by the compressible NUBREs, which are derived herein for the first time. The free-stream flow is studied by including the boundary-layer displacement effect and the solution is matched asymptotically with the boundary-layer flow. The nonlinear interactions inside the boundary layer drive an unsteady two-dimensional flow of acoustic nature in the outer inviscid region through the displacement effect. Analytical solutions are derived by exploiting the well-known analogy with the flow over a thin oscillating airfoil, which is used herein for the first time to study unsteady boundary layers. In the subsonic regime the perturbation is felt from the plate in all directions, while at supersonic speeds the disturbance only propagates within the dihedron defined by the Mach line. Numerical computations are performed for carefully chosen parameters that characterize three practical applications: turbomachinery systems, supersonic flight conditions and wind-tunnel experiments. The results show that nonlinearity plays a marked stabilizing role on the velocity and temperature streaks, and this is found to be the case for low-disturbance environment such as flight conditions. Increasing the free-stream Mach number inhibits the kinematic fluctuations but enhances the thermal streaks, relative to the free-stream velocity and temperature respectively, and the overall effect of nonlinearity becomes weaker. An abrupt deviation of the nonlinear solution from the linear one is observed in the case pertaining to a supersonic wind tunnel. Large-amplitude thermal streaks and the strong abrupt stabilizing effect of nonlinearity are two new features of supersonic flows.
In the second part of the thesis, the generation and nonlinear development of unsteady Gortler vortices in an incompressible boundary layer over a concave plate is studied.
The centrifugal force caused by the concavity of the wall is included in the incompressible NUBREs. The results show that the stabilizing effect on nonlinearity is significantly intensified in the presence of centrifugal forces. Sufficiently downstream the nonlinear vortices generated at different free-stream turbulence levels Tu are stabilized to the same amplitude, suggesting that the initial intensity of the forcing becomes unimportant. At low Tu the perturbation undergoes a quasi-exponential growth with the growth rate being enhanced for lower frequencies and more curved plates. At higher Tu, in the typical range of turbomachinery applications, the Gortler vortices do not exhibit an exponential growth as nonlinearity saturates rapidly, and the wall curvature does not influence the boundary-layer response. Good quantitative agreement with direct numerical simulations and experimental data is obtained.


Pseudomonas fluorescens is a plant growth promoting rhizobacterium that provides nutrients for growth and induces systemic resistance against plant diseases. It has been linked with a number of human diseases including nosocomial infections and bacterial cystitis. Chemotactic motility of P. fluorescens towards root exudates plays a crucial role in establishing a symbiotic relationship with host plants. The P. fluorescens chemotactic transducer of amino acids type B (CtaB) mediates chemotaxis towards amino acids. As a step towards elucidation of the structural basis of ligand recognition by CtaB, we have produced crystals of its recombinant sensory domain and performed their X-ray diffraction analysis. The periplasmic sensory domain of CtaB has been expressed, purified, and crystallized by the hanging-drop vapor diffusion method using ammonium sulfate as a precipitating agent. A complete data set was collected to 2.2 Å resolution using cryocooling conditions and synchrotron radiation. The crystals belong to space group P212121, with unit-cell parameters a = 34.5, b = 108.9, c = 134.6 Å. Calculation of the Matthews coefficient and the self-rotation function using this data set suggested that the asymmetric unit contains a protein dimer. Detailed structural analysis of CtaB would be an important step towards understanding the molecular mechanism underpinning the recognition of environmental signals and transmission of the signals to the inside of the cell.


Dear Editor

Parakshit Gogate & Anil N Kulkarni

J Comm Eye Health 2002; 15: 26–27

Probably no-one will question the advantages of affordable good quality IOL surgery through satellite hospitals, near to where the patients live. The article by Gogate and Kulkarni illustrates the differences in results between hospital based surgery (ECCE/IOL and ECCE) and eye camp surgery (ICCE), in a large series.

The article states that final corrected visual acuities were much better in the Base Hospital (82.7% > 6/18), compared to the Peripheral Eye Camps (43.7% > 6/18). This statement, although clearly accurate in itself, does not seem to me to reflect possibly better results and conclusions – if some of the following comments had been considered and implemented.

In the Camps, visual acuity was assessed with standard +10D aphakic correction. It is reported that 99.1% of the patients received standard +10D aphakic spectacles after 6 weeks.

At the Base Hospital, retinoscopic refraction was done in 63.9% of the patients. This does not necessarily mean that patients also bought the spectacles according to prescription! Visual acuity is not known in the remaining 36.1%.

For comparison, it would have been better to either present visual acuity at the Base Hospital with IOL implant, without additional refraction (real life situation), or with standard +10D in aphakics, or to present retinoscopic refraction in both Camp and Base hospital for all patients. With additional retinoscopic refraction, the Camp group might well have had equally good visual results.

Poor visual results between both groups are about equal: 6/60 or worse at Camps in 5.1% and at Base Hospital in 6.1%. Vitreous loss was more often a complication in the Hospital, but the Hospital operated on more difficult cases.

In addition, 58.2% of the patients at the Base Hospital received an IOL. Thus, 41.8% were left aphakic. In combination with the poor follow-up, some of the aphakic patients may not have received any correction at all, resulting in a VA < 3/60, but no details are given of this group.

IOLs have become much cheaper since the study was done, but it should be noted that, at the time of the study, the main reason (80%) for not receiving IOLs, was inability to pay.

Another interesting point is that Camps were especially suitable for women, who often cannot travel far. This is an important factor that has to be taken into account.

The above study shows that Camps still have a role to play in remote rural areas and that results can actually be quite satisfactory.


Over the last ten years, the United Nations Security Council has begun considering organized criminal activity in some situations, including drug trafficking, diamond, mineral and wildlife trafficking, and piracy. This Working Paper reviews this practice, finding that the Security Council has begun to draw on domestic criminal justice discourse and techniques – including criminal investigation, trial, and punitive sanctions. However, the Council has encountered three obstacles in applying these at the international level: 1) sovereignty; 2) limited access to effective law enforcement and judicial capacity; and 3) due process. Experimenting with ways to address these obstacles, the Security Council has developed four modes of international law enforcement: 1) decentralized enforcement (through states' own criminal justice systems); 2) collective enforcement (for example through anti-piracy naval operations off Somalia); 3) direct enforcement (through executive policing and military action by the UN against criminal groups, for example in Kosovo and Haiti); and, increasingly, 4) a regulatory approach (for example through adoption of 'Due Diligence' guidelines requiring companies to remove illicit minerals from their supply chain). The paper reviews how these different experiments have played out, and draws attention to the dangers of the Council raising public expectations that it will act like a judge, meting out justice, rather than as a political forum. United Nations University Working Paper Series Number 03 – March 2014


Sunflower is a crop with high oil and economic values which portends its great potential for enhancing agricultural productivity and poverty alleviation among smallholder farmers. These notwithstanding, optimum benefit of the sunflower value chain have not been adequately harnessed. Conceived with the backdrop of lack of awareness about the commercial, nutritional and medicinal potentials of sunflower among the rural farm families, the study assessed the utilisation of sunflower among smallholder farmers in two southwestern states (Ogun and Ekiti) of Nigeria, and two districts (southeast and Kgatleng) of Botswana in sub-Saharan Africa. A total of two hundred smallholder farmers were randomly chosen from four purposively selected farming communities in southwestern Nigeria and Botswana districts. Results showed that 49 and 84% of the respondents were aware about the sunflower crop in Nigeria and Botswana, respectively, while only 10 and 25% cultivated the crop, respectively. The results further showed that all those (25%) who cultivated the crop in Botswana utilised it as animal feed only, while their Nigerian counterpart utilised it for variety of purposes. While 6 and 7% utilised it as animal feed and manure/fertiliser production, respectively, in Nigeria, 2, 5 and 8%, respectively, used it for cake/snack production, and traditional and ornamental purposes. Yet, another 6% cultivated the sunflower crop for seed oil extraction. The study concluded that, although, higher proportion of smallholder farmers from Botswana knew about and cultivated the sunflower crop, yet, their Nigeria counterpart utilised the crop more. The need for continuous popularization of the production and utilisation of sunflower crop among smallholder farmers was therefore recommended in both Bostwana and Nigeria.

 Key words: Sunflower utilisation, smallholder farmers, value chain.


Micronutrients, which comprise minerals and vitamins, are essential for a variety of biological processes such as growth, immune response, regulation of gene expression and cognitive functions. Micronutrients: The Key to Good Health presents key information about the causes, signs and symptoms of micronutrient deficiencies along with remedial dietary measures. The book also provides authentic knowledge of the nature, structure and metabolic functions of vitamins and essential minerals in a reader-friendly manner. The aim of the book is to provide comprehensive knowledge about micronutrients and their role in a balanced diet for maintaining personal health.

Key features:

- Covers the basics of nutrition and the importance of micronutrients in health over 5 reader-friendly chapters

- Covers metabolic functions of micronutrients

- Covers the development of micronutrient rich food products

- Includes information about micronutrient deficiencies with remedial dietary measures in terms of ready-to-eat food supplements in a precise manner

- Includes information about phytochemical nutrients, prebiotics and postbiotics

- Informs the reader about myths on micronutrients

- Includes several informative illustrations, tables and appendices on daily nutrient requirements, diet assessment and composition and much more,

This book serves as a ready reference for the health science students, public health workers, nutrition professionals, and health-conscious readers.


Signal processing algorithms in Wireless Sensor Networks claim for energy efficiency because of node energy scarcity. Tailored to this scenario, in this paper we develop energy-efficient cooperative strategies for selective communications. Cooperation among nodes is exploited in order to optimize energy consumption while guaranteeing good overall performance. The analysis of representative scenarios reveals that cooperative selective nodes yield a good performance in both network lifetime and quality of the transmitted information under different network conditions.


In this research we construct market networks to study correlation between the price return for all Dow Jones, NASDAQ-100 and S&P 100 indices that were traded over a period of time. We consider market networks, which have stocks as nodes and edges corresponding to correlated stocks. Specifically, a winner-take-all approach is used to determine if two nodes are adjacent. We identify that all networks based on the connecting stocks of highly correlated price returns display a scale-free degree distribution.
Additionally, we use features for representing different aspects of the network. The feature includes small connected sub-graphs with three and four vertices. We use an algorithm to count frequently the number of the graphlets for our mathematical models and our constructed networks. Each network is assigned an 8-dimensional vector.
We present a model selection algorithm based on supervised learning. Our algorithm classifies our market networks with the best fitting mathematical model.


Economics has the capacity to offer us deep insights into some of the most formidable problems of life, and offer solutions to them too. Combining a global approach with examples from everyday life, Partha Dasgupta describes the lives of two children who live very different lives in different parts of the world: in the Mid-West USA and in Ethiopia. He compares the obstacles facing them, and the processes that shape their lives, their families, and their futures. He shows how economics uncovers these processes, finds explanations for them, and how it forms policies and solutions. Along the way, Dasgupta provides an intelligent and accessible introduction to key economic factors and concepts such as individual choices, national policies, efficiency, equity, development, sustainability, dynamic equilibrium, property rights, markets, and public goods. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.


I have in this discussion tried to normalize the idea of an after-life (with its apparently quantized planes of consciousness) by placing it in a theoretical framework informed by the hiatic behavior of the quantum paradigm.  I have also tried to  de-weird  the paradigm by placing it in the somewhat more accessible framework of world-creative consciousness, a common example of which is the phenomenon of  dreaming up  a complete and all-encompassing world.  To put it another way, the external world behaves the way it does because it appears to be infused with an internal or consciousness-like aspect, which behaves as it does because it is composed of a hierarchy of levels or planes.  One of these levels is the physical plane, wherein the quantum foundations of reality were discovered.  Moreover, the hostility of physicists to the idea of a non-physical plane associated with an after-life or mind somehow independent of matter makes sense in the theoretical framework I am attempting to put forward.


For decades, the Brazilian agriculture sector has suffered strong income transfers to many of the country's other economic sectors, which caused the impoverishment of many Brazilian farmers. Government sponsored rural credit assistance programs have somewhat redressed this inequity and ameliorated the farmer's plight. However, due to the structure of these credit assistance programs, the majority of their benefits have gone to the country's largest agricultural producers, thereby increasing income disparity found between family and commercial farms. New policies are needed that actually assist the majority of those that work in the Brazilian agriculture sector: the family farmers. This work evaluates effects of implementation of an Income Stabilization Policy (ISP) intended to support family farmers, focusing on cassava, milk, and bean producers. The evaluation is based on the costs and benefits of ISP, with reference to the theory of economic surplus. This article also considers the policy's negative effect on the surplus generated by commercial producers. Study results indicate that implementation of the proposed ISP would increase the prices received for cassava, milk and beans, improve the income of Brazilian family farmers producing these products, and lead to consumer gains that more than offset the losses suffered by large, commercial agriculture producers.


Synopsis The key aspects of process metallurgy that distinguish platinum group metal (PGM) concentrate smelting from that of other base metal sulphide concentrates are presented. These differences include considerably higher input chrome and magnesia contents that directly raise the slag liquidus temperature and have the potential to increase accumulations of refractory spinels. Most importantly, the higher processing temperature required for PGM smelting and the resulting very high matte superheat lead to considerably more onerous smelting conditions than those typical of other smelting operations. This has presented challenges to furnace design and integrity, especially when coupled with the progressive intensification of smelting, involving doubling, and then redoubling, of furnace power inputs over the past 20 years. These power increases have been enabled by increasingly more advanced furnace cooling and structural technologies. Key technologies include strong constant-force spring-loaded bindings acting in three dimensions to minimize infiltration of superheated matte into brick joints, and robust well-cooled tapholes for reliably tapping the superheated matte. The result has been substantially improved productivity, and reduced smelting capital cost outlay per unit of production. A significant challenge, which was not anticipated, presented itself in the form of insidious corrosion of the furnace lining, and especially high-intensity copper cooling elements. Investigation of corrosion in related industries eventually identified 'chlorideaccelerated sulphidation', and this term has been retained as it generically describes the most pertinent aspects of the accelerated low-temperature wear of copper coolers observed in PGM smelting. In addition to discussing the corrosion mechanism, this paper describes a number of solutions that were developed jointly by Anglo American Platinum and Hatch to address the copper corrosion problem. First, new monitoring technologies allowed furnaces to be operated more safely for a longer period of time. Second, a system for replacing corroded coolers from outside the furnace during a fast 'hot' shutdown minimized the impact on furnace operating factor and hearth life. Finally, a corrosionresistant graphite-protected cooler design significantly improved furnace campaign life, and heralds a more lasting solution to cooler corrosion in PGM furnaces.


TWENTIETH-CENTURY readers of English without a knowledge of Old Irish (ca. 600-900 A.D.) or Middle Irish (ca. 900-1200 A.D.) were given reasonably good access to early medieval Irish poetry through the medium of the translation anthology. Through the efforts of Kuno Meyer, Robin Flower, Gerard Murphy, Frank O'Connor, and others, a good amount of early Irish verse written between the seventh and twelfth centuries was made available to English-language audiences. (1) But what of translation of this poetry into Modern Irish? Who undertook this task, for what reasons, and to what effect? From the very beginnings of the Gaelic Literary Revival, there had been calls for the translation of medieval Irish literature into Modern Irish. The ordinary reader of Modern Irish would not be able to make much sense of an early medieval Irish story or poem. Thus, at the time, in order to access a substantial portion of the medieval literary tradition, a Modern Irish speaker would generally turn to English translations provided in more or less scholarly editions or to the more literary reworkings provided, again in English, by the likes of Lady Gregory (1902, 1904) and Standish O'Grady (1878-80, 1894). Learning the earlier forms of the language was a daunting task, not one that the average reader of Irish with an interest in the earlier literature could be expected to undertake. This meant that the Irish reader's experience of older Irish texts was essentially mediated by English. In 1900 the perceived need for translations directly from the ancestral language into Modern Irish was formally acknowledged by the Oireachtas (2) in the institution of a prize for "the best modernized version of a tale or episode from Old or Middle Irish" (O'Leary 1994:233). Philip O'Leary has identified three main rationales for such modernization: (1) an awareness of the linguistic, historical, and cultural value of the early literature; (2) ideological grounds; and (3) a view of medieval Irish literature as providing a model for modern writing in Irish (1994:268-70). It is hard to disentangle the three, and separating them risks reductionism: for example, there is certainly an ideological element to the belief that medieval Irish literature is intrinsically valuable and that it can provide a model for contemporary authors. Speaking of the period 1922-39, O'Leary writes that what Gaelic activists wanted was for native scholars to use their learning to enrich contemporary Irish reality by restoring to the nation an authentic and accessible sense of its own past. In practical terms one of the central features of this project would be the immediate provision of competent Modern Irish versions, translations, of the full range of earlier Irish literature. (1998:201) The translation efforts undertaken on this front were almost exclusively from the prose tradition. Until the mid-twentieth century, verse seems to have been more or less ignored. The great early Irish prose narratives such as Tain Bo Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cuailnge, modern "Cooley") were seen as constitutive of and more essential to Irish national identity than were the religious, personal, and love poems from the same period. Therefore earlier translation efforts were centered on the prose, but by mid-century, with Irish political independence a reality, it was possible to turn to works that could not be so easily pressed into the mold of a heroic national ethos, such as lyric verse. (3) We will focus here on the translations done by two men, both of them significant figures in the mid-twentieth-century Irish literary world. Tomas O Floinn published two collections of Modern Irish translations from Old and Middle Irish: Athbheo (Alive Again or Revival) (4) in 1955 and Athdhanta (Re-poems) in 1969. Sean O Riordain provided the Modern Irish translations for an edition of a collection of early medieval Irish religious verse entitled Ri na nUile (King of All Things), prepared by Sean S. …


The purpose of this study was to conduct research on the impact of desegregation, under the Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas Court case decision, on African American principals. My focus was to explore the life of African American principals who served during the desegregation of Greensboro Public Schools in Greensboro, North Carolina. Very little research has been done on the effects of school desegregation on African American principals. Statistics do show that most African American school administrators lost their jobs or were demoted when public schools desegregated, but there are few accounts of their actual experiences. Narrative research was used to collect and study the lives of African American principals that worked during desegregation. Three school leaders were interviewed and their stories were shared with historical context. The research questions for this study were: (a) How do African American principals describe their experiences during desegregation? and (b)What leadership qualities and traits appear in the life stories of these African American principals? The lives of these three African American principals were compared and evaluated on the characteristics of effective school leaders according to two educational theorists. Several themes emerge from the narratives of these three men. First, all three leaders were highly respected members of the black and white community. They were able to bring students, parents and school staff members together in a very tense situation. Second, there is a clear focus on how dedicated these men were to their work. They seldom mentioned family life. Finally, each principal has a different account of desegregation, but they were all positive. They all spoke about a relatively smooth transition into school integration. All of these points will be addressed in the study.


The United States has a long and complicated history concerning religious rights, and the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., has done little to clear up the jurisprudence in this field. Although the decision will doubtless generate a great deal of commentary as a matter of constitutional and statutory law, the better approach is to consider whether and to what extent the majority and dissenting opinions reflect the fundamental principles of religious liberty. Only in that context can the merits of such a novel decision be evaluated free from political and other biases.This Article undertakes precisely that analysis by setting Hobby Lobby into a wider historical, theoretical and international setting so as to determine whether the decision to grant a commercial corporation a religious accommodation is consistent with the rationales underlying religious rights. The discussion considers the work of key theorists in this field while also contemplating relevant principles of international and comparative constitutional law. In so doing, the Article seeks to determine whether the Supreme Court has remained true to established principles of religious liberty or whether Hobby Lobby has made the United States an outlier in this important field of law.


Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used to aid training in language generation. This is achieved by enhancing standard maximum likelihood objectives with user-specified reward functions that encourage global semantic consistency. We propose a principled approach to address the difficulties associated with RL-based solutions, namely, high-variance gradients, uninformative rewards and brittle training. By leveraging the optimal transport distance, we introduce a regularizer that significantly alleviates the above issues. Our formulation emphasizes the preservation of semantic features, enabling end-to-end training instead of ad-hoc fine-tuning, and when combined with RL, it controls the exploration space for more efficient model updates. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed solution, we perform a comprehensive evaluation covering a wide variety of NLP tasks: machine translation, abstractive text summarization and image caption, with consistent improvements over competing solutions.


Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate the awareness level of librarians about various ICT applications in University of the Punjab (PU) and to examine the constraints and issues they are facing in acquisition of modern ICT skills. Methodology A questionnaire was developed and administered to 80 professional librarians having graduate and postgraduate qualification. Data was analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS 19.0). Findings Data analysis revealed that 99% of the participants are computer literate, having good knowledge of library automation and digitization. The knowledge of web based services such as e-mail, search engine, chatting, e-resources search, knowledge of OPAC/Web OPAC, etc by professionals is quite encouraging. However, majority of them have less knowledge of programming languages, whereas, HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is comparatively more popular programming language. Lack of training culture, poor infrastructure, and tight working schedule have been among the most common constraints in the acquisition of ICT skills identified by the participants of this study.


Andris Teikmanis: Toward Models of Socialist Realism Keywords: Soviet art, Latvia, Socialist Realism, political engagement, semiotic models Summary: Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 leaving behind the necessity to interpret and analyze practices of political engagement of art, Socialist Realism theory and method and Soviet art heritage. The aim of this research was the definition and elaboration of models of engagement used by the Soviet power. These models were intended as tools that allowed interpretation and categorization of particular periods of Soviet art ensuring political neutrality of these interpretations. These conditions determined the use of modes of interaction between political textual discourses and visual discourses of images rather than the content of politically engaged pictures as foundation of projected models. This allowed not only to interpret particular aspects of the Socialist Realism and categorize particular aspects of Latvia Soviet art periods, but also to declare some broader considerations about relations between art and politics. CV: Andris Teikmanis is associated professor and Vice-Rector of Art Academy of Latvia. Teikmanis defended his doctoral thesis "Semiotic of Relations between Art and Politics. Interaction between Visual and Verbal Messages in Latvian Soviet Period Painting" in 2010.


BACKGROUND
The new European guidelines on diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular diseases propose that the FINnish Diabetes RIsk SCore should be used to evaluate the risk of diabetes mellitus and that diabetes mellitus screening in coronary artery disease patients should be based on fasting glucose and HbA1c. The 2 hour oral glucose tolerance test, recommended for all pts in the previous guidelines, is now only recommended for 'inconclusive' cases. We aimed to evaluate this new strategy.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
Fasting glucose, HbA1c and glucose tolerance test (75 g, 2h) were prospectively evaluated in a consecutive group of pts with coronary artery disease. ADA criteria (both glucose tolerance test and HbA1c) were used to define diabetes mellitus and pre-diabetes mellitus. Diabetes mellitus risk was evaluated according to the FINnish Diabetes RIsk SCore.

RESULTS
A total of 135 patients were included (mean age 62.3 +/- 13.1 years, 99 males). Glucose tolerance test and HbA1c together diagnosed 18 (13.3%) new cases of diabetes mellitus and 77 (57.0%) patients with pre-diabetes mellitus. Fasting glucose + HbA1c (guidelines strategy) identified 12/18 patients with diabetes mellitus (Sens 66.7%; negative predictive value 95.1%; Kappa 0.78; p < 0.0001) and 83/95 patients with glucose anomalies (pre- diabetes mellitus + diabetes mellitus) (Sens 87.4%; negative predictive value 76.9%). Performing glucose tolerance test in the 29 patients with an elevated FINnish Diabetes RIsk SCore would allow identifying 15/18 patients with diabetes mellitus (Sens 83.3%; negative predictive value 97.5%; Kappa 0.85; p < 0.0001) and 86/95 patients with glucose anomalies (Sens 90.5%; negative predictive value 81.6%).

DISCUSSION
Although this strategy improved the screening accuracy, one in each six patients with diabetes mellitus would still remain undiagnosed, as compared to measuring HbA1c and performing an glucose tolerance test in all patients.

CONCLUSION
Using the FINnish Diabetes RIsk SCore to select candidates to additional glucose tolerance test improves the accuracy for identifying diabetic patients, as compared with fasting glucose + HbA1c alone. However, 1/6 patients diabetes mellitus is still left undiagnosed with this strategy proposed by the current guidelines.


This final report presents the results of the project conducted from 1 July 2005 to 3 July 2008. The project consisted of three phases: firstly, the investigation of personality types of people involved with natural resource management and policy across Australia with a focus on Western Australia; secondly, the development of a system dynamics model of the Western Australian wheat belt at the regional scale to demonstrate the nature of linked social-ecological systems within a resilience paradigm or framework; and thirdly, the knowledge and adoption phase of the model and concepts of resilience paradigm.

At the beginning of this project in July 2005 the concepts of complex problems and resilience were not in common usage and it was a bold step for Land & Water Australia to support this innovative project at that time. These approaches are now validated by bursts of activity over the past three years in which it has become widely acknowledged that many of our most pressing problems have the characteristics of complex problems and require quite different processes to understand and manage them. For example, the Australian Public Policy Commission acknowledges that the public service has to deal with complex problems and developing ways of dealing with them is an evolving process (Commonwealth of Australia 2007). Similarly it has been recognised that, in order for agriculture to respond to climate change, more systemic changes in resource allocation will be required (Howden, Soussana et al. 2007). Internationally the number of papers in the scientific literature related to complex problems and the paradigm of resilience has risen from approximately 50 per year in 2000 to about 250 per year in 2007 (Janssen 2007). The Resilience Alliance (http://www.resalliance.org/1.php) has been instrumental in promoting this approach and a new institute, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, was established in May 2007 to advance the understanding of complex social-ecological systems and to generate new insights and means for governance and management of ecosystem services for long-term sustainability.


Jeremy Rose - of Mashabane, Rose and Associates, Architects - has once more designed a gem. With his colleagues at the allied firm ARC Architects, he has placed a further jewel on the sparkling coronet which he and his immediate MRA associates wear; a tiara that includes, among others, Soweto's Apartheid and Hector Pieterson museums. At his hands, we in Jozi now have a new Arts Centre: a glittering art gallery and, in close, neighbourly conjunction, an intimate theatre for the recently constituted University of Johannesburg. Each of which buildings directly faces the busy Kingsway thoroughfare in Auckland Park.


The lastfifteen years have witnessed an explosion of interest in the history of the Cold War. Historical attention has focused not only on the diplomatic and military aspects of the conflict, but also, increasingly, on its cultural, intellectual, and technological dimensions. One of the fruits of this widening of scope in Cold War studies is a burgeoning literature on the development of the post-Second World War American human sciences. Studies of the Cold War career of the human sciences, however, have often been inflected by moralistic, and sometimes tendentious, claims about the relationship between the state and the academy. This article seeks to explain the chief characteristics of the historiography of the human sciences in Cold War America by describing its formation in the interstices of three distinct lines of inquiry: the history of science, the cultural turn in Cold War studies, and the history of the birth of the human science professions in the United States. It argues that historians of the post-war American human sciences have absorbed some features of these literatures, whilst neglecting others that offer more nuanced perspectives on the relationship between scientific research and its patrons during the Cold War era. Moreover, it suggests that the best prospects for the future maturation of the field lie in the recovery of'middle-range contextualizations' that link post-war trends in the human sciences to interwar and turn-ofthe-century developments, thereby making the Cold War context less all-encompassing than it has sometimes appeared.


The manuscript describes a method to embed into a battery energy storage system (BESS) control strategy the performance degradation associated with the battery operation. In particular, the proposed method aims at minimizing the degradation of the BESS electrochemical cells. A load leveling strategy is described as a case study and the ageing effects associated with the battery current extraction are embedded as constraints into the optimization problem. The main contributions of the work, compared to the existing literature are: i) the degradation process is formulated as a weighted energy throughput, thus taking into account the C-rate effect on the degradation phenomena; ii) the performance of the proposed control strategy has been applied to a large scale lithium-titanate BESS of 280 kWh interfaced to a 20 kV active distribution network.


Contrary to the prediction of the Z-scheme model of photosynthesis, experiments demonstrated that mutants of Chlamydomonas containing photosystem II (PSII) but lacking photosystem I (PSI) can grow photoautotrophically with O2 evolution, using atmospheric CO2 as the sole carbon source. Autotrophic photosynthesis by PSI-deficient mutants was stable both under anaerobic conditions and in air (21 percent O2) at an actinic intensity of 200 microeinsteins per square meter per second. This PSII photosynthesis, which was sufficient to support cell development and mobility, may also occur in wild-type green algae and higher plants. The mutants can survive under 2000 microeinsteins per square meter per second with air, although they have less resistance to photoinhibition.


In 2017, the European Federation of Psychologists Associations made a statement on psychotherapy. It recognizes that psychotherapy is a "special competence" practiced by psychologists, and that psychologists practicing psychotherapy receive specific education, including supervision. The statement also stresses that they have demonstrated competencies in scientifically validated or established theories on human emotions, cognitions, and behavior, and on processes of development, as well as the application of these methods to achieve change. Moreover, the declaration recognizes that they are trained in the scientific application of the methods of change based upon these theories. Within the Standing Committee of Psychology and Health in collaboration with the S-EAC, the group on Psychotherapy is presently working on a conceptual framework and on guidelines for psychotherapy practiced by psychologists. This document is starting to define the necessary skills and competencies for European psychologists practicing psychotherapy. It also makes recommendations for basic training, for the development of practical skills and competencies, for continuing professional development, and for ethical decision making. It especially puts forward psychologists' scientific approach to psychotherapy.