Winner of the William Hill Sports Book of The Year Award A superb book; hilarious, sad, moving and hopeful - The Times A monumental achievement...it documents every facet of his extraordinary life - The Daily Telegraph Hauser's achievement in chronicling the life of Muhammad Ali is monumental...triumphant and harrowing at one and the same time - The Guardian A tour de force - The Observer Compassionate, intelligent, fair-minded, definitive, and certainly exhaustive - The New York Review of Books A delightful summer read - The Los Angeles Times One of the most recognisable, respected and inspirational men on earth, Muhammad Ali is the world's most famous boxing hero. Ali brought unprecedented speed and grace to the sport, and his charm and wit changed forever what the world expects of a champion athlete. In the words of over two hundred of Ali's family members, associates, opponents, friends and enemies, this comprehensive and honest portrait relates his legendary sporting accomplishments, as well as the high drama of life outside the boxing ring. From Olympic gold in Rome, to stunning victory over George Foreman in Zaire, every historic victory and defeat of Ali's career is covered. His controversial embrace of the Nation of Islam - with the renunciation of his 'slave name', Cassius Clay - and the historic refusal to be inducted into the US Army makes for compelling reading. Ali became America's first national conscientious objector, and with a willingness to stage his fights in Third World locales, he continued his advocacy for people in need which was honoured in 2000 when he became a United Nations Messenger of Peace. Charismatic, dedicated and a skilful self-publicist, Muhammad Ali was the embodiment of the American Dream. This is the ultimate biography to match Ali's lifetime of extraordinary achievements. The perfect companion for any boxing enthusiast or fan of Muhammad Ali's life and work.


Obesity discourse is dominant in mainstream Western society, and is increasingly identified as a social category that normalizes, privileges, and praises certain bodies while stigmatizing others. Given that weight-based stigma has been shown to have harmful consequences, addressing and employing teaching strategies that address this social justice issue is, therefore, of utmost importance. This research investigates the academic experiences, philosophical perspectives, and pedagogical approaches of twenty-six post-secondary faculty members in social sciences, humanities, health sciences, behavioural sciences, and education who are known for challenging dominant obesity discourse in their teaching. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews and relevant course materials submitted by each participant (course syllabi, Power Point presentations, workshop materials, and academic papers). Qualitative data analysis and reporting techniques were employed within a critical fat studies, framework to explore the experiences, perspectives, and approaches of all participants. Analysis indicates that fat oppression within academic institutions is prevalent and that working to address this social justice issue is complex. Participants drew specific attention to how bodies are read within their university classrooms in the context of contemporary dominant obesity discourse. They highlighted how their academic careers are being influenced by size privilege and fat oppression within their post-secondary institutions. Lastly, participants shared various pedagogical approaches and teaching practices they have employed in the classroom that aimed to disrupt the reproduction, legitimization, and promotion of biomedical obesity narratives and offer alternative perspectives around fatness. This research concludes that combining critical fat studies and educational research is generative for understanding and addressing fat oppression within higher education.


We explore the Papadodimas–Raju prescription for reconstructing the region behind the horizon of one-sided black holes in AdS/CFT in the case of the R P 2 ?> geon—a simple, analytic example of a single-sided, asymptotically AdS3 black hole, which corresponds to a pure CFT state that thermalizes at late times. We show that in this specific example, the mirror operators involved in the reconstruction of the interior have a particularly simple form: the mirror of a single trace operator at late times is just the corresponding single trace operator at early times. We use some explicit examples to explore how changes in the state modify the geometry inside the horizon.


This paper presents the long-term analysis of flood occurrence along the southern part of the Upper Rhine River system and of 14 of its tributaries in France and Germany covering the period starting from 1480 BC. Special focus is given on the temporal and spatial variations of flood events and their underlying meteorological causes over time. Examples are presented of how long-term information about flood events and knowledge about the historical aspect of flood protection in a given area can help to improve the understanding of risk analysis and therefor transnational risk management. Within this context, special focus is given to flood vulnerability while comparing selected historical and modern extreme events, establishing a common evaluation scheme. The transnational aspect becomes especially evident analyzing the tributaries: on this scale, flood protection developed impressively different on the French and German sides. We argue that comparing high technological standards of flood protection, which were initiated by the dukes of Baden on the German side starting in the early 19th century, misled people to the common belief that the mechanical means of flood protection like dams and barrages can guarantee the security from floods and their impacts. This lead to widespread settlements and the establishment of infrastructure as well as modern industries in potentially unsafe areas until today. The legal status in Alsace on the French side of the Rhine did not allow for continuous flood protection measurements, leading to a constant – and probably at last annoying – reminder that the floodplains are a potentially unsafe place to be. From a modern perspective of flood risk management, this leads to a significant lower aggregation of value in the floodplains of the small rivers in Alsace compared to those on the Baden side – an interesting fact – especially if the modern European Flood directive is taken into account.


Recommended by Elizabeth Houghton Barden, Big Hat Books, Indianapolis, IN The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe (Knopf, 9780307594037, $25) "What a remarkable book! Not only a love letter to his mom, but a love letter to books and their power to help us all remember both the struggle and the joy it is to be human and the grace we can find in our shared humanity. I fell head over heels for Mary Ann Schwalbe, thanks to her son's meticulous and loving tribute. In someone else's hands this is the kind of book that could have slipped into the maudlin or overwrought, but Schwalbe succeeds in portraying his mother's quiet, humble, spot-on wisdom and beautiful daring with both restraint and passion. My copy is thoroughly dog-eared. Is there any better tribute?" —Laurie Paus, The Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA


Considerable economic research suggests that the historical origin of a countrys laws is associated with legal rules and economic outcomes. This paper investigates differing public health outcomes of countries with common law legal origin (the British model) and civil law legal origin (the French model). Civil law countries on net have better health outcomes in the categories of infectious disease, immunization, sanitation, contraception, pregnancy, malnutrition, infant mortality, and life expectancy. Although health outcomes vary regionally, the effect of civil law countries having better health outcomes than common law countries holds within regions as well. Civil law countries do not have a greater financial commitment to public health. Instead, better health outcomes in countries with civil law legal origin seems to result from greater decentralization of government funds, higher rates of urbanization, and less ethnic fractionalization in civil law countries.


In the mountainous regions of the Upper Colorado River Basin, snow course observations give local measurements of snow water equivalent, which can be used to estimate regional averages of snow conditions. We develop a statistical technique to estimate the mesoscale average snow accumulation, using 8 years of snow course observations. For each of three major snow accumulation regions in the Upper Colorado River Basin – the Colorado Rocky Mountains, Colorado, the Uinta Mountains, Utah, and the Wind River Range, Wyoming – the snow course observations yield a correlation length scale of 38 km, 46 km, and 116 km respectively. This is the scale for which the snow course data at different sites are correlated with 70 per cent correlation. This correlation of snow accumulation over large distances allows for the estimation of the snow water equivalent on a mesoscale basis. With the snow course data binned into 1/4° latitude by 1/4° longitude pixels, an error analysis shows the following: for no snow course data in a given pixel, the uncertainty in the water equivalent estimate reaches 50 cm; that is, the climatological variability. However, as the number of snow courses in a pixel increases the uncertainty decreases, and approaches 5-10 cm when there are five snow courses in a pixel.


Statistics can be overwhelming for students due to the vast number of functions available in many software packages. In the computer language APL, "operators" are higher order functions which modify or combine existing functions to produce new functions. These operators allow us to use a reduced set of functions to produce a wide variety of useful results, using expressions which are surprisingly English-like. This approach simplifies the teaching – and learning – of statistics using software, by dramatically reducing the vocabulary that a student needs to master, and clarifying the fundamental principles of entry-level statistics. A working software program, TamStat, with a user interface and an optional interface to "R" has been implemented in Dyalog APL.


Background. Averaged Norbeck Social Support Questionnaire (NSSQ) support scores remove the influence of network size variability but may unduly lower scores for participants with large networks. Objectives. To evaluate the use of averaged NSSQ scores. Method. Pearson correlations determined if averaged scores decreased as network size increased across three samples. Then, Pearson correlations between a criterion variable and both averaged and raw support scores were computed along with the resultant power to detect a true effect. Results. Neither averaged total functional support nor averaged affect and affirmation scores decreased as sample size increased. However, averaged aid scores did decrease as network size increased. Power also increased markedly in all averaged versus raw scores except in averaged aid scores. Discussion and Conclusions. Use of averaged aid scores is not recommended. Use of all other averaged scores appears acceptable.


BACKGROUND
Previous studies have revealed that rigid mitral annuloplasty rings may be associated with left ventricular (LV) systolic dysfunction, but whether ring type affects regional systolic function at the base of the LV, in the region near the mitral annulus, is unclear. We tested the hypothesis that rigid fixation of the mitral annulus results in significant regional systolic dysfunction at the base of the LV.

METHODS AND RESULTS
Twenty-six adult male sheep underwent placement of 13 miniature tantalum markers into the LV epicardium and around the mitral annulus to allow calculation of LV volume and regional epicardial area. Group I (n = 7) sheep served as controls; animals randomized to groups II (n = 11) and III (n = 8) underwent mitral annuloplasty with either a semirigid or flexible ring, respectively. After a 7- to 10-day recovery period, animals were studied in a closed-chest, sedated, autonomically blocked state. Global LV systolic function (end-systolic elastance and preload recruitable stroke work) were not significantly different among the 3 groups (P = 1.0, ANOVA). Regional systolic function at the base of the LV (fractional area shrinkage [FAS] of 4 epicardial areas) at comparable LV preload and afterload was similar in the 4 basal areas (P = 0.223, MANOVA). With the use of load-insensitive indexes (slope and area intercept of the end-systolic pressure-regional area relationship and regional stroke work-end-diastolic area relationship), regional systolic function also was not different between groups at baseline or with inotropic stimulation in any basal region (P > 0.05, MANOVA). Furthermore, neither annuloplasty ring perturbed the regional pattern of basal LV systolic function.

CONCLUSIONS
Postoperative LV systolic function, both globally and in the region of the base of the LV (near the mitral annulus), was not altered with either semirigid or flexible ring fixation of the mitral annulus.


Transformers have made remarkable progress towards modeling long-range dependencies within the medical image analysis domain. However, current transformer-based models suffer from several disadvantages: (1) existing methods fail to capture the important features of the images due to the naive tokenization scheme; (2) the models suffer from information loss because they only consider single-scale feature representations; and (3) the segmentation label maps generated by the models are not accurate enough without considering rich semantic contexts and anatomical textures. In this work, we present CASTformer, a novel type of adversarial transformers, for 2D medical image segmentation. First, we take advantage of the pyramid structure to construct multi-scale representations and handle multi-scale variations. We then design a novel class-aware transformer module to better learn the discriminative regions of objects with semantic structures. Lastly, we utilize an adversarial training strategy that boosts segmentation accuracy and correspondingly allows a transformer-based discriminator to capture high-level semantically correlated contents and low-level anatomical features. Our experiments demonstrate that CASTformer dramatically outperforms previous state-of-the-art transformer-based approaches on three benchmarks, obtaining 2.54%-5.88% absolute improvements in Dice over previous models. Further qualitative experiments provide a more detailed picture of the model's inner workings, shed light on the challenges in improved transparency, and demonstrate that transfer learning can greatly improve performance and reduce the size of medical image datasets in training, making CASTformer a strong starting point for downstream medical image analysis tasks.


This report provides a brief overview of the European Union (EU), an economic and political partnership between 27 sovereign member states. The report describes the formation of the EU, the three main institutions of the EU, and the EU's relationship with the United States.


This paper discusses several rationales for the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) program, including reduced oil dependence, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and the possibility that fuel saving benefits from higher standards might exceed added vehicle costs. We then summarize what can be said about the welfare effects of tightening standards, accounting for prior fuel taxes, and perverse effects on congestion and traffic accidents through the impact of improved fuel economy on the incentive to drive. Implications of CAFE on local air pollution, and the controversy over CAFE, vehicle weight, and road safety, are also discussed. Finally, we describe ways in which the existing CAFE program could be substantially improved and identify a variety of alternative, and much superior, policy approaches.


The load caused by growing volumes of collected residues produces a pressure both on the environment and on the population. Presently, wastes are no longer considered just simple residues, but also resources which can be reused or recovered. Various tools are now available to help compare the various options in waste management. These tools lead to a linear management of the systems. In addition, they generate a division of flow streams and do not allow an optimal use of the available materials. An industrial ecology perspective requires one to move towards a systemic approach. Based on the law of conservation of energy, the Dynamic Waste Management approach (DWM) studies the behaviour of systems to insure a constant supply of favourable waste management options (WMO) and to reduce the global load within these systems. The flow distribution in a global system rests on the principle that the available volumes and the transportation influence the validity of the hierarchical organisation of WMO. Adhering to the philosophy of industrial ecology, the DWM offers a dynamic and evolutionary alternative to reduce the impacts generated by inadequate waste management. The present article exposes the characteristics of the proposed approach, and presents an example of its application in order to demonstrate the advantages of the DWM.


Abstract : The purpose of this report is to imagine the unthinkable to push the boundaries of current research on climate change so we may better understand the potential implications on United States national security. We have interviewed leading climate change scientists, conducted additional research, and reviewed several iterations of the scenario with these experts. The scientists support this project, but caution that the scenario depicted is extreme in two fundamental ways. First, they suggest the occurrences we outline would most likely happen in a few regions, rather than on globally. Second, they say the magnitude of the event may be considerably smaller. We have created a climate change scenario that although not the most likely, is plausible, and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately.


A 600-mm-long, 100-mm-wide, and 20-mm-thick steel plate containing a wavey groove carrying chilled ethanol at −40°C was used successfully to obtain undisturbed frozen samples of saturated clean sand. The freezing probe was also used in an unsaturated sand dune to obtain samples at a depth of 3.0 m. For sands above the groundwater level, an imbibition test is, however, required prior to freezing in order to increase the in situ water content and bond the sand particles as freezing proceeds. The prismatic freezing probe is very efficient and produced frozen sand masses having an outside diameter of 26 cm after 4 h of freezing. Pushing the probe into the ground resulted in a disturbed zone of about 3 to 5 times its thickness.


Objective: Mechanical ventilation contributes to diaphragmatic atrophy and dysfunction, and few techniques exist to assess diaphragmatic function: the purpose of this study was to quantify diaphragm atrophy in a population of critically ill mechanically ventilated patients with ultrasound and to identify risk factors that can worsen diaphragmatic activity. Design: Prospective observational study. Setting: ICU of a 1,200-bed university hospital. Patients: Newly intubated adult critically ill patients. Interventions: Diaphragm thickness in the zone of apposition was measured daily with ultrasound, from the first day of mechanical ventilation till discharge to the main ward. Measurements and Main Results: Daily atrophy rate (&Dgr;Tdi/d) was calculated as the reduction in percentage from the previous measurement. To analyze the difference in atrophy rate (&Dgr;Tdi/d), ventilation was categorized into four classes: spontaneous breathing or continuous positive airway pressure; pressure support ventilation 5–12 cm H2O (low pressure support ventilation); pressure support ventilation greater than 12 cm H2O (high pressure support ventilation); and controlled mechanical ventilation. Multivariate analysis with ventilation support and other clinical variables was performed to identify risk factors for atrophy. Forty patients underwent a total of 153 ultrasonographic evaluations. Mean (SD) &Dgr;Tdi/d was –7.5% (12.3) during controlled mechanical ventilation, –5.3% (12.9) at high pressure support ventilation, –1.5% (10.9) at low pressure support ventilation, +2.3% (9.5) during spontaneous breathing or continuous positive airway pressure. At multivariate analysis, only the ventilation support was predictive of diaphragm atrophy rate. Pressure support predicted diaphragm thickness with coefficient –0.006 (95% CI, –0.010 to –0.002; p = 0.006). Conclusions: In critically ill mechanically ventilated patients, there is a linear relationship between ventilator support and diaphragmatic atrophy rate.


Permafrost soils of the Siberian Arctic are exposed to extreme environmental conditions. Except for the short summer period, when thawing of the uppermost 20 to 50 cm of the permafrost sediment allows for the formation of a so-called active layer, the soils are frozen throughout the entire year. Active layers show steep temperature gradients between 10 to 18 °C in the top and 0 to 1 °C in the bottom part. Seasonal freezing and thawing also lead to the formation of symmetrically patterned low-centred ice wedge polygons which determine a pronounced small-scale heterogeneity of permafrost soils with regard to their physical and chemical properties.Vertical proflies of potential methane oxidation rates in respond to temperatures between 0 and 38 °C indicated shifts between a cold adapted methanatrophic community in the top and a cold loving methanotrophic community in the bottom active layer. Based on these results we used 16S rDNA clone libraries as well as in-situ cell counting to compare the bacterial communities of two active layer depths of a polygon rim and a polygon centre. We will show that the composition of the bacterial soil community depends on soil depth and soil properties. We will also show that bacterial diversity, characterized by richness, relative abundance and genetic relatedness of their operational taxonomic units (OTUs), is comparably high in Siberian permafrost soils, in temperate terrestrial and marine environments. According to cell counts in the range of 107 to 109 this holds also for the number of bacterial cells detected in-situ.


This concise book teaches software professionals and software engineering students the full set of twenty software reading techniques to enhance their effectiveness in reviewing and inspecting software artifacts such as requirements specifications, designs, code files, and usability. Software review and inspection is the best practice in software development whose purpose is to detect and fix problems early. Software professionals are trained to write software but not read and analyze software written by peers. As a result, individual reading skills vary widely. Because the effectiveness of software review and inspection is highly dependent on individual reading skills, differential outcomes among software readers vary by a factor of ten. Software Reading Techniques is designed to close that gap. Dr YangMing Zhus depth of experience as a software architect, team leader, and scientist make him singularly well-equipped to bring software readers up to speed on all the techniques and tips for optimizing the effectiveness and efficiency of their software review and inspection skills. What You'll LearnSoftware review and inspection procedures and reading skillsTraditional and modern advanced reading techniques applicable to almost all software artifactsSpecific reading techniques for software requirements specification, software design, and codeWho This Book Is ForAll software professionals and software engineering students and researchers.


In this paper, the author presents a work on i) range data and ii) stereo-vision system based disparity map profiling that are used as signatures for 3D face recognition. The signatures capture the intensity variations along a line at sample points on a face in any particular direction. The directional signatures and some of their combinations are compared to study the variability in recognition performances. Two 3D face image datasets namely, a local student database captured with a stereo vision system and the FRGC v1 range dataset are used for performance evaluation.


Let $K_q(n,R)$ denote the minimal cardinality of a $q$-ary code of length $n$ and covering radius $R$. Recently the authors gave a new proof of a classical lower bound of Rodemich on $K_q(n,n-2)$ by the use of partition matrices and their transversals. In this paper we show that, in contrast to Rodemich's original proof, the method generalizes to lower-bound $K_q(n,n-k)$ for any $k>2$. The approach is best-understood in terms of a game where a winning strategy for one of the players implies the non-existence of a code. This proves to be by far the most efficient method presently known to lower-bound $K_q(n,R)$ for large $R$ (i.e. small $k$). One instance: the trivial sphere-covering bound $K_{12}(7,3)\geq 729$, the previously best bound $K_{12}(7,3)\geq 732$ and the new bound $K_{12}(7,3)\geq 878$.


The study of haptics, or the sense of touch in virtual reality environments, is constantly looking for improvements in modeling with a high fidelity. Highly detailed models are desirable, but they often lead to slow processing times, which can mean a loss of fidelity in the force feedback sensations. Model compression techniques are critical to balancing model detail and processing time. One of the proposed compression techniques is to create multiple models of the same object but with different levels of detail (LOD) for each model. The technique hypothesizes that the human arm loses sensitivity to forces with the increase of its movement speed. This the compression technique determines which model to use based on the user's movement speed. This dissertation examines studies how the movement speed of the user affects the user's ability to sense changes in details of haptic models. Experiments are conducted using different haptic surfaces. Their levels of detail are changed while the subject interacts with them to mimic the effects of a multiresolution compression implementation. The tests focus on the subjects' ability to differentiate changes of the surfaces at each speed. The first experiment uses curved surfaces with multiple resolutions. This test observes the sensitivity of the user when the details on the surface are small. The results show that the subjects are more sensitive to changes of small details at a lower speed than higher speed. The second experiment measures sensitivity to larger features by using trapezoidal surfaces with different angles. The trapezoidal surfaces can be seen as a low-resolution haptic model with only two vertices, and changing the angles of the trapezoids is seen as changing the radii of curvature. With the same speed settings from the first experiment applied to the subjects, the sensitivity for changes in curvature is predicted to decrease with the increase of speed. However, the results of this experiment proved otherwise. The conclusions suggest that multiresolution designs are not a straightforward reduction of LOD, even though the movement speed does affect haptic sensitivity. The model's iii geometry should be taken into account when designing the parameters for haptic model compression. The results from the experiments provide insights to future haptic multiresolution compression designs.


Southward roll-back and slab retreat of the subducting African plate has been the cause of extension and magmatism in the Aegean since the Early Miocene. The Hellenic subduction system has shown a progressive southward-migration provoking activity on a series of detachment faults and successive associated exhumation episodes of HP-rocks. Volcanism has been localized during Oligocene–Middle Miocene in central Aegean, and from Pliocene to Recent in the south Aegean. Plutonism, active during Early to Middle Miocene also shows a southward migration through time. Fission-track dating of detrital zircon from exhumed HP-rocks along the volcanic arc and the fore-arc ridge shows at least two zones of successive exhumation episodes of HP-rocks. Zircon fission-track (ZFT) dating from the small exposure of metamorphic basement in Paliochori, on Milos Island, located below the unmetamorphosed Neogene limestones and Pliocene to Recent volcanic rocks, documents an older exhumation episode active at ~16 Ma. In comparison, exhumation of metamorphic rocks on and near Kythera Island was active at ~11 Ma. In the southwestern part of Aegean the exhumation was accompanied by activity on two successive low-angle detachments. We infer that rapid roll-back and slab retreat resulted in the migration of the locus of exhumation of HP-rocks from the Cyclades towards the Peloponnese-Cretan fore-arc ridge of the southwest Aegean during the interval of 16-11 Ma. Fore-arc migration and overall extension of at least 150 km occurred in this interval, with rates up to ~30 mm/yr.


CONTEXT
Rehabilitation adherence is accepted as a critical component for attaining optimal outcomes. Poor adherence is recognized as a problem in the athletic training setting. Measurement has been inconsistent, and no measure has been developed for athletic training settings.

OBJECTIVE
To identify indicators of sport-injury rehabilitation adherence relevant to athletic training and develop a Rehabilitation Adherence Measure for Athletic Training (RAdMAT) based on these indicators.

DESIGN
Mixed methods, 3 steps.

SETTING
College athletic training facility.

PARTICIPANTS
Practicing certified athletic trainers (ATCs; n=7) generated items, experts (n=12) reviewed them, and practicing ATCs (n=164) completed the RAdMAT for their most, average, and least adherent athlete.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE
RAdMAT.

RESULTS
The RAdMAT is 16 items with 3 subscales. Subscales and total have good internal consistency and clearly discriminate among adherence levels.

CONCLUSIONS
The RAdMAT is based on scholarly literature and clinical practice, making it particularly appropriate for use in athletic training clinical practice or for research purposes.


Glutamatergic receptors are prominent targets for the treatment of several neurological disorders like epilepsy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and Parkinson's disease. Hence an improved understanding of how glutamate interacts with the ligand binding domain of these receptors can bring crucial insights into the development of new ligands for this system. In this work, a DFT study on the GluA2–glutamate interaction was carried out using the structure of GluA2 co-crystallized with the glutamate ligand. We developed a novel model to describe the non-uniform dielectric function of the GluA2 receptor, evaluating the binding energy of the GluA2–glutamate system accordingly and comparing the results with those obtained using a fixed dielectric function. Our study exhibited significant correlation with experimental data and previous calculations, allowing us to estimate an optimal choice for the dielectric function to simulate the GluA2–ligand interaction.


This thesis is concerned with the problem of recognizing industrial objects rapidly and flexibly. The system design is based on a general strategy that consists of a generalized local feature detector, an extended learning algorithm and the use of unique structure of the objects. Thus, the system is not designed to be limited to the industrial environment. The generalized local feature detector uses the gradient image of the scene to provide a feature description that is insensitive to a range of imaging conditions such as object position, and overall light intensity. The feature detector is based on a representative point algorithm which is able to reduce the data content of the image without restricting the allowed object geometry. Thus, a major advantage of the local feature detector is its ability to describe and represent complex object structure. The reliance on local features also allows the system to recognize partially visible objects. The task of the learning algorithm is to observe the feature description generated by the feature detector in order to select features that are reliable over the range of imaging conditions of interest. Once a set of reliable features is found for each object, the system finds unique relational structure which is later used to recognize the objects. Unique structure is a set of descriptions of unique subparts of the objects of interest. The present implementation is limited to the use of unique local structure. The recognition routine uses these unique descriptions to recognize objects in new images. An important feature of this strategy is the transference of a large amount of processing required for graph matching from the recognition stage to the learning stage, which allows the recognition routine to execute rapidly. The test results show that the system is able to function with a significant level of insensitivity to operating conditions; The system shows insensitivity to its 3 main assumptions -constant scale, constant lighting, and 2D imagesdisplaying a degree of graceful degradation when the operating conditions degrade. For example, for one set of test objects, the recognition threshold was reached when the absolute light level was reduced by 70%-80%, or the object scale was reduced by 30%-40%, or the object was tilted away from the learned 2D plane by 300-400. This demonstrates a very important feature of the learning strategy: It shows that the generalizations made by the system are not only valid within the domain of the sampled set of images, but extend outside this domain. The test results also show that the recognition routine is able to execute rapidly, requiring 10ms-500ms (on a PDP11/24 minicomputer) in the special case when ideal operating conditions are guaranteed. (Note: This does not include pre-processing time).


The idea of creating a working group to perform benchmark on computational methods and experiments in structural acoustics originated as a conclusion of the congress ''Prediction of the noise emitted by vibrating structures,'' held in March 1991. This group was effectively created in 1993, by S.F.M. and S.F.A. and is constituted by researchers working in laboratories, industries, and consulting companies. The name of the participants with their affiliation will be given at the oral presentation. In order to simplify the publications of this working group, a fictitious name (C. Valor) has been created and represents the participants. Each year several one‐day meetings are organized, they are devoted to the comparison of the different results obtained on each benchmark case. The discrepancies are analyzed, leading to new calculations if necessary. When a common agreement is obtained by the working group, each participant having performed the results writes a scientific report collected by the working group. The final goal is to publish a book giving the synthesis of all the work produced by the group. During the presentation, the computational and experimental benchmark will be presented and examples of results will be discussed.


In a Bayesian mixture model it is not necessary a priori to limit the number of components to be finite. In this paper an infinite Gaussian mixture model is presented which neatly sidesteps the difficult problem of finding the "right" number of mixture components. Inference in the model is done using an efficient parameter-free Markov Chain that relies entirely on Gibbs sampling.


Working with examination timetabling is an extremely challenging task due to the difficulty of finding good quality solutions. Most of the studies in this area rely on improvement techniques to enhance the solution quality after generating an initial solution. Nevertheless, the initial solution generation itself can provide good solution quality even though the ordering strategies often using graph colouring heuristics, are typically quite simple. Indeed, there are examples where some of the produced solutions are better than the ones produced in the literature with an improvement phase. This research concentrates on constructive approaches which are based on squeaky wheel optimisation i.e. the focus is upon finding difficult examinations in their assignment and changing their position in a heuristic ordering. In the first phase, the work is focused on the squeaky wheel optimisation approach where the ordering is permutated in a block of examinations in order to find the best ordering. Heuristics are alternated during the search as each heuristic produces a different value of a heuristic modifier. This strategy could improve the solution quality when a stochastic process is incorporated. Motivated by this first phase, a squeaky wheel optimisation concept is then combined with graph colouring heuristics in a linear form with weights aggregation. The aim is to generalise the constructive approach using information from given heuristics for finding difficult examinations and it works well across tested problems. Each parameter is invoked with a normalisation strategy in order to generalise the specific problem data. In the next phase, the information obtained from the process of building an infeasible timetable is used. The examinations that caused infeasibility are given attention because, logically, they are hard to place in the timetable and so they are treated first. In the adaptive decomposition strategy, the aim is to automatically divide examinations into difficult and easy sets so as to give attention to difficult examinations. Within the easy set, a subset called the boundary set is used to accommodate shuffling strategies to change the given ordering of examinations. Consequently, the graph colouring heuristics are employed on those constructive approaches and it is shown that dynamic ordering is an effective way to permute the ordering. The next research chapter concentrates on the improvement approach where variable neighbourhood search with great deluge algorithm is investigated using various neighbourhood orderings and initialisation strategies. The approach incorporated with a repair mechanism in order to amend some of infeasible assignment and at the same time aiming to improve the solution quality.


In August 2013 the South African government released the newly revised National Drug Master Plan 2013-2017. The plan is intended to provide a central reference for the country's drug regulation and elimination efforts. As this article documents, the plan is however riddled with internal inconsistencies and impractical resolutions. As a result, it will be extremely difficult to implement and unlikely to find utility in many South African cities and communities. The authors further argue that the plan has been designed in such a way that it absolves the government of any responsibility should it fail. It does so by subtly ensuring that blame for drug use can continue to be placed on the individual. This requires a punitive understanding of drug use, which is in direct contrast to the stated framework of the plan. As such, we argue that while the plan speaks the language of reform, it is actually far more concerned with continuing to treat drug regulation in South Africa as a matter of criminal justice.


At the time of diagnosis of cirrhosis, varices are present in about 60% of decompensated and 30% of compensated patients. The risk factors for the first episode of variceal bleeding in cirrhotic patients are the severity of liver dysfunction, a large size of the varices and the presence of endoscopic red colour signs, but only a third of patients who suffer variceal haemorrhage demonstrate the above risk factors. The only treatment that does not require sophisticated equipment or the skills of a specialist, and is immediately available, is vasoactive drug therapy. Hence, drug therapy should be considered to be the initial treatment of choice and can be administered while the patient is transferred to hospital, as has been done in one recent study. Moreover, drug therapy is no longer considered to be only a 'stop-gap' therapy until definitive endoscopic therapy is performed. Several recent trials have reported an efficacy similar to that of emergency sclerotherapy in the control of variceal bleeding. Furthermore, recent evidence suggests that those patients with high variceal or portal pressure are likely to continue to bleed or re-bleed early, implying that prolonged therapy lowering the portal pressure over several days may be the optimal treatment. Pharmacological treatment with beta-blockers is safe, effective and the standard long-term treatment for the prevention of recurrence of variceal bleeding. The combination of beta-blockers with isosorbide-5-mononitrate needs further testing in randomized controlled trials. The use of haemodynamic targets for the reduction of the HVPG response needs further study, and surrogate markers of the pressure response need evaluation. Ligation has recently been compared with beta-blockers for primary prophylaxis, but there is as yet no good evidence to recommend banding for primary prophylaxis if beta-blockers can be given.


This update explains several developments in the substantive federal income, estate and gift tax laws affecting individual taxpayers and small businesses. It contains summaries of significant cases, rulings, regulations, legislation and other matters from August, 2010, through August, 2011. This update generally does not discuss developments in the areas of qualified plans or the taxation of business entities (except to a very limited extent).


During maturation to an erythrocyte, a reticulocyte must eliminate any residual organelles and reduce its surface area and volume. Here we show this involves a novel process whereby large, intact, inside-out phosphatidylserine (PS)-exposed autophagic vesicles are extruded. Cell surface PS is a well-characterized apoptotic signal initiating phagocytosis. In peripheral blood from patients after splenectomy or in patients with sickle cell disease (SCD), the number of circulating red cells exposing PS on their surface is elevated. We show that in these patients PS is present on the cell surface of red cells in large (∼1.4 µm) discrete areas corresponding to autophagic vesicles. The autophagic vesicles found on reticulocytes are identical to those observed on red cells from splenectomized individuals and patients with SCD. Our data suggest the increased thrombotic risk associated with splenectomy, and patients with hemoglobinopathies is a possible consequence of increased levels of circulating mature reticulocytes expressing inside-out PS-exposed autophagic vesicles because of asplenia.


This research aimed to gain a deeper understanding of the contribution of programme board collective self-evaluative practice within Academic Quality Assurance. It explored selfevaluative practice as experienced and perceived by academic staff who participated in the process of quinquennial programme re-validation (sometimes known as "programmatic review") in a number of disciplinary areas in one Irish Institute of Technology. The data-set was collected in 2014. A programme board"s self-evaluation report should be a collectively produced document that forms the basis for subsequent external peer review and is the foundation document for assuring the quality of programmes and building stakeholder confidence. The author considers that it is what people do that counts and a sociocultural perspective was taken. The social practice of self-evaluation was explored by focusing on the experiences of those involved and by seeking to understand their accounts of what happened in the name of the practice; this is the unit of analysis. The research identifies with the social constructivist paradigm accepting the notion of multiple constructed subjective realities. The purposes of the research was to understand more deeply how academic staff experience the social practice of evaluating programmes of study and to explore its contribution to Academic Quality Assurance. The research suggests that staff believe assuring the quality of programmes of higher education is very important but a variety of quality cultures exist amongst staff. Respondents" experiences of recent self-evaluative practice indicate that it was outcomes focussed rather than process focussed, there was little or no active participation 1 Kelleher: Exploring the Social Practice of Programme board level self-evaluation Published by ARROW@DIT, 2016 2 by many staff and the self-evaluation was conducted by small groups, the self-evaluation reports could have been more reflective, and many participants had partial or no knowledge of institutional expectations. The project also highlighted some differences in perceptions of self-evaluative practice between staff groups based on their years of teaching experience. It is recommended that Higher Education Institutions, and programme boards, review how they practice self-evaluation and redesign how the quality of their programmes of study are assured and enhanced.


: The web search engine has long become the most important portal for ordinary people looking for useful information on the web. However, users might experience failure when search engines return irrelevant results that do not meet their real intentions. Such irrelevance is largely due to the enormous variety of users' contexts and backgrounds, as well as the ambiguity of texts. Personalized web search (PWS) is a general category of search techniques aiming at providing better search results, which are tailored for individual user needs. As the expense, user information has to be collected and analyzed to figure out the user intention behind the issued query. The solutions to PWS can generally be categorized into two types, namely click-log-based methods and profile-based ones. The click-log based methods are straightforward— they simply impose bias to clicked pages in the user's query history. Although this strategy has been demonstrated to perform consistently and considerably well, it can only work on repeated queries from the same user, which is a strong limitation confining its applicability. In contrast, profile-based methods improve the search experience with complicated user-interest models generated from user profiling techniques. Profile-based methods can be potentially effective for almost all sorts of queries, but are reported to be unstable under some circumstances.


We revisit the efficiency of Schwinger mechanism in creating charged pairs during inflation. We consider a minimal setup of inflation in which the inflaton field is a complex scalar field charged under a $U(1)$ gauge field. There is a time dependent conformal coupling which pumps energy from the inflaton field to the gauge field to furnish a nearly constant background electric field energy density to drive the Schwinger mechanism. The coupling between the gauge field and the scalar field induces a time dependent effective mass for the inflaton field. The requirement of a long period of slow-roll inflation causes the Schwinger mechanism to be highly inefficient during inflation. The non-perturbative Schwinger mechanism can be relevant only towards the end of inflation and only on very small scales. This is in contrast to hypothetical models studied in literature in which the complex scalar field is a test field and a constant electric field is imposed on the dS background by hand. We calculate the number of pairs of charged particles created perturbatively during inflation. We show that it is proportional to the amplitude of the quadrupolar statistical anisotropy and it is very small. Consequently, the back-reactions of created particles on magnetogenesis on large scales are negligible.


As the number and heterogeneity of appliances in smart buildings increases, identifying and controlling them becomes challenging. Existing methods face various challenges when deployed in large commercial buildings. For example, voice command assistants require users to memorize many control commands. Attaching Bluetooth dongles or QR codes to appliances introduces considerable deployment overhead. In comparison, identifying an appliance by simply pointing a smartphone camera at it and controlling the appliance using a graphical overlay interface is more intuitive. We introduce SnapLink, a responsive and accurate vision-based system for mobile appliance identification and interaction using image localization. Compared to the image retrieval approaches used in previous vision-based appliance control systems, SnapLink exploits 3D models to improve identification accuracy and reduce deployment overhead via quick video captures and a simplified labeling process. We also introduce a feature sub-sampling mechanism to achieve low latency at the scale of a commercial building. To evaluate SnapLink, we collected training videos from 39 rooms to represent the scale of a modern commercial building. It achieves a 94% successful appliance identification rate among 1526 test images of 179 appliances within 120 ms average server processing time. Furthermore, we show that SnapLink is robust to viewing angle and distance differences, illumination changes, as well as daily changes in the environment. We believe the SnapLink use case is not limited to appliance control: it has the potential to enable various new smart building applications.


The importance of stencil-based algorithms in computational science has focused attention on optimized parallel implementations for multilevel cache-based processors. Temporal blocking schemes leverage the large bandwidth and low latency of caches to accelerate stencil updates and approach theoretical peak performance. A key ingredient is the reduction of data traffic across slow data paths, especially the main memory interface. In this work we combine the ideas of multicore wavefront temporal blocking and diamond tiling to arrive at stencil update schemes that show large reductions in memory pressure compared to existing approaches. The resulting schemes show performance advantages in bandwidth-starved situations, which are exacerbated by the high bytes per lattice update case of variable coefficients. Our thread groups concept provides a controllable trade-off between concurrency and memory usage, shifting the pressure between the memory interface and the CPU. We present performance results on a contemp...


Hierarchical forecasting (HF) is needed in many situations in the supply chain (SC) because managers often need different levels of forecasts at different levels of SC to make a decision. Top-Down (TD), Bottom-Up (BU) and Optimal Combination (COM) are common HF models. These approaches are static and often ignore the dynamics of the series while disaggregating them. Consequently, they may fail to perform well if the investigated group of time series are subject to large changes such as during the periods of promotional sales. We address the HF problem of predicting real-world sales time series that are highly impacted by promotion. We use three machine learning (ML) models to capture sales variations over time. Artificial neural networks (ANN), extreme gradient boosting (XGboost), and support vector regression (SVR) algorithms are used to estimate the proportions of lower-level time series from the upper level. We perform an in-depth analysis of 61 groups of time series with different volatilities and show that ML models are competitive and outperform some well-established models in the literature.


Designed to provide a step by step guide to successful application of the electrical installation calculations required in day to day electrical engineering practice, the Electrical Installation Calculations series has proved an invaluable reference for over forty years, for both apprentices and professional electrical installation engineers alike.Now in its seventh edition, Volume 1 has been fully updated to meet the requirements of the 2330 Level 2 Certificate in Electrotechnical Technology from City & Guilds, and will also prove a vital purchase for students of the Level 2 NVQ in Installing Electrotechnical Systems (2356). Essential calculations which may not necessarily feature as part of the requirements of these syllabi are retained for reference by professional electrical installation engineers based in industry, or for those students wishing to progress to higher levels of study. The new edition also brings content in line with the latest edition of the Wiring Regulations BS 7671:2001 (incorporating Amendments 1:2002 & 2:2004), with material cross-referenced to the Wiring Regulations throughout.New learning features are now incorporated into the text. In particular, alongside the traditional long method of calculation, new calculator methods are presented to demonstrate this alternative, more simplified methodology, now often in use. Key terms are explained in a glossary section and worked examples and exercises are included throughout the text to maximise accessibility of the material for the reader. A complete answer section is included at the back of the book to enable readers to check their understanding of the calculations presented.


This article develops a model of managerial efficiency for National Collegiate Athletic Association's top division college football coaches. The derived efficiency measures are then linked to the hiring and firing process. The work concludes with an evaluation of the effect of head coach succession on team performance. This study evaluates coaching efficiency in terms of both use of talent and recruiting talent. The constructed efficiency rankings are used to evaluate hiring and firing decisions and determine the degree that each type of efficiency plays in these decisions. Last, the efficiency of the market is assessed by evaluating whether universities are making a good choice and are able on average to improve performance when replacing an underperforming coach. The empirical results indicate that both constructs of efficiency matter. Coaches who exhibit high level of both types of efficiencies regularly move up to the most lucrative jobs. Replacement of poor performing coach is most often a wise decision.


A transparent (wide-area) wavelength-routed optical network may be constructed by using wavelength cross-connect switches connected together by fiber to form an arbitrary mesh structure. The network is accessed through electronic stations that are attached to some of these cross-connects. These wavelength cross-connect switches have the property that they may configure themselves into unspecified states. Each input port of a switch is always connected to some output port of the switch whether or not such a connection Is required for the purpose of information transfer. Due to the presence of these unspecified states, there exists the possibility of setting up unintended all-optical cycles in the network (viz., a loop with no terminating electronics in it). If such a cycle contains amplifiers [e.g., erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA's)], there exists the possibility that the net loop gain is greater than the net loop loss. The amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise from amplifiers can build up in such a feedback loop to saturate the amplifiers and result in oscillations of the ASE noise in the loop. Such all-optical cycles as defined above (and hereafter referred to as "white" cycles) must be eliminated from an optical network in order for the network to perform any useful operation. Furthermore, for the realistic case in which the wavelength cross-connects result in signal crosstalk, there is a possibility of having closed cycles with oscillating crosstalk signals. We examine algorithms that set up new transparent optical connections upon request while avoiding the creation of such cycles in the network. These algorithms attempt to find a route for a connection and then (in a post-processing fashion) configure switches such that white cycles that might get created would automatically get eliminated. In addition, our call-set-up algorithms can avoid the possibility of crosstalk cycles.


Abstract. A new model for greenhouse gas transport has been developed based on Environment and Climate Change Canada's operational weather and environmental prediction models. When provided with realistic posterior fluxes for CO2, the CO2 simulations compare well to NOAA's CarbonTracker fields and to near-surface continuous measurements, columns from the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON) and NOAA aircraft profiles. This coupled meteorological and tracer transport model is used to study the predictability of CO2. Predictability concerns the quantification of model forecast errors and thus of transport model errors. CO2 predictions are used to compute model–data mismatches when solving flux inversion problems and the quality of such predictions is a major concern. Here, the loss of meteorological predictability due to uncertain meteorological initial conditions is shown to impact CO2 predictability. The predictability of CO2 is shorter than that of the temperature field and increases near the surface and in the lower stratosphere. When broken down into spatial scales, CO2 predictability at the very largest scales is mainly due to surface fluxes but there is also some sensitivity to the land and ocean surface forcing of meteorological fields. The predictability due to the land and ocean surface is most evident in boreal summer when biospheric uptake produces large spatial gradients in the CO2 field. This is a newly identified source of uncertainty in CO2 predictions but it is expected to be much less significant than uncertainties in fluxes. However, it serves as an upper limit for the more important source of transport error and loss of predictability, which is due to uncertain meteorological analyses. By isolating this component of transport error, it is demonstrated that CO2 can only be defined on large spatial scales due to the presence of meteorological uncertainty. Thus, for a given model, there is a spatial scale below which fluxes cannot be inferred simply due to the fact that meteorological analyses are imperfect. These unresolved spatial scales correspond to small scales near the surface but increase with altitude. By isolating other components of transport error, the largest or limiting error can be identified. For example, a model error due to the lack of convective tracer transport was found to impact transport error on the very largest (wavenumbers less than 5) spatial scales. Thus for wavenumbers greater than 5, transport model error due to meteorological analysis uncertainty is more important for our model than the lack of convective tracer transport.


The study examines how Australian adult learners of Indonesian modify their requests. It uses interactive roleplay data. The learners use virtually no internal modifiers on two of three request types, apparently due to lack of knowledge of the most common L2 internal modifiers. They do use supportive moves, but are largely restricted to grounders, seeming not to know about the prefaces which Indonesians use to support their direct questions. The grounders which the learners produce are often strikingly lengthy. The study argues that the twin features of scant internal modification and abundant external modifiers are likely to characterise second language speech acts. The study challenges the theoretical claim that the task of acquiring new knowledge itself is a relatively small one for learners of L2 pragmatics.


Seven words stand between the President and the heads of over a dozen "independent" agencies: inefficiency, neglect of duty, and malfeasance in office (INM). The President can remove the heads of these agencies for INM and INM only. But neither Congress nor the courts have defined INM and hence the extent of agency independence. Some proponents of presidential power argue that INM allows the President to dismiss officials who do not follow presidential directives. Others contend that INM is unconstitutional because it prevents presidents from fulfilling their constitutional duty to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. This Article recovers the lost history of INM, explaining its origins and meaning, inverting our current understanding of removal law, and rejecting both challenges to agency independence. It shows that INM provisions are not removal "protections" that prevent at-pleasure removal; they are removal permissions that authorize removal where it is otherwise prohibited by an officer's term of years, a tenure long understood to bar executive removal for any reason. INM provisions are narrow exceptions to term tenures: Neglect of duty and malfeasance in office cash out an official's failure to faithfully execute official duties, while inefficiency relates to government waste and ineptitude. INM provisions do not permit the President to remove agency heads for failing to follow presidential directives. But they do not clash with the Take Care Clause either, because even on an expansive reading of the clause, INM provisions authorize presidents to remove unfaithful or incompetent officials.


In the present study, the failure modes of a hexagonal cell honeycomb core under in-plane loading are investigated. It is shown that, under tensile loading, the node bond failure and ribbon fracture are the main causes of the honeycomb core failure when the core is loaded along the transverse and ribbon directions, respectively. However, under compression loading, the ribbon fracture dominates the failure mode along both directions. The development of a failure envelope for a honeycomb core material is demonstrated using a combination of experiments and simulations. The failure envelope is cast in terms of the core normal strains along the principal material directions. The failure envelope can be used as a design tool to determine the suitability of the core material for sandwich structural applications.


Microplankton is composed of organisms between 20 and 200 μm in size (greatest axial linear dimension) and is a mixture of phytoplankton and zooplankton. It is an important component of the marine pelagic ecosystem not only as primary producers but also as consumers in the microbial loop. In the present paper, the results of microplankton species abundance and their community structure during the first Turkish Antarctic Expedition (TAE-1) at late Antarctic summer were given at four coastal stations along the west Antarctic Peninsula (wAP). According to these results, a total of 37 microplankton species were observed. Diatoms were the dominant group, followed by ciliates. The highest total microplankton cell concentrations were 18370 cells l-1 and 24350 cells l-1 at P4 and P2 sampling stations, respectively. Although the most common phytoplankton and ciliate species were Odontella weissflogii and Cymatocylis affinis, respectively, diversity indexes showed that no dominance of a species could be mentioned at any station. Additionally, we observed that the southern part of the wAP is significantly different from its northernmost part in microplankton abundance/composition


Abstract This article explores the 'law and development' movement's controversial impact in Ethiopia through the involvement of American law professors such as A. Arthur Schiller in the struggle between modernization and traditionalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Elsewhere in Africa there were efforts to improve the administration of law by producing restatements of customary indigenous law, but Ethiopia had opted for wholesale modernization of its legal system. Because it was claimed that the Ethiopian law reform had led to the nullification of law, Schiller attempted to produce a restatement of customary indigenous land law in order to show the viability of traditional law. These two contradictory trends, modernization and traditionalism, are presented against the background of the intellectual currents of normative pluralism and colonialism. Schiller's work was based on the premise that legal pluralism would be the future of African law. The Ethiopian codification recognized customary law only in the norms of land tenure, which Schiller used as a pretext for his project to demonstrate that law reform based on the utilization of traditional law was possible and would successfully correct the nullification of law in rural areas. In the end, all legal reforms were made redundant by the 1974–1975 socialist revolution in Ethiopia. The legacy of Schiller is in the development of legal pluralism. He attempted to chart a course between the subjection of indigenous law to the state legal system and its irrelevance by advocating autonomy and development within the traditional legal culture.


Sir John Franklin - Proclamation of Sir John Franklin's appointment as Lieut. Governor of
Van Diemen's Land. 6 Jan. 1837
Printed by William Gore Elliston

Letter from Sir John Franklin to Capt. Washington, Secretary of the Royal
Geographical Society. 1838
Concerns the dismissal of Capt. Maconochie as Sir John's private secretary.
Copy of extract of despatch from Lord Stanley to Sir John Franklin,
8 Mar 1842.
Copy of letter from Sir John Franklin to Rev. J. Lillie & others 2 Sep. 1843
Copy of letter to unknown gentleman from Sir John Franklin written on
his behalf by Lady (Jane)Franklin in, 20 July?
Lady Franklin -
Dinner engagement book 18 Jan 1837 - 12 Aug. 1843
List of guests invited to dinner.
Letter from Lady Jane Franklin to Archdeacon Davis, hoping to employ
Miss Hayter, 23 Jul. 1841
DR Adam Turnbull (1803-1891)
Copies of letters to Dr Turnbull, 1839-1845.
Letters from George Arthur (1839), John Franklin (1844, 1845), including
one written from H.M.S. Erebus, and Jane Franklin (1845), relating to
Tasmania, mutual friends, politics, Sir John's expedition, the college.
Folder of news clippings relating to the Franklins including report of
the Arctic expedition searching for Sir John Franklin (1852), poem on death
of Franklin, drawing of coronation of Charles 7th by John Franklin, photo of
Lady Franklin's piano, article by L.A.Triebel.
Photo of Lady Franklin Museum [19th cent.]
Letter from Sir John to L3.dy Franklin 1 Jan. 1841
Xerox copy of letter in the National Library, Canberra, (ref. ANL MS 114/12)
from Sir John Franklin in Hobart td Lady Franklin in South Australia
with Governor Gawler:- New year wishes. The colony quiet and prosperous
except for the squabbles of lawyers - refers to cases of Gilbert Robertson
v. Thomas Mcdonald and Abbot, when Mr Anstey was roughly handled by the
Attorney General - verdicts farthing in one case and for the defendants
in the other. Mr Jones directed to supervise criminal proceedings at
quarter sessions but declined so the Executive Council had been summoned.
Mr Anstey also 'carrying on a correspondence with the Gov. respecting
his office' and so Mr Sorell appointed his successor. Sir John also
refers to his proposed visit to Port Arthur, Mr Henslowe to come in
mid-January, Parker's lameness, Government House plans not yet drawn,
gardener arrived, Archdeacon Jefferies.
RS. 18


Evolutionary game theory and the adaptive dynamics approach have made invaluable contributions to understanding how gradual evolution leads to adaptation when individuals interact. Here, we review some of the basic tools that have come out of these contributions to model the evolution of quantitative traits in complex populations. We collect together mathematical expressions that describe directional and disruptive selection in class- and group-structured populations in terms of individual fitness, with the aims of bridging different models and interpreting selection. In particular, our review of disruptive selection suggests there are two main paths that can lead to diversity: (i) when individual fitness increases more than linearly with trait expression; (ii) when trait expression simultaneously increases the probability that an individual is in a certain context (e.g. a given age, sex, habitat, size or social environment) and fitness in that context. We provide various examples of these and more broadly argue that population structure lays the ground for the emergence of polymorphism with unique characteristics. Beyond this, we hope that the descriptions of selection we present here help see the tight links among fundamental branches of evolutionary biology, from life history to social evolution through evolutionary ecology, and thus favour further their integration. This article is part of the theme issue 'Half a century of evolutionary games: a synthesis of theory, application and future directions'.


Oil palm cultivation has vastly expanded in the last decades and led to high economic returns, but has also induced environmental problems including reduced biological diversity and impaired ecosystem services. One potential way of reconciling economic and ecological needs would be to foster oil-palm agroforests by planting native tree species with the objective to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services. In Sumatra, Indonesia, such an oil palm agroforestry experiment was established and a series of studies evaluated tree performance, oil palm yields and biodiversity changes. In this context, spatial information was relevant as the survival of planted trees may be influenced by neighborhood or the occurrence of specific taxa in experimental treatments may be influenced by the distance of source habitats. Drone-based assessments offer opportunities to support such spatial-structure related ecological studies. In this study, I used low and high flying drones (1) to analyze crown metrics of trees and palms to predict plant water use, (2) to study canopy cover in oil palm agroforest and the effect of oil palm canopy cover on tree mortality, and (3) to assess land use types surrounding the experiment. Objectives 1 and 2 were addressed with an octocopter drone, flying approximately 40 m above ground; while objective 3 was addressed by a fixed-wing drone, flying approximately 300 m above ground.
For study objective 1, I collaborated with a colleague who measured the water-use rates of individual trees and palms within the agroforestry experiment. Transpiration is often estimated from direct water-use measurements in a limited number of plants and then scaled up to the stand-level by using plant size related variables for the remaining plants. Presently, drone-based methods offer new opportunities for plant size assessments. We tested crown variables, derived from drone-based photogrammetry, for predicting and scaling plant water use. Aerial images were taken from an octocopter equipped with an RGB camera and the structure-from-motion approach was used to compute several crown variables including crown length, width and volume. Crown volumes for both palms (69%) and trees (81%) explained much of the observed spatial variability in water use; however, the specific crown volume model differed between palms and trees and there was no single linear model that fit both. With respect to trees, crown volume explained more of the observed variability than stem diameter, and in consequence, uncertainties in stand level estimates resulting from scaling were largely reduced. For oil palms, an appropriate whole-plant size related predictor variable was currently not available. In conclusion, we consider drone-derived crown metrics very useful for scaling up to stand-level transpiration from single plant water use.
For study objective 2, using a drone-based analysis, we compared oil palm canopy conditions in thinned and non-thinned plots and also examined how oil palm canopy cover affected the mortality rates of planted tree species. Three years after planting, canopy cover was assessed by drone-based photogrammetry using the structure-from-motion technique. Additionally, these surveys were augmented with tree positions and mortality rates recorded by colleagues. Drone-derived canopy cover was highly correlated with ground-based hemispheric photography along the equality line, indicating the usefulness and comparability of the approach. Canopy cover was further partitioned between oil palm and tree canopies. Oil palm canopy cover was then extracted at the level of individual trees and combined with ground-based mortality assessment for all 3819 planted trees. For three tree species (Archidendron pauciflorum, Durio zibethinus, Shorea leprosula), probability of mortality during the year of the study were dependent on the amount of oil palm canopy cover. Thinning of oil palms before tree planting created a more open and heterogeneous canopy cover. We regard the drone-based method for deriving and partitioning spatially explicit information as promising for many questions addressing canopy cover and the management of agroforestry systems.
For study objective 3, I assessed land use types in the landscape surrounding the oil palm agroforestry experiment. In two consecutive years, 2015 and 2016, 1121 ha were analyzed where the experiment is in the center. Beginning in 2015, oil palm covered 81% of the area and the remaining 19% comprised other land use types including bare soil, rubber plantation, secondary forest, orchard, fallow, water and urban. During this time frame, the area under oil palm continued to expand. In just one year, 50% of bare soil (47 ha), 27% of fallow (10 ha), 18% of secondary forest (10 ha) and 15% of rubber plantation (3.2 ha) were converted to oil palm plantation. We found oil palm cultivation in large and continuous tracts with very little fragmentation. Secondary forests were found in relatively small patches, some of which occurred in close proximity to the northern plots of the agroforestry experiment, and possibly influenced the occurrence of some mobile taxa. We conclude that it was feasible to derive detailed land cover maps from drone-based assessments that enable the detection of even small-scale land use change in the oil palm landscape.
Overall, drone-based assessments can play vital roles for ecological studies in oil palm landscapes and agroforests. The data from the photogrammetric approach, such as SfM point clouds and aerial imagery, can derive quality assessments of canopy structures. Specifically, such assessments can support the prediction of tree and oil palm water use, transpiration at the stand level, and the evaluation of oil palm canopy conditions between thinned and non-thinned plots. According to these drone-based assessments, oil palm canopy cover appeared to influence the mortality of some tree species in the oil palm agroforestry plots. In addition, drone-based monitoring could be used to detect the expansion of oil palm cultivation around the oil palm agroforest. Other applied workflows in forestry and agricultural studies can integrate our procedures to attain spatial information. I conclude that drone-based assessment is a well-suited tool for monitoring oil-palm agroforests, in both small scale and large areas.


Growing plants in containerized substrates has long been common practice in horticulture. Containerized plants (e.g., greenhouse tomatoes) have restricted access to essential growth resources such as oxygen, water, and nutrients. Since a wide range of inorganic and organic materials, and different combinations thereof, are commonly used as growth media, detailed and comparable physical characterization is key to identify the best performing media. In this study, five potential growth media and two mixtures thereof were characterized based on soil gas diffusivity (Dp/Do, where Dp and Do are gas diffusion coefficients in soil air and free air, respectively) and an operationally defined critical window of diffusivity (CWD) representing the interval of air‐filled porosity between critical air filled porosity where Dp/Do ≈ 0.02 and interaggregate porosity. The Dp measurements were conducted with 100‐cm3 samples from wet to complete dry conditions achieved by stepwise air drying and equilibration of initially water‐saturated samples. A previously developed inactive pore and density‐corrected (IPDC) model was able to describe gas diffusivities for media with distinct inactive pore space in the interaggregate pore region reasonably well. An extended IPDC model was introduced for media exhibiting a second percolation threshold in the intra‐aggregate pore region. The analysis revealed comparable CWD values for the majority of the investigated media. The results further highlighted the importance of other major aspects (physical, chemical, and biological) of growth media characterization for optimal growth media design. A simple approach toward designing a gas diffusivity mixing model is presented to assist with selection of optimal mixing ratios of growth media with markedly different Dp/Do behavior.


There has been a sustained resurgence of subscription loan or capital call lending facilities to private equity funds. Typically, the loans to a private equity fund are secured by a pledge by the fund (and, if applicable, the fund's general partner) of the unfunded capital commitments of the fund's investors and the rights and remedies of the fund in respect thereof. Because the collateral securing these loan facilities arises from the constituent documents of the fund, as well as the subscription agreements executed by the fund's investors, the establishment and structuring of a subscription loan facility requires a comprehensive legal due diligence review of the related fund's underlying documents, including its constituent documents, investment management agreement, offering materials, subscription agreements, and any relevant investor-side letters. It is essential that these documents explicitly permit borrowing facilities and the ability to pledge the unfunded capital commitments of the fund's investors and the other collateral and expressly provide that the investors commit to fund capital calls. There are also less obvious, but no less important, fund document provisions that can significantly impact a lender's rights and remedies, including provisions relating to alternative investment vehicles, the right of an investor to be excused from funding a capital call under certain circumstances, the ability of the fund to reduce unfunded capital commitments of investors by deeming the payment of certain expenditures to be capital contributions by the investors, and restrictions set forth in side letters with fund investors. Certain of the issues raised by the terms of the constituent documents for a fund can be addressed or mitigated in the loan documents, however, certain other issues cannot be easily addressed therein. As a result, it is critical to identify potential issues prior to the time that a fund's constituent documents are finalized. The complexity of the underlying fund documents and the relative importance of the provisions therein make due diligence essential in the context of establishing these facilities, as the devil is in the details.


Background: Current MS therapies target the systemic circulation. We previously identified that genes encoding transcription factors were over-represented amongst MS risk factors, and that expression of several of these were altered in MS blood, including EOMES, TBX21 and ZMIZ1. Expression was stable over time, so that it defines a molecular phenotype.

Objectives: Here we tested if this finding could be replicated in independent cohorts, if expression was heritable, longitudinally stable, affected by therapy, and associated with genetic and environmental risk factors. We sought the immune cell subsets expressing these transcription factors, and tested if protein expression was also altered.

Methods: Whole blood mRNA expression was determined in new cohorts of untreated MS (n = 23, Sydney; n = 47, Perth) and healthy controls (n = 23) and protein expression determined by flow cytometry in PBMCs of untreated MS and healthy controls (n = 28, 30 respectively). Effect of major therapies and correlation of gene expression with risk SNP genotypes, and anti-Epstein Barr Virus EBNA-1 titres was assessed, and heritability tested in a large twin cohort.

Results: MS Molecular Phenotypes were replicated in new cohorts. Modules of genes, whose expression correlated with EOMES/TBX21 or ZMIZ1, further defined the phenotypes. CD56+ cells, inflammatory monocytes and plasmacytoid dendritic cells expressed lower levels of Molecular Phenotype transcription factors. EOMES and TBX21 risk SNP genotypes, and serum EBNA-1 titres were not correlated with gene expression, but HLA-DRB1*1501 genotype was. Therapies altered expression levels (e.g. TBX21 returned to control levels on natalizumab) with significant variability between individuals.

Conclusions: EOMES/TBX21 and ZMIZ1 tag molecular phenotypes of MS that are affected by therapy. The phenotypes are due to under-representation and altered state of CD56+ and inflammatory monocytes/pDCs respectively. The dysregulated immune cells are a novel target for therapy and, together with gene expression, represent potential biomarkers of therapeutic response.


An Urban Tree Canopy (UTC) assessment, which provides a measure of a community's tree canopy cover, is important for understanding the extent of a community's forest or tree resource. UTC assessments are often used for establishing and implementing municipal tree canopy goals as part of broader urban greening and sustainability initiatives. Most useful when it is combined with other information—such as the extent of impervious surfaces, socioeconomic and health data, traffic density, and heat island maps—UTC assessment contributes to broader urban greening goals, enabling communities to craft management plans and make policy decisions to optimize benefits from urban forests. This report provides an overview of the approaches, methods, and data sources used in UTC assessments, focusing on the initial steps of project planning, assessment, and analysis. The report also provides general guidelines for conducting UTC assessments and analysis to ensure useful, quality results that can be applied in management and decision-making efforts, and resources for planning and implementing the UTC assessment process. The report is designed to help personnel involved in urban natural resource planning move forward with UTC project planning and assessment.


PURPOSE
The MLC-based CyberKnife system has been shown promising in treatment-time reduction and plan-quality improvement, comparing with the cone-based models. The improved treatment efficiency can be attributed to the enhanced coverage of larger lesions and the capability of realizing high-quality plans with less beams due to improved target conformity. The purpose of this study is to develop an efficient non-coplanar beam selection program for CyberKnife-based IMRT.

METHODS
The candidate beam-set consists of 94 non-coplanar beams, each defined by a vector connecting a CyberKnife node and a target point. The MLC leaves are configured to approximate a circle, whose radius R at 80cm SSD can be chosen such that the beam cross-sections fully covers the PTV. We aim to choose an adequate number of beams that will cover as much body surface area as possible, considering the facts that to deliver a certain dose to the PTV, the larger the total covered surface area is, the lower the surface dose will be and that the more the beams are, the longer the treatment time will be. A beam-selection program was developed based on the constraint on the body surface overlap. To evaluate its effectiveness, several IMRT plans with the selected beams for different treatment sites were generated using the Varian Eclipse treatment-planning-system.

RESULTS
Our program efficiently selected much less number of beams without compromising the desired surface coverage. For example, a set of 17 beams were selected for a pancreas case, covering 92.5% of the surface area covered by the 94 beams for R=5cm with 20% maximal overlap. The IMRT plans with the selected beams show superior quality with dramatically improved critical structure sparing, comparing with the clinically approved IMRT plans.

CONCLUSION
One can efficiently select effective sets of non-coplanar beams with our program, which allow the generation of high-quality plans for MLC-based robotic radiotherapy.


The pulvinar is the largest nucleus in the primate thalamus and contains extensive, reciprocal connections with visual cortex. Although the anatomical and functional organization of the pulvinar has been extensively studied in old and new world monkeys, little is known about the organization of the human pulvinar. Using high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging at 3 T, we identified two visual field maps within the ventral pulvinar, referred to as vPul1 and vPul2. Both maps contain an inversion of contralateral visual space with the upper visual field represented ventrally and the lower visual field represented dorsally. vPul1 and vPul2 border each other at the vertical meridian and share a representation of foveal space with iso-eccentricity lines extending across areal borders. Additional, coarse representations of contralateral visual space were identified within ventral medial and dorsal lateral portions of the pulvinar. Connectivity analyses on functional and diffusion imaging data revealed a strong distinction in thalamocortical connectivity between the dorsal and ventral pulvinar. The two maps in the ventral pulvinar were most strongly connected with early and extrastriate visual areas. Given the shared eccentricity representation and similarity in cortical connectivity, we propose that these two maps form a distinct visual field map cluster and perform related functions. The dorsal pulvinar was most strongly connected with parietal and frontal areas. The functional and anatomical organization observed within the human pulvinar was similar to the organization of the pulvinar in other primate species. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The anatomical organization and basic response properties of the visual pulvinar have been extensively studied in nonhuman primates. Yet, relatively little is known about the functional and anatomical organization of the human pulvinar. Using neuroimaging, we found multiple representations of visual space within the ventral human pulvinar and extensive topographically organized connectivity with visual cortex. This organization is similar to other nonhuman primates and provides additional support that the general organization of the pulvinar is consistent across the primate phylogenetic tree. These results suggest that the human pulvinar, like other primates, is well positioned to regulate corticocortical communication.


The maturing spatial information sciences have led to greater free flow of spatial information. More than ever before, scientists within and between scientific disciplines appreciate the need to exchange environmental information to avert irreversible environmental disasters, hence the development of environmental information systems.
Existing ecological classification schema are seen as an impediment to environmental data exchange between scientific disciplines. However, this paper will show that the perceived different ecological classification systems, though different, are not as incompatible as they might appear to be. It will be shown that the perceived problem of classification schema incompatibility is one of object definition and data structuring and lack of adequately structured meta-data.
The advent of the Internet and it's associated technologies has led to immense possibilities for data exchange. Coupled with those opportunities are perhaps equally frightening possibilities of the use of data of undefined quality obtained from remote databases lacking adequate documentation on the data -sets.
The development of an elegant data model based on the concept of object hierarchies and their associated behavioral attributes enables the capture, storage, and retrieval of data objects in a way that enables the aggregation of the objects into several ecological classification schema. Such a framework would facilitate the exchange of data between scientists and nations with seemingly different ecological classification systems. By carefully capturing meta-data incorporating it, and propagating it through the different hierarchical schema via the development of supporting logical model constructs, it is hoped that the data model will promote the informed multiple use of data from differently focused ecological classification and aggregation schemes from distributed sources.


Background: Being overweight or obese is a growing health concern not just in the United States, but worldwide. In 2009-2010, 2 out of 3 adults are considered overweight or obese, and 1 out of 3 adults are considered obese in the U.S. Overweight and obesity acts as a major risk in cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancer, and arthritis, and carries an overwhelming economic burden. With a 5-10% weight loss, patients can benefit from reduced metabolic and cardiovascular risks; however, this is a challenging goal to achieve and maintain. Naltrexone is a medication commonly used for opioid addiction and alcohol dependence, and bupropion is commonly used for depression. Separately, these two medications have been shown to reduce weight weakly; this review aims to evaluate the benefits of naltrexone and bupropion used in combination for weight loss. Method: An exhaustive literature search using the search engines Medline-OVID, CINAHL, and Web of Science combining keywords naltrexone, bupropion, and weight loss was conducted. Eligible criteria include research with naltrexone and bupropion combination therapy comparing to mono-therapy, other weight loss therapy, or placebo. Only randomized controlled trials (RTC) were selected for maximum validity. Excluded from this analysis were articles with animal subjects or other languages except English. Selected articles were assessed for quality using the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE). Results: Three articles met the criteria and were included in this systematic review. In Greenway et al, enrolled were 419 participants in this randomized, placebo and monotherapy controlled, double blind trial. In general, at week 24, participants in most combination drug groups showed statistically significant weight loss compared to monotherapy and placebo. In the COR-I study, 1742 participants enrolled in this randomized, double blind, placebo controlled phase 3 trial. At week 56, mean change in body weight was statistically significant in combination drug groups compared to placebo. In the COR-II study, a randomized, double blind, placebo controlled study of 1,496 participants, the combination drug group achieved and maintained weight loss at a more pronounced rate than placebo group at the completion of the 28 week trial. Conclusion: Naltrexone and bupropion combination therapy shows promising evidence as a drug therapy for long-term weight loss as evidenced by these studies. While this combination therapy is a safe alternative, further research is needed to assess naltrexone and bupropion combination therapy against other current FDA approved weight loss therapy and its effects on patients with complicated obesity. Degree Type Capstone Project Degree Name Master of Science in Physician Assistant Studies First Advisor Annjanette Sommers, PA-C, MS This capstone project is available at CommonKnowledge: http://commons.pacificu.edu/pa/518


Advances in whole-genome genotyping and sequencing have allowed genome-wide analyses of association, prediction and heritability in many organisms. However, the application of such analyses to bacteria is still in its infancy, being limited by difficulties including the plasticity of bacterial genomes and their strong population structure. Here we propose a suite of genome-wide analyses for bacteria that combines methods from human genetics and previous bacterial studies, including linear mixed models, elastic net and LD-score regression. We introduce innovations such as frequency-based allele coding, testing for both insertion/deletion and nucleotide effects and partitioning heritability by genome region. Using a previously-published large cohort study, we analyse three phenotypes of a major human pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae, including the first analyses of minimum inhibitory concentrations (MIC) for each of two antibiotics, penicillin and ceftriaxone. We show that these are very highly heritable leading to high prediction accuracy, which is explained by many genetic associations identified under good control of population structure effects. In the case of ceftriaxone MIC, these results are surprising because none of the isolates was resistant according to the inhibition zone diameter threshold. We estimate that just over half of the heritability of penicillin MIC is explained by a known drug-resistance region, which also contributes around a quarter of the heritability of ceftriaxone MIC. For the within-host survival phenotype carriage duration, no reliable associations were found but we observed moderate heritability and prediction accuracy, indicating a polygenic trait. While generating important new results for S. pneumoniae, we have critically assessed existing methods and introduced innovations that will be useful for future large-scale population genomics studies to help decipher the genetic architecture of bacterial traits. Author summary Genome-wide association, prediction and heritability analyses in bacteria are beginning to help unravel the genetic underpinnings of traits such as antimicrobial resistance, virulence, within-host survival and transmissibility. Progress to date is limited by challenges including the effects of strong population structure and variable recombination, and the many gaps in sequence alignments including the absence of entire genes in many isolates. More work is required to critically asses and develop methods for bacterial genomics. We address this task here, using a range of existing methods from bacterial and human genetics, such as linear mixed models, elastic net and LD-score regression. We adapt these methods to introduce new analyses, including separate assessment of gap and nucleotide effects, a new allele coding for association analyses and a method to partition heritability into genome regions. We analyse within-host survival and two antimicrobial response traits of Streptococcus pneumoniae, identifying many novel associations while demonstrating good control of population structure and accurate prediction. We present both new results for an important pathogen and methodological advances that will be useful in guiding future studies in bacterial population genomics.


The evaluation of errors made by Machine Translation (MT) systems still needs human effort despite the fact that there are automated MT evaluation tools, such as the BLEU metric. Moreover, assuming that there would be tools that support humans in this translation quality checking task, for example by automatically marking some errors found in the MT system output, there is no guarantee that this actually helps to achieve a more correct or faster human evaluation. The paper presents a user study which found statistically significant interaction effects for the task of finding MT errors under the conditions of non-annotated and automatically pre-annotated errors, in terms of the time needed to complete the task and the number of correctly found errors.


Using robust, integrated analysis of multiple genomic datasets, we show that genes depleted for non-synonymous de novo mutations form a subnetwork of 72 members under strong selective constraint. We further show this subnetwork is preferentially expressed in the early development of the human hippocampus and is enriched for genes mutated in neurological, but not other, Mendelian disorders. We thus conclude that carefully orchestrated developmental processes are under strong constraint in early brain development, and perturbations caused by mutation have adverse outcomes subject to strong purifying selection. Our findings demonstrate that selective forces can act on groups of genes involved in the same process, supporting the notion that adaptation can act coordinately on multiple genes. Our approach provides a statistically robust, interpretable way to identify the tissues and developmental times where groups of disease genes are active. Our findings highlight the importance of considering the interactions between genes when analyzing genome-wide sequence data.


Mucor circinelloides responds to blue light by activating the biosynthesis of carotenoids. Gene crgA acts as a repressor of this light‐regulated process, as its inactivation leads to overaccumulation of carotenoids in both the dark and the light. The predicted CrgA protein contains different recognizable structural domains, including a RING‐finger zinc‐binding motif, several glutamine‐rich regions, a putative nuclear localization signal and an isoprenylation domain. To gain insight into the specific mode of action of the CrgA protein, we sought to define the CrgA domains critical for the light regulation of carotenogenesis. For this, mutant crgA alleles harbouring missense or deletion mutations in conserved residues of those domains were generated, and their functionality was assessed by testing their ability to complement a null crgA mutation. Point mutations of the amino‐terminal RING‐finger domain abrogated the ability of CrgA to repress carotenogenesis in the dark, as did the deletion of a poly glutamine‐rich region at the carboxyl domain of CrgA. In contrast, mutations of the isoprenylation domain only slightly affected the CrgA function in carotenogenesis. The results identify two functional domains presumably involved in protein–protein interaction in the CrgA protein and suggest a role for the ubiquitin–proteasome pathway in the light regulation of carotenogenesis in fungi.