In this paper we show that a small sample of radio galaxies with evidence for multiple epochs of jet activity (so-called `double-double' radio galaxies) have the same electron injection spectral index in the two activity episodes, a result which might be considered surprising given the very different lobe dynamics expected in the first and second episode. We construct models for the dynamics of radio galaxies, with an emphasis on their episodic behaviour, and show that hotspot formation and confinement of lobes for the inner double of double-double radio galaxies are possible even without any thermal matter in the outer cocoon. We argue that (i) the observed similar injection spectral indices are due to similar jet powers in the two episodes, (ii) the `spectral index--radio power' correlation of a flux limited sample of radio galaxies is the primary one, and not the `spectral index--redshift correlation', (iii) jets are made of pair plasma and not electron-proton, (iv) and the Lorentz factor of the spine of the jet should be $\gapp 10$ to explain the observations. Furthermore, we argue that the observations show that higher power radio galaxies do not have a higher jet bulk Lorentz factors, but instead simply have a higher number density of particles in the jet rest frame. A consequence of our models is that aligned double-double radio galaxies with very old ($\gapp10^8$ yr) outer doubles, or misaligned double-double radio galaxies, are statistically more likely to have dissimilar injection indices in two different episodes, as they will probably have different jet powers.


The conventional method for assessing acute oral toxicity (OECD Test Guideline 401) was designed to identify the median lethal dose (LD50), using the death of animals as an endpoint. Introduced as an alternative method (OECD Test Guideline 420), the Fixed Dose Procedure (FDP) relies on the observation of clear signs of toxicity, uses fewer animals and causes less suffering. More recently, the Acute Toxic Class method and the Up-and-Down Procedure have also been adopted as OECD test guidelines. Both of these methods also use fewer animals than the conventional method, although they still use death as an endpoint. Each of the three new methods incorporates a sequential dosing procedure, which results in increased efficiency. In 1999, with a view to replacing OECD Test Guideline 401, the OECD requested that the three new test guidelines be updated. This was to bring them in line with the regulatory needs of all OECD Member Countries, provide further reductions in the number of animals used, and introduce refinements to reduce the pain and distress experienced by the animals. This paper describes a statistical modelling approach for the evaluation of acute oral toxicity tests, by using the revised FDP for illustration. Opportunities for further design improvements are discussed.


Poly(2-alkyl-2-oxazoline)s (PAOx) have received increasing interest for biomedical applications. Therefore, it is of fundamental importance to gain an in-depth understanding of the biodistribution profile of PAOx. We report the biodistribution of poly(2-ethyl-2-oxazoline) (PEtOx) with a molar mass of 5 kDa radiolabeled with PET isotopes 89Zr and 18F. 18F-labeled PEtOx is prepared by the strain-promoted azide-alkyne cycloaddition (SPAAC) of [18F]fluoroethylazide to bicyclo[6.1.0]non-4-yne (BCN)-functionalized PEtOx as many common labeling strategies were found to be unsuccessful for PEtOx. 89Zr-labeled PEtOx is prepared using desferrioxamine end-groups as a chelator. Five kDa PEtOx shows a significantly faster blood clearance compared to PEtOx of higher molar mass while uptake in the liver is lower, indicating a minor contribution of the liver in excretion of the 5 kDa PEtOx. While [18F]-PEtOx displays a rapid and efficient clearance from the kidneys, 5 kDa [89Zr]-Df-PEtOx is not efficiently cleared over the time course of the study, which is most likely caused by trapping of 89Zr-labeled metabolites in the renal tubules and not the polymer itself, demonstrating the importance of selecting the appropriate label for biodistribution studies.


Performance in hardware has typically played a major role in differentiating among leading candidates in cryptographic standardization efforts. Winners of two past NIST cryptographic contests (Rijndael in case of AES and Keccak in case of SHA-3) were ranked consistently among the two fastest candidates when implemented using FPGAs and ASICs. Hardware implementations of cryptographic operations may quite easily outperform software implementations for at least a subset of major performance metrics, such as speed, power consumption, and energy usage, as well as in terms of security against physical attacks, including side-channel analysis. Using hardware also permits much higher flexibility in trading one subset of these properties for another. A large number of candidates at the early stages of the standardization process makes the accurate and fair comparison very challenging. Nevertheless, in all major past cryptographic standardization efforts, future winners were identified quite early in the evaluation process and held their lead until the standard was selected. Additionally, identifying some candidates as either inherently slow or costly in hardware helped to eliminate a subset of candidates, saving countless hours of cryptanalysis. Finally, early implementations provided a baseline for future design space explorations, paving a way to more comprehensive and fairer benchmarking at the later stages of a given cryptographic competition. In this paper, we first summarize, compare, and analyze results reported by other groups until mid-May 2020, i.e., until the end of Round 2 of the NIST PQC process. We then outline our own methodology for implementing and benchmarking PQC candidates using both hardware and software/hardware co-design approaches. We apply our hardware approach to 6 lattice-based CCA-secure Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs), representing 4 NIST PQC submissions. We then apply a software-hardware co-design approach to 12 lattice-based CCA-secure KEMs, representing 8 Round 2 submissions. We hope that, combined with results reported by other groups, our study will provide NIST with helpful information regarding the relative performance of a significant subset of Round 2 PQC candidates, assuming that at least their major operations, and possibly the entire algorithms, are off-loaded to hardware.


I. INTRODUCTION In AES Sparrows Point LNG, LLC v. Smith, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit determined that the Natural Gas Act (NGA) preempted a zoning amendment that would have prevented the construction of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility.1 The court found that the zoning amendment was not part of Maryland's Coastal Management Program (MCMP) and therefore could not fall into one of the exceptions for state legislation in the NGA.2 The Fourth Circuit reversed the District Court of Maryland,3 which had (1) held the zoning amendment was not preempted by the NGA because it fell into one of the three categorical exceptions for the states in the NGA,4 and was (2) not an undue burden on interstate commerce.5 II. CASE OVERVIEW This dispute was before the Maryland District Court twice, and is further complicated by the Maryland governmental authorities' actions in mid-suit. On November 3, 2005, plaintiff AES Sparrows Point LNG, LLC (AES) leased a site at 600 Shipyard Road in Baltimore County, Maryland with the intention of building a LNG facility.6 On March 24, 2006, AES started the requisite process of filing an application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for permission to construct the LNG at the leased site.7 The news of AES's plans to build the LNG provoked some public concern and in reaction to this concern, the Baltimore County Council approved bill 71-06.8 This ordinance, which would have prevented AES from building the LNG facility, stipulated a LNG terminal "could only be constructed with a 'special exception' and had to be at least [five] miles from residential zones and 500 feet from business zones."9 On September 22, 2006, AES filed a lawsuit seeking declaratory and injunctive relief against the County Executive of Baltimore, the Zoning Commissioner for Baltimore County, and Baltimore County.10 The suit claimed the NGA preempted the Baltimore County bill under the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution.11 AES subsequently filed a motion for summary judgment, and the defendants filed a motion to dismiss on the grounds of ripeness and subject matter jurisdiction.12 Although the district court found the zoning restriction violated the Supremacy Clause, and granted AES's motion for summary judgment on January 10, 2007,13 Baltimore County was undeterred. Thirty-six days later, on February 5, 2007, Baltimore County passed Bill 907 (an effort to amend Baltimore County Zoning Regulation Article 105)14 to prevent AES from constructing the LNG because it would have been one of the prohibited uses in Baltimore County's Chesapeake Bay Critical Areas.15 The next day, AES filed the present suit seeking injunctive and declaratory relief, because this new bill would also prevent construction of the LNG facility.16 On February 9, 2007, AES was granted a temporary restraining order until the court could rule on the motions for declaratory and injunctive relief.17 On this same day in February, Baltimore County tried to get the County's Critical Area Protection Program to include a restraint on LNG siting in coastal areas.18 Even as the District Court was conducting a hearing on the motions for declaratory and injunctive relief, the Critical Area Commission adopted the zoning amendment.19 Maryland never presented Bill 9-07 to the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA) for approval as required by the procedures of the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA) for amending a state's CMP.20 The District Court concluded that Bill 9-07 was not preempted by the NGA, because when Maryland adopted Bill 9-07 into the County's CAPP, it also incorporated the bill into its CMP.21 The district court further concluded that Bill 9-07 was an exercise of Maryland's delegated authority under the CZMA and, therefore, was not preempted by the NGA.22 AES's request for declaratory and injunctive relief was denied and this appeal followed. …


Journal of Psychopathology 2015;21:415-423 Summary Despite the fact that awareness of eating disorders (EDs) has grown during the past decades, the conceptualisation, psychopathological characterisation and clinical diagnosis of EDs has proven to be problematic for both researchers and clinicians. Presently, diagnostic criteria employed for anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN) are unable to account for an exceedingly high number of individuals with clinically significant eating symptoms or to properly address new clinical prototypes of ED. The aim of this paper is to describe the developments and current limitations of EDs diagnoses, and to recapitulate the recent literature on emerging phenotypes. Descriptions of the symptoms and behaviours of ED patients with diabulimia, orthorexia, muscle dysmorphia, drunkorexia and nocturnal eating disorders are featured with special focus on psychopathological classification and diagnostic ambiguity issues. An overview of non-specific eating and feeding disorders (EDNOS) in the newly released DSM-5 eating and feeding disorders section is also provided. Given the frequent transition between different phenotypes in patients with EDs and the common occurrence of individuals with clinically significant eating symptoms who evade diagnostic criteria, a better understanding and categorization of emerging EDs is required to guide psychiatric research and improve clinical outcomes.


Kinocuban: the significance of Soviet and East European cinemas for the Cuban moving image examines a piece of evidence that has been misunderstood in the existing body of Cuban film studies. The first revolutionary legislation concerning the arts was the creation of the ICAIC in 1959, a fact that demonstrates the importance of cinema for the new cultural project. This thesis argues that the moving image was radically affected by the proclamation of the socialist character of the Revolution on 16 April 1961. What was it that the distant audiovisual culture, film theories and practices of the Soviet-bloc offered Cubans? Is it not the case that Soviet-bloc cinemas had an influence upon the shaping of the Cuban moving image, if one takes into consideration the very few films co-produced in 30 years? It should be stressed that during this period, the moving image was the direct or indirect effect of the different waves that arrived in Cuba from 'the other' Europe, which were born at the same time as the first films that were co-produced in the 1960s, particularly from the unique experience of Mikhail Kalatozov's masterpiece Soy Cuba. The present study reveals that the most important outcome from that influence was the conceptualisation of the cinematic discourse of the Revolution, so well represented in ICAIC and its socialist films of commitment. The experience included the introduction of new practices in television in order 'to de-colonize' the moving image. KinoCuban analyses the impact on four main subjects: film theory and criticism; film administration; the filmmakers' works (films, videos, and television practices) and the spectator. KinoCuban works within the area of postcolonial studies and takes Ortiz's transculturation as its starting point. KinoCuban argues that the experience was a process of give and take, thus 'lo exacto es hablar de continuidad'.


A new carcharodontosaurid theropod from the Huincul Formation (Aptian-Cenomanian, Upper Cretaceous) of Neuquen Province, Argentina, is described. Approximately the same size as Giganotosaurus carolinii Coria & Salgado, 1995, Mapusaurus roseae n. gen., n. sp. is characterized by many features including a deep, short and narrow skull with relatively large triangular antorbital fossae, relatively small maxillary fenestra, and narrow, unfused rugose nasals. Mapusaurus roseae n. gen., n. sp. has cervical neural spines and distally tapering epipophyses, tall dorsal neural spines, central pleurocoels as far back as the first sacral vertebra, accessory caudal neural spines, stout humerus with poorly defined distal condyles, fused metacarpals, ilium with brevis fossa extending deeply into ischial peduncle, and femur with low fourth trochanter. Phylogenetic analysis indicates that Mapusaurus n. gen. shares with Carcharodontosaurus Stromer, 1931 and Giganotosaurus Coria & Salgado, 1995 several derived features that include narrow blade-like teeth with wrinkled enamel, heavily sculptured facial bones, supraorbital shelf formed by a postorbital/palpebral complex, and a dorsomedially directed femoral head. Remains of Mapusaurus n. gen. were recovered from a bonebed where 100% of the identifiable dinosaur bones can be assigned to this new genus. Based on the metatarsals recovered, a minimum of seven individuals was buried at the site. It is conceivable that this bonebed represents a long term or coincidental accumulation of carcasses. The presence of a single carnivorous taxon with individuals of different ontogenic stages provides evidence of variation within a single population, and may also indicate some behavioural traits for Mapusaurus roseae n. gen., n. sp.


The aim of this study is to examine whether securitized real estate returns reflect direct real estate returns or general stock market returns using international data for the U.S., U.K., and Australia. In contrast to previous research, which has generally relied on overall real estate market indices and neglected the potential long-term dynamics, our econometric evaluation is based on sector level data and caters for both the short-term and long-term dynamics of the assets as well as for the lack of leverage in the direct real estate indices. In addition to the real estate and stock market indices, the analysis includes a number of fundamental variables that are expected to influence real estate and stock returns significantly. We estimate vector error-correction models and investigate the forecast error variance decompositions and impulse responses of the assets. Both the variance decompositions and impulse responses suggest that the long-run REIT market performance is much more closely related to the direct real estate market than to the general stock market. Consequently, REITs and direct real estate should be relatively good substitutes in a long-horizon investment portfolio. The results are of relevance regarding the relationship between public and private markets in general, as the 'duality' of the real estate markets offers an opportunity to test whether and how closely securitized asset returns reflect the performance of underlying private assets. The study also includes implications concerning the recent financial crisis.


The telecommunication industry is concerned about the energy costs of its operating infrastructure, and the associated greenhouse gas emissions. At present, more than half of the total energy consumption of data centers is for the power and cooling infrastructure that supports the storage and communication equipment. One method of reducing energy consumption is an approach called ―free air cooling,‖ where the ambient air is used to cool the equipment directly, thereby reducing the energy consumed in cooling and conditioning the air. However, the impacts of this approach on the performance and reliability of telecommunication equipment need to be identified. The implementation of free air cooling changes the operating environment, including temperature, humidity and airborne contamination, which may have a significant impact on the performance and reliability of telecom equipment. This paper presents the challenges posed by free air cooling and presents a multi-stage process for evaluating and mitigating the potential risks arising from this new operating environment.


In upholding a federal statute authorizing civil commitment of sexually dangerous former federal prisoners, the Supreme Court in United States v. Comstock concluded that the Constitution's Necessary and Proper Clause permits Congress to exercise implied powers that are inferred from other implied powers and dismissed the long-lingering view that Congress's only implied powers are those directly derivable from enumerated powers. The Necessary and Proper Clause is rarely invoked, the Court has not previously embraced the narrower construction, and the trend for nearly a century has been to construe Congress's Article I powers expansively. Thus, although Comstock has significant implications for the scope of national power, the Court's conclusion is not terribly surprising and its implications are fairly clear. The surprising aspect of Comstock is its reasoning. In this brief essay, I discuss three oddities in the Comstock majority opinion: a permutation on conventional accounts of constitutional dialogue between Congress and the courts; a foray into the relationship between tort duties and the proper scope of constitutional power; and deference to the Executive's interpretation of the statute that seems contrary to settled rules of deference and statutory construction. The implications of these analytical twists for constitutional theory and practice are less clear, but potentially significant. Comstock's full impact, therefore, may be more complex and difficult to predict than it at first appears.


Interest in improving public perception of work zones has recently prompted a greater emphasis in work zone traffic management planning in general, and an associated interest in managing work zone incidents. Incidents are difficult to predict in time, location and severity because the mitigation of impacts of incidents in work zones requires considerable advanced planning and preparedness. This guidebook is intended as a resource for engineers and construction managers who are interested in developing sound incident management plans for work zones. Because of the huge variety of work zones and their environments, this guidebook emphasizes flexibility of approach. Although there are a few fundamental principles that must be adhered to, the applications of these principles should be customized to each situation. This guidebook draws from experiences of traffic engineers who have developed incident management plans for work zones and has adapted techniques developed for normal highways.


In recent years, fractional calculus (the branch of calculus that generalizes the derivative of a function to non-integer order) has been a subject of numerous investigations by scientists from mathematics, physics and engineering communities. The interest in this area of research arises mainly from its applications to many models in the fields of fluid mechanics, electromagnetic, acoustics, chemistry, biology, physics and material sciences. In this thesis, we present a numerical algorithm for solving linear and nonlinear fractional initial value problems. This numerical algorithm is based on the spectral method with fractional Legendre functions as basis. Then the collocation method is implemented to turn the original fractional initial value problem into algebraic system. Several examples are discussed to illustrate the efficiency and accuracy of the present scheme.


Philosophy is, generally speaking, divorced from real life, and therefore, monotonous and rigid. But the author maintains that philosophy must be poetic. He advocates philosophy with beautiful features. Western postmodern art is closely related to real life, so art becomes life-oriented and vitalized. Philosophy may be inspired by Western postmodern art as follows: It should philosophize about life; philosophers may use reason to argue for an art-oriented realm of life and achieve a philosophy featuring beauty. Traditional Western philosophy is typical of pursuit of abstract concepts and ideals and an estrangement from the sensible world and life. To make philosophy achieve artistic beauty, we must bring to an end traditional Western philosophy. With the end of old philosophy, a new philosophy came into being with the name of "post-philosophy". One of the features of "post-philosophy" is the union of philosophy and poetry, which is no other than making philosophy achieve artistic beauty. The union of philosophy and poetry is also an important feature of most of traditional Chinese philosophy. Traditional Chinese philosophy ,especially, that of Daoism is similar to Western post-modern art. Both of them stress the realm of life and uphold the beauty of life, mind and spirit. Since the middle of the last century, under the influence of traditional Western philosophy, Chinese philosophy lost its traditional beauty. To keep this beauty, we need to go further and understand philosophy as a discipline to upgrade the realm of life. The beauty of life realm comes before the beauty of philosophy. Therefore, Chinese philosophy needs to become life-oriented like postmodern art. Inheriting and developing Daoism philosophy while absorbing the philosophy of life shown through postmodern art, seems to be a good way for us to enhance the realm of life and pursue the beauty of philosophy.


Abstract: We introduce an abductive method for a coherent integration of independent data-sources. The idea is to compute a list of data-facts that should be inserted to the amalgamated database or retracted from it in order to restore its consistency. This method is implemented by an abductive solver, called Asystem, that applies SLDNFA-resolution on a meta-theory that relates different, possibly contradicting, input databases. We also give a pure model-theoretic analysis of the possible ways to `recover' consistent data from an inconsistent database in terms of those models of the database that exhibit as minimal inconsistent information as reasonably possible. This allows us to characterize the `recovered databases' in terms of the `preferred' (i.e., most consistent) models of the theory. The outcome is an abductive-based application that is sound and complete with respect to a corresponding model-based, preferential semantics, and -- to the best of our knowledge -- is more expressive (thus more general) than any other implementation of coherent integration of databases.


This paper introduces Google Votes, an experiment in liquid democracy built on Google's internal corporate Google+ social network. Liquid democracy decision-making systems can scale to cover large groups by enabling voters to delegate their votes to other voters. This approach is in contrast to direct democracy systems where voters vote directly on issues, and representative democracy systems where voters elect representatives to vote on issues for them. Liquid democracy systems can provide many of the benefits of both direct and representative democracy systems with few of the weaknesses. Thus far, high implementation complexity and infrastructure costs have prevented widespread adoption. Google Votes demonstrates how the use of social-networking technology can overcome these barriers and enable practical liquid democracy systems. The case-study of Google Votes usage at Google over a 3 year timeframe is included, as well as a framework for evaluating vote visibility called the "Golden Rule of Liquid Democracy".


Foreign aid critics, supporters, recipients, and donors have produced eloquent rhetoric on the need for better aid practices— has this translated into reality? This paper attempts to monitor the best and worst of aid practices among bilateral, multilateral, and UN agencies. We create aid practice measures based on aid transparency, specialization, selectivity, ineffective aid channels, and overhead costs. We rate donor agencies from best to worst on aid practices. We find that the UK does well among bilateral agencies, the US is below average, and Scandinavian donors do surprisingly poorly. The biggest difference is between the UN agencies, who mostly rank in the bottom half of donors, and everyone else. Average performance of all agencies on transparency, fragmentation, and selectivity is still very poor. The paper also assesses trends in best practices over time—we find modest improvement in transparency and more in moving away from ineffective channels. However, we find no evidence of improvements (and partial evidence of worsening) in specialization, fragmentation, and selectivity, despite escalating rhetoric to the contrary.


In order to make statistical inference, that is drawing conclusions from a sample to describe a population, it is crucial to know the correct distribution of the data. This paper focused on censored data from the normal distribution. The purpose of this paper was to answer whether we can test if data comes from a censored normal distribution. This by using normality tests and tests designed for censored data and investigate if we got correct size of these tests. This has been carried out with simulations in the program R for left censored data. The results indicated that with increasing censoring normality tests failed to accept normality in a sample. On the other hand the censoring tests met the requirements with increasing censoring level, which was the most important conclusion in this paper.


In There's a Disco Ball Between Us, Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls "Black gay habits of mind." In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world.


It is common knowledge that the way we think profoundly affects our health and happiness. As Tibetan Bon culture has known for centuries, true, original thought is one of the most powerful energy resources that we each have, and tapping into it can bring us great spiritual, emotional and financial success. But, as Christopher Hansard - leading authority in Tibetan medicine - explains, most of us don't know how to think effectively. What we imagine to be thoughts are simply reactions to our environment and to other people, and are far removed from 'original thought', which has the power to transform lives. In this enlightening book, Hansard shows us how to take control of our thinking. Using simple meditations and exercises he shows how we can each harness the power of positive thinking to block negativity, transform emotions, and discover the deepest meaning of our lives, to make it the life we truly want to live.


Abstract : A manufacturing cell is a complex collection of machines and electronics which must be intelligently supervised. It should be flexible enough to readily adapt to different part styles and robust enough to operate without human assistance for reasonable periods of time. A programming language with a correct choice of language properties can make meeting these demands and others like them a manageable programming task. A rule based language in conjunction with a set of grammatical constraints supervises a cell which manufactures turbine blade pre-forms. The non-procedural nature of the language provides considerable flexibility in the operation of the cell. The rules are executed in no particular sequence , but rather as the cell is ready for them. Unfortunately, the non-procedural approach allows for unplanned interactions between rules. Most of these interactions can be avoided by defining which rules can operate concurrently. The language is logically linked to the pre-form cell through a simple database management system. The database system maintains a model of the cell used by the language interpreter to decide which rules to execute. This database system also protects the cell programmer from the low level programming details (e.g., communication protocols). (Author)


A high percentage of the South African population depends on the governance of traditional leaders for social, economic and development projects. However, the duties of traditional leaders towards their people, and the government in power, are always marred by fundamental problems such as the issue of record keeping, management, as well as packaging and dissemination of indigenous information. This article investigated the roles and functions of traditional leaders, and how ICT is applied in the North West Province of South Africa. A case study approach was used. Nine participants were drawn from an entire population of traditional leaders who are chiefs, tribal councillors and headmen.
Data was collected using semi-structured, open-ended interview questions, to inquire about their roles and functions as traditional leaders, types of ICT tools available to them as traditional leaders, and how these ICT tools are used to support their work processes.
The findings revealed that traditional leaders perform functions which include protection of the rural local communities' customs, cultural values, laws, and provision of leadership to the people. It was further noted that there were computers in most traditional or tribal offices but were being used to write official letters and read emails. The routine work activities of the traditional leaders, such as the issue of record keeping, management of cases, accessibility of information from municipal offices, as well as the appropriate coding, packaging and dissemination of indigenous knowledge, were not executed by the use of ICT, but by paper base.
These findings led to the proposal of an ICT Framework for African traditional governance which could assist traditional leaders to automate their work processes, and share information with municipal managers in district offices, to facilitate effective governance. In addition, the ICT framework is to provide a repository where all indigenous knowledge, rules and procedures are stored for future generations.


The conciseness conjecture is a longstanding notion in computer science that
programming languages with more built-in operators, that is more expressive languages with larger semantics, produce smaller programs on average. Chaitin defines the related concept of an elegant program such that there is no smaller program in some language which, when run, produces the same output.

This thesis investigates the conciseness conjecture in an empirical manner. Influenced by the concept of elegant programs, we investigate several models of computation, and implement a set of functions in each programming model. The programming models are Turing Machines, λ-Calculus, SKI, RASP, RASP2, and RASP3. The information content of the programs and models are measured as characters. They are compared to investigate hypotheses relating to how the mean program size changes as the size of the semantics change, and how the relationship of mean program sizes between two models compares to that between the sizes of their semantics.

We show that the amount of information present in models of the same paradigm, or model family, is a good indication of relative expressivity and average program size. Models that contain more information in their semantics have smaller average programs for the set of tested functions. In contrast, the relative expressiveness of models from differing paradigms, is not indicated by their relative information contents.

RASP and Turing Machines have been implemented as Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) circuits to investigate hardware analogues of the hypotheses above. Namely that the amount of information in the semantics for a model directly influences the size of the corresponding circuit, and that the relationship of mean circuit sizes between models is comparable to the relationship of mean program sizes.

We show that the number of components in the circuits that realise the semantics and programs of the models correlates with the information required to implement the semantics and program of a model. However, the number of components to implement a program in a circuit for one model does not relate to the number of components implementing the same program in another model. This is in contrast to the more abstract implementations of the programs.

Information is a computational resource and therefore follows the rules of Blum's axioms. These axioms and the speedup theorem are used to obtain an alternate proof of the undecidability of elegance.

This work is a step towards unifying the formal notion of expressiveness with the notion of algorithmic information theory and exposes a number of interesting research directions. A start has been made on integrating the results of the thesis with the formal framework for the expressiveness of programming languages.


Digital Fabrication (3D printing, laser-cutting or CNC milling) enables the automated fabrication of physical objects from digital models. This technology is becoming more readily available and ubiquitous, as digital fabrication machines become more capable and affordable. When it comes to designing the objects that are to be fabricated however, there are still barriers for novices and inconveniences for experts. Through digital fabrication, physical objects are created from digital models. The digital models are currently designed in virtual design environments, which separates the world we design in from the world we design for. This separation hampers design processes of experienced users and presents barriers to novices. For example, manipulating objects in virtual spaces is difficult, but comes naturally in the physical world. Further, in a virtual environment, we cannot easily integrate existing physical objects or experience the object we are designing in its future context (e.g., try out a game controller during design). This lack of reflection impedes designer's spatial understanding in virtual design environments. To enable our virtual creations to become physical reality, we have to posses an ample amount of design and engineering knowledge, which further steepens the learning curve for novices. Lastly, as we are physically separated from our creation - until it is fabricated - we loose direct engagement with the material and object itself, impacting creativity. We follow a research through design approach, in which we take up the role as interaction designers and engineers. Based on four novel interaction concepts, we explore how the physical world and design environments can be brought closer together, and address the problems caused their prior separation. As engineers, we implement each of these concepts in a prototype system, demonstrating that they can be implemented. Using the systems, we evaluate the concepts and how the concepts alleviate the aforementioned problems, and that the design systems we create are capable of producing useful objects. In this thesis, we make four main contributions to the body of digital fabrication related HCI knowledge. Each contribution consists of an interaction concept which addresses a subset of the problems, caused by the separation of virtual design environment, and physical target world. We evaluate the concepts through prototype implementations, example walkthroughs and where appropriate user-studies, demonstrating how the concepts alleviate the problems they address. For each concept and system, we describe the design rationale, and present technical contributions towards their implementation. The results of this thesis have implications for different user audiences, design processes, the artifacts users design and domains outside of digital fabrication. Through our concepts and systems, we lower barriers for novices to utilize digital fabrication. For experienced designers, we make existing design processes more convenient and efficient. We ease the design of artifacts that reuse existing objects, or that combine organic and geometrically structured design. Lastly, the novel interaction concepts (and on a technical level, the systems) we present, which blur the lines between physical and virtual space, can serve as basis for future interaction design and HCI research.


The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, erected as a permanent cultural institution following the closure of the Great Exhibition of 1851, sought to bring direction to the long-standing inadequacies of pedagogy in existing state and philanthropic schools through the establishment of its own 'national school'. The simple teaching method chosen by the Crystal Palace was 'visual education', which constituted a form of moral awakening through sight rather than words. This disciplined mode of looking associated solely with the sensual was directed towards working-class visitors in need of moral advancement and was completely separate from the rational mind. 'Visual Education' at the Crystal Palace was centred around the Fine Arts Courts, which were a series of model architectural buildings specifically designed to transform the complex historical theory of civilizations into a coherent visual illustration of the imperial history of nations. Thus the visual lessons of the Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Alhambra, Italian, and Pompeian Courts as well as others, were charged with moral enlightenment and rules of taste. In this article I argue that the conflicting and contradictory interpretations of the Fine Arts Courts in newspapers and periodicals exposed the inadequacies of a mode of learning focusing solely on the visual and that the tension between the moral lessons and the intellectual responses to 'visual education' were shaped by the complexities of existing class hierarchies. Thus, by looking at commentaries in the press, I will show that the aim of educated middle and upper class visitors was not to enter the 'visual education' of the Fine Arts Courts to acquire moral taste, but to mark their own social and intellectual advancement.


Fat embolism is a dreaded complication in of procedures of multiple disciplines including plastic surgery. As the popularity of liposuction increases, cases of pulmonary embolism after liposuction are increasingly reported. However, documents of cerebral embolism after liposuction are rarely presented. The degree of disability with respect to Fat fat Embolism embolism Symdrome syndrome (FES) is a Gordian Knot in the evaluation of legal medicine. Therefore, it is of great significance for us to that we report the case of a 30-year-old woman who underwent a large-volume liposuction that resulted in serious complications, especially cerebral embolism. Untypical symptoms of fat embolism hamper the clinical diagnosis, particularly after a surgical procedure such as liposuction. Such a seldom-seen case would easily trigger medical disputes, especially in countries like China suffering increasing claims of medical malpractice and, medical negligences and lawsuits. Detailed descriptions of this case are presented below along with the discussion of the clinical symptoms and the diagnostic approaches to fat embolism.


This paper aims at being a guide to understand the Farm Production Management (FPM) implementing a new paradigm based on CPLEX method with Project Scheduling Problem (PSP) as an integration of Artificial Intelligence with Project Management. In this proposal we design a mathematical model to represent FPM and the objective function oriented to minimize the resources. In this paper we propose the simulation with random data where the parameters are classified as: crop, land, labor, and water. The declared variables are Amount Planted, Permanent Labor Hired, Temporary Labor Hired, Sales and Fraction Consumed. Restrictions: Land limitations, Labor requirements, Water Requirements and Family Consumptions.


In this paper I call for an unequivocal legitimisation of the living 'I' in educational
research. The paper itself becomes a context that explains this call. It is a report of my action research into my professional learning through working in South Africa, within the context of new policy frameworks for continuing teacher development. The call embeds issues about the need for higher education practitioners to produce their explanatory accounts of practice as they support teachers' enquiries for improving practice and knowledge creation, and to legitimise a free academic press for the dissemination of those accounts. The accounts need to demonstrate epistemological, methodological and scholarly
validity, to strengthen practitioners' attempts to influence policy debates about continuing professional development. By clarifying the processes of establishing quality, it becomes possible to show the links between continuing professional education and the active contributions of practitioners to economic and social wellbeing. Keywords : academic freedom; epistemological accountability; living educational
theories; practitioner enquiry; professional learning in higher education South African Journal of Education Vol. 28 (3) 2008: pp. 351-364


Transformation of management coincided with rise of IT and re-orientation towards the demand driven economy. IT facilitated the development of remote communication and data accessibility, while re-profiling the management methods, in meanwhile, customer focus has led to organization of customer-oriented establishments such as call centers. However, aside from benefits, including accessibility, convenience, and long term cost reductions, implementation of innovations in information technologies has yielded issues. Complete assimilation of technology proved to be difficult due to factors emerging from technological, organizational and environmental contexts. Namely, factors that are most applicable in the call center context are technology readiness and managerial obstacles. Another issue that had risen as a consequence of wide spread use of IT in the call center context is employee turnover. Although not directly linked to turnover per se, IT assisted in transformation of management methods, which, uncompensated, exert pressure onto employees, while often remaining unseen. Since pressure in addition to contributing factors is linked to stress, one suggests that stress is the leading cause of turnover at call centers. Accordingly, pressure to perform, along with applied control methods will be examined in this thesis. Thesis proceeds to investigate background information on these issues, followed by review of the relevant academic work, concluding with the case study in the banking sector aiming to look at specific issues in order to find practical solutions. Finally, a summary will indicate the proposed direction for issue resolution.


Europium (E+ ) metal-based nanomaterials have potential applications in optical and electro-luminescent devices, bio-analytical sensors, and biomedical assay technologies. E+ metal ions are of particular interest in biological assays due to their long luminescent lifetimes and nearly monochromatic emission at 614 nm. E+ ions require sensitization by a suitable chromophore since 4f-4f electronic transitions are forbidden by the Laporte selection rule. Relative to well-researched lanthanide-doped matrices such as NaYand LaF3 , lanthanide-doped Cananoparticles have been shown to have promise as an imaging agent due to greater luminescent yields and high biocompatibility. In this work, we report the progress towards the optimization of anaqueous microwave synthetic method for the production of nanosized lanthanide-doped Ca particles, the surface-functionalization of E+ -doped Caparticles with a suitable chromophore, and luminescent quantum yield studies of these particles. Synthesis of lanthanide-doped Cananoparticles and the coating of them with a chromophore ligand to increase their luminescent quantum yield was successful. High-quality product may be obtained with low size dispersion anywhere in the range of 30-1000 nm. Characterization of coated nanoparticle product including the morphology, composition, and quantum yield studies were successful. The highest quantum yield reported was 1.53 +/- 0.41 %. Future work includes the optimization of the coating procedure to maximize luminescent quantum yield and in vitro imaging studies using epifluorescence microscopy.


Until a decade ago, a comprehensive contestation of the so-called
 ?transitional? paradigm was largely missing in the post-socialist era. This
 reality changed in the last ten years, especially in the region of former
 Yugoslavia. Some social movements in this region have started questioning
 the very essence of the economic and social misconceptions of the
 post-socialist condition. This paper first provides an elaboration of the
 very conceptual edifice of the ruling paradigm (hence the object of the
 critique of the three social movements in question), as well as a
 theoretical and methodological framework. It goes on to map out the
 epistemic discursive content of the respective social movements in Belgrade,
 Zagreb and Sarajevo, thereby assessing the conceptual content of their
 critique of the post-socialist transitional paradigm. Finally, given the
 similarities between Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the paper
 seeks to explain variations in the critique by how the structural and
 contextual features impact the perspective from which it is constructed.


The major driving factors of soil CO2 production – substrate supply, temperature, and water content – vary vertically within the soil profile, with the greatest temporal variations of these factors usually near the soil surface. Several studies have demonstrated that wetting and drying of the organic horizon contributes to temporal variation in summertime soil CO2 efflux in forests, but this contribution is difficult to quantify. The objectives of this study were to partition CO2 production vertically in a mixed hardwood stand of the Harvard Forest, Massachusetts, USA, and then to use that partitioning to evaluate how the relative contributions of CO2 production by genetic soil horizon vary seasonally and interannually. We measured surface CO2 efflux and vertical soil profiles of CO2 concentration, temperature, water content, and soil physical characteristics. These data were applied to a model of effective diffusivity to estimate CO2 flux at the top of each genetic soil horizon and the production within each horizon. A sensitivity analysis revealed sources of uncertainty when applying a diffusivity model to a rocky soil with large spatial heterogeneity, especially estimates of bulk density and volumetric water content and matching measurements of profiles and surface fluxes. We conservatively estimate that the O horizon contributed 40–48% of the total annual soil CO2 efflux. Although the temperature sensitivity of CO2 production varied across soil horizons, the partitioning of CO2 production by horizon did not improve the overall prediction of surface CO2 effluxes based on temperature functions. However, vertical partitioning revealed that water content covaried with CO2 production only in the O horizon. Large interannual variations in estimates of O horizon CO2 production indicate that this layer could be an important transient interannual source or sink of ecosystem C.


For decades, the five-forces model of competition has dominated the thinking about strategy. But it describes competition among traditional "pipeline" businesses, which succeed by optimizing the activities in their value chains—most of which they own or control. "Platform" businesses that bring together consumers and producers, as Uber, Alibaba, and Airbnb do, require a different approach to strategy. The critical asset of a platform is external—the community of members. The focus shifts from controlling resources to orchestrating them, and firms win by facilitating more external interactions and creating "network effects" that increase the value provided to all participants. In this new world, competition can emerge from seemingly unrelated industries and even from within the platform itself. The authors, three platform strategists, walk executives through the choices they must make when building platforms, outlining the different metrics needed to manage them. Businesses that fail to learn the new rules will struggle, they argue. When a platform enters the marketplace of a pure pipeline business, the platform nearly always wins. That's exactly what happened when the iPhone came on the scene in 2007. By 2015, it accounted for 92% of global profits in mobile phones, while most of the giants that once ruled the industry made no profit at all. INSETS: Networks Invert the Firm.;HARNESSING SPILLOVERS


A biologist's innovative theoretical syntheses provided the intellectual scaffolding for endosymbiotic theory, a cornerstone of mainstream evolutionary biology. Science progresses mainly through experimentation, but to become useful, experimental results have to be scrutinized, interpreted, and placed on a proper intellectual scaffold. These two activities are not always carried out evenly by the same person. Some scientists become known for their impressive experiments, others for innovative theoretical syntheses. Lynn Margulis, who died on 22 November 2011 at the age of 73, was a striking example of the latter group. She is responsible for the transformative idea that eukaryotic cells evolved by the acquisition and exploitation of other, smaller cells, a process known as endosymbiosis. Accordingly, essential components of eukaryotic cells—the organelles mitochondria and, in photosynthetic cells, plastids—are derived from bacteria that some ancestral cell had ingested. These events are thought to have taken place early in the history of life on Earth.


extract] I cannot say how the Attard twins case would have been resolved in the Australian courts. I cannot guess how Sir Gerard Brennan and I would have resolved it, had such a problem come before us in the High Court of Australia. This much is clear. The issues of bioethics proliferate. Yet there is never a gap in our law. Theologians may dispute. Philosophers may debate. Popular television may entertain. Hypotheticals may speculate. But in the end, judges, whose jurisdiction and powers are properly invoked, must decide. If, as is usual in such cases, the Constitution and the statute law are silent, the judges must reason by analogy from basic principles. They must offer public reasons. Their conclusions will be open to criticism and to praise. Today in such cases, judges must perform their duties under the public and media spotlight. Whatever they decide will be criticised by some.


Many large-scale parallel programs follow a bulk synchronous parallel (BSP) structure with distinct computation and communication phases. Although the communication phase in such programs may involve all (or large numbers) of the participating processes, the actual communication operations are usually sparse in nature. As a result, communication phases are typically expressed explicitly using point-to-point communication operations or collective operations. We define the dynamic sparse data-exchange (DSDE) problem and derive bounds in the well known LogGP model. While current approaches work well with static applications, they run into limitations as modern applications grow in scale, and as the problems that are being solved become increasingly irregular and dynamic.
 To enable the compact and efficient expression of the communication phase, we develop suitable sparse communication protocols for irregular applications at large scale. We discuss different irregular applications and show the sparsity in the communication for real-world input data. We discuss the time and memory complexity of commonly used protocols for the DSDE problem and develop NBX--a novel fast algorithm with constant memory overhead for solving it. Algorithm NBX improves the runtime of a sparse data-exchange among 8,192 processors on BlueGene/P by a factor of 5.6. In an application study, we show improvements of up to a factor of 28.9 for a parallel breadth first search on 8,192 BlueGene/P processors.


Corresponding data set for Tran-SET Project No. 17CLSU05. Abstract of the final report is stated below for reference: "The project objective is to develop cost-effective Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC) with locally available ingredients in Region 6 to address the deficiencies observed in ordinary concrete materials. The study explored the utilization of two types of river sands (coarse and fine), two types of PVA fibers (long and short), four levels of cement replacement with Class F fly ash, and the implementation of recycled crumb rubber in the performance of ECC materials. A total of 24 mix designs were prepared and evaluated in compression, tension, and bending to assess its mechanical properties. Furthermore, the cracking characteristics of the materials produced were evaluated to assess the durability potential of these composites. Lastly, the cost of each mix design and the feasibility of ECC implementation in transportation infrastructure were assessed. The experimental results showed that implementing crumb rubber and/or increasing contents of fly ash in the mixtures produced a positive impact in the ductility of the materials. However, a tradeoff between ductility and strength was observed. Furthermore, the utilization of the different types of sand evaluated in this study produced minor effects in the mechanical properties of ECCs evaluated. The properties of the materials developed in this study were exceedingly superior than that of regular concrete. It was concluded that ECC materials are promising for the future of transportation infrastructure."


An economic evaluation was accomplished of two experiments with intensive feeding systems for rearing of beef heifers weaned with 60-90 days. In experiment 1, the heifers reared in Pearl Millet pasture, exclusively under grazing (PAST1); supplemented with milled corn grain (PAST1/C) or supplemented with pellet citric pulp (PAST1/P). In experiment 2, the heifers were reared in Oat plus Italian Ryegrass pasture without supplementation to the animals (PAST2); supplemented with milled corn grain (PAST2/C) or supplemented with soy hull (PAST2/H). With the results of animal production per hectare and composition of the costs was realized an evaluation of the direct financial response of the studied feeding systems. Based on the live weight of the heifers at twelve months of age a bioeconomic analysis of the employed technologies was presented. In experiment 1, the milled corn grain supplemented presented financial loss, while other systems just only covered costs, without surplus gross margin. In experiment 2, the corn grain system covered only costs, and the exclusive use of the pasture and the soy hull supplementation provided satisfactory values of gross margin for hectare. The increase of birth rate from 50 to 80% or the reduction of the age at first mating of the heifers from three to two years could reduce, respectively, in 62 and 23% the number of unproductive females in the herd for each 100 pregnant cows. These practices present potentiality to reduce this number of animals in 74%, when accomplished jointly.


In this paper, we analyze the annual returns, returns fluctuation and the day of the week effect for five stock markets in Southeast of Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippine, Singapore and Thailand) from 31, December 2007 to 31, December 2011. Non-parametric tests and parametric test are used for equality of variance returns and mean of the daily returns of the week. Graphical representation of indexes annual changes and their correlation were explored to employ this analysis. The results indicate that all of the indexes experienced high negative changes in 2008 and after this decline, market index growth enormously. Especially Indonesia experienced the highest increase. There was a medium positive correlation between all of the markets. There was not the presence of the day of the week effect for markets except Indonesia. There was generally high volatility of returns. The results of the Levene's test of the equality of standard deviations of the returns at the 5 percent confidence level reject the Null Hypothesis that mean returns are not equal across the days of the week for all the markets except for Indonesia and Malaysia.


In this paper we consider one aspect of the problem of automatically building shape models of articulating objects from example range images. Central to the model construction problem is the registration of range data, taken from different vantage points, into a common coordinate frame. This involves determining a transformation for each set of range data which aligns overlapping surface points in the common frame. Current registration algorithms have been developed specifically for rigid objects, but it is not obvious how these can be extended to articulated or more generally deformable objects. Here, we propose that range images of articulated objects are first segmented into their rigid subcomponents. Each subcomponent can then be registered in isolation using the existing algorithms designed specifically for rigid parts and the final model formed by reassembling all of the submodels. This has motivated the development of a rigid part segmentation algorithm which is described and demonstrated here. The algorithm is currently limited to non-umbilic surfaces, but in this more restricted domain is shown to work well.


There are many ways to represent a molecule as input to a machine learning model and each is associated with loss and retention of certain kinds of information. In the interest of preserving three-dimensional spatial information, including bond angles and torsions, we have developed libmolgrid, a general-purpose library for representing three-dimensional molecules using multidimensional arrays. This library also provides functionality for composing batches of data suited to machine learning workflows, including data augmentation, class balancing, and example stratification according to a regression variable or data subgroup, and it further supports temporal and spatial recurrences over that data to facilitate work with recurrent neural networks, dynamical data, and size extensive modeling. It was designed for seamless integration with popular deep learning frameworks, including Caffe, PyTorch, and Keras, providing good performance by leveraging graphical processing units (GPUs) for computationally-intensive tasks and efficient memory usage through the use of memory views over preallocated buffers. libmolgrid is a free and open source project that is actively supported, serving the growing need in the molecular modeling community for tools that streamline the process of data ingestion, representation construction, and principled machine learning model development.


We study the quantitative properties of constrained efficient allocations in an environment where risk sharing is limited by the presence of private information. We consider a life cycle version of a standard Mirrlees economy where shocks to labor productivity have a component that is public information and one that is private information. The presence of private shocks has important implications for the age profiles of consumption and income. First, they introduce an endogenous dispersion of continuation utilities. As a result, consumption inequality rises with age even if the variance of the shocks does not. Second, they introduce an endogenous rise of the distortion on the marginal rate of substitution between consumption and leisure over the life cycle. This is because, as agents age, the ability to properly provide incentives for work must become less and less tied to promises of benefits (through either increased leisure or consumption) in future periods. Both of these features are also present in the data. We look at the data through the lens of our model and estimate the fraction of labor productivity that is private information. We find that for the model and data to be consistent, a large fraction of shocks to labor productivities must be private information. JEL codes: D82, D91, D11, D58, D86, H21


This paper presents two different approaches to visualise information from culture, media and creative industries by using RFID based tracking and identification. Besides the required RFID backend, the paper also introduces the information system built on top of the backend. The first approach is based on passive RFID whereas the second uses active RFID. In particular, the differences in the processing of system events, delivery of needed information and the implemented infrastructure will be discussed and evaluated.


Processes tha t determine the drought hazard for the people l iv ing i n ar id environments have been for some time the subject of research. Recently, new theories and hypotheses popularised under the heading of 'desertification' have emerged that offer a number of differing interpretations of the nature of the problem. A reassessment of current knowledge on the drought hazard is provided to show that theories on desertification are in large part hybrids of those widely studied in geographical climatology and natural hazards research. Evaluation is centred on the meaning of desertification and the extent to which i t is caused by changing climate, climate variability or misuse of the land. Specific examples are drawn from the Sahelian zone of Africa, the world's casebook on drought and desertification.


The k q-flats algorithm is a generalization of the popular k-means algorithm where q dimensional best fit affine sets replace centroids as the cluster prototypes. In this work, a modification of the k q-flats framework for pattern classification is introduced. The basic idea is to replace the original reconstruction only energy, which is optimized to obtain the k affine spaces, by a new energy that incorporates discriminative terms. This way, the actual classification task is introduced as part of the design and optimization. The presentation of the proposed framework is complemented with experimental results, showing that the method is computationally very efficient and gives excellent results on standard supervised learning benchmarks.


Lewis, Marion. Kaugjagjuk . Iqaluit: Inhabit Media, 2011. Print. Kaugjagjuk is a re-telling of a traditional story about an orphan who is ill-treated by a village and then grows up to save them.  Variants of this story are told across the Arctic and are found in other cultures. In western cultures, this is the story that underpins the adage, "be kind to your office boy, he may come back as your supervisor".   Often in other Arctic versions the story ends with the grown-up boy taking revenge for his mistreatment, however Iqualuit-born Marion Lewis specifically chose a version that is "a brave story - an inspirational story". The lesson that Lewis wants us to learn from the story is that "even the smallest and most downtrodden of us – may overcome neglect and great difficulties". Illustrator Kim Smith has done an excellent job of capturing the moon-lit scenes of the Arctic winter nights.  However, her renditions of Inuit people make them look Asian.  The faces are very angular and the eyes have a pronounced upward slant.  Everyone in the book looks a little scary, even Kaugjagjuk's benevolent and loving father.  Everyone else, including most images of the growing Kaugjagjuk look like "evil bad guys" from manga.  This is perhaps not surprising, given that this is Smith's first children's book and that she usually illustrates comics. Apart from the orphan-who-survives theme which occurs in many different Inuit stories, this story also contains the legend of Taqqiq or "the Man in the Moon", whose job it is to "watch over all who sleep" and to "reflect light onto all deeds and to record both the good and bad deeds of all those who sleep under the moon's gaze". Taqqiq takes human form and trains the young Kaugjagjuk as he becomes a man.  While this is undoubtedly a traditional story, the associated commentary about how "the moon does not emit its own light" is probably a modern knowledge addition to the traditional knowledge of the legend. While presented as an illustrated children's book, the text is at an upper senior high school reading level.  The story is intended to be shared by an adult with children, mirroring the way that it would have been told to a child by an elder. This is a good first work that not only entertains, but also preserves the legend. Highly recommended for public and school libraries. Highly Recommended:  4 out of 4 stars Reviewer:  Sandy Campbell Sandy is a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, who has written hundreds of book reviews across many disciplines.  Sandy thinks that sharing books with children is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give.


AMBLESIDE, CUMBRIA LA  LP, UK The habitat preferences of dinoflagellate bloom species along an onshore‐offshore, mixing-nutrient gradient, their associated life-form (morphotype) characteristics and adaptive strategies were evaluated from the perspective of Margalef 's Mandala and Reynolds Intaglio. Nine different mixingnutrient habitats and associated dinoflagellate life-form types having distinctive morphotype features and habitat preferences are distinguishable. Reynolds Intaglio provided greater fidelity to actual in situ dinoflagellate community assembly than the Mandala. We suggest that the correlation between degree of mixing and nutrient levels presumed in the Mandala is not the essential interaction in the selection of life forms and their succession. A more significant aspect of the turbulence axis is the degree of vertical, micro-habitat structural differentiation that it permits. Three primary adaptive strategies consistent with C-S-R strategies recognized among freshwater phytoplankton species characterize the component dinoflagellate species: invasive, small- to intermediate-sized colonist species (C) which often predominate in chemically-disturbed water bodies; acquisitive, larger-celled, nutrient stresstolerant species (S); and disturbance-tolerant ruderal species (R) tolerant of shear/stress forces in physically-disturbed water masses (fronts, upwelling relaxations, current entrainment). It is suggested that harmful algal bloom community assembly and dynamics reflect two basic selection features— life-form and species-specific selection, that commonly held life-form properties override phylogenetic properties in bloom-species selection, and that the latter is often stochastic, rather than singular. The high degree of unpredictability of individual species blooms is consistent with stochastic selection, e.g. bloom species are often selected as a result of being in the right place at the right time at suitable inoculum levels. A focus on the life-form properties, habitat preference and stochastic selection of bloom species would appear to be more viable and realistic than current ecological investigative approaches.


Summary
1Changes in biodiversity can affect ecosystem processes through a variety of pathways, such as changes in community structure, loss of a keystone or changes in resource use patterns among species. The latter, also known as resource use complementarity, is an established mechanistic link between species and ecosystems.
2At present, functional group richness is the dominant measure of the extent of resource use complementarity and has been manipulated in several experiments. These groups are constructed a priori using information about differences between species and a statistically significant effect is typically identified by standard parametric tests. These tests implicitly assume that the a priori functional groups are correct.
3Avoiding this assumption requires a randomization (bootstrap) test of statistical significance that accounts for the effects of grouping per se. This test compares the observed test statistic to the distribution of the test statistic resulting from random assignment of species to groups.
4Re-analyses of experimental manipulations of plant functional diversity by bootstrapping the critical significance value changed the ecological interpretation of results in nearly half of the experiments. This occurred because random assignment of species to functional groups frequently creates a strong relationship between functional diversity and ecosystem functioning.
5The significant bootstrapped results that were found perhaps represent some of the most convincing evidence that functional diversity is an important determinant of local-scale ecosystem functioning.


In this thesis we use statistical physics techniques to study the typical performance of four families of error-correcting codes based on very sparse linear transformations: Sourlas codes, Gallager codes, MacKay-Neal codes and Kanter-Saad codes. We map the decoding problem onto an Ising spin system with many-spins interactions. We then employ the replica method to calculate averages over the quenched disorder represented by the code constructions, the arbitrary messages and the random noise vectors. We find, as the noise level increases, a phase transition between successful decoding and failure phases. This phase transition coincides with upper bounds derived in the information theory literature in most of the cases. We connect the practical decoding algorithm known as probability propagation with the task of finding local minima of the related Bethe free-energy. We show that the practical decoding thresholds correspond to noise levels where suboptimal minima of the free-energy emerge. Simulations of practical decoding scenarios using probability propagation agree with theoretical predictions of the replica symmetric theory. The typical performance predicted by the thermodynamic phase transitions is shown to be attainable in computation times that grow exponentially with the system size. We use the insights obtained to design a method to calculate the performance and optimise parameters of the high performance codes proposed by Kanter and Saad.


In this paper, we investigate the working conditions of the young women working as assistants in the food vending sector in Tanzania using interviews and focus group discussions which are supplemented with quantitative survey. Data were collected in the municipalities of Nyamagana and Ilemela in Mwanza Region, Northern Tanzania, and from officers working with the government and insurance fund organizations in Dodoma region, central Tanzania, from August to September 2020. The results show that young women's working conditions are poor and that they continue working in the sector on the basis of resilience. Young women's poor working conditions are caused by several actors including their employers, central, and local government. The main causes of poor working conditions in street food vending are: informality, low salary, uncertainty of pay, long working hours, poor physical environment, lack of training, job insecurity, lack of legal recognitions, unclear legal status, lack of social security and protection. The emergence of the coronavirus disease has further increased their vulnerability. The government can improve their working conditions by establishing an authority/agency responsible for managing the informal sector, business formalization, reviewing the municipal councils' bylaws that are prohibitive, and establish vending zones. Street food vendors' employers have to improve vendors' salary, improve physical working environment, use participatory management approach, reduce number of working hours, and consider the rights of employees.


We have analyzed cytokine gene expression by a murine CD4+ T-cell clone that expresses three forms of T-cell recognition. The clone employs a V beta 6-containing T-cell receptor to recognize (i) a self class II major histocompatibility complex and an ovalbumin-derived peptide (OVA), (ii) an I-Ab alloantigen, and (iii) Mls-1a. All three responses are accompanied by similar levels of cell proliferation. However, although interferon gamma gene expression is strongly induced during both physiological recognition of the OVA peptide and allogeneic major histocompatibility complex recognition, expression of this gene was not detected during the Mls response. These studies indicate that Mls recognition is functionally distinct from T-cell recognition of peptides and alloantigens and leads to an alternative pattern of cytokine gene expression. They also suggest the possibility that encounter with these two classes of T-cell antigen in vivo may generate subsets of T helper cells that display different patterns of cytokine gene expression.


Variation in the stable isotope composition of oxygen within dissolved phosphate (δ18Op) represents a novel and potentially powerful environmental tracer. In freshwater, marine and terrestrial ecosystems, δ18Op can act as an inherent label for the sources of phosphorus and the extent to which phosphorus from different sources is metabolised. This paper focuses on the methodological development and initial application of δ18Op across a range of freshwater ecosystems. Initially, we report modifications to the analytical protocol for δ18Op that are designed to minimise incorporation of contaminant oxygen in the final silver phosphate precipitate prior to pyrolysis. This is critical given the range of possible sources of contaminant oxygen within freshwater matrices. Subsequently, we consider the potential utility of δ18Op through application of the technique within a range of freshwater ecosystems in England, UK. Firstly, we characterise δ18Op in river water and effluents from Sewage Treatment Works (STW), and examine the opportunity to use the 18Op of STW effluents to trace the entry and downstream fate of phosphorus from these point sources in rivers. Secondly, we analyse δ18Op to gain insights into variations in the sources and biological cycling of phosphorus in a seasonally stratified lake ecosystem. Thirdly, we characterise δ18Op in shallow and deep groundwater samples, considering whether δ18Op might provide evidence for variation in source and extent of metabolism for phosphorus in groundwater ecosystems. Taken together, these data extend the catalogue of δ18Op in freshwater ecosystems, and further the scope of δ18Op as a tool to better understand phosphorus biogeochemistry.


A new surface metrology instrument, the 'Swinging Part Profilometer' (SPP), has been developed for in-situ measurement of optics undergoing robot-processing in the ground (non-specular) state. In this paper, we present the hardware-design of the SPP, together with software for hardware-control, data-acquisition and surface-reconstruction. First results on a sample part are presented, compared with interferometric metrology, and error-contributions considered. Notably, during each individual scan of a measurement-cycle, the probe remains fixed. This lends itself to automated probe-deployment by the same robot as performs surface-processing, as probe stability is required on only the time-scale for a single scan.


-Since 2010, some of the Nordic countries have experienced fertility declines down to unprecedented levels. Fertility decline in the Nordic countries was unexpected for most experts, considering that these countries were not heavily affected by the 2008 economic recession which was related to fertility declines in other European countries. Researchers have sought to understand why fertility is declining in these countries but have so far paid little attention to the spatial dimension of this process, despite evidence of large spatial variation of fertility. This paper contributes new understanding to the role of space in Nordic fertility changa and how the uncertainty perspective is related to spatial patterns of fertility. We apply advanced spatial panel models to data covering 1,099 municipalities in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden to separate out spatial variation and temporal variation. Our models use both economic (employment, income) and social (partnership dissolution, voting) measures of uncertainty to explore how uncertainty is related to fertility. Results show that fertility levels and trends by age vary substantially by level of urbanization. Differences in uncertainty by age appear essential to spatial variation – while social contexts are related to variation at all ages, economic measures are more related to fertility under age thirty than over age thirty. In addition, stability in fertility over age thirty seems to be an important buffer for the overall rate of total fertility decline, especially in rural municipalities.


When you think of the founding fathers, you think of men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin - exceptional minds and matchless statesmen who led the colonies to a seemingly impossible victory over the British and established the constitutional and legal framework for our democratic government. But the American Revolution was about far more than freedom and liberty. It was about economics as well. Robert E. Wright and David J. Cowen here chronicle how a different group of founding fathers forged the wealth and institutions necessary to transform the American colonies from a diffuse alliance of contending business interests into one cohesive economic super-power. From Alexander Hamilton to Andrew Jackson, the authors focus on the lives of nine Americans in particular - some famous, some unknown, others misunderstood, but all among our nation's financial founding fathers. Such men were instrumental in creating and nurturing a financial system that drove economic growth in the nascent United States because they were quick to realize that wealth was as crucial as the Constitution in securing the blessings of liberty and promoting the general welfare. The astonishing economic development made possible by our financial founding fathers was indispensable to the preservation of national unity and of support for a government that was then still a profoundly radical and delicate political experiment. Grand in scope and vision, "Financial Founding Fathers" is an entertaining and inspiring history of the men who made America rich and steered her toward greatness.


Driven by massively parallel sequencing and allied technologies, the scale of genetic predisposition testing is on a dramatic uptrend. While many patients are found to carry clinically actionable pathogenic sequence variants, testing also reveals enormous numbers of Unclassified Variants (UV), or Variants of Uncertain Significance (VUS), most of which are rare missense substitutions. Following IARC variant classification guidelines, quantitative methods have been developed to integrate multiple data types for clinical UV evaluation in BRCA1/2; results from these analyses are recorded in the BRCA gene Ex-UV database (hci-exlovd.hci.utah.edu). In variant classification, the rate-limiting step is often accumulation of patient observational data. Recently, functional assays evaluating BRCA1 RING domain and C-terminal substitutions have been calibrated, enabling variant classification through a two-component combination of sequence analysis-based predictions with functional assay results. This two-component classification was embedded in a decision tree with safeguards to avoid misclassification. For the two-component analysis, sensitivity is 87.5%, specificity is 100%, and the error rate 0.0%. Classification of a UV as likely pathogenic or likely neutral does not require certainty; the probabilistic definitions of the categories imply an error rate. Combining sequence analysis with functional assay data in two-component analysis added 146 BRCA1 variants to the Ex-UV database.


Perhaps more than any other opera by Strauss, Elektra is a drama about the sense of hearing. It belongs to the phantasmagoric realm of listening, and it affirms, like few other operas, the power of music alone to fire up the listener's imagination. In this sense, it renders the transitions between its own different layers of reality, between the here and now of Elektra's agony and her reliving of her father's murder at the hands of her mother and her mother's lover, in a way that obscures the borderline between that terrible past and the soon to be horrible present. The article investigates these transitions in the opera.

The crime against her father, Agamemnon, has burned itself into her soul, and it directs all her experience afterward. Elektra's retribution of the past injustice is no more than an imagined restoration. Her revenge remains a private matter; it does not resurrect any moral order and does not re-create the basis for a new community. The radicalism of this lack of morality is overwhelming, especially if we consider that Hofmannsthal's libretto departs from Sophocles only on this main point.

A different notion of time, articulated through Strauss's music, strikes through the ongoing present, takes hold of it, and becomes predominant. This is the time in which Elektra lives. We witness a strange battle between remembrance and forgetting as Elektra's present actions are driven wholly by the effort to forget the present in order to restore the past. All is in vain, of course, because it is impossible to reverse time. Everything is too late. This belatedness becomes Elektra's destiny.

Directors often lean heavily on Elektra's resolution of her predicament in the fulfillment of full-blown revenge, which ends with a going out of time at the very moment when the border between lived real time and fantasy time collapses. Yet what if emphasis were placed elsewhere? The article raises this question as a pressing one, in connection with Peter Konwitschny's staging of Elektra in the new theater of the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen, February 2005. In Konwitschny's staging, the decisive event, the precipitating trauma, is no longer, as in Strauss and Hofmannsthal, something that has long since happened when the curtain rises and that rules every succeeding event from an inaccessible point in past time. Instead, the precipitating trauma is drawn into the opera itself. The article tries to show how this interpretation has consequences that change the work. Elektra's destiny does not become less shocking, but rather shocks us in a different manner.


This paper describes an approach to the formulation and classification of security requirements in eScience. It explains why it is untenable to suggest that `one size fits all', and that what is an appropriate security solution in one context may not be at all appropriate in another. It proposes a framework for the description of eScience security in a number of different dimensions, in terms of measures taken and controls achieved. A distinctive feature of the framework is that these descriptions are organised into a set of discrete criteria, in most cases presented as levels of increasing assurance. The intended framework should serve as a basis for the systematic analysis of security solutions, facilitating the processes of design and approval, as well as for the identification of expectations and best practice in particular domains. The possible usage of the framework, and the value of the approach, is demonstrated in the paper through application to the design of a national data sharing service.


CO-TEACHING PARTNERSHIPS: HOW CULTURE OF SCHOOLS AND CLASSROOMS AFFECT PRACTICES IN CO-PLANNING AND CO-IMPLEMENTING INSTRUCTION By: Cecilia Gray Batalo, Ph.D. A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2014 Director: Paul J. Gerber, Ph.D., Professor Department of Special Education and Disability Policy School of Education The purpose of this study was to describe how the school and classroom cultures affected practices of inclusion for students with disabilities and how the inclusionary practice of coteaching was influenced by the school culture. This study sought to investigate school and classroom cultures and their impact on practices of inclusion. It also addressed the perceptions of the impact that the school and classroom cultures had on co-teaching and why some practices are effective or not effective for co-planning or co-implementation. A multicase study design was used to gather and explore observations and interviews. Data were analyzed through qualitative methods with a focus on norms, values, and routines. This study provided an understanding of how school and classroom cultures affected inclusion within one school district


Within the last decade, antibodies targeting the node and paranode of myelinated peripheral nerves have been increasingly identified in patients with acquired immune-mediated neuropathies, commonly termed 'nodo-paranodopathies'. Crucially, these patients often present with additional clinical features not usually seen with the most common immune-mediated neuropathies, Guillain-Barré syndrome and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, and respond poorly to conventionally used immunomodulatory therapies. Emerging evidence that these are pathologically distinct diseases has further prompted the use of more targeted treatment, such as the B cell depleting monoclonal antibody rituximab, which has been reported to significantly improve functional outcomes in this subset of patients. We provide an overview of the emerging clinical and serological phenotypes in patients with specific nodal/paranodal antibodies, the practicalities of antibody testing and current evidence supporting the use of non-standard therapies.


Abstract The first strategic EFLM conference "Defining analytical performance goals, 15 years after the Stockholm Conference" was held in the autumn of 2014 in Milan. It maintained the Stockholm 1999 hierarchy of performance goals but rearranged them and established five task and finish groups to work on topics related to analytical performance goals including one on the "total error" theory. Jim Westgard recently wrote a comprehensive overview of performance goals and of the total error theory critical of the results and intentions of the Milan 2014 conference. The "total error" theory originated by Jim Westgard and co-workers has a dominating influence on the theory and practice of clinical chemistry but is not accepted in other fields of metrology. The generally accepted uncertainty theory, however, suffers from complex mathematics and conceived impracticability in clinical chemistry. The pros and cons of the total error theory need to be debated, making way for methods that can incorporate all relevant causes of uncertainty when making medical diagnoses and monitoring treatment effects. This development should preferably proceed not as a revolution but as an evolution.


This is one of a series of short papers which explain conceptual or methodological approaches underpinning analysis undertaken in CASE's research programme Social Policy in a Cold Climate (SPCC). SPCC is designed to examine the effects of the major economic and political changes in the UK since 2007, particularly their impact on the distribution of wealth, poverty, inequality and social mobility. It also examines geographical variations in policy, spending, outputs and outcomes, with a particular focus on London. The analysis includes policies and spending decisions from the last period of the Labour government (2007-2010), including the beginning of the financial crisis, as well as those made by the Coalition government since May 2010. The programme will conclude in 2015, with publication of a final volume. Interim reports will be published in 2013/14, and made available online at http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/case.


This study analyses the impact of technology shocks, inflation and monetary policy on house prices as well as the impact of the housing market on the business cycle, inflation and money market rates by structural vectorautoregressions for ten OECD countries. We find out that in nine of ten countries in our sample housing prices declined after a monetary policy shock, while they fall in eight of ten countries after a negative technology shock. This reaction is straightforward because regressive monetary policy increases the cost of financing real estate projects, while a recession correlates with declining investments. The reaction to an inflationary shock is twofold. In two countries house prices rise in response to inflationary pressures while they fall in the other eight countries. Rising house prices can be due to the fact that households increase their demand for real estate in order to use it as a hedge against future inflation, while falling house prices are due to the fact that the monetary authority raises interest rates in order to fight inflation, which increases the cost of financing real estate projects. The reaction of the money market to increasing house prices is also twofold. In half of the countries interest rates respond with an increase, while they decline in the other half. Interest rates might fall because increasing house prices increase the value of collateral which allows banks to increase their credit supply. On the other hand households increase their consumption expenditures which cause inflationary pressures on which the monetary authority reacts with raising money market rates. Forecast error variance decompositions yield the result that real restate price fluctuations can be explained to 25 percent by these macroeconomic shocks. On the other hand real estate price shocks explain also a part of macroeconomic fluctuations.


The Edible Nest Swiftlet (Aerodramus fuciphagus) is a small bird from the family Apodidae which is commonly found in the South-East Asian region which characteristically roost and nest in cave or cavern-like situation. Swiftlet farming in specially designed building has recently developed due to high consumer demand for the edible bird nest. The farms are not the natural habitat of the swiflets and there are greater chance that this will affect in one way or the other way of their dietary habit and composition. The focus of this study was to investigate the diversity of insects found in the diet of A. fuciphagus in their habitats in oil palm-growing areas in Malaysia. This was achieved by investigating the relationship between insect composition in oil palm and insect prey composition in the feeding bolus of A. fuciphagus. The most common insects order found in the sampled fields of the three states in the study was Diptera (26.53%) and followed closely by Hymenoptera (21.26%). The difference between the sample sites as far as insects order composition is not significantly different (t test = 3.759 and 2.9). We failed to accept the H0 that the diversity of insect in the fields and diet of the swiftlets in all locations was the same.


For many, citizen science is exciting because of the possibility for more diverse, equitable partnerships in scientific research with outcomes considered meaningful and useful by all, including public participants. This was the focus of a symposium we organized at the 2015 conference of the Citizen Science Association. Here we synthesize points made by symposium participants and our own reflections.  Professional science has a participation problem that is part of a larger equity problem in society. Inequity in science has negative consequences including a failure to address the needs and goals arising from diverse human and social experiences, for example, lack of attention to issues such as environmental contamination that disproportionately impact under-represented populations, and a failure to recognize the pervasive effects of structural racism. Inequity also encourages mistrust of science and scientists. A perception that science is practiced for the sole benefit of dominant social groups is reinforced when investigations of urgent community concerns such as hydraulic fracturing are questioned as being biased endeavors. Defined broadly, citizen science can challenge and change this inequity and mistrust, but only if it reflects the diversity of publics, and if it doesn't reinforce existing inequities in science and society. Key will be the way that science is portrayed: Acknowledging the presence of bias in all scientific research and the tools available for minimizing this, and demonstrating the utility of science for local problem solving and policy change. Symposium participants called for reflexive research, mutual learning, and other methods for supporting more equitable engagement in practice and in the activities of the Citizen Science Association.


Classical epidemiology has focused on the control of confounding, but it is only recently that epidemiologists have started to focus on the bias produced by colliders. A collider for a certain pair of variables (e.g. an outcome Y and an exposure A) is a third variable (C) that is caused by both. In a directed acyclic graph (DAG), a collider is the variable in the middle of an inverted fork (i.e. the variable C in A → C ← Y). Controlling for, or conditioning an analysis on a collider (i.e. through stratification or regression) can introduce a spurious association between its causes. This potentially explains many paradoxical findings in the medical literature, where established risk factors for a particular outcome appear protective. We use an example from non-communicable disease epidemiology to contextualize and explain the effect of conditioning on a collider. We generate a dataset with 1000 observations, and run Monte-Carlo simulations to estimate the effect of 24-h dietary sodium intake on systolic blood pressure, controlling for age, which acts as a confounder, and 24-h urinary protein excretion, which acts as a collider. We illustrate how adding a collider to a regression model introduces bias. Thus, to prevent paradoxical associations, epidemiologists estimating causal effects should be wary of conditioning on colliders. We provide R code in easy-to-read boxes throughout the manuscript, and a GitHub repository [https://github.com/migariane/ColliderApp] for the reader to reproduce our example. We also provide an educational web application allowing real-time interaction to visualize the paradoxical effect of conditioning on a collider [http://watzilei.com/shiny/collider/].


The objective of the present study was to describe some reproductive parameters, hormonal levels and some biochemical properties of blood serum in rams under the Afyonkarahisar province conditions. Semen (via an artificial vagina) and blood were collected five times during the breeding season from a total of 10 mature and healthy fat-tailed rams (Akkaraman and Awassi) in Afyonkarahisar. Breed effects were significant for relative testes volume, sperm concentration, percentage of abnormal spermatozoa, triiodothyronine (T3), albumin/globulin ratio, total lipid (P < 0.05) and cholesterol (P < 0.01). Some reproductive parameters and biochemical properties of Akkaraman and Ivesi rams indicated that the values were recorded in the optimum range during the breeding season under Afyonkarahisar conditions. In addition, some reproductive parameters of rams show a correlation with some biochemical and enzymatic properties.


Abstract Target-specific drug-delivery systems for the administration of pharmaceutical compounds enable the localization of drugs to diseased sites. Various types of drug-delivery systems utilize carriers, such as immunoglobulins, serum proteins, synthetic polymers, liposomes, and microspheres. The vesicular system of niosomes, with their bilayer structure assembled by nonionic surfactants, is able to enhance the bioavailability of a drug to a predetermined area for a period. The amphiphilic nature of niosomes promotes their efficiency in encapsulating lipophilic or hydrophilic drugs. Other additives, such as cholesterol, can be used to maintain the rigidity of the niosomes' structure. This narrative review describes fundamental aspects of niosomes, including their structural components, methods of preparation, limitations, and current applications to various diseases.