In this paper a new method for relative train localization in global navigation satellite system (GNSS) denied areas is proposed. The proposed localization system is long-term stable and based solely on magnetometer and odometer measurements. The system utilizes that the magnetic field shows strong and time persistent variations along a railway track. Two trains driving on the same track will observe the same magnetic field variations but with a certain shift. This shift depends on the relative position of the trains and their speed. By measuring the train speed with an odometer it becomes possible to estimate the relative position by comparing the magnetometer and odometer measurements of two trains. In this paper we use cross-correlation to obtain the relative position estimate from a batch of measurements. A subsequent Kalman filter is used to smooth the estimate and to incorporate prior knowledge of the train dynamics. We further derive the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for the relative position estimate to investigate the theoretically achievable localization accuracy and to approximate the variance of the relative position estimate in the update step of the Kalman filter. In an evaluation the feasibility and accuracy of the approach is shown based on measurement data collected with a train driving in a rural area. The results indicate that with the proposed method the relative position can be estimated with sub-meter accuracy.


Online video-sharing services, particularly YouTube, have gained an audience of billions of users including educators and scholars. While the academic literature provides some evidence that YouTube has been studied and written about, little is known about priorities for YouTube research. The study employed the Delphi method to obtain a consensus from experts about areas that are most in need of research in video-sharing technology (particularly YouTube). An expert panel, identified from a comprehensive review of the literature, participated in a three-round Delphi process involving two cycles of online questionnaires and feedback reports. Participants responded to the question, 'What should be the research priorities in video-sharing technologies (particularly YouTube) over the next 5 years?' Seven research priority categories were identified and ranked in order of priority: (1) users, groups and communities; (2) teaching/learning; (3) social/political impact; (4) video creation/production; (5) legal/ethical; (6) media management; and (7) commercial interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]


The tremendous growth in demand for broadband data is forcing ISPs to use pricing as a congestion management tool. This changing landscape of Internet access pricing is evidenced by the elimination of flat rate data plans in favor of usage-based pricing by major wired and wireless operators in the US and Europe. But simple usage-based fees suffer from the problem of imposing costs on all users, irrespective of the network congestion level at a given time. To effectively reduce network congestion, appropriate incentives must be provided to users who are willing to time-shift their data demand from peak to off-peak periods. These pricing incentives can either be static (e.g., two-period daytime/nighttime prices) or computed dynamically (e.g., dayahead pricing, real-time pricing). Data plans that offer such incentives to consumers fall under the category of time-dependent pricing (TDP). Many ISPs across the world are currently exploring various forms of TDP to manage their traffic growth. This article first outlines the sources of today¿s challenges, and then discusses current trends from regulatory and technological perspectives. Finally, we review representative pricing proposals for incentivizing the time-shifting of data.


Practitioners of formalism are frequently anxious to assert the primacy of aesthetic value and its pleasures, whether that formalism is characterized as "new," "activist," or "normative." In so doing, they often register a critical fatigue with and rebuke of historical and ideological criticisms. (1) Likewise, a common critique of formalist criticism per se is that it labors to write out cultural contexts, or, when this is impossible, to transform the historical backgrounds into occasions of poetic figuration and even allegory. (2) While these tensions are vividly evident in recent publications on this topic, critics are hesitant to define the "form" of formalism, such that it is not always clear what they are defending, apart from a valuation of aesthetics and pleasure. (3) Asking "What Is New Formalism?" Marjorie Levinson concludes "that form is either 'the' or 'a' source of pleasure, ethical education, and critical power is a view shared by all the new formalism essays ... but despite the proliferation in these essays of synonyms for form (e.g., genre, style, reading, literature, significant literature, the aesthetic, coherence, autonomy), none of the essays puts redefinition front and center." (4) Thus the category of form is often an assumed, though elusive, quality. To consider the problem of form, I turn to The Rape of the Lock (1712/1714), a text with a storied, if somewhat perplexing, role in the history of formalist criticism. (5) As Christopher Norris has aptly demonstrated, formalist-minded critics of an earlier generation such as F. R. Leavis and Cleanth Brooks have privileged the poem as a tour-de-force of the aesthetic ideal--"that of the poem as a pure, self-enclosed product of verbal artifice"--while grappling with the fact that "poetry and politics are so far intertwined as to make it very hard to read [Pope] without some knowledge of the relevant 'background.'" (6) The Rape of the Lock is undoubtedly a remarkable formal accomplishment (John A. Jones calls it a "triumph of style"), but it also insists upon a connection to contemporary society and manners from the start, beginning with the dedicatory epistle addressed to Arabella Fermor and the opening acknowledgement that Pope's friend, John Caryll, passed on the gossip. (7) But for Brooks in particular, "poetic 'form' is equated" with the poem's pleasurable ambiguities, a notion elaborated more recently by critics such as Margaret Anne Doody and J. Paul Hunter. For Doody, the couplet is "a flexible framework allowing perpetual activity." Hunter argues that historically the couplet contained "no hint of complacency, smugness, or ease," and singles out The Rape of the Lock as an example of how the couplet instead uses "the easy opposition as a way of clarifying the process of deepening qualification and refinement." (8) Both critics are clearly invested in revaluing the couplet and helpfully suggest ways that this form, which can appear sealed and didactic, can also lend itself to complication. (9) By emphasizing how this poetic form is politically progressive rather than ideologically conservative, however, such assessments can obscure the extent to which the question of form more generally evokes a variety of aesthetic, epistemological, and ideological connotations. (10) I argue that Pope's text invites us to analyze form, but from a different viewpoint--that of the representation of form. While others have recently addressed materialism in the period and Pope's particular indebtedness to Berkeley, and still others have offered numerous cultural contexts for Pope's poem, here I intend to broaden our understanding of form by broaching the uneasy transformations and mutations that persistently give shape to The Rape of the Lock. (11) Pope will later argue in the verse epistle To a Lady: Of the Characters of Women (1735) that women are tellingly resistant to the identifying, and stabilizing, imperatives of form: they are "Matter too soft" for "a lasting mark to bear," and so are "best distinguish'd by black, brown, or fair. …


When we look at the asset management industry, we tend to confine ourselves to measurement of the performance of investment funds. We less often analyze the context in which decisions are made. This examination of the influence of the organizational structure of investment management companies on the performance of their managers is based on a series of meetings with IMC managers and an analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data collected from a sample of IMCs and French investment funds. The results demonstrate how much the organizational variables explain performance.


On June 21, 2001, President George W. Bush flew to Birmingham, Alabama, where he gave a speech at Oak Mountain State Park. He discussed his administration's support for environmental conservation programs, his efforts to pass what would become the No Child Left Behind Act, and the benefits of the recently passed tax cuts. During his speech, Bush declared, "It's an honor to be traveling back to Alabama today with Jeff Sessions. I'm going to spend a little time this evening touting his cause." Indeed, that evening, Bush headlined a fundraiser for Senator Sessions at the Jefferson Convention Complex before boarding Air Force One and heading to his ranch in Crawford, Texas (Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States 2001). A presidential journey such as this one has become a common occurrence. In recent years, presidents have devoted increasing amounts of their time, which is perhaps their scarcest resource, to the task of raising funds to advance their own political interests and those of their party. Many observers have decried this trend as part of what has been dubbed a permanent campaign for the presidency, in which little distinction now remains between campaigning and governing (Ornstein and Mann 2000). How do we empirically evaluate whether and to what extent the permanent campaign exists? If, following the logic that David Mayhew (1974) applies to members of Congress, we assume that presidents are single-minded seekers of reelection, strategic presidents as rational actors would work to accumulate the financial resources that would bolster both their own electoral fortunes and those of their co-partisans. Approaching politics with such a worldview, it would be natural for the president to act as the fundraiser in chief. This essay systematically examines the dynamics of presidential fundraising travel from 1977 to 2004 in order to test hypotheses about which factors are related to where presidents go to raise funds from their supporters, how fundraising travel fits into the larger picture of presidential travel, and the evolution of these dynamics over time. Much research on fundraising is based on data from the Federal Election Commission that detail contributions to candidates, political parties, and political action groups, and focuses on the effect of political contributions on the policy process. I have constructed a database of presidential travel and fundraising events to look at the other side of the coin--what do political actors, in this case presidents, do in search of political funds, and how does this relate to other patterns of presidential travel? What do these trends reveal about the evolving nature of the presidency? The next section of this study reviews relevant literature on the permanent campaign and presidential fundraising. I then discuss the data set built for this study and the hypotheses that structure the analysis, which then follows. The conclusion highlights the evolving nature of presidential fundraising, the factors that distinguish it from other presidential public activity, and the normative implications of this study. Presidential Fundraising and the Permanent Campaign This study builds on scholarship that has focused on both the concept of a permanent campaign and the dynamics of political fundraising. First, in spite of the conventional wisdom that presidents are actively concerned with their own electoral fortunes, research on the presidency rarely addresses campaigns, and the literature on campaigns rarely looks at what presidents do throughout their terms to advance their own reelection and that of their fellow party members. In one example, Samuel Kernell explained the decision to study travel trends only over a president's first three years in office by declaring that "[t]o eliminate public activities inspired by concerns of reelection rather than governing, only the first three years have been tabulated" (1997, 113). …


Lenses are bidirectional transformations between pairs of connected structures capable of translating an edit on one structure into an edit on the other. Most of the extensive existing work on lenses has focused on the special case of asymmetric lenses, where one structures is taken as primary and the other is thought of as a projection or view. Some symmetric variants exist, where each structure contains information not present in the other, but these all lack the basic operation of composition. Additionally, existing accounts do not represent edits carefully, making incremental operation difficult or producing unsatisfactory synchronization candidates. We present a new symmetric formulation which works with descriptions of changes to structures, rather than with the structures themselves. We construct a semantic space of edit lenses between "editable structures"—monoids of edits with a partial monoid action for applying edits—with natural laws governing their behavior. We present generalizations of a number of known constructions on asymmetric lenses and settle some longstanding questions about their properties—in particular, we prove the existence of (symmetric monoidal) tensor products and sums and the non-existence of full categorical products and sums in a category of lenses. Universal algebra shows how to build iterator lenses for structured data such as lists and trees, yielding lenses for operations like mapping, filtering, and concatenation from first principles. More generally, we provide mapping combinators based on the theory of containers. Finally, we present a prototype implementation of the core theory and take a first step in addressing the challenge of translating between user gestures and the internal representation of edits. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Computer and Information Science First Advisor Benjamin C. Pierce


The purpose of the present thesis is to demonstrate in detail and by concrete example the construction of music as autonomous. It studies how the basic categories constituting the discourse of musical autonomy get reproduced in commercialized and mass-produced and at the same time institutionally authorized texts. The texts under examination consist of a number of sleeve-notes all concerned with the symphonies of Johannes Brahms.In the first two chapters the purposes as well as the theoretical framework and the methodological procedures of the study are presented. The third chapter provides an historical account of the discourse of musical autonomy. In the fourth chapter the basic categories of this discourse are identified. Each of these categories is discussed at length and their implications clarified. The fifth chapter comprises a text- and discourse analysis that purports to elucidate the internal structure of the texts as well as the relation between text and context. The sixth chapter seeks to determine the extent to which the texts can be seen as structured in accordance with the central categories of musical autonomy. The chapter argues that the texts under examination must indeed be understood as representing the symphonies of Johannes Brahms as autonomous and self-sufficient objects. The seventh and last chapter is concerned with the complex relation between power, knowledge and the constitution of subjectivity in the discourse of musical autonomy. The chapter identifies and discusses some of the operations of power relating to the constitution of the listening subject and to the disciplining of the human body, operations inextricably tied to the production and communication of knowledge within the discourse of musical autonomy.Thus, the real subject of this thesis is the discourse of musical autonomy itself. Its contribution to the ongoing discussion of musical autonomy lies at the level of exemplification: it picks out one of the places where this discourse gets reproduced and demonstrates in detail how that reproduction comes about. But it goes further than that in its attempt to highlight the power relations lying at the heart of the representation and communication of apparently autonomous musical works.


Employees choosing careers with community-based non-profit human services organisations engaged in meeting human needs expecting intrinsic satisfaction often find that the same care and commitment espoused in mission statements are not reflected internally as a commitment to employee satisfaction. These frontline workers are at risk of becoming disillusioned by increasing demands for compliance, internal and external disparities in salaries, unpaid work hours and difficulties in achieving outcomes. Using Herzberg's two-factor theory as a framework, this article incorporates a systematic review of literature per the discipline of evidence-based research to examine the potential of applying non-monetary satisfiers to invigorate the human services workforce. The article, which includes recommendations for management, focuses on the environment for frontline workers and includes creating a flexible workplace as well as implementing best practices for intentionally engaging employees in decision making and problem solving. The article has global relevance for staff retention and job satisfaction issues.


This review presents the most recent applications of solid phase extraction for the separation, preconcentration and speciation of metals, metalloids, and organometals. The review focuses on solid phase, column treatments and on the applications of this technique to various samples. This review also intends to discuss some applications and limitations associated to solid phase extraction techniques due to the necessity on limited selectivity. Nevertheless, the solid phase extraction is still an efficient, sensitive and inexpensive technique to perform removal of metal ions from environmental samples, preconcentration of metal ions for analytical purposes and speciation of the metal and metalloids as shown by the variety of applications presented and discussed in this review. A literature survey of the last three years (2008–2010) offering a critical review of solid phase extraction for separation, preconcentration and speciation of metal ions from various sample matrices is provided.


This poster describes an approach in improving the usability of computer-aided design (CAD) applications by adding an intelligent agent that assists the user in his/her interaction with the system. To implement the agent, I used ConGolog [GLL97, LLR99] – a very high-level programming language for developing knowledge-based agents that are embedded in complex environments. ConGolog supports the specification of a task-level model of a dynamic environment, the description of complex behaviours, and the synthesis of new plans at run-time. A prototype intelligent agent is being developed to work with an existing 3D CAD system [GS99]. This agent is intended to help the user in designing an office layout that satisfies his goals. The CAD system [GS99] that our intelligent agent works with is built to allow the user to design a 3D virtual environment (office, kitchen, living room, etc.). The system's graphical user interface is quite simple. Interactions consist primarily of using the mouse to pick and place various types of objects (desk, chair, lamp, inkwell, etc.) in the room layout. In this, it resembles the Object Associations system [BS95]. The system handles the details of interactions based on a model of objects and the physical constraints that hold in the scene, for instance, an object being supported by a particular surface. But the system lacks a model of the user, of the task that he/she is trying to perform, and of the objectives that he/she is trying to achieve. It cannot really assist the user in quickly creating the desired room layout. An early example for a system that attempts to aid the user in creating a room layout is CRACK [FM88]. This 2D system critiques the current design with text messages that explain the problem. The domain knowledge embedded in the critiquing system is not used to actively aid the user for placing objects. It is believed that the use of intelligent agent technology can provide many benefits in the area of layout systems. An agent would maintain a high-level representation of the application domain, including object behaviour and user knowledge and goals. This could be used to enforce complex application specific constraints on the way objects are manipulated and on the layouts that are produced. Secondly, such a model could be used for disambiguation and consistency checking. Humans often communicate information about a task very inaccurately because they understand the context of the task and its goals from previous experience. An agent could use its domain knowledge to resolve ambiguities, as well as ask more meaningful questions when user input is required. Moreover, the user goal model could be exploited to detect inadvertent errors. Thirdly, the agent could also aid the user in constructing the virtual design using its knowledge of the domain and user goals. Because it is aware of the current state of the design, it can provide suggestions and advice to the user, guide him through the task, and respond to user's questions. All this would lead towards much more natural and intuitive interaction between the user and the CAD system.


This paper examined the performance of a light shelf (LS) as a delighting device for reducing electric light usage in a south-oriented open-plan office (OPO) under the sky in the tropic using Integrated Environmental Solution Virtual Environment (IES VE). Results showed that the LS improved daylight quantity of the one-sided light office by reducing the excessive illumination at the area close to the window opening but increased it at the back where the illuminance is low. The improvement at the rear was from 1.55 % (LS 3 at noon on 21st March) to 2.99 % (LS 2 on 22nd June at noon). The LS also improved illuminance uniformity for visual comfort in the room with the best three test cases ranging from 74.07 % (LS 2 and 7) to 76.67 % (L3) compared to the case without LS. The selected test cases showed higher illuminance distribution between adjacent points or possible sitting position in the room than the base case (BC). The reduction in electric light usage ranged from 11.78 % (LS 3) to 15.97 % (LS 2). Hence, the paper concludes that LS improved daylight and electric energy efficiency. Therefore, the LS 2 is recommended for the south-oriented OPO with one-sided lighting in the tropical climate.


Short, high-concentration peaks of the atmospheric pollutant ozone (O3) cause the formation of cell death lesions on the leaves of sensitive plants. Numerous similarities between the plant responses to O3 and pathogens suggest that O3 triggers hypersensitive response-like programmed cell death (PCD). We examined O3 and superoxide-induced cell death in the O3-sensitive radical-induced cell death1 (rcd1) mutant. Dying cells in O3-exposed rcd1 exhibited several of the typical morphological characteristics of the hypersensitive response and PCD. Double-mutant analyses indicated a requirement for salicylic acid and the function of the cyclic nucleotide-gated ion channel AtCNGC2 in cell death. Furthermore, a requirement for ATPases, kinases, transcription, Ca2+ flux, caspase-like proteolytic activity, and also one or more phenylmethylsulfonyl fluoride-sensitive protease activities was shown for the development of cell death lesions in rcd1. Furthermore, mitogen-activated protein kinases showed differential activation patterns in rcd1 and Columbia. Taken together, these results directly demonstrate the induction of PCD by O3.


The demographic literature has tended to interpret the postponement of childbearing,
experienced in developed countries over the past three decades, as beneficial for families.
As women who postpone their first birth accumulate resources before they become
mothers, an increasing maternal age at first birth is expected to be positively associated
with children's wellbeing. Existing evidence is only partially able to support these
arguments, primarily for two reasons. Firstly, the demographic literature has been mainly
preoccupied with the social aspects of postponement, ignoring that, as showed by the
medical literature, older childbearing may involve health complications and result in worse
outcomes for children. Indeed, the link between postponement and child wellbeing may
depend on how late the birth occurs. Secondly, the "weathering" hypothesis literature
argues that the link between maternal age and child wellbeing is heterogeneous for
population subgroups. Ethnic minority women may have fewer opportunities to acquire
resources even if they postpone childbearing. Because of the disadvantage and racism they
endure, they may experience a more rapid deterioration of their health, which implies that
their children's wellbeing might worsen, rather than improve, with increasing maternal age
at birth. The original contribution to knowledge of this thesis is that of investigating the
way childbearing postponement is associated with family and child wellbeing by
integrating and reconciling different perspectives on maternal age, which have so far been
developed and applied relatively independently.
The research focuses on the U.K. context, on first births and compares (children born to)
Black and White mothers. The results, on average, support the arguments of the
demographic literature as first born children of older mothers (30+) fare significantly better
than children of younger mothers, although, consistent with the medical literature, the
benefits cease to accumulate at particularly advanced maternal ages. However, consistent
with the "weathering" hypothesis literature, the results suggest that when analysed
separately for Black and White mothers, the association between maternal age and child
wellbeing varies across these groups. Indeed, Black/White gaps in child low birth weight
widen with increasing maternal age at first birth. The results also reveal that when Black
mothers delay childbearing to older ages, they do not experience the same accumulation of
resources as White mothers do, suggesting that childbearing postponement may reflect
qualitatively different processes for these groups.


Diverse wetland vegetation flourished at the margins of the Midland Basin in north-central Texas during the Pennsylvanian Period. Extensive coastal swamps and an ever-wet, tropical climate supported lush growth of pteridosperm, marattialean fern, lycopsid, and calamite trees, and a wide array of ground cover and vines. As the Pennsylvanian passed into the Permian, the climate of the area became drier and more seasonal, the great swamps disappeared regionally, and aridity spread. The climatic inferences are based on changes in sedimentary patterns and paleosols as well as the general paleobotanical trends. The lithological patterns include a change from a diverse array of paleosols, including Histosols (ever-wet waterlogged soils), in the late Pennsylvanian to greatly diminished paleosol diversity with poorly developed Vertisols by the Early-Middle Permian transition. In addition, coal seams were present with wide areal distribution in the late Pennsylvanian whereas beds of evaporates were common by the end of the Early Permian. During this climatic transition, wetland plants were confined to shrinking "wet spots" found along permanent streams where the vegetation they constituted remained distinct if increasingly depauperate in terms of species richness. By Leonardian (late Early Permian) time, most of the landscape was dominated by plants adapted to seasonal drought and a deep water table. Wetland elements were reduced to scattered pockets, dominated primarily by weedy forms and riparian specialists tolerant of flooding and burial. By the Middle Permian, even these small wetland pockets had disappeared from the region.


The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms "the coloniality of power" and "modernity." The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the "civilized" West.


What we know already
Specialist spiritual care can be broken down into discrete items within a questionnaire when grounded in the theory developed in the previous paper. However, in order to test whether this project is meaningful the resultant Lothian PROM needs to be validated in a patient population.
What this paper adds
This paper describes the validation of the Lothian PROM in a sample of patients. It shows the pattern of responses given to the questions and analyses the correlations between them. This type of analysis can illuminate connections between the type of person responding and the types of responses they give. This analysis shows that everyone may benefit from specialist spiritual care.
Why this is important.
In order to ascertain whether this measure of specialist spiritual care is valid certain standard procedures need to be followed. This paper describes those procedures. Therefore, the finding that everyone can benefit from specialist spiritual care is grounded in robust measurement techniques.
How this impacts upon chaplaincy
A valid PROM is a powerful tool in terms of providing robust evidence for the efficacy of chaplaincy interventions. That this entire sample benefitted from chaplaincy intervention has significant consequences for the profession. Chaplaincy benefits all, not just the faithful, religious or spiritual.


This paper describes the operation of both the compulsory pension annuity and voluntary annuity markets in the UK. The paper reports on the movement of UK annuity price quotes in the voluntary market from 1957-2009, and in the pension annuity market from 1994 to 2009, and examines whether annuities were fairly priced over this period. The paper computes the money's worth of annuities, and finds that on average the money's worth in the voluntary market over the sample period for 65-year old males has been a very high 98%. In the larger compulsory pension annuity over a shorter sample period we estimate that the money's worth for 65-year old males has been 89%, and for 65-year old females has been a similar but slightly larger 90%. Taking into account load factors associated with annuity contracts and in comparison with other financial and insurance products this implies that annuities are fairly priced. However the value of the money's worth is sensitive to the assumptions made about life expectancy, and we explain the assumptions made about the appropriate life tables to apply to annuitants in these annuity markets. There is some evidence that money's worth has fallen since 2002. We discuss a number of factors that could have effected the fall in money's worth, including: changes in insurance regulation; changes in industrial concentration; an insurance cycle; pricing of mortality uncertainty and the growth in the impaired lives market.


La conquista de Jerusalen, an anonymous play composed before 1586 which Stefano Arata attributes to Miguel de Cervantes, borrows parts of its plot from La Gerusalemme liberata (1581), an epic poem by Torquato Tasso. My purpose is to deepen the observations that Arata already made in 1992 on the relationship between the two texts, examining the reprocessing strategies adopted by the dramatist. I will compare the sequences that show an accurate adaptation of the Italian poem, with other sequences that, in contrast, diverge from La Gerusalemme, although still taking into account the relationship between its characters (Olindo and Sofronia, Tancredi, Erminia and Clorinda). This will allow us to appreciate the dramatic skills of the author, and strenghten the hypothesis that Cervantes wrote the drama.


Extracted from text ... T
Best companies to
work for:
what sets them apart?
20 Management Today March 2005
Prof Tersia Brevis is the newly appointed research editor of Management Today. She is
professor of management in the College of Economic and Business Science at Unisa.
The Corporate Research Foundation (CRF)
recently launched the 5th edition of Best
Companies To Work For. South Africa's top
ten employers for were selected according
to stringent selection criteria by an
panel appointed by CRF.
The study was an opinion based assessment
on how people were managed and
the organisational strategies and practices
used to mobilise people ..


The nearshore Antarctic marine environment is unique, characterised by low but constant temperatures that contrast with an intense peak in productivity. As a result of this stenothermal environment, energy input has a profound ecological effect. These conditions have developed over several millions of years and have resulted in an animal physiology that is highly stenothermal and sometimes closely coupled with the seasonal food supply, e.g. reproductive periodicity and food storage. Therefore, Antarctic marine animals are likely to be amongst the most vulnerable species worldwide to environmental modifications and can be regarded as highly sensitive barometers for change. Reproductive success is a vital characteristic in species survival and evaluation of change in reproductive condition with time key to identifying vulnerable taxa. Characterising reproductive success with time is a major requirement in predicting species response to change and the early stages of species loss. Some invertebrates are highly abundant in shallow water sites around the Antarctic and form conspicuous members of the Antarctic benthos. Three common echinoderms and one nemertean were sampled from sites adjacent to the British Antarctic Survey's Rothera Research Station, Adelaide Island, on the West Antarctic Peninsula between 1997-2001. Reproductive patterns were determined by histological analyses of gonad tissue. This study provided further evidence for inter-annual variation in Antarctic gametogenic development, which appeared to be driven to some extent by trophic position and reliance on the seasonal phytoplankton bloom. The largest variation in reproductive condition was demonstrated for the detritivorous brittle star, Ophionotus victoriae. The seasonal tempos of this echinoderm have been attributed in part, to the seasonal sedimentation events common in the high Antarctic. The reproductive patterns in the scavenging starfish, Odontaster validus and the predatory nemertean, Parborlasia corrugatus showed less inter-annual variation. The de-coupling of these invertebrates from the intensely seasonal phytoplankton bloom appeared to partially account for the reproductive trends observed. The lack of inter-annual variation in the reproduction of the filter-feeding sea-cucumber, Heterocucumis steineni, was somewhat counterintuitive, although problems with sample processing probably accounted for the majority of this anomaly. Echinoderms were also collected during the Antarctic summer field seasons in 2003 and 2004. A series of fertilisation success studies were undertaken comparing the adaptations in an Antarctic and an equivalent temperate starfish to achieve optimal numbers of fertilised eggs, and elemental analyses were used to estimate the nutritional and energetic condition of the bodily and reproductive tissues in two Antarctic echinoderms. Fertilisation studies indicated that Antarctic invertebrates require 1-2 orders of magnitude more sperm to ensure optimal fertilisation success. These sperm tended to be long-lived and capable of fertilising eggs 24+ hours after release. The study suggested that synchronous spawning, aggregations and specific pre-spawning behaviour are employed to help counter the deleterious effects of sperm limitation. The Antarctic eggs and sperm were also highly sensitive to even small modifications in temperature and salinity, affecting the number of eggs fertilised. Such stenothermy is of particular relevance if the 1-2oC rise in global temperature, predicted over the next century, is realised. Biochemical composition of body components of two species of Antarctic echinoderm indicated a significant difference in the composition between the male and female gonad, particularly in the Antarctic brittle star Ophionotus victoriae. The ovaries contained a much larger proportion of lipid compared to the testes, and demonstrated a distinct seasonality in composition. Higher levels of lipid were observed in the ovary during the austral winter coincident with a period of reproductive investment and maturing oocytes in the gonad. O. victoriae exhibited lower amounts of lipid in the late austral spring suggesting the removal of mature oocytes from the ovary through spawning. The seasonality in composition and the high levels of lipid and protein measured in the ophiuroid gut tissue, suggested the gut might play a role in providing material and energy for metabolic function and possibly gametogenesis; higher lipid levels were apparent during the period of seasonal phytodetrital flux. The role of the pyloric ceaca in asteroids as a nutrient storage organ was also evident in the high levels of both protein and lipid observed in this bodily component in the star fish, Odontaster validus.


The aim of this research was to identify the correlation of lifestyle and cognitive function in the elderly in Kelurahan Tuah Karya Kecamatan Tampan Pekanbaru. The design was descriptive correlational research with cross sectional approach. The sampling technique was cluster sampling, stratified random sampling and convenience sampling with 97 elderly which was selected based on inclusion criteria. This research used questionnaire for lifestyle variable and Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) that was developed by Folstein MF (1975) in Brunner and Suddarth (2002) for cognitive function variabel. The univariate analysis was done by looking at the distributions of frequencies and bivariate analysis was done by using chi-square test. The result showed that from 51 respondents with healthy lifestyle, that were 47 respondents (92,2%) with normal cognitive function,  4 respondents (7,8%) with probable cognitive impairment , and no one with definitive cognitive impairment (0%) . Respondents who had unhealthy lifestyle were 46, and from that number 26 respondents (56,6%) had a normal cognitive function,  20 respondents (43,5%) had probable cognitive impairment , and no one had definitive cognitive impairment (0%) . The statistic showed p value (0,000) < alpha (0,05). It means that there is a correlation between lifestyle and cognitive function of elderly in Kelurahan Tuah Karya Kecamatan Tampan Pekanbaru. Keywords: cognitive function, elderly, lifestyle, MMSE


The Brett Murray painting of president Zuma with an opened fly probes into the realm of manhood. It reveals the so called 'masculinity crisis' in the gender discourse. From a practical theological point of view it poses the question whether one can exclude male genitals from a holistic anthropology that views corporeality and sexuality as essential elements of the 'human soul'. The following question is posed: To what extent can the theopaschitic paradigm and Christian iconic view on life contribute to the transformation of existing images on being male and masculinity? Can such a theological approach change existing paradigms determined by domination and patriarchal power? It is accepted that masculinities are products of social and cultural images. In this regard manhood is a social and cultural construct. The Brett Murray painting emphasizes the fact that the penis is still a phallic symbol and as a 'public' subjected to the gaze of social media. The public reactions on Brett Murray's 'The Spear' are scrutinized by a Christian spiritual hermeneutics. The objective of the article is to emphasize the role of aesthetics in the establishment of a poetic gaze on manhood. It is an attempt to transform thrusting manhood into 'compassionate intimacy'. It is argued that male genitals should be viewed as sacred and 'soulful' parts of human embodiment.


Today, we launch a new journal and I am honored to serve as the chair of its editorial board. The goal of the Texas National Security Review (TNSR) is to become the intellectual home to a growing global, interdisciplinary network of scholars working on questions of foreign policy, international relations, and national and international security. With generous and deliberate support from the University of Texas, this journal seeks the best, most innovative scholarship that transcends disciplines and speaks to a wider world. Over time, we hope TNSR will become the go-to source for scholars, decision-makers, military and government practitioners, and concerned citizens from around the world thinking about questions of war and peace.


The Global Matrix Library (GML) is a distributed matrix library in the X10 language. GML is designed to simplify the development of scalable linear algebra applications. By hiding the communication and parallelism details, GML programs are written in a sequential style that is easy to use and understand by non expert programmers. Resilience is becoming a major challenge for HPC applications as the number of components in a typical system continues to increase. To address this challenge, we improved GML's adaptability to process failure and provided a mechanism for automatic data recovery. As iterative algorithms are commonly used in linear algebra applications, we also created a checkpoint/restore framework for developing resilient iterative applications using GML. Using three example machine learning applications, we demonstrate that this framework supports resilient application development with minimal additional code compared to a non-resilient implementation. Performance measurements in a typical cluster environment show that the major cost of resilient execution is due to resilient X10 itself, and that the additional cost due to our framework is acceptable.


Background: Dwindling economic resources and reduced manpower in the health sector require efficient use of the available resources. Day of surgery cancellation has far reaching consequences on the patients and the theatre staff involved. Full use of the theatre space should be pursued by every theatre user. Objective: The study aimed to report on the rates and causes of day of surgery cancellation of elective surgical cases in our hospital as a means towards proffering solutions. Materials and Methods: It was a retrospective study of all elective cases that were booked over a 15-month period from January 2016 to March 2017. Cancellation was said to have occurred when the planned surgery did not take place on the proposed day of surgery. Cancellations were categorized into patient-related, surgeon-related, hospital-related and anesthetist-related. Reasons for the cancellations were documented. Data were analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software program, version 22. Variables were compared using Chi-square tests. A value of P < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: During the 15-month period, a total of 1296 elective surgeries were booked. Of this, 118 (9.1%) cases were cancelled. Patient-related factor was the most common reason (47.5%) followed by surgeon-related factor (28%). Lack of funds was the most common patient related-reason for cancellation. Majority of the cancelled cases were general surgical cases (36.4%) followed by orthopedics (25.4%) and urology (11%). Seventy percent of the cancelled cases were first and second on the elective list. Conclusion: The cancellation rate in this study is high. The reasons for these cancellations are preventable. To ensure effective use of the theatre, efforts should be made to tackle these reasons.


Tilly and Lizzie may be identical to look at, but in every other way they are completely different. While Lizzie likes order, Tilly just wants to have fun. As Lizzie makes her lists, Tilly likes to make a mess. Lizzie sets out to prove how similar they really are, while Tilly is determined to prove her wrong. Will they ever reconcile their differences and just get on?


This chapter reviews the current epidemiology of tuberculosis (TB) in the world. Although the authors concentrate on the number of new cases of deaths from this disease, they also aim at presenting the exact numbers of new cases of TB and deaths from TB that occur each year. The ability of the tuberculin skin test to detect the presence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection can be used to measure the prevalence of infection. The annual risk of infection is the probability that any individual will be infected with M. tuberculosis in 1 year. It is estimated that about 1,700 million people are infected with M. tuberculosis. Primary resistance is defined as the presence of drug resistance to at least one anti-TB drug in a TB patient who has never received prior treatment. Without recognition of the TB crisis confronting the world and prompt, effective action, the TB epidemic can be expected to worsen for several reasons. First, demographic forces are at work. Children born in past decades in regions with high population growth rates are now reaching the ages at which morbidity and mortality for TB are high. Second, famine, war, and natural disasters that create large populations of displaced, malnourished people in crowded living conditions may cause increases in TB case rates. Third, age-specific TB incidence rates can be expected to rise in those areas of the world where immunity of the population is seriously challenged by HIV infection.


Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared that Zika, a virus, which has been linked to birth defects and neurological complications, no longer constitutes an international emergency. However, it still remains a threat which calls for a long term efforts to address the issue through development of vaccines. Several ongoing clinical trials led by government and private pharmaceutical companies have shown a great promise in the treatment of Zika. Apart from these trials, there are also ongoing research on understanding the virus better, its transmission mode and future possibility of leveraging it in other disease treatments. This article provides an insight on these efforts and their findings.


Rights and Regulation is the special focus of this issue of the South African Journal on Human Rights. While the majority of this part contains articles and current developments of general interest, the Rights and Regulation focus is nevertheless an important one. It originates from the Law and Society Association's 2006 Summer Institute held at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The Institute was an intensive postgraduate student-focused research and career workshop.


Surgeon General Luther Terry, in his opening remarks, noted that in the past, and up to the present, every child was destined to contract measles and that the infection was frequently complicated and responsible for more deaths in the United States than any other acute infectious fever of childhood. He therefore looked forward to a valuable conference concerned primarily with the vaccine to prevent its occurrence. Dr. Wilson noted that measles was a disease recognized by Rhazes, the Arabian physician, as distinct from smallpox, a disease known to Shakespeare, and a truly universal disease prevalent in all continents and among all peoples; a disease which is always pandemic. Infection seems to have occurred entirely from case to case, and healthy carriers are unknown. Infection results in overt illness in nearly all the individuals, with an attack rate ranging from 85% in the population of the large cities to 100% in


As the nervous system of the developing vertebrate embryo is laid down, the guidance molecule netrin attracts the growth cones of advancing axons to the embryo's midline. However, as soon as the growth cones cross the midline, they switch allegiance, ignoring netrin and instead responding to Slit, which repels the growth cones away from the midline. Two papers tackle how growth cones make their way through competing signals. Stein and Tessier-Lavigne show that this switch is the result of the cytoplasmic domain of the Slit receptor, Robo, binding to the cytoplasmic domain of the netrin receptor DCC. Thus, the dwindling effects of netrin on growth cones are directly linked to their increasing responsiveness to the repellent effects of Slit. This interlocked silencing mechanism prevents the growth cone from being trapped in a tug-of-war between the attractive and repellent activities of two opposing guidance molecules. Stein et al. address the mechanism by which netrin exerts its effects. In contrast to a recent suggestion that netrin acts through the adenosine A2B receptor, the authors show that netrin binds directly to the DCC protein and that A2B activation is not required for netrin's effects on axon outgrowth or neuron attraction. Thus, DCC is the primary receptor responsible for netrin's actions. Dickson provides a Perspective on axon guidance. E. Stein, M. Tessier-Lavigne, Hierarchical organization of guidance receptors: Silencing of netrin attraction by Slit through a Robo/DCC receptor complex. Science 291, 1928-1938 (2001). [Abstract] [Full Text] E. Stein, Y. Zou, M.-m. Poo, M. Tessier-Lavigne, Binding of DCC by netrin-1 to mediate axon guidance independent of adenosine A2B receptor activation. Science 291, 1976-1982 (2001). [Abstract] [Full Text] B. J. Dickson, Moving on. Science 291, 1910-1911 (2001). [Full Text]


Visual and Technical Aspects of Type gives an introduction to the rules of font design and describes how fonts and their metrics are managed by computers. It is the first book that contains contributions from both type creators and computer scientists. The aim is to provide insights into the production and rendering of digital type and to make traditional type design rules accessible to a wider audience. The first part contains an overview of the evolution of letterforms in their historical and cultural context. The second part is devoted to technical aspects of type; topics covered include character metrics, outline font rasterization techniques, and algorithms for various tasks. Finally, articles by Hans Meier and Fernand Baudin provide an interesting view of the progress of typefaces and page layout, and insight into future developments. This unique book will appeal to graphics designers, computer scientists, typographers and desktop publishers who wish to know more about computer typography.


Personal names are important and common information in many data sources, ranging from social networks and news articles to patient records and scientific documents.They are often used as queries for retrieving records and also as key information for linking documents from multiple sources. Matching personal names can be challenging due to variations in spelling and various formatting of names. While many approximated name matching techniques have been proposed, most are generic string-matching algorithms. Unlike other types of proper names, personal names are highly cultural. Many ethnicities have their own unique naming systems and identifiable characteristics. In this paper we explore such relationships between ethnicities and personal names to improve the name matching performance. First, we propose a name-ethnicity classifier based on the multinomial logistic regression. Our model can effectively identify name-ethnicity from personal names in Wikipedia, which we use to define name-ethnicity, to within 85\% accuracy.Next, we propose a novel alignment-based name matching algorithm, based on Smith–Waterman algorithm and logistic regression.Different name matching models are then trained for different name-ethnicity groups.Our preliminary experimental result on DBLP's disambiguated author dataset yields a performance of 99\% precision and 89\% recall.Surprisingly, textual features carry more weight than phonetic ones in name-ethnicity classification.


Water objects of Siberia north contain impurities in water in colloid form. The impurities are stable to physical and chemical influence. Search ways of decreasing of natural colloid solutions stability is topical issue. Destruction of colloid particles makes it possible to produce qualitative potable water. In the present work factors influenced on aggregate stability of colloid solutions are represented. It is shown that a disperse phase of natural colloid systems consists of iron and silicium ions and humic organic substances in the ratio 5.6 mg/L:20 mg/L:2.2 mg/L, respectively. Calculated electrokinetic potential of colloid solutions is in the range from -23 up to -32 mV. Stability of colloid iron is studied at the presence of CaCl2 and AlCl3 electrolits. Coagulation thresholds of CaCl2 and AlCl3 are equal to 1.25 mmol/L and 0.0074 mmol/L, respectively. Furthermore, it is shown pH is also influenced on stability of the colloid system. When pH of solution is 4.5 colloid iron system coagulates. This fact allows developing a method of removal of colloid iron by temporal decreasing of pH by using of carbon dioxide. This method is ecologically safe and allows simplifying technology of water-preparation due to exception of the thin filtration which is used for removal colloid particals. The pH renewal is spontaneous process which is going while carbonization is going. Thermodynamic calculations of reactions describing the destruction mechanism of colloid iron are represented.


The continuous development of improved non-fullerene acceptors and deeper knowledge of the fundamental mechanisms governing performance underpin the vertiginous increase in efficiency witnessed by organic photovoltaics. While the influence of parameters like film thickness and morphology are generally understood, what determines the strong dependence of the photocurrent on the donor and acceptor fractions remains elusive. Here we approach this problem by training artificial intelligence algorithms with self-consistent datasets consisting of thousands of data points obtained by high-throughput evaluation methods. Two ensemble learning methods are implemented, namely a Bayesian machine scientist and a random decision forest. While the former demonstrates large descriptive power to complement the experimental high-throughput screening, the latter is found to predict with excellent accuracy the photocurrent–composition phase space for material systems outside the training set. Interestingly, we identify highly predictive models that only employ the materials band gaps, thus largely simplifying the rationale of the photocurrent–composition space.


Any archaeological site shows a stratification formed by single 3D volumes, the deposits and specific 3D surfaces of human origin as pits, ditches or wall-surfaces known as the units of stratification. Excavation forms the main data retrieval process in field archaeology a destructive process to be documented in three dimensions. To fully reconstruct the part of the site destroyed by excavation these units have to be documented in 3D. The outstanding importance of a 3D documentation of the stratification by the means of the single surfaces indicates the use of terrestrial 3D laser scanners combined with digital imagery as a standard documentation tool. They provide high topographic detail and texture for the efficient digital documentation and monitoring of the excavation process. This monitoring demand opens a wide field of future development – hardware and software to integrate laser scanners in the daily archaeological work flow. DIgItAl recorDIng oF strAtIgrAphIc ArchAeologIcAl excAvAtIons UsIng terrestrIAl 3D lAser scAnners


In the middle of highly competitive tourism market, development of successful destination image is paramount towards memorable experience for visitors. This study aims to support tourism stakeholders from the service providers and national tourism by analyzing, and extracting meaningful patterns from social media, e.g. Twitter, based on destination image information. This data plays an important role for destination marketers to distinguish their destination among others based on Twitter Statistics and key public opinion towards destination image attributes. London and New York were used as destination cities under the analysis of text mining with the concept linkage approach. Results shows five distinct keywords attributed to each city. Each keyword found to be relevant in representing the image of destination cities based on the public opinion on Twitter. For keyword "Culture and Cultural", term "British" and "Black" represent London and New York the best, respectively. In keyword "Entertainment", term "James Bond" and "Broadway" represent London and New York, respectively. In keyword "Festival", term "Lumiere" and "Global Citizen Festival" are best in describing city of London and New York, respectively. In keyword "Food", term "traditional British food" best describes London and "Food truck" best describes New York. The keyword "Shopping" exhibits term "Etsy" as the image of London and "Kate Spade" as the image for New York. This research reveals the value of social media analysis and the ability of text mining as an effective technique to extract opinions from vast amount of available social media data. Recommendations related to tourism strategic plan are made to facilitate possible future destination image studies.


In regression problems, making accurate predictions is often the primary goal. Also, relevance of inputs in the prediction of an output would be valuable information in many cases. A sequential input selection algorithm for Radial basis function (SISAL-RBF) networks is presented to analyze importances of the inputs. The ranking of inputs is based on values, which are evaluated from the partial derivatives of the network. The proposed method is applied to benchmark data sets. It yields accurate prediction models, which are parsimonious in terms of the input variables.


We have undertaken spectral energy distribution (SED) modelling of discs around low-mass T Tauri stars in order to delineate regions of the infrared two-colour plane (K - [8] versus K - [24]) that correspond to discs in different evolutionary stages. This provides a tool for classifying the nature of star-disc systems based on infrared photometry. In particular, we demonstrate the distinct loci followed by discs that undergo 'uniform draining' (reduction in surface density by a spatially uniform factor) from those that clear from the inside-out. We draw attention to the absence of objects on this 'draining locus' in those star-forming regions where the 24-μm sensitivity would permit their detection, as compared with the ~20 objects in these regions with colours suggestive of inner holes. We thus conclude that discs predominantly clear from the inside-out. We also apply our classification of the infrared two-colour plane to stars of spectral types M3-M5 in the IC 348 cluster and show that some of its members (dubbed 'weak excess' sources by Muzerolle et al.) that had previously been assumed to be in a state of clearing are instead likely to be optically thick discs in which the dust is well settled towards the mid-plane. Nevertheless, there are many discs in a state of partial clearing in IC 348, with their abundance (relative to the total population of disc bearing stars) being around four times higher than for comparable stars in Taurus. However, the number of partially cleared discs relative to the total number of late-type stars is similarly low in both regions (10 and 20 per cent, respectively). We therefore conclude that IC 348 represents a more evolved version of the Taurus population (with more of its discs being highly settled or partially cleared) but that the time-scale for clearing is similarly short (a few times 10 5 yr) in both cases.


There is a lot of research interest in encoding variable length sentences into fixed length vectors, in a way that preserves the sentence meanings. Two common methods include representations based on averaging word vectors, and representations based on the hidden states of recurrent neural networks such as LSTMs. The sentence vectors are used as features for subsequent machine learning tasks or for pre-training in the context of deep learning. However, not much is known about the properties that are encoded in these sentence representations and about the language information they capture. We propose a framework that facilitates better understanding of the encoded representations. We define prediction tasks around isolated aspects of sentence structure (namely sentence length, word content, and word order), and score representations by the ability to train a classifier to solve each prediction task when using the representation as input. We demonstrate the potential contribution of the approach by analyzing different sentence representation mechanisms. The analysis sheds light on the relative strengths of different sentence embedding methods with respect to these low level prediction tasks, and on the effect of the encoded vector's dimensionality on the resulting representations.


This paper suggest the need to use both qualitative and quantitative research methods to engage stakeholders across scales so as to improve Chile´s adaptation policy framework. Historic climatic trends show alarming changes, both in rainfall and temperature patterns. In large parts of central Chile annual rainfall has considerably diminish by more than 1 mm per m2 per year since the 20th century. Moreover, throughout the 20th and first part of the 21st century, minimum and maximum mean temperatures have generally increased, but in some cases they have decreased. Socioeconomic groups, such as farmers, are highly exposed to extreme weather events, being in all cases aware of climatological changes. In addition, farmers are a reliable source of past/present weather information, while being imperative on the understanding of other socioeconomic and environmental related issues. Nevertheless, instead of being considered in the decision making-process they are often left apart. Finally, this paper thoroughly analyzes climatic trends in central Chile, Coquimbo and Maule regions, the ways they are being perceived by weather dependent groups and whether the government is generating sufficient tools for adaptation to the changing weather conditions


: This essay explores what obligations we have to protect the Great lakes ecosystem from the threat of aquatic invasive species within the context of Aldo Leopold"s seminal essay in environmental philosophy The Land Ethic . In this essay I argue that Leopold"s land ethic provides a consistent and dynamic paradigm for how we perceive and protect the natural environment. The land ethic is summarized in what I call Leopold's Edict which directs us to preserve the health and beauty of the natural environment. The land ethic implies that people interested in conservation must develop a firm understanding of what is necessary by experience with nature. The experience of venturing out into the natural world allows us to enter into a relationship with the land and thereby develop sound judgment in our ecological decision-making. This judgment, the judgment that a craftsman may have is more finely tuned due to the experience. The best way to come to this level of judgment is both through an understanding of the scientific and natural history but it is also vital that an understanding of the natural aesthetics be present as we make conservation decisions. Not all invasive species will pose substantial threats and possible response will vary because ecosystems are dynamic not static. New solutions will need to be discovered, but it seems as though Leopold"s land ethic can provide a versatile framework within which to determine the best solutions. Versatility does not mean that it is adaptable to whatever moral winds seem to be blowing at the time, but rather that it will help us to discover the mean between two extremes and therefore give us a virtuous response to each new threat.


Nutritive options for ruminants, which have been proposed to mitigate methane (CH4) emissions, are used to showcase how decision strategies enable reasonable decision-making in case of various types of uncertainty of information regarding the policy decision problem. Decision strategies concerning the scope of the decision problem and the timing of decision-making provide a systematic structure for deliberation and learning about these types of uncertainty. Regarding nutritive options for ruminants, incompleteness, inherent variability, and unreliability of information about the options, outcomes and stakes involved speak against accepting the proposed list of options and closure of the decision problem. However, the role of CH4 emissions from ruminants in abating global warming speaks against passive postponement of decision-making. Thus, decision strategies to be considered are adapting the list of options and active postponement, or possibly semi-closure, of decision-making.


Stochastic gradient optimization is a class of widely used algorithms for training machine learning models. To optimize an objective, it uses the noisy gradient computed from the random data samples instead of the true gradient computed from the entire dataset. However, when the variance of the noisy gradient is large, the algorithm might spend much time bouncing around, leading to slower convergence and worse performance. In this paper, we develop a general approach of using control variate for variance reduction in stochastic gradient. Data statistics such as low-order moments (pre-computed or estimated online) is used to form the control variate. We demonstrate how to construct the control variate for two practical problems using stochastic gradient optimization. One is convex—the MAP estimation for logistic regression, and the other is non-convex—stochastic variational inference for latent Dirichlet allocation. On both problems, our approach shows faster convergence and better performance than the classical approach.


The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have largely abdicated their role to scrutinize and challenge mergers in zero-priced industries. This abdication derives from a Chicago School assumption that concentration in these industries will not lead to consumer harm. Due to the agencies' hands-off approach to merger review, the digital economy is rapidly concentrating as firms are permitted to acquire their competitors with no meaningful antitrust supervision. Increased consolidation of ownership is evident in the dating app industry. One firm has acquired twenty-five rival dating apps in the past decade and now operates over forty-five distinct dating sites, including Tinder, OkCupid, and Hinge. In this Note, I argue that increased concentration and decreased competition in the dating app sector can lead to three types of consumer harm: price discrimination, deterioration of quality, and reduced data privacy.


Book synopsis: This book seeks to illuminate what we call the cultural lives of cause lawyers by examining their representation in various popular media (including film, fiction, mass-marketed non-fiction, television, and journalism), the work they do as creators of cultural products, and the way those representations and products are received and consumed by various audiences. By attending to media representations and the culture work done by cause lawyers, we can see what material is available for citizens and others to use in fashioning understandings of those lawyers. This book also provides a vehicle for determining whether, how, and to what extent cause lawyering is embedded in the discourses and symbolic practice around which ordinary citizens organize their understanding of social, political, and legal life. This book brings together research on the legal profession with work that takes up the analysis of popular culture. Contributors to this work include scholars of popular culture who turn their attention to cause lawyers and experts on cause lawyering who in turn focus their attention on popular culture. This is a joining of perspectives that is both long overdue and fruitful for both kinds of scholarship.


Discovering methods to combat poverty and social exclusion has now become a major political challenge in Europe. This book offers an original and timely analysis of how actors at the European, national and subnational levels meet this challenge. Combining perspectives on multilevel and network coordination, the editors discuss to what extent actors join forces in these efforts and identify the factors limiting the coordination achieved in practice. The book builds on a European study comparing Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the UK.


Given the small body of existing research concerning focus on form at the post-task stage in task-based language teaching, the present study uses a post-task transcribing condition as a focus on form activity and explores the effects of transcribing under various conditions. Eighty participants, divided into four experimental groups and one control group completed four tasks with a one-week interval between each task. Different experimental groups were assigned various post-task activities respectively. No post-task activity was adopted in the control group. Task performance was measured in terms of complexity, accuracy and lexical performance. The findings are multifaceted. First of all, the adoption of post-task transcribing, in general, was found to be efficient for different formal aspects of task performance. In the second place, pair-based transcribing led to more syntactically complex language, whereas the individual-based transcribing at the post-task stage led to an improvement in lexical sophistication. Thirdly, further revision after transcribing had mixed effects on accuracy and complexity. The findings are discussed in light of the concepts of noticing and attention, interaction theory and other related SLA theories. Based on the theoretical discussion, pedagogical implications are proposed.


The research is in the field of conservation of digitally printed materials. In order to accurately edit these proceedings the editors required detailed knowledge in all research aspects covered during the conference.

The conference was held on 24th & 25th March 2003 at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh as part of the Institute of Physics Annual Physics Congress 2003. The conference was jointly organised by the Institute of Physics 3Ps Group and The London College of Printing, The London Institute. The conference was organised by Andrew Manning, Robert Thompson and Anthony Smith.

The conference proceedings were edited and compiled by Andrew Manning and Robert Thompson.

The conference was the second international event, the first being held in 2000. The conference was unique in attracting speakers from industry and academic institutions as well as standards organisations. There were four sessions; session one dealt with the concerns of the artists and printmakers, session two with materials, processes and permanence issues, session three dealt with standards and the last session with digital photography. At the end of each session there was a panel discussion, these has been reproduced in the proceedings. The second panel, which dealt with Materials, Processes and Permanence Issues, was chaired by the researcher. As well as the printed papers there is an accompanying CD showing additional material which again was compiled by the editors.

The proceedings are a unique collection of research papers and discussions on the topics of conservation and preservation of digitally produced material. They are to be found in many libraries throughout the world. The Institute of Physics were still reporting a demand for these proceedings in 2005, at the subsequent conference held in 2006 all the remaining copies were sold.


Glaucoma is a debilitating optical degeneration disease that can lead to vision loss and eventually blindness. Given its asymptomatic nature, most people with Glaucoma aren't even aware that they have the disease. As a result, the disease is often left untreated until it is too late. Detecting the presence of Glaucoma is one of the most important steps in treating Glaucoma, but is unfortunately also the most difficult to enforce. The Mobile Glaucoma Detection application aims to reduce the growing number of individuals who are unaware that they have Glaucoma by providing a simple detection mechanism to notify users if they are at risk. The system does this by enabling its users to independently conduct Tonometry exams through the application. Tonometry examinations allow doctors to determine if the intra-ocular pressure levels in a person's eyes put them at risk for Glaucoma. The M.G.D.A(Mobile Glaucoma Detection Application) allows users to determine their intra-ocular pressure levels from the comfort of their own home via a special contact lens paired with a smartphone application. The system also offers users the opportunity to monitor, regulate, and track their use and progress through the system.


This anthology provides insightful data on and discussions of a wide array of popular cultural manifestations and theoretical perspectives, covering such issues as kinship, religion, conflict resolution, music, cinema, drama, and literary texts. The issues cohere around the understanding that culture is situational and political. Going beyond merely challenging popular stereotypes and representations of Africans and African related practices in various outlets, the book reveals how popular cultural practices are instruments that have been manipulated for personal and collective survival.BR> The book is distinctive in its codification and explication of aspects of popular practices that are based on data from countries in Africa, Europe, and the Americas that showcase cultural negotiations either with reference to how notions, values, norms, and images of Africans have been packaged and exploited over the years or how popular cultures are used as tools of resistance and agitation by the various focal groups that are discussed. The topics are presented and illustrated in ways easily accessible to readers of all backgrounds. Toyin Falola is the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor in History at the University of Texas at Austin as well as a University Distinguished Teaching Professor. Augustine Agwuele is an assistant professor of linguistics in the Department of Anthropology, Texas State University, San Marcos. Contributors: Arinpe Adejumo, Augustine Agwuele, Antoinette Tidjani Alou, Maurice N. Amutabi, Tokunbo A. Ayoola, Nicholas M. Creary, Toyin Falola, Celeste A. Fisher, Denise Amy-Rose Forbes-Erickson, Hetty ter Haar, Debra L. Klein, Emmanuel M. Mbah, Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, and Asonzeh Ukah


Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) have been identified as key endothelial signaling molecules regulating lipid metabolism, and contributing to the metabolic derangements associated with Type 2 Diabetes. We investigated whether PPARβ activation can prevent palmitate-induced endothelial dysfunction using ex vivo and in vitro models, focusing on the rate-limiting enzyme for beta-oxidation, carnitine palmitoyl transferase (CPT)-1. Acetylcholine-induced endothelium-dependent relaxation in mouse thoracic aortic (MTA) rings was measured using wire myography, and mouse aortic endothelial cell (MAEC) function was assessed in the presence or absence of palmitate, with or without the PPARβ agonist and antagonist, GW0742(1 µM), or GSK0660(1 µM) respectively. MAECs were also transfected with control or CPT-1-specific siRNA. Nitric oxide (NO) and reactive oxygen species (ROS) production was measured using DAF and DHE respectively, while western blotting and RT-PCR was used to assess eNOS and CPT-1 expression respectively. Palmitate impairs endothelium-dependent relaxation to acetylcholine and attenuates eNOS phosphorylation in MTA, also reducing A23187-stimulated NO, and increasing ROS production in MAECs. GW0742 improved endothelial function, increased NO production and suppressed ROS generation induced by palmitate. RT-PCR demonstrated a marked increase of CPT-1 expression in GW0742-treated MAECs, an effect abolished by GSK0660 or the CPT-1 inhibitor etomoxir. CPT-1 siRNA, also blunted i) CPT-1 up-regulation, ii) elevated NO bioavailability, and iii) reduction in ROS generation induced by GW0742, in palmitate-treated MAECs. PPARβ activation protects against palmitate-induced endothelial dysfunction ex vivo and attenuates the damage in activated MAECs in vitro. These novel cytoprotective effects appear to operate via increased beta-oxidation resulting from CPT-1 up-regulation.


The author in this paper tries to answer the question of status of American dollar as the world's reserve currency in the context of American economic and political power in crisis conditions and new positioning of leading world countries. Is the thesis still relevant - dollar as world reserve currency has been positioned there as a result of historic conditions, developed American financial market, and confidence in stability and value of that currency? The paper analyses the relationship between trade deficit and collapse of dollar, export of American crisis to the rest of the world, hidden and concealed inflation, American capital market, American debt, implications of power sector prices fall, dollar, euro, Yuan and Yen. The intriguing issue is how much dollar as reserve currency has been a blessing and/or a curse to the USA. The destiny of dollar in the conditions of recession of American economy has also been discussed and the emerging of BRICS countries, as well as, inevitability of establishing of a new monetary system and introduction of reserve world currency.


The outbreak of COVID-19 Disease due to the novel coronavirus has caused a shortage of medical resources. To aid and accelerate the diagnosis process, automatic diagnosis of COVID-19 via deep learning models has recently been explored by researchers across the world. While different data-driven deep learning models have been developed to mitigate the diagnosis of COVID-19, the data itself is still scarce due to patient privacy concerns. Federated Learning (FL) is a natural solution because it allows different organizations to cooperatively learn an effective deep learning model without sharing raw data. However, recent studies show that FL still lacks privacy protection and may cause data leakage. We investigate this challenging problem by proposing a simple yet effective algorithm, named Federated Learning on Medical Datasets using Partial Networks (FLOP), that shares only a partial model between the server and clients. Extensive experiments on benchmark data and real-world healthcare tasks show that our approach achieves comparable or better performance while reducing the privacy and security risks. Of particular interest, we conduct experiments on the COVID-19 dataset and find that our FLOP algorithm can allow different hospitals to collaboratively and effectively train a partially shared model without sharing local patients' data.


Herpesvirus saimiri (saimiriine herpesvirus 2) is the classical prototype of the gamma(2)-herpesviruses or rhadinoviruses, which also contains a human member, the Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus. The T-lymphotropic Herpesvirus saimiri establishes specific replicative and persistent conditions in different primate host species. Virtually all squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus) are persistently infected with this virus. In its natural host, the virus does not cause disease, whereas it induces fatal acute T-cell lymphoma in other monkey species after experimental infection. The virus can be isolated by cocultivation of permissive epithelial cells with peripheral blood cells from naturally infected squirrel monkeys and from susceptible New World monkeys during the virus-induced disease. Tumour-derived and in vitro-transformed T-cell lines from New World monkeys release virus particles. Herpesvirus ateles is a closely related virus of spider monkeys (Ateles spp.) and has similar pathogenic properties to Herpesvirus saimiri in other New World primate species. Similar to other rhadinoviruses, the genome of Herpesvirus saimiri harbours a series of virus genes with pronounced homology to cellular counterparts including a D-type cyclin, a G-protein-coupled receptor, an interleukin-17, a superantigen homologue, and several inhibitors of the complement cascade and of different apoptosis pathways. Preserved function has been demonstrated for most of the homologues of cellular proteins. These viral functions are mostly dispensable for the transforming and pathogenic capability of the virus. However, they are considered relevant for the apathogenic persistence of Herpesvirus saimiri in its natural host. A terminal region of the non-repetitive coding part of the virus genome is essential for pathogenicity and T-cell transformation. Based on the pathogenic phenotypes and the different alleles of this variable region, the virus strains have been assigned to three subgroups, termed A, B and C. In the highly oncogenic subgroup C strains, the two virus genes stpC and tip are transcribed from one bicistronic mRNA and are essential for transformation and leukaemia induction. stpC fulfils the typical criteria of an oncogene; its product interacts with Ras and tumour necrosis factor-associated factors and induces mitogen-activated protein kinase and nuclear factor kappa B activation. Tip interacts with the RNA transport factor Tap, with signal transduction and activation of transcription factors, and with the T-cellular tyrosine kinase Lck, which is activated by this interaction and phosphorylates Tip as a substrate. It is of particular interest that certain subgroup C virus strains such as C488 are capable of transforming human T lymphocytes to stable growth in culture. The transformed human T cells harbour multiple copies of the viral genome in the form of stable, non-integrated episomes. The cells express only a few virus genes and do not produce virus particles. The transformed cells maintain the antigen specificity and many other essential functions of their parental T-cell clones. Based on the preserved functional phenotype of the transformed T cells, Herpesvirus saimiri provides useful tools for T-cell immunology, for gene transfer and possibly also for experimental adoptive immunotherapy.


This study deals with imparting special effects on denim fabric using novel finishes. Special finishes are applied on desized indigo dyed cotton fabric. Their impacts are evaluated concerning breaking force, spectral characteristics and surface appearance. The results show significant differences among modern special treatments, thus providing important data on the processing of denim. All finishes show decrease in breaking force and cause changes in spectral characteristics of the treated samples. The results indicate that some of them are acceptable only as an effective segment on a garment.


Legal academics are not only teachers but also creators of knowledge. The role of an academic includes a responsibility to share this knowledge through engagement not just of their students,but also of the wider community. In addition, there is increasing emphasis on legal academics having to account for the so-called 'impact' of research. In selecting both the topic of their research and the mode of publication of their knowledge, legal academics act as gatekeepers. There is an increasing critique of the existing paradigm of research publication and its emphasis on the metrics of impact. This critique recognises the limitations of the commercial publication paradigm in the present context of open access and the vast array of citizen-mediated platforms for dissemination of legal knowledge and innovation. Susskind (Tomorrow's Lawyers 2013) for example identifies expert crowd-sourced legal information as breaking down barriers to access to justice. Tracking their experience with publication of a paper on social media in legal education from the ALTA conference in 2012, the authors share an auto-ethnographic account of their insights into the potential for both impact and engagement of a diverse audience in their research. This highlights the ways in which various media can be used strategically to redefine the role of the gatekeeper.


We examine two widely used treatment strategies for African animal trypanosomosis in West Africa: preventive drug control ex-ante trypanosomosis infection and curative drug control ex-post trypanosomosis infection. We investigate which combination of these alternative strategies is economically optimal for cattle farmers. We apply a dynamic optimisation framework to consider both the negative externality of drug resistance development and human behaviour. We develop a bio-economic model to simulate the economic consequences of treatment strategies in a dynamic scenario that takes into account the interactions among the vector, host and livestock farmers. This model allows for the evolution of drug-resistant trypanosomes through trypanocide misuse and simulates the observed behaviours of cattle farmers based on the elicited risk and time preferences of a sample of 202 cattle farmers in Mali and Burkina Faso. The results show that the private optimal mix of treatment strategies for a risk averse and patient farmer involves preventive treatment for susceptible cattle, supported by a small number of curative treatments for infected cattle. Compared with the treatment strategies observed in the field, this optimal mix of treatment strategies would save approximately 5% of the annual income of a livestock farmer in the study area and would reduce the prevalence of trypanosomosis. In addition, we demonstrate that a reduction in a farmer's risk aversion is associated with higher treatment rates that can avoid additional losses. By contrast, a decrease in a farmer's patience is related to lower treatment rates that thwart additional benefits. Our results suggest that individual risk and time preferences need to be considered in the development process of disease control interventions.


Rhodopsin is a canonical class A photosensitive G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR), yet relatively few pharmaceutical agents targeting this visual receptor have been identified, in part due to the unique characteristics of its light-sensitive, covalently bound retinal ligands. Rhodopsin becomes activated when light isomerizes 11-cis retinal into an agonist, all-trans-retinal (ATR), which enables the receptor to activate its G protein. We have previously demonstrated that, despite being covalently bound, ATR can display properties of equilibrium binding; yet how this is accomplished is unknown.  Here we describe a new approach for both identifying compounds that can activate and attenuate rhodopsin, and for testing the hypothesis that opsin binds retinal in equilibrium. Our method uses opsin-based fluorescent sensors, which directly report the formation of active receptor conformations by detecting the binding of G protein or arrestin fragments that have been fused onto the receptor's C-terminus.  We show that these biosensors can be used to monitor equilibrium binding of the agonist, all-trans retinal (ATR), as well as the non-covalent binding of β-ionone, an antagonist for G-protein activation. Finally, we use these novel biosensors to observe ATR release from an activated, unlabeled receptor and its subsequent transfer to the sensor in real time. Taken together, these data support the retinal equilibrium binding hypothesis. The approach we describe should prove directly translatable to other GPCRs, providing a new tool for ligand discovery and mutant characterization.


The volatility of sub-micrometer atmospheric aerosol particles was studied in a rural background environment in Finland using a combination of a heating tube and a scanning mobility particle sizer. The analysis focused on nanoparticles formed through nucleation which were subsequently observed during their growth in the diameter range between 5 and 60 nm. During the 6 days of new particle formation shown in detail, the concentrations of newly formed particles increased up to 10 000 cm −3 . The number of nucleation mode particles measured after volatilization in the heating tube at 280°C was up to 90% of the total number under ambient conditions. Taking into account the absolute accuracy of the size distribution measurements, all ambient particles found in the rural atmosphere could have a non-volatile core after volatilization at 280°C. As the regional new particle formation events developed over time as a result of further vapor condensation, the newly formed particles grew at an average growth rate of 2.4±0.3 nm h −1 . Importantly, the non-volatile cores of nucleation mode particles were also observed to grow over time, however, at a lower average growth rate of 0.6±0.3 nm h −1 . One implication of the volatility analysis is that the newly formed particles, which have reached ambient diameters of 15 nm, are unlikely to consist of sulfuric acid, ammonium sulfate, and water alone. A relatively constant ratio between the growth rate of the ambient particles as well as their non-volatile cores indicates that non-volatile matter is formed only gradually in the growing particles. The non-volatile fraction of the particles showed some correlation with the ambient temperature. The composition and formation mechanism of this non-volatile material in nucleation mode particles are, to date, not known.


Aerosolized fluorescent microspheres were used to study particle deposition in site‐specific regions of the lung with confocal laser scanning microscopy. A nebulizer was used to aerosolize microspheres followed by passage through a heated discharging column to reduce static charge and to remove water surrounding each microsphere. Precoating of microspheres with albumin helped to minimize displacement during vascular fixation of the lungs. Confocal laser microscopy facilitated visualization of microspheres throughout the bronchial tree, ducts, and alveoli of the lungs. The use of fluorescent microspheres and confocal laser imaging provided distinct advantages compared with other methods to study lung particle deposition due to (1) the generation of single microspheres of uniform size by nebulization, (2) easy detection of microspheres in large slabs of microdissected lung tissues, (3) excellent resolution of tissue surfaces and microspheres for an infinite number of orientations and planes of section, and (4) the ability to visualize microspheres below fluid lining layers and on surfaces that could not easily be done by other methods of microscopy.© 1993 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.


Multi-agent path planning is a challenging problem with numerous real-life applications. Running a centralized search such as A* in the combined state space of all units is complete and cost-optimal, but scales poorly, as the state space size is exponential in the number of mobile units. Traditional decentralized approaches, such as FAR and WHCA*, are faster and more scalable, being based on problem decomposition. However, such methods are incomplete and provide no guarantees with respect to the running time or the solution quality. They are not necessarily able to tell in a reasonable time whether they would succeed in finding a solution to a given instance.

We introduce MAPP, a tractable algorithm for multi-agent path planning on undirected graphs. We present a basic version and several extensions. They have low-polynomial worst-case upper bounds for the running time, the memory requirements, and the length of solutions. Even though all algorithmic versions are incomplete in the general case, each provides formal guarantees on problems it can solve. For each version, we discuss the algorithm's completeness with respect to clearly defined subclasses of instances.

Experiments were run on realistic game grid maps. MAPP solved 99.86% of all mobile units, which is 18-22% better than the percentage of FAR and WHCA*. MAPP marked 98.82% of all units as provably solvable during the first stage of plan computation. Parts of MAPP's computation can be re-used across instances on the same map. Speed-wise, MAPP is competitive or significantly faster than WHCA*, depending on whether MAPP performs all computations from scratch. When data that MAPP can re-use are preprocessed offline and readily available, MAPP is slower than the very fast FAR algorithm by a factor of 2.18 on average. MAPP's solutions are on average 20% longer than FAR's solutions and 7-31% longer than WHCA*'s solutions.


South Asia is a rich and fascinating linguistic area, its many hundreds of languages from four major language families representing the distinctions of caste, class, profession, religion, and region.This comprehensive new volume presents an overview of the language situation in this vast subcontinent in a linguistic, historical, and sociolinguistic context. An invaluable resource, it comprises authoritative contributions from leading international scholars within the fields of South Asian language and linguistics, historical linguistics, cultural studies, and area studies. Topics covered include the ongoing linguistic processes, controversies, and implications of language modernization; the functions of South Asian languages within the legal system, media, cinema, and religion; language conflicts and politics; and Sanskrit and its long traditions of study and teaching. Language in South Asia is an accessible interdisciplinary book for students and scholars in sociolinguistics, multilingualism, language planning, and South Asian studies.


CONTEXT
New York City firefighters responding to the World Trade Center (WTC) disaster on September 11, 2001, were exposed to numerous hazards. A medical screening program was conducted 3 weeks after the disaster on a sample of firefighters.

OBJECTIVES
To determine whether arrival time at the WTC and other exposure variables (including respirator use) were associated with symptoms and changes in pulmonary function (after exposure - before exposure).

DESIGN
A cross-sectional comparison of firefighters representing the following groups: (1) firefighters who arrived before/during the WTC collapse, (2) firefighters who arrived 1 to 2 days after the collapse, (3) firefighters who arrived 3 to 7 days after the collapse, and (4) unexposed firefighters.

SETTING
Fire Department of New York City (FDNY) Bureau of Health Services on October 1 to 5, 2001.

POPULATION
A stratified random sample of 362 of 398 recruited working firefighters (91%). Of these, 149 firefighters (41%) were present at the WTC collapse, 142 firefighters (39%) arrived after the collapse but within 48 h, 28 firefighters (8%) arrived 3 to 7 days after the collapse, and 43 firefighters (12%) were unexposed.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
New/worsening symptoms involving the eyes, skin, respiratory system, and nose and throat (NT), and changes in spirometry from before to after exposure.

RESULTS
During the first 2 weeks at the WTC site, 19% of study firefighters reported not using a respirator; 50% reported using a respirator but only rarely. Prevalence ratios (PRs) for skin, eye, respiratory, and NT symptoms showed a dose-response pattern between exposure groups based on time of arrival at the WTC site, with PRs between 2.6 and 11.4 with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) excluding 1.0 for all but skin symptoms. For those spending > 7 days at the site, the PR for respiratory symptoms was 1.32 (95% CI, 1.13 to 1.55), compared with those who were exposed for < 7 days. Mean spirometry results before and after exposure were within normal limits. The change in spirometry findings (after exposure - before exposure) showed near-equal reductions for FVC and FEV(1). These reductions were greater than the annual reductions measured in a referent population of incumbent FDNY firefighters prior to September 11 (p <or= 0.05). There was a 60% increased risk of a decline of >or= 450 mL in FEV(1) in those arriving during the first 48 h compared to the referent (p <or= 0.05).

CONCLUSIONS
The symptoms and pulmonary function changes following exposure at the WTC demonstrate the need for improvements in respirators and their use, as well as long-term medical monitoring of rescue workers.


This paper analyzes the effect of trade liberalization on government spending in a general equilibrium model with a continuum of industries supplying tradable and nontradable goods under monopolistic competition. Trade liberalization is modeled as the opening up of product markets between two countries, which may differ in total factor productivity, factor endowment and fix cost technology. In this setup, I show that the optimal provision of a public consumption good depends positively on the degree of openness. Moreover, the richer and more productive country chooses a lower optimal government share.