Every day, tens of thousands of Amazon customers message Amazon's selling partners inquiring about orders, products and services. Unfortunately, we have observed over time that buyers may send unsolicited and often times mal intended messages to sellers through the buyer-seller messaging (BSM) service. Although the BSM service gives the ability to sellers to report such messages, most of them do not make use of this feature. Hence, collecting training and testing data with clean labels to build machine learning models in order to proactively block unsolicited messages and help prevent and mitigate losses for Amazon is extremely challenging. To address this problem we propose ClusterClean, an algorithm that automatically cleans data labels with little to no human effort. ClusterClean has the ability to a) accurately infer the labels of unlabeled data points based on an initial small labeled set and b) detect new data patterns such as incoming unobserved spam attacks by soliciting feedback from users to decide on their label. Experiments on approximately 150,000 real messages from Amazon customers showed that ClusterClean can accurately clean the labels of these messages in a few minutes, drastically reducing the human effort and time spent on this task.


Scholars and pharmaceutical industry representatives consider the United States a worldwide leader in pharmaceutical innovation. However, the recent expansion of the international generics market has threatened the strength of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. The pressure has led to the U.S. market's overreliance on a patentability standard that blocks generics competition without contributing substantially to the state of the art. This Note contrasts the U.S. nonobviousness standard and patent linkage regime with those of generics giants India and Israel and considers the effects of these policies on the relevant national and international generics industries. This Note proposes that the United States revise its current approach to patent protection of pharmaceuticals by adopting a heightened nonobviousness standard and lengthening the available patent-term-restoration period through modifications to the linkage regime. Only by balancing these two legal mechanisms will the United States maintain its status as the international leader in blockbuster pharmaceuticals.


Folger guides provide lively, authoritative surveys of important aspects of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English cultural history. Attractively illustrated with material from contemporary documents, the Guides are designed for the general reader and are particularly valuable as enrichment resources for courses in Renaissance history and literature.


In this report we first review important publications in the field of face recognition; geometric features, templates, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), pseudo-2D Hidden Markov Models, Elastic Graph Matching, as well as other points are covered; important issues, such as the effects of an illumination direction change and the use of different face areas, are also covered. A new feature set (termed DCT-mod2) is then proposed; the feature set utilizes polynomial coefficients derived from 2D Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients obtained from horizontally & vertically neighbouring blocks. Face authentication results on the VidTIMIT database suggest that the proposed feature set is superior (in terms of robustness to illumination changes and discrimination ability) to features extracted using four popular methods: PCA, PCA with histogram equalization pre-processing, 2D DCT and 2D Gabor wavelets; the results also suggest that histogram equalization pre-processing increases the error rate and offers no help against illumination changes. Moreover, the proposed feature set is over 80 times faster to compute than features based on 2D Gabor wavelets. Further experiments on the Weizmann Database also show that the proposed approach is more robust than 2D Gabor wavelets and 2D DCT coefficients.


Formin-like 1 (FMNL1) is a member of the formin family of actin nucleators, and is one of the few formins for which in vitro activities have been well characterized. However, the functional roles of this mammalian formin remain ill-defined. In particular, it is unclear how the unique in vitro biochemical properties of FMNL1 relate to its regulation of cellular processes. Here, we demonstrate that FMNL1 depletion caused a dramatic increase in cellular F-actin content, which resulted in Golgi complex fragmentation. Moreover, increased F-actin and maintenance of Golgi structure were distinctly regulated by the gamma isoform of FMNL1, which required binding to actin. Importantly, in addition to Golgi fragmentation, increased F-actin content in the absence of FMNL1 also led to cation-independent mannose 6-phosphate receptor dispersal, lysosomal enlargement and missorting of cathepsin D. Taken together, our data support a model in which FMNL1 regulates cellular F-actin levels required to maintain structural integrity of the Golgi complex and lysosomes.


A nationwide survey of 125,000 public rural waterpoints installed between 2007 and 2012 reveals major changes from the pre-arsenic era and expectations of the 2004 Arsenic Policy. Shallow tubewell (STW) use has greatly reduced and deep tubewells (DTWs) now dominate in arsenic-affected areas. Arsenic contamination is greatly reduced from baseline; 3.6% of DTWs, 7.6% of STWs and 5.5% of ringwells (RWs) exceed 50 μg/L. In some sub-districts contamination is worse than previously recognised. Faecal contamination affects 48% of devices, and is most severe in RWs and surface water devices (SWDs). Manganese exceeds 0.4 mg/L in 12% of DTWs, 51% of STWs and 40% of RWs. Iron exceeds 1 mg/L in 48% of devices. Sustained operation ranges from 91% in DTWs, 84% in STWs, 68% in RWs to 47–94% in SWDs. Falling water levels in shallow and deep aquifers require replacement of suction pumps. Addressing aesthetic, water quality and level issues will require major investment in piped water systems with Fe/Mn removal and chlorination. Technologies differ in household coverage (DTW > STW > RW) and use for drinking (DTW > RW > STW). With a modest increase in investment in relatively safe, popular and cost-effective DTWs and better targeting, arsenic poisoning could be virtually eliminated in 5–10 years.


This paper is the first to study the impact of offshoring on the age-skill composition of labour demand. In doing so, it provides novel empirical evidence firmly supporting the argument that the age profile of a worker is at least as crucial a criterion as the skill to be taken into account by firms while they make optimal labour utilisation adjustments through offshoring. The analysis is conducted on a sample of manufacturing and service industries in 12 developed countries for the period 1995-2005. Its main findings are that material and service offshoring to high-income countries decrease the relative demands for older more skilled workers, while they increase the relative demands for the youngest less skilled. In addition, material and service offshoring to low/middle-income countries decrease the relative demands for the youngest workers, while they mostly increase the relative demands for older workers. These findings are explained by the relative abundance of offshoring destinations in skills and in aspects of employment associated with workers' age profiles, such as the level of human capital and expertise, the returns to training and the level of employment protection.


Abstract. Blowing snow processes commonly occur over the earth's ice sheets when the 10 m wind speed exceeds a threshold value. These processes play a key role in the sublimation and redistribution of snow thereby influencing the surface mass balance. Prior field studies and modeling results have shown the importance of blowing snow sublimation and transport on the surface mass budget and hydrological cycle of high-latitude regions. For the first time, we present continent-wide estimates of blowing snow sublimation and transport over Antarctica for the period 2006–2016 based on direct observation of blowing snow events. We use an improved version of the blowing snow detection algorithm developed for previous work that uses atmospheric backscatter measurements obtained from the CALIOP (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization) lidar aboard the CALIPSO (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation) satellite. The blowing snow events identified by CALIPSO and meteorological fields from MERRA-2 are used to compute the blowing snow sublimation and transport rates. Our results show that maximum sublimation occurs along and slightly inland of the coastline. This is contrary to the observed maximum blowing snow frequency which occurs over the interior. The associated temperature and moisture reanalysis fields likely contribute to the spatial distribution of the maximum sublimation values. However, the spatial pattern of the sublimation rate over Antarctica is consistent with modeling studies and precipitation estimates. Overall, our results show that the 2006–2016 Antarctica average integrated blowing snow sublimation is about 393 ± 196 Gt yr−1, which is considerably larger than previous model-derived estimates. We find maximum blowing snow transport amount of 5 Mt km−1 yr−1 over parts of East Antarctica and estimate that the average snow transport from continent to ocean is about 3.7 Gt yr−1. These continent-wide estimates are the first of their kind and can be used to help model and constrain the surface mass budget over Antarctica.


Musicians have to make many interpretive decisions when performing a piece. For example, the grace note, a one-note musical ornament, has no precise duration written in the score; it has to steal its duration
 from either the preceding or following melody notes. This study addressed several empirical questions: What duration are grace notes given? Does this vary depending upon musical context or individual preferences?
 And, are the durations of grace notes taken from the preceding or subsequent melody note, or is time added? In an experiment, 16 professional pianists performed three musical fragments (from a Beethoven
 theme) "with" and "without" grace notes in seven different tempi. The timing of the grace notes was found not to be proportional to changes in global tempo for most, but not all performers, which replicates
 findings in earlier studies. In the majority of cases, increases in bar duration were matched by relative increases in grace-note duration that were smaller than predicted by a proportional tempo model,
 with a minority of subjects performing grace notes with fixed duration over tempo. In most cases, grace-note duration was "stolen" from the preceding melody note, with a small contribution from the following
 (main) note and with minimal disturbance to local tempo. Conversely, where grace notes were played as appoggiatura , the main source of their duration was the main note. The type of grace note performed
 depended both on its musical context and on individual differences between performers. A model of grace-note duration is proposed to account for these results.


In this thesis we presented a new direction for handling missing values in multi agent-based simulation (MABS) at micro-level by using truth tables and logical relations. Although micro-level simulation is a vast field to use logical relations with truth tables to find missing values but it takes values into account at individual levels. We used databases in form of tables to extract missing values. Our literature review suggested us a method for input handling by using electronically saved truth tables. We have defined logical relations according to scenario by interacting with truth tables to find appropriate missing values. Our conclusions suggested a method which can find appropriate values for input parameters when they are missing. Accurate results have been gained according to updated database. In this thesis we have concluded that missing values would be handled in different ways, such as: Artificial neural network, K-nearest neighbor, Statistical method and Data mining; etc… These methods have not facilitated in finding appropriate missing values as we saw in literature. We have created a method that can find missing values and produce good results. We have run our method on a specific scenario to check the efficiency of input handling that motivated us to arrange database in a proper way to handle missing values along.


Long-term oxygen therapy (LTOT) ≥ 15 h/day improves survival in hypoxemic chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). LTOT 24 h/day is often recommended but may pose an unnecessary burden with no clear survival benefit compared with LTOT 15 h/day. The aim was to test the hypothesis that LTOT 24 h/day decreases all-cause, respiratory, and cardiovascular mortality compared to LTOT 15 h/day in hypoxemic COPD. This was a prospective, observational, population-based study of COPD patients starting LTOT between October 1, 2005 and June 30, 2009 in Sweden. Overall and cause-specific mortality was analyzed using Cox and Fine-Gray regression, controlling for age, sex, prescribed oxygen dose, PaO2 (air), PaCO2 (air), Forced Expiratory Volume in one second (FEV1), WHO performance status, body mass index, comorbidity, and oral glucocorticoids. A total of 2,249 included patients were included with a median follow-up of 1.1 years (interquartile range, 0.6–2.1). 1,129 (50%) patients died and no patient was lost to follow-up. Higher LTOT duration analyzed as a continuous variable was not associated with any change in mortality rate (hazard ratio [HR] 1.00; (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.98 to 1.02) per 1 h/day increase above 15 h/day. LTOT exactly 24 h/day was prescribed in 539 (24%) patients and LTOT 15–16 h/day in 1,231 (55%) patients. Mortality was similar between the groups for all-cause, respiratory and cardiovascular mortality. In hypoxemic COPD, LTOT 24 h/day was not associated with a survival benefit compared with treatment 15–16 h/day. A design for a registry-based randomized trial (R-RCT) is proposed.


The twentieth century witnessed an array of fresh models of Jewish women's educational and religious leadership. Quite understandably, the majority of the scholarly focus has been on burgeoning egalitarian trends featured in the new roles for women within liberal Jewish denominations and among the Modern Orthodox. Yet increased appreciation for gendered perspectives within Jewish studies has also led to recognition that seemingly conventional female roles, once viewed as purely supportive in nature, have evolved into platforms for voicing uniquely feminine styles of Jewish authority. This article offers an initial portrayal and analysis of a relatively new phenomenon: the American female non-hasidic Haredi outreach activist. It does so, first, by locating these figures within overall trends of American Haredi Jewry as well as in relation to the broader phenomenon of Orthodox feminism. The central contention is that inasmuch as American Haredi Orthodoxy vehemently opposes many of the changes advanced by the Modern Orthodox sector, a "silent" revolution is actually taking place within its own elite frameworks. The instigation for the emergence of new religious leadership roles for Haredi women is the increasing focus of this sector on outreach to the non-observant, and the recognition that woman can be especially effective in these capacities. Yet such activities demand types of public behavior, often in mixed gender settings, that are inconsistent with the messages of strict modesty put forward within Haredi female education. Moreover, some of the female Haredi figures have begun to advance the notion that their functions are not merely vehicles for increasing engagement with Judaism, but actually represent a new empowered model of Orthodox women's leadership and activism.


Soil respiration as a major component of the carbon cycle has received considerable attention because of its role in amplifying global warming and in climate feedbacks of ecosystems. This makes it important for us to devise reliable methods in order to measure soil CO2 effluxes accurately. In this study, we investigated the variations of CO2 effluxes for 93 days in sweet sorghum plots and a dry dipterocarp forest by closed chamber and soil gradient methods. The results show that both sites had similar patterns of soil CO2 emission but CO2 emission from the sweet sorghum plots was 4 times higher than from the dry dipterocarp forest. Over the study period, the average soil CO2 efflux and accumulative emission from the dry dipterocarp forest were 360±129 mg CO2 m −2 h−1 and 34 g CO2 m −2 and from the sweet sorghum plots they were 2456±614 mg CO2 m −2 h−1 and 235 g CO2 m −2, respectively. Continuous and high temporal-resolution measurements based on the soil gradient method also enabled us to detect the response of soil CO2 efflux to environmental drivers. We found that rainfall and irrigation events in a short time period could significantly enhance the magnitude of soil CO2 effluxes. In addition, we also found that an appropriate time for daily soil CO2 measurements was around noon.


Colloidal silver is an alternative medicine consisting of silver particles suspended in water. After using this solution as a nasal spray, the symptoms of a previously recalcitrant Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus)‐infected chronic rhinosinusitis patient were observed to have improved markedly. The aim of this study was to determine whether colloidal silver has any direct bactericidal effects on these biofilms in vitro.


PURPOSE
Mutations at some retinitis pigmentosa (RP) loci are associated with variable penetrance and expressivity, exacerbating diagnostic challenges. The purpose of this study was to dissect the genetic underpinnings of nonsyndromic RP with variable age of onset in a large Mexican family.

METHODS
We ascertained members of a large, multigenerational pedigree using a complete ophthalmic examination. We performed whole exome sequencing on two affected first cousins, an obligate carrier, and a married-in spouse. Confirmatory sequencing of candidate variants was performed in the entire pedigree, as well as genotyping and mRNA studies to investigate expression changes in the causal locus.

RESULTS
We identified a 14-base pair (bp) deletion in PRPF31, a gene implicated previously in autosomal dominant (ad) RP. The mutation segregated with the phenotype of all 10 affected females, but also was present in six asymptomatics (two females and four males). Studies in patient cells showed that the penetrance/expressivity of the PRPF31 deletion allele was concordant with the expression levels of wild-type message. However, neither the known PRPF31 modulators nor cis-eQTLs within 1 Mb of the locus could account for the variable expression of message or the clinical phenotype.

CONCLUSIONS
We have identified a novel 14-bp deletion in PRPF31 as the genetic driver of adRP in a large Mexican family that exhibits nonpenetrance and variable expressivity, known properties of this locus. However, our studies intimate the presence of additional loci that can modify PRPF31 expression.


[1] Fire is a widely used tool to prepare deforested areas for agricultural use in Amazonia. Deforestation is currently concentrated in seasonal forest types along the 'arc of deforestation', where dry-season conditions facilitate burning of clear-felled vegetation. Interior Amazon forests, however, are less suitable for fire-driven deforestation due to more humid climate conditions. These forests will ultimately come under more intense pressure as the deforestation frontier advances. Whether these regions continue to be protected by humid conditions partly determines land use changes in interior Amazon forests. Here, we present a study of the climate constraint on deforestation fires in Amazonia under present-day and projected climate conditions. We used precipitation data and satellite-based active fire detections to model fire-driven deforestation potential. Our model results suggest that 58% of the Amazon forest is too wet to permit fire-driven deforestation under current average climate conditions. Under the IPCC B1 scenario, the model indicates increased fire potential by 2050 in eastern Amazonia, while dry-season precipitation may provide limitations on projected deforestation by 2050 in central and western Amazonia. However, the entire region is very sensitive to a possible drying with climate change; a reduction in dry-season precipitation of 200 mm/year would reduce the climate constraint on deforestation fires from 58% to only 24% of the forest. Our results suggest that dry-season climate conditions will continue to shape land use decisions in Amazonia through mid-century, and should therefore be included in deforestation projections for the region.


This study describes  working  memory and developing and validating of an  L1 Persian reading span test for the measurement of working  memory of L1 Persian EFL learners. The test, which included  64  Persian  sentences,  was  developed  based  on  Daneman  and Carpenter's (1980) reading  span  test.  The  shortcomings  of  the  test  were  identified  and  removed  over  three  pilot studies  on  74  participants.  The  final  test  was  used  in  a  study  with  140  participants  at  three different proficiency levels. The results of  an item analysis, as indicated by Cronbach's Alpha, displayed  an  internal  reliability  of  .844  and  .790  for  the  RST  processing  and  recall  scores respectively. This suggests that the newly developed test is reliable enough and could be used to measure  working  memory  capacity  for  future  L2  studies.  This  study  also  provides  a  clear procedure for the development of a reading span test for speakers of other languages.


School geography is often quite different from academic geography and there are good reasons for that, as school is preparing young people to be able to lead the life they value instead of just training them to learn specific subject contents. In some countries school geography is understood as being mainly a social science. Nonetheless physical geography often plays an important part in textbooks and in everyday teaching in these countries. This presentation will examine how physical geography topics are justified in specialist teacher magazines in Germany. Are they justified by simply pointing at the value of the academic knowledge itself? Are they justified by claiming students' special interest in these topics? Or are they justified by showing the value of physical geography in promoting social aims such as sustainable development, freedom or equality?


Within Lorenz models, the three major kinds of butterfly effects (BEs) are the sensitive dependence on initial conditions (SDIC), the ability of a tiny perturbation to create an organized circulation at large distances, and the hypothetical role of small-scale processes in contributing to finite predictability, referred to as the first, second, and third kinds of butterfly effects (BE1, BE2, and BE3), respectively. A well-accepted definition of the butterfly effect is the BE1 with SDIC, which was rediscovered by Lorenz in 1963. In fact, the use of the term "butterfly" appeared in a conference presentation by Lorenz in 1972, when Lorenz introduced the BE2 as the metaphorical butterfly effect. In 2014, the so-called "real butterfly effect", which is based on the features of Lorenz's study in 1969, was introduced as the BE3.


In 1889, Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, asked her fractious Church of Christ (Scientist) in Boston to disband. No scholar has studied this "Church of 1879," the predecessor of the present Mother Church founded in 1892, nor analyzed the members of this religious body. Therefore, after briefly discussing Eddy's journey of faith, this article delves into pertinent affairs of her early, struggling church and investigates the largely forgotten people from most levels of society who comprised her initial flock. Many of Eddy's actions to curb unruly personalities or undue adulation of herself followed sociologist Max Weber's theories about the "routinization of charisma." The headstrong membership, coupled with unreliable preaching by invited clergy and confusion over competing metaphysical groups, led Eddy to disincorporate her first church and found the more centralized Mother Church—The First Church of Christ, Scientist—in 1892. This article shows the institutional birth of an American religion.


This Article contends that post-Katrina New Orleans exemplifies the exclusionary dynamic in which government-assisted housing operates throughout America and the fundamental failure of American housing policy at the federal, state, and local levels to prevent the racial segregation that inevitably results. Federal law has prohibited racial segregation in government-housing programs for decades, yet it has proven difficult to reverse entrenched patterns of segregation in these programs. Patterns of racial segregation have been particularly intractable in New Orleans, which, prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, boasted the second-highest level of poverty concentration in the nation and relatively high levels of poverty concentration in all of the major government-housing programs. Furthermore, low-income white residents in pre-Katrina New Orleans had greater access to middle-income neighborhoods throughout the metropolitan area of New Orleans than low-income black residents, who were overwhelmingly concentrated into high-poverty neighborhoods. Hurricane Katrina, with its massive levee failures and neighborhood flooding, offered an opportunity for New Orleans to emerge as a more inclusive region; new government-assisted housing could have helped facilitate inclusion, while also responding to the regional-housing needs of the area. However, rental housing bans proliferated throughout the region, primarily in communities that had previously served as affordable suburban alternatives for lower- and middle-income whites in prior decades. These communities sought not only to prevent the development of new rental housing, but also to limit the repair of rental housing that preexisted the storm. At the same time, other communities in metropolitan New Orleans that were the least affordable, most homogeneous, and nationally recognized as desirable places to live were not targeted for government-assisted housing, and thus did not pass similar sweeping rental bans. Therefore, rather than using recovery efforts to reverse racially segregated housing patterns, the region took steps to exacerbate them. This Article describes a perennial dynamic of two impulses pulling in opposite directions - the anywhere-ist and nowhere-ist impulses, which conspire to perpetuate segregation. The anywhere-ists are primarily focused on securing as much federally assisted housing as possible; the nowhere-ists are primarily focused on keeping it out of their communities. This dynamic has created a "path of least resistance," whereby government-assisted housing continues to be provided in places where it already exists or in places that are already open and affordable. Ultimately, federal intervention in the housing market must encompass more than providing a subsidy. It must open neighborhoods not already open, make affordable what is not already affordable, enable housing subsidies to act as gateways to educational and employment opportunity, and inform families historically excluded from housing markets about their choices. Any federal housing interventions that are not so designed will almost certainly exacerbate existing racial segregation and poverty concentration, as they have done for decades, and - as post-Katrina New Orleans illustrates - as they will continue to do, again and again and again.


Objectives Various scales exist to assess different domains of functioning in knee osteoarthritis (OA). This study aimed to explore whether it is possible to develop a common metric (CM) from the frequently used scales to assess functioning in knee OA. Patients and methods The methodological study evaluated 411 patients (81 males, 330 females; mean age: 61.8±10.5 years; range, 41 to 88 years) with knee OA. Data from the Health Assessment Questionnaire, Oxford Knee Score, Medical Outcomes Study Short Form 36, Knee Injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score, Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Arthritis Index, and the Nottingham Health Profile were used, and the items focusing on self-care, mobility, and domestic activity domains based on the activities and participation component of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health were included. Concurrent calibration was performed to combine the items of the scales. The CM parameters were estimated using the Rasch measurement model. Reliability was assessed using the person separation index. The CM was utilized to generate a transformation table to convert the scale scores to each other based on the reference metric score. Results Each scale fitted the Rasch model. Item invariance was achieved for the CM (p=0.775). The CM had a person separation index of 0.827. Age, sex, and disease duration did not cause difference in item functions. The CM satisfied the assumptions of unidimensionality and local independence. Conclusion A reliable CM was created from the commonly used scales to measure functioning in individuals with knee OA. Thus, clinicians and researchers can refer to the transformation table to directly compare scores of those scales and use them interchangeably.


Abstract. Remote sensing image classification, as an important direction of remote sensing image processing and application, has been widely studied. However, in the process of existing classification algorithms, there still exists the phenomenon of misclassification and missing points, which leads to the final classification accuracy is not high. In this paper, we selected Sentinel-1A and Landsat8 OLI images as data sources, and propose a classification method based on feature level fusion. Compare three kind of feature level fusion algorithms (i.e., Gram-Schmidt spectral sharpening, Principal Component Analysis transform and Brovey transform), and then select the best fused image for the classification experimental. In the classification process, we choose four kinds of image classification algorithms (i.e. Minimum distance, Mahalanobis distance, Support Vector Machine and ISODATA) to do contrast experiment. We use overall classification precision and Kappa coefficient as the classification accuracy evaluation criteria, and the four classification results of fused image are analysed. The experimental results show that the fusion effect of Gram-Schmidt spectral sharpening is better than other methods. In four kinds of classification algorithms, the fused image has the best applicability to Support Vector Machine classification, the overall classification precision is 94.01 % and the Kappa coefficients is 0.91. The fused image with Sentinel-1A and Landsat8 OLI is not only have more spatial information and spectral texture characteristics, but also enhances the distinguishing features of the images. The proposed method is beneficial to improve the accuracy and stability of remote sensing image classification.


The Lofoten Ridge is an integral basement horst of the hyperextended continental rift-margin off northern Norway. It is a key area for studying onshore–offshore rift-related faults, and for evaluating tectonic control on landscape development along the North Atlantic margin. This paper combines onshore geomorphological relief/aspect data and fault/fracture analysis with offshore bathymetric and seismic data, to demonstrate linkage of landscapes and Mesozoic rift-margin structures. At Leknes on Vestvågøya, an erosional remnant of a down-faulted Caledonian thrust nappe (Leknes Group) is preserved in a complex surface depression that extends across the entire Lofoten Ridge. This depression is bounded by opposing asymmetric mountains comprising fault-bounded steep scarps and gently dipping, partly incised lowrelief surfaces. Similar features and boundary faults of Palaeozoic–Mesozoic age are present on the offshore margin surrounding the Lofoten Ridge. The offshore margin is underlain by a crystalline, Permo–Triassic to Early Jurassic, peneplained basement surface that was successively truncated by normal faults, down-dropped and variably rotated into asymmetric fault blocks and basins in the Mesozoic, and the basins were subsequently filled by Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous sedimentary strata. Comparison of the onshore asymmetric landscapes and offshore tectonic architecture supports the idea that disrupted low-relief surfaces, bounding steep scarps, ridges and depressions onshore the Lofoten Ridge, represent tectonic inheritance of a tilted basement-cover surface, rotated fault blocks and half-graben basins from Mesozoic rifting of the margin. In the Cenozoic, Mesozoic faults controlled the landscape by tilting and reactivated footwall uplift, followed by exhumation of the Mesozoic–Cenozoic cover sediments. Glacial erosion during the Pleistocene partly incised and modified these tectonic features, which nevertheless remain as distinct elements in the landscape.


Although the transmembrane protein CD44 does not itself signal, its association with tumor cell growth and metastasis is probably due to its ability to costimulate growth factor receptor signaling. Noticing a correlation between the abundance of CD44 and that of mutant forms of the tumor suppressor protein p53 in various carcinomas, Godar et al. investigated the relationship between p53 and CD44 in human breast primary epithelial cells (BPECs). Immunofluorescent staining and Western blotting analyses revealed the mutually exclusive presence of p53 and CD44 in immortalized BPEC (BPEC-T) cells. The abundance of CD44 protein was higher in BPEC-T cells treated with p53-specific short hairpin RNA (shRNA) than in control cells, which, together with semiquantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction assays, suggested the repression of CD44 expression by p53. Indeed, CD44 was more abundant in the mammary glands of p53–/– mice than in those of wild-type mice. Reporter assays and gel-shift analysis showed that p53 directly repressed CD44 expression, and this direct interaction was confirmed by chromatin immunoprecipitation assays. Stimulation of cell proliferation by epidermal growth factor was greater in cells that overexpressed CD44 than in wild-type cells, which was also true for cells in which p53 was knocked down with shRNA. Cells overexpressing CD44 were more resistant to drug-induced, p53-dependent apoptosis than were control cells. Although transformed (p53-inactivated) BPEC-T cells formed tumors when transferred to susceptible mice, those treated with CD44-specific shRNA formed fewer and smaller tumors. Together, these data suggest that the basal abundance of p53 in mammary epithelial cells is sufficient to repress CD44 expression and thus prevent growth and tumor initiation. S. Godar, T. A. Ince, G. W. Bell, D. Feldser, J. L. Donaher, J. Bergh, A. Liu, K. Miu, R. S. Watnick, F. Reinhardt, S. S. McAllister, T. Jacks, R. A. Weinberg, Growth-inhibitory and tumor-suppressive functions of p53 depend on its repression of CD44 expression. Cell 134, 62-73 (2008). [PubMed]


Inspection of a pattern of horizontal, vertical, or oblique lines differentially affects the visual acuity for test gratings as a function of their orientation. After a horizontal grating is viewed for 1 sec or longer, the resolution threshold for horizontal contours is greater than the threshold for the identification of vertical and obliquely oriented contours. Conversely, prolonged viewing of vertical contours raises the threshold for the identification of vertical lines above those for other orientations. Similar results are found following adapting exposures to left-and right-oblique contours. The differential masking effects are systematic functions of the duration of exposure to the light-and-dark adapting pattern.


Kawaii (a Japanese word meaning "cute") things are popular because they produce positive feelings. However, their effect on behavior remains unclear. In this study, three experiments were conducted to examine the effects of viewing cute images on subsequent task performance. In the first experiment, university students performed a fine motor dexterity task before and after viewing images of baby or adult animals. Performance indexed by the number of successful trials increased after viewing cute images (puppies and kittens; M ± SE = 43.9±10.3% improvement) more than after viewing images that were less cute (dogs and cats; 11.9±5.5% improvement). In the second experiment, this finding was replicated by using a non-motor visual search task. Performance improved more after viewing cute images (15.7±2.2% improvement) than after viewing less cute images (1.4±2.1% improvement). Viewing images of pleasant foods was ineffective in improving performance (1.2±2.1%). In the third experiment, participants performed a global–local letter task after viewing images of baby animals, adult animals, and neutral objects. In general, global features were processed faster than local features. However, this global precedence effect was reduced after viewing cute images. Results show that participants performed tasks requiring focused attention more carefully after viewing cute images. This is interpreted as the result of a narrowed attentional focus induced by the cuteness-triggered positive emotion that is associated with approach motivation and the tendency toward systematic processing. For future applications, cute objects may be used as an emotion elicitor to induce careful behavioral tendencies in specific situations, such as driving and office work.


Fingerprint verification is one of the most reliable personal identification methods. Fingerprint matching is affected by non-linear distortion introduced in fingerprint impression during the image acquisition process. This non-linear deformation changes both the position and orientation of minutiae. The proposed system operates in three stages: alignment based fingerprint matching, fuzzy clustering and classifier framework. First, an enhanced input fingerprint image has been aligned with the template fingerprint image and matching score is computed. To improve the performance of the system, a fuzzy clustering based on distance and density has been used to cluster the feature set obtained from the fingerprint matcher. Finally a classifier framework has been developed and found that cost sensitive classifier produces better results. The system has been evaluated on fingerprint database and the experimental result shows that system produces a verification rate of 96%. This system plays an important role in forensic and civilian applications.


Grapevine leafroll disease is widely accepted to be the most damaging grapevine virus disease in South Africa. The current industry strategy to limit leafroll infection in new vineyards includes treating newly planted grapevines with a systemic insecticide like imidacloprid and rogueing all grapevines that exhibit leafroll symptoms. A tendency by some producers to eschew rogueing and rely solely on imidacloprid applications to control vine mealybug and so protect new vineyards from leafroll infection gave rise to this study. Two bioassays were conducted to determine if Planococcus ficus (Signoret) nymphs can transmit grapevine leafroll-associated virus 3 (GLRaV-3) to potted indicator grapevines treated with imidacloprid applied through the soil five months before exposure to viruliferous mealybugs. Ten of 21 leafroll-free grapevines treated with imidacloprid tested positive for GLRaV-3 seven to eight weeks after being exposed to viruliferous first- and second-instar P. ficus nymphs. This means that the systemic applications of imidacloprid to newly planted, virus-free vineyards will not necessarily protect the vines from GLRaV-3 if they become infested by viruliferous vine mealybugs, although the insecticide provides effective mealybug control and helps to prevent the secondary spread of leafroll infection in these vineyards. To control the spread of leafroll virus to newly planted, leafroll-free vineyards, all grapevines that serve as sources of infection should be removed. Where this is not feasible, vectors should be monitored and controlled rigorously in infested and disease-free vineyards alike, while all infected grapevines should be removed from new vineyards as they begin to develop leafroll symptoms.


This paper describes an integrated radial basis function network (IRBFN) method for the numerical modelling of the dynamics of strain localization due to strain softening in quasi-brittle materials. The IRBFN method is a truly meshless method that is based on an unstructured point collocation procedure. We introduce a new and effective regularization method to enhance the performance of the IRBFN method and alleviate the numerical oscillations associated with weak discontinuity at the elastic wave front. The dynamic response of a one dimensional bar is investigated using both local and non-local continuum models. Numerical results, which compare favourably with those obtained by the FEM and the analytical solutions for a local continuum model, demonstrate the efficiency of the present IRBFN approach in capturing large strain gradients encountered in the present problem.


Adolf Grunbaum and others have criticised Freudian Psychoanalysis (FPA) methodologically, because of the potential inferential liabilities of testing causal psychoanalytic claims in the interview sessions. Also, Grunbaum has prescribed scientific experimentation (especially prospective group-comparison studies) as the best means of overcoming these methodological deficiencies. I argue, firstly, that the opportunities for making reliable inferences (including some causal ones) in psychotherapeutic interviews are better than Grunbaum canvasses, though I do this for a theoretically weaker form of psychodynamic psychology than FPA (i.e. General Psychotherapeutic Counselling, or GPC). Secondly, 1 argue that there are substantial problems with and limitations of experimental methodology, both in itself and when applied to test the specific kinds of hypotheses psychotherapists are interested in. Grunbaum and others fail to draw adequate attention to the generic problems of experimentation. I argue that insofar as the acquisition of psychological knowledge is concerned, it is legitimate to distinguish two broad categories of inductive processes capable of providing it: (i) folk-psychological (or FP-) reasoning; and (ii) experimentation (including epidemiology). (By 'FP-reasoning' I mean the largely inherent capacity that human beings have for making inferences about the psychology of others or themselves, in folk-psychological terms.) I argue that FP-reasoning is in some respects inductively superior to experimentation. If this is correct, there ought to be no automatic methodological priority granted to experimentation in psychology and psychiatry. Various topics related to the above are developed. For example; (i) some problems of the practical application to the psychotherapeutic domain of a principle of causal relevance (provided by Grunbaum) are examined; (ii) a sketch for a model of testing for causal relevance in the special case of insults (provided by Grunbaum) is criticised, and an alternative model is proposed; (iii) some general problems of justifying FP knowledge-claims are discussed, and sceptical attitudes towards the acquisition of folk-psychological knowledge are criticised.


Optical RAM appears to be the alternative approach towards overcoming the "Memory Wall" of electronics, suggesting use of light in RAM architectures to enable ps-regime memory access times. In this communication we take advantage of the wavelength properties of optical signals to present new architectural perspectives in optical RAM structures by introducing the WDM principles in the storage area. To this end, we report on a 4 × 4 WDM optical RAM bank architecture that exploits a novel SOA-based multi-wavelength Access Gate (WDM-AG) and a dual wavelength SOA-based SET-RESET All-Optical Flip Flop (AOFF) as fundamental building blocks. The WDM-AG enables simultaneous random access to a 4-bit optical word encoded in 8 different wavelengths, allowing for the four AOFFs of each RAM row to effectively share the same Access Gate. The scheme is shown to support a 10 Gbit/s operation for the incoming 4-bit data streams, with a power consumption of 15 mW/Gbit/s for the WDM-AG and 120 mW/Gbit/s for the AOFFs. The proposed optical RAM architecture reveals that exploiting the WDM capabilities of optical components can lead to RAM bank implementations with smarter column/row encoders/decoders, increased circuit simplicity, reduced number of active elements and associated power consumption, while enabling for re-configurability in optical cache mapping.


The global world we live in is made to seem smaller by technology but also by the realisation that the way we live and behave has consequences elsewhere, news is instantaneous with food and humanitarian crises being reported as they happen. For food this requires us to behave as global citizens and be cognisant of how our behaviours impact on others but also how our governments and private companies conduct trade with emerging economies. The Australian Government and the Australian food industry are planning encroachments into the growing SE Asia food market. Australia sees itself as the food bowl of SE Asia in the Asian Century (Gillard. 2012; The Australian, 2013). The Australian National Food Plan (Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, 2013) envisages the production of more meat, fat, salt and sugary products for export, thus exporting chronic diseases via dietary intake. While at the same time the proposal is to cut aid to some of these same developing economies that it is proposed to export food to. Australia is no different from most developed economies with food plans based on export and trade and not linked or tied to sustainability or healthy eating policies (Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, 2013; Friel, 2010; Friel, Barosh and Lawrence, 2013: Caraher, 2013).

This article explores the place of developed economies in the global food economy and attempts to ground this by relating some of the issues to the Australian context and the changing food climate.


The objective of this study is to isolate phytoconstituents from Diospyros lotus stems extracts and to evaluate antifungal, lectin and trypsin inhibitory activities of the extracts. The stems were extracted with petroleum ether, diethyl ether and chloroform, respectively, three compounds were isolated and identified as β-sitosterol, stigmasterol and protocatechic acid from both petroleum ether and ether extracts. Chloroform extract was subjected to silica gel column chromatography using CHCl3 as eluent and an increasing amount of EtOAc and MeOH gradually resulted in the isolation and identification of kaempferol 8-O-methylether, apigenin, kaempferol, kaempferol 3-O-α-rhamnoside and luteolin 7-O-β-glucoside. The petroleum ether, diethyl ether and chloroform extracts of Diospyros lotus were tested at the concentration of 0.1 mg/ml for their effect against the fungus Mycosphaerella arachidicola and for their lectin and trypsin inhibitory activities. The results showed that the extracts exhibited significant antifungal activity but had no hemagglutinating and trypsin inhibitory activities.


This book is a timely contribution to the emerging field of the aurality of theatre and looks in particular at the interrogation and problematisation of theatre sound(s). Both approaches are represented in the idea of noise which we understand both as a concrete sonic entity and a metaphor or theoretical (sometimes even ideological) thrust. Theatre provides a unique habitat for noise. It is a place where friction can be thematised, explored playfully, even indulged in: friction between signal and receiver, between sound and meaning, between eye and ear, between silence and utterance, between hearing and listening. In an aesthetic world dominated by aesthetic redundancy and aerodynamic signs, theatre noise recalls the aesthetic and political power of the grain of performance. Theatre noise is a new term which captures a contemporary, agitatory acoustic aesthetic. It expresses the innate theatricality of sound design and performance, articulates the reach of auditory spaces, the art of vocality, the complexity of acts of audience, the political in produced noises. Indeed, one of the key contentions of this book is that noise, in most cases, is to be understood as a plural, as a composite of different noises, as layers or waves of noises. Facing a plethora of possible noises in performance and theatre we sought to collocate a wide range of notions of and approaches to noise in this book by no means an exhaustive list of possible readings and understandings, but a starting point from which scholarship, like sound, could travel in many directions.


Recently, the amount of muddy soil produced from various kinds of construction sites has been increasing. Most of the soils are difficult to reuse as construction material owing to low strength, and the disposal site of the soil has been decreasing. Therefore, it is very important to reuse the soil from the view point of natural resource preservation and environmental impact mitigation.The purpose of this study is to reuse the muddy soil effectively stabilized with cement, and to clarify the possibility of application of coal fly ashes as hardening additives to the soil stabilization. In this study, the hardening effects of four coal fly ashes are examined by an unconfined compression test, and the hardening reaction products of stabilized soil were measured by SEM observation and X-ray diffraction analysis.As a result, it has been found that coal fly ashes, especially fluidized bed combustion coal fly ash, are effective on the muddy soil stabilization as a hardening additive. The quality control of coal fly ash is very important, because the hardening activity of the coal fly ash changes due to the storage condition. Furthermore, the main reaction products which contribute to strength development are ettringite and calcium silicate hydrate compound.


The importance of providing compassionate care to patients is well established. While compassionate care can be understood as an individual response to others' vulnerability, it is acknowledged that healthcare environments can impact significantly on this aspect of practice. This study sought to explore how health professionals and pre-qualifying healthcare students (HCS) understand compassionate care and factors that hinder or enable them to practice compassionately. The perceptions of health professionals (n=146) and HCS (n=166) registered at a university in Northwest England were explored using mixed methods. This article reports on the data gained from the qualitative interviews and responses to open-text questions from the mainly quantitative questionnaire. The findings are discussed under the following themes: individual and relationship factors that impact on compassionate care practice; organisational factors that impact on the clinical environment and team; and leadership factors that hinder or enable a compassionate care culture. This article argues that there are a number of enabling factors that enhance a culture conducive to providing compassionate care. These include leaders who act as positive role models, good relationships between team members and a focus on staff wellbeing.


Abstract. Black carbon (BC), from incomplete combustion of fuels and biomass, has been considered highly recalcitrant and a substantial sink for carbon dioxide. Recent studies have shown that BC can be degraded in soils. We use two soils with very low spatial variability sampled 100 years apart in a Russian steppe preserve to generate the first whole-profile estimate of BC stocks and turnover in the field. Quantities of fire residues in soil changed significantly over a century. Black carbon stock was 2.5 kg m−2, or about 7–10% of total organic C in 1900. With cessation of biomass burning, BC stocks decreased 25% over a century, which translates into a centennial soil BC turnover (293 years best estimate; range 182–541 years), much faster than so-called inert or passive carbon in ecosystem models. The turnover time presented here is for loss by all processes, namely decomposition, leaching, and erosion, although the latter two were probably insignificant in this case. Notably, at both time points, the peak BC stock was below 30 cm, a depth interval, which is not typically accounted for. Also, the quality of the fire residues changed with time, as indicated by the use benzene polycarboxylic acids (BPCA) as molecular markers. The proportions of less-condensed (and thus more easily degradable) BC structures decreased, whereas the highly condensed (and more recalcitrant) BC structures survived unchanged over the 100-year period. Our results show that BC cannot be assumed chemically recalcitrant in all soils, and other explanations for very old soil carbon are needed.


The popularity of complementary and alternative medicines (CAMs) has been increasing in Australia and high levels of CAM use have been documented among people with chronic conditions. Yet little is known about how people with chronic disease manage their continuing need for medical care and make decisions about using CAM and/or conventional medicines. This thesis describes the use of CAM among people in Victoria, Australia, with two common chronic conditions, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Using both qualitative (n=88) and quantitative (n=2,915) data from the CAMELOT study (Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Economics Lifestyle and Other Therapeutic approaches for chronic conditions), new knowledge is provided which contributes to the understanding of care-seeking and health management among people with these conditions. This thesis contains seven articles for publication (and Appendices) which use literature review, descriptive statistics, logistic regression, thematic analysis and discussion to analyse and explore aspects of the use of CAM and conventional healthcare products and services. Areas investigated include: (l) use of CAM products and/or practitioners - prevalence, extent (quantity), modalities used, reasons for and motivators of use, costs, outcomes of CAM practitioner use, factors that would increase the likelihood of visiting a CAM practitioner, disclosure of use to medical doctors and communication between CAM and medical practitioners; (2) use of conventional medical services - frequency of consultations, numbers of doctors visited and pharmaceuticals used, and costs; (3) demographic, health status, quality of life, and care-seeking differences between CAM users and non-users; (4) participants' perspectives on CAM and conventional medical healthcare services and treatment; and (5) concepts of integration of CAM and conventional medicine. While this study has limitations, many of which are inherent in self-report data and in research of such a diverse and highly pluralistic field as CAM, it highlights the perceived significance and benefits of CAM use for consumers in chronic condition prevention and management, the affordability barrier of access to CAM, the perceived shortfalls of mainstream services, and the potential benefits of greater interaction and communication between CAM and conventional medical providers in Australia. The research brings focus to the multiple ways in which people incorporate CAMs in their lives, often using it to maintain a sense of control or empowerment when faced with living with a chronic condition. Many participants reported improved blood sugar or blood pressure readings and ability to cope, and CAM practitioner use was associated with benefits such as improved confidence in condition management and improved knowledge and understanding of condition(s}. The benefits of CAM use should be viewed at a higher level than solely research on clinical efficacy allows, and further investigation of how the CAM workforce might be incorporated into mainstream pathways for chronic disease prevention and management is warranted. The application of comparable standards and subsidies across conventional and complementary healthcare would help to remove significant barriers currently limiting access to CAM and could encourage a more consumer-centred health system.


Sustainable e-Learning holds the promise of enabling higher education to meet the needs of a large and diverse market. Central to this is the response of academic staff teams in meeting the needs of individual learners, in order to enfranchise them within an evolving, enabling learning context. Enfranchisement is underpinned by the management of learner-expectations in the value-added nature of the on-line learning experience. However, learnerenfranchisement demands that on-line interaction is both accepted by academic teams and educationally liberating. Liberation requires meaningful existence, and hence active participation, within a 'supercomplex' world, in which both individual identities and the ability to manage information are tested. This paper assesses ways in which learner-enfranchisement can be encouraged by academic teams. It pivots around the outcomes from student evaluations of a strategic e-Learning implementation in one UK higher education institution. The conclusions that it draws focus upon strategies for adding pedagogic value, increasing academic participation and developing e-Learning sustainability in order to enfranchise e-learners. The argument highlights ways in which academic teams can move from a battery-intensive approach to e-Learning towards one that is more free-ranging. It highlights how academic staff can increase the sustainable, inclusive value of the learning experience at a minimised cost. From this basis, it is argued that any extant disenfranchisement in the delivery of e-Learning can begin to be addressed by increased team-work. A by-product for those teams is that in the very process of engaging their students, there is more hope that they will in-turn become empowered within their own use of e-Learning.


Background and Objectives: Spiritual health is one of the valuable religious resources of humans, which helps promote mental health. In addition, the role of happiness in mental health and life satisfaction is considered significant. This study aimed to examine the correlation between spiritual health and happiness in staff of Semnan University of Medical Sciences, in 2015. Materials and Methods: This descriptive-analytic study was performed in the staff of Semnan University of Medical Sciences, who were chosen through stratified random sampling and the table of random numbers. Data collection was conducted using Paloutzian and Ellison standard questionnaire of spiritual health and Oxford Happiness Questionnaire revised by Argil. To analyze the data, descriptive and inferential statistics were used in SPSS 21. Results: In total, 149 administrative employees of Semnan University of Medical Sciences completed the questionnaire. The mean score of spiritual well-being was 77±0.53 and the mean happiness score was 58.75±0.56. The mean score of spiritual well-being in males and females showed significant differences (P=0.01), and females had a higher spiritual health. Spiritual health of the personnel and their happiness had a significant direct correlation (r=0.45, P=0.001). Conclusion: The mutual influence of spiritual well-being and happiness on overall health is a debatable topic in health issues. The importance of spiritual health and its effect on happiness as variables affecting the general health status of employees is approved. Thus, planning in the field of spiritual health and happiness can promote job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and productivity


mod_perl is a unique piece of software that wholly integrates the power of Perl with the flexibility and stability of the Apache Web server. With mod_perl, developers can harness the power of the full Apache API and develop Web applications quickly and without sacrificing performance.The mod_perl Developer's Cookbook teaches programming with the mod_perl API by example. The book takes developers from the basics of mod_perl to the development advanced Web applications. Developers will learn tricks, solutions, and mod_perl idioms gleaned from the authors' experience as developers and expert users of mod_perl.Geoffrey Young is a frequent contributor to the mod_perl community and has written scores of mod_perl handlers, the most useful of which can be found on CPAN.Paul Lindner manages, designs, and implements mod_perl applications at Critical Path. He is a long-time Internet and open-source developer, and was one of the founders of the Internet Gopher at the University of Minnesota.Randy Kobes is a professor of physics at the University of Winnipeg who conducts research on chaos and fractals. He used mod_perl to establish a search engine for CPAN.


Drawing on institutional theory and discursive psychology, this article elucidates how actors use emotion discourse to undermine the legitimacy of consumer practices. Based on an empirical investigation of the bullfighting controversy in Spain, our work shows how activists engage in the production and circulation of compelling emotional prototypes of their adversaries. Such emotional prototypes constitute the discursive foundations of a pathic stigma, which, once established, taints the identity of the social groups associated with the practice. Our work frames the centrality of pathic stigmatization as a cultural mechanism mediating the relationship between emotion discourse and the subsequent delegitimization of consumer practices. We make three key contributions to the literature: we advance a rhetorical perspective on emotions and their role in deinstitutionalization processes; we further develop the theory of marketplace sentiments by showing how sentiments operate downstream; and we provide evidence of the sociocultural mechanisms underpinning the emotional vilification, stereotyping and stigmatization of consumer collectives.


This research examines the within-game television ratings of regular season NFL games across three distinct viewership markets. Specifically, we operationalize our markets as follows—winning market denotes that of the team winning the game, losing market denotes the market of the losing squad, and all other markets where the game was broadcast were pooled in the neutral market category. Our modeling demonstrates that ratings changes attributable to scoring margin are essentially similar in neutral and losing markets, but different than winning markets. Implications related to the NFL's policy on televising uncompetitive games in neutral markets are further examined, concluding that the relationship between final scoring margin and audience interest is nuanced.


Climate observations made since the mid twentieth century reveal that the Antarctic Peninsula is a region of extreme climate variability and change. The pattern of change is, however, both seasonally and spatially inhomogeneous. Limited data from the east (Weddell Sea) coast indicate that surface air temperatures here are rising at around 0.03 degreesC per year in all seasons. On the west (Bellingshausen Sea) coast, summer temperature trends are similar to those prevailing on the east coast but, in winter, warming trends of over 0.1 degreesC per year are observed, making this the most rapidly warming part of the Southern Hemisphere. Rapid warming is confined to the very lowest levels of the atmosphere and warming of the free troposphere over the Peninsula is not statistically significantly different from the Southern Hemisphere average. Interannual variations in winter temperatures on the west coast are strongly correlated with variations in atmospheric circulation and sea ice extent, suggesting that both atmospheric and ice/ocean processes may be contributing to the long-term warming. However, there is little observational evidence to support long-term atmospheric circulation changes. Coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model (AOGCM) experiments, forced with observed greenhouse gas increase, fail to reproduce the observed pattern of warming around the Peninsula. However, current AOGCMs may not be sophisticated enough or of high enough resolution to represent all of the processes that control climate on a regional scale around the Antarctic Peninsula.


We propose a new approach to the problem of optimizing autoencoders for lossy image compression. New media formats, changing hardware technology, as well as diverse requirements and content types create a need for compression algorithms which are more flexible than existing codecs. Autoencoders have the potential to address this need, but are difficult to optimize directly due to the inherent non-differentiabilty of the compression loss. We here show that minimal changes to the loss are sufficient to train deep autoencoders competitive with JPEG 2000 and outperforming recently proposed approaches based on RNNs. Our network is furthermore computationally efficient thanks to a sub-pixel architecture, which makes it suitable for high-resolution images. This is in contrast to previous work on autoencoders for compression using coarser approximations, shallower architectures, computationally expensive methods, or focusing on small images.


Phytoplankton communities in the Ross Sea, Antarctica, are characterized by the haptophyte Phaeocystis antarctica Karsten, which dominates deep mixed layers, and diatoms, including Fragilariopsis cylindrus Grunow, that thrive in shallower mixed layers. To investigate whether differences in photoprotective strategies explain these distributions, photosynthetic parameters, pigments, and fluorescence properties were measured in cultures grown under several irradiance regimes and during acclimation to increased irradiance. In P. antarctica, cellular concentrations of all pigments declined with increasing growth irradiance under continuous light, but xanthophyll cycle pigment concentrations increased with increasing irradiance under dynamic conditions without changes in chlorophyll. In contrast, F. cylindrus exhibited declines in chlorophyll cell−1 with increasing irradiance under both continuous and dynamic conditions, but xanthophyll cycle cell21 pigments increased under continuous irradiance and declined under dynamic irradiance. P. antarctica did not exhibit non‐photochemical quenching (NPQ) unless exposed to irradiance in excess of the mean growth irradiance. F. cylindrus exhibited NPQ in response to lower irradiances but displayed less photoinhibitory quenching than P. antarctica after exposure to very high irradiance. Inhibitor experiments suggest that both taxa rely upon xanthophyll cycle photoprotection to maintain photosynthetic performance but only P. antarctica relies heavily upon protein synthesis, presumably for D1 protein repair. F. cylindrus can thrive in shallow mixed layers because its high capacity for heat dissipation minimizes photoinhibition. P. antarctica utilizes xanthophyll cycle photoprotection to a lesser degree, but is able to dominate deeper mixed layers by effectively repairing the photodamage incurred when it is mixed to the surface.


We present a novel POMDP problem formulation for a robot that must autonomously decide where to go to collect new and scientifically relevant images given a limited ability to communicate with its human operator. From this formulation we derive constraints and design principles for the observation model, reward model, and communication strategy of such a robot, exploring techniques to deal with the very high-dimensional observation space and scarcity of relevant training data. We introduce a novel active reward learning strategy based on making queries to help the robot minimize path "regret" online, and evaluate it for suitability in autonomous visual exploration through simulations. We demonstrate that, in some bandwidth-limited environments, this novel regret-based criterion enables the robotic explorer to collect up to 17% more reward per mission than the next-best criterion.


Transgenic plants may contain several DNA elements, most notably the selectable marker genes, that are not needed after the selection of the transgenic line. Using site-specific recombination system, such as Crellox, targeted deletion of these so-called unneeded DNA elements can be achieved. To study the efficiency of Cre/lox-mediated deletion of transgenic DNA from complex locus generated by particle bombardment, we generated two transgenic rice (Oryza saliva L.) lines that contain several copies of lox-flanked β-glucuronidase (GUS) gene (gusA) and unmarked hygromycin resistance (hpt) gene and crossed them with a Cre-expressing line. Excision of both gusA and hpt genes occurred in F 1 hybrids. Molecular data demonstrated that Crellox recombination was initiated randomly in F 1 plants leading to complete excision of all transgene fragments in somatic tissue. F 2 analysis suggested that efficient excision also occurred in germline, preventing the transfer of lox-flanked genes into most of the F 2 plants. Further, the excised DNA did not apparently re-integrate into the genome. Thus, Cre/lox-mediated DNA recombination in rice is highly suitable for the removal of the unneeded transgenic DNA.


This short paper presents an iterative and incremental process to improve the probability that the product or service definition leading to requirements and implementation is both representative of the market needs and has a reasonable expecta-tion of a financially viable business model. Rather than a relative-ly linear process wherein marketing delivers a product definition to the development team, this process ensures that all assump-tions are validated during the definition stage and that all team members are engaged. The process balances the need to address current challenges against future opportunities, providing short-term customer satisfaction (and justification for purchasing or adoption) and a coherent vision for future development efforts (and maintaining and growing the customer base). The process is applied to a case in the agriculture commodities sector.


In Germany the life satisfaction of those in first marriages traces the following average course. Starting from a baseline of life satisfaction in noncohabiting years one or more years prior to marriage, those who cohabit prior to marriage have an increase in life satisfaction significantly above the baseline. In the year of marriage and that immediately following, the life satisfaction of those in first marriages, prior cohabitors and noncohabitors combined, increases to a value even further above the baseline, significantly higher than for premarital cohabitors. Thereafter, life satisfaction of those in first marriages drops, but remains significantly above the baseline, at the same level as for premarital cohabitors. Compared with the population generally, those in first marriages are selective with regard to a number of socioeconomic characteristics, but not in regard to personality traits. Those whose first marriage ends in separation or divorce have a life satisfaction trajectory in the years before and during marriage not significantly different from that described above, but separation or divorce reduces this group's life satisfaction to the original baseline value. This group differs significantly from the first marriage population as a whole in its selectivity – lower socioeconomic status and personality traits less conducive to marriage. The roots of prospective dissolution thus apparently lie in this group's distinctive socioeconomic and personality traits, and not in a disparate course of life satisfaction in the first years of marriage.


In this paper, we investigate new active-settype methods for l1-regularized linear regression that overcome some difficulties of existing active set methods. By showing a relationship between l1-regularized linear regression and the linear complementarity problem with bounds, we present a fast active-set-type method, called block principal pivoting. This method accelerates computation by allowing exchanges of several variables among working sets. We further provide an improvement of this method, discuss its properties, and also explain a connection to the structure learning of Gaussian graphical models. Experimental comparisons on synthetic and real data sets show that the proposed method is significantly faster than existing active set methods and competitive against recently developed iterative methods.


Premenopausal osteoporosis is a poorly understood condition in which otherwise healthy, premenopausal women have very low bone mineral density. This makes them susceptible to low trauma fractures that are both painful and debilitating. Being diagnosed with a chronic condition at any age has been shown to have profound psychosocial implications for the individual. A diagnosis of osteoporosis for a premenopausal female is significant as the condition is most commonly associated with postmenopausal women. For a young woman, therefore, the age of diagnosis contrasts markedly from the common cultural paradigm for the condition, with its established health care pathway and support systems. There is a paucity of literature on the patient experience of osteoporosis and literature on the patient experience of premenopausal osteoporosis seems absent altogether. The aim of this study is to explore the experience of living with osteoporosis, as a young active female. Autobiographical methodology was employed utilising a reflective topical autobiographical approach. Data included personal diary and blog entries over a two year period, from pre-diagnosis, to 21 months post diagnosis. This allowed the breadth and depth of the experience of living with premenopausal osteoporosis to be captured through storytelling. Seven reflective themes were produced from the illness experience data: Engagement with the medical profession; information seeking as an educated patient; managing invisibility and disclosure; social interaction; the impact on physical activity; a stranger in a biomedical land; and the emotional journey. The experience of living with premenopausal osteoporosis was found to be a disruptive and dehumanising one. Each element of the experience was impacted upon through the resonance of biographical and emotional echoes from biographical antecedents, such as life experiences, coping resources and personality. These echoes drove the journey through diagnosis and subsequent living with the condition and reinforce the idiographic nature of chronic illness experiences.


This paper presents a case study in Usangu Sub-basin, Tanzania, investigating the relationships between irrigation water management, rice productivity, and malaria incidence. The information was gathered for two paddy growing seasons from two types of irrigation systems namely large/modern and smallholder irrigation systems. The number of days that water spent in the fields and their respective daily depths were recorded for each season. Further, the annual volumetric water use for different irrigation systems were monitored from three selected sample fields. The average rice yields were then computed from each trial field and the productivity of water in Kg of paddy per cubic metres of annual volumetric water use was worked out. On the other hand, malaria incidences were recorded for two different age groups in the area with their respective occurrence period. The relationship of malaria incidence and its pattern to peak activities in the fields were used to assess the loss in rice productivity. The result suggests that there is a significant contribution of high depth flooding technique (up to 25cm), to increased malaria incidences, water losses and low productivity of irrigated water in the study area. A loss of up to 8% in rice productivity was estimated to occur per single malaria attack in wet season. In addition the findings suggest that about 40% of the water could be saved from large irrigation systems through intermittent irrigation and an obvious reduction in malaria breeding and without necessary affecting the rice productivity.


Guillet's goby ( Lebetus guilleti ) is thought to be Europe's smallest marine fish. Records of Guillet's goby in the UK are limited with observations restricted to the Isle of Man, the Plymouth area and Lyme Bay in the English Channel. This species is described for the first time from the Shetland Isles, Scotland, UK where it was documented photographically on two separate occasions in June 2010. On both occasions male and female pairs were photographed on shell gravel in water depths of 10 m and 8 m. These are the first recorded field observations of Guillet's goby in Scotland and extend the known range of this species from 58°N (Kattegat, southern Scandinavia) to 60°N (Shetland). It is probable that species such as Guillet's goby are under-recorded due to their small size, cryptic coloration and behaviour.


This is an important resource for designers, textile lovers, and African art scholars. Over 200 color photographs beautifully illustrate the mud-cloth art of the Bogolan people in Mali, Africa. Their art form, in which geometric, abstract, and semi-abstract patterns are hand painted with mud dyes on hand woven cloth, has gained enormous popularity internationally. Informative text, by noted African art historian Irwin Hersey, examines the evolving cultural role of mud-cloth art, and gives technical information about traditional methods of its production. The mud-cloth designs featured in this book come from African artists, who have depicted scenes of African village life, and exciting geometric and abstract patterns in rich earth tones. The CD included with the book contains over 200 patterns, and is compatible with most graphic, design, and editing programs.


Are we at the end of fossil fuels (coal, gas, oil) and will we know how to do without them? What alternatives are we considering? Human societies depend on hydrocarbons extracted from soil, for a multitude of applications that are sometimes ignored. There is of course the need for gasoline or kerosene for our vehicles on roads, oceans, in the air... While there are convincing solutions for running cars without gas, it is often said that the last drop of oil will be used to fly an aircraft. Fossil hydrocarbons are also a source of compounds for the chemistry – or petrochemistry – from which plastics and all kinds of materials are made, but also for the tars that cover our roads, polyurethane foams and insulation products for our buildings. What is the state of research to develop biofuels? How do we anticipate these new bio-based industrial sectors?


This paper considers the writing practices of William Johnson (1823-1864), editor of the Practical mechanics' journal, and the translator, editor and author of the Practical draughtsman's book of industrial design (1853). Johnson also acted as Secretary to the Glasgow Committee for the Great Exhibition (PICE 1866: 528), and a further publication. The Imperial cyclopaedia of machinery (Johnson nd [1852-6]), presents a large, brash and lavishly illustrated celebration of that event. I have chosen Johnson's professional practice as a writer as one example of how status could be negotiated in public life by building an audience for the particular expertise of engineers in the period to 1850. Engineers were embroiled with other groups competing for cultural status, for example the BAAS or the 'design reformers', and in his work Johnson defended his own specialism whilst making large, reasoned claims about the function of technical and mechanical drawing skills in wider intellectual life. Previous discussions of the visual practices of elite engineers and inventors have often sought to gain access to a private train of creative through manifested, for example through in autographic sketches and 'first thoughts'. In contrast to such approaches I have used relatively low grade, banal material to consider how engineering was made visible in public culture and how this particular elite engineer aimed to negotiate allegiances with other groups that were aiming to claim social and intellectual distinction.


Take your business to the next level--for the win Millions flock to their computers, consoles, mobile phones, tablets, and social networks each day to play World of Warcraft, Farmville, Scrabble, and countless other games, generating billions in sales each year. The careful and skillful construction of these games is built on decades of research into human motivation and psychology: A well-designed game goes right to the motivational heart of the human psyche. In For the Win, authors Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter argue persuasively that gamemakers need not be the only ones benefiting from game design. Werbach and Hunter are lawyers and World of Warcraft players who created the world's first course on gamification at the Wharton School. In their book, they reveal how game thinking--addressing problems like a game designer--can motivate employees and customers and create engaging experiences that can transform your business. For the Win reveals how a wide range of companies are successfully using game thinking. It also offers an explanation of when gamifying makes the most sense and a 6-step framework for using games for marketing, productivity enhancement, innovation, employee motivation, customer engagement, and more. In this illuminating guide, Werbach and Hunter reveal how game thinking can yield winning solutions to real-world business problems. Let the games begin!


The research community over the past several years has put a great effort into studying the potential impacts of a changing climate. But the issues that face the world today encompass greater change than just that of climate. For instance, there are changes due to population dynamics (such as migration), economics, and the way that land is used. Water resources are affected specifically by changes in climate and land use. A water balance developed for the purpose of examining climate change was extended to allow analysis of impacts from land-use change. In addition, it was modified so that a watershed could be modeled by multiple smaller units within the basin. Two methodologies were applied to break the basin into smaller parts: first, hydrologic boundaries of major tributaries were used, and second, a delineation based on five classes of land-use type, which included tundra, forest, rangeland, agriculture, and urban land, was created. The model originally had three parameters which were calibrated statistically. A goal of this project was to take a step towards making these parameters physically-based in the watershed, thereby avoiding the need for statistical calibration which might allow parameters to mask interconnections in the hydrologic process. The parameter which represents maximum soil moisture capacity was therefore set based on land-use type. The South Platte Basin upstream of the town of Masters, Colorado was chosen as a case study basin. The study included eight sub-basins delineated by hydrologic boundaries and the five land classes mentioned previously. A climate change sensitivity analysis was performed and a hypothetical land-use scenario was analyzed. This hypothetical scenario increased the percentage of urban land and removed all agriculture. In addition, some rangeland was converted to forested land. These tests were examined individually and in a combined scenario. Results found that the land-use scenario estimated greater runoff and acted to mitigate negative effects and enhance positive impacts of climate change. The magnitude of the impact of land-use change was found to be of the same order as that of climate change, and it therefore further warrants further research into possible effects of such changes. The study clearly demonstrated the sensitivity of model results to inclusion of land-use change, and the need for further development of the hydrological model for the Yellow River basin in North China, a water-critical region of the LUC project study area.


In this paper we present a scalable deep learning framework for finding Markovian Nash Equilibria in multi-agent stochastic games using fictitious play. The motivation is inspired by theoretical analysis of Forward Backward Stochastic Differential Equations (FBSDE) and their implementation in a deep learning setting, which is the source of our algorithm's sample efficiency improvement. By taking advantage of the permutation-invariant property of agents in symmetric games, the scalability and performance is further enhanced significantly. We showcase superior performance of our framework over the state-of-the-art deep fictitious play algorithm on an inter-bank lending/borrowing problem in terms of multiple metrics. More importantly, our approach scales up to 3000 agents in simulation, a scale which, to the best of our knowledge, represents a new stateof-the-art. We also demonstrate the applicability of our framework in robotics on a belief space autonomous racing problem.


Work reported here consists of two parts: the first part describes studies performed on a conceptual catchment, the second part, presented as a separate paper, describes studies on real catchments in the city of Lund (Niemczynowicz 1984b). In this paper we try to find the general shape of the relation between storm movement parameters like storm duration, intensity, velocity and direction, and its influence on peak discharge. This influence is called a "directional bias". Different factors affecting the magnitude of directional bias are described. The relations between rainfall characteristics and the magnitude of the directional bias are shown for a conceptual catchment. The most important conclusion is that the maximal directional bias can theoretically reach values of several hundred percent, but this can happen only in a catchment with specially designed linear geometry. Maximal directional bias can be expected for storms moving downstream the catchment with velocity equal to the average flow velocity. Maximal directional bias occurs for storms with short duration giving low peak discharge, which are not important for design purposes.


Our climate is changing and the results of that are already visible. The two-month period of December 2013 and January 2014 was for England and Wales one of, if not the most, exceptional periods of winter rainfall in at least 248 years. In addition to that, on July 1st, 2015, at Heathrow, Greater London the highest July temperature on record for the UK was recorded. Our buildings are already performing poorly under the current weather conditions. Even the buildings that are performing well now may become intolerable for the occupants by 2080. It is therefore important to find ways to increase the resilience of the current building stock and to identify master planning principles for the new buildings. The scope of this research was to study the resilience of three different types of buildings (high- , medium- and low risk) under extreme weather conditions. The extreme events that were investigated are extreme hot and heavy rain. EDSL TAS, XP SWMM and MicroDrainage simulation software packages were used in order to estimate the thermal and energy performance of the buildings and investigate the effects of heavy rainfall. There is clear evidence to show that climate change is happening. According to the UK Climate Projections (UKCP09), we can expect warmer and wetter winters, hotter and drier summers, rising sea levels, and more extreme weather events. These extreme weather events in the UK are likely to increase with rising temperatures, causing among others more substantial rainfall events with an increased risk of flooding. Flooding is currently identified as one of the greatest threats to the UK posed by climate change. In addition to that, the UKCP09 show that means daily temperatures will increase everywhere in the United Kingdom. This will significantly affect the thermal and energy performance of the current building stock. This study presents four case studies where the resilience of the examined buildings is investigated under extreme hot weather events. It looks into the risk of overheating of a school building in 14 locations in the United Kingdom using the overheating criteria defined in Building Bulletin 101 (BB101). It examines three different ventilation modes and quantifies the required amount of cooling loads to achieve thermal comfort conditions. Furthermore, it considers the effect of relative humidity for an office building in London and for the same building, it examines the effect of the window-to-wall ratio on thermal comfort and energy consumption. This study also evaluates the effect of extreme rainfall events on the resilience of buildings and presents two case studies on this. The first one examines the effect of building development on the risk of flooding under extreme rainfall for an area that has a very low chance of flooding by modelling two different scenarios of building development. The second case study investigates the effects of sustainable drainage systems on residential developments under extreme rainfall events. The outcomes of this research present practical approaches of mitigating the effects of extreme hot weather and extreme rainfall events. The research has demonstrated that lower window to wall ratios result in more comfortable conditions and has also shown that a relative humidity control will result in improved thermal comfort conditions for most of the occupied hours during the summer months. This study has also examined a school building and quantified the amount of cooling loads required to comply with the BB101 criteria and presented a comparison between the current and future weather conditions. Additionally, the research results demonstrated that automated control of the opening of the windows results in reduced operative temperatures and improved thermal comfort conditions. This study has also investigated the effects of sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) during extreme rainfall and has quantified the effect of three different types of SuDS (permeable water, rainwater harvesting, and attenuation basins) for a new build residential development. It has also shown that building development will increase the risk of flooding from surface water, even for areas with a low chance of flooding.


In this paper, it is argued that in the digital era, self-portraiture enables anyone to produce a work of art instinctively, without knowing anything about photography, and more and more people today feel a strong urge towards self representation. Facing the camera lens and releasing the shutter immediately takes us to our first essential process of the definition of the self: the recognition of our image in the mirror. By objectifying our 'dark side' in a photograph, we can separate ourselves from what we dislike and open up a space for catharsis or renewal. During a self-portrait session we can start a dialogue between our thinking mind and our 'gut' to draw from an inexhaustible source of meanings, which must be expressed. The self-portrait can be incredibly empowering. By forcing us into the Now, it can help us perceive and express our essential humanity in a photograph. The decision to represent oneself can provide what is termed here a 'state of grace': the feeling of centeredness that occurs in moments of creative work in which the emotions are naturally retained because our higher self is in command. This paper is an outline of the author's thoughts on the therapeutic use of self-portraiture and the personal nature of the narrative is reflected in the use of the first person.


Video codecs have undergone dramatic improvements and increased in complexity over the years owing to various commercial products like mobiles and Tablet PCs. With the emergence of standards, such H.264 which has emerged as the de facto standard for video, uniformity in the delivery of video is observed. With constraints of memory and transmission bandwidth, focus has been on the effective compression and decompression of video. Multicore architectures have increasingly becoming available on mobiles and Tablet PCs. As codecs have increased in complexity and become computationally intensive, it is all the more important to leverage such computation over multicore hardware architectures. OpenCL programming framework for programming multicore hardware architectures such as CPUs, GPUs and DSPs has grown to a high level of maturity. In this study an efficient H.264 video codec is developed using OpenCL for multicore architectures based on the x264 open source H.264 library. The x264 library is profiled using sample videos on a CPU and performance hotspots are identified for optimisation. These hotspots are optimized by means of encapsulation into the OpenCL kernel loops where 4 parallel threads are created by OpenMP. Further, compiler optimization flags and assembly instructions within the x264 library are used to improve memory efficiency and execution speed. Programs to identify and use the queried OpenCL CPU device and analyze the PCI bandwidth between the host and the device are developed. When launched over CPU and GPU platforms, with OpenCL API's and multi threading, improvements in time of execution and the number of systems calls made are observed. The hotspot of x264_pixel_satd_8*4 resulted in 1.2 seconds gain as compared with earlier non OpenCL based optimization on CPU and 0.4 seconds gain for a GPU. The degradation in performance on a GPU platform is due to the read and write latencies. However, along with the use of compiler optimization flags and invoking assembly instructions in the entire x264 library resulted in a 4.3X improvement on a CPU and a 4.2X on a GPU platform. It can be concluded that, along with multithreading with OpenCL, the traditional approach of compiler level optimization is important as it deals with the core improvement in the application considered.


We have implemented a phase-only optical encryption and decryption system with a readout based on the generalized phase-contrast method. The experimental system has been implemented with liquid-crystal spatial light modulators to generate binary phase-encrypted masks and a decrypting key. A phase-contrast filter is used to display the phase information.


Seeing is believing ? A beginners' guide to practical pitfalls in image acquisition Imaging can be thought of as the most direct of experiments. You see something; you report what you see. If only things were truly this simple. Modern imaging technology has brought about a revolution in the kinds of questions we can approach, but this comes at the price of increasingly complex equipment. Moreover, in an attempt to market competing systems, the microscopes have often been inappropriately described as easy to use and suitable for near-beginners. Insufficient understanding of the experimental manipulations and equipment setup leads to the introduction of errors during image acquisition. In this feature, I review some of the most common practical pitfalls faced by researchers during image acquisition, and how they can affect the interpretation of the experimental data. This article is targeted neither to the microscopy gurus who push forward the frontiers of imaging technology nor to my imaging specialist colleagues who may wince at the overly simplistic comments and lack of detail. Instead, this is for beginners who gulp with alarm when they hear the word " confocal pinhole " or sigh as they watch their cells fade and die in front of their very eyes time and time again at the microscope. Take heart, beginners, if microscopes were actually so simple then many people (including myself) would suddenly be out of a job! All data are subject to interpretation Deliberate scientific fraud exists, but in modern microscopy a far greater number of errors are introduced in complete innocence. As an example of a common problem, take colocalization. Upstairs in the lab, a researcher collects a predominantly yellow merged image on a basic microscope, naturally interpreted as colocalization of green and red signals. But on the confocal microscope, there is no yellow in the merged images. short article cannot be an exhaustive " how to " guide, I have also assembled a bibliography of a few highly recommended textbooks and microscopy web sites, which readers should consult for more extensive treatments of the critical issues introduced here. Sample preparation " Garbage in ϭ garbage out " is the universal motto of all microscopists. A worrying tendency today is to assume that deconvolution software or confocal microscopes can somehow override the structural damage or suboptimal immuno-labeling induced by poor sample preparation. The importance of appropriate fixation, permeabilization, and labeling methods for preserving cellular …