For national advisory services in the UK (UKOLN, CETIS, and OSS Watch), varieties of openness (open source software, open standards, and open access to research publications and data) present an interesting challenge. Higher education is often keen to embrace openness, including new tools such as blogs and wikis for students and staff. For advisory services, the goal is to achieve the best solution for any individual institution's needs, balancing its enthusiasm with its own internal constraints and long term commitments. For example, open standards are a genuine good, but they may fail to gain market acceptance. Rushing headlong to standardize on open standards may not be the best approach. Instead a healthy dose of pragmatism is required. Similarly, open source software is an excellent choice when it best meets the needs of an institution, but not perhaps without reference to those needs. Providing open access to data owned by museums sounds like the right thing to do, but progress towards open access needs to also consider the sustainability plan for the service. Regrettably institutional policies and practices may not be in step with the possibilities that present themselves. Often a period of reflection on the implications of such activity is what is needed. Advisory services can help to provide this reflective moment. UKOLN, for example, has developed of a Quality Assurance (QA) model for making use of open standards. Originally developed to support the Joint Information Systems Committee's (JISC) digital library development programmes, it has subsequently been extended across other programmes areas. Another example is provided by OSS Watch's contribution to the development of JISC's own policy on open source software for its projects and services. The JISC policy does not mandate the use of open source, but instead guides development projects through a series of steps dealing with IPR issues, code management, and community development, which serve to enhance any JISC-funded project that takes up an open source development methodology. CETIS has provided a range of services to support community awareness and capability to make effective decisions about open standards in e-learning, and has informed the JISC policy and practices in relation to open standards in e-learning development. Again, rather than a mandate, the policy requires development projects to become involved in a community of practice relevant to their domain where there is a contextualised understanding of open standards.


Mainstream object-oriented languages such as C# and Java provide an initialization model for objects that does not guarantee programmer controlled initialization of fields. Instead, all fields are initialized to default values (0 for scalars and null for non-scalars) on allocation. This is in stark contrast to functional languages, where all parts of an allocation are initialized to programmer-provided values. These choices have a direct impact on two main issues: 1) the prevalence of null in object oriented languages (and its general absence in functional languages), and 2) the ability to initialize circular data structures. This paper explores connections between these differing approaches and proposes a fresh look at initialization. Delayed types are introduced to express and formalize prevalent initialization patterns in object-oriented languages.


The gruesome videos circulated on most media platforms by the organization that calls itself the Islamic State (IS) have prompted a heated debate about the "Islamicity" of the organization that centered on how serious IS actors were regarding getting their "interpretations" right. If any act of interpretation or of understanding of "religion" has been transformed by the various technological and ideological developments of the last two centuries, I will argue here that Salafi thinking (of which IS articulations are but one aspect), understanding of a mythical past, and imagining of history outside a "lived" tradition, marries itself conveniently with the way the latest audiovisual technology manifests itself to an audience, especially in consecrating a culture of speed and "eventual" rupture. This relationship leads to a "collapse of meaning" while leaving room for an overflow of "graphicness." The article will draw parallels between these practices and those of recent TV shows such as Game of Thrones , especially in reimagining a "medieval era" that serves as a schema for addressing contemporary concerns.


Human metapneumovirus (hMPV) is an increasingly recognised cause of respiratory tract infections, particularly in children, the elderly, those with preexisting pulmonary diseases and immunocompromised hosts. The increasing availability of nucleic acid testing has revolutionised our understanding of the pathogenesis, epidemiology, clinical and laboratory aspects of hMPV infection. Although hMPV-specific antiviral therapy and vaccines are currently unavailable, it is anticipated that this will change in the near future.

Key Concepts

hMPV is a leading cause of acute respiratory tract infections.
Infection with hMPV generally occurs in the first 2 years of life, and exposure to hMPV is near universal by the age of 5.
hMPV infection is characterised by respiratory tract infection with wheeze.
hMPV is associated with admission for exacerbations of obstructive pulmonary disease and congestive heart.
Patients with haematological malignancies have a high mortality with hMPV.
Diagnosis should be confirmed with NAT on nasopharyngeal specimens.

Keywords:

human metapneumovirus;
respiratory virus;
upper respiratory tract infection;
lower respiratory tract infection;
pneumonia


(Color version) From the basics of video editing with Premiere Elements, like capturing your media and building a timeline, to advanced functions, like creating customized effects and building menus for your DVDs and BluRay discs, Steve Grisetti, co-founder of videomaker support site Muvipix.com, will show you: * How to use the new tools in version 9, including support for the Mac OSX and Windows 7 operating systems. * How to use the Smart Trim, Smart Fix and Smart Mix features. * How to set up your projects to interface most effectively with video from any camcorder, including Flip pocket cams. * The benefits, and the challenges, of Background Rendering and the Media Analyzer. * How to take full advantage of the Elements Organizer and your Photoshop.com account. * The wealth of tools available in not-so-obvious places. * The magic of keyframing, Premiere Elements' most versatile and powerful tool for creating motion paths and special effects.


The use of capacitors for correcting the power factor is a very well known approach in industry. However, the increase of harmonic sources in power systems is heightening the risk of resonance and, consequently, a drastic decrease in electric power quality. In order to keep the rating voltage, the power factor, and the voltage and current harmonic distortions within acceptable limits, an expert system approach was implemented. Based on this approach, a software program that is able to decide about the optimal distribution of the capacitor banks has also been developed. The program decision is based on the rating voltage, the power factor, end the whole voltage and current harmonic distortions. When necessary, the computer program decides on the use of filters for harmonic compensation, indicating the best filter and the corresponding tuning frequency. Furthermore, the approach is able to deal with some aspects concerning the electric losses, both on the rating frequency and on the harmonic components.


Recent catastrophic seismic events, such as the events that struck L'Aquila in Italy and Port-au-Prince in Haiti, have highlighted once again the urgent need for effective mitigation plans for the building stocks. The effectiveness of these plans should be based on a well-informed assessment of the associated risk. The main challenge in this assessment involves the incorporation of the uncertainty associated with its main components, namely, the ground shaking hazard, the building's vulnerability and its associated exposure to damage. A significant contribution for better understanding and communication of the examined risk to any interested parties is the distinct treatment of uncertainties inherent in the model (aleatory) from those that could be, theoretically at least, reduced (epistemic). Following these principles, the aforementioned sources of uncertainty are treated, in this thesis, rigorously and explicitly through a novel two-stage Monte Carlo methodology, which is superior to existing simplified and/or approximate and potentially inaccurate procedures. The developed methodology can be applied under general conditions and results in the estimation of seismic damage and subsequent direct financial loss for a single building. In particular, the proposed procedure is based on fragility curves which may be obtained by any of the generally accepted vulnerability assessment methodologies. Moreover, it accounts for all possible seismic events likely to cause damage to any given building in a single year but can also deals with single events. In the first stage of the Monte Carlo procedure, the aleatory uncertainty in the three risk assessment components is introduced. This results in a point estimate for the annual failure probability for the building and the cumulative distribution of the scenario and annual loss. The degree of confidence in these results is obtained by the introduction of the epistemic uncertainty in the second stage of the proposed Monte Carlo methodology. This source of uncertainty is investigated here with respect to the building's vulnerability and the exposure, both of which have received limited attention in the literature compared to the epistemic uncertainty associated with the hazard. The overall uncertainty in the damage and loss of a low-rise steel moment resisting frame is quantified through the proposed methodology and conclusions are drawn on' the significance of the two types of uncertainty and the role of the components of risk on each type. In this case study, the aleatory uncertainty in the vulnerability is associated with structural parameters and performance level thresholds, while the epistemic component is represented by the record-to-record variability. With regard to the exposure, the aleatory uncertainty in the repair cost due to the random extent of damage, as well as the modelling uncertainty in the damage-to-loss relationship, is considered. Finally, uncertainty in the hazard is expressed via the randomness in the characteristics of the seismic events. It is shown that for this case study epistemic uncertainty plays a significant role in the annual failure probability. With regard to the scenario loss, the epistemic uncertainty dominated when small events were considered, while the aleatory uncertainty was the most influential uncertainty type for large events. It was also shown that the vulnerability dominated both the aleatory and epistemic component of uncertainty in loss for small events, while its role was substantially reduced for high intensities. The introduction of hazard, i.e. when annual loss is considered, showed that the epistemic uncertainty was as influential as the aleatory uncertainty. Finally, the dominant role of hazard for this loss was highlighted. Although the above conclusions are linked to the specific building considered, it is shown that the proposed methodology can produce risk estimates, together with the confidence levels associated with these estimates. This is an important contribution to the development of loss estimation tools, which are increasingly being used by the insurance industry and civic authorities in their attempt to quantify and mitigate seismic risk.


Most online first person shooter (FPS) games require clients to discover game servers through a two- step process. The client initially queries a well-known master server for a list of currently registered game servers. Each game server is then probed in the order they were returned by the master server. It may take quite some time to discover playable game servers (within a tolerable round trip time of the client). We investigate the need for, and benefits of, explicitly re-ordering a master server's reply list so the client is more likely to probe closer servers before more distant servers. We use data gathered from the Wolfenstein Enemy Territory (ET) master server gathered in late 2005 and early 2006 to assess such optimisation. We conclude that such re-ordering will reduce unwanted probe traffic on game servers and improve player experience.


We consider the problem of routing in a Mobile Ad-Hoc wide area network called Terminodes Network. In our solution every node builds its personal view of the network, composed of local and remote views. Large scale routing in the terminode network is achieved by the combination of these two views. We describe two methods called Terminode Local Routing (TLR) and Anchored Geodesic Packet Forwarding (AGPF) that are used for routing in such a network, as well as path discovery and path maintenance mechanisms.


Abstract The Caledonian Hecla Hoek succession in Ny Friesland, eastern Svalbard has been interpreted, for many decades, to be a continuous stratigraphic sequence. Early Palaeozoic and Neoproterozoic strata in its upper parts pass more or less conformably down into amphibolite facies rocks (Stubendorffbreen Supergroup) at depth. Recent isotopic age-determination and structural studies have indicated that the Stubendorffbreen succession is tectonostratigraphic and made up of at least three major thrust sheets. This paper provides new data from two meta-igneous units within the succession, the Bangenhuk and Instrumentberget gneisses. Both are granitoid sheets, consisting mainly of red, strongly lineated gneisses of monzogranitic composition; the Bangenhuk unit also contains some lenses of little deformed granitoids, as well as cross-cutting aplite dykes, amphibolitized dolerites and subordinate metasedimentary rocks. The latter are locally cut by granitoids. U—Pb zircon dating of six samples of variably deformed Bangenhuk granitoids, including one cross-cutting aplitic dyke, has yielded ages between 1720 and 1770 Ma, the higher values generally from the less deformed samples. The Instrumentberget gneissic granite yielded an age of 1737+46−41 Ma. These ages are interpreted to date the time of intrusion of the granitoids at around 1750 Ma; the younger ages may have been slightly lowered by Caledonian deformation, particularly those from specimens located close to a major fracture (the Billefjorden Fault Zone) in Wijdefjorden—Austfjorden. U—Pb dating of titanite from the least deformed granitoid also yields comparable Palaeoproterozoic ages; in the more deformed rocks, however, titanites give evidence of Caledonian ductile deformation at c. 410 Ma. The Rb—Sr system of the corresponding whole rock samples has been disturbed and yields an errorchron age of about 1650 Ma and, for some samples, an impossibly low initial Sr ratio. The Sm—Nd system may be more intact and yields initial εNd values of −2 to −3, suggesting some contribution from older crustal material to the granitoid magmas. The results indicate the presence of extensive units of Palaeoproterozoic granitic basement within the Lower Hecla Hoek succession of Ny Friesland, supporting the hypothesis that the latter is composed of tectonically intercalated basement and cover units.


In the summer of 2009, the world watched as Iranians took the online services that some of us have come to regard as tools of procrastination — services like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube — and turned them into the tools of cyber-democratization. When the Iranian government banned foreign journalists, grainy cell phone footage of peaceful street protests and the government's brutal response filled the void and kept the world informed. But news did not escape Iran's borders unaided. Liberation technology, particularly the popular anonymity network "Tor," helped Iranian protesters bypass government censors while remaining undetected. Today, the U.S.-based volunteers who comprise a significant segment of Tor's operator network face an uncertain legal landscape because Tor technology can facilitate copyright infringement. I foresee that Tor operators will soon find themselves defendants in copyright infringement actions arising from file-sharing activity, most likely in connection with the popular BitTorrent protocol. The typical plaintiff's strategy of subpoenaing Internet service providers (ISPs) to identify users based on Internet Protocol (IP) address can mistakenly identify Tor operators who, because of the nature of this technology, will appear to be the sources of any infringing activity passing through their virtual tunnels.Using the Iranian uprising as case study, I argue that Tor operators should be shielded from secondary infringement liability so that they can continue to facilitate speech in heavily censored nations thereby improving U.S. access to world news and nurturing the development of democratic habits abroad. Specifically, volunteer anonymity network operators should enjoy protection under DMCA § 512(a), a provision allowing safe harbor for transitory digital network communication providers.


In this work we studied the influence of the power density of hydrogen plasma on electrical and optical properties (Hall mobility, free carrier concentration, sheet resistance, optical transmittance and a.c. impedance) of indium zinc oxide films, aiming to determine their chemical stability. This is an important factor for the optimization of amorphous/nanocrystalline p-i-n hydrogenated silicon (a/nc-Si:H) solar cells, since they should remain chemically highly stable during the p layer deposition. To perform this work the transparent conductive oxide was exposed to hydrogen plasma at substrate temperature of 473 K, 87 Pa of pressure and 20 sccm of hydrogen flow. The results achieved show that IZO films were reduced for all plasma conditions used, which leads mainly to a decrease on films transmittance. For the lowest power density used in the first minute of plasma exposition the transmittance of the IZO films decreases about 29%.


Antarctica is surrounded by a variety of large, medium and small sized ice shelves, glacier tongues and coastal areas without offshore floating ice masses. We used the mosaic of the Radarsat-1 Antarctica Mapping Project (RAMP) Antarctic Mapping Mission 1 (AMM) to classify the coastline of Antarctica in terms of surface structure patterns close to the calving front. With the aid of an automated edge detection method, complemented by manual control, the surface structures of all ice shelves and glacier tongues around Antarctica were mapped. We found dense and less dense patterns of surface structures unevenly distributed over the ice shelves and ice tongues. Dense surface patterns are frequent on fast flowing ice masses (ice streams), whereas most ice shelves show a dense surface pattern only close to the grounding line. Flow line analyses on ten ice shelves reveal that the time of residence of the ice along a flow path and—associated with it—the healing of surface crevasses can explain the different surface structure distribution close to the grounding line and the calving front on many ice shelves. Based on the surface structures relative to the calving front within a 15 km-wide seaward strip, the ice shelf fronts can be separated into three classes. The resulting map of the classified calving fronts around Antarctica and their description provide a detailed picture of crevasse formation and the observed dominant iceberg shapes.


Compound transport of energetic charged particles across the mean magnetic field due to field line random walk is investigated by means of a Chapman–Kolmogorov equation. The probability distribution function (pdf) for the particle transport across the field P⊥ is given as a convolution of the pdf for random walk of the magnetic field, PFRW, with the pdf Pp, for particle transport relative to the random walking field. The particle propagator Pp includes the effects of advection, drift, parallel diffusion and local perpendicular diffusion of particles relative to the random walking field. At early times, the particles sub-diffuse across the field due to field line random walk. At late times, the effective cross-field diffusion coefficient has the form κ⊥e = κ⊥ + κF. The diffusion coefficient κ⊥ is the local cross-field diffusion coefficient due to particle scattering in the random magnetic field. The diffusion coefficient κF is due to coherent particle advection parallel to the mean magnetic field B0 coupled with transverse random walk of the magnetic field. Estimates of cross-field diffusion due to field line random walk, advection and drift are obtained both near to the heliospheric current sheet at Earth and at higher helio-latitudes. Cross-field diffusion due to field line random walk and advection is shown to be an important transport mechanism for low-energy particles near the current sheet, where the effects of drifts are negligible. Drift effects and field line random walk are also assessed at higher helio-latitudes off the current sheet, for a model interplanetary magnetic field, with a flat current sheet in the helio-equatorial plane.


Throughout the history of mathematics, there are several individuals with significant contributions. However, if we look at the contribution of a single family in this field, the Bernoulli probably outshines others in terms of both the number of mathematicians it produced and their influence on the development of mathematics. The most outstanding three Bernoulli mathematicians are Jacob I Bernoulli (1654-1705), Johann I Bernoulli (1667-1748), and Daniel Bernoulli (1700-1782), all three of whom were the most influential math experts in the academic community yet very hostile to each other. Their family structure and jealousy toward each other might have fueled their massive contributions to mathematics.


Visual object tracking is a fundamental and time-critical vision task. Recent years have seen many shallow tracking methods based on real-time pixel-based correlation filters, as well as deep methods that have top performance but need a high-end GPU. In this paper, we learn to improve the speed of deep trackers without losing accuracy. Our fundamental insight is to take an adaptive approach, where easy frames are processed with cheap features (such as pixel values), while challenging frames are processed with invariant but expensive deep features. We formulate the adaptive tracking problem as a decision-making process, and learn an agent to decide whether to locate objects with high confidence on an early layer, or continue processing subsequent layers of a network. This significantly reduces the feedforward cost for easy frames with distinct or slow-moving objects. We train the agent offline in a reinforcement learning fashion, and further demonstrate that learning all deep layers (so as to provide good features for adaptive tracking) can lead to near real-time average tracking speed of 23 fps on a single CPU while achieving state-of-the-art performance. Perhaps most tellingly, our approach provides a 100X speedup for almost 50% of the time, indicating the power of an adaptive approach.


Summary The chemical, microbial and rheological properties of commercial and home-made laban were investigated in an effort to contribute to the standardization of the product. Commercial laban has higher fat, protein and total solids content but was less acidic than traditional laban. Lactobacilli dominate in the former, whereas lactococci are found mainly in the latter. Four micro-organisms classified as Lactococcus lactis ssp lactis, Lactococcus lactis ssp lactis biovar diacetylactis, Lactococcus lactis ssp cremoris and Lactobacillus plantarum were responsible for the fermentation of traditional laban, whereas three micro-organisms, namely: Lactobacillus acidophilus, bifidobacteria and Streptococcus thermophilus were responsible for the production of commercial laban. Unlike the commercial preparation, traditional laban contained considerable numbers of yeasts and moulds and was contaminated with coliforms and fecal coliforms. The rheological profile of a semi-dilute solution was more pronounced in the home-made laban with both preparations flowing from the first Newtonian plateau and the power law region to the second Newtonian plateau with increasing shear rate.


Purpose: Congenital corneal leukoma is rare with an incidence of 6/100000 and is one of the most important causes of amblyopia. Here we report an unusual case of bilateral congenital elevated corneal leukoma. Methods: We encountered a 13-day-old full term male newborn. Ocular examination of both eyes revealed central elevated corneal leukomas with a narrow normal lucid interval to limbus. Corneal diameter of both eyes was 10.5 mm. Results: After performing penetrating keratoplasty, histological examination reported that corneal thickness was about 2 mm and had central circular defect in Descemet's membrane, endothelium, and some part of Bowman's layer compatible with Peters' anomaly. Conclusion: Peters' anomaly should be considered in the differential diagnosis of bilateral congenital bulged corneal leukoma with severe edema.


This paper proposes a new research perspective on resistance to information systems (IS) change. Drawing upon a power lens and complementing it with the organizational literature on resistance, we develop an integrative framework that conceptualizes resistance at three levels: 1) the non-compliance behaviors, 2) the meanings and norms that resisters contest and enact, and 3) the technical artifacts that resisters bring into their acts. By mapping existing IS literature on resistance onto our framework, we identify a bias of the literature towards a refusal view of resistance. That is, IS literature has been mainly concerned with resistance as a refusal behavior –i.e. refusal to a new system, to changes in the working practices, to loss of status quo– by which resisters attempt to neutralize the actions from the proponents of IS change. Yet our framework enables us to depict resistance not only as refusal but also as generative. Whilst a focus on resistance as refusal pays attention to the acts by which resisters aim to block the outcomes intended by the proponents of IS change, the analysis of the generative potential of resistance considers two additional aspects. First, it involves looking at how resisters challenge the meanings that proponents assign to the IS change –i.e. assumptions about the technology, goals and role of actors in the change process. Second, it entails analyzing how (human) resisters and technical artifacts become intertwined in the acts of resistance and how those socio-technical assemblages instigate disciplinary effects to the proponents of IS change. In other words, studying the generative potential of resistance involves viewing resistance as a socio-material accomplishment that may transform the established order through structural and radical changes.


OBJECTIVE
Angiogenic growth factors bFGF and VEGF ensure vascularisation of the growing tumor tissue. We decided to investigate their peripheral serum concentrations in patients with thyroid gland adenoma and papillary carcinoma and with parathyroid adenoma. We wanted to find the possible serum marker of these tumor diseases.

METHODS
28 patients with thyroid gland tumor (14x adenoma, 14x papillary carcinoma) and 12 patients with parathyroid gland adenoma. Growth factors serum levels were measured by ELISA method.

RESULTS
We found significantly higher serum levels of bFGF in both groups of patients with thyroid adenoma (4.93 +/- 3.42 ng/ml) and papillary carcinoma (5.69 +/- 5.58 ng/ml) compared to the healthy population (1.47 +/- 1.77 ng/ml). There were no significant differences of VEGF serum levels between all examined groups of patients (adenoma 213 +/- 197, papillary carcinoma 210 +/- 179, healthy 227 +/- 231 pg/ml). We found significantly higher serum levels of bFGF in patients with parathyroid gland adenoma (7.59 +/- 9.12 ng/ml) compared to those in healthy people (1.47 +/- 1.77 ng/ml).

CONCLUSIONS
Higher bFGF serum concentrations in patients with thyroid and parathyroid tumors are in accordance with their immunohistochemical tissue levels described in the literature. Not so in VEGF. bFGF may be a serum marker of thyroid and parathyroid neoplasms.


Cleft lip and palate are the most common craniofacial deformities in the United States of America and México. Their aesthetic and functional implications influence the life style of the patient: social relationships, school and working performances, self-esteem and health. Surgical repair of the cleft lip is around the third to sixth month of age and the palate repair is when the patient is between six and eighteen months old. There are other surgical repairs during childhood and ideally all of them should be performed by an experienced surgeon teaming up with a pediatric anesthesiologist following the gold standards in cleft care, in a setting where the safety of the patient is paramount.


Recurrent pregnancy loss (RPL) occurs in ∼5% of women. However, the etiology is still poorly understood. Defects in decidualization of the endometrium during early pregnancy contribute to several pregnancy complications, such as pre-eclampsia and intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR), and are believed to be important in the pathogenesis of idiopathic RPL. We performed microarray analysis to identify gene expression alterations in the deciduas of idiopathic RPL patients. Control patients had one antecedent term delivery, but were undergoing dilation and curettage for current aneuploid miscarriage. Gene expression differences were evaluated using both pathway and gene ontology (GO) analysis. Selected genes were validated using quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). A total of 155 genes were found to be significantly dysregulated in the deciduas of RPL patients (>2-fold change, P < 0.05), with 22 genes up-regulated and 133 genes down-regulated. GO analysis linked a large percentage of genes to discrete biological functions, including immune response (23%), cell signaling (18%) and cell invasion (17.1%), and pathway analysis revealed consistent changes in both the interleukin 1 (IL-1) and IL-8 pathways. All genes in the IL-8 pathway were up-regulated while genes in the IL-1 pathway were down-regulated. Although both pathways can promote inflammation, IL-1 pathway activity is important for normal implantation. Additionally, genes known to be critical for degradation of the extracellular matrix, including matrix metalloproteinase 26 and serine peptidase inhibitor Kazal-type 1, were also highly up-regulated. In this first microarray approach to decidual gene expression in RPL patients, our data suggest that dysregulation of genes associated with cell invasion and immunity may contribute significantly to idiopathic recurrent miscarriage.


Every day, three women are murdered in the United States by a current or former partner. Yet policy action to prevent gender-based violence has been limited. Previous studies have highlighted the effect of female political representation on crimes against women in the developing world. This paper investigates whether the election of a female politician reduces the incidence of gender-based violence in the United States. Using a regression discontinuity design on mixed-gender races, we find that the election of a female House Representative leads to a short-lived decline in the prevalence of femicides in her electoral district. The drop in femicides is mainly driven by a deterrence effect that results from higher police responsiveness and effort in solving gender-related crimes.


Oceans represent more than 95% of the world's biosphere and are among the richest sources of biodiversity on Earth. However, human activities such as shipping and construction of marine infrastructure pose a threat to the quality of marine ecosystems. Due to the dependence of most marine animals on sound for their communication, foraging, protection, and ultimately their survival, the effects of noise pollution from human activities are of growing concern. Life cycle assessment (LCA) can play a role in the understanding of how potential environmental impacts are related to industrial processes. However, noise pollution impacts on marine ecosystems have not yet been taken into account. This paper presents a first approach for the integration of noise impacts on marine ecosystems into the LCA framework by developing characterization factors (CF) for the North Sea. Noise pollution triggers a large variety of impact pathways, but as a starting point and proof-of-concept we assessed impacts on the avoidance behaviour of cetaceans due to pile-driving during the construction of offshore windfarms in the North Sea. Our approach regards the impact of avoidance behaviour as a temporary loss of habitat, and assumes a temporary loss of all individuals within that habitat from the total regional population. This was verified with an existing model that assessed the population-level effect of noise pollution on harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) in the North Sea. We expanded our CF to also include other cetacean species and tested it in a case study of the construction of an offshore windfarm (Prinses Amalia wind park). The total impact of noise pollution was in the same order of magnitude as impacts on other ecosystems from freshwater eutrophication, freshwater ecotoxicity, terrestrial acidification, and terrestrial ecotoxicity. Although there are still many improvements to be made to this approach, it provides a basis for the implementation of noise pollution impacts in an LCA framework, and has the potential to be expanded to other world regions and impact pathways.


In this paper we focus on identifying some of the important sociological dimensions of the process of environmental governance through a review of European regulatory frameworks and instruments, specifically in regard to the European Union's Fifth Action Programme on the Environment (5EAP). We show that such policies and the institutions and social networks that promote them are locked into wider social dynamics in the political regulation of European economic and social integration and development. We argue that the 5EAP is a 'redrafting of Rio' in the context of these processes of regulation and integration rather than a systematic rearrangement of society-economy-environment relationships. These processes can be described through the three political dynamics of veto, deflection and differentiation. Focusing on the level of political dynamics provides methodological resources that can contribute to the programme of research developed by the Regulation Approach (RA) (Jessop, 1994a et passim), in particular by accounting for the conflicts and struggles between organised socio-economic actors rather than their (quasi-functionalist) cohesive structural relations that serve a dominant 'strategic line' of accumulation.


Periorbital arteriovenous malformations (AVMs) are uncommon, locally aggressive lesions that pose a therapeutic challenge. The clinical presentation varies from asymptomatic, to tissue destruction, significant hemorrhage, or congestive heart failure. Endovascular treatment is challenging because the lesions are commonly fed by the ophthalmic artery and external carotid arteries, which may have communication to the ophthalmic artery, increasing the potential of vision loss in the event of non-target arterial embolization.1 Various surgical and endovascular methods have been described for the treatment of these lesions.2

The authors present a case series of three patients, describing their experience with the treatment of palpebral and orbito-frontal fistulas using three different types of liquid embolic agents: n-butyl cyanoacrylate (nBCA) (Codman Neurovascular, Raynham, Massachusetts, USA), ethylene vinyl alcohol (EVOH) (Onyx; Medtronic, Irvine, California, USA), and precipitating hydrophilic injectable liquid (PHIL) (Microvention, Tustin, California, USA).(.3 The authors describe intra-arterial injection of the three liquid embolic agents along with the percutaneous injection of nBCA and EVOH for the treatment of these lesions. Two of the patients subsequently underwent surgical excision of the lesion, one for redundant skin in the upper eyelid and the other to avoid a potential tattoo effect from the EVOH. Clinical follow-up, for the three patients, was 1 week, 6 months, and 14 months. The short term clinical outcomes for all three patients were excellent. However, given the natural history of AVMs with a high rate of recurrence after treatment. long term follow-up …


To evaluate and conserve the biodiversity of tidal flats, quantitative research studies and precise identification of benthos species are required. However, there has been no convenient procedure for conducting a benthos survey by common people attempting the conservation of tidal flat ecosystems. In this paper, we describe our attempts to make a civil procedure with a method that is not only simple but also semi-quantitative and analytical. From field tests and field practices, we propose the following method as the civil procedure. At least 8 people are necessary for this work, which entails collecting epifauna during a 15-min search and infauna from 15 holes dug with a small scoop. After collection, the benthos species are identified in the fields through the help of experts and by referring to a handy-sized guidebook with pictures of benthos species. Then, the benthos species are recorded by checking on the tidal flat benthos check sheet. Next, numbers of the check marks for respective species recorded on every check sheet are transcribed to a new sheet (to ascertain how many people collect each species). The total number of species recorded on this combined sheet signifies species richness, with 70% check mark recorded being evaluated as dominant, 70–10% as common and 10% (or collected by only 1 person) as a rare species. Since the civil procedure is designed to be conducted by more than 8 people, deviations due to personal idiosyncrasies would be eliminated. Therefore, the civil procedure we proposed would be not only simple and easy for beginners but also semi-quantitative and analytical. It might be possible to make significant comparisons with other tidal flats and it might be prove useful for long-term monitoring by the


Accurate prediction of solar activity as one aspect of space weather phenomena is essential to decrease the damage from these activities on the ground based communication, power grids, etc. Recently, the connectionist models of the brain such as neural networks and neuro-fuzzy methods have been proposed to forecast space weather phenomena; however, they have not been able to predict solar activity accurately. That has been a motivation for the development of the connectionist model of the brain; this paper aims to apply a connectionist model of the brain to accurately forecasting solar activity, in particular, solar cycle 24. The neuro-fuzzy method has been referred to as the brain emotional learning-based recurrent fuzzy system (BELRFS). BELRFS is tested for prediction of solar cycle 24, and the obtained results are compared with well-known neuro-fuzzy methods and neural networks as well as with physical-based methods. Keywords—brain emotional learning-based recurrent fuzzy system, emotional system, solar activity forecasting,


MOTIVATION
Scaffolding is often an essential step in a genome assembly process, in which contigs are ordered and oriented using read pairs from a combination of paired-end libraries and longer-range mate-pair libraries. Although a simple idea, scaffolding is unfortunately hard to get right in practice. One source of problems is so-called PE-contamination in mate-pair libraries, in which a non-negligible fraction of the read pairs get the wrong orientation and a much smaller insert size than what is expected. This contamination has been discussed before, in relation to integrated scaffolders, but solutions rely on the orientation being observable, e.g. by finding the junction adapter sequence in the reads. This is not always possible, making orientation and insert size of a read pair stochastic. To our knowledge, there is neither previous work on modeling PE-contamination, nor a study on the effect PE-contamination has on scaffolding quality.

RESULTS
We have addressed PE-contamination in an update to our scaffolder BESST. We formulate the problem as an integer linear program which is solved using an efficient heuristic. The new method shows significant improvement over both integrated and stand-alone scaffolders in our experiments. The impact of modeling PE-contamination is quantified by comparing with the previous BESST model. We also show how other scaffolders are vulnerable to PE-contaminated libraries, resulting in an increased number of misassemblies, more conservative scaffolding and inflated assembly sizes.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION
The model is implemented in BESST. Source code and usage instructions are found at https://github.com/ksahlin/BESST BESST can also be downloaded using PyPI.

CONTACT
firstname.lastname@example.com

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


Modern Technology has its purpose of making lives easier and helping people to connect. In the advent of fast pacing world through technology, the Internet and Social Media became a "need" in this present generation. It affects the way the people live at present, specifically the youth of today. In this current situation and reality, the researcher desires to have an in-depth study on this and try to look into what "social media" is as well as its purpose for us. This paper will also attempt to see the effects of social media on young people. The researcher will try to see the advantages or benefits of using this platform most especially in problem solving, creative and critical thinking skills, as well as easy access to communication to other people. On the other hand, this study will also try to discover the disadvantages or negative effects of social media to the young such as internet addiction, depression, cyberbullying, "sex texting", and peer pressure. Through a descriptive method and qualitative approach of research, responses will be gathered from the respondent young people or students through an interview. In relation to this, the study will also try to understand and connect the findings or results of the study to the theory on Moral Development by Lawrence Kohlberg, an American psychologist, and James Fowler, an American theologian and professor, in his stages on Faith Maturity and Development as well as some of the social teachings of the Catholic Church which speak about the importance of the role of the parents in the formation of the young people as moral responsibility. To end this study, the researcher will give some recommendations to fellow educators, parents and guardians on how to deal with this reality of "social media" and continue to become values formators of the young people at present.


Kona is one of the world's premium coffees. Given its small-scale cultivation on family farms, however, it has been especially susceptible to price swings and market gluts. A Cup of Aloha is a heartfelt portrait of the farmers, millers, landowners, merchants, and laborets who struggled to keep themselves and their industry alive. The author traces coffee's history in Hawai'i - from its arrival in 1828 to Kona's position in today's highly competitive speciality coffee market. Through the author's use of oral history interviews, readers will experience day-to-day life on a coffee farm and the challenges, natural and man-made, that inspired innovations and adaptations to the agricultural, economic, and social life in the Kona Coffee Belt.


Purpose: The purpose of this study is to develop an automated frequently asked question (FAQ) answering system for farmers. This paper presents an approach for calculating the similarity between Chinese sentences based on hybrid strategies. Design/methodology/approach: We analyzed the factors influencing the successful matching between a user's question and a question-answer (QA) pair in the FAQ database. Our approach is based on a combination of multiple factors. Experiments were conducted to test the performance of our method. Findings: Experiments show that this proposed method has higher accuracy. Compared with similarity calculation based on TF-IDF, the sentence surface forms and the semantic relations, the proposed method based on hybrid strategies has a superior performance in precision, recall and F-measure value. Research limitations: The FAQ answering system is only capable of meeting users' demand for text retrieval at present. In the future, the system needs to be improved to meet users' demand for retrieving images and videos. Practical implications: This FAQ answering system will help farmers utilize agricultural information resources more effi ciently. Originality/value: We design the algorithms for calculatingn similarity of Chinese sentences based on hybrid strategies, which integrate the question surface similarity, the question semantic similarity and the question-answer similarity based on latent semantic analysis(LSA) to find answers to a user's question.


Real-world learning systems have practical limitations on the quality and quantity of the training datasets that they can collect and consider. How should a system go about choosing a subset of the possible training examples that still allows for learning accurate, generalizable models? To help address this question, we draw inspiration from a highly efficient practical learning system: the human child. Using head-mounted cameras, eye gaze trackers, and a model of foveated vision, we collected first-person (egocentric) images that represents a highly accurate approximation of the "training data" that toddlers' visual systems collect in everyday, naturalistic learning contexts. We used state-of-the-art computer vision learning models (convolutional neural networks) to help characterize the structure of these data, and found that child data produce significantly better object models than egocentric data experienced by adults in exactly the same environment. By using the CNNs as a modeling tool to investigate the properties of the child data that may enable this rapid learning, we found that child data exhibit a unique combination of quality and diversity, with not only many similar large, high-quality object views but also a greater number and diversity of rare views. This novel methodology of analyzing the visual "training data" used by children may not only reveal insights to improve machine learning, but also may suggest new experimental tools to better understand infant learning in developmental psychology.


This paper proposes an automatic design flow of datapath-dominated applications which is able to deal with optimization and equivalence checking of multi-output polynomials over Z2n. This paper also gives four main contributions: 1) proposing a complete design flow for modular equivalence checking, high level synthesis, and optimization; 2) considering hidden monomials to factorize those polynomials which do not have any common monomials; 3) combining and improving our previous optimization heuristics to eliminate multi-operand common sub-expressions as much as possible; and 4) implementing all algorithms on top of the modular Horner expansion diagram package. Experimental results have shown an average saving of 9.9% and 4.5% in the number of gates and critical path delay, respectively, after applying modular reduction over Z2n, while other optimization techniques are not used. Besides, after applying our optimization techniques, experimental comparisons with the state-of-the-art techniques show an average improvement in the area by 19.5% with an average delay decrease of 16.7%. Regarding the comparison with our previous papers, the area and delay are improved by 13.3% and 15.5%, respectively.


Recently it has been shown that a repeating arbitrary spatiotemporal spike pattern hidden in equally dense distracter spike trains can be robustly detected and learned by a single neuron equipped with spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) (Masquelier, Guyonneau, & Thorpe, 2008). To be precise, the neuron becomes selective to successive coincidences of the pattern. Here we extend this scheme to a more realistic scenario with multiple repeating patterns and multiple STDP neurons listening to the incoming spike trains. These listening neurons are in competition: as soon as one fires, it strongly inhibits the others through lateral connections (one-winner-take-all mechanism). This tends to prevent the neurons from learning the same (parts of the) repeating patterns, as shown in simulations. Instead, the population self-organizes, trying to cover the different patterns or coding one pattern by the successive firings of several neurons, and a powerful distributed coding scheme emerges. Taken together, these results illustrate how the brain could easily encode and decode information in the spike times, a theory referred to as temporal coding, and how STDP could play a key role by detecting repeating patterns and generating selective response to them.


Novel HIV protease inhibitors containing a hydroxyethylamine dipeptide isostere as a transition state-mimic king structure were synthesized by combining substructures of known HIV protease inhibitors. Among them, TYA5 and TYB5 were proven to be not only potent enzyme inhibitors (K(i) = 0.12 nM and 0.10 nM, respectively) but also strong anti-HIV agents (IC(50) = 9.5 nM and 66 nM, respectively), even against viral strains with multidrug resistance. Furthermore, insertion of an (E)-alkene dipeptide isostere at the P(1)-P(2) position of TYB5 led to development of a purely nonpeptidic protease inhibitor, TYB1 (K(i) = 0.38 nM, IC(50) = 160 nM).


Abstract Maximizing the current organizational culture and diversity/inclusion practices within CUNY libraries is crucial to retaining highly talented support staff with significant potential for future leadership roles. This research explores equity, diversity, and inclusion within the library profession, with the intention of implementing strategic frameworks to attract, recruit, and retain underrepresented groups within the University. To spotlight areas of upward mobility within CUNY academic libraries, a CUNY-wide Library Workplace Climate survey on the perceptions of diversity, universal inclusion, and career progression was conducted. The scope of the survey study compares the different perspectives of CUNY librarians, full-time library classified paraprofessionals, and part-time classified staff to measure CUNY's commitment to addressing the diversity gap in the library profession. CUNY-wide, 141 library employees participated in a survey study to uncover professional development opportunities in support of career advancement and upward mobility. Nearly 2 in 5 African American/Black library staff-members are paraprofessionals, while 13.5% are faculty. A stark contrast to 3 in 5 or 64% CUNY library faculty, which identified as White/Caucasian. The findings reinforce the need for measures to maximize workplace diversity through support-staff mentoring, guidance, and recruitment. Workplace mentorship and career development—across all levels within CUNY libraries—cultivate skills for a better work environment that can lead to promotion and successful plans for succession. Investing and sustaining structured library professional development opportunities geared toward underrepresented groups—generally in paraprofessional and student-worker roles—will help identify next generation CUNY library leadership.


This article discusses the design and analysis of an experiment performed in a continuous process (CP). Three types of iron ore pellets are tested on two levels of a process variable in an experimental blast furnace process, using a full factorial design with replicates. A multivariate approach to the analysis of the experiment in the form of principal component analysis combined with analysis of variance is proposed. The analysis method also considers the split‐plot‐like structure of the experiment. The article exemplifies how a factorial design combined with multivariate analysis can be used to perform product development experiments in a CP. CPs also demand special considerations when planning, performing and analyzing experiments. The article highlights and discusses such issues and considerations, for example, the dynamic characteristic of CPs, a strategy to handle disturbances during experimentation and the need for process control during experimentation. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Abstract Recent developments in Hungarian constitutional and judicial politics have given impetus to question not only the outcomes of democratisation and Europeanisation, but also the efficacy of the European Union's compliance mechanisms. In 2010, Hungary, one of the forerunners in building democracy made the headlines with Fidesz's attempts at adopting a new Constitution and implementing cardinal laws along with controversial institutional, cultural, religious, moral and socio-economic policies. This article attempts to depict the transformative power of the European Union within a sensitive policy area which touches upon States' pouvoris régaliens: the independence of the judiciary.


This article describes an institutional course redesign initiative in terms of leadership, support, and preliminary findings, based on the Inquiry Through Blended Learning (ITBL) program created to support faculty engaging in blended course redesign. Garrison, Anderson, and Archer's (2000) Community of Inquiry framework has been adapted to a blended environment in order to provide faculty participants with opportunities to discuss and reflect on key redesign questions, explore and experience blended learning from a student perspective, and implement and evaluate their own course redesigns. This article describes the inquiry process and the preliminary lessons learned from the implementation of the ITBL program.


The paper investigates the impact of infrastructural development on poverty reduction in Nigeria. Specifically, the relative effects of physical and social infrastructure on living standards or poverty indicators are examined, with a view to providing empirical evidence on the implications of increased urban infrastructure for the urban poor. The paper employs secondary data for the period 1970:1 to 2005:4 and the structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) technique is adopted in the analysis. The study unequivocally finds that infrastructural development leads to poverty reduction. Results also show that though infrastructure in general reduces poverty, social infrastructure explains a higher proportion of the forecast error in poverty indicators relative to physical infrastructure. This suggests that massive investment in social infrastructure in cities would drastically reduce poverty in the urban areas.


A linear feature extraction technique for asymmetric distributions is introduced, the asymmetric class projection (ACP). By asymmetric classification is understood discrimination among distributions with different covariance matrices. Two distributions with unequal covariance matrices do not, in general, have a symmetry plane, a fact that makes the analysis more difficult compared to the symmetric case. The ACP is similar to linear discriminant analysis (LDA) in the respect that both aim at extracting discriminating features (linear combinations or projections) from many variables. However, the drawback of the well-known LDA is the assumption of symmetric classes with separated centroids. The ACP, in contrast, works on (two) possibly concentric distributions with unequal covariance matrices. The ACP is tested on data from an array of semiconductor gas sensors with the purpose of distinguish bad grain from good.


Reconciliation is a complicated but not intractable matter. Its realisation will depend on context, history and a desired destination. If it were like a contract, then we might look to the terms of the contract to tell whether it had been achieved. But it is not like a contract. If it were about recognising legal rights, then reconciliation might already have been achieved by the fiat of parliaments and the decisions of the courts. But it is not a remedy for broken political machinery that can be 'fixed' by legal mechanics. Reconciliation is closer to a social movement or process, whose character is moral rather than legal. For although the rule of law and the regime of rights attached to it support the fabric of everyday life in democracies, law and rights require something else, and that is the bonds that form a community. These bonds are complex, but they are expressed in the trust and confidence of citizens in their political institutions, and in the civility with which a society conducts itself.


Measuring infiltration and leaching at the plot scale is difficult, especially for high hydraulic conductivity soils. Infiltration rate has been indirectly calculated at the plot scale by comparing surface runoff to rainfall. Direct measurement of infiltration and leaching beyond the point scale is typically limited to locations where land forming has been performed, e.g. infiltration ponds and fields with basin irrigation. The standard method for field measurement of infiltration is a double ring infiltrometer, which is limited in size (typically 30 cm diameter). In this research, a new method is proposed that uses a temporary berm constructed of a water filled 15 cm diameter vinyl hose with the edges sealed to the soil using bentonite. The berm is capable of confining infiltration plot areas of various sizes (e.g. 1 m by 1 m and 3 m by 3 m areas in this research). Water tanks (0.8 m3 and 4.9 m3) and gravity flow were used to supply water and tracers to the plots. A constant head was maintained within the plot automatically using float valves for lower flow rates and manually with a gate valve for higher flow rates. Observation wells were installed 0.5 m outside the plot to monitor for water table rise and tracers that leached into the groundwater. The procedure was tested on soils ranging from silt loam to coarse gravel with measured infiltration rates ranging from 5 to 70 cm/hr. Guidelines are provided for tank size and refilling frequency for field experiments. In addition, numerical simulations were performed to estimate time of response in wells for various soil and experimental design conditions.


Posing the questions that anyone with food allergies will think to ask - and then some - "Food Allergies" provides practical, emotional, and scientific guidance on the topics that affect your life. Allergy expert Scott H. Sicherer addresses the full spectrum of food allergies, from mild to life threatening, from single foods to food families, clearing up misconceptions along the way. He explains how exposure to foods can bring about an allergic response, describes the symptoms of food allergy, and illuminates how food allergies develop. He also recommends tests for diagnosing both food allergies and chronic health problems caused by food allergies - such as eczema, hives, and respiratory and gastrointestinal symptoms. "Food Allergies" thoroughly explains how to prevent exposure to a known allergen at home, at school, in restaurants, and elsewhere and what to do if exposure occurs, including how to handle an anaphylactic emergency. Dr. Sicherer also reviews food reactions that are not allergic (such as lactose intolerance), advises how to get adequate nutrition when you must avoid dietary staples, and discusses whether allergies ever go away (they do-and then sometimes they return).


Marks Basic Medical Biochemistry takes a patient-oriented approach that links biochemistry to physiology and pathophysiology, allowing students to apply fundamental concepts to the practice of medicine from diagnosing patients to recommending effective treatments. Intuitively organized chapters center on hypothetical patient vignettes and helpful icons allow for smooth navigation, making complex concepts easier to grasp! Access additional resources online with purchase of text! Instructors receive access to a dedicated Image Bank as well as all student features, which include fully searchable eBook; animations depicting 9 key biochemical concepts; interactive question bank with more than 450 USMLE questions and complete rationales; full patient summaries for each patient discussed in the text; comprehensive list of disorders covered in the text, with relevant web links; and suggested readings for further exploration."


Understanding people's experiences and the context of
use of a product at the earliest stages of the design
process has in the last decade become an important
aspect of both the design profession and design
education. Generative design research helps designers
understand user experiences, while also throwing light on
their current needs, preferences and future expectations.
In this paper, two complementary methods, namely the
Generative Focus Group (GFG) approach and Experience
Reflection Modelling (ERM), will be presented through a
research case focusing on the development of sustainable
design considerations in the areas of effective use of
resources, and product maintenance and repair. The first
method makes use of generative tools (i.e. diaries and
timelines) to gain feedback from a group of experienced
users. It facilitates group discussions and enables engaging
user participation to develop potential design directions. In
contrast, the second method utilizes a special toolkit of
abstract two- and three-dimensional product parts to
reveal the needs, preferences, and expectations of the
individual in a more in-depth manner, with the intention
being to further explore the insights and design directions
that emerged during the application of the first method.
This paper proposes an initial model that brings together
these two methods, incorporating generative tools and
techniques that are adaptable, participatory and engaging,
and discusses their implications for design education.


In this article, we consider the pricing and hedging of single route dry bulk freight futures contracts traded on the International Maritime Exchange. Thus far, this relatively young market has received almost no academic attention. In contrast to many other commodity markets, freight services are non-storable, making a simple cost-of-carry valuation impossible. We empirically compare the pricing and hedging accuracy of a variety of continuous-time futures pricing models. Our results show that the inclusion of a second stochastic factor significantly improves the pricing and hedging accuracy. Overall, the results indicate that a non-stationary two-factor model provides the best performance.


The steady increase in diabetes among children and young adults is one of the emerging health problems worldwide. This disease, characterized by impaired glucose metabolism and abnormally high blood glucose levels, has serious negative health consequences in young organisms, many of which surface later in life. In addition, pharmacological treatments primarily developed and tested in adult diabetics carry health risks and are associated with unanticipated side effects when administered to children. All these concerns generate interest in developing micronutrient based approaches as safe and effective alternatives to medical drugs in both prevention and management of diabetes, especially in children. This review outlines the scope of this health problem, highlights current therapeutic approaches to pediatric diabetes, and presents the latest findings on preventive and therapeutic potential of micronutrients and other natural compounds in controlling diabetes in children.


During the Copenhagen Fashion Week A/W 2010, CPH Kids opened as the first independent trade fair for children's clothing. Despite considerable resistance, the fair managed to establish itself and challenge the established order by providing a venue devoted fully to children's clothing and luring away exhibitors and visitors looking for change. In this paper, we analyze the dynamic development and distinctive traits of the children's clothing sector symbolized at the new fair. Our study contributes to inquiry into the role of fairs and festivals in the creative industries by examining the special case of coinciding, competing trade fairs. We introduce and build on three closely related, but in our view complementary, concepts applied and developed in analyses of festivals, trade shows and other kinds of temporary, usually competitive events, namely tournament rituals, field configuring events and tournaments of value. We establish the common ground of the three approaches, particular their assertion of the rich research potential and vital significance of festivals, fairs and similar events for many fields, whether deemed creative or not. We also single out particular strengths of each approach, which inform our inquiry. They review of theory, points to how existing work has explored fairs as arenas of conflict between exhibitors as well as the rivalry between events separated in time and/or place. In our case, we demonstrate how the emergence of a rival fair both incites and exposes division or segmentation of a field. This observation in our view, challenges prevailing understandings of the relationship between fields and the events, we assume represent and shape them. We argue that it is more complicated than 2 extant theory suggests, and this has implications for the analysis of the fairs and to their role in configuring field. We raise questions about the precise manner in and extent to which events configure field, and point to the agency of event organizers, the fair context and the fair as medium as factors that need to be factored in. The reflections on the field configuring capacity of fairs and similar event, inform our explorations of Danish childrenswear. Following the tournament of value-approach, we place values – more specifically how different values are affirmed and negotiated at the fairs – at the center of our analysis. The approach suggests, that symbolic value, and ultimately the (economic) value exchange value, of cultural products are established through judgments of their technical/material, social, situational, appreciative and utility values. However, we do not focus as much on specific evaluative practices in the field, as the cultural values and norms around which childhood is constructed. These values are vital for the field of children's clothing, so we address contemporary concerns about childhood placing a particular emphasis on the Nordic context with its the notion of "the competent child". While our analysis only offers only selected snapshots of the many activities at the two fairs, we have pointed to some of the ways in which positions are staked, values are addressed, forms of capital built and exchanged, and different field configuring mechanisms operate. We conclude, that while further research is required to gauge the field configuring impact of CPH Kids and explore the values, identities and structures of Danish children's fashion in more depth, our investigation points to the field dividing impact that fairs might have.


Suspension feeding is one of the most widespread feeding strategies among benthic organisms. However, natural feeding ecology and energetics of benthic suspension feeders are poorly known. The scarcity of field methods, apparatus and protocols that facilitate obtention of reliable in situ data has contributed to this lack of knowledge. A detailed description of an improved semi-closed recirculating system as well as the experimental set up is provided for the study of energetics in benthic suspension feeders. The system, completely submersible and surface-independent, allows us to assess oxygen concentration changes and feeding rates under natural conditions. Methodological examinations are conducted to investigate: a) the circulation of the water within the chamber; b) the time required for the flushing pump to entirely renew the volume of water of the incubation chambers; c) the behavior of the species within the chambers; d) the time of acclimation to the chamber conditions for the different species; e) the maximum decrease in oxygen concentration without affecting respiration rate; f) the time required to detect changes in concentration of the natural food sources. The system and experimental protocol is tested with species from three representative phyla, Porifera, Cnidaria and Tunicata.


The EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) requires that the ecological and chemical status of water bodies in Europe should be assessed, and action taken where possible to ensure that at least "good" quality is attained in each case by 2015. This paper is concerned with the accuracy and precision with which chemical status in rivers can be measured given certain sampling strategies, and how this can be improved. High-frequency (hourly) chemical data from four rivers in southern England were subsampled to simulate different sampling strategies for four parameters used for WFD classification: dissolved phosphorus, dissolved oxygen, pH and water temperature. These data sub-sets were then used to calculate the WFD classification for each site. Monthly sampling was less precise than weekly sampling, but the effect on WFD classification depended on the closeness of the range of concentrations to the class boundaries. In some cases, monthly sampling for a year could result in the same water body being assigned to three or four of the WFD classes with 95% confidence, due to random sampling effects, whereas with weekly sampling this was one or two classes for the same cases. In the most extreme case, the same water body could have been assigned to any of the five WFD quality classes. Weekly sampling considerably reduces the uncertainties compared to monthly sampling. The width of the weekly sampled confidence intervals was about 33% that of the monthly for P species and pH, about 50% for dissolved oxygen, and about 67% for water temperature. For water temperature, which is assessed as the 98th percentile in the UK, monthly sampling biases the mean downwards by about 1 °C compared to the true value, due to problems of assessing high percentiles with limited data. Low-frequency measurements will generally be unsuitable for assessing standards expressed as high percentiles. Confining sampling to the working week compared to all 7 days made little difference, but a modest improvement in precision could be obtained by sampling at the same time of day within a 3 h time window, and this is recommended. For parameters with a strong diel variation, such as dissolved oxygen, the value obtained, and thus possibly the WFD classification, can depend markedly on when in the cycle the sample was taken. Specifying this in the sampling regime would be a straightforward way to improve precision, but there needs to be agreement about how best to characterise risk in different types of river. These results suggest that in some cases it will be difficult to assign accurate WFD chemical classes or to detect likely trends using current sampling regimes, even for these largely groundwater-fed rivers. A more critical approach to sampling is needed to ensure that management actions are appropriate and supported by data.


Abstract: Conodont apatite from a shallow-marine Middle Devonian transgressive unit has been investigated in five borehole sections representative of the epicontinental Belarussian Basin located in a near-equatorial setting. The transgression is related to the onset of the late Eifelian Kačák Event, an important biotic episode recorded worldwide. The δ18Oapatite data were acquired using the secondary ion mass spectrometry (SHRIMP) technique. The mean corrected values in the studied sections are in the range 19.8 ‰ to 20.2 ‰, significantly exceeding the values measured for late Eifelian low-latitude open marine basins. This can be explained by higher average δ18Oseawater levels related to elevated seawater salinities in the Belarussian epeiric basin, in agreement with the presence of impoverished marine fauna. The intra-specimen δ18O variability, with differences ranging up to 2.6 ‰ in some specimens, can be explained by fluctuating δ18Oseawater and, to a smaller degree, temperature variations in the Belarussian inland sea under a monsoonal climate. The present results demonstrate that local paleoclimate and epeiric paleogeography may considerably obscure the global climatic signature of the conodont apatite isotopic record.


This investigation was aimed to find out the most common deficiencies of Composition I students' English writing and consequently identify the weak points in the students writings and then establish a prioritization of such in order to have a better knowledge on the right and precise course of action to be taken for further researchers. This study was carried out in the Foreign Language Department of the University of El Salvador. The subjects of this study were a total of 21 students randomly chosen from four different groups of Composition I. The data required for this study was gathered through four different instruments: two questionnaires to collect the points of view from teachers and students respectively. As well as a rubric to analyze students' compositions and a check list to keep records of the class observation. The results of the study suggested that
there are three kinds of errors that outstand as the most common errors in the students' writings: Those related to Grammatical Deficiencies, those related to Coherence Deficiencies and finally those related to Mother Tongue Interference Deficiencies. In conclusion, the thesis argues that writing in English is essential in students' process of learning a new language but that students should not be expected to be able to write good abstracts without assistance. This investigation hopes to offer all participants useful insights on writing in English, and thus, make a contribution to improving the general standard of students' compositions.


The most recent FCC ruling proposes relying on a database of incumbents as the primary means of determining white space availability at any white spaces device (WSD). While the ruling provides broad guidelines for the database, the specifics of its design, features, implementation, and use are yet to be determined. Furthermore, architecting a network where all WSDs rely on the database raises several systems and networking challenges that have remained unexplored. Also, the ruling treats the database only as a storehouse for incumbents. We believe that the mandated use of the database has an additional opportunity: a means to dynamically manage the RF spectrum. Motivated by this opportunity, in this paper we present SenseLess, a database driven white spaces network. As suggested by its very name, in SenseLess, WSDs obviate the need to sense the spectrum by relying entirely on a database service to determine white spaces availability. The service, using a combination of an up-to-date database of incumbents, sophisticated signal propagation modeling, and an efficient content dissemination mechanism ensures efficient, scalable, and safe white space network operation. We build, deploy, and evaluate SenseLess and compare our results to ground truth spectrum measurements. We present the unique system design considerations that arise due to operating over the white spaces. We also evaluate its efficiency and scalability. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that identifies and examines the systems and networking challenges that arise from operating a white space network, which is solely dependent on a channel occupancy database.


The performance of a plane, unblazed grating (600 lines/mm) as a predisperser has been investigated. Placed 7 cm in front of the primary slit of a 2-m grazing incidence vacuum spectrograph, the foregrating allowed passage of uv (100 to 500 A) into the spectrograph in 50 to 150 A bands. The spurious background observed when radiation passed directly through the primary slit was found to be absent from the predispersed spectra, which have been observed by both photographic and photoelectric methods. These spectra, free from scattered background and second-order images, exhibited measurable line displacement, up to 0.3 mm from the line image positions of the direct spectra. Such displacement, occuring naturally with the plane foregrating and shown to be in agreement with theoretical predictions, are sometimes found as a result of source misalignment with grazing incidence instruments. Use was made of the foregrating for isolation of true continuum radiation for the Vodar vacuum sliding spark and linear pinch sources.


Social infrastructure has endured a long period of neglect in most developed and emerging countries, with chronic underinvestment exposed by the coronavirus crisis 2020. Private sector investment in social infrastructure has widely fallen back over the last decade - this in contrast to economic infrastructure. One of the outcomes of the last global (financial) crisis 2007/08 was a slow revival of economic infrastructure policies, and a growing involvement of institutional investors. This is the first, more systematic account of social infrastructure investment from an international perspective, leading to several key conclusions. The public sector will remain the dominant funding and financing source. Nonetheless, much more private capital could flow with greater clarity on social assets and projects, given their very diverse specific characteristics. There are various investment strategies that can realistically be improved and expanded. Sustainability, impact and SDG investing open a new door for asset owners.


Changes in the sensitivity of the fovea of one of the eyes (the right eye) under influence of a glaring source of light shining into that eye can be demonstrated by comparing the visual impression obtained by that eye from a dimly illuminated surface with the impression obtained by the other eye (the left eye) from a similar surface. By adjusting the illumination of one of the surfaces the apparent brightnesses can be made to match exactly. In this way a quantitative method of measuring the sensitivity of the fovea under influence of various conditions of illumination is obtained. When a small area of the retina is illuminated the sensitivity of this area and also of the surroundings drops to a considerably lower level within 0.1 second (α-adaptation). The rate of recovery of the sensitivity after exposure is strongly dependent upon the time of exposure (β-adaptation). α-adaptation can neither be accounted for by assuming a strong adaptive influence of the stray light within the eye, nor by assuming a lateral diffusion of photosensitive substances or of photolytic products over the retina. The hypothesis is put forward that α-adaptation is of electrical origin. This hypothesis accounts for many of the phenomena observed with incandescent lamp light but not for those observed with strongly chromatic light. The only hypothesis presenting itself at present to account for these phenomena seems to be that α-adaptation has its seat in the retinal synapses.


Current U.S. policy on safety regulation for imported food is based largely on ex post measures. Several reform proposals seek to strengthen the ex ante component of this regulatory program. These proposals rely on one or more of three basic strategies: direct extraterritorial regulation; delegation of regulatory authority to private entities; and delegation of regulatory authority to foreign government agencies. This paper explores the ability of each strategy to respond to several principal-agent problems relevant to imported-food safety: the regulatory license problem; interest group capture; and the reality of bribery and threats in many food-exporting countries. Through the lens of these principal-agent problems, delegation to a foreign government agency is the least attractive of the three strategies. The choice between the remaining two strategies is an empirical question on which little data is currently available. To the extent governments wish to experiment with delegation to private entities, they should do so in a limited manner, focusing on specific product categories or regions. The success or failure of these programs could then inform decisions on whether to rely more broadly on delegation to private entities as a regulatory strategy.


We analyzed and radiocarbon-dated 205 fossil woodrat middens from 14 sites in central and northern Wyoming and adjacent Utah and Montana to document spa- tiotemporal patterns of Holocene invasion by Utah juniper (Juniperus osteosperma). Ho- locene migration into central and northern Wyoming and southern Montana from the south proceeded by a series of long-distance dispersal events, which were paced by climate variability and structured by the geographic distribution and connectivity of suitable habitats on the landscape. The migration of Utah juniper into the region involved multiple long- distance dispersal events, ranging from 30 to 135 km. One of the earliest established populations, on East Pryor Mountain in south central Montana, is currently the northernmost population of the species. Establishment by long-distance dispersal of that population and another in the Bighorn Basin occurred during a period of relatively dry climate between 7500 and 5400 years ago. Further expansion of these initial colonizing populations and backfilling to occupy suitable sites to the south was delayed during a wet period from 5400 to 2800 years ago. Development of dry conditions 2800 years ago led to a rapid expansion in which Utah juniper colonized sites throughout its current range. Landscape structure and climate variability play important roles in governing the pattern and pace of natural in- vasions and deserve close attention in studying and modeling plant invasions, whether exotic or natural.


Although mindfulness meditation practice appears to confer positive effects on various clini-cal conditions, physiological responses to this practice in healthy individuals are largely un-known. This study is aimed at evaluating the physiological effects of short-term mindfulness meditation in university students intending to take a written term examination. Young healthy university students (n=18) recruited as participants were divided equally into a me-ditation group without examination stress, a non-meditating group with examination stress, and a meditation group with examination stress. The meditation intervention groups were offered mindfulness practice twice daily of 1 h each time for a period of 5 weekdays, except for weekends, for 3 consecutive weeks. The parameters measured included heart rate, blood pressure and serum cortisol. Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS) were also obtained to monitor any negative psychological symptoms. All parameters were measured before inter-vention, just after intervention, which also coincided with the eve of the academic examina-tion and at 3 weeks after. The DASS-Stress scale was significantly (p<0.05) reduced after in-tervention in the meditation group with no examination challenge. However, no significant changes were found in the cardiovascular and cortisol outcomes amongst all groups for all time lines. Even though these findings did not show any significant physiological responses to the short-term mindfulness practice in stressful conditions, nonetheless, the results dem-onstrate the potential benefits of this practice in alleviating stress in the neutral environment of university students. Future studies should address the effects of mindfulness practice in larger groups exposed in stressful situations.


The boundary cap (BC) is a transient neural crest-derived group of cells located at the dorsal root entry zone (DREZ) that have been shown to differentiate into sensory neurons and glia in vivo. We find that when placed in culture, BC cells self-renew, show multipotency in clonal cultures and express neural crest stem cell (NCSCs) markers. Unlike sciatic nerve NCSCs, the BC-NCSC (bNCSCs) generates sensory neurons upon differentiation. The bNCSCs constitute a common source of cells for functionally diverse types of neurons, as a single bNCSC can give rise to several types of nociceptive and thermoreceptive sensory neurons. Our data suggests that BC cells comprise a source of multipotent sensory specified stem cells that persist throughout embryogenesis.


Summary.  Background: Acute traumatic coagulopathy (ATC) is an impairment of hemostasis that occurs early after injury and is associated with a 4‐fold higher mortality, increased transfusion requirements and organ failure. Objectives: The purpose of the present study was to develop a clinically relevant definition of ATC and understand the etiology of this endogenous coagulopathy. Patients/methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study of trauma patients admitted to five international trauma centers and corroborated our findings in a novel rat model of ATC. Coagulation status on emergency department arrival was correlated with trauma and shock severity, mortality and transfusion requirements. 3646 complete records were available for analysis. Results: Patients arriving with a prothrombin time ratio (PTr) > 1.2 had significantly higher mortality and transfusion requirements than patients with a normal PTr (mortality: 22.7% vs. 7.0%; P < 0.001. Packed red blood cells: 3.5 vs. 1.2 units; P < 0.001. Fresh frozen plasma: 2.1 vs. 0.8 units; P < 0.001). The severity of ATC correlated strongly with the combined degree of injury and shock. The rat model controlled for exogenously induced coagulopathy and mirrored the clinical findings. Significant coagulopathy developed only in animals subjected to both trauma and hemorrhagic shock (PTr: 1.30. APTTr: 1.36; both P < 0.001 compared with sham controls). Conclusions: ATC develops endogenously in response to a combination of tissue damage and shock. It is associated with increased mortality and transfusion requirements in a dose‐dependent manner. When defined by standard clotting times, a PTr > 1.2 should be adopted as a clinically relevant definition of ATC.


We face a time of stagnant economic growth, severe unemployment, massive budget deficits, and an increasingly competitive global economy. Monetary policy is tapped out, and there is a great deal of uncertainty about the effectiveness of a traditional Keynesian stimulus – and, not surprisingly, a heated debate among economists. One thing we do know is that a stimulus is quite difficult to execute effectively. For example, it is a challenge to identify "shovel ready" projects that contribute to long-term economic growth, particularly on short notice. There is no uncertainty, though, about the need to address a broad range of specific problems contributing to our economic woes. As an illustrative example, this Article emphasizes the perils of having the highest corporate tax rate in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ("OECD") in a competitive global economy. Cutting our corporate tax rate will encourage businesses to invest and hire more employees, while also reducing incentives to engage in wasteful tax planning and to shift taxable income and jobs overseas. In addition to these problems with our substantive law, we also face problems of process that are undercutting our government's effectiveness. An important (and familiar) one is that politicians are consistently tempted to accommodate organized interest groups, especially if the costs of these favors can be quietly passed on to the general public. This is all the more true if special interest deals can be financed with deficit spending, so that the bill will not come due until long after our current political leaders have retired. Various measures can constrain this familiar political dynamic, and this Article sketches three strategies as illustrative examples. First, we should make the costs of special interest deals more visible through better budgetary accounting. Second, we should enlist specific institutions within our government to target waste and pork. For example, we should empower special House and Senate committees to cut particular budget items or, alternatively, to sever them from the rest of the budget and subject them to a separate public vote. Third, we should create stronger institutional barriers to deficit spending. Scarcity focuses the mind, so that our leaders will have greater incentive to reject initiatives that are not cost-justified.


The majority of social science research uses a single measure of race when investigating racial inequality. However, a growing body of work demonstrates that race shapes the life chances of individuals in multiple ways, related not only to how people self-identify but also to how others perceive them. As multiple measures of race are increasingly collected and used in survey research, it becomes important to consider the best methods of leveraging such data. We present four analytical approaches for incorporating two different dimensions of race in the same study and illustrate their use with data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. The approaches range from tests of specific hypotheses to the most exploratory description of how different measures of race relate to social inequality. Although each approach has its strengths and weaknesses, by accounting for the multidimensionality of race, they all allow for more nuanced patterns of advantage and disadvantage than standard single-measure methods.


Providing a wealth of synonyms and antonyms for everyday use, this revised edition of the Compact Oxford Thesaurus is ideal in helping you find the right word when writing, or for other language queries. The Compact Oxford Thesaurus provides you with the most useful synonym first, so that you can find the information you are looking for easily. It also features a two-colour layout and a very clear, open design, so that you can navigate around the thesaurus quickly. New vocabulary has been added in this revised edition, so you can be sure that your Oxford thesaurus reflects the very latest changes in the English language. Notes on frequently confused words such as affect and effect, or compliment and complement can be found throughout the text, helping you to avoid common pitfalls when writing. The centre section of the thesaurus provides practical help in using a thesaurus to improve your choice of words and to refine your writing style, as well as new material for word game and puzzle enthusiasts. The Compact Oxford Thesaurus is an invaluable tool for anyone who needs to write reports or memos at work, essays at school or college, or letters or emails to friends, and is ideal for creative writing too. It can help to expand your vocabulary, or give you vital clues in solving language puzzles and crosswords.


This book tackles one of the most topical socio-legal issues of today: how the law - in particular, the European Court of Human Rights - is responding to shifting practices and ideas of fatherhood in a world that offers radical possibilities for the fragmentation of the conventional father figure and therefore urges decisions upon what kind of characteristics makes someone a legal father. It explores the Court's reaction to changing family and, more specifically, fatherhood realities. In so doing, it engages in timely conversations about the rights and responsibilities of men as fathers. By tracing values and assumptions underpinning the Court's views on fatherhood, this book contributes to highlight the expressive powers of the ECtHR and, more specifically, the latter's role in producing and legitimising ideas about parenting and, more generally, in influencing how family life is regulated and organised.


The unsaturated hydraulic conductivity function is the dominant material property for modeling soil water dynamics. Because it is difficult to measure directly, it is often derived from the water retention characteristic combined with a geometric model of the pore space. In this study, we developed an automated, simple multistep flux (MSF) experiment to directly measure unsaturated conductivities, K(ψm), at a number of water potentials, ψm, using the experimental setup of classical multistep outflow (MSO) experiments. In contrast to the MSO experiment, the MSF experiment measures the conductivity directly at a spatially constant water potential assuming macroscopically homogeneous materials. Additionally, the proposed method reveals the hysteresis of K(ψm) with respect to increasing and decreasing water potentials as well as the temporal dynamics of K(ψm) during transient‐flow conditions. This temporal behavior is explained by the dynamics of fluid configurations at the pore scale during drainage and imbibition leading to hydraulic nonequilibrium. It may provoke a systematic underestimation of hydraulic conductivity using inverse optimization of K(ψm) based on classical MSO experiments. The new approach will improve the determination of K(ψm) and it provides an experimental tool to quantify the effects of hydraulic nonequilibrium under transient conditions.


This article describes and illustrates how to produce modular .NET software solutions by the use of Decorator design pattern and AspectOriented Programming (AOP) tool PostSharp. We applied both techniques for modularizing crosscutting concerns of a traditional modularization example: logging function. This work presents logging solutions with the use of Decorator and PostSharp to modularize associated cross issues, along with detailing the advantages and disadvantages of both solutions. Likewise, this work points out details of in PostSharp along with proposing the use of PostSharp and Decorator to achieve solutions with a higher level of modularity.


The lung of the African lungfish Protopterus aethiopicus has been investigated by morphometric techniques. The volume of the lung was strongly correlated with body mass. The exchange tissue made up about 50% of the lung. The intrapulmonary air constituted 73% of the volume of the lung, the rest being made up of the interalveolar septa (22%) and the blood capillaries (5%). The surface area of the blood-gas (tissue) barrier per unit body mass was 14.3 cm2 g-1 and the harmonic mean thickness of the tissue barrier 0.370 μm. The total morphometric pulmonary diffusing capacity per unit body mass was 0.0024 ml O2 s-1 mbar-1 kg-1 (1 bar = 105 Pa) Of the three existing genera of lungfish, the general structure of the lung of Protopterus was similar to that of Lepidosiren and much unlike that of Neoceratodus. This could be attributed to the fact that both Protopterus and Lepidosiren are obligate air-breathers while Neoceratodus is an obligate water- breather. A comparison of the pulmonary morphometric data on Protopterus with those of the gas exchange apparatus of other groups of vertebrates has been made and pulmonary morphometric and design specializations in the evolution of the air-breathing vertebrates from the lungfishes (some of the initial air-breathers) to reptiles through to birds are apparent.


Store layout is an important factor affecting consumer behaviour and a critical determinant towards the creation of store image. Well designed layouts are extremely important because they strongly influence in-store traffic patterns, shopping atmosphere, shopping behaviour, and operational efficiency (Vrechopoulos et al., 2004: 13). When an inconsistency occurs, some consumers will abandon that establishment in search of another one which offers fast, convenient and better services (Andersen, 1997: 118). Taking a more strategic approach to store layout can reap big rewards by boosting sales, increasing customer loyalty and ultimately increasing turnover (Clark, 2003: 42). The overall aim of the study was to ascertain if independent convenience stores in Kwa Mashu are aware of the impact of store layout on purchasing patterns of consumers. In order to accomplish the objectives of the study, a quantitative study was conducted at the convenience stores at Kwa Mashu by means of self-administered questionnaires. A sample of 400 respondents was asked questions pertaining to the study. The respondents were selected through non-probability sampling within which convenience sampling was applied. Conclusions and recommendations were thereafter drawn from the literature and the findings of the study. The results of this study show that consumers experience problems with store layout. It was found that appearance of the store, merchandise display, store atmosphere, instore service and accessibility are the major causes of this discomfort. Therefore, it is recommended that convenience retail owners in Kwa Mashu attend to those areas and see to it that necessary strategies are implemented to help customers where there is a need.


Ocean-zoning arguments often center on the biology of ocean species, the geography of fishing-use patterns, and the need for preventing use conflicts. Here we expand this discussion to the social and legal aspects of ocean zoning, focusing on comprehensive planning, segregation of activities into use-priority areas, and the allocation of user rights within each zone. The inclusion of all of these features within an ocean-zoning regime can be a catalyst for a variety of ancillary benefits, including opportunities for user groups to form informal or formal long-lived institutions and a reassessment of the focus and scope of the regulatory institutions involved in ocean management. Along with the ability of users to negotiate and trade within and between zones, both features will lead to improved conflict resolution, efficiency of use, and ecosystem stability - critical components for the production of ecosystem services and maintenance of biological and human economic benefits.