Exposed Riverine Sediments (ERS) are highly dynamic habitats that support large numbers of rare and scarce invertebrates. ERS are characterised by a high diversity of microhabitats and microclimates. The thesis aimed to assess ERS habitats at a micro, patch and reach scale addressing three broad aims (1) to characterise the nature and dynamics of ERS microhabitat through investigating the thermal characteristics of ERS with respect to sediment calibre, depth and distance from the water"s edge, and so identify the key factors that control variations in surface and subsurface physical habitat spatially and temporally. (2) Establish the physical drivers of invertebrate microspatial distribution (a) investigate the interaction of microhabitat (moisture and temperature) and food availability in determining invertebrate habitat selection, achieved through experimental habitat manipulation and the use of marked beetles. (b) Determining the microspatial distribution of specialist ERS beetles and spiders, and whether different species were significantly spatially aggregated/ separated from each other. Significant positive or negative association with physical ERS habitat characteristics. Identifying if species show a (3) Examine the spatial dynamics of beetle assemblages in relation to patch environmental variables and, assess population stability, persistence, occupancy and synchrony over time in relation to river flow. ERS microhabitats were found to be subject to strong lateral gradients in sediment, temperature and humidity that are amplified in hot dry weather. Specialist ERS beetles and spiders were found to occupy distinct habitats and showed clear spatial zonation in regard to sediment calibre, vegetation and elevation. Distribution of some species was highly variable and responsive to elevated levels humidity and temperature. Microclimate was found to have a greater influence over invertebrate distributions than food availability. The analysis of the long term data set provided evidence that larger and diverse ERS within sample reaches is associated with larger numbers of beetles of conservation value. Cattle trampling and stabilisation through vegetation were identified as having significant deleterious effects on ERS habitat quality. River flow variability, specifically the timing of high flow events was found to potentially have a negative influence on beetle abundance, population stability and persistence. Population synchrony revealed that the UKBAP beetle Perileptus areolatus exhibits little mobility and is highly resilient to inundation. However this makes it more susceptible to reach scale disturbance and a reduction in either habitat availability or quality.


Soil erosion in Brazil is very high, and there is need to promote aggregate stability technics to increase the soil organic matter and the soil water infiltration, with a consequent decrease in erosion processes. Applications of animal manure on sandy loam soil may increase carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) contents in soil aggregates, causing increased aggregate stability. This study aimed to evaluate the contents of total organic carbon (TOC) and total nitrogen (TN) as well as the physical properties of a sandy loam soil subjected to 11 years of application animal manure and mineral fertilizer. The experiment was conducted under no-tillage (NT) system with corn (Zea mays L.)/black oat (Avena strigose Schreb.), bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.)/black oat, and corn/wheat (Triticum spp.) crops. The following treatments were used: control (no fertilization), pig slurry (PS), pig deep litter (DL), cattle slurry (CS), and mineral fertilizer (NPK). Soil aggregates were obtained from undisturbed soil samples collected at soil depths of 0 to 5, 5 to 10, and 10 to 20 cm. Applications of PS, DL, and CS on soil increased TOC and TN contents, and increasing weighted mean diameter (WMD) and geometric mean diameter (GMD) in the topsoil. Use of DL and CS increased TOC at 0 to 5 cm in comparison to PS, NPK, and control. The use of animal manure also resulted in higher TN contents at 0 to 5 and 10 to 20 cm compared to control. The use of animal manure for 11 years under NT reduced the amount of mesoaggregates (2.0 > Ø ≥ 0.25 mm) and microaggregates (Ø < 0.25 mm) and increased GMD in the topsoil in comparison to the NPK and control. The animal manure promoted the dispersion of clays at 5 to 10 and 10 to 20 cm, resulting in lower soil aggregation in depth. Principal component analysis confirmed that animal manure reduced the degree of flocculation, with a consequent decrease in aggregation indexes, as it grouped the manure treatments in opposition to the NPK and control treatments.


Mineral nitrogen (N) fertiliser inputs are essential for achieving high crop yields in agricultural production systems and can help to drive farm profitability. However, when N fertiliser is applied to soil it can be lost to the environment and have negative consequences. Such losses include nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, ammonia (NH3) emissions and nitrate (NO3-) leaching to waterways. This loss of N fertiliser also represents
a substantial economic loss of N from the farm. The dominant N fertiliser source used on arable farms in Ireland is calcium ammonium nitrate (CAN) which, in environmental terms, principally contributes to N2O emissions and NO3- leaching. Switching from CAN to urea has the potential to reduce these N loss pathways, but can result in substantially higher NH3 emissions. Nitrogen stabilisers are compounds that can be added to N fertilisers to reduce these N losses. There are two main types of N stabilisers currently available: urease inhibitors and nitrification inhibitors. Urease inhibitors are used to regulate urea fertiliser hydrolysis and to reduce NH3 emissions and nitrification inhibitors are used to regulate the soil NO3- pool and to reduce N2O emissions and NO3- leaching. The urease inhibitor used in this study was N-(n-butyl) thiophosphoric triamide (NBPT) and the nitrification inhibitor used was dicyandiamide (DCD). An additional N fertiliser formulation, urea + the maleic – itaconic
co-polymer (MICO), was added in 2014. Two field sites cropped with spring barley were established in 2013 and the overall study was conducted for three years. Nitrous oxide emissions, NH3 emissions, NO3- leaching and grain yield and N uptake were measured. The N fertilisers evaluated were CAN, urea, urea + NBPT, urea + DCD and urea + NBPT + DCD and Urea + MICO in 2014. Results showed that N2O emissions were low (over 50% lower than the IPCC default emission factor of 1%) regardless of the N fertilisers used but using the N stabilisers NBPT and DCD reduced emissions by up to 62%. There was no significant effect (P>0.05) of fertiliser formulation on NO3- leaching but there was a significant effect (P 0.05) of fertiliser formulation on spring barley grain yield but there was significantly lower N uptake with urea compared to CAN. Using urea + NBPT had similar N uptake levels to CAN. Overall this study showed that switching N fertiliser source from CAN to urea stabilised
with the urease inhibitor NBPT can reduce environmental N losses and increase fertiliser N use efficiency (fNUE). This provides farmers with options to increase the environmental and economic sustainability of their arable farming systems while maintaining crop yields and quality.


Rust's ownership type system enforces a strict discipline on how memory locations are accessed and shared. This discipline allows the compiler to statically prevent memory errors, data races, inadvertent side effects through aliasing, and other errors that frequently occur in conventional imperative programs. However, the restrictions imposed by Rust's type system make it difficult or impossible to implement certain designs, such as data structures that require aliasing (e.g. doubly-linked lists and shared caches). To work around this limitation, Rust allows code blocks to be declared as unsafe and thereby exempted from certain restrictions of the type system, for instance, to manipulate C-style raw pointers. Ensuring the safety of unsafe code is the responsibility of the programmer. However, an important assumption of the Rust language, which we dub the Rust hypothesis, is that programmers use Rust by following three main principles: use unsafe code sparingly, make it easy to review, and hide it behind a safe abstraction such that client code can be written in safe Rust. Understanding how Rust programmers use unsafe code and, in particular, whether the Rust hypothesis holds is essential for Rust developers and testers, language and library designers, as well as tool developers. This paper studies empirically how unsafe code is used in practice by analysing a large corpus of Rust projects to assess the validity of the Rust hypothesis and to classify the purpose of unsafe code. We identify queries that can be answered by automatically inspecting the program's source code, its intermediate representation MIR, as well as type information provided by the Rust compiler; we complement the results by manual code inspection. Our study supports the Rust hypothesis partially: While most unsafe code is simple and well-encapsulated, unsafe features are used extensively, especially for interoperability with other languages.


A flexible platform supporting the linked data life-cycle has been developed and applied in various use cases in the context of the large scale linked
open data project Fusepool P3. Besides the description of the aims and achievements, experiences from publishing and reusing linked data in public sector and business are summarized. It is highlighted that without further help it is difficult for domain experts to estimate the time, effort and necessary skills when trying to transfer the platform to other use cases. Applying a new publishing methodology turned out to be useful in these cases.


International Criminal Court launches. On April 11th 2002, ten governments ratified the statute of the International Criminal Court, bringing the total number of ratifications to 66, well above the 60 needed to launch the court. With this milestone, the treaty will take effect July 1, and the court should be up and running within a year. This is a historic moment for the cause of human rights and international justice. The ICC will be the first standing court of its kind, a permanent international criminal tribunal with potentially global reach to try individuals responsible for the most serious human rights crimes: genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity such as systematic torture, enforced disappearance, or rape. This book aims to assess the subject matter jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and to explore the borderlines of judicial interpretation. In due course, the definitions of the crimes included in the Rome Statute are to be interpreted by the Court on the basis of a Statutory provision containing a principle fundamental to most national criminal laws: nullum crimen sine lege. However, does this principle apply in international law in the same way as it does in national laws? And how should the Court deal with this principle in view of the character of the crimes concerned? The author offers a complete overview of the statute and the work of the International Criminal Court. Definitions, standards, outcomes, etc. are put into context and supported by a detailed table of contents, index and bibliography. A must for the libraries of individuals and institutions alike.


Many modern machine learning algorithms such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and adversarial training can be formulated as minimax optimization. Gradient descent ascent (GDA) is the most commonly used algorithm due to its simplicity. However, GDA can converge to non-optimal minimax points. We propose a new minimax optimization framework, GDA-AM, that views the GDA dynamics as a fixed-point iteration and solves it using Anderson Mixing to converge to the local minimax. It addresses the diverging issue of simultaneous GDA and accelerates the convergence of alternating GDA. We show theoretically that the algorithm can achieve global convergence for bilinear problems under mild conditions. We also empirically show that GDA-AM solves a variety of minimax problems and improves GAN training on several datasets.


The modern concept of privacy as a right to be let alone was developed in the context of print media. With the advent of digital technology, the focus of the privacy concept has changed to individuals' right to control their information. In this essay, we explore why the individual right to control personal information is not enough to protect privacy in a meaningful way in a networked environment, given the interactive nature of the Internet and the voluntary nature of information activities of individual users. The greatest difficulty for individuals who become the object of surveillance in the current technological environment lies in the fact that as individual users' identities become more and more exposed, subjects of surveillance and their activities become less and less identifiable. Given the power disparity regarding identifiability that always has existed between individuals and institutions and among different individuals, we argue that privacy should not only be an individual's right but also a social good with concerns for the public interest.


The aim of this article is to provide a brief overview of the increasing importance of China's economy around the world economy, and to discuss the impacts of the global financial crisis on China's economy. While China's economic growth remained well above international averages, its drop was of the same order of magnitude as for the US. The question is that how China responds to the global financial crisis. Using two individual vector auto-regression (VAR) models, I analyze the relationship between China's output and two foreign outputs including US and Germany over the period of 1979-2013. The results of VAR Granger-casualty show that China's output and US output does affect each other. Also, China's output affect Germany output, but not vice versa. Besides that, China's output illustrates variance decomposition (VDC) of US output with 3.21%, and US output explains VDC of China's output with 0.14%. China's output illustrates VDC of Germany output with 7.84%, and Germany output explains VDC of China's output with 1.36%. Therefore, the impact of US output shock on China is greater than Germany output shock.


Ozone treatment is an oxidative process used in wastewater treatment plant to demolish complex organic molecule. In the case of textile industry is required to adequately remove residual color, demolishing the chromophoric bonds or groups in the dye molecules. A useful method for adding the ozone gas into water and maximize ozone-water mixing to increase mass transfer, is the use of Venturi ejectors. Forcing water through Venturi body, it creates a differential pressure between the fluid inlet and outlet, which in turn creates a vacuum inside the ejector body. In this part, it is possible introduce ozone. COMSOL Multiphysics® is used to define the design parameter of the ejector


We propose a novel approach to boost the performance of generic object detectors on videos by learning video-specific features using a deep neural network. The insight behind our proposed approach is that an object appearing in different frames of a video clip should share similar features, which can be learned to build better detectors. Unlike many supervised detector adaptation or detection-by-tracking methods, our method does not require any extra annotations or utilize temporal correspondence. We start with the high-confidence detections from a generic detector, then iteratively learn new video-specific features and refine the detection scores. In order to learn discriminative and compact features, we propose a new feature learning method using a deep neural network based on auto en-coders. It differs from the existing unsupervised feature learning methods in two ways: first it optimizes both discriminative and generative properties of the features simultaneously, which gives our features better discriminative ability, second, our learned features are more compact, while the unsupervised feature learning methods usually learn a redundant set of over-complete features. Extensive experimental results on person and horse detection show that significant performance improvement can be achieved with our proposed method.


"Habitat" is probably the most common term in ecological research. Elementary school students are introduced to the term, college students study the concept in depth, hunters make their plans based on it, nature explorers chat about the different types, and land managers spend enormous time and money modifying and restoring habitats. Although a broad swath of people now have some notion of what habitat is-opening up ample opportunity for further education and conservation-the scientific community has by and large failed to define it concretely, despite repeated attempts in the literature to come to meaningful conclusions regarding what habitat is and how we should study, manipulate, and ultimately conserve it. Wildlife Habitat Conservation presents an up-to-date review of the habitat concept, provides a scientifically rigorous definition, and emphasizes how we must focus on those critical factors contained within what we call habitat. The result is a habitat concept that promises long-term persistence of animal populations. Key concepts and items in the book include: the necessity of moving away from vague and inconsistent perspectives to more rigorous and standard conceptual definitions of wildlife and their habitat; a discussion of the essential integration of population demographics and population persistence with the concept of habitat; the importance of carry over and lag effects, behavioral processes, genetics, and species interactions to our understanding of habitat; an examination of spatiotemporal heterogeneity, realized through fragmentation, disruption to eco-evolutionary processes, and alterations to plant and animal assemblages; and, an explanation of how anthropogenic effects alter population size and distribution (isolation), genetic processes, and species diversity (including exotic plants and animals). It includes advocacy of proactive conservation and management through predictive modeling, restoration, and monitoring. Each chapter is accessibly written in a style that will be welcomed by private land owners and public resource managers at local, state, and federal levels. Also ideal for undergraduate and graduate natural resource and conservation courses, the book is organized perfectly for a one semester class. Contributors:William M. Block, Kathi L. Borgmann, J. Curtis Burkhalter, Bret A. Collier, Courtney J. Conway, Clinton W. Epps, Clinton D. Francis, Fred S. Guthery, Douglas H. Johnson, Julie L. Lockwood, Heather A. Mathewson, Kevin S. McKelvey, Michael L. Morrison, Amanda D. Rodewald, Jamie S. Sanderlin, Michael K. Schwartz, K. Shawn Smallwood, Bronson K. Strickland, Beatrice Van Horne, Lisette P. Waits, and, John A. Wiens.


Caldecott Honor winner David Shannon applies his wonderful off-beat humor to the story of a duck who decides to try riding a bike--and loves it! Another young, funny book perfect for reading aloud. One day down on the farm, Duck got a wild idea. "I bet I could ride a bike," he thought. He waddled over to where the boy parked his bike, climbed on and began to ride. At first he rode slowly and he wobbled a lot, but it was fun! Duck rode past Cow and waved to her. "Hello, Cow!" said Duck. "Moo," said Cow. But what she thought was, "A duck on a bike? That's the silliest thing I've ever seen!"And so Duck rides past sheep, horse, and all the other barnyard animals. Suddenly, a group of kids ride by on their bikes and run into the farmhouse, leaving the bikes outside. Now ALL the animals can ride bikes, just like Duck!


Through silicon vias (TSVs) provide an efficient way to support vertical communication among different layers of a vertically stacked chip, enabling scalable 3-D networks-on-chip (NoC) architectures. Unfortunately, low TSV yields significantly impact the feasibility of high-bandwidth vertical connectivity. In this paper, we present a semi-automated design flow for 3-D NoCs including a defect-tolerance scheme to increase the global yield of 3-D stacked chips. Starting from an accurate physical and geometrical model of TSVs: 1) we extract a circuit-level model for vertical interconnections; 2) we use it to evaluate the design implications of extending switch architectures with ports in the vertical direction; moreover, 3) we present a defect-tolerance technique for TSV-based multi-bit links through an effective use of redundancy; and finally, 4) we present a design flow allowing for post-layout simulation of NoCs with links in all three physical dimensions. Experimental results show that a 3-D NoC implementation yields around 10% frequency improvement over a 2-D one, thanks to the propagation delay advantage of TSVs and the shorter links. In addition, the adopted fault tolerance scheme demonstrates a significant yield improvement, ranging from 66% to 98%, with a low area cost (20.9% on a vertical link in a NoC switch, which leads a modest 2.1% increase in the total switch area) in 130 nm technology, with minimal impact on very large-scale integrated design and test flows.


Synopsis The structure of an Hfq homolog from the deep-branching thermophilic bacterium Aquifex aeolicus, determined to 1.5-Å resolution both in apo form and bound to a uridine-rich RNA, reveals a conserved, pre-organized RNA-binding pocket on the lateral rim of the Hfq hexamer. Abstract The host factor Hfq, as the bacterial branch of the Sm family, is an RNA-binding protein involved in post-transcriptional regulation of mRNA expression and turnover. Hfq facilitates pairing between small regulatory RNAs (sRNA) and their corresponding mRNA targets by binding both RNAs and bringing them into close proximity. Hfq homologs self-assemble into homo-hexameric rings, with at least two distinct surfaces that bind RNA. Recently, another binding site—dubbed the 'lateral rim'—has been implicated in sRNA•mRNA annealing; the RNA-binding properties of this site appear to be rather subtle, and its degree of evolutionary conservation is unknown. An Hfq homolog has been identified in the phylogenetically deep-branching thermophile Aquifex aeolicus (Aae), but little is known about the structures and functions of Hfq from basal bacterial lineages such as the Aquificae. Thus, we have cloned, overexpressed, purified, crystallized, and biochemically characterized Aae Hfq. We have determined the structures of Aae Hfq in space-groups P1 and P6, both to 1.5 Å resolution, and we have discovered nanomolar-scale binding affinities for uridine- and adenosine-rich RNAs. Co-crystallization with U6 RNA reveals that the outer rim of the Aae Hfq hexamer features a well-defined binding pocket that is selective for uracil. This Aae Hfq structure, combined with biochemical and biophysical characterization of the homolog, reveals deep evolutionary conservation of the lateral RNA-binding mode, and lays a foundation for further studies of Hfq-associated RNA biology in ancient bacterial phyla.


With death looming, Jacques Derrida, the world's most famous philosopher-known as the father of "deconstruction"-sat down with journalist Jean Birnbaum of the French daily Le Monde. They revisited his life's work and his impending death in a long, surprisingly accessible, and moving final interview. Sometimes called "obscure" and branded "abstruse" by his critics, the Derrida found in this book is open and engaging, reflecting on a long career challenging important tenets of European philosophy from Plato to Marx. The contemporary meaning of Derrida's work is also examined, including a discussion of his many political activities. But, as Derrida says, "To philosophize is to learn to die"; as such, this philosophical discussion turns to the realities of his imminent death-including life with a fatal cancer. In the end, this interview remains a touching final look at a long and distinguished career.


Organisations are increasingly adopting e-learning environments for employee and customer training projects. These environments use educational technologies and interactive learning objects (ILOs) to increase the quality of digital training experiences. ILOs are growing in popularity because material is multimodal but even more so, interactive which engages trainees and increases motivation to learn. Several studies have proposed processes and guidelines for improving the usability and user experience (UX) of system applications and websites. However, the processes and guidelines for designing ILOs are limited and the majority of these focus on ILOs adopted in educational institutions. Corporations need to consider additional factors, such as the organisational culture and the disparate profile of users when designing their e-learning environment and the ILOs to be adopted. This paper seeks to answer the research question, "What process should be followed when designing interactive learning objects (ILOs) in a corporate context?". The purpose of this paper is to propose a process for designing and developing ILOs (PDILO) that can be used to increase the UX of these ILOs and ultimately, the usage thereof in an e-learning environment for corporate contexts. A case study approach was adopted and the case was a software development company incorporating e-learning into its management strategy. The design process was used to design ILOs that formed part of a module in the company's new e- learning environment. The proposed process can be used to guide content developers with the design of ILOs in e-learning environments and ultimately improve the success thereof.


Motion Retargeting is a movement edition technology that designed for motion capture data of the production of computer animation. The technology of Motion Retargeting now has two problems--large databases and the complexity of the algorithm increased rapidly with the joints increasing. According to this, we propose a new method, Vector-Mapping method of motion retargeting. The initial movement curve is transferred to vectorization and mapped to the target figure. The virtual figure is setting by IK, which moved along the trajectory curve in order to achieve motion retargeting. Finally, we implemented several experiments based on this method and described some ideal results in this paper.


Building up a rule of law is one of the objectives of transition. This objective, however, cannot be separated from the other main objectives, namely a market economy and democracy. These have all been developed simultaneously in Russia and the failure of one task affects the others."Rebuilding a ship at sea" is an unavoidable vicious circle, but it is the only possible way of transition for Russia, even if it means constant failures and setbacks. The Constitution of the Russian Federation from 1993 technically contains all the bricks needed to build constitutionalism. The separation of powers between the state organs is established as well as a judicial body to guard the Constitution. Newly gained independence of the courts is an important prerequisite for developing the rule of law. There is, however, an institutional setup hindering this development. The political culture still has a long way to develop to the stage of constitutionalism. Authoritarian presidential power, which was the result of the hectic power struggle between the legislative and the executive after separation of powers, enabled an excessively powerful presidency to be the winner of the struggle. A weak party system and an underdeveloped civil society allow authoritarian rule of the president to go even further than the constitution permits. For the same reason corrupted politics can continue. The development of the rule of law has largely been left to the courts and lawyers. The Constitutional Court has, however, chosen a cautious attitude towards presidential power after having supported the legislative in the power struggle and being suspended by the President. If the balance between federal state organs is not yet found, the question of federalism is at an even more underdeveloped stage. Federalism is not developed in an open, transparent and democratic way, but in a power struggle between the center and the powers including fiscal federalism. The center has tried to regain the power, which was given to the regions during the power struggle at the federal center. This is done with the help of new federal laws increasing the powers of the federal center. The Presidential Administration has extended the federal executive power and the President has tried to change regionalist governors into "his own men". The Constitutional Court has repeatedly interpreted the Constitution in favor of the federal center. Decentralization has been developed through the back door with administrative treaties between the federation and different subjects of the federation. These treaties all differ from each other and usually contradict the federal constitution. They also contain secret provisions. These treaties have been a political necessity to prevent the federation from falling apart. In the hierarchy legal norms they are, however, submitted under the Constitution, which makes them vulnerable from the legal point of view.


Female-limited colour polymorphisms are widespread in Odonata, usually showing an androchrome and one or more gynochromes. Androchromes have been hypothesized to function as male mimics with a consequent decrease of male harassment, although males may also learn to recognize the different female colour morphs. In the Eurasian damselfly Lestes sponsa, the occurrence of two female colour morphs (androchrome and gynochrome) has been known since the beginning of the twentieth century, although this has been generally overlooked. In this work, we studied a Swedish population of L. sponsa by counting the number of females of each morph during nine consecutive days, as well as the number of tandems. Androchromes showed blue pruinescence at similar body parts as males, although more limited at the tip of the abdomen. Moreover, androchromes also showed bright blue coloured eyes as males. We found no indication that androchromes might be a result of age changes in female coloration. The androchrome morph accounted for 19% of the female population. Androchromes did not form tandems at a lower frequency than expected in the population, given the frequency of presence of each morph. Therefore our results suggest that either androchromes in this species do not function as male mimics, or that the population has reached equilibrium with equal fitness for each morph. Other aspects of male harassment and learned mate-recognition, as well as female morph behaviour, would shed light on the evolutionary and ecological significance of female morphs in this species.


Fibrous entangled media are interesting architectured materials because of their numerous different applications, such as thermal insulation, mechanical reinforcement, filtration and biomedicine. Entangled materials have recently been more investigated, due to the poor mechanic properties (such as frailness) that usually present porous sintered metals. [1,2].
However, their mechanical behavior is complex and still not well explained, although comparatively, for example the nowadays available knowledge about metal foams is much extensive [3-5].
The objective of this work is to expand the current experimental data base on this kind of materials, in order to characterize and better explain their mechanical behavior. For this purpose various fibrous self-entangled media were elaborated with porosity values ranging from 42% to 75%. These entangled samples were made of three types of fibers/wires with different mechanical behavior: polyamide fibers (presenting elastic behavior), NiTi wires (presenting superelastic behavior) and copper wires (presenting elastoplastic behavior). All three types of fibers/wires had the same nominal diameter (500μm), and their tensile behavior was characterized in this work.
To obtain cylindrical entangled samples from the fibers and the wires, a specific manufacturing process was developed for each type of material. A local strain measurement method was developed as well, to accurately assess axial, lateral, and volumetric strains of interest zones of the samples.
In order to characterize the entanglements mechanical behavior, the manufactured samples were subjected to uniaxial compression and tension tests up to axial strain values of 30%.


The single-crystal X-ray structure of a sulphate-bearing buttgenbachite, Cu36Cl7.8(NO3)1.3 (SO4)0.35(OH)18.104.22.168H2O, from Likasi, Democratic Republic of Congo, has been determined at 100 and 288 K. The basic framework of the structure is the same as has been previously reported for buttgenbachite, except for the identification of a hydrogen-bonded chloride ion (occupancy 0.6) at the origin instead of a Cu ion with partial occupancy. The nature of nitrate positional disorder along channels in the c direction and how this relates to the presence of other species such as chloride ions and water molecules and, most importantly, sulphate ions has been elucidated. One nitrate ion, with an occupancy of 0.18, lies at 2/3,1/3,1/4 and shares the site with a chloride ion (occupancy 0.30) and also a sulphate ion (occupancy 0.09); a second nitrate, with an occupancy of 0.24, lies at 2/3,1/3,0.084 and shares the site with a water molecule (occupancy 0.06). As a result, a formula of Cu36Cl7.8(NO3)1.3 (SO4)0.35(OH)22.214.171.124H2O is obtained. Re-refinement of deposited data for a supposed connellite crystal from the Toughnut mine,Tombstone, Arizona gives a related, but different, pattern of anion substitution. No sulphate could be detected in the structure and it is evident that this structure refers to buttgenbachite. A nitrate nitrogen atom and a chloride ion are disordered at 2/3,1/3,1/4, the overall site being fully occupied. A chloride ion with ~0.5 occupancy is sited at the origin and the formula Cu36Cl7.9(NO3)1.1(OH)63.4H2O is indicated. Re-refinement of a deposited data set for another buttgenbachite crystal from the Likasi mine reveals a partially occupied nitrate centred at 2/3,1/3, z and a partially occupied chloride at 2/3,1/3,1/4. Either 0.5Cl , OH , H2O or H3O + is located at the origin. If the latter is the case, the stoichiometry for this buttgenbachite is Cu36Cl6.5(NO3)1.5(OH)64.5.5H2O. The present study has highlighted the fact that a range of compositions for buttgenbachite exists, depending on the pH and relative activities of chloride, nitrate and sulphate ions in solutions from which the mineral crystallizes.


This study investigated the possible use of shea butter for fried plantain chips production as well as comparative assessment of their quality characteristics. Mature green plantain was peeled and chipped followed by deep-frying using three different vegetable oils (shea butter, soybean oil and palm oil) individually. The respective fried plantain chips were then evaluated for their quality attributes. The fat content of fried plantain chips from shea butter (FPC-Shea) was 19.79% while that from FPC-Soy (plantain chips from soybean oil) and FPC-Palm (plantain chips from palm oil) were 18.47 and 20.04%, respectively. The protein, ash, crude fibre and carbohydrate contents of FPC-Shea were 5.22, 2.62, 3.54 and 69.33%, respectively while those of FPC-Soy and FPC-Palm ranged from 3.84 – 4.77, 2.36 – 2.54, 3.41 – 3.64 and 69.01 – 71.92%, respectively. The browning index (BI), oiliness index and in vitro starch digestibility of FPC-Shea were 103.71, 28.14 cm2 and 42.38 mg/g, respectively while those of FPC-Soy and FPC-Palm ranged from 108.34 – 111.94, 24.45 – 36.31 cm2, and 34.54 – 37.27 mg/g, respectively. The organoleptic assessment revealed that FPC-Shea was rated the highest in terms of colour and crispness while FPC-Soy was rated the highest in terms of taste, aroma, hand greasiness and overall acceptability. The FPC-Palm was rated the lowest in terms of all sensory parameters. The overall acceptability of FPC-Shea was lower than that of FPC-Soy but still processed high potentiality. The storability study revealed that the fried plantain chips from all vegetable oil sources could not last beyond seven days due to the level of thiobarbituric acid reactive substance (TBARS) exceeding a threshold level of 1.1 mg MDA/kg. The type of packaging material used (transparent polyethylene material) might have played a critical role in this relatively short storage life of the fried plantain chips.


The application of cooling enhancement in a short vertical container emplacement layout is analyzed. Two 25 m-long heat pipes upward oriented at 45 degrees are installed at each emplacement borehole to promote heat transport into the pillar area. In addition, ventilation of the emplacement drifts is assumed for a period from two to twenty years. It is concluded that the maximum borehole temperature can be reduced from 230°C to 136°C using only the heat pipes, and to 110°C applying the heat pipes together with moderate air cooling. The ventilation alone without heat pipes can only reduce the temperature to around 200°C. It is also demonstrated that the heat transferred from the container area to farther distances into the pillar raises rock temperatures significantly, by 10-20°C, and the increase in temperature remains noticeable for at least a 1000 years. In addition, due to the more efficient heat distribution caused by the heat pipes, it shown that it is possible to store more waste in the same repository area, together with decreased hot-spot temperatures. Based on these results, it is expected, that as a result of using heat pipes, there will be decreased thermal cycling in the container area together with improved drying, and permanent as well as temporary water removal in the pillar area.


This discussion investigates the importance of understanding and establishing limits on the following three areas during the compositional process of creating music for a digital musical instrument (DMI): group paradigms; performance practises; sound-gesture combinations. I will propose a compositional model in which composing for and performing on a DMI requires rigourous technique attained only by proper training; thus, the proposed model advocates physically active on-stage music-making in the field of computer music – rather than typical and current static representations. Examples are drawn from performances featuring different DMIs, as well as a small selection of ensemble music combing digital with acoustic instrumentalists. These examples serve to assess the implementation of limits and constraints in the compositional approach of different composers.


Banks, banking regulators, and community organizations have spent nearly thirty years interpreting and re-interpreting the simple but ambiguous mandate of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). The statute imposes an affirmative duty requiring "regulated financial institutions to have continuing... obligations to help meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered." The CRA was met with much resistance and lax enforcement for almost a decade. Active protest from community groups, a more defined CRA exam, and innovative, profitable lending strategies, have resulted in a dramatic increase in community reinvestment dollar commitments and in loans to low- and moderate-income (LMI) and minority households.Banks have accepted reinvestment as a means of meeting the convenience and credit needs of communities and preventing urban deterioration. Yet, implementation and enforcement of the CRA remain problematic. The increase in lending has created another trouble - less vigorous and less qualitative enforcement. In an era of potentially lessened accountability due to almost laissez-faire enforcement, the CRA can benefit from increased use of regulatory enforcement powers and from more standardized performance reports.The CRA is designed to make lending institutions more accountable to the communities they affect. By definition, accountability requires banks to have some input from constituent communities. Measuring the CRA's efficacy according to outcome - that is, the real improvement of physical infrastructures, maintenance of social and economic stability, and the actual influx of credit and investment capital into communities - is desirable.The dilemma presented when balancing community participation and inclusiveness while preserving as much autonomy as possible for financial institutions is the subject of this article. Part I discusses the CRA's explicit and implicit objectives. Part II discusses the CRA's evaluative tools: the traditional three-part test and the strategic CRA plan. The three-part test measures a bank's actual performance in service, investment, and lending. As an optional way to comply with the CRA, the strategic CRA plan envisions that lenders will seek community input in setting five-year CRA objectives. The strategic plan brings to the forefront the conflict and pressure that banks experience when community groups organize to halt an institution's merger or expansion plans based on past CRA performance. Part III discusses the potential pitfalls that can be produced by the CRA's obligations. Such obligations, if not carefully crafted, could limit the flow of capital into communities even from banks that are willing to reinvest. Efforts to increase capital must be paired with sensitivity to a community's redevelopment concerns. Vocal communities that are able to determine their sustainable economic need must have the opportunity to participate meaningfully in the funding process. The conflict between allowing communities to participate in shaping the bank's funding commitments and requiring a bank to pledge its financial support in advance is discussed in Part III. Part IV discusses the definition and role of community participation and outlines various ways that communities can be better included in a bank's reinvestment process. The section concludes with a suggestion of factors to use in evaluating the level of community participation and inclusiveness. Part V discusses the importance of the strategic plan option to community participation.


Acute infective conjunctivitis (AlC) is a common self-limiting condition presenting to general practice. However, evidence is limited on GPs current management of AlC, patients' understanding of conjunctivitis or the most appropriate management strategy for AlC in general practice. The aims of this thesis where to: 1) To determine GPs' current management strategies for AlC 2) To gain an understanding of patients concerns and beliefs about AlC and develop a patient information leaflet (PIL). 3) To assess the effect of common management strategies for AlC on symptom resolution and patients belief in antibiotics. Three complementary studies were used: 1) A postal survey of 300 GPs regarding their diagnosis and management of AlC. 2) A qualitative study involving interviews with 25 patients to explore conjunctivitis from the patients' perspective. 3) An open randomised controlled tria~ with 307 recruits, to assess the effect of different management strategies (immediate, delayed or no offer of antibiotics; a patient information leaflet and an eye swab) for AlC in general practice. The results were: 1) Survey: 95% of responding GPs usually prescribe topical antibiotics for AlC despite 58% stating that they thought at least half of the cases they see are viral in origin. Only 36% of GPs believed they could discriminate between viral and bacterial infection 2) Qualitative study: patients regarded conjunctivitis as a minor illness although some considered it might become more serious if not treated. They stated a preference not to take medication but believed that conjunctivitis would not clear without treatment. However, they were open to alternative management approaches (e.g. delayed prescription approach) because they trusted their GPs judgement. Once aware of the selflimiting nature of conjunctivitis, patients felt they would prefer to wait a few days to see if it improved before seeking medical advice even if this resulted in a few more days of symptoms. 3) Randomised trial: different prescribing strategies did not affect symptom severity in the ftrst 3 days, but duration of moderately bad symptoms was less with antibiotics (control 4.83 days, immediate 3.26 days (p=O.OOl), delayed 3.86 days (p=O.002)). Compared with no initial offer of antibiotics, antibiotic use was higher in the immediate group (control 30%, immediate 99% (p=0.001), delayed 53% (p=O.004)) as was belief in the effectiveness of antibiotics (control 47%, immediate 67% (p=0.03); delayed 55% (p=0.35)) and intention to re-consult (control 40%, immediate 68% (p=0.001), delayed 41 % (p=0.98)). A patient information leaflet or an eye swab had no affect on the main outcomes, but an eye swab seemed to increase patient worry about AlC and a PIL seemed to increase satisfaction with the consultation and the amount of information received. Re-attendance in the next two weeks was less in the delayed group (delayed OR 0.33 (0.11;0.98); immediate OR 0.65 (0.26; 1.63)). In conclusion: Most general practitioners prescribe topical antibiotics for most cases of acute infective conjunctivitis -a self-limiting condition. Most patients are unaware of the self-limiting nature of AlC. A delayed prescribing approach is probably the most appropriate strategy to use for the management of acute conjunctivitis in primary care - it reduces antibiotic use by nearly 50%, shows no evidence of 'medicalisation', provides similar symptom duration and severity to immediate prescribing and reduces re-attendance in the short term compared with no offer of antibiotics.


Abstract Many animals have evolved mechanisms to withstand the harsh desert environment, characterized by extreme high temperatures and scarce water supplies. The Arabian Camel, and the Arabian Oryx are valued economically and culturally. These animals can survive for several days without food or water. As the Arabian peninsula undergoes rapid and vast industrial changes, it is increasingly important to understand the biological aspects of these animals. From the unicellular microbes to the sophisticated multi-cellular animals, sensing the chemical composition of the surrounding environment is essential for survival. The vertebrate chemosensory receptors genes, which are members of the seven transmembrane -helical G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), are encoded by six different multigene families. Four of these genes encode receptor proteins for sensing odors. The olfactory (odorant) receptors (ORs) are predominately expressed in the sensory neurons of the main olfactory epithelium, and can sense either water-soluble (class I) or volatile (class II) molecules. Furthermore, certain OR genes are expressed in non-olfactory tissues, such as brain, kidney, testis, and placenta. Being adapted to very harsh conditions with elevated temperature, scarce water supply and limited vegetation, we hypothesize that desert animals have evolved the ability to detect water either from volatiles liberated by water in the environment or through the blooming of short-lived vegetation, via their olfactory systems. To explore this possibility we have undertaken the study of the Camel OR genes. We identified approximately one hundred candidate OR genes, all of which are ortholgos to OR genes in other mammals and most closely related to those of the Equus caballus. Preliminary analysis revealed an enrichment in OR gene family 2/13, found in the highest proportion in aquatic animals, as compared to other mammals. This finding provides the intriguing suggestion that desert animals have evolved specific OR genes to adapt to the desert ecosystem. We are currently working to identify the complete OR gene repertoire in the Camel, and to identify and characterize the OR subgenome in other desert animals such as the Arabian Oryx.


With technology scaling, the wire delay as a fraction of the total delay is increasing, and the communication architecture is becoming a major bottleneck for system performance in systems on chip (SoCs). A communication-centric design paradigm, networks on chip (NoCs), has been proposed recently to address the communication issues of SoCs. As the geometries of devices approach the physical limits of operation, NoCs will be susceptible to various noise sources such as crosstalk, coupling noise, process variations, etc. Designing systems under such uncertain conditions become a challenge, as it is harder to predict the timing behavior of the system. The use of conservative design methodologies that consider all possible delay variations due to the noise sources, targeting safe system operation under all conditions will result in poor system performance. An aggressive design approach that provides resilience against such timing errors is required for maximizing system performance. In this paper, we present T-error, which is a timing-error-tolerant aggressive design method to design the individual components of the NoC (such as switches, links, and network interfaces), so that the communication subsystem can be clocked at a much higher frequency than a traditional conservative design (up to 1.5x increase in frequency). The NoC is designed to tolerate timing errors that arise from overclocking without substantially affecting the latency for communication. We also present a way to dynamically configure the NoC between the overclocked mode and the normal mode, where the frequency of operation is lower than or equal to the traditional design's frequency, so that the error recovery penalty is completely hidden under normal operation. Experiments on several benchmark applications show large performance improvement (up to 33% reduction in average packet latency) for the proposed system when compared to traditional systems.


In the knowledge based economy, accounting information in general, and cost information in particular acquire increased importance. The quality of accounting information can be affected by the non-compliance with professional ethical requirements. In relation to the management accounting, the law provides a higher degree of freedom for the organization and presentation of the information, as compared to the financial accounting. Due to the importance of the information supplied, management accountants should observe certain professional ethical standards. Professional associations develop ethical guides with the purpose of supporting management accountants in solving the ethical problems they may encounter. Among other factors, universities play a significant role in the development of management accountants' professional ethical conduct.


This document defines a new report block type within the framework of
RTP Control Protocol (RTCP) Extended Reports (XR). One of the initial
XR report block types is the Loss Run Length Encoding (RLE) Report
Block. This report conveys the information regarding the individual
Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) packet receipt and loss events
experienced during the RTCP interval preceding the transmission of the
report. The new report, which is referred to as the Post-repair Loss
RLE Report, carries the information regarding the remaining lost
packets after all loss-repair methods are applied. By comparing the
RTP packet receipts/losses before and after the loss repair is
completed, one can determine the effectiveness of the loss- repair
methods in an aggregated fashion. This document also defines the
signaling of the Post-repair Loss RLE Report in the Session
Description Protocol (SDP).


Nearly one quarter of New Zealand's unique vascular plant flora is threatened, and weed invasion is implicated in the decline of more than half of these threatened species. However, there is little experimental evidence showing that invasive weeds have a direct impact on threatened native plants. This study experimentally tested the hypothesis that competition with invasive weeds threatens the rare outcrop plant Pachycladon cheesemanii (Brassicaceae). Pachycladon cheesemanii is a threatened South Island, New Zealand endemic with a distribution nearly confined to rock outcrops. It has disappeared from historical record sites throughout its range. The effects of weed competition and habitat on P. cheesemanii establishment, growth and survival were investigated by sowing seed into replicated plots subject to three treatments: weed removal, soil disturbed and unweeded control, in three habitat types: forested and open rock outcrops and open tussock grassland. The experiments were carried out at three locations: Mt Somers (Canterbury), Wye Creek and Diamond Lake (Otago). Within weedy rock outcrop habitat, weed removal significantly increased the rate of P. cheesemanii germination, and appeared to increase seedling growth rates, implying that weeds can negatively impact populations. Relative to rock outcrop habitat, P. cheesemanii germination was very low in adjacent open grassland habitat regardless of weeding treatment. Demographic monitoring of four natural populations of P. cheesemanii revealed that seed production is highly variable among populations and may be limited by browse and mechanical damage to inflorescences. Pachycladon cheesemanii does produce a persistent seed bank but most seed is found close to parent populations. Our results suggest that competition with invading weeds threatens current P. cheesemanii populations, that plant establishment can be enhanced by weed removal, and that considerable potential exists for artificially expanding populations by sowing seed into appropriate weed-free habitat.


The relationship between space and communication is becoming more complex. Mediatisation blurs the boundaries between different spaces, as well as between dimensions of space. It also leads to the re-articulation of geographical territories – often (re)producing socio-political values and power struggles. This book departs from the assertion that the changing character of media society calls for a spatial turn in media studies. There are clear signs that such a turn is on its way. But no account has yet been formulated for the full potential of this. Gathering new analyses from leading Nordic media scholars, geographers and ethnologists, this book provides a broad view of the perspectives that emerge from the spatial turn. The chapters explore issues such as (trans)nationality, tourism, urban culture, interactive media, and the networking of domestic space. Together, they map out what might become a new sub-field within media and cultural studies: the geography of communication.


Impairments in the acquisition of new object-name associations after unilateral temporal lobectomy despite fast-mapping encoding. has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Master of Arts degree in Speech Pathology and Audiology at the May 2013 graduation. ABSTRACT Learning new object-name associations (i.e., word learning) is an ability crucial to normal development starting in early childhood and continuing through the lifespan. To learn a new word, an object must be associated with an arbitrary phonological (or orthographic) string representing a word. The declarative memory system formulates and encodes associations between two arbitrary stimuli and has been well established as playing a critical role for adult word learning. Research investigating the neural substrates of the declarative memory system and word learning has implicated the hippocampus and the surrounding medial temporal lobe (MTL) as crucial structures. A substantial literature on populations with damage to these particular structures (e.g., hippocampal amnesia, temporal lobectomy) has supports the view that without these structures, declarative learning, and word learning by extension, is grossly impaired. However, a recent study Sharon and colleagues (2011) suggested that non-MTL structures may be sufficient to support word learning under special study conditions (" fast mapping ") (Sharon, Moscovitch, & Gilboa, 2011). Fast mapping is a word-learning phenomenon described as the ability to acquire the name for a new word in a single exposure to an unknown word and unfamiliar referent alongside a known word with its This study evaluated the ability of patients with unilateral temporal lobectomy (TL) following early-onset temporal lobe epilepsy to learn new object-name associations in two different word learning conditions: fast mapping (FM) and explicit encoding (EE). The word learning performance was evaluated relative to a group of healthy normal iii comparison participants (NC). The goal of this study was to examine the role of the hippocampus in word learning to answer the question: does a FM condition promote word learning in participants with temporal lobe epilepsy who have had a left temporal lobectomy? NC participants were able to acquire a rich representation of novel items (as evidenced by improved familiarity ratings and generalization of items) while TL participants had severely impaired performance on free recall, recognition testing, and generalization tasks. TL participants did not learn novel object-name associations despite a FM paradigm while the NC group performed significantly above chance on recognition testing. These findings in conjunction with broadly similar results …


We describe several families of k-mer based string kernels related to the recently presented mismatch kernel and designed for use with support vector machines (SVMs) for classification of protein sequence data. These new kernels -- restricted gappy kernels, substitution kernels, and wildcard kernels -- are based on feature spaces indexed by k-length subsequences ("k-mers") from the string alphabet Σ. However, for all kernels we define here, the kernel value K(x,y) can be computed in O(cK(|x|+|y|)) time, where the constant cK depends on the parameters of the kernel but is independent of the size |Σ| of the alphabet. Thus the computation of these kernels is linear in the length of the sequences, like the mismatch kernel, but we improve upon the parameter-dependent constant cK = km+1|Σ|m of the (k,m)-mismatch kernel. We compute the kernels efficiently using a trie data structure and relate our new kernels to the recently described transducer formalism. In protein classification experiments on two benchmark SCOP data sets, we show that our new faster kernels achieve SVM classification performance comparable to the mismatch kernel and the Fisher kernel derived from profile hidden Markov models, and we investigate the dependence of the kernels on parameter choice.


Long-range hypervelocity vehicles are studied in terms of their motion in powered flight. Powered flight is analyzed for an idealized propulsion system which approximates rocket motors. Unpowered flight is characterized by a return to earth along a ballistic, skip, or glide trajectory. Only those trajectories are treated which yield the maximum range for a given velocity at the end of powered flight. Aerodynamic heating is treated in a manner similar to that employed previously by the senior authors in studying ballistic missiles (NACA rep. 1381), with the exception that radiant as well as convective heat transfer is considered in connection with glide and skip vehicles. As a final performance consideration, it is shown that on the basis of equal ratios of mass at take-off to mass at the end of powered flight, the hypervelocity vehicle compares favorably with the supersonic airplane for ranges in the neighborhood of and greater than one half the circumference of the earth. In the light of this and previous findings, it is concluded that the ballistic and glide vehicles have, in addition to the advantages usually ascribed to great speed, the attractive possibility of providing relatively efficient long-range flight.


In many countries were populism has taken hold, focus on quicker yet ultimately unsustainable policy shortcuts gave rise to canonical populism that has led to policy failure and crises. This note analyzes three policy cases in the Philippines which appear to reflect populist tendencies, defined simply by its redistributive yet potentially unsustainable characteristics. It aims to reveal not simply the cost of these policies, but also the need to think of structural and institutional reforms that address the root causes of the risks and challenges. Ultimately, populism appears to be trumped by evidence on policies that actually work more effectively.


European Geosciences Union, 1st General Assembly Nice, France 25–30 April 2004 Website: http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/ga/egu/04 Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Water Resources III Nashville, TN 17–19 May 2004 Website: http://www.awra.org/meetings/Nashville2004/index.html CGU/AGU/SEG Montreal, Quebec 17–21 May 2004 Website: http://www.agu.org/meetings/sm04/ North American Genthological Society Meeting Vancouver, BC 6–10 June 2004 Website: http://benthos.org/index.cfm 61 Eastern Snow Conference Portland, Maine, USA 9–11 June 2004 Website: http://www.easternsnow.org/ International Conference on Groundwater Vulnerability Assessment and Mapping Sosnowiec, Poland 16–19 June 2004 Contact: Dr Andrzej J. Witkowski, Secretariat of the Conference, University of Silesia, Bȩdzińska Str., 60, 41‐200 Sosnowiec, Poland Tel: +48 32 291 68 88 Fax: +48 32 291 58 65 E‐mail: firstname.lastname@example.com Website: http://khgi.wnoz.us.edu.pl/vulnerability.htm Riverflow 2004–Second International Conference on Fluvial Hydraulics Naples, Italy 23–25 June 2004 Website: http://www.riverflow2004.unina.it Riparian Ecosystems and Buffers: Multi‐Scale Structure, Function and Management Olympic Valley, CA 28–30 June 2004 Website: http://www.awra.org/Olympic2004/index.html BHS International Conference on 'Hydrology: Science and Practise for the 21st Century' Imperial College, London 12–16 July 2004 Contact: Dr Adrian Butler Tel: 020 7954 6122 Fax: 020 7594 6124 E‐mail: firstname.lastname@example.com Website: http://www.hydrology.org.uk/index.html Italia 2004 32nd International Geological Congress "From the Mediterranean Area Toward a Global Geological Renaissance" Geology, Natural Hazards and Cultural Heritage Florence 20–28 August 2004 Contact: Chiara Manetti, Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, Via La Pira, 4‐50121 Firenze, Italy Tel/Fax: +39 055 2382146 Email: firstname.lastname@example.com Good Water Governance for People & Nature: What Roles for Law, Institutions, Science & Finance Dundee, Scotland 29 August–1 September 2004 Website: http://www.awra.org/meetings/Dundee2004/index.html XXXIII Congress of IAH—Conference on Groundwater Flow Understanding: From Local to Regional Scale. Joint Conference IAH/ALHSUD Mexico 11–15 October 2004 E‐mail: firstname.lastname@example.com Website: www.igeograf.unam.mx/aih Acid Rain 2005 7th International Conference on Acid Deposition Prague, Czech Republic 12–17 June 2005 Contact: Jaroslav Santroch Czech Hydrometeorological Institute, Na Sabatce 17, 14306 Prague 4, Czech Republic Tel: +420 24 1765803 Fax: +420 24 1760689 E‐mail: firstname.lastname@example.com Website: http://www.acidrain2005.cz


Based on the complete edition of his works, this new volume presents Gandhi's most important political writings arranged around the two central themes of his political teachings: satyagraha (the power of non-violence) and swaraj (freedom). Dennis Dalton's general Introduction and headnotes highlight the life of Gandhi, set the readings in historical context, and provide insight into the conceptual framework of Gandhi's political theory. Included are bibliography, glossary, and index.


Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE) is undergoing extremely rapid economic growth and experiencing a related increase in infrastructure and industrial development. If not managed properly, this growth can lead to significant impacts on the natural environment. Environmental impact assessment (EIA) practice in Abu Dhabi is approximately 10 years old. During the period, the number of EIAs conducted each year has increased considerably. This research activity evaluates the performance of the system as documented in legislation, relevant documents and current practices. The current system is compared with evaluation criteria from Christopher Wood. The analysis reveals that the Abu Dhabi process is strong in its legal basis, coverage, screening, scoping and review of the report. Areas that need improvement include better specification of alternatives in design, integration of EIAs into final decision-making, monitoring of the overall process, public consultation and ongoing impact monitoring. A discussion of public involvement and impact monitoring provides the context for potential future enhancements to strengthen the Abu Dhabi system.


In recent years, Western countries have been experiencing a significant increase in both humanitarian and economic immigration. With the number of migrants, the challenges of integration have also surged. In consequence, host countries have invested a considerable amount of resources in comprehensive and effective immigrant integration policies. Various integration measures, such as foreign credential recognition or education and (re-)training, have been implemented to help immigrants with their transition into the host country's labor market. The success of such policies, we argue, depends not only on their extent and coverage but also on whether they are compatible with other institutional characteristics of the host countries. This contribution hence asks to what extent host countries' immigrant integration policies aligned with these countries' skill production regimes channel immigrants into the labor market and consequently are responsible for the cross-national differences in immigrants' economic integration. We expect that immigrants, particularly those with a less marketable status (e.g., refugees or asylum seekers), should have higher incentives to acquire host-country-specific education or to have their source country education recognized in countries that lay a stronger emphasis on highly specific vocational skills. They also should have higher labor market returns on their investments in countries with more vocationally oriented education systems (such as in Germany and Austria) as opposed to countries with more generally oriented education systems (such as Ireland and the United Kingdom).


Presentation co-delivered with Martin Westwood at the Valand Academy of Fine Arts, Gothenburg, Sweden as part of a public seminar with Tim Ingold, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.

This presentation was given as part of an EU-funded NEARCH fellowship awarded by the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, which runs from January 2015 - September 2017. The project involves collaboration with archaeologists; aiming to examine their working methodologies and to develop work which responds to the synthesising of cultural heritage through technological means.

The three partner institutions are: the Archaeological Unit of Saint-Denis (UASD); the Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) and the Archaeology Department of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Press Release:

We welcome you to a seminar with Tim Ingold and artists Joey Bryniarska and Martin Westwood on Creativity, Art and Archaelogy within the framework of the EU-project NEARCH (New Scenarios for a Community-involved Archaeology) of which Gothenburg University is a partner and to which Jason E. Bowman, Programme Leader of the MFA: Fine Art is affiliated as a researcher, together with Dr. Anita Synnestvedt, Lecturer of Archeology at Gothenburg University.

Joey Bryniarska and Martin Westwood are two London-based visual artists whose independent practices have formed around shared themes of mediation, technology and their temporal relationships. Their chosen mediums range widely; from darkroom photography, text-work and video, to large-scale ceramics and sculpture. Bryniarska and Westwood's collaborative research stems from a mutual fascination in the properties of historical value; how cultural or historical artefacts are extracted, mediated and administrated, either as raw material or as a virtual construction of heritage. Conceptions of technology and time are considered alongside notions of reuse and the ruin. Their current concerns with heritage divide its contents into three sites, situations or economies; the geographic site, the technological site and the regulatory site. This scheme aims to understand a network of relations and processes in which archaeology exists – in order to consider the alignment of technology and its rhetoric, understanding how archaeology produces objects and considering the insight this has for artistic practice. Bryniarska and Westwood were selected for the NEARCH artist in residence project and they have Gamlestaden and its archeological excavations as a case study.

Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, and a Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Following 25 years at the University of Manchester, where he was appointed Max Gluckman Professor of Social Anthropology in 1995, Ingold moved in 1999 to Aberdeen, where he went on to establish the UK's newest Department of Anthropology. Ingold has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on comparative questions of environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, as well as on the role of animals in human society, on issues in human ecology, and on evolutionary theory in anthropology, biology and history. In his more recent work, he went onto explore the links between environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold's latest research pursues three lines of inquiry that emerged from his earlier work, concerning the dynamics of pedestrian movement, the creativity of practice, and the liarity of writing. He is currently writing and teaching on issues on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Ingold is the author of many books, including The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011) and Making (2013).


Abstract Incorporation mechanisms of Cl in peralkaline and peraluminous Na2O-CaO-Al2O3-SiO2 glasses as a model system for phonolitic melts were investigated using 35Cl, 23Na, 27Al, and 29Si magic angle spinning (MAS) nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. The size and large distribution of electric field gradients for 35Cl causes loss of signal in the MAS NMR experiment and this, in combination with the low concentration of Cl and the large chemical shift dispersion, means that even at the highest available fields we are at the limits of MAS NMR. Nevertheless clear differences in the Cl environment in peralkaline and peraluminous glasses can readily be seen. In both glass types Cl exists in relatively symmetric Na-Ca-Cl environments. The 35Cl chemical shift indicates that the Cl environment is dominated by the presence of Na cations, consistent with the Na/Ca ratio of 5/1 in the glasses. 35Cl MAS NMR spectra of the peraluminous glasses show a larger chemical shift distribution and a more positive isotropic chemical shift, ~-75 ppm, than the peralkaline glasses, ~-100 ppm. They also have a larger quadrupole coupling constant with a larger distribution, indicating greater disorder in the peraluminous glasses. It is likely that there are more Ca cations present in the Cl environments in the peraluminous glasses than in the peralkaline glasses despite their having the same Na/Ca ratio. In the peralkaline glasses the formation of Na-Ca-Cl environments leads to a decrease in the number of network-modifying cations, which causes a polymerization of the glass network. No effect on the glass polymerization was observed in the peraluminous glasses. Some 35Cl signal is also lost in the static spectra indicating that ~20% of Cl for a peralkaline glass and more than ~70% for a peraluminous glass must be in environments where there is a large enough electric field gradient that the resulting very broad line is unobservable. These environments could be simply Na-Ca-Cl with higher electric field gradients than those producing the observed 35Cl signal or non-bridging Cl environments like for example Al-Cl. The Cl environment in the present mixed Na2O-CaO aluminosilicate glasses appears to be more disordered than was to be expected from previous NMR spectroscopic studies on simpler glass compositions.


Preface 1 Introduction 2 Classifications and key concepts of credit risk 2.1 A classification 2.2 Key concepts 3 Rating assignment methodologies 3.1 Experts based approaches 3.2 Statistical based models 3.3 Heuristic and numerical approaches 3.4 Involving qualitative information 4 Developing a statistical based rating system 4.1 The process 4.2 Setting model's objectives and generating the dataset 4.3 Case study: dataset and preliminary analysis 4.4 Defining an analysis sample 4.5 Univariate and bivariate analyses 4.6 Estimating a model and assessing its discriminatory power 4.7 From scores to ratings and from ratings to probabilities of default 5 Validating rating models 5.1 Validation profiles 5.2 Roles of internal validation units 5.3 Qualitative and quantitative validation 6 Case Study. Validating PanalpBank's statistical based rating system for Financial Institutions 211 6.1 Case study objectives and context 6.2 The 'Development report' for the validation unit 6.3 The 'Validation report' by the validation unit 7 Conclusions. Ratings usage opportunities and warnings. 7.1 Internal ratings are critical to credit risk management 7.2 Internal ratings assignment trends 7.3 Statistical based ratings and regulation: conflicting objectives? 7.4 Statistical based ratings and customers: needs and fears 7.5 Limits of statistical based ratings 7.6 Statistical based ratings and the theory of financial intermediation 7.7 Statistical based ratings usage: guidelines Bibliography Subject Index


This study assessed the impact of static and dynamic variables in EUR and NPV in the development plan of a North Sea offshore field with 81 m of water, light oil crude of 40.5 API and 510 SCF/STB of GOR comprised of sandstones from a shallow marine environment in anticline structure separated to the northeast and southwest by a pair of normal faults. The analysis is conducted through the application of different experimental design techniques and the preparation of a comparison between them. Uncertainty analysis has been prepared to characterize the appropriate range for nine variables that affect the oil recovery and net present value of the field development. A Folded Plackett-Burman design was prepared to screen the initial nine variables; the linear regression results show that the oil water contact, permeability anisotropy and net to gross are the significant variables. Also, the residual analysis demonstrated that the proxy equation should be improved to have better predictability in the non-sampled space. In consequence, a D-Optimal and a Central Composite experimental design were prepared for the three significant variables. The regression results show better coefficient correlation and lower least square errors in the D-Optimal design using a full quadratic model and confirmed the oil water contact as the most significant variable of the field. Finally, Monte Carlo Simulation was performed in the proxy model from the D-Optimal design, which resulted in an expected value ultimate recovery of 357 MMSTB. The paper presents an exciting workflow to analyze different experimental design techniques, compare them and use the most suitable to prepare the development plan of a field.


Fully-transparent DWDM networks working at 10 Gb/s or more have limited reach. At these high rates, only translucent networks able to fully regenerate the signal when needed can be used to implement long haul transport networks. Since signal regeneration and regenerator placement can be done in many ways, an effective design procedure will target the overall cost minimization. In this paper, we propose three regenerator placement procedures. Two of them minimise the number of regeneration nodes, whereas the third method minimises the total number of regenerators. Moreover, we present an economic model aimed to evaluate and compare the overall cost of these procedures. We show how to choose the optimum regenerator placement method according to regeneration type and associated costs.


Social problems are inevitable in urban communities. One of the problems is homeless. In Indonesia there is a foundation that provides shelter house for homeless, named Yayasan Bina Insan Mandiri (BIM). This shelter provides some books which functions as a simple library which provides reading materials for those who living in this shelter. While, in Malaysia there is a school for homeless and books are provided there too. In this article, the writer will get some data from a shelter house named Master (served by BIM) in Jakarta, Indonesia and data from a school for homeless in Malaysia. The writers will evaluate how this shelter and school operate the libraries provided there, what the benefits for the homeless and poor people and what the role of government in intervening this practice. In Indonesia, there is a governnment regulation no. 39 year 2012 about social welfare operation. The regulation mandated the implementation of social rehabilitation. Social rehabilitation is intended to restore and develop abilities for someone who suffers from social dysfunction in order to carry out his reasonable social function. This research will employ qualitative methods with indepth interview with social workers, volunterary teachers, homeless and government officers who conduct social rehabilitation. This research will give benefit for social workers in developing the library for fulfilling the needs of homeless and also give recommendation for government official in sustain the program for homeless deal with the providing and improving library for them.


A set of cationic group IX metal complexes of the type [(η5-Cp*)M(Cl)(N,N′)]+ bearing N,N′-coordinating ligands structurally related to 2,2′-bipyridine were synthesized and characterized by means of elemental analysis, spectroscopy and single crystal X-ray diffraction. These complexes can undergo two different modes of CH activation in the gas phase, which were examined by CID ESI-MS spectrometry and by DFT calculations. On one hand, a roll-over cyclometallation can occur at one of the aromatic rings of the N,N′-coordinated ligands. On the other hand, a deprotonation of one of the Cp* methyl groups can take place, leading to complexes in the oxidation state +I with a tetramethylfulvene ligand coordinated. In both cases, the chlorido ligand acts as an internal base in the ESI-MS CID experiment.


Xpedite was a computer-based information system developed by the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) to enhance organ procurement and placement from cadavers. Using state-ofthe-art development approaches and technology at the time of its development, Xpedite was built around Lotus Notes®, facsimile machines, and alphanumeric pagers. It was developed to integrate and streamline the collection, transfer, and exchange of data on available organs more fully. The concept was to shorten the time from organ availability (i.e., donor death) to transplant, thus reducing organ wastage. Xpedite met design and operational performance goals (i.e., a reduction in placement times and data errors), yet its operation was terminated after barely twenty-four months of operation. Adoption of the new technology throughout the transplant community was limited due to inexperience with integrated information technology systems and the resistance to change that accompanied Xpedite's launch. The individual and organizational resistance was a surprise to UNOS. The technical and organizational lessons learned from this experience helped UNOS with developing subsequent information technology infrastructure components. The complexity of the technology support environment and low levels of user adoption for Xpedite ultimately led to an evolution beyond this tool, resulting in an Internet-based environment that would be more robust, easier to maintain, and better able to support user needs.


This contribution has three main aims, which are pursued at progressively greater length. First, I define globalization as a basis for my own interrogation of its nature, causes, and consequences. Second, I argue, only partly in a wilfully contrarian spirit, that the spatial turn associated with the interest in the globalization of capital has been overdone and that a temporal (re)turn is overdue. For time and temporality are at least as important as, if not more important than, space and spatiality in the logic of economic globalization. I ground this claim in the nature of the capital relation and its contradictions. Third, I explore the implications of this approach for some spatio-temporal contradictions of globalization and their implications for national states as they become more involved in promoting globalization and managing its repercussions.


Offering a novel clue about the basic biology of pancreatic cancer, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have confirmed a decades-old discovery of a link between blood type and the risk of developing the disease. The finding, published online by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute on March 10, is based on an analysis of blood type and pancreatic cancer occurrence in participants of two large health-tracking studies, the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. The new study demonstrates that while people's overall risk of pancreatic cancer is relatively low - with nearly 40,000 news cases diagnosed annually in the United States, compared with nearly 150,000 new cases of colorectal cancer — people with blood types A, B, or AB were more likely to develop the disease than those with type O. "Except for several rare familial syndromes, the genetic factors that raise or lower an individual's risk for pancreatic cancer are largely unknown," says the study's lead author, Brian Wolpin, MD, MPH. "Studies done several decades ago suggested a link between blood type and the risk of various malignancies, including pancreatic cancer, but they were limited by the fact that they 'looked back' at cancers that had already occurred and involved relatively few cases. We wanted to see if the association held up using modern patient cohorts and research techniques." They found that, compared to participants with type O blood, those with type A had a 32 percent higher chance of incurring pancreatic cancer, those with type AB had a 51 percent higher chance, and those with type B had a 72 percent higher chance. Within the entire group, 17 percent of pancreatic cancers were attributable to inheriting a non-O blood group. But because the lifetime risk of developing the disease is relatively low (estimated at 1.3 percent), and the increased risk associated with blood type relatively modest, screening tests for pancreatic cancer risk are unlikely to be based on blood type alone. The real value of the findings currently is what they suggest about the inner workings of the disease, the authors say. The four human blood groups are defined by the type of glycoproteins — confections of sugar and protein — found on the surface of red blood cells and other cells, including those in the pancreas. A gene known as ABO helps construct these glycoproteins by ordering the placement of sugar molecules on a protein "backbone" called the H antigen. The pattern formed by these sugars determines whether an individual's blood type is A, B, AB, or O. (In the O type, no sugars are attached to the antigen.) Experiments by other investigators have shown that normal pancreas cells carry a different pattern of these blood-type antigens than pancreatic tumor cells do, suggesting that changes in the ABO gene's activity may occur as the cells become cancerous. Researchers speculate that alterations in the antigens may interfere with the cells' ability to signal and adhere to one another, and with the immune system's ability to detect abnormal cells — potentially setting the stage for cancer. Blood-type antigens may also affect the level of inflammatory proteins in a person's blood. Chronic inflammation has been linked to pancreatic cancer risk. Intriguing as these findings are, they don't necessarily prove a direct link between blood-type antigens and pancreatic cancer development, the authors assert. It is possible that the ABO gene is merely a marker for other, nearby genes that are more directly involved in cancer development. "The association between blood type and pancreatic cancer risk provides a new avenue for getting at the disease's underlying biological mechanisms," Wolpin says. "Understanding the biology will put us in a better position to intervene so the cancer doesn't develop or progress." The study's senior author is Charles Fuchs, MD, MPH, of Dana-Farber and Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH). Co-authors include David Hunter, ScD, and Edward Giovannucci, MD, ScD, of BWH and the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH); Andrew Chan, MD, MPH, of BWH and Massachusetts General Hospital; Patricia Hartge, ScD, and Stephen Chanock, MD, of the National Cancer Institute; and Peter Kraft, PhD, of the HSPH. Funding for the study was provided by grants from the National Cancer Institute and the Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (www.dana-farber.org) is a principal teaching affiliate of the Harvard Medical School and is among the leading cancer research and care centers in the United States. It is a founding member of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC), designated a comprehensive cancer center by the National Cancer Institute. Contact Bill Schaller (617) 632-4090


One of the emerging applications that belongs to ambient systems is to transparently and directly interconnect vehicles in roads, making an ad hoc network that enables a variety of applications through distritbuted softwares without the need of any fixed and dedicated infrastructure. The network as well as the embedded computers and sensors in the vehicle will be invisible to the driver, who will get the required services during his journey. The most important kind of services are the ones related to his safety. Before Proceeding to the real implementation of any software or communication protocol in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) it is mandatory to first evaluate it through a comprehensive simulation study. Mobility is an essential parameter that features VANET, and should be carefully considered in the evaluation. To get faithful and correct results in a simulation study, the mobility model should be as realistic as possible. The earlier models used in general mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), such as the random waypoint, are unsuitable for the VANET application, where the movements cannot take place freely in the open area. Indeed, vehicles move on the existing routes, constrained by many parameters (route intersections, stop and traffic light signals, the presence of other vehicles in front the vehicle, etc.). Some new models taking into account these features have been recently proposed. In this paper we provide an overview of the mobility models newly proposed in literature, which can be used for simulating VANET. After that, we will present our mobility simulator that mimics many of the recent models. Finally, we use this simulator to illustrate the impact of the overtaking on mobility, a parameter ignored by all the previous simulation studies.


The main aim of my thesis is to explore and define the characteristic styles of the contemporary fantasy story's narrative structure, primarily by focusing on the works of both J.R.R Tolkien, also acknowledged as the father of the modern fantasy genre, writer of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, published after his death and a more contemporary fantasy author, George R.R Martin, writer of the A Song of Ice and Fire series. I am interested in their narrative structure and approach to the fantasy genre, the similarities and the dire contrast between them, how Martin took the foundation of what Tolkien designed and how he has expanded upon it to create a more contemporary perspective to the genre. I aim to focus and expand upon Tolkien's own theory of sub-creation, in which he argues that the crucial feature of fantasy should be the creation of what he called secondary belief. I argue that Martin also adopts this approach, but brings a greater level of reality to his creation, seeing Tolkien's depiction of his world and its politics as being too naive and lacking complexity. Martin explores issues of power and gender in his work which gives his own 'sub-creation' a more recognizable contemporary texture. In my own work, offered as part of this thesis, I have tried to adopt the best of both approaches within my own narrative, For Glory.

J.R.R Tolkien always held a strong fascination with fairy tales, where they originated and how they eventually developed into the fantasy genre we all know so well. He marked their relationship with myths, leading him to investigate the well-known but conflicting theories of Max Muhller and an opposing theorist Andrew Lang, who sought to categorise fairy tales and their place within literature. However after examining both Muhller's Solar theory and Langs anthropological theory, Tolkien found that he did not agree with either theory, leading to him developing his own theory about myths and fairy tales, arguing that they were the direct result of what people knew about the world around them and the human imagination. Tolkien could not stress enough how important the human imagination was, he went on to base his sub-creation theory mostly upon this, developing it during his time writing The Hobbit and finalising it as he wrote The Lord of the Rings. This in turn led to the development of his Sub-Creation theory, which is expanded upon in Tolkien's World by Randel Helms. Tolkien sought to transport his readers into a world which they could visualise and believe without suspending disbelief, a world full of many magical creatures and monsters that were mainly influenced by Tolkien's fascination with Nordic mythology.

The Lord of the Rings and his other works set the tone for the next generation of fantasy writers, many embracing the structure of Middle Earth and creating similar worlds. George R.R Martin, author of The Song of Ice and Fire series, was no exception to this; like many fantasy writers that followed in Tolkien's footsteps, he went on to create Westeros, a world also set in medieval times, loosely based upon the historical War of the Roses. Martin decided that Tolkien, despite his success in creating a rich, magical and detailed medieval world of Middle Earth, had nonetheless ushered in many other fantasy writes that followed too mechanically, with character types such as Dark Lords being over used. He decided that Tolkien had diluted the trappings of power too much, as he never went into depth into the political arena and what it means to rule. Martin made sure to clearly illustrate that within Westeros, political machinations were rife, as each House strives to outplay the other and one has to watch one's step or get killed in a moment of weakness. Also instead of a central quest, the characters within Martin's world spend most of their time separated from one another, scattered across Westeros and beyond, where they would all undergo their own personal journeys, sometimes crossing paths but never gathering together to complete a certain task. After expanding upon the finer points of the styles and structures that J.R. R Tolkien and George R.R Martin applied within their narratives, the thesis will then outline which factors make up a successful fantasy story, factors that I applied to my own fantasy story, For Glory.


Abstract In multiple property models of lexical categories, the assignment of a word to a lexical category is determined by a set of properties associated with that category. Specifically, if a word displays a sufficient number of properties associated with a given category, it will be assigned to that category. The current article critically evaluates multiple property models of lexical categories. In particular, it focuses on a multiple property model recently developed by Aarts (Syntactic gradience: The nature of grammatical indeterminacy, Oxford University Press, 2007b) and a variety of other such models. It is argued that multiple property models encounter problems in four key areas. Firstly, they struggle to determine an appropriate set of lexical categories and to provide coherent accounts of the nature and function of such categories. Secondly, they encounter difficulties in determining the properties that define categories and in determining features of properties such as whether they should be weighted or not. Thirdly, a variety of problems arise when multiple property models combine words, properties and categories together. Finally, multiple property models fail to account for crosslinguistic data. It is concluded that multiple property models do not provide viable accounts of lexical categories.


With alternate, sustainable, natural sources of energy being sought after, there is new interest in energy from radioactivity, including natural and waste radioactive materials. A study of various atomic batteries is presented with perspectives of development and comparisons of performance parameters and cost. We discuss radioisotope thermal generators, indirect conversion batteries, direct conversion batteries, and direct charge batteries. We qualitatively describe their principles of operation and their applications. We project possible market trends through our comparative cost analysis. We also explore a future direction for certain atomic batteries by using nanomaterials to improve their performance.


Numerous studies have evaluated the composition of gut microbiota in experimental animals fed high-fat or low-fiber diets. However, few reports have focused on the effects of different fatty acid (FA) compositions on the diversity of gut microbiota and its metabolites. Therefore, the aim of this research was to investigate the effects of different dietary fats on liver mRNA expression levels of genes related to cholesterol and bile acid (BA) metabolism, as well as to investigate cecal microbiota composition and bacterial metabolites composition in rats. Four-week-old male Wistar/ST rats were fed a 15% fat diet for 30 days, including from different sources (soybean oil, lard, menhaden oil, or tuna oil). Then, the rats' cecal microbiota composition was determined by sequencing the 16S ribosomal RNA gene using next-generation sequencing. Lard diet drastically decreased the expression level of liver ATP-binding cassette subfamily G genes (Abcg5 and Abcg8 genes) compared with other diets. Menhaden oil diet increased the fecal BA excretion compared with soybean oil and lard diets. Fecal BA excretion tended to be positively correlated with the relative abundance of Firmicutes, and negatively correlated with the relative abundance of Bacteroidetes. These results have shown that dietary fats with different FA compositions have a different effect on the relative composition of cecal microbiota, and in particular, menhaden oil may have very different effects compared to other experimental fats. The effects of fish oils on the cecal microbiota may differ greatly depending on the ratio of EPA to DHA and the composition of FA other than n-3 polyunsaturated FA. Our results provided new insights on the way different dietary fat sources affect sterol metabolism and alter cecal microbiota composition in rats.


Intelligence affects social outcomes of groups. A systematic study of the link is provided in an experiment where two groups of subjects with different levels of intelligence, but otherwise similar, play a repeated prisoner's dilemma. The initial cooperation rates are similar, it increases in the groups with higher intelligence to reach almost full cooperation, while declining in the groups with lower intelligence. The difference is produced by the cumulation of small but persistent differences in the response to past cooperation of the partner. In higher intelligence subjects, cooperation after the initial stages is immediate and becomes the default mode, defection instead requires more time. For lower intelligence groups this difference is absent. Cooperation of higher intelligence subjects is payoff sensitive, thus not automatic: in a treatment with lower continuation probability there is no difference between different intelligence groups.


This cross-sectional survey focused on faculty use and knowledge of author identifiers and researcher networking systems, and professional use of social media, at a large state university. Results from 296 completed faculty surveys representing all disciplines (9.3% response rate) show low levels of awareness and variable resource preferences. The most utilized author identifier was ORCID while ResearchGate, LinkedIn, and Google Scholar were the top profiling systems. Faculty also reported some professional use of social media platforms. The survey data will be utilized to improve library services and develop intra-institutional collaborations in scholarly communication, research networking, and research impact.