A study was conducted to evaluate the effects of bacterial inoculation and cellulase on the fermentation quality of ensiled whole-crop sweet sorghum (WCSS, Sorghum bicolor L. Moench). The WCSS (323 g dry matter (DM)/kg, 251 g water soluble carbohydrates (WSC)/kg DM, 43 g crude protein (CP)/kg DM and 439 g neutral detergent fibre (NDF)/kg DM) was ensiled with i) no additive (control); ii) Lactobacillus buchneri (LB); iii) Lactobacillus plantarum (LP); and iv) LB+E, a combination of LB and enzyme. These treatments were ensiled in 1 L anaerobic jars for 25 days. The jars were opened on days 3, 7 and 15 to determine pH, while those of day 25 were sampled to determine nutrient composition, fermentation characteristics and aerobic stability. Inoculation reduced pH, butyric acid and ammonia-N and increased lactic acid content in sweet sorghum silage compared with the control. The aerobic stability of WCSS was improved with LB, while it was reduced with the homofermentative LP treatment compared with the control. The LB+E reduced the fibre, but increased residual WSC of silage. The aerobic stability of LB+E silage was lower than LB treated silage. Using enzymes to increase the WSC content of crops that already have high levels of WSC may result in reduced aerobic stability of silage. Further work is needed to evaluate these effects on silage produced on farm scale and on animal production performance.


We explore the baseline resilience to natural hazards through the Baseline Resilience Indicators for Community (BRIC) in northeastern Taiwan. Based on the specific situation of our study site, we slightly modified the BRIC. Due to the correlation between some of the subcomponents, we apply principal component analysis (PCA) to solve this issue. Therefore, we slightly changed the classification of subcomponents. We aggregated economic resilience, social resilience, and community capital resilience into socioeconomic community resilience. The result of geographically weighted regression (GWR) shows that even though we modified the indicator, the BRIC we built is still valid. Through spatial autocorrelation analysis, it reveals that the urban region in plain areas is the cluster of high resilience areas. On the other hand, almost all the entire mountain areas are the cluster of low resilience areas. The topography is the most important factor to cause this distribution. Plain areas have favorable characteristics to trigger development and create high socioeconomic community resilience. Mountain areas, on the other hand, do not have these advantages. The distribution of institutional and infrastructure subcomponents shows no particular pattern. That is to say, institutional and infrastructure subcomponents do not influence the distribution of BRIC. The difference in socioeconomic community resilience causes the uneven distribution of baseline resilience to natural hazards. Nevertheless, the distribution of institutional and infrastructure resources is also a crucial issue. In our case, although the distribution of institutional and infrastructure follows the "distributive justice" approach and distribution randomly, whether it is an appropriate approach is still under debate.


Abstract:The majority of learning in arts entrepreneurship education is experiential (Essig & Guevara, 2016). Experiential and entrepreneurial learning theories indicate that to facilitate entrepreneurial knowledge generation which "enables [entrepreneurs] to recognize and act on entrepreneurial opportunities and to organize and manage new ventures" (Politis, 2005, p. 400), individuals need to exercise personal agency and engage in explorative behavior (Kolb & Kolb, 2009; Politis, 2005). If arts entrepreneurship education is to help students generate such entrepreneurial knowledge, arts entrepreneurship educators should create learning environments in which their students can exercise personal agency and behave exploratively. Despite this, how students exercise personal agency and explore within arts entrepreneurship education has not been empirically studied. This empirical paper attempts to answer the following question: How do students explore and exercise personal agency in arts entrepreneurship education? Using rigor to systematically analyze qualitative data (Gioia et al., 2013) from a five-week course in entrepreneurship in higher music education to produce a data structure and model, I find that within a teacher-created learning environment, students balance personal factors (their values and beliefs, habitual modes of thought, prior experience and personal goals) against social factors (social interdependencies and conditions of approval) while taking actions to reduce uncertainty. The findings imply that teacher-created learning environments and engagement in social contexts influences how students exercise personal agency and explore.


The state-of-charge (SoC) in electric vehicles (EVs) is a key piece of information, which plays a crucial role in reducing drivers' range anxiety (fear of being stranded due to insufficient EV battery power) and also in amping up EVs uptake into the global transport market. This paper proposes a new real-time mixed SoC estimation algorithm for lithium-ion batteries used in EVs. The mixed algorithm is a combination of an improved Coulomb Counting (CC), a Model-Based (MB), and a Bottom-up (BU) methods in order to improve the accuracy of the SoC estimation. To extract the battery parameters, experimental tests have been conducted on a 2012 Nissan Leaf battery cell (i.e. 31.1 Ah Manganese-oxide Li-ion cell). The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is then validated using the measured data from an actual driving cycle test on the battery cell. The results demonstrate a great accuracy with a maximum error of 0.15% for the SoC estimation in comparison with conventional models.


Advancements in Radio Astronomical Array Processing: Digital Back End Development and Interferometric Array Interference Mitigation Mitchell Costus Burnett Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, BYU Master of Science The Brigham Young University (BYU) Radio Astronomy Systems group, in collaboration with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), the Center for Astrophysics at West Virginia University (WVU), and the Green Bank Observatory (GBO) have developed, and commissioned, a broadband real-time digital back end processing system for a 38-element phased array feed (PAF) with 150 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth. This system is capable of producing coarse and fine channel correlations, and implements a real-time beamformer that forms 7 simultaneous dual-polarized beams. This thesis outlines the hardware and software development for the digital back end and presents on-telescope commissioning results. This system has been measured to provide an unprecedented low Tsys/η noise level of 28 K and can perform maps of galactic hydrogen observations in a fraction of the time of a conventional single horn feed. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) has recently announced the concept and development of the next generation Very Large Array (ngVLA), a large interferometric array consisting of 300 radio telescopes and longest baseline (distance between a pair of antennas) of 300 km. Large interferometric arrays have been shown to attenuate radio frequency interference (RFI) because it is decorrelated as it propagates across long baselines. This is not always sufficient, especially with dense core array geometries and with the ever-increasing amount of strong RFI sources. Conventional RFI projection-based mitigation techniques have performed poorly on large interferometers because of covariance matrix estimation error due to decorrelation when identifying interference subspace parameters. This thesis presents an algorithm that overcomes the challenge of decorrelation by applying subspace projection via subarray processing (SP-SAP). Each subarray is designed to have a set of elements with high mutual correlation in the interferer for better estimation of subspace parameters. In simulation, compared to the former approach of applying subspace projection on the full array, SP-SAP improves mitigation of the RFI on the order of 9 dB. A signal of interest is shown then to be observable through the RFI in a full synthetic image.


Abstract Repairing and regenerating defects of large bones caused by disease or trauma is a significant clinical challenge. Extensive research has been done on bone tissue regeneration incorporating biodegradable scaffolds mainly polymeric scaffolds which are used heavily due to their ease in manufacturing, biocompatibility and biodegradability. The use of biodegradable polymers for scaffolding has certain drawbacks for bone tissue regeneration such as mismatch in mechanical properties and issues relating to bone infection and osseointegration of the bioresorbable scaffold. Metallic foams have been explored as an alternative to polymers as a scaffolding material. Metallic porous structures have advantages such as high strength and ductility relative to polymeric scaffolds that could be favorable for hard tissue regeneration such as bone. In this manuscript, we review metallic scaffolds for bone tissue engineering including potential metals for tissue engineering scaffold applications. Current techniques of metallic scaffold production including production of magnesium scaffold are discussed.


A remarkable amount of our personal information is in the hands of corporations such as the Experian credit bureau; strangers to us, they make their money by collecting our data, processing it and selling it to others. Other firms make decisions shaping our lives on the basis of credit ratings the credit bureaus assign to us. Those companies have profound impact on our lives, but we are not their customers and have no control over them. Most of us assume that this state of being, in which we find ourselves at the mercy of firms whose business is to process and sell our information, is a new thing – a product of the Information Age, credit cards, and mainframe computers. In fact, it's much older than that. The story of the 21st-century credit bureau echoes that of the first credit bureau, initially known as the Mercantile Agency, founded before the Civil War. In a world in which such things were unknown, the Mercantile Agency sought to establish and maintain a file on every American who might ever seek commercial credit. Deeply controversial and deeply influential, the Mercantile Agency created an early, computer-free, version of the database system, maintaining and updating files on well over a million people by 1890. It and its rivals put in place a new, pervasive, network of social monitoring that became a central part of the nation's economic infrastructure. The early credit bureaus faced some of the same issues that the modern ones do, and inspired deep privacy fears. Modern privacy law didn't exist yet, and so privacy issues found their way into the law of credit bureaus in the context of defamation lawsuits. The resulting defamation case law displays remarkably modern concerns about the commoditization of information, and about the untrammeled distribution of information about individuals. It suggests possibilities in the evolution of the law that ultimately went unrealized.


Women continue to occupy a vulnerable position in society, which is reflected in their health status and in their ability to access relevant health services. In the past few years, great strides have been made in policies to improve women's health, including the passage of the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act, the appointment of a National Committee for Confidential Enquiry into Maternal Deaths, and the drafting of the National Contraceptive Policy Guidelines and National Maternity Care Guidelines. However, women's health has yet to improve. Maternal deaths continue to be unacceptably high, even taking into account the effect of HIV/ AIDS on this mortality rate. Women are the majority (59%) of those infected with HIV in this country, which further undermines their health status. Women are still too often victims of violence, with estimates showing that between one in four and one in six women are in abusive relationships. The inadequacy of the health system in caring for victims of violence, as well as in offering women easy access to services such as screening services for cervical cancer and termination of pregnancy, exaccerbates the plight of women in society. This chapter looks at the health status of women in South Africa, the policies designed to improve this and the progress that has been made. It argues that women's health should no longer be seen as limited to reproductive and child health, but should be viewed more holistically, encompassing all the aspects of women's health needs throughout their lives.


Code-switching is a phenomenon of mixing grammatical structures of two or more languages under varied social constraints. The code-switching data differ so radically from the benchmark corpora used in NLP community that the application of standard technologies to these data degrades their performance sharply. Unlike standard corpora, these data often need to go through additional processes such as language identification, normalization and/or back-transliteration for their efficient processing. In this paper, we investigate these indispensable processes and other problems associated with syntactic parsing of code-switching data and propose methods to mitigate their effects. In particular, we study dependency parsing of code-switching data of Hindi and English multilingual speakers from Twitter. We present a treebank of Hindi-English code-switching tweets under Universal Dependencies scheme and propose a neural stacking model for parsing that efficiently leverages the part-of-speech tag and syntactic tree annotations in the code-switching treebank and the preexisting Hindi and English treebanks. We also present normalization and back-transliteration models with a decoding process tailored for code-switching data. Results show that our neural stacking parser is 1.5% LAS points better than the augmented parsing model and 3.8% LAS points better than the one which uses first-best normalization and/or back-transliteration.


There exists a limited pluralist model of regulating or `managing' religious diversity in contemporary Europe. This pluralist model, however, is in contrast to the limitations that appear at the state level, which reflect an increasingly illiberal, secular Europe. Such contrast stems historically from tensions that exist between the national and transnational aspects of the model itself, but it also reflects the emerging debates on religious pluralism and the democratic state. With the settlement of post-colonial migrants (with Muslims constituting a large majority) a public debate on the role of religion in Europe has resurfaced as these communities exist outside the historical formation of Western church-state relations and are challenging the very underpinning of what comprises a `liberal' democratic state. In particular, it is the role of Islam in secular Europe that frames several questions in this debate: to what extent is it necessary to regulate religious freedoms in the `public sphere' in order to protect the democratic state? What restrictions on minority religions should be considered `necessary in a democratic society' and what limitations should be placed on state interference in minority religions as protection against the undue influence of a dominant social group? Against this backdrop, this article explores the historical social formation of religious pluralism in the European context and examines the legal and political frameworks at the national and regional levels to `regulate' diversity.


The background of this study comes from the lack of documentation and knowledge about logistics in units, which has the main focus on combat or reconnaissance. The aims of the thesis is to determine and compare the different methods used to provide logistical support to units operating in enemy territory by Sweden and the Czech Republic in todays convention and asymmetric wars.Method of gathering information is through qualitative interviews using a semi-structured interview technique with both Swedish and Czech officers. The topics of the interviews are defined beforehand on an interview template and are based on the Swedish basic view of logistics. The three logistical branches that are covered are; service, movement and healthcare support. The result shows that Sweden and the Czech Republic have largely the same methods in all three branches. Sweden has one method in both service and healthcare support, which the Czech Republic does not have. For service support the method is a "forward operating place" which is similar to a forward operating base but only smaller and within the enemies territory. With healthcare support Sweden has small competent medicalgroups further out in enemy territory.The conclusion is that although Sweden and the Czech Republic have mostly the same logistical methods in supporting units in enemy territory they sometimes use them differently. The Swedish armed forces have a more evolved system for logistical support in enemy territory, which is a consequence of the cold war and the Swedish decision of not joining NATO, according to the author.


Several lines of research suggest that the depressant effects of intoxicant-anesthetic compounds are mediated through the GABA receptor-chloride ionophore. We have recently demonstrated a procedure that allows direct measurement of GABA-mediated chloride influx in neural tissue. Using this approach in conjunction with receptor-binding techniques, we examined the role of the GABAergic system using mice selected for genetic differences in ethanol hypnosis. A low concentration of ethanol (15 mM) enhanced the muscimol-stimulated chloride influx in cerebellar membranes from Long-sleep (LS-ethanol sensitive) mice, but had no effect on membranes from Short-sleep (SS-ethanol resistant) mice. In addition, muscimol was more potent in stimulating chloride flux and in inhibiting 35S-TBPS binding in LS membranes than in SS membranes. Mice from a heterogeneous stock were selected for differences in ethanol-induced loss of righting reflex. Cerebellar membranes from these mice also showed differences in ethanol augmentation of muscimol-stimulated chloride flux in vitro that were related to their differential sensitivity to ethanol in vivo. This combined genetic-neurochemical approach provides strong evidence for the importance of GABA-operated chloride channels in ethanol intoxication.


Sugarcane shows reduced crop stand under relatively suboptimal conditions, the main reason for this is sensitivity of bud tissue to temperature fluctuations and salinity at sowing time. The aim of these studies was to explore the physiological, developmental and molecular changes occurring in the immature sugarcane buds under heat, cold and salt stresses, and possible role of proline and glycinebetaine in mitigating the changes in a time course manner during sprouting of nodal buds. All the stresses reduced bud fresh and dry weight, led to the generation of H2O2, reduced the tissue levels of K+ and Ca2+, but enhanced the synthesis of osmolytes in a time course manner. Heat stress mainly produced oxidative damage and acted as a dehydrative force, whereas cold stress caused oxidative stress and slowed down the physiological activities. Salinity was the most damaging of all the stresses. The main effects of salinity were the accumulation of Na+ and Cl-, reduced tissue contents of Ca2+ and K+ and enhanced synthesis of H2O2 in the developing sugarcane bud. As for histological changes, all the stresses delayed and reduced the formation of new bud leaves and their expansion, which was mainly because of reduction in the number and area of mesophyll cells and poor development of vascular bundles. The pretreatment of bud chips with proline and GB effectively reduced stress effects being more effective under heat stress followed by cold stress and the least under salinity stress. As revealed from the correlation studies, although pretreatment with proline and GB appeared to have no direct role in stress tolerance, main effects were the reduced generation of H2O2, improvement in the K+ and Ca2+ nutrition and further enhancement in the levels of free proline, GB and soluble sugars under heat and cold stress. Under salt stress, the pretreatment reduced Na+ and Cl-, in addition to the observed effects under heat and cold stresses. Histological changes revealed that the pretreatment with osmoprotectants increased the mesophyll cell area leading to expansion in the bud leaves and led the development of elaborated vascular tissues. Of the two, GB was more effective than proline for all stress treatments but for different measured variables. Detailed studies on the molecular and metabolic responses indicated the enhanced expression of Asn, dehydrins, LEA and GAPDH genes, stronger accumulation of proline and alanine followed by glycine, glutamic acid and 5-oxo-proline. Among the sugars, sucrose followed by diethylene glycol, fructose, glucose and glycerol, and nucleic acids, adenosine and uracil, as well as organic acids, aconitate, chlorogenate, ribonate_put, quinate, pipecolate, erythronate, GABA, glucoronate, gluconate, glucarate, glucoranate and octadecanoate showed accumulation at all temperature treatments and time periods. HCA and LVL revealed that out of 108 metabolites, chlorogenate, putrescine, octadecanoate, fructose, proline, glycine, sucrose, quinate, trans-aconitate, guanine, GABA and ethanolamine showed greater accumulation under high temperature. In crux, albeit all stresses deterred the transition of bud from immature to mature state, the salinity was the most damaging. In most cases, improvement produced by proline was greater than GB. Heat stress revealed distinct patterns of gene expression and metabolites synthesis. The correlation data showed that pretreatment with the osmoprotectants improved bud growth under stress regimes; the roles are indirect in improved Ca2+ and K+ nutrition and reduced production of H2O2. Nevertheless, these findings suggest that in low to moderately hot, cool and saline areas sugarcane bud sprouting can be improved by pretreatment of bud chips with the 20 mM levels of proline and GB and requisite crop stand can be achieved


The purpose of this study was to determine whether daily running lengthens the life-span of animals dying prematurely due to cardiovascular disease. We used a strain of rat that is genetically hypertensive and obese and is reported to develop atherosclerosis (Exp. Mol. Pathol. 19: 53--60, 1973). These animals were divided into three groups consisting of runners exercised daily on treadmills from an early age life, food-restricted sedentary rats, and libitum eaters that were sedentary. This latter group had significantly higher average daily food intakes and body weights than either of the other two groups. The average life-span of both sedentary groups was significantly longer than the running group. Runners had a greater frequency of focal myocardial necrosis, but atherosclerosis was absent in all three groups. We speculate that daily running may have accentuated the development of factor s that may have contributed to the early death of runners.


Wireless technologies are advancing rapidly, providing ubiquitous communication to diverse user communities. Businesses are seeking wireless networks for a wide range of application domains, which fuels the need for higher data rates and better performance levels. The wireless industry has made significant progress in overcoming performance constraints that hindered the widespread adoption of wireless technologies. Extensive research on architectures and their implementation details has brought tremendous advancements and improvements in wireless capabilities. In this paper, we show how we can improve the performance of wireless networks by employing various configuration techniques. We deal with two configuration issues, the overlapping channel problem and the node assignment problem, which specifically affect the performance of Wireless Infrastructure networks. This paper aims at proposing channel assignment techniques which minimize the channel interferences between access points and presents node assignment patterns which minimize congestion and contention at the access point by balancing traffic load. This study will help wireless users choose and adopt a suitable wireless technology based on their application's QoS requirements, infrastructure available and wireless features needed.


This study estimated net irrigation benefits from the proposed Cable Mountain Reservoir (CMR) on the North Fork of the Red River in Southwestern Oklahoma. Part of the benefits from the CMR might come from replacing the largely depleted groundwater in the Tillman Terrace area (TTA) of western Tillman County. The elevation of the TTA would be at or below level of the CMR. Construction of the CMR is dependent on a project to prevent loading of up to 400 tons of salt per day on the Elm Fork upstream of the proposed reservoir. ArcGIS was used to locate and calculate the area of potential irrigable soils (Class I, IIe, and IIw). The potential irrigable soils were restricted to those with a slope of less than three percent. The clusters of irrigable soils that could be covered by ¼ mile pivot systems within cadastral section boundaries while avoiding roads, buildings, and gullies were then calculated. Some 543 full or partial pivots containing over 68,000 acres were identified. Elevation contour maps constructed from USGS data sets were used to draw alternative pipeline routes that could deliver water to each of the pivots with minimal pumping. The EPANET hydrologic pipeline program was used to calculate energy costs and pipeline pressures necessary to deliver 600 to 800 gpm to each pivot with at least 35 PSI. Salinity of the surface water limited crop choice to currently grown cotton crop. The EPIC simulation program was used to develop soil type specific cotton response functions to irrigation, to salinity in the irrigation water, and to salt accumulation in the soil. These functions were used to estimate the yield of cotton to the amount of irrigation and the accumulation of soil salinity over a 50-year period. Examination of EPANET results indicated points in the system where pumps were necessary and where pipe diameters could be increased or decreased to reduce the sum of energy costs and annualized pipe costs. A series of nonlinear programming models were used to determine the annual amount of water to be applied to maximize discounted profit from each pivot given the individual soil types covered by pivot and the delivery cost of water from the pipeline. If all producers adopted 600 gpm pivots and operated simultaneously, the cost of the 360,000 gpm pipeline would be prohibitive. However, formation of an irrigation scheduling district that divided the irrigable areas in four subareas where producers use 800 gpm pivots requires a 120,000 gpm system at one-third of the fixed cost of the unrestricted 600 gpm system. The net present value (NPV) per acre for a 50-year period for designs 1, 2, and 3 were profitable over 75, 70, and 65 cents of cotton prices, respectively. The study suggests that economies can be obtained through a combination of pipe sizing and by increased cooperation or utilization of the pipeline.


An intuitive guide to implementing and calibrating SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor with minimum hassle Overview Configure network monitoring services on servers and devices Populate SolarWinds SAM with network nodes and tailor it to your environment Design a live network map with the Orion Network Atlas In Detail As a network or system administrator, your primary responsibility is to ensure high availability of all managed IT services. There are a number of monitoring tools available; but these can be complicated and expensive, and may only monitor certain areas of your network. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is an intuitive, all-encompassing, yet cost effective, enterprise-level network monitoring service. A concise and practical, hands-on guide that will teach you how utilize SolarWinds SAM. It provides step-by-step tutorials to walk you through every feature, while teaching you how to tailor the product to your own network environment. This book will guide you through equipping your network devices and servers for SolarWinds SAM utilization. It will provide a sequential, hands-on overview of the product, and is suited for networks of all sizes, ranging from small businesses to larger enterprises. You will learn how to populate SolarWinds SAM with nodes, then classify and group nodes to tailor the product to your network environment. By doing so, you will benefit from key features such as automated alerts, traps, and reports. Each feature is explained in a practical and useful manner via tutorials and real-world examples to help you start monitoring your network quickly and efficiently, while keeping security implications in mind by applying enterprise-level best practices. What you will learn from this book Enable and configure network monitoring services and protocols on servers, virtual hosts, and network devices Walk through the installation and initial configuration of SolarWinds Manually add, remove, promote, and demote nodes Classify and group nodes Define child and parent node dependencies Run reports, create custom reports, and schedule automated report forwarding to an email system Troubleshoot common issues with the network monitoring service and SolarWinds SAM Approach A concise and practical guide to using SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor. Who this book is written for If you are an IT professionals ranging from an entry-level technician to a more advanced network or system administrator who is new to network monitoring services and/or SolarWinds SAM, this book is ideal for you.


Animal by-products such as meat and bone meals are now certified as free from bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and their use as organic fertilizers is considered safe again. Given that knowing the rates at which their nutrients are released is key to efficient use, nitrogen (N) mineralization in Mediterranean soils fertilized with meat and bone meals (MBMs) has been studied by means of 12 incubation experiments using three soils of different textures and organic-matter contents and five MBMs of varied origin and characteristics. After the application of the organic products, the amounts of mineral N released after 2, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, and 35 weeks of aerobic incubation at 25 °C were measured and the data were adjusted to first-order reaction kinetics. In all cases, the results were consistent with the assumption of N mineralization being a first-order reaction with k constants ranging from 0.177 week−1 to 1.603 week−1. Mineralization was fast, with most of the N release taking place during the first 5–10 weeks of the incubations. Despite the different origin and characteristics of the MBMs compared in the experiment, soil type was the most influential factor in the mineralization process. The N mineralization rates were greater in the loam soil, suggesting a relevant role of enzymes immobilized in inorganic colloids such as clay.


A low-temperature sealing technique for micro-fabricated alkali vapor cells for chip-scale atomic clock applications is developed and evaluated. A thin-film indium bonding technique was used for sealing the cells at temperatures of ≤140 °C. These sealing temperatures are much lower than those reported for other approaches, and make the technique highly interesting for future micro-fabricated cells, using anti-relaxation wall coatings. Optical and microwave spectroscopy performed on first indium-bonded cells without wall coatings are used to evaluate the cleanliness of the process as well as a potential leak rate of the cells. Both measurements confirm a stable pressure inside the cell and therefore an excellent hermeticity of the indium bonding. The double-resonance measurements performed over several months show an upper limit for the leak rate of 1.5 × 10−13 mbar·l/s. This is in agreement with additional leak-rate measurements using a membrane deflection method on indium-bonded test structures.


Today, there is little question that faculty scholarship is intimately related to the reputation of a law school, and also relatedly, to the law school rankings game. Central to this reality are some emergent administrative positions — the position of Associate Dean for Research, for example — which carry important possibilities for a law school, both internally and externally, in terms of promoting attention to scholarship. Yet this position, which has only recently emerged in law schools over the last twenty years, is also one that is largely fluid and often determined by the relative institutional capabilities of the rest of the University administration, in addition to the larger landscape of legal education. Because there is no precise one-size-fits-all model for an Associate Dean, the fluidity of the position enables us to consider a range of variables that impact scholarly visibility, both internally within a law school community, and externally within the larger scholarly world. How can we, as Associate Deans, strive to support the productivity of faculty members in these shifting times? How can Associate Deans navigate complex social relations on faculties, where issues of gender, race, class, and other variables often abound? How can we draw attention to scholarly endeavors at a time when law schools are undergoing a massive transformation for the future? How can we ensure that legal scholarship remains relevant and important? How can we value the many types of scholarly contributions that our faculty can make, without imposing a narrow view of what counts as "serious" scholarship?Answering these questions is not an easy task. Just as there are many different types of research and scholarship, there are many different roles for an Associate Dean for Research. As Associate Dean for Research at Fordham, and one of the small number of minority women who have held this position in law school academia, I have been struck by how many of these issues can be indirectly tied to traditional, institutional questions about building a law school community. Here, questions about identity, seniority, productivity, and interdisciplinary scholarship emerge, often without clear answers. Indeed, also, identity politics — not just demographic identities, but institutional identities — affect so many of the range of questions that surround productivity and the way in which research is valued and embraced in a law school community. Mainstream law review publications, clearly, are an essential part of every law faculty in the country, and should be valued and encouraged, but an administration, should also have a greater sense of the importance of other types of engaged scholarship. In this symposium article, I draw on the history and trajectory of American Indian legal scholarship as an illustrative example of the kind of engaged scholarship that law schools should value and encourage.


Background: Humans are exposed to both inorganic and organic arsenic through environmental, medicinal and occupational situations. The main source of arsenic exposure is drinking water with high levels of arsenic. Aim: This study was undertaken to investigate the gender and segmental difference in arsenate (As V) uptake by everted gut sacs of mice. Materials & methods: By using the everted gut sac technique, the serosal and mucosal uptake of Arsenate (2 mM) in both sexes of mice was studied in the intestinal segments. The Arsenate in the samples of fluid present in serosal and mucosal compartments of everted gut sacs was estimated by Hydride-Generation Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer. Results: There was a steady increase in both serosal and mucosal uptake of Arsenate in both duodenum and ileum with a rise in the initial Arsenate concentration of the incubation medium. The mucosal uptake of Arsenate was significantly higher in duodenum than ileum (P<0.001). Both serosal and mucosal uptakes were elevated in the duodenal segment of male mice when compared to female mice except mucosal uptake in ileum. Conclusion: These results indicate that there is a gender and segmental difference in the up take of AS (V), which can be explored pharmaceutically to reduce the arsenic toxicity in pop ulation at risk.


Geographic information observatories (GIOs) extend the capabilities for observatory-based science to the broad geographic data associated with a place or region. GIOs are a form of scientific instrumentation that affords a holistic view of geographic data. This potentially could lead to new insights about geographic information, as well as the human and coupled human-natural systems described by this information. In this report, I discuss GIOs in light of a timely question – what new types of GIScience should we be doing with big geographic data? I argue that GIOs also allow for a new type of opportunistic geographic information science that leverages real-world events via ongoing observation, experimentation and decision-support.


This article reports on the first 3D cadastral registration in The Netherlands, accomplished in March 2016. The solution was sought within the current cadastral, organisational, and technical frameworks to obtain a deeper knowledge on the optimal way of implementing 3D registration, while avoiding discussions between experts from different domains. The article presents the developed methodology to represent legal volumes in an interactive 3D visualisation that can be registered in the land registers. The source data is the 3D Building Information Model (BIM). The methodology is applied to two cases: (1) the case of the railway station in Delft, resulting in the actual 3D registration in 2016; and (2) a building complex in Amsterdam, improving the Delft-case and providing the possibility to describe a general workflow from design data to a legal document. An evaluation provides insights for an improved cadastral registration of multi-level property rights. The main conclusion is that in specific situations, a 3D approach has important advantages for cadastral registration over a 2D approach. Further study is needed to implement the solution in a standardised and uniform way, from registration to querying and updating in the future, and to develop a formal registration process accordingly.


Cyclic changes in temperature and humidity in real-life distribution environments decrease BCT and life-span of standard corrugated containers. As a result, BCT obtained from testing at standard TAPPI environment may be inadequate to protect the products inside from damages during real-life distribution. The corrugated containers users need to understand this concept in order to design a proper corrugated containers at a costefficient price that can retain BCT in these extreme temperature and humidity changes environments. Wax curtain coating is one of the most commonly used techniques to retain BCT of corrugated containers that are distributed in short-term high humidity environment, and usually found in the fresh produce, poultry and meat industries. In this study, standard and wax curtain coated corrugated containers were toploaded with two different safety factors and conditioned in three different cyclic environments. Every 24 hours, moisture contents and heights of these loaded test containers were determined to investigate life-span and relationship between moisture content change and reduction in height. In addition, unloaded standard and wax curtain coated corrugated containers were conditioned in three different cyclic and constant environments. The reduction in BCT of these unloaded test containers in each cyclic and constant environment was investigated after the loaded test containers in that cyclic environment reached the critical deflection. The results of the experiment showed that there was a notable difference in reduction in BCT of the standard unloaded test containers after exposure to every cyclic and constant environments, but not of the wax curtain coated unloaded test containers. The life-span of loaded wax curtain coated test containers were also greater than of loaded standard test containers in every cyclic environment. The greater difference of temperature in cyclic environment resulted in greater moisture content change of corrugated material. Thus, both types of test containers experienced the greatest moisture content change in cyclic cold storage environment. However, due to its most severe temperature and relative humidity, cyclic tropical environment showed the greatest effect on reduction in BCT, reduction in height and life-span ofboth types of test containers.


'Morrowind', Bethesda's 2002 game, marries an explicit attachment to the type of free-form, gaming experience that allows for intensely personal character creation and role-play, with a rich and complex main storyline based on the theological concept of prophecy - the story of the reincarnation of the legendary hero, Indoril Nerevar. The interaction between these two aspects of the game puts Morrowind in a particular position at the point of interaction between theology and computer game design. By seeking to balance the competing demands of an explicitly prophetic main story with a free-form user experience, Morrowind produces an effective synthesis of both narrative gaming and theological prophecy in a new light which changes the common paradigm of both. This paper aims to trace and highlight the way in which this tension has been resolved within the game, relying on a voluntary understanding of prophecy and a distinct approach to narrative urgency.


Tropical forests provide important ecosystem services in maintaining biodiversity, sequestering carbon and regulating climate regionally and globally. Climate triggers the seasonal transitions of vegetation structure and function in tropical forests. In turn, the seasonal cycles of structure and function in tropical forests feed back to the climate system through the control of land-atmosphere exchange of carbon, water and energy fluxes. Large uncertainties exist in the carbon and water budgets of tropical forests, and environmental controls on phenology are among the least understood factors. Although field studies have identified patterns in the environmental controls on local-scale species-level phenology in the tropics, there is little consensus on large-scale top-down environmental controls on whole-ecosystem seasonality. In this paper, we use both optical and microwave remote sensing to investigate the seasonality of vegetation canopy structure and function in three distinct tropical African forest types, and identify environmental triggers or controls of their variability. For most tropical forests that have a closed canopy and high leaf biomass, optical remote sensing (e.g., vegetation indices) captures canopy photosynthetic capacity (i.e., canopy function), while small-wavelength microwave remote sensing characterizes the leaf biomass and leaf water content of the upper canopy (i.e., canopy structure). Our results reveal a strong coupling of canopy structure with canopy function in the tropical deciduous forests and woody savannas, and their seasonalities are both controlled by precipitation rather than solar radiation. By contrast, tropical evergreen forests in Africa exhibit a decoupling of canopy structure from canopy function revealed by different sensors: canopy photosynthetic capacity shown by the optical remote sensing is linked to the seasonal variation of precipitation, while microwave remote sensing captures semi-annual leaf-flushing that is synchronous with peak insolation intensity at the top of the atmosphere, which is bimodal. The differential coupling of canopy structure and function in tropical forests observed from remote sensing highlights differences inherent in distinct vegetation types within the tropics that may originate in the different life histories of their respective floras. This satellite-based finding encourages more field-based studies to clarify the interpretation of these large scale patterns.


Photoelectric and photographic spectrophotometry have been utilized to infer some of the properties of the nuclear regions of eight Seyfert galaxies and two additional objects displaying somewhat more normal spectra. The observations were principally made during 1966 and 1967 and cover much of the region between 3300A and 10,000A. For each of the objects, absolute continuous energy distributions are obtained. In addition, the relative and absolute emission-line intensities and profiles were derived from the observational data. It is found that the emission-line profiles, and the profiles of the Balmer line cores can be consistently interpreted in terms of mass-motions and/or turbulence within the emitting regions. The wings of the Balmer lines are difficult to interpret in this fashion and evidence is presented which indicates that the relevant broadening mechanism is electron scattering. This process requires that the emission nuclei possess significant optical depth in the Balmer lines. The anomalously steep Balmer decrements which are observed, as well as the presence of the Balmer wings, may also be consistent with such optical depth. Absorption lines seem to be extremely weak, or absent, in the nuclear spectra and the continuous energy distributions bear little resemblance to those of normal nuclei. The presence of a relatively flat non-thermal component to the observed spectrum is indicated. Approximate forms for these non-thermal spectra are derived from the observational data and auxiliary calculations. It is found that this non-thermal flux constitutes a large part of the blue and ultraviolet fluxes observed in the Seyfert nuclei. It is this component which is responsible for the unusually blue colors of these objects and for the weakness of the absorption lines. This non-thermal component may also be responsible for the observed wide ranges of ionization. Rough calculations indicate that sufficient ionizing flux will result from an extrapolation of the optical non-thermal spectrum to the far ultraviolet. It is concluded that the Seyfert nuclei are objects characterized by large internal velocity dispersions, a sizeable non-thermal component, and significant optical thickness in the Balmer lines. The levels of ionization are quite mixed in the line-emitting regions and the source of this ionization is either synchrotron photons or the conversion of the kinetic energy of cloud motions into ionization energy by means of cloud interactions. Of the two, the former seems the more likely. Finally, the sources of the excitation are considered, but no clear distinction between the various mechanisms is possible on the basis of the available data.


ARP spoofing attack, one of the most important security topics, is usually taught in courses such as Intrusion Detection in Local Area Networks (LANs). In such a course, hands-on labs are very important as they facilitate students' learning on how to detect ARP spoofing using various types of security solutions, such as intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS). The preparation of these hands-on labs are usually the task of Security Instructors who are required to select and use efficient security solutions for their hands-on experiments; the problem that presents itself is that most of these security instructors lack the sufficient hands-on experience and skills. For this reason and because of the diversity of the available security solutions, the security instructors are having much difficulty when selecting the adequate security solutions for their hands-on labs.
 This paper is a comparative study for educational purpose. It provides analysis based on practical experiments carried out on a number of security solutions regarding their ability to detect ARP spoofing. Our analysis provides means for security instructors to evaluate and select the appropriate security solutions for their hands-on labs. In addition, we clearly show that ARP spoofing has not been given enough attention by most tested security solutions, even though this attack presents a serious threat, is very harmful and more dangerously it is easy to conduct. As a solution, we propose the requirements for an ideal algorithm that can be used by security solutions to detect effectively any ARP spoofing attack.


This chapter explores interactions among American high school learners of L2 Spanish during three lessons on the pronominal clitic se which were designed to promote grammatical consciousness-raising through guided induction. Following Adair-Hauck, Donato, and Cumo-Johanssen (2010), each lesson first presented a property of se within a narrative text, with learners then inductively "co-constructing" rules in small groups, followed by a whole class discussion where the teacher guided learners toward a consensus. Analyses of the small group and whole class discussions focused on the amount of analytic talk produced by individual learners and the types of interactions among learners. The results suggest that although the amount of analytic talk varied considerably across individuals, the tasks promoted consciousness-raising of the target form.


What can you do with a million images? In this paper, we present a new image completion algorithm powered by a huge database of photographs gathered from the Web. The algorithm patches up holes in images by finding similar image regions in the database that are not only seamless, but also semantically valid. Our chief insight is that while the space of images is effectively infinite, the space of semantically differentiable scenes is actually not that large. For many image completion tasks, we are able to find similar scenes which contain image fragments that will convincingly complete the image. Our algorithm is entirely data driven, requiring no annotations or labeling by the user. Unlike existing image completion methods, our algorithm can generate a diverse set of image completions and we allow users to select among them. We demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm over existing image completion approaches.


Land-Use/Land-Cover (LU/LC) change detection using satellite data has gained momentum with the advance of the pre-operational phase of regional and global earth observation programmes such as GEOS, GMES, and GOFC-GOLD to name but a few. Present study aims at revealing LU/LC change of Bistrishko branishte biosphere reserve using Landsat 5 TM and Landsat 7 ETM+ radiometer satellite data. The LU/LC classification of the study area is done for the period 2007-2012, and difference images, between LU/LC maps, have been created. The classification scheme follows CORINE2000 Level 3 with few additional classes introduced to map changes. The methods used in the study are geoinformation, cartography, and statistical. The results show that in effect of 2012 wildfire 0.72 km2 from reserve territory was devastated. The temporal changes which are taking place after the 60 ha windthrow in 2001, the 200 ha bark-beetle outbreak in 2003–2011 and the wildfire from June 2012 were further investigated using ASD HH FS spectrometer in 2011. As a result the increase in '331 Broad-leaved forest' and '312 Coniferous forest' LU/LC classes is attributed to the increase of the territory of deciduous species after a large bark beetle outbreak, which took place between 2003 and 2011, which devastated most of the old Picea abies trees, while the decrease of 'Outbreak' and '332 Bare rock' LU/LC classes is mainly due to the wildfire which took place in June 2012.


The vast amount of knowledge about past human societies has not been systematically organized and, therefore, remains inaccessible for empirically testing theories about cultural evolution and historical dynamics. For example, what evolutionary mechanisms were involved in the transition from the small-scale, uncentralized societies, in which humans lived 10,000 years ago, to the large-scale societies with an extensive division of labor, great differentials in wealth and power, and elaborate governance structures of today? Why do modern states sometimes fail to meet the basic needs of their populations? Why do economies decline, or fail to grow? In this article, we describe the structure and uses of a massive databank of historical and archaeological information, Seshat: The Global History Databank. The data that we are currently entering in Seshat will allow us and others to test theories explaining how modern societies evolved from ancestral ones, and why modern societies vary so much in their capacity to satisfy their members' basic human needs.


Gestational weight gain was within the recommended range for 32% of women giving birth to full-term, singleton infants in 2015, with 48% gaining more weight and 21% less weight than recommended. Approximately 44% of women who were underweight before pregnancy gained within the recommendations, compared with 39% of women who were normal weight, 26% of women who were overweight, and 24% of women with obesity before pregnancy. Weight gain above the recommendations was highest among women who were overweight (61%) or had obesity (55%) before pregnancy.


The GLEON Research And PRAGMA Lake Expedition – GRAPLE – is a collaborative effort between computer science and lake ecology researchers. It aims to improve our understanding and predictive capacity of the threats to the water quality of our freshwater resources, including climate change. This paper presents GRAPLEr, a distributed computing system used to address the modeling needs of GRAPLE researchers. GRAPLEr integrates and applies overlay virtual network, high-throughput computing, and Web service technologies in a novel way. First, its user-level IP-overP2P (IPOP) overlay network allows compute and storage resources distributed across independently-administered institutions (including private and public clouds) to be aggregated into a common virtual network, despite the presence of firewalls and network address translators. Second, resources aggregated by the IPOP virtual network run unmodified high-throughput computing middleware (HTCondor) to enable large numbers of model simulations to be executed concurrently across the distributed computing resources. Third, a Web service interface allows end users to submit job requests to the system using client libraries that integrate with the R statistical computing environment. The paper presents the GRAPLEr architecture, describes its implementation and reports on its performance for batches of General Lake Model (GLM) simulations across three cloud infrastructures (University of Florida, CloudLab, and Microsoft Azure).


This collection provides a kaleidoscopic view of a range of identity struggles in the workplace context. It features twenty-two case studies that present an eclectic mix of workplaces in different socio-cultural contexts. They include, among others, household workers in Peru and Hong Kong, female professionals in India and the UK, social workers in Botswana and on Canadian reserves, tourist guides in Europe and construction workers in New Zealand. The volume addresses important questions on professional competence, group membership, (sometimes competing) expectations, and identity boundaries. The chapters establish that identity struggles are a reflection of issues of knowledge, competing norms and attempts for social change.


The administration of cytotoxic chemotherapy is one of the key strategies for the treatment of early and advanced cancer. In Australia, there are over 300,000 hospitalisations per year for the administration of cytotoxic chemotherapy, equating to approximately a third of all cancer related hospitals admissions. As a consequence of the variability in drug exposure and the narrow therapeutic window of cytotoxic chemotherapy, clinicians have adopted various approaches to individualise chemotherapy dosing in an attempt to maximise clinical outcome and minimise toxicity. In this thesis, a series of studies have been undertaken to examine and inform the dosing of cytotoxic chemotherapy in clinical practice. These studies focused on existing clinical practices where evidence to support the practice was lacking. The use of body surface area (BSA) as a means of individualising doses of cytotoxic chemotherapy is the most common dosing method in clinical practice. One of the historical justifications for the BSA approach is the postulated relationship between renal function and BSA. The first paper evaluated the relationship between BSA and glomerular filtration rate (GFR) measured by radiolabelled technetium-99m diethyl triamine penta-acetic acid (Tc99mDTPA) clearance. In 122 adult oncology patients planned for chemotherapy, the correlation between BSA and GFR was r = 0.24 (95% confidence interval: 0.06 -OAO). These results do not support BSA dosing based on a purported relationship with renal function. While BSA is the predominant means for dose individualisation for cytotoxic chemotherapy, there are other instances when BSA is not utilised. Carboplatin is one such example, which is dosed based on a target area under the plasma concentration-time curve (AUC) with two formulae (Calvert and Chatelut) used in practice. The Chatelut formula had been validated in a very small patient cohort, while the Calvert formula has been utilised for 2 decades in clinical practice. Anecdotal clinical experience observed that Significantly different doses are calculated depending on which formula is used and also the method of estimating renal function, for example, Tc99mDTPA or the Cockcroft and Gault (CG) formula. The second paper evaluated i) a comparison of the doses of carboplatin calculated using the Chatelut formula compared with the Calvert formula and ii) a comparison of doses calculated using the Calvert formula when modified with non-isotopic estimations of GFR. When the Chatelut formula was compared the Calvert formula in 122 oncology patients, it was found to statistically over-estimate doses for males (% diff = +22%, P<0.001) and under-estimate doses for females (% diff = -6%, P<0.05). When non-isotopic estimates of GFR where substituted into the Calvert formula there were statistically significant reductions in the dose calculated (CG formula: -8% mean difference, P<0.05; Jelliffe formula: -14% mean difference, P<0.05). This study demonstrated that the dose of carboplatin calculated to achieve a specific target AUC was very dependant on the formula applied and that the Chatelut formula had a statistically significant gender bias and should not be used in practice. Two oncology research groups have developed formulae to predict GFR specifically in cancer patients as a means of assisting the bedside dosing of cytotoxic chemotherapy. Despite only being validated in a small number of patients, these GFR prediction methods were adopted into practice. The third paper evaluated the predictive ability of the Wright formula and the Martin formula when compared to Tc99mDTPA clearance. This analysis was performed with the patient cohort from the two earlier papers. The mean measured GFR was 87mLlmin (range: 30-174mLlmin). The mean precision (mean absolute percentage error) was 18% and 19% for the Wright and Martin formulae respectively. The Martin formula under-estimated GFR for females (mean percentage error: -9%) and over¬estimated GFR for males (mean percentage error: +8%). The key findings were that the estimations of renal function from these two formulae were imprecise and do not provide an improvement on other existing bedside estimates of GFR. The practice of rounding up low serum creatinine (SCr) concentrations to 60 IJmollL in the estimation of renal function for carboplatin dosing is often practiced and also stipulated in clinical trials. This round up method is utilised on the basis that low SCr concentrations «60 IJmol/L) reflect reduced creatinine production rather than enhanced clearance. In the fourth paper an evaluation of this round up method incorporated in the CG formula was compared to measured T c99mDPT A clearance in 419 adult oncology patients. This research demonstrated that rounding low SCr concentrations up to 60 IJmollL improved the predictive ability of the CG formula using actual body weight (mean percentage error 12.9% compared to -7% without rounding). The fifth paper evaluated the practice of dose rounding at the time of prescribing and dose preparation. This study evaluated the feasibility of applying a whole vial size dose rounding approach. The study assessed the impact of this practice across five common cytotoxic chemotherapy drugs. Using data from 2828 oncology patients receiving chemotherapy (mean BSA: 1.80m2; range: 1.00 -2.56m2) this approach would not have resulted in a clinically significant difference between the mean calculated dose and the rounded dose for docetaxel, gemcitabine, oxaliplatin and vinorelbine. This study provided support for adoption of the practice for dose rounding for certain drugs when multiple vial size presentations are available. Clinical practice guidelines have been published to assist in the management of cancer patients with organ dysfunction, including recommendations for cytotoxic chemotherapy dosing in renal impairment. Clinicians are now routinely provided with estimated GFR (eGFR) through automated pathology reports in many countries calculated from the 4¬variable Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (4v-MDRD) formula. The sixth paper evaluated doses calculated for renally excreted cytotoxic chemotherapy drugs using available formulae in comparison to doses when using measured Tc99mDPTA clearance. This included the 4v-MDRD and the Chronic Kidney Disease Epidemiology Collaboration (CKD-EPI) formula which has been recommended to replace the other formulae in routine practice. The concordance of the renal function estimates according to CKD classification with measured Tc99mDPTA clearance in 455 adults (median age: 66.0 years; range 17-87 years) for the 4v-MDRD, CKD-EPI, CG, Martin and Wright formula was 47.7%,56.3%,46.2%,56.5% and 60.2% respectively. Concordance for chemotherapy dose based on Cancer Institute New South Wales recommendations for these formulae was 89.0%, 89.5%, 85.1%, 89.9% and 89.9% respectively. The key findings of this study was that all the bedside formulae provided similar levels of concordance in dosage selection for the renal excreted chemotherapy drugs when compared to the use of a direct measure of GFR. Clinicians using any of these formulae for dosing selection must be cognisant of the potential inherent inaccuracies in dosing that may result. The findings from the series of papers presented as a thesis by publication provide evidence to guide dosing practices for cytotoxic chemotherapy. Further improvements in dosing approaches must be explored as alternatives to existing practices, which are primarily historically based.


The Antillean Island chain is a known breeding and calving ground for North Atlantic humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae). However, while most research efforts for this species have focused on the largest aggregation of whales, located on Silver Bank, off the northern coast of the Dominican Republic, there are still significant knowledge gaps with respect to humpback whale movements along the Antillean Island chain. Even less is known about the spatio-temporal distribution of other marine mammal and fish species in the region. This report summarizes analysis results of acoustic data (10-8000 Hz effective analysis bandwidth recorded at a 25% duty cycle), recorded on the north east of Saba Bank from October 2011 to April 2012. The results show the consistent presence of humpback whales in the vicinity of Saba Bank during their winter breeding season, occasional presence of minke whales and the presence of sound producing fish assemblages. Humpback whale song occurred from the end of December to the end of the recording period in April. From February to April humpback whale song was recorded on more than 89 % of all recording days, though it occurred most frequently in March. All recording days in March showed song presence, with an average of 8.5 ± 2.8 (mean ± SE) hours of recorded song per day. In contrast, for minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) 48 pulse trains (n = 32) were detected less frequently between February to April 2012. A variety of unidentified fish sounds were present throughout the recordings. Although the occurrence of these sounds was not quantified, notable fish choruses (e.g. grouper spp. Epinephelinae) consisting of one to two distinct pulsed calls in the frequency range of 100 - 600 Hz were documented from October to December 2011 in particular. The results of this pilot project highlight the feasibility of using passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) to explore year-round marine mammal and fish presence and distribution in otherwise understudied and remote field sites.


The objective of this paper is to present a method for mapping burnt areas in Brazilian Amazonia using Terra MODIS data. The proposed approach is based on image segmentation of the shade fraction images derived from MODIS, using a non‐supervised classification algorithm followed by an image editing procedure for minimizing misclassifications. Acre State, the focus of this study, is located in the western region of Brazilian Amazonia and undergoing tropical deforestation. The extended dry season in 2005 affected this region creating conditions for extensive forest fires in addition to fires associated with deforestation and land management. The high temporal resolution of MODIS provides information for studying the resulting burnt areas. Landsat 5 TM images and field observations were also used as ground data for supporting and validating the MODIS results. Multitemporal analysis with MODIS showed that about 6500 km2 of land surface were burnt in Acre State. Of this, 3700 km2 corresponded to the previously deforested areas and 2800 km2 corresponded to areas of standing forests. This type of information and its timely availability are critical for regional and global environmental studies. The results showed that daily MODIS sensor data are useful sources of information for mapping burnt areas, and the proposed method can be used in an operational project in Brazilian Amazonia.


Cyber-security risks are growing, both in their prevalence and in their disruptive potential. Attacks against businesses have almost doubled in five years, and incidents that would once have been considered extraordinary are becoming more and more commonplace. The financial impact of cyber-security breaches is rising, and some of the largest costs in 2017 related to ransomware attacks, which accounted for 64% of all malicious emails. Notable examples included the WannaCry attack — which affected 300,000 computers across 150 countries — and NotPetya, which caused quarterly losses in excess of US$300 million for a number of affected businesses. Another growing trend is the use of cyber-attacks to target critical infrastructure and strategic industrial sectors, raising fears that, in a worst-case scenario, attackers could trigger a breakdown in the systems that keep societies functioning.


The granary at the Amsterdam Westerdoksdijk, designed by architect Klinkhamer, recently became out of use by the new destination of the Westerdok area as western emphasis in the new harbour-project. The threatening demolition of the granary is reason to evaluate the introduction of this building type in Holland and the granaries built by Klinkhamer.
The horizontal packing up of cereals in warehouses has in Europe and America during the second half of the 19th century been replaced by vertical storage in tubes (silo's), joined to a granary with mechanical appliance for vertical transport by ladders (elevators) and horizontal mostly by conveyor belts. Also drying and purifying was driven by a steam engine, while after weighing load and discharge of the cargo-boats transport again passed by the elevator system.
Technical problems like the extreme heaviness of such granaries slowed down the introduction of this type. The American 'sillon-system' first introduced in Germany in the 1880's, the first Dutch granary was built at Delft by architect Zieren in commission of J. C. Marken for his 'Gist en Spiritus' factories (1885-86). Educated at the Polytechnische School Delft Jacob F. Klinkhamer (1854-1929) must have known about this project when he had to design a granary for J. Reynvaan at Amsterdam (1885). The mechanical installation delivered by specialist firm G. Luther from Braunschweig, Klinkhamer's granary is a boxlike building with saddle-roof, the tower containing the installation for vertical transport.
In 1888 Klinkhamer and Reynvaan pleaded for the building of more granaries in Amsterdam as 'last entrenchment' of Holland to be able to feed her population in times of war. The added design for a large stone granary at the harbour front already largely is the granary for the Delftsche Distilleerderij and in 1895 for the bradfactory 'Holland' at Amsterdam.
By his contacts with the town councilors R. W.J.C. van den Wall Bake and J.Ph. Korthals Altes (who pleaded western expansion of the harbour) and his experience with this building type Klinkhamer was almost automatically chosen to build a large granary in the western harbour area (1896). Technical problems solved by engineer A.L. van Gendt Klinkhamer's granary Korthals Altes combines classical building up with functional division.
The purification-building in front of instead of between the silo's (like G. Luther's), this granary resembles a granary designed by the firm Ulrich at Boedapest. In 1899 Klinkhamer became Professor in functional architecture at the Polytechnische School Delft, teaching medieval and functional architecture. Still no suitable design principles developed for functional architecture, one used the rudiments of Gothic as most rational and constructive style. Studying this style one could accomplish elementary skills to solve actual problems. Klinkhamer's interpretation a.o. derived from Viollet-le-Duc and Cuypers favoured a 'dechristianized' Gothic and besides Early Gothic or rather Romanesque style.
At home and abroad the forms of medieval civil architecture like castles and city gates were applied at functional buildings. The expression of 'character' of a building as one of the most important elements of contemporary architectural thinking this choice seems logical. The military association of 1888 still actual at the Korthals Altes granary of 1896, the closeness of the building, the austere ornaments with medieval elements, the constructive articulation and balanced proportions are all means to indicate 'character'. It is this same 'character' of the building, which retards a redevelopment plan and threatens the granary with demolition.


The Generic Viewpoint Assumption (GVA) states that the position of the viewer or the light in a scene is not special. Thus, any estimated parameters from an observation should be stable under small perturbations such as object, viewpoint or light positions. The GVA has been analyzed and quantified in previous works, but has not been put to practical use in actual vision tasks. In this paper, we show how to utilize the GVA to estimate shape and illumination from a single shading image, without the use of other priors. We propose a novel linearized Spherical Harmonics (SH) shading model which enables us to obtain a computationally efficient form of the GVA term. Together with a data term, we build a model whose unknowns are shape and SH illumination. The model parameters are estimated using the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers embedded in a multi-scale estimation framework. In this prior-free framework, we obtain competitive shape and illumination estimation results under a variety of models and lighting conditions, requiring fewer assumptions than competing methods.


Case studies offer students the opportunity to explore critical incidents and develop effective strategies for resolution. Featuring the exclusive, real-life case studies of top communication scholars, Case Studies for Organizational Communication: Understanding Communication Processes, Third Edition, employs a unique applied approach that allows students to use their knowledge of organizational communication to analyze typical organizational problems. Edited by Joann Keyton and Pamela Shockley-Zalabak, the book includes a variety of open-ended cases that encourage lively classroom discussions. This format also provides instructors with greater flexibility in connecting case assignments to their primary text. Now in its third edition, the book is enhanced by an updated companion website (www.oup.com/us/keytonshockley) featuring instructor resources and case studies from previous editions. Two new sections--"Organizations and Their Stakeholders" and "Organizational Crisis"--and twenty-one new readings address a variety of issues, including organizational technology, teamwork and group processes, decision-making and problem-solving, and diversity. A flexible supplement covering a broad range of contexts and situations, Case Studies for Organizational Communication, Third Edition, is an essential resource for helping students devise successful communication strategies.


Traditionally, the engineering education is aiming to establish quantifiable, measurable units, and after that comparing those to utilise the unit considered more suitable. When thinking about sustainability of structures, traditional mentality has to be set aside, as comparing different structural systems is becoming a complex task. Choosing different materials for the same reinforced concrete structure has immediate comparable impact on the environment. Reinforced concrete structures are using excessively the limited limestone and other resources and, in the same time, a large quantity of energy for producing the rebar, the clinker and the structural concrete, having negative impact on the environment. Even if reinforced concrete structures are not generally known as the most sustainable solutions for several structural queries, reinforced concrete structural solutions are preferred for most of the situations due to the other advantages presented by these structures. Hence, considering that specific building indispensable for the society, the aim of obtaining sustainable buildings becomes equiva lent to decrease their negative impact on the environment while still taking full advantage of their strength. This target can be achieved by judicious choose of the built-in materials. For a given multistorey reinforced concrete frame building, the scope is to establish the concrete and the reinforcing steel classes in such a way that the impact of these materials on the environment to be kept at the lowest possible level. This paper presents a study on an ordinary reinforced concrete frame structure designed using two different concrete classes (C16/20 and C30/37) and two different reinforcing bar classes (PC52 and S500), obtaining four different possibilities for the same solution. Different combinations of built-in materials are resulting different economic and environmental impacts. The environmental impact for the whole life cycle of the studied solutions, using different material qualities, is estimated using Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings, taking into consideration weighted life-cycle analysis indicators (total energy used, the quantity of solid emissions in air and water, the required natural resources consumed – especially the non-renewable ones – the impact owed to the depletion of the natural resources, human health and the impact on the ecosystems). Besides the environmental impact estimation, realisation cost is also evaluated for each structural solution, obtaining a relationship between the cost (as the major decision influencer) and the sustainability of the studied solutions.


The effective planning, design and management of water resources systems for sustainable development are severely hampered in developing countries by five major factors. First, use is frequently made of an incomplete framework for analysis, ignoring positive impacts of development. Second, there is a lack of appropriate methodology for applying environmental impact assessments in these countries. Third, there is a lack of adequate knowledge about the effects of water development projects. Fourth, there are institutional restraints, particularly the division of responsibilities among various ministries. Fifth, monitoring and evaluation are seldom integrated into project management. Each of these interrelated problems is discussed in turn.


A wide range of low level vision problems have been formulated in terms of finding the most probable assignment of a Markov random field (or equivalently the lowest energy configuration). Perhaps the most successful example is stereo vision. For the stereo problem, it has been shown that finding the global optimum is NP hard but good results have been obtained using a number of approximate optimization algorithms. In this paper, we show that for standard benchmark stereo pairs, the global optimum can be found in about 30 minutes using a variant of the belief propagation (BP) algorithm. We extend previous theoretical results on reweighted belief propagation to account for possible ties in the beliefs and using these results we obtain easily checkable conditions that guarantee that the BP disparities are the global optima. We verify experimentally that these conditions are typically met for the standard benchmark stereo pairs and discuss the implications of our results for further progress in stereo.


In UK schools, as elsewhere, linguistic diversity is on the rise. Changing patterns of migration and settlement mean that schools in areas where once English was the only language spoken are encountering bilingual pupils for the first time, while schools with a long history of multilingualism are finding that the range of languages spoken by pupils is growing and changing. These developments can be viewed positively, in particular given that plurilingualism (competence in more than one language) has been recognized by the Council of Europe, among other international bodies, as a desirable educational goal for all, benefiting both the individual who can speak several languages and wider society. However, to reap these benefits, there is a need for investment in formal educational provision which enables plurilingual learners to maintain and develop all their languages. Research conducted by three of the UK's Centres for Information on Language Teaching and Research—Scottish CILT, CILT, the (English) National Centre for Languages and CILT Cymru, in Wales—has established that there are substantial (and growing) numbers of plurilingual children in UK schools, speaking a very wide range of languages. There is provision for some of these languages to be studied formally, in mainstream education and in complementary classes. However, the research also revealed that professional development is a high priority for community language teachers, many of whom are untrained volunteers. In addition, research conducted by the Training and Development Agency (TDA) in England has shown that newly qualified teachers feel that their training has not prepared them well for working with pupils from a wide range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds. There is therefore also a need for initial teacher education and professional development which raises awareness of the benefits of plurilingualism, and for teacher educators to participate in experimental initiatives to develop bilingual educational approaches.


This paper uses a new typology of authoritarian regimes to explore the extent to which regime type explains the survival (and breakdown) of non-democratic regimes as well as the impact of different types of authoritarian regimes on democratic development. Our results demonstrate that different types of authoritarian regime face different propensities to develop toward democracy. Hence the nature of the authoritarian regime in question deserves to be added to the list of democracy's essential preconditions. One regime type—the limited multiparty system—stands out as the prime stepping stone to democracy. The fact that this regime type has become the most common form of authoritarianism can be seen as a promising sign for the future.


A series of ternary rare-earth metal aluminum germanides with the general formula REAl1-xGe3 (RE = Nd, Sm, Gd, Tb, Dy, and Ho; 0.6 < x < 0.9) have been synthesized by direct fusion of the corresponding elements. Their structures have been characterized by single-crystal X-ray diffraction and selected area electron diffraction methods. The average structure for all members is a representative of the orthorhombic SmNiGe3-type structure (Pearson symbol oS20, space group Cmmm), where the Al atoms occupy the Ni site, and the deep off-stoichiometry is due to statistical vacancies at this position. Considering long-range ordering of the vacancies, a monoclinic and a different orthorhombic structure, which represent idealized ordered variants, are possible, and the structural evolution depending on the nature of the rare-earth metals and the amount of vacancies at the aluminum site are discussed. Commensurate and incommensurate structural modulations based on these parent structures are also observed by electron diffraction, attesting to the great structural complexity in these systems. Magnetic susceptibility measurements are presented and discussed, along with the results from electronic band-structure calculations.


Apparentments – or coalitions of several electoral lists – are a widely neglected aspect of the study of proportional electoral systems. This paper proposes a formal model that explains the benefits political parties derive from apparentments, based on their alliance strategies and relative size. In doing so, it reveals that apparentments are most beneficial for highly fractionalised political blocs. However, it also emerges that large parties stand to gain much more from apparentments than small parties do. Because of this, small parties are likely to join in apparentments with other small parties, excluding large parties where possible. These arguments are tested empirically, using a new dataset from the Swiss national parliamentary elections covering a period from 1995 to 2007.


Processes of regional trade integration may have an important impact on firms' strategies and forms of organization. This article provides an empirical case study of the impact of regional trade integration in the Andean Pact in the 1990s on the strategies and organization of British American Tobacco (BAT), using internal tobacco industry documents. BAT conducted an integrated strategy by lobbying on tax and tariff rates and intellectual property regulations, whilst simultaneously adapting its market strategies and attempting to modify its internal organization. The company incorporated substantial sales in illicit markets into its strategy, and launched new legal export operations within the region, in part to assert ownership over contested trademarks. It attempted to significantly modify its internal organization by better integrating its national operating companies on a regional basis, but was only partially successful in this due to resistance from its powerful Brazilian subsidiary. Changes in intellectual property rules also intensified competition between BAT and its main competitor, Philip Morris, culminating in a legal dispute between the two firms and leading BAT to develop a more coherent strategy on trademark ownership. These findings raise implications for understanding, and regulating, tobacco industry activities worldwide.


The purpose of this dissertation is to determine the role that Walter Willson Cobbett (1847-1937) played in the British Musical Renaissance by his initiation of a series of chamber music competitions, beginning in 1905, each of which required the composition of a phantasy. The phantasy was Cobbett's reinvention of an older genre, the fancy, or fantasia, which had been popular in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century England. A vast number of new British chamber compositions was generated from these competitions. After examining the events of Cobbett's life that contributed to his involvement and passion for music, the paper discusses some of the events and issues that caused England to experience a musical renaissance. This leads to a discussion of the history of the fancy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Cobbett's reinvention of the genre and some of the reactions to it are subsequently examined. The competitions themselves are presented in great detail with the results and descriptions and/or reviews of some of the winning compositions. Other important contributions of Cobbett are shown, such as his eleven commissions for phantasies, his sponsorship of prizes at the Royal College of Music, and the endowed medal for services to chamber music issued each year by the Worshipful Company of Musicians. Concluding statements portray the lasting legacy Cobbett has had on British chamber music.


In this paper, we study the problem of addressee and response selection in multi-party conversations. Understanding multi-party conversations is challenging because of complex speaker interactions: multiple speakers exchange messages with each other, playing different roles (sender, addressee, observer), and these roles vary across turns. To tackle this challenge, we propose the Speaker Interaction Recurrent Neural Network (SI-RNN). Whereas the previous state-of-the-art system updated speaker embeddings only for the sender, SI-RNN uses a novel dialog encoder to update speaker embeddings in a role-sensitive way. Additionally, unlike the previous work that selected the addressee and response separately, SI-RNN selects them jointly by viewing the task as a sequence prediction problem. Experimental results show that SI-RNN significantly improves the accuracy of addressee and response selection, particularly in complex conversations with many speakers and responses to distant messages many turns in the past.


The present paper analyses for the first time a sacred inscription from S. Terenziano (Perugia, Italy), which in the authors opinion cannot be considered funerary. Although several papers have been published on the Silvanus cult contained in the Roman folk religion, there is no study dealing specifically and analytically with the role of this cult in the country and on the rural estates run by stewards (i.e. the vilici) during the late republican and imperial period. The authors come up with a tentative explanation concerning the epigraphic synthetic formulary, through an analysis of the manuscript tradition and the epigraphic sources which refer to the Silvanus cult both in town and in the country.


In this paper we present a deployed, scalable optical character recognition (OCR) system, which we call Rosetta , designed to process images uploaded daily at Facebook scale. Sharing of image content has become one of the primary ways to communicate information among internet users within social networks such as Facebook, and the understanding of such media, including its textual information, is of paramount importance to facilitate search and recommendation applications. We present modeling techniques for efficient detection and recognition of text in images and describe Rosetta 's system architecture. We perform extensive evaluation of presented technologies, explain useful practical approaches to build an OCR system at scale, and provide insightful intuitions as to why and how certain components work based on the lessons learnt during the development and deployment of the system.


Chapter one serves as an introduction to the principles and methods used throughout this
thesis. The principles of photophysics are discussed generally and also in relation to
porphyrins and dipyrromethenes. Potential applications for the novel thienyl dyes and related
metal carbonyl complexes synthesised are then presented. This is followed by an outline of
the techniques of laser flash photolysis, time-resolved infrared (TRIR) spectroscopy and time
correlated single photon counting.
Chapter two involves the study of thienyl porphyrins. This chapter begins with a literature
survey on the synthesis, photophysics and electrochemistry of thienyl porphyrin systems. The
synthesis of the porphyrins studied is given, followed by their photophysical and
electrochemical properties. The effect of the thienyl moiety on the ground state and excited
state properties of the porphyrin macrocycle is examined
Chapter three commences with a general introduction to Sonogashira-Hagihara type cross
coupling reactions and is followed by a literature survey on the synthesis and photochemistry
of thienyl based organometallic systems. The synthesis of the novel systems produced for this
study is then described and the photophysical properties are examined. Electrochemical data
are also presented. The photochemistry of the Co2(CO)6 complexes are examined by steady
state photolysis in the presence of a trapping ligand. Three of the complexes were studied by
TRIR on a picosecond timescale and the quantum yields of CO loss were determined at a
range of excitation wavelengths.
Chapter four commences with a literature survey focusing on the photophysics of pyridyl
porphyrins and related organometallic systems. The synthesis of the monopyridyltriphenyl
porphyrin and metal carbonyl derivatives produced for this study is described. The
photochemistry of the complexes was examined by pump and probe TRIR spectroscopy on a
picosecond timescale.
Chapter five contains with a short literature review on the synthesis and photophysics of
dipyrromethanes and dipyrrin compounds. The synthesis of a series of substituted thienyl
dipyrromethanes, related dipyrrin complexes and corresponding dicobalt complexes is
presented. Preliminary photophysical measurements are discussed.
Finally chapter six discusses future work for chapters 3, 4 and 5.


Partially Premixed Combustion (PPC) is a promising combustion concept for future IC engines. However, controllability of PPC is still a challenge and needs more investigation. The scope of the present study is to investigate the ignition sensitivity of PPC to the injection timing at different injection pressures. To better understand this, high-speed shadowgraphy is used to visualize fuel injection and evaporation at different Start of Injections (SOI). Spray penetration and injection targeting are derived from shadowgraphy movies. OH∗ chemiluminescence is used to comprehensively study the stratification level of combustion which is helpful for interpretation of ignition sensitivity behavior. Shadowgraphy results confirm that SOI strongly affects the spray penetration and evaporation of fuel. However, spray penetration and ignition sensitivity are barely affected by the injection pressure. There is a critical SOI range, in which a significant amount of fuel is trapped in the crevice volume. Injection in this critical range has a negative influence on the combustion efficiency and ignition sensitivity. Impingement of liquid fuel on the piston crown advances the combustion phasing by providing higher levels of stratification. Moreover, results of combustion stratification study show that stratification level has an inverse correlation with combustion phasing of PPC for late injections. (Less)


Lipid signaling in yeast is regulated by intracellular pH. Intracellular pH regulates metabolism by poorly understood mechanisms, but biosensors are likely to be important in this process. Young et al. took a systems biology approach in yeast to identify in excess of 200 genes that regulate phospholipid metabolism. They found that the signaling lipid phosphatidic acid appeared to act as a cytosolic biosensor via the pH-dependent binding of protein effectors to phosphatidic acid. This pH-dependent mechanism directly affects gene expression and is involved in a pathway in which nutrient availability regulates phospholipid metabolism to control production of membranes. B. P. Young, J. J. H. Shin, R. Orij, J. T. Chao, S. C. Li, X. L. Guan, A. Khong, E. Jan, M. R. Wenk, W. A. Prinz, G. J. Smits, C. J. R. Loewen, Phosphatidic acid is a pH biosensor that links membrane biogenesis to metabolism. Science 329, 1085–1088 (2010). [Abstract] [Full Text]


In existing freight models, the choice of locations for logistics facilities and the choice of logistics facilities for routing the shipments are often treated without distinction, although these two decisions are separate and affected by different factors. In this paper, models for choosing a logistics facility are developed that match truck trip ends with logistics facilities by using a large urban freight survey data from the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. The models can be used to estimate truck traffic flows associated with transshipments. The urban portion of the logistics chains was categorized into five types of movements, and 30 models were developed to analyze six commodity groups separately. The results indicated that the proposed approach could capture the mechanism of the selection of a logistics facility by movement and commodity type. The tests for the reproducibility of the models warrant the future use of the models for analysis of urban freight demand.


Abstract. The reconstruction of 3D building models has been extensively researched in the last decade. The model driven methods, which fit building parts to predefined building primitives and glue them together into complete buildings, have been proved to be powerful. This paper solves two open questions left in prior works. Firstly, the primitive building libraries defined in literature are limited to few types of building structures. Therefore the undefined types of buildings could not be well represented by the primitive libraries. Secondly, the roof topology graphs used for interpreting the roof structures are assumed to be correct in previous works. In many cases, however, the roof topology graphs are inevitably wrong because of outliers in input data and errors in their construction steps. In this paper we solve the two problems and compare the improvements with prior woks. We introduce a complete building library, which can present planer buildings with arbitrary structures, and present an automatic method to correct the erroneous roof topology graph. Experiments show our method is robust to reconstruct buildings in both resident and commercial areas.


To design a robust controller for active suspension systems is very important for guaranteeing the riding comfort for passengers and road handling quality for a vehicle. In this thesis, the mathematical model of full vehicle nonlinear active suspension systems with hydraulic actuators is derived to take into account all the motions of the vehicle and the nonlinearity behaviours of the active suspension system and hydraulic actuators. Four robust control types are designed and the comparisons among the robustness of
those controllers against different disturbance types are investigated to select the best controller among them. The MATLAB SIMULINK toolboxes are used to simulate the proposed controllers with the controlled model and to display the responses of the controlled model under different types of disturbance. The results show that the neurofuzzy controller is more effective and robust than the other controller types. The implementation of the neurofuzzy controller using FPGA boards has been investigated in this work. The Xilinx ISE program is employed to synthesis the VHDL codes that describe the operation of the neurofuzzy controller and to generate the configuration file used to program the FPGA. The ModelSim program is used to simulate the operation of the VHDL codes and to obtain the expected output data of the FPGA boards. To confirm that FPGA the board used as the neurofuzzy controller system operated as expected, a MATLAB script file is used to compare the set of data obtained from the ModelSim program and the set of data obtained from the MATLAB SIMULINK model. The results show that the FPGA board is effective to be used as a neurofuzzy controller for full vehicle nonlinear active suspension systems. The active suspension system has a great performance for vibration isolation. However the main drawback of the active suspension is that it is high energy consumptive. Therefore, to use this suspension system in the proposed model, this drawback should be solved. Electromagnetic actuators are used to convert the vibration energy that arises from the rough road to useful electrical energy to reduce the energy consumption by the active suspension systems. The results show that the electromagnetic devices act as a power generator, i.e. the vibration energy excited by the rough road surface has been converted to a useful electrical energy supply for the actuators. Furthermore, when the nonlinear damper models are replaced by the electromagnetic actuators, riding comfort and the road handling quality are improved. As a result, two targets have been achieved by using hydraulic actuators with electromagnetic suspension systems: increasing fuel economy and improving the vehicle performance.


In a series of studies in which consumers assembled IKEA boxes, folded origami, and built sets of Legos, we demonstrate and investigate the boundary conditions for what we term the "IKEA effect" – the increase in valuation of self-made products. Participants saw their amateurish creations – of both utilitarian and hedonic products – as similar in value to the creations of experts, and expected others to share their opinions. Our account suggests that labor leads to increased valuation only when labor results in successful completion of tasks; thus when participants built and then destroyed their creations, or failed to complete them, the IKEA effect dissipated. Finally, we show that labor increases valuation of completed products not just for consumers who profess an interest in "do-it-yourself" projects, but even for those who are relatively uninterested. We discuss the implications of the IKEA effect for marketing managers and organizations more generally.