Despite the vast amount of scholarship completed on the First World War, relatively little work has focused on the British Left and the conflict. The aim of this thesis is to rectify this, by examining left-wing support for the war effort, and the implications of this for the labour movement.
This study aims to ascertain the extent and nature of support for the war effort amongst the Left. It will survey the relationship between patriotism and the Left in the years before 1914, in order to give context for the events of the war years. It will then examine the reactions of the men and women of the Left – at both an elite and subaltern level – to the First World War.
Furthermore, it will investigate how left-wing patriotism in this period impacted on the fortunes of the labour movement after the Armistice. The war also saw a great increase in the size and scope of the state, and the significance and implications of this will be examined. Finally, this thesis will aim to enhance our understanding as to why and how the labour movement was able to remain united and purposeful in the war years and immediately after 1918.
Overall, this thesis will contribute to our understanding of the nature and extent of support for the war on the Left, the impact of the war on Labour's electoral fortunes, the relationship between the Left and the state, and labour movement cohesion in this period.


Bacterial populations inhabiting pharmaceutical grade water systems were investigated over a fifteen year period. The systems analyzed were mains water, purified and Water-for-Injection (WFI). Samples of water were tested by membrane filtration and the samples cultured using R2A agar. Culture based methods and phenotypic identification methods were used to characterize the isolates. The research was undertaken to produce an in-depth study of the microbiota of pharmaceutical grade water systems. The results presented act as a benchmark for industrial and pharmaceutical microbiologists to review comparable systems against, as well as to present a review of the typical culturable microorganisms recoverable from pharmaceutical water systems.


Academics have recently brought a Foucauldian analysis to bear on the field of employee health, but there is an absence of empirical research grounded in employee accounts. In this thesis, qualitative research methods and forms of Discourse Analysis are utilised from within a predominantly Foucauldian perspective, in order to explore the relations between the perceived shift toward an underlying neoliberalist political rationality and emerging forms of regulation. Neoliberalism is concerned to reform the conduct of individuals and institutions to make them more competitive and productive. Research proceeds through analysis of a key cultural technology, the 'Revitalising Health and Safety Strategy Statement', and two case studies, Consignia and a small web-design company, The Byte. Consignia adopts a disciplinary regulatory approach to employee health, The Byte, a decentred (non)regulatory approach. The state, through the Revitalising Health and Safety Strategy Statement, makes a subject position available for employees characterised by motivation, responsibility and productivity, that is 'happy, healthy and here'. An appeal is made to freedom: companies, groups and individuals are positioned as autonomous and responsible agents. Active participation in health and safety establishes local sites of self government that can be indirectly managed by the technologies of numericisation and performance. The concept of responsibility is used strategically as a powerful persuasive trope, designed to change - or maintain - certain behaviours. At both Consignia and The Byte employees continue to subjectively experience health problems that they understand to be caused by work. Under contemporary problematisations they are positioned as (ir)responsible for failing to take adequate measures to protect themselves. The employee, caught within competing problematisations, can struggle to achieve an 'authentic' self. Responsibility for employee health has been successfully implanted into companies and employees through modification of localised discursive conditions. Regulation becomes understood as the production of (de)responsibilisation.


Integrated Security Systems Design, 2nd Edition, is recognized as the industry-leading book on the subject of security systems design. It explains how to design a fully integrated security system that ties together numerous subsystems into one complete, highly coordinated, and highly functional system. With a flexible and scalable enterprise-level system, security decision makers can make better informed decisions when incidents occur and improve their operational efficiencies in ways never before possible. The revised edition covers why designing an integrated security system is essential and how to lead the project to success. With new and expanded coverage of network architecture, physical security information management (PSIM) systems, camera technologies, and integration with the Business Information Management Network, Integrated Security Systems Design, 2nd Edition, shows how to improve a security program's overall effectiveness while avoiding pitfalls and potential lawsuits. * Guides the reader through the strategic, technical, and tactical aspects of the design process for a complete understanding of integrated digital security system design.* Covers the fundamentals as well as special design considerations such as radio frequency systems and interfacing with legacy systems or emerging technologies.* Demonstrates how to maximize safety while reducing liability and operating costs.


Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) replication has enjoyed a series of performance improvements, but remains costly due to its replicated work. We eliminate this cost for read-mostly workloads through Prophecy, a system that interposes itself between clients and any replicated service. At Prophecy's core is a trusted sketcher component, designed to extend the semi-trusted load balancer that mediates access to an Internet service. The sketcher performs fast, load-balanced reads when results are historically consistent, and slow, replicated reads otherwise. Despite its simplicity, Prophecy provides a new form of consistency called delay-once consistency. Along the way, we derive a distributed variant of Prophecy that achieves the same consistency but without any trusted components.

A prototype implementation demonstrates Prophecy's high throughput compared to BFT systems. We also describe and evaluate Prophecy's ability to scale-out to support large replica groups or multiple replica groups. As Prophecy is most effective when state updates are rare, we finally present a measurement study of popular websites that demonstrates a large proportion of static data.


BACKGROUND
Academic self-efficacy, when operationalized as mastery over domain-specific knowledge, has been found to be a predictor of academic achievement and emotions. Although academic emotions are also a predictor of academic achievement, there is limited evidence for reciprocal relations with academic achievement.

AIMS
To examine whether academic self-efficacy, when operationalized as confidence in study-related skills and behaviours, is also a predictor of academic achievement and emotions and to test reciprocal relations between academic emotions and achievement.

SAMPLE
Two hundred and six first-year undergraduate students.

METHODS
Academic self-efficacy was measured at the beginning of the first semester and learning-related emotions (LREs) at the beginning of the second semester. Academic performance was aggregated across assessments in semester one and semester two.

RESULTS
Self-efficacy in study-related skills and behaviours predicted: (1) better semester one academic performance and (2) more pleasant and fewer unpleasant LREs at the beginning of the second semester directly and (3) indirectly through semester one academic performance. Reciprocal relations between academic performance and emotions were supported, but only for pleasant emotions.

CONCLUSIONS
Self-efficacy in study-related skills was the critical academic self-efficacy variable in this study. It may play an important role in maintaining challenge appraisals to maintain pleasant emotions and better academic performance. Accordingly, practitioners in higher education may wish to consider the value of assessing and developing students' self-efficacy in relation to their independent study skills.


HOW DOES AN EXPERIENCED performer memorize when learning a new piece quickly, in just a few hours of practice? To find out, a concert pianist recorded her practice as she learned Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy. She also provided detailed reports on the formal structure of the piece, the performance cues that she selected to attend to while playing, and other decisions about technique and interpretation. These reports were used to determine what she paid attention to during practice and where she had difficulty with memory retrieval. Retrieval practice was one of the main activities throughout the 4 3/4 hours needed to prepare the piece for performance. The pianist tried to play from memory almost from the start, used the musical structure to organize practice, and worked on performance cues to speed up retrieval from long-term memory. Performers practice memory retrieval, even when practice time is limited.


The flow of particulate suspensions and brines in porous media is encountered in a wide range of industrial situations such as oil production, soil erosion, and ground water pollution and in the operation of filter beds. Three major classes of such problems are addressed in this thesis, namely particle movement, scale formation and filtration. Particle movement and scale formation are known to be serious problems in oil reservoirs where incompatible brine is brought into contact with the formation. Dramatic reductions in permeability are observed in such cases due to the release of fine particles that subsequently plug flow channels downstream. This study deals with an experimental and theoretical study of formation damage resulting from particle movement and scale formation in porous media. An experimental investigation was undertaken to look into the possible causes of the injectivity loss in a typical Iranian oilfield. Sets of experimental investigations were undertaken with different objectives in mind. Glass and sand bead packs were used to test the experimental set up and to observe the general behavior of fine particle movement and scale formation in porous media. The experiments were conducted with injection rates from 25 cm3/min to 100 cm3/min. Particles of alumina oxide were suspended in the injected water to simulate fine particle migration in porous media. The particles were injected at concentrations ranging from 500 ppm to 2000 ppm. It was observed that the build-up of flow resistance was mostly due to frontal face plugging. Alumina particles were added to the glass beads to study the effect of particles initially present in the glass bead pack. A mathematical model is presented that simulates the porosity impairment by particle movement. This model, which is based on the mass balance of particles flowing through the porous media, at first, proposes an overall equation to determine the porosity and by a special mechanism it can predict the overall change in porosity. The equations are quite general and can be used to model the permeability reduction for any given pore or particle size distribution. Also this study aims to investigate the calcium sulphate and calcium carbonate scaling in a porous medium to discover its possible effect upon the permeability of the porous medium. The information on the effect of scale deposition is obtained experimentally by flooding porous medium with incompatible brines. The experimental data are used to develop and validate models for predicting the permeability decline caused by scale. The model is intended to provide a link between what is known or can be assumed about brines in an oil reservoir. A computer program was developed which can predict the scaling tendency of the sulphate minerals and calcium carbonate, in water disposal wells, water injection systems, surface equipments and facilities that commonly form scale. This program is based on the latest correlations of experimental data relating to North Sea and Iranian oilfields. It is used to determine the degree to which brine becomes supersaturated with a scale forming mineral under specified conditions. Processes capable of creating supersatuartion in oilfields are described and it is shown that the distribution of scale depends on the process involved.


The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Pleasant Grove City v. Summum may indicate a change in the direction of the Supreme Court's Establishment Clause jurisprudence. Although the Court decided Summum on the basis of the government speech doctrine, Justice Alito's opinion for the Court contains an extended discussion of monuments and messages that is directly at odds with some of the Court's Establishment Clause cases applying the endorsement test. Particularly in light of the fact that Summum was decided while the Court was considering Salazar v. Buono, another case involving a religious monument, it is possible that Summum suggests a move away from the endorsement test in the context of religious symbols and displays.


Helping People Change-Richard Boyatzis 2019-08-20 You're trying to help--but is it working? Helping others is a good thing. Often, as a leader, manager, doctor, teacher, or coach, it's central to your job. But even the most well-intentioned efforts to help others can be undermined by a simple truth: We almost always focus on trying to "fix" people, correcting problems or filling the gaps between where they are and where we think they should be. Unfortunately, this doesn't work well, if at all, to inspire sustained learning or positive change. There's a better way. In this powerful, practical book, emotional intelligence expert Richard Boyatzis and Weatherhead School of Management colleagues Melvin Smith and Ellen Van Oosten present a clear and hopeful message. The way to help someone learn and change, they say, cannot be focused primarily on fixing problems, but instead must connect to that person's positive vision of themselves or an inspiring dream or goal they've long held. This is what great coaches do--they know that people draw energy from their visions and dreams, and that same energy sustains their efforts to change, even through difficult times. In contrast, problem-centered approaches trigger physiological responses that make a person defensive and less open to new ideas. The authors use rich and moving real-life stories, as well as decades of original research, to show how this distinctively positive mode of coaching—what they call "coaching with compassion"--opens people up to thinking creatively and helps them to learn and grow in meaningful and sustainable ways. Filled with probing questions and exercises that encourage self-reflection, Helping People Change will forever alter the way all of us think about and practice what we do when we try to help.


We investigate a generalized Langevin equation (GLE) in the presence of an additive noise characterized by the mixture of the usual white noise and an arbitrary one. This scenario lead us to a wide class of diffusive processes, in particular the ones whose noise correlation functions are governed by power laws, exponentials, and Mittag-Leffler functions. The results show the presence of different diffusive regimes related to the spreading of the system. In addition, we obtain a fractional diffusionlike equation from the GLE, confirming the results for long time.


Higher education has become the basic education of the knowledge economy. Yet in transitioning, emerging and developing countries, resources for higher education, and indeed higher educational systems themselves, remain inadequate. Urgent action is needed to expand and diversify the supply of educational avenues to meet the fast rising demand. This review paper, based on the ongoing research of the authors, defines business education as the collection of skills and abilities given by the business disciplines and enabling the development of an entrepreneurial society. We contend that the institutionalisation of world-class management programmes to produce a continuous and self-renewing stream of intellectual capital and its retention in the emerging economies of the world is possibly the most significant challenge faced by business and management education in the coming generation.


This thesis describes a stochastic ship routing problem with inventory management. The problem involves finding a set of least costs routes for a fleet of ships transporting a single commodity when the demand for the commodity is uncertain. Storage at consumption and supply ports is limited and inventory levels are monitored in the model. Consumer demands are at a constant rate within each time period in the deterministic problem, and in the stochastic problem, the demand rate for a period is not known until the beginning of that period. The demand situation in each time period can be described by a scenario tree with corresponding probabilities. Several possible solution approaches for solving the problem are studied in the thesis. This problem can be formulated as a mixed integer programming (MIP) model. However solving the problem this way is very time consuming even for a deterministic problem with small problem size. In order to solve the stochastic problem, we develop a decomposition formulation and solve it using a Branch and Price framework. A master problem (set partitioning with extra inventory constraints) is built, and the subproblems, one for each ship, involve solving stochastic dynamic programming problems to generate columns for the master problem. Each column corresponds to one possible tree of schedules for one ship giving the schedule for the ship for all demand scenarios. In each branch-and-bound node, the node problem is solved by iterating between the master problem and the subproblems. Dual variables can be obtained solving the master problem and are used in the subproblems to generate the most promising columns for the master problem. Computational results are given showing that medium sized problems can be solved successfully. Several extensions to the original model are developed, including a variable speed model, a diverting model, and a model which allows ships to do extra tasks in return for a bonus. Possible solution approaches for solving the variable speed and the diverting model are presented and computational results are given.


Florida Sea Grant and UF researchers conducted a study on the economic benefits associated with artificial reef programs in a six-county region of southwest Florida, where they asked private boater and for-hire operators and clients about their artificial reef use during 2009. Results are summarized in one-page fact sheets.


Software engineering yielded the big fruits of the Design Patterns and POSA and so forth by using the Pattern Language of architectonics, but they only focused on the side of the format of the pattern as know-how description. Focusing on another side of the Pattern Language—"timeless way" as continuous activities—we can see that the Pattern Language is an ideal mechanism to incorporate the requirements and the design constraints of information systems into itself as organization learning. In this paper, "The Information Systems Cycle" is provided for the building process of the enterprise information systems from such a viewpoint, and the meaning and the problem of incorporating the Pattern Language into the cycle are discussed.


The results of a 2 × 2 factorial online experiment are reported. The first factor refers to the information on precautionary measures and the second factor on the information regarding the share of EMF exposure from extra-high-voltage power lines compared to overall EMF exposure measured in-house. The study is based on a community sample of 440 subjects. Information on the share of EMF exposure from extra-high-voltage power lines at the in-house overall EMF exposure has no statistically significant effect of safety distances and acceptance distances. Further findings indicate that communications of precautionary measures produce a countervailing effect: on average, subjects require a higher distance from their homes compared to those who were not informed about precautionary measures. However, there is also a positive effect of precautionary information on the acceptance belief. Subjects who received this information are, in average, less negative about the claim that compliance with the value limit is sufficient in order to agree with the construction of a power line. Possible explanations of the findings such as cognitive dissonance, negativity bias, and style of information processing are discussed.


In this work, the IR thermography was used to study the steel specimens (DIN 50125 Standard) undergoing the tensile tests. The tensile tests were performed using GUNT® Hamburg Universal Material Tester. The tensile specimens were clamped, and the test force was generated using a hand-operated hydraulic system. A dial gauge measured the elongation of the specimens. Using the WP 300.20 system for data acquisition, the measured values for force and displacement were recorded in a PC. The IR thermographic imaging was performed using the FLIR® T1030sc IR camera and ResearchIR Max software. The steel specimens were coated with high emissivity paint. Thermography revealed that the steel specimens show noticeable thermal signature when undergoing tensile loading. The samples were found to be warmer by 20-25 °C at the time of failure. The tests were repeated under various surrounding temperatures such as 25 °C, -5 °C, -10 °C, -15 °C, and -20 °C. The same study was compared with the finite element numerical simulation in ANSYS® Workbench. The experimental and simulation results were found to be in a qualitative agreement.


The presence of natural resources makes civil conflicts more likely to erupt, last longer, and more difficult to end. Yet rebels do not always exploit resources wherever they are present. Why? I argue that rebels extract more resources when they compete with governments over territorial authority. Territorial competition facilitates black market access, generates financial pressure, and produces governance incentives for rebels to extract natural resources. I test this proposition in a two-tiered research design. First, I show globally that moderate territorial control predicts more resource extraction by rebels. Subsequently, I focus on the example of ivory poaching which offers a rare glimpse into the usually hidden resource extraction process. I match spatially disaggregated conflict event data to subnational poaching data in conflict-affected African countries. Results show that rebels seeking territorial control substantially increase poaching rates. These findings highlight the strategic conditions under which territorial competition shapes rebel criminal behavior.


Graph algorithms play an important role in several fields of sciences and engineering. Prominent among them are the All-Pairs-Shortest-Paths (APSP) and related problems. Indeed there are several efficient implementations for such problems on a variety of modern multi- and many-core architectures. It can be noticed that for several graph problems, parallelism offers only a limited success as current parallel architectures have severe short-comings when deployed for most graph algorithms. At the same time, some of these graphs exhibit clear structural properties due to their sparsity. This calls for particular solution strategies aimed at scalable processing of large, sparse graphs on modern parallel architectures. In this paper, we study the applicability of an ear decomposition of graphs to problems such as all-pairs-shortestpaths and minimum cost cycle basis. Through experimentation, we show that the resulting solutions are scalable in terms of both memory usage and also their speedup over best known current implementations. We believe that our techniques have the potential to be relevant for designing scalable solutions for other computations on large sparse graphs.


It is important to develop corpuses of data to test out the efficacy of using metrics. Replicated studies are an important contribution to corpuses of metrics data. There are few replicated studies using metrics reported in software engineering.
 To contribute more data to the body of evidence on the use of novel program slicing-based cohesion metrics.
 We replicate a very well regarded study by Meyers and Binkley [15, 16] which analyses the cohesion of open source projects using program slicing-based metrics.
 Our results are very different from Meyers and Binkley's original results. This suggests that there are a variety of opportunities for inconsistently to creep into the collection and analysis of metrics data during replicated studies.
 We conclude that researchers using metrics data must present their work with sufficient detail for replication to be possible. Without this detail it is difficult for subsequent researchers to accurately replicate a study such that consistent and reliable data can be added to a body of evidence.


A new type of optical encryption based on super-structured Bragg gratings is proposed. Security is provided by the transformation of the signal to noiselike patterns in the optical domain, which hides any structure to nonauthorized users. Encryption at speeds of several gigabits per second with low bit error rates is simulated.


A school system's significant asset is its teaching force. The most important investment a school board, administration, and parents can make in a school system is to ensure that teachers continue to learn. The growing literature on teacher learning and professional growth of teachers reveals that if standards are to be achieved particularly in raising student achievement, there will have to be a massive change in the way we do the business. Good schools, therefore, should aim at making every member of the institution a professional to achieve its goals. The experiences emanating from professional development initiatives of the Aga Khan University-Professional Development Centre North (AKU-PDCN) particularly those coming from the Whole School Improvement Program (WSIP) help not only in the establishment of continuous teacher professional development mechanisms and processes, but also provide opportunities for various stakeholders to work together and share their experiences in the process of implementing the school improvement initiatives. Moreover, the field -based nature and the two years follow-up mechanism of the programme provide further professional support to the project schools. This ongoing professional support is intensive and regular and aims to encourage the participants to reflect on new practices as well as on developing positive professional development culture in schools. This paper attempts to illustrate the background and purpose of WSIP, and how it provides professional development opportunities for the teachers of Gilgit-Baltistan of Pakistan through AKU-PDCN. The paper also highlights the challenges faced and the lesson learnt in the process, and concludes with some suggestions for a possible and preferable way forward.


In this work, we perform a first-principles study of the adsorption properties of an In adatom deposited on a 1.75 ML( monolayer) InAs, forming a wetting layer on GaAs(001) with the ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{2}(2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}4)$ or ${\ensuremath{\beta}}_{2}(2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}4)$ reconstruction. Thus, we are addressing here the important case of the wetting layer at a high In coverage, just before the occurrence of the two-dimensional to three-dimensional transition. The structural properties of these reconstructions have been studied: we determine the equilibrium geometry of the surfaces and their stability for various growth conditions. We have then carried out a detailed study of the potential energy surface (PES) for an In adsorbate, finding the minima and the saddle points. The main characteristics of the PES and the bonding configurations of the In adatom on the surface are analyzed by comparing them with analogous studies reported in the literature, trying to extract the effects due to (i) the compressive strain to which the InAs adlayer is subjected, (ii) the particular surface reconstruction, and (iii) the wetting layer composition. We found that, in general, stable adsorption sites are located at (i) locations beside the As in-dimers, (ii) positions bridging two As in-dimers, (iii) between two adjacent ad-dimers (only in ${\ensuremath{\beta}}_{2}$), and (iv) locations bridging two As ad-dimers. We find also other shallower adsorption sites which are more reconstruction specific due to the lower symmetry of the ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{2}$ reconstruction compared to the ${\ensuremath{\beta}}_{2}$ reconstruction. We point out that the ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{2}$ reconstruction has the lowest symmetry among the reconstructions studied so far for this system.


This report shares the findings of first round of the Learning and Educational Achievement in Punjab Schools (LEAPS) survey carried out in all the public and private schools offering primary level education in 112 villages of the province. This survey includes learning outcomes for 12,000 children in Class III in Urdu, English, and Mathematics together with detailed information on the beliefs and behavior of schools, teachers and parents. This large and independent exercise provides critical information on every aspect of the educational marketplace, including performance of all types of schools in select districts of the province. This report presents findings from the first round of the survey in 2003 along with trends for a few key outcomes between 2003 and 2007; a further report will incorporate all other information from the four rounds collected between 2003 and 2007.


Compared to the rest of the world9s oceans, high-resolution late Holocene paleoclimatic data from the Southern Ocean are still rare. We present a multiproxy record from a sediment core retrieved from a deep basin on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula that reveals a dramatic perspective on paleoclimatic changes over the past 3700 yr. Analyses completed include measurement of magnetic susceptibility and granulometry, bed thickness, particle size, percent organic carbon, bulk density, and microscopic evaluation of diatom and benthic foraminiferal assemblages and abundances. Downcore variability of these parameters demonstrates the significance of both short-term cycles, which recur approximately every 200 yr, and longer term events (≈2500 yr cycles) that are most likely related to global climatic fluctuations. In the upper 600 cm of the core, lower values of magnetic susceptibility (MS) are correlated with lower bulk density, the presence of thinly laminated units, specific diatom assemblages, and generally higher total organic carbon content. Below 600 cm, magnetic susceptibility is uniformly low, though variability in other parameters continues. The magnetic susceptibility signal is controlled primarily by dilution of ferromagnetic phases with biosiliceous material. This signal may be enhanced further by dissolution of magnetite in the magnetic susceptibility lows (high total organic carbon). The role of variable primary productivity and its relationship to paleoclimate is assessed through the diatom data. In particular, magnetic susceptibility lows are characterized by higher than normal abundances of Chaetoceros resting spores. Corethron criophilum and/or Rhizosolenia spp. also are found, as is a higher ratio of the most common species of Fragilariopsis versus species of Thalassiosira . These assemblages are indicative of periods of high primary productivity driven by the presence of a meltwater stabilized water column. The 200 yr cyclicity noted in other paleoclimatic records around the world suggests a global forcing mechanism, possibly solar variability. In addition to the cyclic changes in productivity, overall elevated productivity is noted below 600 cm, or prior to ca. 2500 yr B.P. This increased productivity may represent the tail end of a Holocene climatic optimum, which is widely recognized in other parts of the world, but as yet is poorly documented in Antarctica.


This paper examines the likely market for electrical energy storage from a market viewpoint, taking market prices as given and determining the extent to which a strategy of arbitrage across the day, buying at the lowest price times at night and selling at the highest times during the early evening, generates profits in the British context. The paper sets out the potential problems as the market moves to absorb increasing amounts of wind, then characterises the nature of prices, which reveals the importance of a strategy in which power is absorbed into store for a relatively few hours of the day and discharged over a relatively few hours. The paper models the ongoing costs of operation and compares them with revenues, but does not consider construction costs. It argues that additional incentives may need to be put into place in order to render storage over relatively longer periods more attractive.


The aim of this study is to investigate the influence of dietary halal practices to organizational performance among the halal food industry in Malaysia. In this study, four key elements have been identified as performance predictors which are; halal and thoyyib, internal process, halal assurance, and staff. A cross sectional study design has been adopted in this study through quantitative methods using closed ended questions. Questionnaires were distributed to the halal food industry in Malaysia and 241 of them are usable for analysis at an organizational level. Respondents who participated in this study are internal committee members who are specially appointed for halal dietary management control within the organization. Data were analyzed by using SPSS version 21. Descriptive analysis showed that the level of halal practices and the performance of the halal food industry in Malaysia is positive. In addition, the inference test results prove that there is a significant correlation between all the variables studied. However, based on the regression analysis, the halal and thoyyib dimensions majorly influence the performance of the organization as compared to internal dimensions of process, halal assurance, and staff. In this research, few limitations have been identified. The first limitation is that there was limited number of respondents (241 companies) due to time constraint. Furthermore, some respondents were quite hesitant in giving their cooperation due to company's confidentiality. If the return rate is higher then, the possibility to obtain more accurate results is higher. Secondly, the research was more focused on 'halal' food while the term 'halal' is now globally known not only in food industry but also in pharmaceutical, logistic etc. The standards used are only limited to the management of food. The implication towards theory and literature - Quality researches have always been linked to total quality management, this time it is the 'Research Based View' approach that was actually used. With that, the number of researches using strategic management as the core theory can be increased. Moreover, this research showed that other factors must be studied in order to produce a working halal model. Besides, the implication towards the industry is that the findings obtained have produced a new phenomenon in which the industry needs a paradigm shift and does not only stay in the secure zone but accept all the changes outlined by the government or halal certification body. In relation to this, the industry must know its responsibilities in order to convince the customers on the practice of halal by the organization. For the government on the other hand, it will be easy for them to make assessment on halal food industry in Malaysia aside from preparing an effective plan especially in the effort to draw a clear picture on the industry in relation to the real halal management including the understanding on standard acts or all the guidelines that have been introduced. For users, it gives the assurance that a product must undergo a few steps which are not only controlled by the industry, but the competent authorities as well in halal certification. In addition to the existence of a few acts, the rules and standards which binds the industry to always be responsible and practice integrity in halal implementation


The all-sky direct radiative effect by anthropogenic aerosol (DRE a ) is calculated in the solar (0.3–4 μm) and infrared (4–200 μm) spectral ranges for six Mediterranean sites. The sites are differently affected by pollution and together reflect typical aerosol impacts that are expected over land and coastal sites of the central Mediterranean basin. Central to the simulations are aerosol optical properties from AERONET sun-/sky-photometer statistics for the year 2003. A discussion on the variability of the overall (natural + anthropogenic) aerosol properties with site location is provided. Supplementary data include MODIS satellite sensor based solar surface albedos, ISCCP products for high- mid- and low cloud cover and estimates for the anthropogenic aerosol fraction from global aerosol models. Since anthropogenic aerosol particles are considered to be smaller than 1 μm in size, mainly the solar radiation transfer is affected with impacts only during sun-light hours. At all sites the (daily average) solar DRE a is negative all year round at the top of the atmosphere (ToA). Hence, anthropogenic particles produce over coastal and land sites of the central Mediterranean a significant cooling effect. Monthly DRE a values vary from site to site and are seasonally dependent as a consequence of the seasonal dependence of available sun-light and microphysical aerosol properties. At the ToA the monthly average DRE a is −(4±1) W m −2 during spring-summer (SS, April–September) and −(2±1) W m −2 during autumn-winter (AW, October–March) at the polluted sites. In contrast, it varies between −(3±1) W m −2 and −(1±1) W m −2 on SS and AW, respectively at the less polluted site. Due to atmospheric absorption the DRE a at the surface is larger than at the ToA. At the surface the monthly average DRE a varies between the most and the least polluted site between −(7±1) W m −2 and −(4±1) W m −2 during SS, and between −(4±3) W m −2 and −(1±1) W m −2 during AW. The DRE a at infrared wavelengths is positive but negligible, especially at the ToA ( −2 ). The average of DRE a monthly-means referring to all sites has allowed getting a ToA- and sfc-DRE a yearly-mean value of −(3±2) and −(5±3) W m −2 , respectively at solar wavelengths. Last data, even if refer to a particular year, indicate that the radiative energy-balance of Central Mediterranean land and coastal sites is quite affected by anthropogenic particles.


Recruiting the growing numbers of immigrants into union ranks is imperative for the besieged U.S. labor movement. Nowhere is this task more pressing than in California, where immigrants make up a quarter of the population and hold many of the manual jobs that were once key strongholds of organized labor. The first book to offer in-depth coverage of this timely topic, Organizing Immigrants analyzes the recent history of and prospects for union organizing among foreign-born workers in the nation's most populous state. Are foreign-born workers more or less receptive to unionization than their native-born counterparts? Are undocumented immigrants as likely as legal residents and naturalized citizens to join unions? How much does the political, cultural, and ethnic background of immigrants matter? What are the social, political, and economic conditions that facilitate immigrant unionization? Drawing on newly collected evidence, the contributors to this volume explore these and other questions, analyzing immigrant employment and unionization trends in California and examining recent strikes and organizing efforts involving foreign-born workers. The case studies include both successful and unsuccessful campaigns, innovative and traditional strategies, and a variety of industrial and service sector settings.


Existing gravity data in the vicinity of Yucca Mountain and Crater Flat have been examined to determine if these data support only the caldera model or if they support other geologic models such as for a high-angle graben or detachment fault. The west to east isostatic gravity profile reduced for a density of 2.0 g/cm 3 shows a gravity low of about 20 mGal centered only 2 km from the eastern edge of Crater Flat relative to a gravity high over the eastern boundary of Yucca Mountain. In the western part of Crater Flat, isostatic anomalies rise about 50 mGal across the flat, reaching a maximum gradient of 9 mGal/km about 3 km east of the Bare Mountain range-front fault. Computer modeling of these data indicate that a model that consists of a detachment fault that dips to the west at 12° under Yucca Mountain and intersects a 27° east-dipping Bare Mountain fault fits the observed gravity data generally as well as the caldera model.


This thesis deals with techniques for the displacement measurement of
fast transient phenomena using ESPI. Four main contributions are presented.
First, a computer model for speckle noise and ESPI fringe generation is
proposed. An assessment methodology for speckle noise reduction algorithms
is then derived using the computer model. Then the noise in the ESPI fringe
patterns is analysed using computer generated speckle and several solutions
for its reduction are proposed and assessed. Finally, a fast electro-optical
system is presented as a solution to the unambiguous phase extraction problem
from a single interferogram. With this novel system, whole field transient
displacements occurring in time intervals as short as 20ns can be successfully
registered and retrieved. [Continues.]


Massively parallel functional dissection of regulatory elements Rupali P Patwardhan Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Associate Professor Jay Shendure Department of Genome Sciences Massively parallel sequencing has accelerated the cataloging of cis-regulatory elements in mammalian genomes. However, it remains challenging to estimate the functional effects of variation in cis-regulatory elements. The current methods to measure such effects are laborintensive and involve testing each variant separately. This dissertation describes the development of methods to interrogate functional effects of cis-regulatory variants in a massively parallel fashion. First, I present a method that takes advantage of massively parallel DNA synthesis and massively parallel sequencing to test the functional effects of all possible single nucleotide variants of a given cis-regulatory element en masse in a single assay. As a proof of concept, this method was applied to perform saturation mutagenesis of three bacteriophage core promoters and three core promoters recognized by the mammalian Pol II transcriptional machinery. Microarray synthesized mutant promoters, each with a unique 20bp tag sequence downstream of the transcription start site were subjected to in vitro transcription and the resulting RNA-derived tags were sequenced. The relative abundance of each programmed tag provided a digital readout of the transcriptional efficiency of its cis-linked mutant promoter. Next, I describe a method to generate long, accurate reads from short, errorprone reads produced by the current massively parallel sequencing platforms. This strategy, referred to as "subassembly", is of broad utility in a wide range of contexts including but not limited to metagenomics, de novo genome assembly and detection of rare variants in clinical samples. It also enables the interrogation of longer regulatory elements beyond the current read-lengths supported by massively parallel sequencing platforms. Finally, I present an improved version of the saturation mutagenesis method, including incorporation of the "subassembly" technique and use it to dissect mammalian enhancers up to 620bp long in a massively parallel in vivo assay. Development of such methods for rapid functional analysis of regulatory elements will not only facilitate interpretation of variation and understanding of the architecture and grammar of these elements, but also enable design of novel synthetic regulatory elements.


The Multiplicative Error Model introduced by Engle (2002) for positive valued processes is specified as the product of a (conditionally autoregressive) scale factor and an innovation process with positive support. In this paper we propose a multivariate extension of such a model, by taking into consideration the possibility that the vector innovation process be contemporaneously correlated. The estimation procedure is hindered by the lack of probability density functions for multivariate positive valued random variables. We suggest the use of copula functions and of estimating equations to jointly estimate the parameters of the scale factors and of the correlations of the innovation processes. Empirical applications on volatility indicators are used to illustrate the gains over the equation by equation procedure.


After the Fukushima disaster in March 2011, the Japanese government promised a sweeping review of the country9s nuclear-centric energy policy. On 28 May, a governmental advisory body laid out options for the mix of energy sources in 2030, along with projected effects on the economy and carbon dioxide emissions. Targets for nuclear power range from 35% of generating capacity down to zero—a total nuclear phaseout—although those close to the deliberations believe the government will settle on 15% when it finalizes the policy this summer. While that scenario would not require Japan to go cold turkey on nuclear power, it would rule out building new reactors for the immediate future and cloud prospects for R&D.


The selection of suitable peripheral nerve electrodes for biomedical applications implies a trade-off between invasiveness and selectivity. The optimal design should provide the highest selectivity for targeting a large number of nerve fascicles with the least invasiveness and potential damage to the nerve. The transverse intrafascicular multichannel electrode (TIME), transversally inserted in the peripheral nerve, has been shown to be useful for the selective activation of subsets of axons, both at inter- and intra-fascicular levels, in the small sciatic nerve of the rat. In this study we assessed the capabilities of TIME for the selective recording of neural activity, considering the topographical selectivity and the distinction of neural signals corresponding to different sensory types. Topographical recording selectivity was proved by the differential recording of CNAPs from different subsets of nerve fibers, such as those innervating toes 2 and 4 of the hindpaw of the rat. Neural signals elicited by sensory stimuli applied to the rat paw were successfully recorded. Signal processing allowed distinguishing three different types of sensory stimuli such as tactile, proprioceptive and nociceptive ones with high performance. These findings further support the suitability of TIMEs for neuroprosthetic applications, by exploiting the transversal topographical structure of the peripheral nerves.


The efficiency, safety, and soundness of financial markets depend on the operation of core infrastructure--exchanges, central counter-parties, and central securities depositories. How these institutions are governed critically affects their performance. Yet, despite their importance, there is little certainty, still less a global consensus, about their governance. Running the World's Markets examines how markets are, and should be, run. Utilizing a wide variety of arguments and examples from throughout the world, Ruben Lee identifies and evaluates the similarities and differences between exchanges, central counter-parties, and central securities depositories. Drawing on knowledge and experience from various disciplines, including business, economics, finance, law, politics, and regulation, Lee employs a range of methodologies to tackle different goals. Conceptual analysis is used to examine theoretical issues, survey evidence to describe key aspects of how market infrastructure institutions are governed and regulated globally, and case studies to detail the particular situations and decisions at specific institutions. The combination of these approaches provides a unique and rich foundation for evaluating the complex issues raised. Lee analyzes efficient forms of governance, how regulatory powers should be allocated, and whether regulatory intervention in governance is desirable. He presents guidelines for identifying the optimal governance model for any market infrastructure institution within the context of its specific environment. Running the World's Markets provides a definitive and peerless reference for how to govern and regulate financial markets


Spatially modulated electrostatic fields can be designed to efficiently accelerate particles by exploring the relations between the amplitude, the phase velocity, the shape of the potential and the initial velocity of the particle. The acceleration process occurs when the value of the velocity excursions of the particle surpass the phase velocity of the carrier, as a resonant mechanism. The ponderomotive approximation based on the Lagrangian average is usually applied in this kind of system in non-accelerating regimes. The mean dynamics of the particle is well described by this approximation far from resonance. However, the approximation fails to predict some interesting features of the model near resonance, such as the uphill acceleration phenomenon. A canonical perturbation theory is more accurate in these conditions. In this work we compare the results from the Lagrangian average and from a canonical perturbation theory, focusing in regions where the results of these two approaches differ from each other.


President Obama's first trip to Africa as US President in July 2009 took him to Ghana. The president used his 2009 trip to articulate his broad and ambitious policy of engagement towards sub-Saharan Africa. His pronouncements during the trip to Ghana generated high expectations for a new dawn in the relationship between the United States and Africa.The U.S. President made Ghana his first stop on the continent because he was probably highly impressed by the institutionalization of democratic processes in the country. While in Ghana, the president highlighted that country's commitment to peaceful democratic transition and establishment of effective governance practices. Obama also called on other African leaders to follow the example of Ghana by creating democratic institutions, embracing good governance practices, and showing respect for the human rights of their citizens. During his second trip to Africa from June 27-July 2, 2013, President Obama and the First Lady traveled to Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania to meet with leaders from government, business, and civil society, and to reinforce U.S. commitment to expanding economic growth, investment, and trade; strengthening democratic institutions; and investing in the next generation of African leaders. The U.S.-Africa Summit of August 6-7, 2014, convened by President Obama in Washington, D.C. was no doubt initiated to advance the political agenda of his previous two trips to Africa, and also to establish stronger economic and cultural ties with Africa. The 2014 summit brought together an unprecedented number of African leaders to Washington, D.C. for a two day conference that covered a broad array of topics ranging from health Care, trade and investments, security and terrorism, to good governance, democratic institutions and human rights. His third trip to Africa as President, took Obama to Kenya and Ethiopia from July 24-July 28, 2015.This visit was historic on two levels: it was the first time that a sitting American President had visited each of these countries as well address the African Union. In Kenya, Obama held bilateral meetings with Kenyan officials and attended the 2015 Global Economic/Entrepreneurship summit, an annual conference that brings together entrepreneurs, business leaders, and international organizations to discuss global economic and business issues. This trip built on the success of the August 2014 U.S.-Africa Leader's Summit and continued America's efforts to work with countries in sub-African, including Kenya, to accelerate economic growth, strengthen democratic institutions and improve health and security. A partnership between the United States and Africa is as important as it is strategic because both partners must work together in order to function effectively in a complex global environment that is increasingly plagued by terrorism, political instability, devastating public health epidemics, economic inequalities, poor governance and the failure to effect credible administrative reforms in a number of African nations. This paper proposes to examine the content of U.S. support for the establishment of democratic institutions and good governance practices in Africa since the onset of democratic transitions in Africa in the early 1990s. A review of American support for Africa's democratic transitional process is important because the United States was 1 Ngwafu: U.S. Support for Democracy in Africa: Discrepant Orientations of Published by Digital Scholarship @ Texas Southern University, 24 instrumental in supporting and facilitating the political discourse and initial processes that constituted the foundations of many transitional efforts in Africa. This task will be accomplished against the backdrop of the inability, unwillingness, or failure of some African nations to fully embrace the democratic processes and institutions upon which such US support is supposed to be predicated. It is apparent that the Anglophone nations in West, East and South Africa have been more responsive to the political practices advocated by the United States and its western allies and are in fact reforming their political institutions and administrative processes and procedures. By contrast, most Francophone nations in West and Central Africa are content with the status quo. Why is there a discrepancy between the English-speaking and French-speaking African nations toward embracing democratic and good governance practices? It is to answering this question that this paper aspires to accomplish through a comparative analysis of the performance records of a select number of Anglophone and Francophone states in West and Central Africa. How have these English (Ghana, Botswana, and South Africa) and Frenchspeaking (Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and the Democratic Republic of Congo) countries fared since President Obama first acknowledged the great strides made by Ghana during his 2009 visit?


Scrabble is a commonly played word game in which players take turns forming words using a set of seven letter tiles and placing them onto a grid, following placement rules similar to a crossword puzzle. Various applications exist for helping players with forming words from their tiles, but few account for all of the possible positions on the board simply because manually entering the board state is tedious. This paper presents an image processing algorithm for extracting and recognizing characters from Scrabble game boards for use in general Scrabble backends. In the test images used to evaluate this algorithm, boards were digitized with 87% character accuracy on average. Keywords—Scrabble; character recognition


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This essay explores the story of Nancy Clem, an outwardly respectable Indianapolis confidence woman and alleged murderess, in the context of changing constructions of class, gender, and criminality. It examines various ways in which lawyers, newspaper reporters, and ordinary citizens struggled to understand a woman who did not fit preexisting conceptions of gender and crime. A series of high-profile cases involving bourgeois criminals and (more than likely) Clem's own social aspirations allowed cultural commentators to portray her as a "genteel murderess." Upon her release from prison after an abortive fifth trial, Clem could not sustain her newly acquired social identity, in part because her erstwhile refinement was a journalistic creation and in part because the changing nature of class, gender, and space in Gilded Age Indianapolis provided her with fewer opportunities for self-fashioning. Clem's social odyssey from half-literate "Butternut" to genteel murderess to uncultured "capitalist" reflects slippery, yet significant, transitions between social fluidity and relative rigidity, antebellum respectability and Gilded Age gentility.


Well-performing subsurface drainage systems form an important aspect of pavement design by the Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT). The recently completed Iowa Highway Research Board (IHRB) project TR-643 provided extensive insights into Iowa subsurface drainage practices and pavement subdrain outlet performance. However, the project TR-643 (Phase I) forensic testing and evaluation were carried out in a drought year and during the fall season in 2012. Based on the findings of IHRB Project TR-643, the Iowa DOT requested an expanded Phase II study to address several additional research needs: evaluate the seasonal variation effects (dry fall 2012 versus wet spring/summer 2013, etc.) on subdrain outlet condition and performance; investigate the characteristics of tufa formation in Iowa subdrain outlets; investigate the condition of composite pavement subdrain outlets; examine the effect of resurfacing/widening/rehabilitation on subdrain outlets (e.g., the effects of patching on subdrain outlet performance); and identify a suitable drain outlet protection mechanism (like a headwall) and design for Iowa subdrain outlets based on a review of practices adopted by nearby states. A detailed forensic test plan was developed and executed for inspecting the Iowa pavement subdrains in pursuit of fulfilling the Phase II study objectives. The observed outlets with blockage and the associated surface distresses in newly constructed jointed plain concrete pavements (JPCPs) were slightly higher during summer 2013 compared to fall 2012. However, these differences are not significant. Less tufa formation due to the recycled portland cement concrete (RPCC) base was observed with (a) the use of plastic outlet pipe without the gate screen–type rodent guard and (b) the use of blended RPCC and virgin aggregate materials. In hot-mix asphalt (HMA) over JPCP, moisture-related distress types (e.g., reflection cracking) were observed more near blocked drainage outlet locations than near "no blockage" outlet locations. This finding indicates that compromised drainage outlet performance could accelerate the development of moisture-related distresses in Iowa composite pavement systems.


Melanin in vivo is usually packaged in melanosomes with protein coats that restrict direct interaction of the melanin with the surrounding medium. We found that disruption of the melanosomes by exposure to a pulsed laser increased the ability of the melanin radicals to oxidize NADPH in a photochemical reaction. Retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) melanosomes were prepared from fresh bovine eyes in 0.25 M sucrose. A reaction mixture of 7 mM NADPH, approximately 7500 RPE melanosomes, and 80 mM Tris buffer, pH 7.2, was prepared in a volume of 60 (mu) l. Of the two 25-(mu) l aliquots taken from this mixture, one was pre-exposed to the 2nd-harmonic output of a Q-switched Nd:YAG laser (532 nm, 1800 10-nsec pulses at 10 Hz), and then was exposed to an Argon ion continuous wave (CW) laser (488.1 and 514.5 nm) for five minutes. The other aliquot was exposed only to the Argon laser. The CW exposure excited the melanin radicals to a reactive state that oxidized NADPH, as assayed by the loss of absorbance at 340 nm. Native melanosomes oxidized less NADPH during Ar+ laser pumping than did melanosomes pre-exposed to the YAG laser. The YAG laser's stimulatory effect on melanosomes reactivity increased as the total energy it delivered rose above 3.5 J (0.14 J/cm2/pulse X 1800 pulses), up to a maximum NADPH oxidation at about 20 J (0.2 J/cm2/pulse X 1800 pulses, beam broadened at higher pulse energy). Electron microscopic analysis of the melanosomes confirmed the progressive physical disruption of melanosomes as the YAG pulse energy increased.


Summary: This study examines whether Turkish Industry is ready to apply Total Quality Management (TQM) or not by using Analytic Network Process (ANP). Our database is based on a survey realized among the one hundred big size companies in Turkey. Those companies have been randomly selected for the study from the list of "Five Hundred Biggest Companies in Turkey." A specific questionnaire with 25 questions has been sent to those one hundred companies. We used the questionnaire responses in our pairwise comparisons of criteria and alternatives. We have considered advantages, disadvantages, risks and opportunities of implementing TQM under current Turkish industry structure. This study shows that "Applying TQM" is 59% preferable, yet "not applying" is 41% preferable. "Applying TQM" alternative is not as highly preferable to "not applying" as we expected. We attribute this result for TQM's high risks and disadvantages considering the current status of Turkish Industry.


Machine learning methods, a family of statistical techniques with origins in the field of artificial intelligence, are recognized as holding great promise for the advancement of understanding and prediction about ecological phenomena. These modeling techniques are flexible enough to handle complex problems with multiple interacting elements and typically outcompete traditional approaches (e.g., generalized linear models), making them ideal for modeling ecological systems. Despite their inherent advantages, a review of the literature reveals only a modest use of these approaches in ecology as compared to other disciplines. One potential explanation for this lack of interest is that machine learning techniques do not fall neatly into the class of statistical modeling approaches with which most ecologists are familiar. In this paper, we provide an introduction to three machine learning approaches that can be broadly used by ecologists: classification and regression trees, artificial neural networks, and evolutionary computation. For each approach, we provide a brief background to the methodology, give examples of its application in ecology, describe model development and implementation, discuss strengths and weaknesses, explore the availability of statistical software, and provide an illustrative example. Although the ecological application of machine learning approaches has increased, there remains considerable skepticism with respect to the role of these techniques in ecology. Our review encourages a greater understanding of machine learning approaches and promotes their future application and utilization, while also providing a basis from which ecologists can make informed decisions about whether to select or avoid these approaches in their future modeling endeavors.


To attain sustainable development in the 21st century, the world's population still has to overcome many challenges; hunger, poverty, environmental degradation and depletion. Policy design in such a context is and will remain a complex task. On one hand, policy makers often lack information on stakeholders' strategies and constraints as well as on potential options for improvement. On the other hand, stakeholders do not always adhere to policies for lack of understanding of the pursued goals. It is not unusual to observe that often, real policy effects are not those initially expected. Furthermore, existing decision-making mechanisms for public intervention are increasingly questioned due to pressure for market liberalization, decentralization processes and the increasing role of the civil society. However, while the classical role of government is challenged, few methods have been proposed to enable the design of viable alternatives. The approach presented in this book is a contribution to the improvement of efficiency in public decision-making. Based on practical experience from Viet Nam, Indonesia and other countries, it proposes new methods for the identification of policy objective, stakeholders and issues at stake, and for the definition and implementation of concrete actions. It also provides means and guidance to foster progressive actors' participation and involvement in decision-making and policy implementation processes. Key Words: analytical methods, tools, decision making, agricultural policies


Distribution of income has been an important area of research in both economics and sports economics literature. However, the sports economics literature regarding European football lacks empirical studies associated with the relationship between revenue generation and competitive balance. This study analyzes the revenue sharing structure in Europe's top 5 football leagues along with its effects on competitive balance. Trends in the distribution of revenue are illustrated with the help of Lorenz curves and the coefficient of variations of revenue shares. There is significant evidence that there have been severe distortions in the distribution of revenue in European football, and it has been influential in the competition. The revenue shares of the top 5 leagues' have changed substantially over the last two decades which led to the utter dominance of European football by few clubs. The increasing inequality, in revenue generation and sharing, has affected the competitive balance adversely. The rising financial domination of the giants in European football is widening the gap between them and the lower profile teams hence decreasing the uncertainty of games, which might have adverse effects on the demand for football.


Polyunsaturated fatty acids are the main cause of the poor thermal and oxidative stabilit ies of fatty oils as well as biodiesels. The conversion of polyunsaturated to monounsaturated fatty acid moieties are normally carried out via hydrogenation. The most conventional hydrogenation process uses gaseous hydrogen at relatively high temperature and pressure in the presence of metal catalysts. Catalytic-transfer hydrogenation is an alternative method for oil hydrogenation which does not require the presence of hydrogen and can be carried out at atmospheric pressure. This paper describes the catalytic transfer-hydrogenation of kapok seed oil ( Ceiba pentandra ) and candlenut oil ( Aleurites moluccana ) by potassium formate (KOOCH) solutions using the following catalysts: Ag–Cu 2 O, Ag–Cu 2 O/Pumice, Ag–Cu 2 O–Pd/Pumice, and Pd/C 5% . None of the catalysts were found effective and kapok seed oil hydrogenated using 5%- Pd/C catalyst turned into gel , most probably due to the poly merization reaction s of sterculic and malvalic acid


Pressure sensitive adhesive surfaces are often inspired by nature. Miming the toe-surface of gecko, engineered surfaces made of thousands of micro-pillars show promising adhesive properties. This surfaces, covered with cylindrical pillars arranged into a pattern have adhesive properties greatly dependent on the geometrical characteristics. In this thesis, have been studied successively two models of micro-patterned surfaces, one two-dimensional, the other in three-dimensional using a FEM tool. Varying geometry parameters, has been determined optimal geometries to improve adhesive strength on these biomimetic, micropatterned surfaces. This study concludes to the non-adaptability of one-level scale micropatterned surface to large area of adhesion, to the strong advantage from the point of adhesion per contact area for high aspect ratio at each level of the geometry and study the opportunity of hierarchical structures. Some further suggestions of improvements to adhesion properties are discussed in the final chapter.


In this paper, we postulate that some of the best opportunities for reducing energy demand and carbon emissions are through stronger involvement and leadership from local government. We show that local government can and do have a significant impact on both energy production and energy consumption and are important participants for the implementation of distributed generation (DG). the progress being made by successful local governments can be narrowed to three key factors. First, they have all recognised the co-benefits of a local energy strategy: a reduction in fuel poverty, increased employment, improved quality of life and mitigation of uncertain fuel supplies and prices. Secondly, successful councils have strong political leadership and employee support to implement the structural change to bring about change. Thirdly, leading councils have gained momentum by working in partnership with utilities, private companies, NGO's, DNO's and government departments to raise finance and garner support. While climate change remains a global issue, some of the best strategies for mitigation are implemented at the local level.


Acinetobacter baumannii is a frequent cause of hospital-acquired pneumonia, and has recently increased in incidence as the causative agent of severe disease in troops wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq. Clinical approaches are limited since A. baumannii strains isolated from patients are extremely resistant to current antimicrobials. A. baumannii can survive desiccation and during outbreaks has been recovered from various sites in the patients' environment. To better understand its prevalence in hospital settings, we used a stainless steel washer (SSW) platform to investigate A. baumannii biofilm formation on abiotic surfaces. Scanning electron microscopy demonstrated that A. baumannii forms strong biofilms on stainless steel surfaces. This platform was combined with a colorimetric 2,3-bis(2-methoxy-4-nitro-5-sulfophenyl)-5-[(phenylamino)carbonyl]-2H-tetrazolium hydroxide (XTT) reduction assay to observe the metabolic activity of bacterial cells, and to facilitate the manipulation and comparison of multiple A. baumannii clinical strains. A strong correlation between XTT and c.f.u. assays was demonstrated. To complement the cell viability assays, A. baumannii biofilm mass was measured by crystal violet staining. Furthermore, the effect of commonly used disinfectants and environmental stressors on A. baumannii biofilms and planktonic cells was compared and characterized. Biofilms on SSWs were significantly more resistant than their planktonic counterparts, providing additional evidence that may allow us to understand the high prevalence of this microbe in hospital settings. Our results validate that SSWs are a simple, versatile and innovative method to study A. baumannii biofilms in vitro.


The widespread implementation of customer relationship management technologies in business has allowed companies to increasingly focus on both acquiring and retaining customers. The challenge of designing incentive mechanisms that simultaneously focus on customer acquisition and customer retention comes from the fact that customer acquisition and customer retention are usually separate but intertwined tasks that make providing proper incentives more difficult. The present study develops incentive mechanisms that simultaneously address acquisition and retention of customers with an emphasis on the interactions between them. The main focus of this study is to examine the impact of the negative effect of acquisition on retention, i.e., the spoiling effect, on firm performance under direct selling and delegation of customer acquisition. Our main finding is that the negative effect of acquisition on retention has a significant impact on acquisition and retention efforts and firm profit. In particular, when the customer acquisition and retention are independent, the firm's profit is higher under direct selling than under delegation; however, when acquisition spoils retention, interestingly, the firm's profit may be higher under delegation. Our analysis also finds that the spoiling effect not only reduces the optimal acquisition effort but may also reduce retention effort under both direct selling and delegation. Comparing the optimal efforts under direct selling and delegation, the acquisition effort is always lower under delegation regardless of the spoiling effect, but the retention effort may be higher under delegation with the spoiling effect. Furthermore, when the customer antagonism effect from price promotions is considered, our main results hold regarding the firm's preferences between direct selling and delegation, which demonstrates the robustness of our model.

This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing.


We report the results of Faraday rotation measurements of 23 background radio sources whose lines of sight pass through or close to the Rosette Nebula. We made linear polarization measurements with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) at frequencies of 4.4 GHz, 4.9 GHz, and 7.6 GHz. We find the background Galactic contribution to the rotation measure in this part of the sky to be +147 rad m−2. Sources whose lines of sight pass through the nebula have an excess rotation measure of 50–750 rad m−2, which we attribute to the plasma shell of the Rosette Nebula. We consider two simple plasma shell models and how they reproduce the magnitude and sign of the rotation measure, and its dependence on distance from the center of the nebula. These two models represent different modes of interaction of the Rosette Nebula star cluster with the surrounding interstellar medium. Both can reproduce the magnitude and spatial extent of the rotation measure enhancement, given plausible free parameters. We contend that the model based on a stellar bubble more closely reproduces the observed dependence of rotation measure on distance from the center of the nebula.


Sampling cruises were carried out on three coastal stations of the northern Ionian Sea over one year to investigate the effects of environmental factors on phytoplankton and picophytoplankton composition and succession. Larger phytoplankton (micro and nano fractions) was determined by using the Utermöhl settling technique, while picophytoplankton fraction was determined by epifluorescence microscopy. Furthermore, microbiological procedures were applied to investigate cyanobacterial diversity in the studied area. Results suggested that the most striking feature of phytoplankton communities was the high spatial variability in terms of abundance and biomass, which showed specific coastal Mediterranean values. Undetermined phytoflagellates and diatoms were the dominant groups of the Utermöhl fraction of phytoplankton, while round to rod-shaped small sized cyanobacteria represented the picophytoplankton fraction. Our data suggested that in the northern Ionian Sea the phytoplankton development was related to phosphorus availability and to 'nitrogen-rich' waters. Also the picophytoplankton seasonal trend was significantly correlated to N-compounds as well as to water temperature. In addition to the typical picoplanktonic Synechococcus, the culture techniques allowed us to isolate and identify cyanobacteria belonging to the pleurocapsalean genus Stanieria and the oscillatoriacean genera Geitlerinema, Leiblenia, Leptolyngbya, Oscillatoria, Pseudanabaena and Spirulina. These species represent a minor fraction of the total cyanobacterial community in terms of biomass, but their importance is related to their contribution to the phytoplankton diversity.


In this work, the concept of reusing a memory location to significantly reduce the overall memory size for storing wide dynamic range (WDR) information in rolling shutter active pixel sensors (APSs) is discussed. At the high light level, WDR is achieved via multiple-resets and real time feedback, allowing a pixel to independently set its integration period as per its ambient light level. Traditionally these WDR bits are stored in a dedicated memory location for every pixel. We propose a new memory architecture which, in principal, is similar to time division multiplexing, such that it achieves memory size reduction by sharing a single memory location among a number of pixels as a function of time. The proposed architecture is ideally suited for rolling shutter APS, where each row is processed sequentially in time. Compared to a commonly used memory design, the proposed architecture becomes increasingly efficient as the pixel count increases, resulting in momentous savings in memory chip area and leakage power consumption. For a pixel array of 128 * 128, only 14.2% of the commonly used memory bits are required, when using 7 WDR bits per pixel. This requirement reduces to 8.3% of the commonly used memory bits for a pixel array size of 4096 * 4096, rendering the purposed architecture particularly efficient for larger arrays. The savings in leakage power will track the corresponding savings in memory size and area especially for newer technologies. The purposed concept has been verified in design and simulation for a 128 * 128 pixel array, fabricated in 180 nm technology.


We examined the hypothesis that spring migration in barren-ground caribou (Rangifer tarandus) enhances access to high quality food, reduces predation risks or both. We related our findings to the hypothesis that one of the consequences of migration is that prey populations cannot be regulated by predation because predators are unable to respond numerically to changes in abundance of migratory prey. In the Northwest Territories, migration to calving grounds by pregnant cows reduced the risk of predation on neonates. Wolf (Canis lupus) densities on calving grounds averaged only 22% of winter range densities because most wolves denned near tree line. The quality and quantity of food that was available to cows that migrated to calving grounds was lower than for bulls and other caribou that lagged far behind the pregnant cows during spring migration. Fecal nitrogen levels were higher in bulls than in cows in late May and early June but there were no differences in mid or late June. Areas occupied by bulls in late May had a greater biomass of live sedges than on the calving ground in early June. It appears that although food in July is abundant and nutritious, insect harassment prevents efficient feeding. Body fat reserves in both sexes declined to almost zero by mid-July, the lowest level of the year. Insect numbers declined in August and body fat levels increased to the highest level of the year by early September. Because the timing of caribou's return to the hunting ranges of tree line denning wolves was related to caribou density, our data were inconsistent with the suggested consequence of migration. Tree line denning by wolves and density-dependent changes in caribou migration suggests a mechanism for population regulation in caribou and wolves. We suggest that the process is as follows; when caribou numbers increase, some density-dependent factor causes range expansion in August (e.g., competition for food) causing caribou to return earlier to the hunting ranges of tree line denning wolves, more denning wolves have access to caribou, wolf pup survival increases and wolf numbers increase. The effect on caribou population growth will depend on the timing and magnitude of the wolf numerical response.


One of the greatest challenges facing libraries all over the world is how to effectively curb the menace of user delinquency. The academic libraries in the university community in Nigeria cannot be isolated from this problem. Consequently, this study examined the issue of user delinquency in Nigeria using three selected universities in Edo State as case study. The universities were Ambrose Alli University, Benson Idahosa University and University of Benin. A survey research design was adopted and the Questionnaire was used as an instrument for data collection in addition to interview and observation methods. 350 copies of the Questionnaire were administered to both staff and students of the universities sampled for the study. 298 copies of the Questionnaire were successfully retrieved giving a response rate of 85.14%5. The data collected from respondents were analyzed based on the five research questions designed for this study using simple tables and percentages. However, it was revealed through the data collected from the study that user delinquency includes: stealing of library books, hiding books from other users and mutilating pages of library books. In view of the foregoing, the researchers amongst others recommend installation of security systems in the library; putting expensive or popular titles on reserve for short term loans; engaging staff to glance over the reading rooms and daily shelving and shelf reading of library materials.


E-commerce has been emerging over the past two decades due to the advancement of Internet and information technology. The current trend of online shopping among Internet users are becoming more significant, especially among the young agers and professionals. This is due to convenience and beneficial perseption towards online shopping. The working professionals are identified as frequent online shoppers thus providing an opportunity to undestand their perception towards online shopping. The understanding on the perception on online buyers can provide marketer a guide to strategise their marketing advantage. Therefore, the objective of this study is to understand the online shopping demodraphy and to get meaningful insight on how they perceive online shopping which later shape their online shopping orientation. A sample of 1202 of polytechnic college's academicians were asked for input and descriptive analysis was done to investigate factors that characterised their online shopping orientation. Based on the results, the study has shown several significant findings. It is found that there are three factors that have an effeect on online shopping orientation namely information search, religion commitment and religion concern. The findings consequently will stipulate the understanding on how professionals in Malaysia distinguish online shopping and what have modelled their orientation and perception towards e-commerce.


"There was no patriotism in the trenches. It was too remote a sentiment, and rejected as fit only for civilians. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out. As Blighty, Great Britain was a quiet, easy place to get back to out of the present foreign misery, but as a nation it was nothing." This is the original version of Robert Graves' intense memoir of the First World War, restoring this raw, emotionally truthful, darkly comic work to the way it was first written, by a young man still reeling from the trenches. "We see the dark heart of the book even more clearly, and hear it beating even more loudly, in this original edition than we do in the comparatively careful and considered terms of the later one." (Andrew Motion). "One of the most candid self-portraits, warts and all, ever painted." (TLS).


In the wake of corporate acquisitions, mergers, and spin-offs, considerable senior management attention has been devoted to corporate identity and its communication to key stakeholder groups. This article provides a framework to help management achieve clearer understanding and better management of their corporation's identities. Many firms operate with a belief in a single monolithic corporate identity. Our research leads to a different view: organizations have multiple identities. We delineate five kinds of identity, within a framework termed the AC²ID Test™(ACCID), namely, the actual, communicated, conceived, ideal, and desired identities. These reflect respectively: the current, distinct attributes of the organization; what the organization communicates about itself; the perceptions of the corporation by stakeholders; the optimum positioning for the organization; and corporate vision from the perspective of the CEO or management board. Not only should management understand its multiple identities, it also should be alert to critical misalignments among them, as these can seriously weaken a company.


The Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act, Act 12 of 2004, was instituted to curb corrupt activities. It imposes a duty on people in positions of authority to report corrupt or suspected corrupt activities and related activities. However, auditors are not listed in this Act as persons in a position of authority. This article discusses whether, despite the fact that the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act does not place such a reporting duty on an auditor, auditors nevertheless have a duty in terms of other legislation to report any unlawful activities that they uncover in the course of their work, or which they suspect to have been committed. The article also examines whether auditors are required to consider the risk of corruption.


Here, we present the deposition of antimony-doped tin oxide thin films using the ambient spray pyrolysis technique and demonstrate their implementation as transparent electrodes (anodes) in red, green and blue organic light emitting diodes. The films were spray coated at 380 °C from SnCl4 and SbCl3 solution blends in methanol and ∼230 nm thick films were investigated by means of X-ray diffraction, AFM, UV-Vis absorption spectroscopy, 4-point probe, Hall effect measurements and Kelvin probe. It was found that for optimum antimony doping in the precursor solution of ∼2 wt%, the as-deposited ATO films exhibit excellent characteristics such as a low surface roughness (RRMS) of ∼ 6.3 nm, a high work function (∼−5.03 eV), a wide direct band gap (∼4.2 eV), high transparency in the visible spectrum in excess of 85% on glass, a low sheet resistivity (∼32 Ohms sq−1), a high charge carrier concentration (∼6.35 × 1020 cm−3) and a carrier mobility of ∼32 cm2 V−1 s−1. Furthermore, the electrical and optical performance i.e. the turn on voltage and external quantum efficiency of red, green and blue OLEDs fabricated on optimized SnO2:Sb films were identical to those of OLEDs fabricated on commercially available ITO (Rs ∼ 15 Ohms sq−1) and were found to be in excess of 11%, 0.3% and 13% for red, green and blue OLEDs, respectively.


Between men of action, men of words, and men—like the philosophers—who find themselves curiously in between, Montaigne would ideally write like Epicurus and Seneca, in a style that unites his actions with his words. This union of "doings" and "sayings," of doctrine and daily activity, is also what Montaigne refers to as the wisdom of the philosophers. His new form of wisdom in the Essays unites his sayings and doings, but without losing touch with the paradox of making the private public, and the inevitability of being judged comic in his time for exposing his private life.


This research explores the consumer socialisation of children and adolescents from low-income groups. In particular, the importance of reference groups in cognitive development and understanding is investigated to gain insight into the consumption behaviours immediately before, during and after their 'tweens'. 'Tweens' are defined as 8–12-year-olds. To gain a thorough insight into changes in opinion during tweenage years, 7-, 11- and 14-year-olds were interviewed in this study. In total 30 children from these three age groups were (depth) interviewed and their discourses were compared to show the development in understanding of brands and peer influence. Whereas previous studies have concentrated on the symbolism behind clothing brands this research looks at the meanings attached to different types of food and beverage brands.

Our interviews suggest peers become more influential to consumption decisions as children move through the tweens and in our study, peer approval replaces family as the main influence behind consumption behaviour. Brand understanding also changes as the child becomes older; children learn how to identify commercial, supermarket and budget brands and attach meaning to these different types of brands. The symbolic meaning of products and brands become more complex during the tween years as children view possessions as material symbols of identity and make inferences about peers based on their consumption choices. This research found that as children become older even simple products change from functional to symbolic items.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


The paper discusses the relationship between the syntax of street networks and the differentiation of the size of urban blocks in a sample of small towns and settlements. The argument is in four parts. In the first part it is demonstrated, through design games, that the differentiation of streets by integration is linked to the differentiation of blocks by size. In the second part, it is shown that in a small sample of towns in the Provence, small blocks are not associated with more integrated streets but are distributed throughout the street network. The demonstration is based on an original method for studying the block size in relation to street integration. In the third part, the historic evolution of these particular towns is shown to involve the rationalisation of their integration core: integrated streets become better aligned and wider, and reach more directly into all parts of the town. However, the historic relationship between integration and block size is also based on mixture rather than a linear pattern of association. The final part uses these findings to advance a speculation about the origin of the syntax of these towns as compared to the syntax of the smaller settlements that Hillier and Hanson characterise as 'beady rings'. This leads to a discussion of some of the abstract syntactic generators originally presented in The Social Logic of Space. In short, the final section of the paper argues that the lack of linear association between small blocks and integrated streets, in this particular sample, points to the emergence of gradually more complex generators of town form, generators which presuppose the ideas of the urban block and the street. These act upon the seeds of prior small aggregations, generated by simpler rules of adjacency.


Supercolonies of the red fire ant Solenopsis saevissima (Smith) develop in disturbed environments and likely alter the ant community in the native range of the species. For example, in French Guiana only 8 ant species were repeatedly noted as nesting in close vicinity to its mounds. Here, we verified if a shared set of biological, ecological, and behavioral traits might explain how these 8 species are able to nest in the presence of S. saevissima. We did not find this to be the case. We did find, however, that all of them are able to live in disturbed habitats. It is likely that over the course of evolution each of these species acquired the capacity to live syntopically with S. saevissima through its own set of traits, where colony size (4 species develop large colonies), cuticular compounds which do not trigger aggressiveness (6 species) and submissive behaviors (4 species) complement each other.


We consider the scientifically challenging and policy-relevant task of understanding the past and projecting the future dynamics of the Antarctic ice sheet. The Antarctic ice sheet has shown a highly nonlinear threshold response to past climate forcings. Triggering such a threshold response through anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions would drive drastic and potentially fast sea level rise with important implications for coastal flood risks. Previous studies have combined information from ice sheet models and observations to calibrate model parameters. These studies have broken important new ground but have either adopted simple ice sheet models or have limited the number of parameters to allow for the use of more complex models. These limitations are largely due to the computational challenges posed by calibration as models become more computationally intensive or when the number of parameters increases. Here we propose a method to alleviate this problem: a fast sequential Monte Carlo method that takes advantage of the massive parallelization afforded by modern high performance computing systems. We use simulated examples to demonstrate how our sample-based approach provides accurate approximations to the posterior distributions of the calibrated parameters. The drastic reduction in computational times enables us to provide new insights into important scientific questions, for example, the impact of Pliocene era data and prior parameter information on sea level projections. These studies would be computationally prohibitive with other computational approaches for calibration such as Markov chain Monte Carlo or emulation-based methods. We also find considerable differences in the distributions of sea level projections when we account for a larger number of uncertain parameters.


We report the Swift discovery of the nearby long, soft gamma-ray burst GRB 100316D, and the subsequent unveiling of its low-redshift host galaxy and associated supernova. We derive the redshift of the event to be z = 0.0591 +/- 0.0001 and provide accurate astrometry for the gamma-ray burst (GRB) supernova (SN). We study the extremely unusual prompt emission with time-resolved gamma-ray to X-ray spectroscopy and find that the spectrum is best modelled with a thermal component in addition to a synchrotron emission component with a low peak energy. The X-ray light curve has a remarkably shallow decay out to at least 800 s. The host is a bright, blue galaxy with a highly disturbed morphology and we use Gemini-South, Very Large Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope observations to measure some of the basic host galaxy properties. We compare and contrast the X-ray emission and host galaxy of GRB 100316D to a subsample of GRB-SNe. GRB 100316D is unlike the majority of GRB-SNe in its X-ray evolution, but resembles rather GRB 060218, and we find that these two events have remarkably similar high energy prompt emission properties. Comparison of the host galaxies of GRB-SNe demonstrates, however, that there is a great diversity in the environments in which GRB-SNe can be found. GRB 100316D is an important addition to the currently sparse sample of spectroscopically confirmed GRB-SNe, from which a better understanding of long GRB progenitors and the GRB-SN connection can be gleaned.


The overall purpose of this thesis is to describe and analyse interpersonal behaviour in career counselling sessions. The importance of the relationship in counselling for the outcome of sessions has been acknowledged in earlier research. How the actual interaction process between client and career counsellor looks like has been sparsely investigated. The present research explores expected, experienced behaviours and self-image of 15 adolescent clients' and counsellors' dyads in career counselling. The research was guided by interpersonal theory and the model of structural analysis of social behaviour (SASB) developed by Lorna Smith Benjamin. The research focuses on four different aspect of interpersonal behaviour. First, the significance of different behaviours by the clients and the career counsellors related to session evaluation. Second, the significance of expected and experienced similarity in perceptions of self and other behaviours related to session evaluation. Third, differences of perceived behaviours and possible influence by self-image over the course of sessions and fourth, comparing the influence of positive and negative self-image to expected and experienced behaviours, perceived important events during session and session evaluation session by clients'. Results indicate the importance for clients to become close to the career counsellor in session, while the career counsellors' encouragement of clients' independency during sessions showed to be of less importance for the clients'. This pattern imply a difficult balance act for career counsellors between providing a safe and close relationship and promoting independence and exploration for the clients. Further, it was found that career counsellors had difficulties in identifying their own contributions to a positive session evaluation, indicating a problem for the career counsellors' to make conscious adjustments of behaviours. The degree to which client and career counsellor agreed of their behaviours only mattered for experiences of the career counsellors' behaviour when related to their evaluation of session. Only minor tendencies of influence by the career counsellors' self-image of clients' perceived differences in behaviours were found. Self-image played a significant role in how the clients' expected and experienced behaviours, perceived important events in session and in their session evaluation. Clients' with positive self-image showed consistently more positive perceptions on each of the involved variables.