This paper investigates relationships between innovation input, innovation output and labor productivity in China for four major manufacturing sectors; textiles, wearing apparel, transport equipment and electronic equipment. It uses a large sample of firm level micro data and a structural model in the estimation. The data from 2005 to 2006 is estimated, and results of all the sectors show positive effects from innovation input to output, and then to firm performance. Globalization has various impacts on innovation, through exports. It has a positive effect on both the decision to carry out R&D, and intensity of R&D input in sectors with competitive advantage, such as textiles and transport equipment, but not in sectors with high levels of overseas capital control, such as electronic equipment and wearing apparel. Ownership reveals the same story in different sectors, namely that foreign firms tend to do less in innovation input and output, but they do have higher level of productivity. Moreover, market share, subsidy, firm size and other characters of firms are involved in the estimation, which explains significant difference in engaging in innovation and production. Thus, in all the sectors, market share improves R&D input, continuous R&D input and exports improve new products output. Subsidy sustains R&D input, but not innovation output.


Ceril went to primary school in Nottinghamshire where she was taught history by means of stories about figures like Robin Hood. She remembered a visit to Newstead Abbey in the last year of junior school where the emphasis was on tales of Lord Byron rather than the dissolution of monasteries. She passed the eleven plus and went to Sutton-in-Ashfield Girls' Grammar School where the history teaching was chronological and taught by the teacher talking – no aids except textbooks. This teacher was inspiring and Ceril has met up with her several times over the last twenty years at school reunions. Trips with an element of history included ones to Southwell, Stratford-upon-Avon, and in the fifth year a long weekend in York. The school was small and everyone had to do history for O level. Ceril took history at A level as well , studying the sixteenth century – European as well as British. There were only four who took history A Level. Ceril considered doing history at university but eventually chose French which she taught. Later she became a primary school teacher. She felt the history she taught was fairly 'bitty' – a mixture of television programmes including How We Used To Live, trips, and reading stories


Roadside drainage ditches (roadside grassed swales) typically receive runoff directly from the road and water is infiltrated over the side slope of the ditch, similar to a filter strip. Water that runs off the side slopes then has a further opportunity to infiltrate as it flows down the center of the ditch. This research focuses on the volume reduction performance of grassed drainage ditches or swales by infiltration. A total of 32 tests were performed during three seasons in four different highways maintained by Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) in the Twin Cities metro area. The field-measured saturated hydraulic conductivities (Ksat) correspond to hydrologic soil group A, even though the soil textures indicated correspondence to hydrologic soils groups A, B and C. This means that the infiltration performance is better than expected for these types of soils. In addition, the trend was to have more infiltration when the saturated hydraulic conductivity was higher and for a greater side slope length, as expected. A coupled overland flow-infiltration model that accounts for shallow concentrated flow has been developed. The predicted infiltration loss has been compared with the actual infiltration loss determined from the monitored field tests. In this manner, the validity of the model as well as the associated soil hydraulic and surface geometry parameters have been evaluated. Using the coupled infiltration-overland flow model, multiple scenarios with sensitivity analyses have been computed, and the results have been used to generate a simplified calculator to estimate the annual infiltration performance of a grassed roadside drainage ditch.


Negative interactions between corals and algae have been implicated in preventing coral reef recovery. A recent hypothesis is that algae indirectly cause coral tissue mortality by fueling microbial growth, which drives hypoxic conditions at the interface between corals and algae. However, previous studies have largely ignored how water flow influences oxygen concen- trations at the interface between corals and algae. This study quantified the effect of water flow on oxygen concentrations above the zone of inter - action between massive Porites spp. and algal turf during the day and at night. Coralalgal inter - actions were exposed to 3 flow speeds (0, 7.7, 14.5 cm s �1 ), and diffusive boundary layer (DBL) thicknesses were measured in the light and dark. DBL thickness (< 500 to 2500 µm) decreased with increasing water flow, but remained thicker above algal turf and the zone of interaction (~1000 µm) than over corals (370 µm) in the dark. Oxygen extremes above the zone of interaction were most similar to concentrations above algal turf in low flow (34 to 43% oxygen saturation). The influence of microbes on oxygen conditions was estimated by adding antibiotic (50 µg ampicillin ml �1 ) to algal turfmassive Porites interactions. The results showed no indication of microbially mediated hy - poxic conditions. These results suggest that water flow likely limits the effectiveness of hypoxia or hyperoxia-mediated coralalgal competition under natural reef conditions.


Precise micropatterning of polypropylene film, which is highly transparent in the wavelength range over 250 nm has been demonstrated by 355 nm nano/picosecond laser and 785 nm femtosecond laser. Increments of both the pulse energy and the shot number of pulses lead to cooccurrence of photochemical and thermal effects, demonstrated by the spatial expansion of rim on the surface of PP. The shapes of the laser-ablated polypropylene films were imaged by optical microscope and measured by a 3D optical measurement system. And, the ablation depth and width of polypropylene film ablated by femtosecond laser at various pulse energy and pulse number were characterized. Our results demonstrate that a femtosecond pulsed laser is an efficient tool for fabricating micropatterns of polypropylene films, where the micropatterns are specifically tailored in size, location and number easily controlled by laser processing conditions.


Patient-specific quality assurance of image registrations is needed to enable their use in adaptive radiotherapy. An automated method of assessing the quality of a registration between head and neck CT scans was investigated. Ground truth organ contours were propagated to the deformed image from the floating image and then compared with contours on the reference image by calculating Dice similarity. A 2D convolutional neural network was designed to predict Dice coefficients based on the reference image and the displacement vector field of the registration. The network was trained using axial slices of head and neck CT images to predict the metric for the spinal canal, parotid glands and brainstem. The network was able to predict the Dice coefficient for unseen images. For the spinal canal, 95% of predictions were within 0.208 of the true value, with an average absolute difference of 0.0811. For the left parotid gland, 95% were within 0.270 of the true value, with an average absolute difference of 0.0987. This demonstrates that convolutional neural networks can be trained to effectively predict similarity metrics which can be used to assess the quality of an automatically produced registration.


Microorganisms are ubiquitous in nature and make up the biodiversity on earth. They perform several important processes in cycling of nutrients, degradation of various compounds globally. Knowledge of microbial activities helps mankind to find various strategies to utilize agricultural natural resources in long term sustainable manner. In sustainable agriculture bacteria and fungi are being utilized as biofertilizers. Plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) play important role in soil fertility. Use of PGPR as biofertilizers should be increased to stop deterioration of soil fertility due to extensive application of chemical fertilizers. Change in living standards contributes increased dependence on chemicals in day today life, These chemicals are used from our soaps, detergents, disinfectants, insecticides, like DDT, pollute receiving water bodies through sewage. Various microorganisms can be used for bioremediation of such waste water containing recalcitrant and xenobiotic compounds. The microbial activities that help us to design an excellent new strategy of life leading to sustainable future are presented.


I consider the design of policy-making institutions to aggregate preferences and information. A pervasive incentive problem hinders the creation of desirable deliberative institutions; participants that expect to have minority interests have an incentive to misrepresent their information. Moreover, contrary to conventional wisdom, diversity of preferences or information sources amplifies this incentive problem. It is only when all types of participants expect to have the majority interests or no individual's private information can be decisive that full aggregation is possible. The addition of external incentives enables efficient aggregation of preferences and information. The external incentives need only depend on agent actions and, interestingly, the magnitude of these external incentives can be vanishingly small for large groups. These external incentives can be created by augmenting deliberation with concerns about ex-poste monitoring or ex-interum perceptions of competence, the opportunity to trade in information markets, or the opportunity to join clubs with network externalities.


By use of near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy, simultaneous, multiple-constituent estimation of important bioprocess parameters can be obtained in a time frame (<1 min assay) that was previously unattainable. Therefore, with NIR spectroscopy the opportunity exists to incorporate real-time chemical information into bioprocess monitoring or control strategies which will lead to significant bioprocess improvements. The NIR spectroscopic analysis of unmodified whole broth samples for acetate, ammonium, biomass, and glycerol is described for an industrial Escherichia coli fed-batch fermentation bioprocess. For acetate and glycerol, suitable results were obtained from multiple linear least-squares regression (MLR) analysis. A more sophisticated partial least-squares (PLS) regression analysis was necessary to adequately model ammonium and biomass. The respective prediction errors (1σ) of 0.7 g/L, 1.4 g/L, 0.7 g/L, and 7 mmol/L for acetate, biomass, glycerol, and ammonium compare well with the error of the wet chemical reference methods used to derive the calibration algorithms.


Abstract: A revised pre-Jurassic chronology is presented for the Antarctic Peninsula on the basis of new U–Pb zircon dating, using both conventional (11 samples) and SHRIMP microprobe data (10 samples). The age range for plutonism and high-grade metamorphism is from 435 ± 8 Ma (Silurian) to c. 206 Ma (approximately the Triassic–Jurassic boundary), with peaks of activity in Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian and mid-Triassic times, although some are represented by rocks with limited outcrops. The new data confirm the importance of Mid- and latest Triassic magmatic events, previously identified using Rb–Sr geochronology. The Adie Inlet gneiss, previously thought to be Neoproterozoic, is recognized as a Permian migmatite derived from paragneiss with a provenance dominated by Cambrian granitoids. Granite gneiss from NW Palmer Land, previously dated as Cambrian, is shown to be Triassic. Detrital zircons in metasedimentary rocks, and inherited zircons in granitoids, are dominated by Mesoproterozoic to Cambrian components, with sparse Palaeoproterozoic to Archaean grains, suggesting sources within Gondwana. At times these sources were nearby, as shown by an Archaean cobble-sized granite clast from a Permo-Triassic conglomerate; another clast in the same conglomerate, previously thought to be Devonian in age, has an Ordovician crystallization age.


This paper provides a case study of the creation of a parcel‐based land information system for a large metropolitan county. The paper describes the structure of the system and the technical specifications used in its creation; the attendant costs; the institutional structure created to implement the system utilizing a combination of public and private funding sources; and the work accomplished to date toward completion of the system, including work on the required remonumentation of the U.S. Public Land Survey system, on the required horizontal and vertical control surveys, on the large‐scale topographic and cadastral mapping, and certain related activities. The project provides for the creation over time of a decentralized parcel‐based land information system in which individual participants add their own data to a common automated base map and under which that map becomes the medium through which a broad range of data can be readily exchanged between all of the participants.


Gothic tales from Carmilla to Edgar Allen Poe stories often make use of first person narrators and direct address to the reader to present their horrors as personally experienced and immediate. This paper examines one common strategy for achieving this in twenty-first century TV horror terms. The now-notorious BBC pseudo-documentary Ghostwatch (1992) achieved its horror effect by capitalizing on the inherent immediacy and 'liveness' of TV broadcast and on the apparent authenticity of the events it purported to document. Subsequently, TV shows from Psychoville (2009-2011) to Supernatural (2005-) have similarly engaged with the formats and style of reality TV. Miniseries Dead Set (2008) even used the set, talent and familiar dynamics of Endemol's Big Brother as part of its satirical take on a zombie apocalypse.
Just as Poe's often disturbed narrators offer a sense of intimate closeness to Gothic terror, the observational documentary style of much reality TV apparently allows viewers up-close and personal access to unfolding drama and participants' often emotional responses to it. Successful horror cinema like The Blair Witch Project, REC, or the Paranormal Activity series exploit the sense of visceral immediacy that comes with handheld cameras and observational 'raw footage' to create both tension and scares, mobilising the promise of unmediated access to the real to offer an apparently more authentic sense of 'uncut' horror. TV horror engages more directly with the debates about authenticity and constructedness that are inherent in our understanding of 'reality' as a TV genre. This paper examines how contemporary TV horror series (especially Dead Set, Supernatural and The Fades, 2010) mobilise this form of story-telling as a twenty-first century Gothic technique that makes full use of reality TV's formats, visual style, and engagement with negative emotions (in participants and viewers alike) to navigate between reality and the fantastic, and to produce particularly televisual forms of horror


Objective: To evaluate the effect of hyoscine on pain and tenderness, rebound tenderness and appendicitis patients before surgery and this study can be considered as the first study investigated the efficacy of hyoscine on pain, tenderness, and rebound tenderness in patients with appendicitis. Methods: In this single-group, prospective interventional study (before-after) according to inclusion and exclusion criteria, 70 patients with pain in the right lower abdomen and typical symptoms of appendicitis were evaluated and after surgery, diagnostic accuracy was examined by pathologic results. The pain was evaluated before and after administration of hyoscine by numerical and verbal examination. Tenderness and rebound tenderness were also determined. Results: The mean age of patients was 26.81±7.66. Totally, 42 patients (60%) had reduction in pain, 50 patients (71% percent) had reduction in tenderness, and 39 (55%) had reduction in rebound tenderness after treatment with the drug. A statistically significant reduction of pain and tenderness, rebound tenderness was observed in all of men after administration of hyoscine (p<0.001) but in women, the reduction of severity of tender results was only significant (p=0.002). Data analysis in women and men together showed the significant reduction of pain, tenderness, and rebound tenderness (p<0.001). Conclusion: According to the results, hyoscine can reduce pain, tenderness, and rebound tenderness. So, it seems that hyoscine is a good candidate for patients with appendicitis. IRCT registration number: IRCT2015111825123N1


While recent years have witnessed astonishing improvements in visual tracking robustness, the advancements in tracking accuracy have been limited. As the focus has been directed towards the development of powerful classifiers, the problem of accurate target state estimation has been largely overlooked. In fact, most trackers resort to a simple multi-scale search in order to estimate the target bounding box. We argue that this approach is fundamentally limited since target estimation is a complex task, requiring high-level knowledge about the object. We address this problem by proposing a novel tracking architecture, consisting of dedicated target estimation and classification components. High level knowledge is incorporated into the target estimation through extensive offline learning. Our target estimation component is trained to predict the overlap between the target object and an estimated bounding box. By carefully integrating target-specific information, our approach achieves previously unseen bounding box accuracy. We further introduce a classification component that is trained online to guarantee high discriminative power in the presence of distractors. Our final tracking framework sets a new state-of-the-art on five challenging benchmarks. On the new large-scale TrackingNet dataset, our tracker ATOM achieves a relative gain of 15% over the previous best approach, while running at over 30 FPS. Code and models are available at https://github.com/visionml/pytracking.


The importance of building relationships with customers is well documented, yet the role of consumer comfort in service relationships has not been fully explored. The authors report their efforts to measure and ascertain the importance of this construct in service relationships. Their findings provide evidence that consumer comfort has a significant and incremental impact on satisfaction, trust, commitment, and active voice with service providers. Furthermore, this variable appears to provide incremental understanding of the traditional satisfaction-trust-commitment paradigm. A scale of consumer comfort is developed that exhibits validity and reliability across two provider types.


We show that in almost every economy with separable externalities, every competitive equilibrium can be Pareto improved by a package of anonymous commodity taxes that causes prices to adjust and markets to reclear at different levels of individual consumption. This constrained suboptimality of competitive allocations might provide a rationale for economic policy in economies with externalities. It shows that policy makers should look for good tax packages that help everybody, rather than thinking taxes must inevitably be bad for some lobby that will oppose them.


Researchers who study pointing facilitation have identified the ability to identify–during motion–the likely target of a user's pointing gesture, as a necessary precursor to pointing facilitation in modern computer interfaces. To address this need, we develop and analyze how an understanding of the underlying characteristics of motion can enhance our ability to predict the target or endpoint of a goal-directed movement in graphical user interfaces. Using established laws of motion and an analysis of users' kinematic profiles, we demonstrate that the initial 90% of motion is primarly balistic and submovements are limited to the last 10% of gesture movement. Through experimentation, we demonstrate that target constraint and the intended use of a target has either a minimal effect on the motion profile or affects the last 10% of motion. Therefore, we demonstrate that any technique that models the intial 90% of gesture motion will not be affected by target constraint or intended use. Given, these results, we develop a technique to model the initial ballistic motion to predict user endpoint by adopting principles from the minimum jerk principle. Based on this principle, we derive an equation to model the initial ballistic phase of movement in order to predict movement distance and direction. We demonstrate through experimentation that we can successfully model pointing motion to identify a region of likely targets on the computer display. Next, we characterize the effects of target size and target distance on prediction accuracy. We demonstrate that there exists a linear relationship between prediction accuracy and target distance and that this relationship can be leveraged to create a probabilistic model for each target on the computer display. We then demonstrate how these probabilities could be used to enable pointing facilitation in modern computer interfaces. Finally, we demonstrate that the results from our evaluation of our technique are supported by the current motor control literature. In addition, we show that our technique provides optimal accuracy for any optimal accuracy when prediction of motion endpoint is performed using only the ballistic components of motion and before 90% of motion distance.


Presented here are experimental results of an extended depth-of-field (EDF) system using film to record the image. The EDF system used is an application of wave-front coding. A phase mask is placed in the aperture stop of the lens to code the image data; then digital signal processing is used to decode the image. Wave-front coding is based on linear systems theory, but film is not a linear medium. An extra step of linearization is then needed to apply the technique. Both nonlinear and linearized results are shown, as is a test image that demonstrates the success of the technique for nonlinear media.


In this letter we present measurements of the influence on inhomogeneous electrode biasing on the basic plasma parameters of inverted fireballs in a hydrogen plasma. The measurements were performed in hydrogen because it is often used in many reactive plasmas, which are very important for technical or industrial applications. The dependence of the plasma parameters on voltages and currents on the electrodes are described in this work. It will be shown that the density profiles and the plasma potentials inside an inverted fireball can be shaped to a certain extend by asymmetric potentials on the anode.


Book synopsis: Henley Business School is delighted to be hosting the 18th International Colloquium on Relationship Marketing. A strategic objective of Henley Business School is to deliver high quality contributions to thought leadership, through research into the management of organisation so there is a natural fit with the aims of the Colloquium. Through consortia like the Henley Centre for Customer Management our academic faculty are able to pursue research themes that are high on the agenda of the businesses that we work with.

The ICRM Colloquium was originally conceived as an ongoing forum for creating new knowledge and circulating viewpoints which challenge established marketing management theory and practices. David Ballantyne of the University of Otago, the first convenor, had the vision of a Colloquium which went beyond the bounds of a conventional conference, to one which would expand and sustain a community of academics and researchers, allowing sufficient time for meaningful dialogue within this community, and providing access to academic journals for publishing the Colloquia papers. Networks and dialogue remain essential elements of the Colloquium.

The 2010 Colloquium will be the 18th since the event was established and it has earned a reputation for being the focus of cutting edge thinking about relationship marketing. Despite the growing reputation of the Colloquium, the organisers will limit attendance to around 60 people, in order to preserve depth and dialogue. In the tradition of the colloquium series there are no parallel tracks, all discussions are held in a single venue, there will be a gala dinner and this conference website is provided for dissemination and promotions of the work of colloquium members.

The first day, the doctoral colloquium, will be dedicated to providing outstanding doctoral students with an opportunity to discuss their dissertation research with other doctoral students and leading academics in the field of relationship marketing.

The 2010 conference is expected to attract academics and researchers from all over the world. Participants are invited to present research papers and posters on the theme of "Re-inventing relationship marketing in a service dominant world".

Henley Business School, part of the University of Reading, is one of Europe's largest full-service business school founded in 1945 and was the first business school in the UK established by business for business. The School has a global presence and reputation as a leading international business school reflected throughout all aspects of its work. Faculty and programmes draw participants from more than 130 countries, from an international network of associates and collaborative partners and has an alumni organisation of 30,000 members from every corner of the globe.


In Britain since the 1930s social assistance recipients have in certain circumstances been able to claim 'exceptional expenses' in addition to their weekly benefit income. From the 1940s these were administered by its central government. However, in April 2013 the then incarnation of such payments (the discretionary Social Fund) was partly replaced by locally administered Local Welfare Assistance. Drawing upon material held in files at Britain's National Archives and central government documents framing the development of Local Welfare Assistance, this paper examines how concerns raised in the 1980s meant it was not possible to then transfer responsibility for 'exceptional expenses' from central to local government. The paper explores those concerns and how in contemporary Britain they are no longer deemed to be problematic because of the Coalition government's emphasis upon localism and because of changing local government views on the possibility of delivering a mainstream social assistance function.


This thesis presents a comparison between the synchronous and asynchronous model of computation in the area of knowledge processing. Focus lies on evaluating if a synchronous approach to knowledge processing is possible and practical. This has been done by implementing the reconfigurable fault diagnosis framework FlexDx using the synchronous programming language SIGNAL, a language designed to be used in embedded real-time systems. FlexDx have previously been implemented using the asynchronous knowledge processing middleware DyKnow, from which an example system with multiple failure scenarios consisting of input signals and results were available. Matlab code for many algorithms in FlexDx from the existing implementation could also be reused. The SIGNAL implementation was tested using one of the available scenarios and the results matched the expected results from the DyKnow implementation almost perfectly. The synchronous aspect of the new implementation was not a problem as the behavior of all parts of FlexDx that had to be reimplemented easily could be described synchronously. However, using SIGNAL for this purpose proved to be both complicated and cumbersome. This was partly because of the strict declarative coding style, but mostly because of limitations of SIGNAL and the POLYCHRONY compiler. Two such limitations caused most of the problems that were encountered. First, SIGNAL does not support dynamic arrays and all iteration constructs require that the number of iterations is determined at compile time. This could be overcome by using external types and processes, the method used in SIGNAL to import code written in other languages, to implement the needed functionality in C++ and Matlab. Second, the POLYCHRONY compiler provides very limited feedback that can be used to correct non-trivial coding errors, making the task of programming with SIGNAL far more complicated than necessary. While it is clear that a synchronous approach to knowledge processing works well, it is not practical to write a working implementation of FlexDx using only SIGNAL. Because of the limitations of SIGNAL a large part of the system had to be implemented using other languages.


The effect of iridium loading on the properties and catalytic isomerization of n-heptane over Ir-HZSM-5 is studied. Ir-HZSM-5 was prepared by impregnation method and subjected to isomerization process in the presence of flowing hydrogen gas. XRD and BET studies show that the presence of iridium stabilizes the crystalline structure of HZSM-5, leading to more ordered framework structure and larger surface area. TGA and FTIR results substantiate that iridium species interacts with OH group on the surface of HZSM-5. Pyridine FT-IR study verifies the interaction between iridium and surface OH group slightly increased the Bro¨nsted and Lewis acid sites without changing the lattice structure of HZSM-5. The presence of iridium and the increase of strong Lewis acid sites on HZSM-5 were found to bring an increase about 4.1%, 33.2% and 11.8% in conversion, selectivity and yield of n-heptane isomerization, respectively.


Sound source localization and separation with permutation resolution are essential for achieving a computational auditory scene analysis system that can extract useful information from a mixture of various sounds. Because existing methods cope separately with these problems despite their mutual dependence, the overall result with these approaches can be degraded by any failure in one of these components. This paper presents a unified Bayesian framework to solve these problems simultaneously where localization and separation are regarded as a clustering problem. Experimental results confirm that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of the separation quality with various setups including practical reverberant environments.


Abstract Detritiation of light water wastes down to a level permissible to discharge into the environment while simultaneously concentrating tritium to decrease amount of waste being buried is a constant problem. The laboratory setup for the light water detritiation process is presented. The separation column consists of 10 horizontally arranged perfluorosulphonic acid Nafiontype membrane contact devises and platinum catalyst (RCTU-3SM). Each contact device has 42.3 cm2 of the membrane and 10 cm3 of the catalyst. The column is washed by tritium free light water (LH2O) and the tritiumcontaining flow (FHTO) feeds the electrolyser at γ = GH2/LH2O = 2. A separation factor of 66 is noted with the device at 336 K and 0.145 MPa.


The proliferation of international supply chains makes the domestic production of goods increasingly dependent on inputs from foreign sources. By expanding their sourcing portfolio to foreign suppliers, firms and by extension entire economies are more prone to the trade effects of adverse bilateral political shocks. In this paper, we analyze the relation between political relations and trade at lower levels of aggregation, allowing for a heterogeneous effect by types of inputs. We show that a negative shock to political relations has a more pronounced effect on trade of critical goods, conditional on the ease of switching suppliers. We construct a simple model exhibiting input-output linkages to clarify the mechanisms at play, from which we derive testable predictions. Using a new measure for countries' dependence on these critical inputs, we then test the proposed mechanism in a difference-in-differences framework. To address potential endogeneity issues we perform an event study, in which the treatment is an exogenous adverse political shock. Using a new dataset on the status of diplomatic representation and monthly trade data, we exploit the recalling or summoning of the ambassador of a country as a shock to bilateral political relations.


Hardware security is one of the most researched areas in the field of security. It focuses on discovering and understanding attacks and countermeasures for electronic hardware that provides the "root-of-trust" for modern computing systems upon which the software stack is built. The increasing reliance on electronic devices in our everyday life has also escalated the risks of experiencing security threats on these technologies. Students today are exposed to these devices and thus require a hands-on learning experience to be aware of the threats, solutions, and future research challenges in hardware security. Currently, there are limited opportunities for students to learn and understand hardware security. A significant factor limiting exposure to these topics is the lack of an accessible, low-cost, flexible, and ready-made platform for training students on the innards of a computing system and the spectrum of security issues/solutions at the hardware-level. In this paper, we introduce the motivation and efforts behind a course named "Hands-on Hardware Security." The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida has been offering this course for the past three years in providing experiential learning of hardware security through a set of well-designed experiments performed on a custom hardware module. We also present, in detail, the idea of a custom-designed, easy-to-understand, flexible hardware module with fundamental building blocks that can emulate a computer system and create a network of connected devices. We refer to the module as "HaHa SEP" (Hardware Hacking Security Education Platform), and it encourages students to learn and exercise "ethical hacking," a critical concept in the hardware security field. It is the first and only known lab course offered online, where students can perform ethical hacking of a computing system using a dedicated hardware module. This paper also provides a brief introduction to the experiments performed using this module, highlighting their significance in the field of Hardware Security. Finally, it concludes with a compilation of course evaluation survey results discussing the success of this course in engaging students' interest in the subject matter and determining the accomplishment of maintaining a balance between their expectation and the effort required towards the course.


Thirty years after Robin Morgan's groundbreaking anthology, "Sisterhood Is Powerful" -- named by The American Librarians' Association one of "The 100 Most Influential Books of the Twentieth Century" -- comes this landmark new collection for the twenty-first century. "Sisterhood Is Forever" -- with over 60 original essays Morgan commissioned from well-known feminist leaders plus energetic Gen X and Y activists -- is a composite mural of the female experience in America: where we've been, where we are, where we're going. The stunning scope of topics ranges from reproductive, health, and environmental issues to workplace inequities and the economics of women's unpaid labor; from globalization to the politics of aging; from cyberspace, violence against women, and electoral politics to spirituality, the law, the media, and academia. The deliberately audacious mix of contributors spans different generations, races, ethnicities, and sexual preferences: CEOs, housewives, rock stars, farmers, scientists, prostituted women, politicians, women in prison, firefighters, disability activists, artists, flight attendants, an army general, an astronaut, an anchorwoman, even a pair of teens who edit a girls' magazine. Each article celebrates the writer's personal voice -- her humor, passion, anger, and the integrity of her perspective -- while offering the latest data on women's status, political analysis, new "how-to" tools for activism, and visionary yet practical strategies for the future -- strategies needed now more than ever. Robin Morgan's own contributions are everything her readers expect: prophetic, powerfully argued, unsentimentally lyrical. From her introduction: "The book you hold in your hands is a tool for the future -- a future also in your hands." Edna Acosta-Belen Carol J. Adams Margot Adler Natalie Angier Ellen Appel-Bronstein Mary Baird Brenda Berkman Christine E. Bose Kathy Boudin Ellen Bravo Vednita Carter Wendy Chavkin Kimberle Crenshaw Gail Dines Paula DiPerna Helen Drusine Andrea Dworkin Eve Ensler Barbara Findlen Mary Foley Patricia Friend Theresa Funiciello Carol Gilligan Sara K. Gould Ana Grossman The Guerrilla Girls Beverly Guy-Sheftall Kathleen Hanna Laura Hershey Anita Hill Florence Howe Donna M. Hughes Karla Jay Mae C. Jemison Carol Jenkins Claudia J. Kennedy Alice Kessler-Harris Clara Sue Kidwell Frances Kissling Sandy Lerner Suzanne Braun Levine Barbara Macdonald Catharine A. MacKinnon Jane Roland Martin Debra Michals Robin Morgan Jessica Neuwirth Judy Norsigian Eleanor Holmes Norton Grace Paley Emma Peters-Axtell Cynthia Rich Amy Richards Cecile Richards Carolyn Sachs Marianne Schnall Pat Schroeder Patricia Silverthorn Eleanor Smeal Roslyn D. Smith Gloria Steinem Mary Thom Jasmine Victoria Faye Wattleton Marie Wilson Helen Zia"


A theoretical framework for sampling theory is developed. In this relation, concepts like mixture heterogeneity and representative samples are mathematically defined. Further, the relation between Gy's concepts of accuracy and reproducibility with mixture quality and the entropy of the sample distribution is established. Moreover, it is shown that within the developed homework, Lacey's conjecture is mathematically consistent. It is also shown that a consequence of the theory is the prediction of the number of key components of given size in random binary closed batch systems. It is also shown that this estimate is a function of microstructural properties of the mixture under study. Furthermore, this theory is used to develop a unifying approach to description of RTD of continuous systems. These results are further used to develop a model for RTD of a commercial twin screw extruder. A new theoretical approach to the dynamics of the mixing processes is developed. In this context, the concept of heterogeneity landscape is introduced. It is argued that the valleys in the heterogeneity landscape correspond to different equilibrium states of the mixture. Further, it is shown that the valleys in the heterogeneity landscape can mathematically be described by heterogeneity equation and this would allow for classification of all the valleys. The characteristic function of the general solution to the heterogeneity equation is also determined. Moreover, it is shown that based on the mathematical model for the valleys, one can deduce that in the case of insufficient information about the mixture structure, the normal distribution, up to the second order; is the best distribution in describing the mixture structure.


This report documents the construction of the first Next Generation Concrete Surface (NGCS) by the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT). A 1,500 foot test section was installed on the eastbound lanes of I-82 near Sunnyside, WA in October of 2010. Baseline measurements of noise, friction, wear and smoothness are reported. The sound intensity levels of 101.6 and 99.6 for the outside and inside lanes, respectively, are within the range reported for other NGCS projects. A literature review is provided that documents the development of the NGCS process as well as descriptions and results from the initial field trials in the U.S.


This study investigates creative uses of writing systems on the electronic bulletin boards (BBSs) of two college student organizations in Taipei, Taiwan. Data were collected from postings on bulletin boards and semi-structured interviews with members of the student organizations, and analyzed using qualitative and ethnographic methods. Four popular creative uses of writing systems are identified and discussed: the rendering in Chinese characters of the sounds of English, Taiwanese, and Taiwanese-accented Mandarin, and the recycling of a transliteration alphabet used in elementary education. It is argued that these practices are enabled by the written nature of the Internet, the orthographic systems available in the society, and the multilingual situation in Taiwan, and that the everyday meanings associated with the writing systems and languages are appropriated and reproduced through online practice, resulting in a unique mode of communication in its own right.


Electric vehicles (EVs) coupled with low‐carbon electricity sources offer the potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and exposure to tailpipe emissions from personal transportation. In considering these benefits, it is important to address concerns of problem‐shifting. In addition, while many studies have focused on the use phase in comparing transportation options, vehicle production is also significant when comparing conventional and EVs. We develop and provide a transparent life cycle inventory of conventional and electric vehicles and apply our inventory to assess conventional and EVs over a range of impact categories. We find that EVs powered by the present European electricity mix offer a 10% to 24% decrease in global warming potential (GWP) relative to conventional diesel or gasoline vehicles assuming lifetimes of 150,000 km. However, EVs exhibit the potential for significant increases in human toxicity, freshwater eco‐toxicity, freshwater eutrophication, and metal depletion impacts, largely emanating from the vehicle supply chain. Results are sensitive to assumptions regarding electricity source, use phase energy consumption, vehicle lifetime, and battery replacement schedules. Because production impacts are more significant for EVs than conventional vehicles, assuming a vehicle lifetime of 200,000 km exaggerates the GWP benefits of EVs to 27% to 29% relative to gasoline vehicles or 17% to 20% relative to diesel. An assumption of 100,000 km decreases the benefit of EVs to 9% to 14% with respect to gasoline vehicles and results in impacts indistinguishable from those of a diesel vehicle. Improving the environmental profile of EVs requires engagement around reducing vehicle production supply chain impacts and promoting clean electricity sources in decision making regarding electricity infrastructure.


Orangutan survival is threatened by habitat loss and illegal killing. Most wild populations will disappear over the next few decades unless threats are abated. Saving orangutans is ultimately in the hands of the governments and people of Indonesia and Malaysia, which need to ensure that habitats of viable orangutan populations are protected from deforestation and well managed to ensure no hunting takes place. Companies working in orangutan habitat also have to play a much bigger role in habitat management. Although the major problems and the direct actions required to solve them—reducing forest loss and hunting—have been known for decades, orangutan populations continue to decline. Orangutan populations in Sumatra and Borneo have declined by between 2,280 and 5,250 orangutans annually over the past 25 years. As the total current population for the two species is some 60,000 animals in an area of about 90,000 km2, there is not much time left to make conservation efforts truly effective. Our review discusses what has and has not worked in conservation to guide future conservation efforts.


Due to the development of technology, production and other business functions, customers have entered in the focus of enterprises' endeavours, displacing mass-produced standardized products. Efficiency is no longer sufficient: flexibility, creativity and innovation have become vital. Creativity and innovation processes started to be studied, first at the level of individuals and then within organizations. It became obvious that creativity and innovation depend on individuals themselves and, within social units, also on their organisation. From the organisational point of view, practitioners and researchers attempt to determine the organisational variables that positively influence creativity. In this paper, the authors describe both the process and characteristics of creativity and innovation conducted by an autonomous individual as well as the same process conducted by members of a social unit. The appropriate organisation supporting the development of a creative and innovative social unit is established by management whose responsibility is to assure a rational achievement of new useful ideas and their development into products, services and processes. Therefore, the authors focus on three processes, emphasizing their relationships: individual creativity and innovation processes, organizational creativity and innovation processes, and the management of creativity and innovation.


[Extract] On 25 May 1939, Evelyn Waugh wrote to Marie Stopes.[1] Coming across a reference to his letter in a catalogue, I imagined a sharp missive about birth control or Black Mischief, for Waugh lampoons Stopes (the then leading advocate of birth control) in Black Mischief, and Stopes eagerly joined in The Tablet's condemnation of the novel. Some years later, in 1943, Stopes would attack, and Waugh defend, Catholic schools. Imagine my surprise (as they say) when Waugh's 1939 letter turned out to be a polite note agreeing to put his name to a petition organized by Stopes seeking a civil list pension for Lord Alfred Douglas, "Bosie" of Oscar Wilde fame.

 Stopes's papers reveal that Lord Alfred had been living on a small allowance from a kinsman, which the kinsman could no longer afford. Lord Alfred faced destitution. Stopes, a woman of advanced views, was nevertheless a close friend and voluminous correspondent of Lord Alfred, a Catholic and conservative far to the Right of Evelyn Waugh. Stopes believed that Lord Alfred's contribution to English literature was such as to warrant a civil list pension, and she set about trying to persuade the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, to provide one. Part of the campaign involved enlisting eminent literary figures to testify to Lord Alfred's outstanding contribution to English poetry. At this period, as is well known, the dominant influences on English poetry were Eliot and Auden, whereas Lord Alfred's sonnets were metrical, musical and nineteenth-century in theme; in short, highly unfashionable. His principal literary admirers, like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, then Professor of English Literature at Oxford, came from the Men of Letters generation; but some Moderns, like Virginia Woolf, signed the petition. The argument was that Lord Alfred's poetry was a permanently valuable contribution to the national literature. Much was made of the fact, if it is a fact, that he was the only English poet for a century whose entire corpus the French had thought worthwhile to translate.


Abstract. Interactions between different formative processes are reflected in the internal structure of rock glaciers. Therefore, the detection of subsurface conditions can help to enhance our understanding of landform development. For an assessment of subsurface conditions, we present an analysis of the spatial variability of active layer thickness, ground ice content and frost table topography for two different rock glaciers in the Eastern Swiss Alps by means of quasi-3-D electrical resistivity imaging (ERI). This approach enables an extensive mapping of subsurface structures and a spatial overlay between site-specific surface and subsurface characteristics. At Nair rock glacier, we discovered a gradual descent of the frost table in a downslope direction and a constant decrease of ice content which follows the observed surface topography. This is attributed to ice formation by refreezing meltwater from an embedded snow bank or from a subsurface ice patch which reshapes the permafrost layer. The heterogeneous ground ice distribution at Uertsch rock glacier indicates that multiple processes on different time domains were involved in the development. Resistivity values which represent frozen conditions vary within a wide range and indicate a successive formation which includes several advances, past glacial overrides and creep processes on the rock glacier surface. In combination with the observed topography, quasi-3-D ERI enables us to delimit areas of extensive and compressive flow in close proximity. Excellent data quality was provided by a good coupling of electrodes to the ground in the pebbly material of the investigated rock glaciers. Results show the value of the quasi-3-D ERI approach but advise the application of complementary geophysical methods for interpreting the results.


No sector of a superpower's defense system is quite so invulnerable against a preemptive attack as its fleet of highly mobile, deep-diving, long-ranging missile-bearing submarines. These make possible a second-strike capability that acts as a forceful deterrent against aggression. But this situation could become unbalanced through the development of effective techniques of strategic antisubmarine warfare (ASW).The objective of this book is to ascertain whether extending arms control to cover ASW weapons systems would measurably improve the calculated confidence that defense analysts place in the long-term viability of the missile submarine deterrent. In the course of investigating many questions, a major conclusion that emerges is that there are only a small number of potential measures for strategic ASW control that would significantly increase confidence in this deterrent, but that the matter is not now urgent in any case, because any threat to the submarine deterrent from ASW "seems at the moment uncertain and very far in the future." These concerns are addressed in the book by a group of contributors who originally delivered their papers at a conference organized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences with the support and cooperation of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Johnson Foundation. The conference was held at "Wingspread," the headquarters of the Johnson Foundation in Racine, Wisconsin, in November 1972.The papers range in content from technical considerations to political and legal concerns.


The applicability of the confusion principle and size factor in glass formation has been explored by following different combinations of isoelectronic Ti, Zr and Hf metals. Four alloys of nominal composition Zr41.5Ti41.5Ni17, Zr41.5Hf41.5Ni17, Zr25Ti25Cu50 and Zr34Ti16Cu50 have been rapidly solidified to obtain an amorphous phase and their crystallisation behaviour has been studied. The Ti-Zr-Ni alloy crystallises in three steps. Initially this alloy precipitates icosahedral quasicrystalline phase, which on further heat treatment precipitates cF96 Zr2Ni phase. The Zr-Hf-Ni alloy can not be amorphised under the same experimental conditions. The amorphous Zr-Ti-Cu alloys at the initial stages of crystallisation phase-separateinto two amorphous phases and then on further heat treatment cF24 Cu5Zr and oC68 Cu10Zr7 phase are precipitated. The lower glass-forming abilityof Zr-Hf-Ni alloy and the crystallisation behaviour of the above alloys has been studied. The rationale behind nanoquasicrystallisation and the formation of other intermetallic phases has been explained.


This paper introduces the use of asphalt mixture beams in the bending beam rheometer (BBR) for quality control with a project in Utah as a case study. A good solution for quality control, the BBR test can be performed by materials laboratory staff at highway agencies and private materials laboratories because it is reasonably priced, is rugged-tested, uses limited material, is conditioned quickly, is available, and is familiar to staff at materials laboratories for everyday mix design and quality control. The paper begins with a literature review of past research work in support of using BBR tests to measure properties of asphalt mixture beams. An asphalt construction project in Utah was selected to demonstrate the applicability of using asphalt mixture beams in the BBR for quality control. Field samples obtained from the project in Utah were shipped to the laboratory, where comparisons of low-temperature properties of asphalt mixtures were done with the BBR. Results easily showed an anomaly on two paving days, when the m value (slope of the curve) was higher than normal. Because of this irregularity, further testing was initiated with the indirect tension test performed at the Asphalt Institute; the test confirmed the results from the BBR. On the basis of results and demonstration, it is clear that using asphalt mixture beams in the BBR is feasible for quality control to evaluate the performance of constructed materials. The application of using asphalt mixture beams in the BBR can be easily adopted by highway agencies to facilitate quality control operations in asphalt construction.


Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have been shown to work effectively for modeling graph structured data to solve tasks such as node classification, link prediction and graph classification. There has been some recent progress in defining the notion of pooling in graphs whereby the model tries to generate a graph level representation by downsampling and summarizing the information present in the nodes. Existing pooling methods either fail to effectively capture the graph substructure or do not easily scale to large graphs. In this work, we propose ASAP (Adaptive Structure Aware Pooling), a sparse and differentiable pooling method that addresses the limitations of previous graph pooling architectures. ASAP utilizes a novel self-attention network along with a modified GNN formulation to capture the importance of each node in a given graph. It also learns a sparse soft cluster assignment for nodes at each layer to effectively pool the subgraphs to form the pooled graph. Through extensive experiments on multiple datasets and theoretical analysis, we motivate our choice of the components used in ASAP. Our experimental results show that combining existing GNN architectures with ASAP leads to state-of-the-art results on multiple graph classification benchmarks. ASAP has an average improvement of 4%, compared to current sparse hierarchical state-of-the-art method. We make the source code of ASAP available to encourage reproducible research 1.


The palustrian and loessic sediments of the late Pleistocene-early Holocene (ca. 130–8 ka) of Argentina contain and preserve one of the most important records of vertebrates (mainly mammals) of South America. However, except for the Pampean region of Argentina, largely studied from the middle of the 19th century, other areas, especially those located between 29oS and 21oS are, from a palaeontological point of view, very poorly known. In this contribution an association of Pleistocene mammals is reported, coming from the center area of the Chaco Oriental, which in addition constitutes the most complete record for the Formosa province, Argentina. This association was exhumed from the cliff of the Bermejo river, near the locality of Villa Escolar, and probably corresponds to the Fortin Tres Pozos Formation (Upper Pleistocene). This ensemble of fossil mammals is represented by the following taxa: Cingulata: Glyptodon sp., Neosclerocalyptus cf. N. paskoensis, Pampatherium typum; Phyllophaga: Megatherium sp.; Artiodactyla: cf. Morenelaphus, cf. Hemiauchenia paradoxa; Notoungulata: Toxodon sp. In this context, the presence of the Glyptodontidae Neosclerocalyptus cf. N. paskoensis suggests a Lujanian age (late Pleistocene-early Holocene), while recent optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating in the sediments of the Fortin Tres Pozos Formation indicate an approximate age of 58,160 years BP (± 4390). This set of mammals (plus those previously published for this region) are constituted by taxa adapted to cold and arid/semiarid environmental conditions, which is consistent with the inferred conditions of the deposition of sediments that forms the alluvial fan of the Bermejo river. Much of this fauna would be synchronous with the Isotope Stage 3 (59–28 ka) and probably relates to some of the cold and arid phases detected in this period.


Software testing remains the most widely used approach to verification in industry today, consuming between 30-50 percent of the entire development cost. Test input selection for intelligent agents presents a problem due to the very fact that the agents are intended to operate robustly under conditions which developers did not consider and would therefore be unlikely to test. Using methods to automatically generate and execute tests is one way to provide coverage of many conditions without significantly increasing cost. However, one problem using automatic generation and execution of tests is the oracle problem: How can we automatically decide if observed program behavior is correct with respect to its specification? In this paper, we present a model-based oracle generation method for unit testing belief-desire-intention agents. We develop a fault model based on the features of the core units to capture the types of faults that may be encountered and define how to automatically generate a partial, passive oracle from the agent design models. We evaluate both the fault model and the oracle generation by testing 14 agent systems. Over 400 issues were raised, and these were analyzed to ascertain whether they represented genuine faults or were false positives. We found that over 70 percent of issues raised were indicative of problems in either the design or the code. Of the 19 checks performed by our oracle, faults were found by all but 5 of these checks. We also found that 8 out the 11 fault types identified in our fault model exhibited at least one fault. The evaluation indicates that the fault model is a productive conceptualization of the problems to be expected in agent unit testing and that the oracle is able to find a substantial number of such faults with relatively small overhead in terms of false positives.


We consider an electricity market organized with two settlements: one for a pre-delivery (day-ahead) market and one for real time, where uncertainty regarding production from non-dispatchable energy sources as well as variable load is resolved in the latter stage. We formulate two models to study the efficiency of this market design. In the myopic model, the day-ahead market is cleared independently of the real-time market, while in the integrated stochastic dispatch model the possible outcomes of the real-time market clearing are considered when the day-ahead market is cleared. We focus on how changes in the design of the electricity market influence the efficiency of the dispatch, measured by expected total cost or social welfare. In particular, we examine how relaxing network flow constraints and, for the stochastic dispatch model, even the balancing constraints in the day-ahead part of the dispatch models affects the overall efficiency of the system. This allows the dispatch to be infeasible day-ahead, while these infeasibilities will be handled in the real-time market. For the stochastic dispatch model we find that relaxing the network flows and balancing constraints in the dayahead part of the market provides additional flexibility that can be valuable to the system. In our examples with high up-regulation cost we find a value of "overbooking" that lead to lower total costs. In the myopic model the results are more ambiguous, however, leaving too many constraints to be resolved in the real-time market only, can lead to infeasibilities or high regulation cost.


This research compares the innovation capacity of the most important ceramic tile industrial districts located in Europe. Our analysis shows: Firstly, a similar level of competition within them but a far weaker cooperation in the Spanish district. Secondly, that the scarcity of technology and advanced services providers in the Spanish district relegates it to a follower role in the adoption process of innovation. And thirdly, that the presence in the Italian district of horizontal technology enterprises raises the innovative tension because of the technology diffusion across districts and it is favoured by the mobility of qualified workers.


We aim in this paper to address the sustainability challenge of how an integrated approach can lead to figuring out solutions to complex issues for modern societies. We reviewed papers related to integrated water resource management (IWRM) and integrated solid waste management (ISWM) to advocate some innovative concepts and methodologies of sustainability science. An investigation of the concepts of IWRM and ISWM over various sustainability science research clusters and dimensions is presented. Water resource management projects at different scales and across various geographical boundaries are reviewed to understand the IWRM approach. The ISWM approach is discussed with regard to research topics and methodologies from selected case studies in developed and developing countries. We sought to look at various definitions, the integrated elements, and the similarities and differences between the two approaches. We also present our definitions for each approach. Our findings show how integrated thinking can help in achieving sustainable development. Finally, we present our recommendations for possible implications to the integrated approach in order to accelerate the process of sustainable development. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment


This paper analyses the determinants and consequences of horizontal job-education mismatches, an increasingly relevant topic in debates about education and labour markets. This issue reflects the articulation of educational fields and occupations in the labour market. We evaluate the determinants of job-education mismatches and their impact on salaries of university graduates using comprehensive and representative national data for Russia. The study is based in graduates' assessment and statistical analyses. We find that one-third of graduates in Russia work in a job that is not related to their field of study. Moreover, graduates from fields that either generate more general human capital (social sciences, business, law, services) or where low pay is common (agriculture) are more likely to be in that situation. On the contrary, graduates from fields that generate specific human capital (e.g.: medicine) are considerably more likely to be matched. We find that mismatches negatively affect the earnings of university graduates and the higher the degree of mismatch, the higher the penalty for the mismatch. The study depicts that mismatch is penalized in the majority of fields except for low-paid ones (e.g.: agriculture).


Proper control of NaCl excretion in the kidney is central to bodily functions, yet many mechanisms that regulate reabsorption of sodium and chloride in the kidney remain incompletely understood. Here, we identify an important role played by the intracellular sorting receptor SORLA (sorting protein-related receptor with A-type repeats) in functional activation of renal ion transporters. We demonstrate that SORLA is expressed in epithelial cells of the thick ascending limb (TAL) of Henle's loop and that lack of receptor expression in this cell type in SORLA-deficient mice results in an inability to properly reabsorb sodium and chloride during osmotic stress. The underlying cellular defect was correlated with an inability of the TAL to phosphorylate Na (cid:1) -K (cid:1) -Cl (cid:2) cotransporter 2 (NKCC2), the major sodium transporter in the distal nephron. SORLA functionally interacts with Ste-20-related proline-alanine-rich kinase (SPAK), an activator of NKCC2, and receptor deficiency is associated with missorting of SPAK. Our data suggest a novel regulatory pathway whereby intracellular trafficking of SPAK by the sorting receptor SORLA is crucial for proper NKCC2 activation and for maintenance of renal ion balance.


During the eruption of the Eyjafjallaj ¨ okull vol- cano in the south of Iceland in April/May 2010, about 40 Tg of ash mass were emitted into the atmosphere. It was unclear whether volcanic ash particles with d < 10 µm facilitate the glaciation of clouds. Thus, ice nucleation properties of vol- canic ash particles were investigated in AIDA (Aerosol In- teraction and Dynamics in the Atmosphere) cloud chamber experiments simulating atmospherically relevant conditions. The ash sample that was used for our experiments had been collected at a distance of 58 km from the Eyjafjallaj ¨ okull during the eruption period in April 2010. The temperature range covered by our ice nucleation experiments extended from 219 to 264 K, and both ice nucleation via immersion freezing and deposition nucleation could be observed. Im- mersion freezing was first observed at 252 K, whereas the deposition nucleation onset lay at 242 K and RHice = 126 %. About 0.1 % of the volcanic ash particles were active as im- mersion freezing nuclei at a temperature of 249 K. For de- position nucleation, an ice fraction of 0.1 % was observed at around 233 K and RHice = 116 %. Taking ice-active surface site densities as a measure for the ice nucleation efficiency, volcanic ash particles are similarly efficient ice nuclei in im- mersion freezing mode (ns,imm 10 9 m 2 at 247 K) com- pared to certain mineral dusts. For deposition nucleation, the observed ice-active surface site densities ns,dep were found to be 10 11 m 2 at 224 K and RHice = 116 %. Thus, volcanic ash particles initiate deposition nucleation more efficiently than Asian and Saharan dust but appear to be poorer ice nu- clei than ATD particles. Based on the experimental data, we have derived ice-active surface site densities as a function of temperature for immersion freezing and of relative humidity over ice and temperature for deposition nucleation.


ABSTRACT The Canterbury, New Zealand, earthquake disaster of 2010–2011 had a major impact on children. The present study aims to increase understanding of schools' contributions to children's recovery by examining how this core context fosters children's effective coping in a disaster. The study uses a phenomenological approach to investigate the disaster experience from the children's (n = 32) own viewpoint and from that of their parents (31), teachers (6), and school principals (5). The schools in the study proved a stable, supportive environment for children providing routine, consistency, and a sense of safety and security. Teachers were a trusted source of support for children, and they coached children to cope. Teachers and schools also continually kept channels open between children and their families, including maintaining contact with parents during aftershocks to reassure them their children were safe. Peer contact was also important for children to share their experiences and gain support from one another. Principals considered welfare and put in place support mechanisms for staff and the children. Understanding how a school context and the relationships within that context promote effective coping in children facing a disaster is critical for developing more effective psychosocial support, and intervention strategies for children. In view of the school's key role, support to schools and teachers, including further training for education professionals, is needed throughout a disaster cycle if children's positive adaptation and coping is to be fostered.


The effect of selective glucocorticoid or mineralocorticoid replacement on pressor responses to angiotensin I and II and norepinephrine was studied in adrenalectomized rats given high salt intake. Four groups were prepared by 1) adrenalectomy only (n = 5); 2) adrenalectomy plus aldosterone, 6 micrograms/24 hr i.p. (n = 5); or 3) adrenalectomy plus dexamethasone, 10 micrograms/24 hr i.p. (n = 5), using miniosmotic pumps; and 4) sham adrenalectomy (controls; n = 5). Plasma corticosterone was undetectable in all three adrenalectomized groups. Plasma aldosterone concentration was similar in aldosterone-replaced and sham-operated controls. Pressor responses to various doses of angiotensin I, angiotensin II, and norepinephrine were determined in unanesthetized, undisturbed rats. Compared with both control and dexamethasone-replaced rats, pressor responses to all three agonists were significantly reduced in both nonreplaced adrenalectomized and aldosterone-replaced groups. Comparing the ratios of the pressor responses to angiotensin I and angiotensin II in the four groups over the entire dose range suggests that a greater fraction of injected angiotensin I was converted to angiotensin II in nonreplaced adrenalectomized rats than in the other three groups. We conclude that glucocorticoid action markedly contributes to the systemic pressor effect of angiotensin and norepinephrine. However, glucocorticoid deficiency does not impair in vivo conversion of angiotensin I to angiotensin II.


We have described decision models for the three modules internal to a virtual IP-network provider: Sales, network planning and trading. To coordinate decisions we have taken advantage of the dual solutions from a stochastic program and derived simplified functions or probability distribution that express valuation and costs of resources. Using these functions or values we are able to, locally, anticipate costs imposed on, or value created at, other modules of the organization. Each module is then able to run local versions, or simplifications, of the global optimization problem. We have done this in the setting of a virtual IP-network provider, but the framework is generally applicable to organizations with distributed decision processes. Our implementation of the framework showed some of the potential of the suggested method. However, further work should expand the implementation to a full simulation of all modules interacting over multiple time periods to evaluate the method's full potential.


ABSTRACT This paper explores the possible existence of the repeat phenomenon and their impact on racial disparities in police motor vehicle stops. The repeat phenomenon is the existence of a small proportion of people or places that account for a much larger proportion of events. While this phenomenon has been identified and discussed in other areas of criminal justice and criminology, it has not been extended to motor vehicle stops. The current study examines the existence of repeat citizens in a population of motor vehicle stops (N = 4775) from a Mid-western city during 2001. A small, but significant, concentration of motor vehicle stops were discovered among a few citizens and significant predictors of citizen performance included citizen race, gender, age, residency, time of the stop, and reason for the stop.


Abstract Background The Bahamas provides a wide range of crucial coastal habitats to many declining resident and migratory birds. Amongst these species is the Piping Plover (Charadriusmelodus), whose breeding populations are all listed as federally threatened or endangered in the United States and Canada. This species winters in the southern U.S. and the Caribbean, including The Bahamas, spending most of the year on the wintering grounds. Nonetheless, prior to the census data presented here, reports of Piping Plovers from The Bahamas were few and incidental. Therefore, repeated surveys are essential to increase understanding of the distribution, abundance and movement patterns of Piping Plovers and other shorebirds in the Bahamian territory. This dataset provides information on the abundance and distribution of the Piping Plover across multiple islands and much of the suitable habitat that exists in The Bahamas. It also provides some information on the variability of Piping Plover count data and presence of other shorebird species. Furthermore, these data may serve as baseline information on Piping Plover abundance and shorebird site occupancy by which to assess key candidate sites for protection and also future impacts of climate change, such as sea level rise and hurricanes. New information The National Audubon Society (NAS), Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) conducted a multi-year shorebird census in The Bahamas. Surveys initiated by ECCC and many other collaborators were also part of a multi-year survival study. Censuses were conducted across 16 different islands between the years 2006 and 2020. These surveys were performed with the cooperation of the Bahamas National Trust (BNT), volunteer biologists and scientists from the United States and Canada. Biologists working with NAS, ECCC and USGS used satellite imagery, historical records and local knowledge from Bahamian residents to identify sites with suitable habitat for Piping Plovers. Experienced researchers visited each site during winter (November-February), identified and counted Piping Plovers and, when possible, other bird species in each of the sampled locations. In total, the resulting database holds 2,684 observations of 62 bird species, of which 77% belong to 24 shorebird species. Approximately 30% of all presence records belong to the Piping Plover. It is important to emphasise that the counts reported in this dataset represent minimum estimates of local shorebird assemblages. Since abundance and distribution of birds vary with changing conditions, representative estimates are best achieved via repeated surveys that reflect a range of conditions including timing (day, year, month), weather (wind direction and speed, precipitation), tide state etc.


The key aim of the research discussed in this paper has been to investigate ways of integrating
techniques from SSM (Soft Systems Methodology) into the requirements elicitation stage of an
agile system development method based on the UML (Unified Modelling Language). We argue
that used alone UML models can encourage early design decisions before opportunities for
improvement have been agreed and that SSM lacks the detailed information required by
programmers. This leads to the conclusion that there could be some advantage in using the
techniques together.
In developing an integrated method we have been influenced by the recent trend towards agile
systems development. This represents a move away from seeing software development methods
as codified practices focusing on specific artefacts within a prescribed lifecycle. Instead emphasis
is placed on the provision of a framework of development activities, products and workflows
together with guidance for applying these to a particular application area.
The design of the research is as follows:
1. An Information Systems Development (ISD) project is being carried out using SSM and
UML techniques to make recommendations about the design of our School's intranet.
This is being written up as a case study.
2. The case study is being used to reflect upon and develop a hybrid method (or
development framework) and a supporting CASE (Computer Assisted Software
Engineering) tool.
2
The discussion of how the proposed framework emerged from our practical experience is
punctuated with UML and other types of model that relate to the design of the supporting CASE
tool.


Wadeye (Port Keats), a community of approximately 2500 people in the Northern Territory of Australia, is one of a small number of communities in which the traditional indigenous language is still being acquired by children as their first language. Children in this community speak Murrinh-Patha prior to attending a bilingual school where they begin learning English. This paper investigates the Murrinh-Patha input to and production of infants and pre-schoolers and examines attitudes to language learning from the early years at home through the transition to school. Longitudinal language sampling was used to explore how children acquire complex verbal structures. Data were collected from five children (four girls; one boy), starting at age 2;7 over a two-year period. Murrinh-Patha is a polysynthetic language, with complex verbal predicates which are formed with discontinuous stem elements and are semantically noncompositional. In languages like English, these words would require entire phrases to express. For example, the Murrinh-Patha word WURDAMnginthaDHAWIWEPERLwardagathu means "then the two non-siblings, at least one of whom was female, spoke out in unison", with the two bolded elements jointly providing the predicate 'speak out in unison'.
 Courtney and Saville-Troike (2002), investigating the acquisition of the polysynthetic languages Navajo and Quechua, found that children extracted the verb roots first, before acquiring affixes. Yet how are Murrinh-Patha children to do this when the verb root is itself complex and distributed across the verbal word? Little is known about the acquisition of polysynthetic languages and the linguistic and pedagogical theory for creating tools to support language practice and literacy is based on vastly different language and socio-cultural foundations.
 A major motivation for this study is that the school bilingual program is developing educational materials in Murrinh-Patha, but with no knowledge of how children actually learn the language. Much of the pedagogical foundation for materials development comes from research based on widely spoken, more isolating languages such as English, Spanish and French. In these languages children learn literacy through whole word or syllabic teaching methods (Moats 2000). In Murrinh-Patha, where words are very long, it is possible that a syllabic approach to literacy-teaching would be successful. However, with little knowledge of foundational language learning in the language it is a challenge to develop appropriate literacy materials. This research will lay the foundation for ongoing investigations into language acquisition in Murrhin-Patha, with an aim to ensure the persistence and vitality of the language for future generations.
 References
 Courtney, E. H. and M. Saville-Troike (2002) "Learning to construct verbs in Navajo and Quechua" Journal of Child Language Vol. 29(3), pp. 623-654.
 Moats, L. Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers. New Jersey, Brookes Publishing


The use of mobile EEG brainwave monitoring and eye-tracking recorded synchronously during the training of sports skills offers significant opportunities but creates challenges. Opportunities: ♦ Measuring neurocognitive activity and visual focus in real time which can be used to provide immediate feedback to the coach, in 'real world' settings, for optimising training protocols for the individual athlete. ♦ Use of sound output ('sonification') in proportion to EEG regions of interest as a neurofeedback mechanism for athlete self-training. ♦ Application of visualisation protocols and 'EEG-driven' PC games where game feedback based on state of mind is used to optimise mental state prior to performance. ♦ Examining the relationship between eye movement and neuro activity (e.g. saccades and gamma waves) and in athlete coaching interventions such as sports visual scanning strategies, Eye Movement Desensitisation & Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, focussed relaxation, etc. Challenges: ♦ The recording of EEG during gross motor behaviour is subject to non-brain artefacts in the raw (time-domain) EEG, due to the much larger (than EEG) electrical voltages arising from muscle and eye movements. Practical approaches and signal processing (frequency domain spectrum) techniques to address these problems will be discussed. ♦ The synchronisation of data recorded on different types of equipment (e.g. EEG, eyetracker, video, sound, EMG, etc.) with different 'clocks' and diverse data formats is difficult – both in terms of time-stamping the original recordings across all the systems and playing them back synchronously for subsequent performance analysis. Progress on creating real-time data export methods which allow synchronous data recording and playback will be reported. Examples of studies carried out in archery, golf, motorsport, football and skiing will be discussed, with a focus on archery where: ♦ Measurements were taken from intermediate, county level, near elite and elite archers. ♦ Archery was chosen to demonstrate the real-time and in-situ quantification of neural activity compared with target-based measures of performance that archery provides, over a range of time-spans and skills. ♦ Results demonstrate that there are significant and measurable changes in EEG patterns during a shot with evidence suggesting that the patterns vary as a function of skill level, but not simply as a function of score. Significance of each of these studies for goal-directed learning and performance enhancement are discussed.


Clustering of spatial data in the presence of obstacles has a wide application. It is an important research topic in the spatial data mining. This paper discusses the problem of spatial clustering with obstacles constraints and presents a revised method named ant clustering algorithm with obstacle constraints(ACAOC) based on the basic ant model. This algorithm avoids some defects of other spatial clustering algorithms. These defects make algorithm not iterate when it has arrived at the stagnating state of the iteration or local optimum solution. ACAOC algorithm proposed in this paper can not only give attention to local converging and the whole converging, but also consider the obstacles that exit in the real world and make the clustering result more practical. Because of the use of Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN), the computing speed is increased greatly. The last experimental results conducted on synthetic data sets demonstrate that this method could extract the correct number of clusters with good clustering quality and high whole converging speed compared to the results obtained from clustering algorithm ignoring considering obstacles constraints.


The societal impacts of As in water resources in the arid western USA are potentially acute as a consequence of the combined effects of limited water supplies and the pervasive occurrence of naturally occurring As in subsurface geologic formations, including the carbonate‐hosted, disseminated gold‐bearing formations of the Carlin Trend. The prevalence of As in secondary minerals in gold‐bearing carbonate‐hosted ores is of interest because of the potential for As release as a result of ore development. A key component to gold mining is the engineering and construction of large‐scale heap‐leach and waste‐rock containment structures that are characterized by variably saturated hydrology. Estimating As release behavior from these structures with a variably saturated reactive flow and transport numerical model requires the quantification of the significant differences in the sorption behavior for the stable redox states for As. Therefore, the objective of this study was to quantify this sorption behavior and to represent the observed behavior with an isotherm formulation. The pH‐dependent sorption behavior of arsenite, As(III), and arsenate, As(V), onto two carbonate‐hosted gold ores is presented. The experimentally determined pH‐dependent sorption behavior for both As(III) and As(V) is consistent with sorption on metal oxides as reported in studies on rock and soils with similar bulk mineralogical properties. The experimental sorption data are represented with two modified isotherm formulations. Modified formulations of the Langmuir isotherm and of the Sips isotherm are presented that include the pH of the sorbate solution as an additional model parameter. These formulations are applied to both As(III) and As(V) sorption data to generate an isotherm surface. The pH‐dependent isotherm methodology can be incorporated readily into numerical models for the purposes of estimating As transport behavior in field‐scale, variably saturated environments.


We report on lattice-Boltzmann simulations of slow fluid flow past mono- and bidisperse random arrays of spheres. We have measured the drag force on the spheres for a range of diameter ratios, mass fractions and packing fractions; in total, we studied 58 different parameter sets. Our simulation data for the permeability agrees well with previous simulation results and the experimental findings. On the basis of our data for the individual drag force, we have formulated new drag force relations for both monodisperse and polydisperse systems, based on the Carman–Kozeny equations; the average deviation of our binary simulation data with the new relation is less than 5%. We expect that these new relations will significantly improve the numerical modelling of gas–solid systems with polydisperse particles, in particular with respect to mixing and segregation phenomena. For binary systems with large diameter ratios (1:4), the individual drag force on a particle, as calculated from our relations, can differ by up to a factor of five compared with predictions presently favoured in chemical engineering.


During the last decade the use of titanium dioxide has been the focus of water purification studies for photocatalytic degradation of organic compounds. Various studies have shown that TiO2 photocatalysis is a very efficient process for removal (by mineralization) of a large variety of hazardous chemicals. However, the potential use of this technology for water disinfection has been essentially unexplored. Only a few papers have described the photocatalytic destruction of microbial cells, such as E. coli bacteria, MS2 bacteriophages and recently B. fragilis phages, D. radiophilus. The mechanism of photocatalysis in the presence of TiO 2 is the enhanced formation of hydroxyl (HO·) radicals, active in oxidation processes. The HO· radicals have a significant effect on chemical oxidation of anthropogenic organic compounds in the environment. Complete mineralization of many organic substances is possible in aqueous systems, when sufficient HO· radical flux can be generated in situ. Various water treatment technologies inherently produce HO· radicals in relatively minuscule quantities (i.e., < 10-12 M). Examples of such processes include ozonation, direct photolysis of hydrogen peroxide, and radiolysis. In contrast to the above system, steady- state HO· concentrations of the order of 10 -9 M can be generated in UV-irradiated aqueous suspensions of immobilised particles of titanium dioxide. The use of TiO2 for microbial inactivation and disinfection of potable water is suggested, since free radicals such as HO· might act as a strong biocide, because of its high oxidation potential and nonselective reactivity. In the present study, two bacilli strain spores (B. subtilis and B. cereus) were tested for photocatalytic inactivation in water as simulators of B. anthracis spores. B. subtilis was selected for its high resistance to disinfection and B. cereus for its phylogenetic proximity to B. anthracis. Two UV sources were used: 1) monochromatic UV lamp with irradiation intensity of 7mW/cm2 at 365nm; and 2) Natural sunlight (irradiation intensity at 365nm of ~4 mW/cm2 between 12:00 and 14:00 hours). TiO2 at 0.25g/L was found to be the optimal concentration needed for the reduction of four orders of magnitude in B. subtilis spores viability after irradiation for 300 minutes. B. cereus subjected to similar photocatalysis conditions was reduced by five orders of magnitude revealing lower endurance to this process. Comparison of artificial and natural (sunlight) UV irradiation source on B. subtilis resulted in increased inactivation of 5 orders of magnitude in favour of sunlight. Combined inactivation by photocatalytic process (UV 365nm) and detrimental activity of UV at 265nm can explain this result. There was no difference between the two irradiation sources when B. cereus was tested. Under both irradiation types, B. cereus was reduced by four orders of magnitude during 300 minutes time interval. Additional experiments including TiO 2 concentration, irradiation intensity, water depth, initial spore number, etc. were performed. Taking into account that B. anthracis spores have hydrophobic properties, the photocatalytic process seems to be the method of choice in water disinfection eliminating the possibility of by products formation such as halogens.


This paper provides a systematic assessment of the effect of the Federal Reserve's asset purchase programs on Treasury yields, with particular emphasis on the role of market expectations about the evolution of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet and of interest rates on the impact of the programs. We construct measures of such market expectations based on Blue Chip survey forecasts, Congressional Budget Office projections, and information from formal FOMC communications. Those measures are combined with a no-arbitrage term structure model, in which yields are driven by current and expected future private Treasury holdings, among other factors. This approach allows us to provide estimates of the term premium effects of the asset programs both at the time of the announcements and in the future as expectations about the economy and the Federal Reserve's balance sheet evolve. Our results suggest that the program with the largest initial impact on the ten year Treasury yield as the first purchase program, which is estimated to have held down rates by about 40 basis points in early 2009, and the initial maturity extension program had the second largest estimated impact at its inception, pushing rates down by about 20 basis points in late 2011. Currently, we estimate all programs combined are holding down the 10-year yield by about 65 basis points, of which about one-third is attributable to the first purchase program.


Analysis of livelihood strategies can aid to understand and resolve problems associated with vulnerability to poverty and food security. This paper aims to identify and describe the changes in rural livelihood activities by using household data for 2013 and 2014 collected in Stung Treng, Cambodia. We use the same variables and estimate different clusters for both the years. The paper concludes that despite the lag of only one year, there are noticeable changes in livelihood strategies. Firstly, we find a group of transition farmers in 2014 that is composed of households that are witnessing a shift towards commercialization. They invest and consume more than subsistence farmers. Secondly, there is a greater diversification in activities amongst the groups. Most households practice multiple activities. Lastly, with regards to self-employment, there has been a shift from agriculture and the production sector to services and crafts. All of the above changes can be deemed as positive as there is a gradual movement away from more vulnerable sectors. Accordingly, households that participate in livelihood activities related to agriculture and natural resource extraction are most affected by shocks and face the highest vulnerability to poverty. The paper additionally highlights some concerns such as a decline in availability of extracted products such as the fish stock which are expected to negatively impact on these more vulnerable rural households in the medium and longer term. Furthermore, the state of education is dismal and needs attention. Therefore, policy makers need to consider these issues while addressing rural poverty.


The beneficial effects of ginger in the management of gastrointestinal disturbances have been reported. In this study, the anti-inflammatory potential of ginger extract was assessed in a cellular model of gut inflammation. In addition, the effects of ginger extract and its major active compounds on intestinal barrier function were evaluated. The response of Caco-2 cells following exposure to a mixture of inflammatory mediators [interleukin [IL]-1β, 25 ng/mL; lipopolysaccharides [LPS], 10 ng/mL; tumor necrosis factor [TNF]-α, 50 ng/mL; and interferon [INF]-γ, 50 ng/mL] were assessed by measuring the levels of secreted IL-6 and IL-8. In addition, the mRNA levels of cyclooxygenase-2 and inducible nitric oxide synthase were measured. Moreover, the degree of nuclear factor (NF)-κB inhibition was examined, and the intestinal barrier function was determined by measuring the transepithelial electrical resistance (TEER) and fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC)-dextran transfer. It was observed that ginger extract and its constituents improved inflammatory responses by decreasing the levels of nitrite, PGE2, IL-6, and IL-8 via NF-κB inhibition. The ginger extract also increased the TEER and decreased the transfer of FITC-dextran from the apical side of the epithelium to the basolateral side. Taken together, these results show that ginger extract may be developed as a functional food for the maintenance of gastrointestinal health.


1 Dear Editor, With great interest, I read the paper entitled, "Analysis of Kudoa septempunctata as a cause of foodborne illness and its associated differential diagnosis", written by Lee [1], which was published in Epidemiology and Health in March 2017. The pathogenicity of K. septempunctata was advocated for in an article written by Kawai et al. [2] in Japan, but this proposal was argued against in 2 studies conducted by Ahn et al. [3] and Jang et al. [4] in South Korea (hereafter Korea) using suckling mice. However, there are a few differences among these studies that should be noted. First, the study by Kawai et al. [2] used K. septempunctata spores isolated from the cases of foodborne illness outbreaks, while the other studies [3,4] used K. septempunctata spores collected from commercial fish farms. Second, the genotypes of K. septempunctata can be classified as sequence type1 (ST1), ST2, and ST3. The ST1 and ST2 genotypes are mostly found in Japan, while the ST3 genotype is most commonly found in Korea [5]. No information was provided about the genotype of K. septempunctata in the study performed in Japan [2]. The 2 studies performed in Korea [3,4] assessed the pathogenicity of the ST3 genotype. Thus, these findings do not demonstrate the lack of pathogenicity of the ST1 and ST2 genotypes. According to the study by Lee [1] in Korea, 11 foodborne outbreaks in 2015 provide support for the possibility of K. septempunctata pathogenicity. However, there are limitations to this argument because those outbreak investigations were case series studies, not case-control studies or retrospective cohort studies. In Japan, among 24 foodborne outbreaks with unknown causes, 4 outbreaks were significantly associated with the consumption of olive flounder (Paralichthys olivaceus). Among those 4 outbreaks, K. septempunctata was isolated from at least 1 foodborne outbreak [2]. In Korea, K. septempunctata has not been included as a causative agent of foodborne outbreaks in the 2016 guidelines for water and foodborne diseases prevention and control [6]. However, K. septempunctata was included as a causative agent of food poisoning in the 2017 food safety administrative guidelines [7]. To obtain more epidemiological evidence of pathogenicity, further efforts are needed to perform a case-control study or cohort study of foodborne outbreaks relating to the consumption of olive flounder. Moreover, more stringent traceback investigations are needed to determine the production and distribution chain of olive flounder.