Aim The purpose of our study is to analyse the activities initiated by the foundation of the reformpools on the regional level. We wanted to see not only what projects have emerged from these funds, but also how the incentives of this special way of funding influence the activity and what overall impact can be expected on health services delivery in the future. Context In Austria, all expenses in the outpatient sector are borne by the statutory health insurance. But in the inpatient sector, SHI just co-finances about 45% of all costs incurred by patients, with the rest contributed by the federal, regional and municipal level. This, however, leads to a number of problems in today's epidemiological situation with patients in need of many different interventions in the course of their chronic disease. Originally with the aim of finding solutions to these interface problems between inpatient and outpatient care, the healthcare reform 2005 instated the instrument of the reformpool. The reformpool unites funds from social health insurance and regions to finance projects that develop new ways of health services delivery across the sectors. In the course of recent reforms, it became explicitly possible to sponsor projects of integrated care, which had de facto already been the case before. Theory The reform pool has various disincentives or wrong incentives compared to e.g. the German 'Anschubfinanzierung' for IC-contracts, which was probably a role-model for the Austrian reformpool, because of the underlying differences in the healthcare system and the distinct differences in the regulation. For example, the 'Anschubfinanzierung' in Germany withdraws money from the available funds for contract physicians to finance IC-projects, whereas in Austria, their fees are fixed. So in Austria, there is no incentive to retrieve money by participating in such projects. For the stakeholders supplying the pool, mainly the sickness funds and the regions, many projects inflict additional costs on the one or on the other in the future. So as both parties have to agree on projects, there is a strong basic disincentive to grant funds in the present. If a project is in both their interest because it is reducing costs, the care providers might not be interested to participate, as this would diminish their revenues in the future. What is more, the federal control over the (region-based) funds and projects is poor, which might lead to duplication of efforts and missing scale-efficiency in some regions. Methods and data For our analysis, we conducted a survey with a standardised questionnaire sent to the management of the regional health funds, which are responsible for the reformpool funds. The questionnaire was checked by experts of the federal association of social security institutions. We also conducted an on-site visit of the reformpool-manager, a programme which can be used to evaluate the reformpool-projects. In addition, we used all available evaluation reports of projects to assess the situation of evaluation of the projects. Furthermore, we used financial data from the regional health funds, the federal association of social security institutions, from the ministry of health and the regional health funds to assess the usage of the reformpool. (Preliminary) Results The qualitative results are mixed. Some projects are promising with regard to improvements of the current situation and are well evaluated. Many projects neglect the requirement of the reformpool to be such as to yield a monetary benefit for the system but only focus on improving service delivery. Some evaluations are not well operationalised and thus, arguments why these projects should be transformed to ordinarily financed services will be lacking. The reformpool activity set on very slowly, with only one project already started in 2005, the first possible year. In 2007 we see the highest number (23) of new projects granted and the highest monetary volume, €11 Mio total for 21 of them 1, with activity subsiding in 2008 (6 projects with a volume of € 2.5 Mio total for 5 of them 1) and most certainly in 2009 (with diminishing tax revenues and health insurance contributions) with only one project granted in the first quarter of the year. Of all funds (theoretically) available, only about 16% have been put to use in a reformpool project per year, with high variation (e.g. in the region of Styria over 30%, in Tyrol only 1.5%). (Preliminary) Conclusions From our study we can tell that the instrument of reformpool was not devised well concerning its incentive structure, and the interest to conduct such projects is diminishing. Stricter control of the requirements by the federal level, more pronounced requirements, a dedication of the funds to projects instead of a virtual budget and more cooperation between regions could improve the effectiveness of the instrument. Conflicts of interest: The project was funded by the federal association of social security institutions. All authors are researchers at the IHS and hold no commercial interests in the subject. Additional information: Founded by the economist Oskar Morgenstern and the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, the IHS (Institute for Advanced Studies) is a non-profit post-graduate teaching and research facility in the fields of economics, sociology and politology, and one of the two Austrian institutes preparing the official economic forecast for Austria. For more than a decade, it has been one of the major research facilities in the fields of health economics and health policy in Austria.


The laser microprobe is a useful tool for the analysis of specific sample areas of approximately 50 μ diameter. The auxiliary spark excitation of Brech and Cross1 increases spectrum intensity but results in a staining of metal sample surfaces in the area of analysis.2 Sample surface detail is thus obscured and selection of analysis sites for subsequent determinations is extremely difficult. The capability of the laser microprobe to selectively sample closely adjacent areas is thereby nullified. Deposition of the stain can be restricted to the dimensions of a central hole in a paper shield; however, placement of a shield is difficult even for plane surface samples.


The potential benefits to the US economy from Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) are substantial but the United States can enjoy them only if it grants Russia permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) status—by repealing application to Russia of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which bars favorable trade relations with countries that restrict emigration. While congressional approval is not necessary for completion of Russian accession to the WTO, Congress needs to grant Russia PNTR to make it possible for US companies to take full advantage of the best available conditions of access to the Russian market for both trade and investment. Aslund and Hufbauer calculate that US exports to Russia could double over the next five years—from $9 billion in 2010 to $19 billion—adding jobs in the services, agriculture, manufacturing, and high-tech sectors. More generally, with Russia's accession to the WTO and the United States granting PNTR to Russia, US-Russia commercial relations will be set on a sounder and friendlier footing, facilitating cooperation on national security and political issues. By strengthening the rules-based global trading system, WTO accession and PNTR will discourage Russia from undertaking protectionist measures. President Barack Obama has stated that he looks forward to working with Congress "to end the application of the Jackson-Vanik amendment to Russia in order to ensure that American firms and American exporters will enjoy the same benefits of Russian WTO membership as their international competitors." It is imperative that Congress respond constructively in the same spirit of bipartisanship that led to the successful approval earlier this year of the Colombia, Korea, and Panama trade accords. Political wrangling, misjudgment, and miscalculations must not be allowed to cost the United States a significant new source of economic growth and cooperation in the future.


This paper describes procedures for taking solar aureole photographs with conventional small format (35-or 70-mm) cameras and films and discusses photographic-photometry techniques for obtaining accurate solar aureole radiance measurements from these photographs, the measurements being used for retrieving atmospheric aerosol characteristics. The photographic data reduction techniques discussed here include sensitometry, densitometry, off-axis illumination distribution measurement, photogrammetry and photometry relations, etc. Comparison tests show that photographic measurements of the solar aureole radiance agree well with simultaneous photoelectric measurements.


The primary cilium was first discovered over 100 years ago but only relatively recently has it been widely regarded as an integral cellular organelle for brain development, maturation and function. Defects in primary cilia contribute to a set of human disorders, ciliopathies, which are multi-systemic in pathology and often include abnormal CNS architecture and intellectual deficits. The intricate structure of the cilium and the molecules that localise to the axoneme all contribute to elegantly orchestrated signalling pathways that influence the whole cell. From their role in neural tube development, neuronal migration and differentiation, to their putative role in adult cognition, primary cilia are critical for diverse aspects of brain function. Yet our current understanding is still very limited: much remains to be discovered about primary cilia biology and ciliary function in the mammalian brain.

Key Concepts

Primary cilia are unusual cell organelles that look similar to antennae protruding from the cell.
Almost all brain cell types have primary cilia, which transduce signals from the milieu.
Ciliopathies in humans result from primary cilia defects and often include cognitive impairments and cortical malformations.
Primary cilia contribute to brain development and function.

Keywords:

cilia;
ciliopathy;
IFT;
axoneme;
neurogenesis;
neural patterning;
memory;
cognitive impairment


The management of many universities is in a state of transformation from the traditional collegiate, to a more structured corporate style of management. These universities are increasingly modelling their educational administration structures on structures used by business enterprises. At the same time there has been a remarkable technology shift which has enabled effective computer based learning linked to sophisticated online delivery mechanisms. Academics and educational managers are embracing the new technologies for a variety of reasons not all of which focus on improving educational outcomes. The transformation of universities from traditional to corporate management which has developed in conjunction with the technology shift has produced a whole new set of problems and opportunities and educational managers have yet to capitalize on the opportunities. This paper identifies these problems and opportunities and provides a framework for taking more control of the e-learning process in order to provide a better outcome for both students and educational managers. This paper initially examines the problems inherent in online delivery of both traditional university education and competency-base vocational training. We also present our research into student evaluations and how they can lead to false metrics. The paper then identifies better evaluation mechanisms for quality control. These mechanisms are presented as a unified framework for the ongoing evaluation of e-learning outcomes.


This article investigates the pre-Islamic name ʿAbd al-Asad and the alleged lion-god in the Arabic tradition through the onomastic evidence of two ancient Semitic languages (Eblaite and Amorite) as well as the ancient epigraphic languages of Arabia. The study suggests that the name has no association with the god Yaġūṯ under the form of a lion. Alternatively, it reflects either an 'archaic' astral cult related to Leo or a traditional namegiving practice known especially in the northern parts of the Arabian Penin-sula. According to this practice, the individual, whether being a child or an adult, could have been named ʿAbd-of-X after the person who took care of him (i.e. a patron) or the tribe he belonged to.


Stress testing, which has its roots in risk management, should be adapted to support financial stability monitoring and to incorporate the interconnections and dynamics of the financial system. Since the 2008 financial crisis, bank supervisors have honed their financial stability monitoring tools and significantly expanded the use of stress testing in the supervision of the largest financial institutions. This article describes areas in which further research could contribute to the development of best practices in stress testing and how bank supervisory stress tests can be made more useful for macroprudential supervision. We discuss both near-term and longer-term objectives.


"A very rich book sprinkled with real-life examples as well as battle-tested advice.Pierre Haren, VP ILOG, IBM"James does a thorough job of explaining Decision Management Systems as enablersof a formidable business transformation.Deepak Advani, Vice President, Business Analytics Products and SPSS, IBMBuild Systems That Work Actively to Help You Maximize Growth and ProfitsMost companies rely on operational systems that are largely passive. But what if you could make your systems active participants in optimizing your business? What if your systems could act intelligently on their own? Learn, not just report? Empower users to take action instead of simply escalating their problems? Evolve without massive IT investments?Decision Management Systems can do all that and more. In this book, the fields leading expert demonstrates how to use them to drive unprecedented levels of business value. James Taylor shows how to integrate operational and analytic technologies to create systems that are more agile, more analytic, and more adaptive. Through actual case studies, youll learn how to combine technologies such as predictive analytics, optimization, and business rulesimproving customer service, reducing fraud, managing risk, increasing agility, and driving growth.Both a practical how-to guide and a framework for planning, Decision Management Systems focuses on mainstream business challenges.Coverage includesUnderstanding how Decision Management Systems can transform your businessPlanning your systems with the decision in mindIdentifying, modeling, and prioritizing the decisions you need to optimizeDesigning and implementing robust decision servicesMonitoring your ongoing decision-making and learning how to improve itProven enablers of effective Decision Management Systems: people, process, and technologyIdentifying and overcoming obstacles that can derail your Decision Management Systems initiative


Generalized anxiety disorder is influenced by different emotional and cognitive components. The purpose of this study was to simultaneously investigate the role of cognitive regulation strategies of emotion, poor understanding of emotions, and thought-action combination in patients suffering from generalized anxiety disorder. The correlational method of the study was used in this study and the sample included 120 patients suffering from generalized anxiety disorder selected among the patients of four psychiatric centers in the city of Shiraz through available Sampling. The Cognitive Regulation Strategies Of Emotion questionnaires (Garnefsky et al, 2001), Beck's Anxiety (1988), Thoughts Combination Instrument (Wells et al, 2001) and Toronto's 20 Alexithymia Scale (Begbi et al, 1994) were used to collect data. The results showed that there was a significant and positive relationship between the difficulty in identifying and describing emotions, non-adaptive/maladaptive emotions regulation strategies and thought-action combination with generalized anxiety disorder. Stepwise Regression Analysis indicated that the difficulty in identifying emotions, non-adaptive emotions regulation strategies and the difficulty in describing emotions are appropriate predictors for this disorder, respectively. In overall, with regard to the role of emotional deficits and thought-action combination in generalized anxiety disorder, the above variables should be considered in prevention and treatment programs of this disorder.


B. Nyangone Assam and P.A. Mavoungou, Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, Republic of South Africa -Abstract: nus paper traces the historical development of lexicography in Gabon. Gabon, like most African countries, is multilingual. The recent inventories of languages spoken in Gabon ar~ those established by Jacquot (1978) and Kwenzi-Mikala (1998). According to Kwenzi-Mikala (1997), there are 62 speech fonns divided into 10 language groups or language-units in Gabon. These speech fonns co-exist with French, the official language. In fact, in article 2 of paragraph 8 of the revised Constitution of 1994 the following can be read: ''The Gabonese Republic adopts French as the official language. Furthennore, she endeavours to protect and promote the national languages." This constitutional arrangement naturally makes French the language used in education, administration and the media, The survey of lexicography in Gabon that is presented here inclUdes the linguistic situation in and the language policy of Gabon, the lexicographic survey itself, as well as the lexicographic needs of the different speech forms (including languages and dialects), Initially, the pioneers of Gabonese leXicography were missionaries or colonial administrators. Very little was done in this field by the Gabonese themselves. Although credit is to be given to these early works, there are a number of shortcomings regarding the linguistic as well as the metalexicographic contents of dictionaries and lexicons produced during this period. In fact, the main weak point of those studies was the lack of tones in the written transcription of oral productions and orthographic problems. Furthermore. in those contributions, the theory of lexicography is largely unknown and lexicographic works are hardly ever based on authentic data corpora of the languages veing described.


[ https://www.flickr.com/photos/57221817@N07/23966658969/]Flashback W e are in the forest behind the street of the neighbourhood and the city where i grew up between the age of five and up to high school.  It is a small town south of Gothenburg or maybe a  Stockholm suburb.  Since I grew up right next to the forest, I played a lot here on my own or together with, well usually, together with friends. The forest wasn't really that big but, you know, when you're a kid you love to just run around and explore it. This place is where we used to play a lot and also where I found my first porn magazines in the forest, at a very young age.  It's like some kind of a mixture between myth and some kind of reality and it's a bit sort of tricky to say what is what. Porr i skogen  is like a fairytale. It was never addressed from the adult world that there was  porr i skogen , it was more something that only we knew about. It's not like my parents or anyone close to me actually spoke about it or knew it existed, or if they did I thought they were like: who cares or that kind of thing.  But i don't remember anyone really talking about it, except me and my friends. It wasn't something that your parents would talk about. But I think it was real. I moved here when I was five and I think it was the first time that I found the porn magazines. I was probably six or seven, something like that.  There is this kind of vague memory of just walking around in the forest and then it was behind these kind of shrubbery bushes kind of stuff.  Because it wasn't just anywhere in the forest. It was often tucked down under rocks or next...between trees and rocks like this. Look. There were more like bits of porn, not the full magazines, just like, you know scraps of porn. Fragments of pages and fragments of bodies. You didn't see a whole body, it was like a leg there some breasts over there.  Pieces of paper – must be porn.  They were like strewn and kind of torn apart and they might have been rained on, so they were all like wrinkly.  You know, it wasn't plastic, it was paper, and if you put it here and you have one winter it just goes back to nature. I think most people knew about  porr i skogen  from being the one who found it, not really the one who brought it there. So i know lots of people who say, yeah we used to find it all the time in the forest, but I never heard someone say oh no I used to bring it to the forest all the time, I went to the store, I bought it, I went to the forest, you know, I sat there, found a nice spot and enjoyed my magazine. Porr i skogen  felt like if it wasn't just left there. It was very consciously placed somewhere, as if it were like a treasure.  I never understood who it was who brought them here. I always thought, how did they end up in the forest?.  And I think it's also because obviously it must have been teenagers, or I don't know,  maybe it was an adult. It felt a bit like the porn that was lying there was kind of a bit for everyone I guess, because if you would like to have it for yourself, you would hide it better.  I mean they were obviously used, or opened, or watched, or whatever people did with them. When we found them we were the secondary consumers.. It was probably like a plastic bag somewhere, like lying there or hidden under a rock, and then we opened it up, and it was like wow, and ran away, and then like ran back to check it out... or something like that. Porr i skogen  has both kind of a positive vibe to it, something like, oh that's nice, you know, you share your stuff. But on the other hand it is like really disgusting as well, because you know when you found this porn stuff, they were ... not so fresh. So we were climbing here and I remember that it was in the middle of a climb, so i was going up somewhere and then all of a sudden in front of me i had these things in front of me and i started to look through these papers, and in one of them I realized...oh here is like a naked person.  You didn't, the first time perhaps, you didn't even understand what it was.  So, it was on the one hand this plastic thing that smelled really bad, or that looked really gross, and on the other hand these magazines, so I thought there must be some connection here, but I didn't know what it was.  It was really funny cause when you encountered it, it was like wow is really weird that someone would stash these magazines there, and then I wondered whether it was actually other kids who were hiding the magazines in the forest, or if it was grown ups, and it was also like the forest was a little bit like a scary place.  Like this is a bit, sort of forbidden, and not really allowed but ok and, something that grown ups do, and you are not really supposed to see this. It was as bad as you could get, back then, with regards to media.  And then it's just sort of lying around in the forest and you can find it. It's like, in a forest you can find all kinds of stuff, I mean whatever people put there someone else will find it I guess, and in that sense it is the same on the internet, more or less. I guess it takes a bit longer to find it. Internet  used to provide this private sphere, and private communication without insight from others, that only the forest did before. Maybe the forest is the medium, and the internet is the medium, and then the porn is  the content .  I mean, also maybe the forest is media too and that it is like an experience right? You go into this world, and there are all these things that you like discover and may or may not see and there is like an interesting interplay of light and of humidity and smell and all these things are incredibly evocative and then of course, you are never the first person to discover a forest and the things of the forest . There are all these other people that have been there before, that have left like different traces of their lives, or have left things there to hide and discover later on. But it's like private room here, that you don't have in a house with a family and… but with internet you did, you could sit with the screen turned away from others, or everyone's asleep or everyone's at work or whatever. The internet provided that, so there was no need for the forest anymore. And in one way maybe it's a bit funny because, the porn, the porn industry for the last fifty years have always sort of invaded any kind of new technology that arrived, and also being quite important I guess, sometimes, in media politics and stuff. Maybe it's a bit funny that it also has invaded the forest, at least in Sweden. It's typical that when we think of the 80's now, this nostalgia and retro for the ages, it usually goes directly to video games, old computers, pop music and video – these things that already were media and stored. But like half of my memories aren't recorded. Maybe they are false or invented and I misremember like half of my past life? Maybe I romanticized part of it and made part of it more horrible than it actually was, or something like that, so this just leaves a lot more room for, i don't know, subjectivity.  Just like having real artifacts from things can seem very harsh and arbitrary, because also what gets stored in media is always just like a sliver of what actually happened, a specific viewpoint of what happened, you know, depends of whoever happened to be holding the camera in a sense. When tend to forget th at  all these things from our pre-internet childhood , which have never been  filmed by a video camera or recorded by someone did leave  physical traces; but paradoxically, the memory of it is gone in a way and  porr i skogen  then doesn't exist anymore, and now it's just like a fairytale. It's only specific people ' s perspective which is archived, multiplied  and turned into history; at least that is the way that the internet has felt like in the last ten years. T here are a lot of memories stored on video or cassette or records or diskettes or you know, these things that we can still find lingering everywhere around us, waiting to be found or forever lost . Yet,  even if we sit in a place where things  used to be, there is so much else that actually happened and perspectives about it that kind of.. got lost. It's gone. -- Thanks to M, O and A for their memories in the forest.


Information on the value of water in use is a prerequisite for the efficient allocation, utilization, trading and transfer thereof. These issues are becoming very important for South Africa. Linear programming (LP) and stochastic dynamic programming (SDP) are two techniques that can be applied to value water. Based on a simulated irrigation farming situation downstream of the Vanderkloof Dam wherein farmers hold a capacity share (CS) this paper draws a comparison between the marginal value products (MVP's) obtained from applying LP and SDP simultaneously. Linear programming is used to optimize water use on the farm during the immediate season while SDP is used to optimize the use of water in storage in the farmers capacity share (CS) in the Vanderkloof Dam through time. Emphasis is placed on the interpretation of the results which are presented graphically.


The present study examined the role of parenting styles and basic psychological needs in the adoption of goals and aspirations of learners, as well as for their psychological wellbeing (positive versus negative affect) in a South African sample of learners. A cross-sectional design was used to conduct this study with a sample of 853 learners at public schools in the Western Cape of South Africa (females = 57%, mean age 16.96 years, SD = 1.12). Data were collected using the Parenting Style and Dimensions Questionnaire (PSDQ), Psychological Needs Scale, Aspiration Index and the Positive And Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). The results suggest that authoritative and authoritarian parenting styles influence the adoption of life goals and psychological wellbeing of adolescents with fathers' negative parenting possibly reducing adolescent wellbeing. Extrinsic life goals was a significant predictor of positive affect, while need frustration was a significant predictor of negative affect. These findings suggest parenting styles and basic psychological needs influence life aspirations and psychological wellbeing of learners in a developing country context.


Input-output (I/O) functions for stimulus-frequency (SFOAE) and distortion-product (DPOAE) otoacoustic emissions were recorded in 30 normal-hearing adult ears using a nonlinear residual method. SFOAEs were recorded at half octaves from 500-8000 Hz in an L1=L2 paradigm with L2=0 to 85 dB SPL, and in a paradigm with L1 fixed and L2 varied. DPOAEs were elicited with primary levels of Kummer et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 103, 3431-3444 (1998)] at f2 frequencies of 2000 and 4000 Hz. Interpretable SFOAE responses were obtained from 1000-6000 Hz in the equal-level paradigm. SFOAE levels were larger than DPOAEs levels, signal-to-noise ratios were smaller, and I/O functions were less compressive. A two-slope model of SFOAE I/O functions predicted the low-level round-trip attenuation, the breakpoint between linearity and compression, and compressive slope. In ear but not coupler recordings, the noise at the SFOAE frequency increased with increasing level (above 60 dB SPL), whereas noise at adjacent frequencies did not. This suggests the existence of a source of signal-dependent noise producing cochlear variability, which is predicted to influence basilar-membrane motion and neural responses. A repeatable pattern of notched SFOAE I/O functions was present in some ears, and explained using a two-source mechanism of SFOAE generation.


Fibroblast growth factor 23 (FGF23) is a therapeutic target for treating hereditary and acquired hypophosphatemic disorders, such as X-linked hypophosphatemic (XLH) rickets and tumor-induced osteomalacia (TIO), respectively. FGF23-induced hypophosphatemia is mediated by signaling through a ternary complex formed by FGF23, FGF receptor (FGFR), and α-Klotho. Currently, disorders of excess FGF23 are treated with an FGF23-blocking antibody, Burosumab. Small-molecule drugs that disrupt protein:protein interactions necessary for the ternary complex formation offer an alternative to disrupt FGF23 signaling. In this study, the FGF23:α-Klotho interface was targeted to identify small-molecule protein:protein interaction inhibitors. We computationally identified "hot spots" in the FGF23:α-Klotho interface of the ternary complex and performed in silico docking of ~5.5 million compounds from the ZINC database to the interface region of α-Klotho from the ternary crystal structure. Following docking, 23 and 18 compounds were chosen based on the lowest binding free energies to α-Klotho and the largest number of contacts with Tyr433, a predicted hot spot, respectively. 5 compounds available were assessed experimentally by their FGF23-mediated extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) activities in vitro, and two of these reduce activities significantly. Both these compounds have a favorable predicted binding affinity, but not a large number of contacts with the hot spot residues. ZINC12409120 was found experimentally to reduce FGF23-mediated ERK activities by 70% and have a half maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) of 5.0 ± 0.23 uM. ZINC12409120 exhibits contacts with residues on KL1 and KL2 domains and on the linker between the two domains of α-Klotho in in silico binding poses, thereby possibly disrupting the regular function of α-Klotho and impeding FGF23 binding. ZINC12409120 is a candidate for lead optimization.


Friedrich Nietzsche occupies a contradictory position in the history of ideas: he came up with the concept of a master race, yet an eminent Jewish scholar like Martin Buber translated his Also sprach Zarathustra into Polish and remained in a lifelong intellectual dialogue with Nietzsche. Sigmund Freud admired his intellectual courage and was not at all reluctant to admit that Nietzsche had anticipated many of his basic ideas. This unique collection of essays explores the reciprocal relationship between Nietzsche and Jewish culture. It is organized in two parts: the first examines Nietzsche's attitudes towards Jews and Judaism; the second Nietzsche's influence on Jewish intellectuals as diverse and as famous as Franz Kafka, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Sigmund Freud. Each carefully selected essay explores one aspect of Nietzsche's relation to Judaism and German intellectual history, from Heinrich Heine to Nazism.


Research of L1 education is recently established in the Nordic countries. Since the turn of the century we have seen the emergence of national and Nordic research networks, conference and publication series, research programs, and the designation of positions as professors and associate professors. Studies of Nordic L1 research have taken stock of the disciplinary sub fields, but empirical studies of the L1 school subject as a unitary field are still in demand. The aim of this study is to investigate the emergence of Nordic L1 research and its present profile(s) through PhD research. The present study examines the abstracts of Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish L1 PhD dissertations defended between 2000 and 2017. The results point to a growing field. A general observation is that the research focuses on reading and writing, whereas oral and aesthetical expressions are minor topics. Another result is a set of national differences which are related to governmental policy documents and school curricula. Further, the research has be- come more internationally oriented during recent years. The L1 research is characterized as a profession-alized region (Bernstein, 2003) with strong didactization (Ongstad, 2004), and a potential for powerful disciplinary knowledge (Lambert, 2017).


Addition of green tea's extract in edible film's matrix will improve film's functionality. The film will has antioxidant properties and can protect food from rancidity and discoloration. In this research film based component was jack bean flour which has high content of carbohydrate and protein. The film had good mechanical and physical characters. The aim of this research was studying effect of green tea's extract addition on phenolic, tannin concentration and antioxidant  activity of edible film . Extract of green tea was prepared with variation of temperature (28 o C, 50 o C and 100 o C). The result showed that increasing of extraction temperature would increase phenolic content, tannin concentration and antioxidant  activity. When green tea extracted at 100 o C phenolic concentration was 144.179 mg/g, tannin  was 50.345 mg/g and antioksidant activity was 58.8% (DPPH inhibition). After the extract was incorporated in to edible film , total phenolic concentration of film was 113.544 mg/g, tannin was 41.842 mg/g and antioxidant activity was 45.22%. Edible film with green tea addition, showed ability in inhibiting rancidity of peanut oil whereas peroxide value and TBA (Thio Barbituric Acid) number of peanut oil was 11.5 meq O 2 /kg and 0.13 ml/g after edible film immersion in 5 days. Peroxide value and TBA number of peanut oil without edible film immersion was 20.3 meq O 2 /kg and 0.32 ml/g.


It was never going to be easy to convince the South African art establishment that a retrospective of Vladimir Tretchikoff's work had any merit, least of all in the hallowed halls of the Iziko South African National Gallery. An overview of press releases and reviews which preceded and accompanied the show makes this abundantly clear (see Preller 2011). However, through the efforts mainly of UCT academic, Andrew Lamprecht, the curator of the retrospective and editor of the publication, the show not only materialised but was accompanied by the first publication on Tretchikoff's work not facilitated or authorised by the artist himself.


Machine learning, as a subarea of artificial intelligence, is widely believed to reshape the human world in the coming decades. This thesis is focused on both the unsupervised and supervised self-organising transparent machine learning techniques. One particularly interesting aspect is the transparent self-organising deep learning systems. Traditional data analysis approaches and most of the machine learning algorithms are built upon the basis of probability theory and statistics. The solid mathematical foundation of the probability theory and statistics guarantees the good properties of these learning algorithms when the amount of data tends to infinity and all the data comes from the same distribution. However, the prior assumptions of the random nature and same distribution imposed on the data generation model are often too strong and impractical in real applications. Moreover, traditional machine learning algorithms also require a number of free parameters to be predefined. However, without any prior knowledge of the problem, which is often the case in real situations, the performance of the algorithms can be largely influenced by the improper choice. Deep learning-based approaches are currently the state-of-the-art techniques in the fields of machine learning and computer vision. However, they are also suffering from a number of deficiencies including the computational burden of training using huge amount of data, lack of transparency and interpretation, ad hoc decisions about the internal structure, no proven convergence for the adaptive versions that rely on reinforcement learning, limited parallelisation and offline training, etc. These shortcomings largely all hinder the wider applications of the deep learning in real situations. The novel approaches presented in this thesis are developed within the Empirical Data Analytics framework, which is an alternative, but more advanced computational methodology to the traditional approaches based on the ensemble properties and mutual distribution of the empirical discrete observations. The novel self-organising transparent machine learning algorithms presented in this work for clustering, regression, classification and anomaly detection are autonomous, self-organising, data-driven and free from user- and problem- specific parameters. They do not impose any data generation models on the data a priori, but are driven by the empirically observed data and are able to produce the objective results without prior knowledge of the problems. In addition, they are highly efficient and suitable for large-scale static/streaming data processing. The newly proposed self-organising transparent deep learning systems are able to achieve human-level performance comparable to or even better than the deep convolutional neural networks on image classification problems with the merits of being fully transparent, self-evolving, highly efficient, parallelisable and human-interpretable. More importantly, the proposed deep learning systems have the ability of starting classification from the very first image of each class in the same way as humans do. Numerical examples based on numerous challenging benchmark problems and comparisons conducted with the state-of-the-art approaches presented in this thesis demonstrated the validity and effectiveness of the proposed new machine learning algorithms and deep learning systems and show their potential for real applications.


Efficient irrigation technologies, which seem to promise reduced production costs and water consumption in heavily irrigated areas, may instead be driving increased irrigation use in areas that were not traditionally irrigated. As a result, the total dependence on supplemental irrigation for crop production and revenue is steadily increasing across the contiguous United States. Quantifying this dependence has been hampered by a lack of comprehensive irrigated and dryland yield and harvested area data outside of major irrigated regions, despite the importance and long history of irrigation applications in agriculture. This study used a linear regression model to disaggregate lumped agricultural statistics and estimate average irrigated and dryland yields at the state level for five major row crops: corn, cotton, hay, soybeans, and wheat. For 1945–2015, we quantified crop production, irrigation enhancement revenue, and irrigated and dryland areas in both intensively irrigated and marginally-dependent states, where both irrigated and dryland farming practices are implemented. In 2015, we found that irrigating just the five commodity crops enhanced revenue by ~$7 billion across all states with irrigation. In states with both irrigated and dryland practices, 23% of total produced area relied on irrigation, resulting in 7% more production than from dryland practices. There was a clear response to increasing biofuel demand, with the addition of more than 3.6 million ha of irrigated corn and soybeans in the last decade in marginally-dependent states. Since 1945, we estimate that yield enhancement due to irrigation has resulted in over $465 billion in increased revenue across the contiguous United States (CONUS). Example applications of this dataset include estimating historical water use, evaluating the effects of environmental policies, developing new resource management strategies, economic risk analyses, and developing tools for farmer decision making.


Nowadays, personalized education is a very hot topic in technology enhanced learning (TEL) research. To support students during their learning process, the first step consists in capturing the context in which they evolve. Users typically operate in a heterogeneous environment when learning, including learning tools such as Learning Management Systems and non-learning tools and services such as e-mails, instant messaging, or web pages. Thus, user attention in a given context defines the Contextualized Attention Metadata (CAM). Various initiatives and projects allow capturing CAMs in a knowledge workers' environment not only in the TEL area, but also in other domains like Knowledge Work Support, Personal Information Management and Information Retrieval. After reviewing main existing approaches according to some specific criteria that are of main interest for capturing and sharing user contexts, we present in this paper a framework able to gather CAMs produced by any tool or computer system. The framework is built on the Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) standard dedicated to system, network and application management. Attention information specific to heterogeneous tools are represented as a unified and extensible structure, and stored into a central repository compliant with the above-mentioned standard. To facilitate access to this attention repository, we introduced a middleware layer composed of two dynamic services: the first service allows users to define the attention data they want to collect, whereas the second service is dedicated to receive and retrieve the traces produced by computer systems. An implementation for collecting and storing CAM data generated by the Ariadne Finder and Moodle validates our approach.


Problem. During the first decade of the 21st century, the Rocky Mountain Conference leaders fostered the professional development of the pastoral workforce. Although periodic seminars and training events were provided, an ongoing model supporting individual growth in ministry deserves further study and implementation. Research indicates that ministerial attrition rates continue to rise in Christian churches, especially among those new in ministry. With the increasing complexities of life and demand for quality pastoral leadership, the intentional development of relationships designed to impact these leaders is vital to strengthen both personal and professional growth. Method. An existing Christian coaching model was chosen and facilitated by the researcher among six pastoral leaders during 2010-2011. Coaching contracts were formed and implemented. The purpose was to realize the impact of these coaching relationships over the course of six months. An instrument was developed which integrated three areas, "knowing, being, and doing." The success of the coaching relationships was measured by a self-assessment instrument and review questionnaire. Results. All six of the pastoral leaders completed the coaching contract time period. The project focused on the data received from the project assessment tool completed by the participants. The analysis demonstrates the positive impact that the coaching relationship brought to the experience of the participants. Statistically significant (p<.10) positive outcomes for pastoral coaching impact were found in nine of 30 items. These range from p = .004 to p = .093. One statement has statistical significance of p = .004; two statements have a p = .042; five statements have response ratings that result in a p = .076; one statement lists a response value of p = .093. The main weaknesses related to sample size and coach experience of the researcher although positive results were identified. Conclusions. The study demonstrates the value of long-term relationships on pastoral leaders in order to improve satisfaction in their areas of "knowing, being, and doing." Larger sample studies would be helpful in the future to determine if the results would be similar for other coaching approaches. Long-term studies would additionally prove beneficial in evaluating the positive impact of the coaching relationship. In general, these finding suggest that broad implementation of the coaching relationship would have positive impact mitigating pastoral attrition rates.


Efficient memory sharing between CPU and GPU threads can greatly expand the effective set of GPGPU workloads. For increased programmability, this memory should be uniformly virtualized, necessitating compatible address translation support for GPU memory references. However, even a modest GPU might need 100s of translations per cycle (6 CUs * 64 lanes/CU) with memory access patterns designed for throughput more than locality. To drive GPU MMU design, we examine GPU memory reference behavior with the Rodinia benchmarks and a database sort to find: (1) the coalescer and scratchpad memory are effective TLB bandwidth filters (reducing the translation rate by 6.8x on average), (2) TLB misses occur in bursts (60 concurrently on average), and (3) postcoalescer TLBs have high miss rates (29% average). We show how a judicious combination of extant CPU MMU ideas satisfies GPU MMU demands for 4 KB pages with minimal overheads (an average of less than 2% over ideal address translation). This proof-of-concept design uses per-compute unit TLBs, a shared highly-threaded page table walker, and a shared page walk cache.


Several transit agencies in the U. S. have developed commuter paratransit services - subscription bus, vanpools, and carpools - as a means of pursuing the objective of more cost-effective peak period service provision. These services have been used as supplements to, and in some cases substitutes for, the transit agency's regular commuter bus services. As such, they represent a marked departure from the traditional transit agency approach to service delivery, in which a single public organization provides all service itself using standard transit technology - fixed route, fixed schedule service in large vehicles. Not only do the commuter paratransit strategies represent different service concepts than transit agencies have traditionally employed, they also make use of the private sector to deliver the service, another major deviation from conventional practice. These strategies thus constitute an innovative approach to the objective of improving public transportation service availability and cost-effectiveness.


The product of strategic collaboration between CTR and Orkestra (Basque Institute for Competitiveness) at Deusto University, this volume draws out a broad new view of the future of energy in the Atlantic Basin. The authors comprise a diverse range of Atlantic Basin energy thinkers and practitioners. They provide a multifaceted view of the new and evolving energy land- and seascapes of the Atlantic Basin, including the shale, offshore and low carbon revolutions. The overall result not only allows for new perspectives on a global sector in transformation but also helps reveal a new Atlantic world, grounded in emerging energy dynamics for cooperation.
Africa and Latin America are given special focus in recognition of the new "Southern Atlantic" as a key creative component in any new Atlantic Community. Other innovative perspectives are also showcased, including sub-state regional or municipal views and a new revealing angle of analytical vision provided by the "Atlantic energy seascape." Energy policy and regulatory reform are analyzed from both traditional and "pan-Atlantic" points of view, while nascent "pan-Atlantic" cooperative mechanisms (like the Atlantic Energy Forum) are introduced.


In recent months, top officials in the US government have been calling attention to the reported progress in Iraq. According to current data, positive trends do in fact exist. This is not meant to congratulate the Bush administration--whatever success the surge is having now makes one wonder what might have been possible had we followed the advice of General Eric Shinseki and others who counseled a robust invasion and occupation force from the start. The situation in Iraq is hardly good; it is simply much better than it was last year. But the stakes in achieving a semblance of stability in Iraq are so high for the region and the world that even those who do not support this administration should welcome the favorable developments. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The fact is that trend lines in Iraq are headed in the right direction. The "surge" of US forces in early 2007 has fostered real improvements in security throughout most of the country and has helped foster an environment in which political and economic progress is possible. These facts, however, are no cause for complacency. The situation in 2006 was so disastrous that vast improvements only resulted in the mediocre situation we are in now. Many Iraqis, particularly those in power, have been slow to take advantage of decreased levels of violence to cross ethno-sectarian lines and allow for the political and economic growth requisite for sustainable stability. It remains unclear whether or not Iraq will truly turn the corner. The kind of improvements we have seen on the ground will not suffice to produce a viable stability or exit strategy. Ultimately, reconciliation, or at least accommodation, among Sunni and Shia Arabs and Kurds is needed if the country is to hold together as US and coalition forces begin to leave in 2008 and thereafter. It is nevertheless clear that important developments are being made in all sectors of Iraqi society. Though progress has been uneven and somewhat inconsistent, Iraq is not the lost cause it appeared to be only 18 months ago, and there is even a glimmer of hope for longer term stability. This article will present some of the raw data to give a more complete picture of the situation in Iraq, and to help determine what strategies are still possible, or not possible, in the region. The analyses are based on four years of work at the Brookings Institution tracking trends in Iraq from reputable databases, using independent analytical judgments to determine the most trustworthy and transparent sources. Indicators of progress are organized into the broad categories of security, politics, and economics. Security The "surge" of 30,000 additional US troops into Iraq beginning in early 2007 has been a key factor in the significant reduction in violence in Iraq over the past 8 months. While the Sabwa (Awakening) Movement that helped to stabilize the previously forsaken Sunni province of Anbar and the ceasefire declared by Shia militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr deserve recognition for producing greater safety, it was the "surge" that dispelled the commonly held notion among Iraqis that a US withdrawal was imminent and that they should therefore consolidate their resources along ethno-sectarian lines in preparation for imminent chaos. The surge, together with a new strategy of protecting the population, created a greater sense of security among citizens and elicited more of their cooperation as a result. However, other questions related to security that are also important for understanding future policy options. Is the reduction in killing partly due to the separation of Sunni and Shia into separate neighborhoods? In other words, has ethnic cleansing gone so far that killing is bound to decline? Or is this decrease only temporary? Are people moving back to their homes? And how have the size, composition, and capabilities of coalition forces in Iraq, as well as casualties to those forces, changed? In his September 2007 testimony to the US Congress, General David Petraeus argued that Iraqi civilian fatalities should be a central metric for gauging progress on the security front. …


This article examines the controversy over the Beijing Olympics–themed float for the 2008 Pasadena Rose Parade in the broad context of China's public diplomacy and contentious international politics involving the Chinese community in Los Angeles, human rights activists, the City of Pasadena, and other players. It aims to understand the ways in which a nation's public diplomacy strategy can be contested in a local setting and how different players mobilized their resources to strategically frame their messages. It explores three questions: (1) How did different parties draw on the repertoire of contentious politics to frame the controversy? (2) What role did the Chinese diaspora play in the development of the controversy? How does the controversy clarify the function of Chinese immigrants in China's public diplomacy? (3) What did this controversy imply for China's soft power and international communication? This article draws on materials from media reports, official records, videotaped meeting records, personal observations, and semi-structured interviews with the float sponsors, organizers, officials in Pasadena, and human rights activists.


This paper examines the role of social class and ethnic group background in determining individuals' social class destinations. It explores the extent to which these background factors are mediated by educational achievement, and the role of educational qualifications in enabling intergenerational class mobility. To do this, it uses the ONS Longitudinal Study. These data allow us to observe parents' characteristics during childhood for a group of children of different ethnic groups growing up in England and Wales in the same period and who had reached adulthood by 2001. Results show that the influence of class background on these children's subsequent social class position varied with ethnicity: it was important for the majority, even after taking account of educational qualifications, but had a much smaller role to play for the minority groups. The minority groups made use of education to achieve upward mobility, but to greater effect for some groups than for others. Among those without educational qualifications, minority groups suffered an 'ethnic penalty' in relation to higher class outcomes; but for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, this penalty persisted at all levels of education. These findings challenge the notion that a more equal society can be achieved simply through promoting equality of opportunity through education.


Anoxia-tolerant vertebrates decrease their metabolic rate by 70% or more during anoxia, while the major inhibitory neurotransmitter in the vertebrate brain, GABA, increases in concentration. To test the possibility that GABA could be a mediator of anoxic metabolic depression, crucian carp ( Carassius carassius L.) were given an inhibitor of GABA synthesis, isoniazid, and the rate of anoxic ethanol production (ethanol being the main end product of energy metabolism in anoxic crucian carp) as well as the rates of normoxic and hypoxic oxygen consumption were measured. Isoniazid (500mgkg−1), which significantly inhibited the anoxia-induced rise in brain GABA concentration, caused a nearly threefold increase in anaerobic ethanol production without affecting normoxic oxygen consumption. The GABA synthesis inhibitor 3-mercaptopropionic acid (3-MP, 200mgkg−1) and the GABA receptor antagonist securinine (20mgkg−1) caused similar rises in anoxic ethanol production. Nevertheless, crucian carp given 250–500mgkg−1 isoniazid, 200mgkg−1 3-MP or 20mgkg−1 securinine all recovered after anoxia, suggesting that a complete depression of the rate of metabolism may not be essential for survival during short-term anoxia. These results indicate that GABA is a mediator of anoxic metabolic depression in crucian carp.


Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is emerging as a paradigm for developing distributed applications. A critical issue of utilizing SOC is to have a scalable, reliable, and robust service discovery mechanism. However, traditional service discovery methods using centralized registries can easily suffer from problems such as performance bottleneck and vulnerability to failures in large scalable service networks, thus functioning abnormally. To address these problems, this paper proposes a peer-to-peer-based decentralized service discovery approach named Chord4S. Chord4S utilizes the data distribution and lookup capabilities of the popular Chord to distribute and discover services in a decentralized manner. Data availability is further improved by distributing published descriptions of functionally equivalent services to different successor nodes that are organized into virtual segments in the Chord4S circle. Based on the service publication approach, Chord4S supports QoS-aware service discovery. Chord4S also supports service discovery with wildcard(s). In addition, the Chord routing protocol is extended to support efficient discovery of multiple services with a single query. This enables late negotiation of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between service consumers and multiple candidate service providers. The experimental evaluation shows that Chord4S achieves higher data availability and provides efficient query with reasonable overhead.


The two cardinal problems recognized with gaze-based interaction techniques are: how to avoid unintentional commands, and how to overcome the limited accuracy of eye tracking. Gaze gestures are a relatively new technique for giving commands, which has the potential to overcome these problems. We present a study that compares gaze gestures with dwell selection as an interaction technique. The study involved 12 participants and was performed in the context of using an actual application. The participants gave commands to a 3D immersive game using gaze gestures and dwell icons. We found that gaze gestures are not only a feasible means of issuing commands in the course of game play, but they also exhibited performance that was at least as good as or better than dwell selections. The gesture condition produced less than half of the errors when compared with the dwell condition. The study shows that gestures provide a robust alternative to dwell-based interaction with the reliance on positional accuracy being substantially reduced.


Thiamethoxam is a systemic insecticide from the neonicotinoid group, nitroguanidin family which affects the nicotinic receptor acetyl choline in the insect membrane, wounding the nervous system and causing the death of the insect. It was used with success in the control of initial pests of several crops. It was considered that thiamethoxam has a bioactivator effect, because in the absence of insects promoted increase in vigor, development and productivity of crops. This work was carried out to verify if thiamethoxam causes histological changes in sugarcane roots. In this work, it was used optical microscopy, images arrest, tissue biometrics and statistical analysis, in young roots of sugarcane RB 83 5486 after the treatments with different thiamethoxam concentrations. It was determined changes in histological structure of tissues 7, 14, 21 and 28 days after the treatments, establishing its effects on root plant anatomy. It was verified that thiamethoxam increased root cortex width, increasing the vascular cylinder and the metaxylem vessel elements number in the vascular tissue until 21 days after application.


'Revealed theology' claims that religious belief derives from divine revelation and can only be justified in the light of such revelation. This entails a retreat into an intellectual ghetto: Only believers can participate in this kind of theology because only believers have access to divine revelation. The usual alternative to revealed theology is 'natural theology', which tries to prove the truth of (Christian) faith in the light of the universally accessible criteria of reason and experience. It is argued that natural theology fails to provide such proof and therefore cannot liberate theology from the intellectual ghetto of revealed theology. This paper argues for a 'philosophical theology' which analyses the meaning of (Christian) doctrine rather than proving its truth. Since the methods and criteria of this analysis are universally acceptable and not reserved for believers, this form of theology liberates believers from the intellectual ghetto of revealed theology.


Natural compounds have been utilised for medicinal purposes since ancient times. The toxic secretions of venomous animals have evolved over millions of years of evolutionary time to induce paralysis and systematic breakdown of homeostasis in prey, in addition to aiding in defence against predators. In the process, a remarkable arsenal of biochemical components has been developed, including toxins with astonishing specificity and affinity for various types of cells and receptors, many of which participate in essential physiological pathways. Hence, venoms and toxins have been perceived as rich sources of novel biochemical compounds for use in drug design and development. Although biased towards a narrow range of taxa, modern toxinological research has focussed on utilising these fascinating biochemical compounds not only in elucidating the intricate mechanisms of life but also in aiding the development of life-saving pharmaceutical drugs. Understanding the complex evolutionary mechanisms shaping different venom components is essential for the development of highly effective drugs. A multidisciplinary approach, spanning methods such as transcriptomics, proteomics, bioactivity testing and molecular evolution analyses, has the potential to unravel the true biodiversity of toxins and provide invaluable information for drug design and development.


Livestock play an important role in the social, cultural and economic environment of the Pacific Island countries and territories (PICTs). Currently, the development of the livestock sector in the Pacific region is constrained by a number of factors, including animal health status requirements. So far, the Pacific Islands region has a favourable animal health situation but it is a challenge to maintain a disease free environment in an area composed of 25,000 islands dispersed over 180 million square kilometres. While most of the PICTs face a critical shortage of veterinarians and have limited financial resources, this study aims to examine ways by which animal disease surveillance in the Pacific Islands region could be better targeted to enable more efficient use of scarce resources in the PICTs.

Within this context, a literature review was conducted to synthesize data across studies from peer-reviewed and grey literature on the animal diseases in the Pacific Islands region. Based on the outputs of the meta-analysis, a multicriteria prioritization process was then developed to identify animal diseases perceived to be of importance by decision makers within selected PICTs, at the regional and national levels. Pig and poultry husbandry being of primary importance for the Pacific communities, farmer practices and the movements of pigs and poultry were then examined in four selected PICTs (Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu), using questionnaire survey and social network analysis tools in view of better predicting how diseases could potentially spread in the region. Finally, a combined pig and poultry market chain and risk pathway analysis was conducted in these four PICTs to identify the highest risk areas (risk hotspots) and risky practices and behaviours (risk factors) of animal disease introduction and/or spread, using highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) and foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) as model diseases because of their potential importance in the region.

From the 158 eligible references retrieved from the literature review, only 77 (48.7%) were published since 1992 and analysed in more details. A total of 101 diseases and pathogens were reported on for domestic animals in the Oceania region and in 17 PICTs in particular. Retrieved literature on animal diseases in PICTs was scarce and no longer up to date. There is a need to improve the published knowledge on the current animal disease status in the region.

The list of the top-twenty ranked diseases for the Pacific Islands region resulting from the structured prioritization process shows a mix of endemic zoonotic diseases (such as leptospirosis ranked first; brucellosis third; tuberculosis sixth and endoparasites and ectoparasites respectively eleventh and thirteenth) with exotic diseases (such as highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) ranked second, foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) fifth and rabies ninth). There were different disease ranking lists for each of the four targeted PICTs, confirming different strategies of disease prevention and control may be required for each country, rather than a regional approach. Interviewed animal health and production workers were unfamiliar with most of the prioritized diseases and a majority acknowledged that they would not be able to recognise clinical signs if outbreaks were to occur in their area.

Results from the survey and the social network analysis indicate that a large proportion of farmers (44.6 to 61.3%) do not implement any preventive or control measures, yet, the majority (80.6 to 88%) did not experience any animal diseases over the past twelve-months. Most farmers never ask for veterinary care, never engage in laboratory testing and do not report when their animals show clinical signs. Many pig farmers (31.8%) trade within their communities only and sell directly to consumers (24.5%) which reduces the risk of diseases spreading. Our results show an association between farmers that report having had disease on their farm in the past twelve-months and movements of animals on and off their farms. The capitals of the studied provinces in PNG, Vanuatu and Solomon Islands were identified as the most connected nodes of both pig and poultry trade while Fiji networks appeared much less connected. Farmer practices increased the risk of disease spread but this was currently limited by trading practices.

The conduct of the combined market chain analysis with risk pathways was a practical way of communicating risk to animal health officials and improving biosecurity. It provided a participatory approach that helps officials to better understand the trading regulations in place in their country and to better evaluate their role as part of the control system. Common risk patterns were found to play a role in all four PICTs. Legal trade pathways rely essentially on preventive measures put in place in the exporting countries while no or only limited control measures are undertaken by the importing countries. Legal importations of animals and animal products are done mainly by commercial farms which then supply local smallholders. Targeting surveillance on these potential hotspots would limit the risk of introduction and spread of animal diseases within the pig and poultry industry. Swill feeding is identified as a common practice in the region that represents a non-negligible risk factor for dissemination of pathogens to susceptible species. Illegal introduction of animals and animal products is suspected, but appears restricted to small holder farms in remote areas, limiting the risk of spread of transboundary animal diseases along the market chain. Introduction of undeclared goods hidden within a legal trade activity was identified as a major risk pathway. Activities such as awareness campaigns for pig and poultry farmers regarding disease reporting, biosecurity measures or danger of swill feeding and training of biosecurity officers in basic animal health and import-associated risks are recommended to prevent and limit the spread of pathogens within the PICTs.

We put forward the methodology used for this study as a novel approach for more rational and transparent allocations of resources for enhancing food security and for better targeted approach to animal disease prevention and control. The results of this study are expected to lead to a more rational use of skilled manpower and increase the sensitivity of disease identification within the PICTs.


Applied mathematics, which means application of mathematics to problems, is a
wonderful and exciting subject. It is the essence of the theoretical approach to
science and engineering. It could refer to the use of mathematics in many varied
areas. Mathematical model is applied to predict the behaviour of the system. This
behaviour is then interpreted in terms of the word model so that we know the
behaviour of the real situation.
We can apply mathematical languages to transform ecology's phenomena into
mathematical model, including changes of popUlations and how the populations of
one system can affect the population of another. The model is expected to give us
more information about the real situation and as a tool to make a decision. Some models that constitute autonomous differential equations are presented;
Malthusian and logistic model for single population; two independent populations,
competing model, and prey-predator model for two populations; and extension of
prey-predator model involving three populations. In this thesis we will study the
effect of harvesting on models.
The models are based on Lotka-Volterra model. All models involve harvesting
problem and some stable equilibrium points related to maximum profit or maximum
sustainable yield problem. The objectives of this thesis are to analyse, to investigate
the stability of equilibrium point of the models and to control the exploitation efforts
such that the population will not vanish forever although being exploited. The
methods used are linearization method, eigenvalues method, qualitative stability test
and Hurwitz stability test. Some assumptions are made to avoid complexity. Maple
V software release 4 is used to determine the equilibrium points of the model and
also to plot the trajectories and draw the surface. The single population model is
solved analytically.We found that in single population model, the existence of population depends on
the initial population and harvesting rate. In model that involves two and three
populations, the populations can live in coexistence although harvesting is applied.
The level of harvesting, however, must be strictly controlled.


This distinguished collection stands out from the recent flurry of books on health reform by its sustained and sophisticated analysis of the political dimension. In The Politics of Health Care Reform, some of America's best-known political scientists, historians, and legal scholars make sense of our most turbulent policy issue. They dig below the jargon and minutiae to explore the enduring questions of American politics, government reform, and health care. The Politics of Health Care Reform explains how successful reforms occur in the United States and shows what is unique about health care issues. Theoretically informed, politically astute, historically nuanced, this volume takes an inventory of our health policy infrastructure. Here is an account of the institutions, ideas, and interests that shape health policy in the 1990s: Congress, the federal courts, interest groups, state governments, the public bureaucracy, business (large and small), the insurance industry, the medical profession. The volume offers a fresh look at such critical matters as public opinion, the politics of race and gender, and the lessons we can draw from other nations. The Politics of Health Care Reform is the definitive collection of political science essays about health care. Expanded from two special issues of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, the most prominent scholarly journal in the field it helped create, this collection will enliven the present debate over health reform and instruct everyone who is concerned about the future of American health care. Contributors. Lawrence Brown, Robert Evans, William Glaser, Colleen Grogan, Robert Hackey, Lawrence Jacobs, Nancy Jecker, Taeku Lee, Joan Lehman, David McBride, Ted Marmor, Cathie Jo Martin, James A. Morone, Mark Peterson, David Rochefort, Rand Rosenblatt, David Rothman, Joan Ruttenberg, Mark Schlesinger, Theda Skocpol, Michael Sparer, Deborah Stone, Kenneth Thorpe


Poly(methyl methacrylate)/clay and poly(methy acrylate)/clay nanocomposites are prepared by polymerizing the monomers in the presence of modified sodium montmorillonite (Na-MMT).Na-MMT is modified by either cetyltrimethylammonium(CTA+) or dodecylammonium (DDA+) ions via a cation exchange process. After the modification, CHN elemental analysis shows that CTA+ and DDA+ ions are present in the montmorillonite. Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR) spectra of CTA-MMT and DDA-MMT clearly indicate the presence of new absorption bands, i.e. C-H asymmetric and symmetric stretching vibrations. The basal spacing of CTA-MMT and DDA-MMT increases from 11.6A to 19.3A and 18.7A, respectively.Thermal gravimetric analysis(TGA) shows that CTA-MMT and DDA-MMT degrade at higher temperatures as compared to Na-MMT. Conversions of methyl methacrylate (MMA) and methyl acrylate (MA) into the polymers are carried out by either microwave irradiation or conventional heating methods in the presence of benzoyl peroxide as the initiator.The microwave assisted preparation of PMMA/clay and PMA/clay nanocomposites significantly reduces the reaction period as compared to conventional heating.Gel
permeation chromatography (GPC) results show that polydispersity indices of PMMAs prepared at high (650 W) and medium high (530 W) microwave power level and PMAs
prepared at high microwave power level are narrower than that of PMMA and PMA prepared by conventional heating. FT-IR spectra of PMMA/clay and PMA/clay clearly indicate the presence of the polymer and clay functional groups. X-ray diffraction analysis (XRD) analysis shows that there are increments in the clay basal spacing of the PMMA/clay and PMA/clay nanocomposites prepared by both methods. This indicates that PMMA or PMA are successfully intercalated into the interlayer galleries of the clay.However, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) shows that the nanocomposites are of intercalated and flocculated type. The TGA thermograms indicate enhancement in thermal stability for PMMA/clay and PMA/clay nanocomposites and microcomposites as compared to that of the pure PMMA or PMA prepared by both microwave irradiation
and conventional heating. The remarkable improvement in storage modulus of PMMA/clay and PMA/clay nanocomposites compared to that of the pure PMMA and PMA indicates there is a strong interaction between the matrix and the organoclay. The glass transition temperatures (Tg) of PMMA/CTA-MMT nanocomposites increase by around 10-20 oC as compared to that of the pure PMMA. PMMA/DDA-MMT
nanocomposite with 1 wt% of DDA-MMT filled PMMA gives a higher Tg compared to the other DDA-MMT filled PMMA.However, the Tg for PMA/CTA-MMT and PMA/DDA-MMT nanocomposites is similar to that of the pure PMA


We study a proposed statistical explanation for the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of a black hole in which entropy arises quantum-mechanically as a result of entanglement. Arguments for the identification of black hole entropy with entanglement entropy are reviewed in the framework of quantum field theory, emphasizing the role of renormalization and the need for a physical short-distance cutoff. Our main novel contribution is a calculation of entanglement entropy in loop quantum gravity. The kinematical Hilbert space and spin network states are introduced, and the entanglement entropy of these states is calculated using methods from quantum information theory. The entanglement entropy is compared with the density of states previously computed for isolated horizons in loop quantum gravity, and the two are found to agree up to a topological term. We investigate a conjecture due to Sorkin that the entanglement entropy must be a monotonically increasing function of time under the assumption of causality. For a system described by a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, the conjecture is found to be trivial, and for a system described by an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space a counterexample is provided. For quantum states with Euclidean symmetry, the area scaling of the entanglement entropy is shown to be equivalent to the strong additivity condition on the entropy. The strong additivity condition is naturally interpreted in informationtheoretic terms as a continuous analog of the Markov property for a classical random variable. We explicitly construct states of a quantum field theory on the one-dimensional real line in which the area law is exactly satisfied.


The findings of independent commissions and research derived from a data set of career-ending misconduct among New York Police Department (NYPD) officers suggests that police engage in a wide variety of crimes while they are off duty including domestic violence, bar fights, drunk driving, burglary, and sex offenses (Fyfe & Kane, 2006; Kane & White, 2009; Mollen Commission, 1994). The off-duty misbehavior of police is an important concern for police agencies exposed to potential liability costs, and scholars engaged in debates about whether studies on police deviance should include acts committed while an officer is technically off duty. The problem for scholars interested in understanding off-duty police misconduct is that virtually all of the existing data describes the misbehavior of NYPD police. The purpose of the current study is to explore the nature and character of off-duty police crime in the United States through a content analysis of news articles on arrested off-duty police officers. Data are presented in terms of the arrested off-duty officer(s), his or her agency, and case outcomes including legal and/or employment dispositions. The article includes a discussion regarding the generalizability of existing data on off-duty police crime and the policy implications of our research.


Poster presented at the Cranfield Doctoral Network Annual Event 2018.The geothermal energy sector is facing numerous challenges related to heat recovery efficiency and economic feasibility. Ongoing research on superheated/supercritical geothermal system, potentially representing a intensive amount of energy, is developed in Europe notably the Iceland Deep Drilling project (IDDP). The well IDDP-1, which reached a magma intrusion at a depth of 2100 m, raised new opportunities to untap the geothermal potential near shallow magmatic intrusions. Given their highly corrosive nature, geothermal fluids weaken the wellbore's integrity during conventional geothermal production. Deep Borehole Heat Exchangers (DBHE) that do not require fluid exchange between the surface and the wells represent a strategic alternative to recovering heat from these unconventional geothermal resources, while minimising the risk of in-situ reservoir damage. The thermal influence and heat recovery associated with a hypothetical DBHE drilled into the IDDP geological settings were investigated via Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques until 10 years of production, when the system reaches full equilibrium. Two wellbore designs were simulated, based on simplified geological properties from the IDDP-1 well description. The results show that, during the first year of production, the output temperature is function of the working fluid velocity before reaching pseudo-steady state behaviour. The cooling perturbation near the bottom hole is shown to grow radially from 10 to 40 m between 1 and 10 years of production, and the output thermal power calculated after 10 years reaches 1.2 MW for a single well.


1. INTRODUCTION Technology-mediated learning (TML) has been defined as "an environment in which the learner's interactions with learning materials (e.g., readings, assignments, exercises), peers, and/or instructors are mediated through advanced information technologies" (Alavi and Leidner, 2001b, p.2). Since mandatory involvement requirements may not intrinsically motivate learners to achieve high quality learning (Bullen, 1998), affective commitment, psychological attachment mechanism such as identification and internalization, is an especially important determinant of TML success. Thus, affective commitment and intrinsic motivation to share knowledge are critical issues in developing successful TML and knowledge management (KM) systems. In addition, social intervention for interaction and communication in e-learning positively influence outcomes in varied dimensions of TML (Rourke and Anderson, 2002; Garrison et al., 2003; Baugher et al., 2003; Gallardo et al., 2007; Ellis, 2007). Given that effective learning requires engagement with others in the learning community (Laurillard, 2000; Rungtusanatham et al., 2004; Janicki & Steinberg, 2003; Antony and Santhanam, 2007; Bullen, 1998), these social factors should be investigated further in the TML context. Bohlken (1998) suggested that incorporating the social aspects of e-learning can enhance classroom effectiveness within a TML environment. For example, several studies suggest that in-depth learning effects are accomplished when students realize the need to learn by collaboratively sharing knowledge (Cooney, 2000; Arbaugh, 2000; Poole, 2000; Siau et al., 2006; Hopgood and Hirst, 2007). Knowledge sharing has been an important variable in the TML and KM literature incorporating social factors (e.g., Alavi et al., 2006; Alavi and Leidner, 2001a; Bock et al., 2005; Ko et al., 2005; Wasko & Faraj, 2005; Chiu et al., 2007; Powell et al., 2007). Despite the availability of the best technologies and rich information in the knowledge organization, KM system users' motivation and commitment to sharing knowledge in the organization often determine the success or failure of KM systems (Dyer and McDonough, 2001; Malhotra and Galletta, 2003). For example, a simple system for "knowledge sharing" that was sent out with questions and email invitations to potential participants failed, without even a single user posting any message after six months (Charles, 2002). In the TML systems context, peer participation can influence the student's attitude and action toward knowledge sharing (Piccoli et al., 2001). Janz and Prasarnphanich (2003) explained the relationships among organizational climate, the level of cooperative learning that takes place between knowledge workers, and the resulting level of knowledge created by team performance and individual satisfaction levels. Based on insights into the social factors of knowledge sharing behavior, the role of affective commitment, such as identification (relationships established and maintained among group members), for the proactive adoption of KM or TML systems is recently gaining significant interest from IS and KM researchers (e.g., Venkatesh and Speier, 2000; Malhotra and Galletta, 2005; Alavi and Leidner, 2001a). Malhotra and Galletta (2005) argued that a system user's affective commitment development was omitted in the previous research model which investigated IS adoption in the IS and KM literature. Malhotra and Galletta (2003, 2005) argued that previous KM literature focused on commitment by compliance (to gain extrinsic reward), which makes our understanding of social influence, such as social identity and self identity, and knowledge sharing behavior incomplete. Thus, this paper investigates several psychological variables that have been recently introduced into the IS and KM literature, which enables us to more fully understand the important factors and dynamic relationships involved in knowledge sharing in the TML environment. …


From the Publisher:
AppleScript in a Nutshell is the first complete reference to AppleScript, the popular programming language that gives both power users and sophisticated enterprise customers the important ability to automate repetitive tasks and customize applications. As the Macintosh continues to expand and solidify its base in the multimedia and publishing industries, AppleScript is the tool of choice on this platform for creating sophisticated time- and money-saving workflow applications (applets). These applets automate the processing and management of digital video, imaging, print, and web-based material. AppleScript is also gaining a foothold in scientific programming, as technical organizations adopt G4 CPU-based systems for advanced computing and scientific analysis. Finally, "power users" and script novices will find that AppleScript is a great everyday Mac programming tool, similar to Perl on Windows NT or Unix.
In this well-organized and concise reference, AppleScript programmers will find:
Detailed coverage of AppleScript Version 1.4 and beyond on Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. Complete descriptions of AppleScript language features, such as data types, flow-control statements, functions, object-oriented features (script objects and libraries), and other syntactical elements. Descriptions and hundreds of code samples on programming the various "scriptable" system components, such as the Finder, File Sharing, File Exchange, Network scripting, Web scripting, Apple System Profiler, the ColorSync program, and the numerous powerful language extensions called "osax" or scripting additions.

Most other AppleScript books are hopelessly out of date. AppleScriptin a Nutshell covers the latest updates and improvements with practical, easy to understand tips, including:
Using AppleScript as a tool for distributed computing, an exciting development that Apple Computer calls "program linking over IP." Programmers can now do distributed computing with Macs over TCP/IP networks, including controlling remote applications with AppleScript and calling AppleScript methods on code libraries that are located on other machines. Using the Sherlock find application to automate web and network searching. Insights on scripting new Apple technologies such as Apple Data Detectors, Folder Actions, Keychain Access, and Apple Verifier.

AppleScript in a Nutshell is a high-end handbook at a low-end price—an essential desktop reference that puts the full power of this user-friendly programming language into every AppleScript user's hands.


Entomocidal activity of ethanolic leaf extracts of four plant species namely Euphorbia balsamifera Aiton, Lawsonia inermis L., Mitracarpus hirtus (L.) DC. and Senna obtusifolia L. were evaluated in order to assess their protectant ability to stored sorghum against Sitophilus zeamais Motsch. The botanicals were applied to 20 g of sorghum grains at the rate of 25, 50 and 100 mgml-1, while no extracts was added to the control. Percentage repellency was recorded at 24 h after exposure (HAE) while adult mortalities of the weevils were obtained at 3 days after treatment (DAT). Adult emergence and grain perforations were recorded at 49 and 84 DAT, respectively. Repellency levels of the botanicals against S. zeamais ranged from 87.05 ± 0.45 to 100.00 ± 0.00%. Also, the ethanolic extracts resulted in high adult mortalities of the weevils in the treated sorghum grains. No adult emergence was recorded in grains treated with the botanical extracts. Highest (10.00 ± 2.04%) grain perforations among the treatments were observed in 25 mgml-1 of S. obtusifolia, while 2.50 ± 1.25% was the least in the highest concentration of E. balsamifera. Findings of the study have revealed that the selected botanicals could serve as stored sorghum protectants against S. zeamais infestations.

 Key words: Adult mortality, adult emergence, grain perforations, plant extracts, repellency levels, Sitophilus zeamais.


The author reflects upon and examines his own educational memories, his personal and professional and historical relationship to public education, and his life as a learner. This reflection and examination - complete with connections to many strands of inquiry in broadly accepted educational, sociological, and psychological theory - culminates in both an enhanced self-awareness and in this document, this ethnographic and autobiographic statement of past experiences, present educational frustrations and celebrations, and future educational goals, hopes, and dreams. Likewise, the author argues that this autobiographic statement, this studied articulation, is both an artifact of and a necessary co-requisite to his educational identity. He further asserts the absolute necessity of just such autobiographical writing for his own sanity in the face of multiple institutional mores unrelated to authentic, student-centered learning in public education, for genuine self-awareness and ethical practice for all educational professionals, and for enhanced learning opportunities for all learners at various levels of maturity everywhere.


Recent discussions of gentrification in the UK have centred on new builds and on the influence of particular public programmes. This paper focuses on a form of gentrification that has cut across both of these: buy-to-let, broadly defined as the purchase and transfer of a dwelling to the private rental market. Initiated in response to a favourable legislative and financial context, this form of property investment has not usually been considered as gentrification, likely because it is at odds with the historical link between gentrification and ownership in the UK, poses problems with consumption side explanations and is not seen as displacing low-income residents. The paper uses a detailed comparison of small-area social and tenure data from the 2001 and 2011 UK censuses to show that buy-to-let has become a prominent tenure trajectory in gentrifying neighbourhoods. This prominence emerges from the opportunity it affords to use the general value gap created by the deregulation of the private rental sector to close rent gaps in the most urban, central and disadvantaged areas of England. This tenure shift, shown to be intrinsically linked to gentrification, creates vast opportunities for asset appreciation but also initiates long term trajectories of displacement in surrounding areas.


The mean, the variance, and the correlation function of the intensity pattern resulting from an incoherent source that has propagated through a complex ABCD optical system are derived. The number of speckle correlation cells (or modes, N) within an effective measurement area is presented and discussed. Optical field decorrelation effects with respect to secondary fringe formation in phase-shifting speckle interferometry are discussed. In particular, the correlation coefficient resulting from load-induced object tilt, in-plane translations, and displacements parallel to the optic axis as a function of the number of modes propagating through the optical system is derived and discussed. In contrast to previous research, in which the calculation of speckle interferometric decorrelation effects was restricted to direct imaging systems and the special case where N → ∞, the correlation coefficients that we derive are valid for arbitrary complex ABCD systems (i.e., nonimaging configurations) and for all finite values of N ≥ 1.


ABSTRACT Political theory accommodates two main ideas about the relationship between education and the health of democracies. One stresses that education furthers liberal ideals, regularly theorized as the view that democracy sustains open societies. The other maintains there is no coherent "party of the educated" that has an impact on politics. This debate rose a notch when some highly educated European states recently turned towards less open societies. This paper argues that the causal connections among education, politics, and open societies need to be situated within a broader set of social and data contexts to grasp how education can promote open societies.


This study describes a method used to improve ore grade estimation in a limestone deposit in India. Ore grade estimation for the limestone deposit was complicated by the complex lithological structure of the deposit. The erratic nature of the deposit and the unavailability of adequate samples for each of the lithogical units made standard geostatistical methods of capturing the spatial variation of the deposit inadequate. This paper describes an attempt to improve the ore grade estimation through the use of a feed forward neural network (NN) model. The NN model incorporated the spatial location as well as the lithological information for modeling of the ore body. The network was made up of three layers: an input, an output and a hidden layer. The input layer consisted of three spatial coordinates (x, y and z) and nine lithotypes. The output layer comprised all the grade attributes of limestone ore including silica (SiO2), alumina (Al2O3), calcium oxide (CaO) and ferrous oxide (Fe2O3). To justify the use of the NN in the deposit, a comparative evaluation between the NN method and the ordinary kriging was performed. This evaluation demonstrated that the NN model decisively outperformed the kriging model. After the superiority of the NN model had been established, it was used to predict the grades at an unknown grid location. Prior to constructing the grade maps, lithological maps of the deposit at the unknown grid were prepared. These lithological maps were generated using indicator kriging. The authors conclude by suggesting that the method described in this paper could be used for grade-control planning in ore deposits.


From the 1870's, Norwegian authorities began to give instructions for the ways in which the indigenous Sami toponymy had to be changed into Norwegian in official place name use. These instructions concerned especially place name use in land purchasing and mapping. According to the 'Land Purchasing Act', the land property had to have a Norwegian name even if in many cases the land properties had only a Sami name in oral use. In mapping, the main rule for Norwegianizing the toponymy was to translate the Sami names into the Norwegian language. In my paper, I will discuss the linguistic strategies which were used in creating the Norwegian place names in cases when these names were deliberately constructed for the purposes of renaming. As a starting point, the contact onomastic theories will be applied in discussion of methods of this type of conscious renaming policy.


Much information in today's information society goes through the Internet. On five senses smell information, DigiScent Inc. reported the development of the scent generator "iSmell" in 1999. But, it was never available and closed down in April 2001. We thought that the cause of the bankruptcy was smell blending. The smells are not blended in our policy. We developed a smell emitter which stored some element of the perfume. Ethanol and a cooling gel material were used in order to enable the emission of long term perfume. Using this device, we succeeded in transmitting/receiving the perfume mail. The result of this research indicates the future application of a smell emitter system via Internet.


We suggest a novel conceptual approach to describing the properties of waveguides and circuits in photonic crystals, based on effective discrete equations that include long-range interaction effects. We demonstrate, through the example of sharp waveguide bends, that our approach is very effective and accurate for the study of bound states and transmission spectra of photonic-crystal circuits and disclose the importance of evanescent modes in these phenomena.