Poul Frost and colleagues (1) argue that the excess work disability that we observed following notification of occupational disease is small and reassuring indicating no need for major concern. We agree with respect to patients who are not at work when notified because for them we observed no increased risk of subsequent work disability.

For patients, who were at work when notified, we do not agree however. For them, we observed a hazard ratio of 1.46 [95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.17–1.82] and a risk difference of 12.5% (risk notified - risk not notified = 48.1% - 35.6%) (2). Whether an absolute risk of 12.5% is small or not depends on the comparison.

One example among many is Acheson and colleagues' seminal work on sinonasal adenocarcinoma in wood-dust-exposed Buckinghamshire furniture workers, a milestone in occupational epidemiology (3, 4). In a population of 5371, they observed 8 cases of sinonasal adenocarcinoma while the expected number was 0.06. This corresponds to a risk difference of 0.15% which is about 1/80 of that observed in our study. Had their findings been neglected because of arguments about low public health impact, we would have been denied information with immense impact on our understanding of carcinogenesis as well as the prevention of sinonasal cancer.

Another way of assessing the size of the problem is by estimating the excess number in the general population. Annually, about 18 000 patients are notified of occupational disease in Denmark. If we assume that 50% are at work when notified, as in our data, this means that 1125 patients are work-disabled annually due to notification if our findings represent a causal effect (18 000 × 50% × 12.5%). This is in our opinion not a negligible number of patients even if it is expected to represent a small fraction of all work-disabled patients as only about 0.6% of the workforce is notified annually. A low population-attributable fraction is generally seen in occupational medicine because of low population exposure prevalence (5).

The high prevalence of work disability in our study population indicates a multifactorial etiology that includes more and frequent causes than for sinonasal adenocarcinoma, but this should not inveigle us into neglecting individual risk factors that step by step may improve our understanding of the mechanisms behind work disability and furthermore may be amendable and thus targeted by preventive initiatives that can improve workers' health (6).

In our opinion, the major problem is thus not the magnitude of the effect we observed but how workers' compensation systems can implement our results, bearing in mind the methodological limitations of the study and the fact that this is a delicate topic in occupational health.

In a second commentary on our original research, Kuijer and colleagues (7) argue – based on Dutch experiences – that our suggestions for changing worker's compensation might be counterproductive for preventing work disability. They refer to a national survey showing that patients who presumed that their disease was work-related and who were not notified had longer sick leave. In our opinion, this indicates that patients' perception of work-relatedness may be an important confounder when studying the effect of notification. Because all patients included in our study were referred to our occupational medicine department explicitly because their health problems were presumed to be work-related this should, however, not have confounded our results. By the same token, the side-effect of notification that we observed should add on top of the effect associated with the mere presumption of work-relatedness.

Kuijer and colleagues recommend a randomized, controlled intervention study as more appropriate than our observational design. We agree that this would have addressed the key problem of higher levels of clinical, occupational, and social characteristics, which predict a poorer vocational prognosis, among the notified patients. However, this was and is not an option due to ethical and statutory reasons.

Kuijer et al recommend that occupational physicians discuss the work-relatedness of the illness with their patients, make a timely diagnosis, and provide appropriate care and intervention at the workplace to prevent work disability. We fully agree, and this is the focus of our clinical as well as our scientific work (8–10) as it should be for any occupational physician regardless of whether the patient's disease is caused by the occupation or not, or whether the patient is notified to the compensation board or not. Our data suggest that the latter may be an important predictor of work disability.

Conflicts of interest
Lone Donbaek Jensen and Ane Marie Thulstrup prepare specialist's statements for the National Board of Industrial Injuries. Vivi Schlunssen is advisor for the labor union "HK Danmark" in notification issues. Jens Peter Bonde prepares expert testimonies concerning industrial injuries for the Medico-Legal Council.


The Wrttemberg Cape Regiment which was made available as a body of mercenaries to the Dutch East India Company by Count Karl Eugen, had 54 musicians at its disposal. They, together with the troops, experienced bad times, and many subsequently died in Batavia; only about 100 out of a total of approximately 3200 troops had the privilege of seeing their fatherland again. In this article the circumstances that led to the hiring of the regiment, as well as the recruitment of troops, their privations en rule and conditions at the Cape are discussed. The focus is especially on the musicians of the regiment with regard to their origins, their duties in the regiment, and their substitutes, as well as the influence they exerted on the musical life at the Cape.


The effect of rotor purge flow on the unsteady aerodynamics of a high-pressure turbine stage operating at design corrected conditions has been investigated, both experimentally and computationally. The experimental configuration consisted of a single-stage high-pressure turbine with a modern film-cooling configuration on the vane airfoil and the inner and outer end wall surfaces. Purge flow was introduced into the cavity located between the high-pressure vane and the high-pressure disk. The high-pressure blades and the downstream low-pressure turbine nozzle row were not cooled. All of the hardware featured an aerodynamic design typical of a commercial high-pressure ratio turbine and the flow path geometry was representative of the actual engine hardware. In addition to instrumentation in the main flow path, the stationary and rotating seals of the purge flow cavity were instrumented with high frequency response flush-mounted pressure transducers and miniature thermocouples in order to measure the flow field parameters above and below the angel wing.Predictions of the time-dependent flow field in the turbine flow path were obtained using FINE/Turbo, a three-dimensional Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes computational fluid dynamics CFD code that had the capability to perform both a steady and unsteady analysis. The steady and unsteady flow fields throughout the turbine were predicted using a three blade-row computational model that incorporated the purge flow cavity between the high-pressure vane and disk. The predictions were performed in an effort to mimic the design process with no adjustment of boundary conditions to better match the experimental data. The time-accurate predictions were generated using the harmonic method. Part I of this paper concentrates on the comparison of the time-averaged and time-accurate predictions with measurements in and around the purge flow cavity. The degree of agreement between the measured and predicted parameters is described in detail, providing confidence in the predictions for the flow field analysis that will be provided in Part II.


Emory University's Winship Cancer Institute has earned the coveted National Cancer Institute Cancer Center designation. Winship is the first medical facility in Georgia to earn this distinction. As an NCI designated center, Winship joins an elite group of 64 cancer centers nationwide that are on the forefront of the battle against cancer. Winship's NCI designation will benefit patients through increased access to new clinical trials and technologies that are available through NCI-designated cancer centers. "We are very proud of Emory's Winship Cancer Institute for achieving this important designation," says Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue. "Cancer strikes more than 35,000 Georgians each year, and through initiatives like the Georgia Cancer Coalition and the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA), we are working hard to eliminate this disease. Winship has served as a model in establishing collaborative research programs and in working statewide to address the pressing issues related to treatment, education and access to care for cancer patients." As an NCI-designated center, Winship will receive $4,285,191 in funding over the next three years to grow scientific research. The NCI will then review Emory's designation for a five-year renewal. According to the NCI, a designated cancer center's research components are the core of a much larger assembly of cancer activities, including clinical care, support services and education, extending the benefits of research directly to patients, their families, and the general public. "This designation is a tremendous honor and a reflection of the hard work and dedication that is exhibited by faculty and staff throughout the Emory system," says Brian Leyland-Jones, MD, PhD, executive director of Winship, associate vice president for health affairs for the Woodruff Health Sciences Center, and a GRA Eminent Scholar. "The designation enables us to continue to develop research initiatives that will result in new therapies for patients throughout Georgia and beyond." James Wagner, president of Emory University, says, "Winship's culture of collaboration and discovery will continue to grow thanks to NCI's designation. There are many people to thank for their dedication, involvement and belief in attaining this goal. Chief among these are the Woodruff Foundation and the State of Georgia who deserve recognition for their vision and steadfast support. And while this is an important day for Emory, it is cancer patients and their family members, whether they live in Georgia or beyond our borders, who are the true beneficiaries of this designation." The Winship Cancer Institute is part of Emory's Woodruff Health Sciences Center, Emory Healthcare and Emory University. Researchers and clinical members of the cancer center are faculty at Emory or at partner institutions such as Georgia Institute of Technology. Faculty members collaborate with national and state agencies, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Cancer Society. Fred Sanfilippo, MD, PhD, Emory executive vice president for health affairs and CEO of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center, praised Winship's faculty and staff for the achievement. "NCI Cancer Center designation is an important chapter in Winship's long and impressive history," says Sanfilippo. "Winship's faculty and staff have devoted many years to achieving this goal and deserve recognition for this achievement. The designation is a milestone that will serve as a turning point for Winship and our patients. We are on the brink of great advances in cancer research, and our ability to translate those advances into therapy is significantly enhanced by the NCI's designation." John Fox, president and CEO of Emory Healthcare points to the positive impact the NCI designation will have for patients. "In awarding this designation, the NCI is recognizing the emphasis we place on translating science into care," he says. "Winship has successfully developed a culture of multidisciplinary care that places patients at the center of everything we do, from scientific research to providing support services that include loved ones and family members." The Winship Cancer Institute was established in 1937 through a $50,000 gift to Emory from Coca Cola CEO Robert Woodruff, who named the center after his grandfather, Robert Winship. Woodruff's vision was for a center that focused on research, education and patient care. The Woodruff Foundation has continued to support Emory in achieving this vision, and in 2002 Emory dedicated the 275,000 square-foot Winship Cancer Institute building, constructed with funds from the Woodruff Foundation and designed to facilitate development of new and more effective cancer treatments. Leyland-Jones maintains this historical perspective in his role as director of Winship. "Robert Woodruff's vision - that no one should have to leave Georgia to receive excellent cancer care - is alive and well in Winship and our partner organizations such as the Georgia Cancer Coalition and the Georgia Research Alliance," he says. "These partnerships will help extend the positive impact of the NCI designation throughout our state and to the nation." Recently, Emory was recognized as one of the top 50 cancer centers in the United States by U.S. News and World Report and received the Blue Cross Blue Shield Designation for Treatment of Rare and Complex Cancers. Contacts: Vince Dollard, firstname.lastname@example.com, 404-778-4580 Sarah Goodwin, email@example.com, 404-727-3366


BACKGROUND
In 2009 Malawi introduced a new protocol to screen potential blood donors for anaemia, using the WHO Haemoglobin Colour Scale (HCS) for initial screening. Published studies of the accuracy of the HCS to screen potential blood donors show varying levels of accuracy and opinion varies whether this is an appropriate screening test. The aim of the study was to assess the validity of the HCS, as a screening test, by comparison to HemoCue in potential blood donors in Malawi.

STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS
This was a blinded prospective study in potential blood donors aged over 18 years, at Malawi Blood Transfusion Service in Blantyre, Malawi. Capillary blood samples were analysed using the HCS and HemoCue, independent of each other. The sensitivity and specificity of correctly identifying ineligible blood donors (Hb ≤ 12 g/dL) were calculated.

RESULTS
From 242 participants 234 (96.7%) were correctly allocated and 8 (3.3%), were wrongly allocated on the basis of the Haemoglobin Colour Scale (HCS) compared to HemoCue, all were subjects that were wrongly accepted as donors when their haemoglobin results were ≤ 12.0 g/dL. This gave a sensitivity of 100% and specificity of 96.7% to detect donor eligibilty. The negative predictive value of the HCS was 100% but the positive predictive value to identify ineligible donors on the basis of anaemia was only 20%.

CONCLUSIONS
Initial screening with the HCS correctly predicts eligibility for blood donation in the majority of potential blood donors at considerable cost saving compared with use of HemoCue as the first line anaemia screening test, however, by this method a small number of anaemic patients were allowed to donate blood.


Statistically independent features can be extracted by finding a factorial representation of a signal distribution. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) accomplishes this for linear correlated and Gaussian distributed signals. Independent Component Analysis (ICA), formalized by Comon (1994), extracts features in the case of linear statistical dependent but not necessarily Gaussian distributed signals. Nonlinear Component Analysis finally should find a factorial representation for nonlinear statistical dependent distributed signals. This paper proposes for this task a novel feed-forward, information conserving, nonlinear map - the explicit symplectic transformations. It also solves the problem of non-Gaussian output distributions by considering single coordinate higher order statistics.


This Technical Note analyzes how Chile's Center of Government (CoG) institutions have operated between 2010 and 2013. During this period, the Ministry of the Presidency took on a more prominent role in the strategic management of the overall government program by coordinating government action, monitoring the delivery of government priorities, and enhancing accountability to citizens. This study examines in detail the experience of the President's Delivery Unit created in 2010, which has enhanced the strategic coherence of the government program and oriented it towards results. Furthermore, the paper identifies opportunities for improvement in developing the core CoG functions, and gathers lessons learned from other countries in the region that have also shown interest in strengthening these capacities.


We used data from the near-infrared Visible and Infrared Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) survey of the Magellanic Cloud system (VMC) to measure proper motions (PMs) of stars within the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The data analysed in this study comprise 26 VMC tiles, covering a total contiguous area on the sky of ∼40 deg2. Using multi-epoch observations in the Ks band over time baselines between 13 and 38 months, we calculated absolute PMs with respect to ∼130 000 background galaxies. We selected a sample of ∼2160 000 likely SMC member stars to model the centre-of-mass motion of the galaxy. The results found for three different choices of the SMC centre are in good agreement with recent space-based measurements. Using the systemic motion of the SMC, we constructed spatially resolved residual PM maps and analysed for the first time the internal kinematics of the intermediate-age/old and young stellar populations separately. We found outward motions that point either towards a stretching of the galaxy or stripping of its outer regions. Stellar motions towards the North might be related to the 'Counter Bridge' behind the SMC. The young populations show larger PMs in the region of the SMC Wing, towards the young Magellanic Bridge. In the older populations, we further detected a coordinated motion of stars away from the SMC in the direction of the Old Bridge as well as a stream towards the SMC.


I. INTRODUCTION II. HECKLER V. CHANEY AND THE FDA's RELUCTANCE TO ACT III. WASHINGTON V. GLUCKSBERG AND OREGON'S DEATH WITH DIGNITY ACT IV. THE EMERGENCE OF LETHAL INJECTION AS THE SOLE METHOD OF EXECUTION A. Lethal Injection's Rise to Exclusivity B. Lethal Injection's Effect on All Prisoners C. Botched Executions V. THE PRACTICE OF MEDICINE EXCEPTION A. Medical Association Views B. The Hippocratic Oath C. Physicians Play a More Active Role in Causing Death in Lethal Injection than in PAS D. Lethal Injection Does Not Fit the Standard Model of the Practice of Medicine VI. DULY AUTHORIZED STATE PRACTICE VII. CONCLUSION I. INTRODCUTION In 1985, in Heckler v. Chaney, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge by death row inmates to the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) failure to initiate enforcement actions against drugs used in capital punishment. Rehnquist's majority opinion cursorily held that agency decisions not to institute such proceedings are unreviewable, and the Court has persistently upheld this principle in Chaney's progeny. As important as this principle may be, even more important is why the FDA chose not to review the safety and efficacy of drugs used in capital punishment. First, the FDA argued that lethal injection was a distinctly minority practice affecting few prisoners and that scant empirical evidence existed that the drugs used in the procedure were dangerous. Second, it claimed that lethal injection constitutes the practice of medicine, and the FDA has a policy of non-interference with physician's professional treatment decisions. Finally, the FDA asserted that it has a policy of not initiating enforcement actions against state laws that are duly authorized and further legitimate state interests. In 1997, the Supreme Court gave such authorization to states to experiment with physician-assisted suicide (PAS). Although the Court found no fight to PAS, it explicitly delegated to states the power to legalize and regulate its practice. Based on this decision, Oregon enacted its Death with Dignity Act (DWDA) that same year, legalizing PAS for terminally ill patients. Later, Attorney General John Ashcroft--usually a federalist--challenged the DWDA under the federal Controlled Substance Act. A primary contention of his challenge was that PAS is subject to federal regulation because it does not constitute the practice of medicine. Concurrently, lethal injection has become the primary, almost the sole, method of execution in this country. Despite frequently clandestine execution procedures, many observers have filed reports of "botched" executions based on improper dosages and combinations of drugs. Doctors who treat other prisoners frequently participate directly in these executions, and non-medical personnel often improperly inject the drugs, causing painful and prolonged deaths. While the FDA is under no legal obligation to regulate the drugs used in executions, these recent developments certainly create a moral imperative requiring review. This paper will argue that the federal government cannot consistently refrain from regulating lethal injection drugs while arguing for prosecution of those prescribing drugs to be used by patients in assisted suicide. Part II will look at the opinions in Chaney and the factors behind the FDA's decision not to regulate the drugs used in executions. Part III will look at Oregon's Death with Dignity Act and its authorization by the Supreme Court. Parts IV-VI will analyze how the justifications given by the FDA in the early 1980s, for not regulating the drugs used in executions, are no longer valid in 2003. Part IV will discuss how lethal injection now constitutes a serious public health issue. In the early 1980s, only two hundred prisoners were subject to lethal injection, and scant evidence existed of its dangerousness. …


Biomass syngas, a low-calorific gas continuously produced in the process of biomass pyrolysis and gasification, a relatively little-known fuel, can be used for heat production in an industrial plant. However, stringent emission norms have to be fulfilled at all times. In this paper, we present numerical simulations of turbulent combustion of the biomass syngas. They show that strict norms can be kept and that the process does not need any additional oil-burners to sustain the mandatory temperature. We have created a 3D model of the real industrial syngas combustion chamber of complex geometry involving an axial co-flow jet and six additional air inlets to enhance the swirl and to promote the generation of vortices. We have run a series of non-premixed combustion simulations for the syngases produced from wood chips and from turkey feathers.


Abstract Unique among major communications media, the Internet has delivered vast public benefit while being designed, developed, and deployed largely through private initiative and nongovernmental funding. At the same time, key public policy decisions were made early on that established the legal and regulatory foundations necessary for economic innovation and free expression to flourish. Those foundations include strong free speech protections, liability limits on Internet platforms, protections against excessive government surveillance, open technical standards, individual privacy protection, and some form of net neutrality. Those foundations were laid when the Internet was young. As part of a roundtable on "Competing Visions for Cyberspace," this essay argues that as the business, social, and technical impact of the Internet has become clearer globally, some of these principles require adjustment, but all will remain important if we are to preserve the economic potential of the Internet environment going forward.


Artists often want to change the colors of an image to achieve a particular aesthetic goal. For example, they might limit colors to a warm or cool color scheme to create an image with a certain mood or feeling. Gamut masking is a technique that artists use to limit the set of colors they can paint with. They draw a mask over a color wheel and only use the hues within the mask. However, creating the color palette from the mask and applying the colors to the image requires skill. We propose an interactive tool for gamut masking that allows amateur artists to create an image with a desired mood or feeling. Our system extracts a 3D color gamut from the 2D user-drawn mask and maps the image to this gamut. The user can draw a different gamut mask or locally refine the image colors. Our voxel grid gamut representation allows us to represent gamuts of any shape, and our cluster-based image representation allows the user to change colors locally.


We report evidence for ongoing lateral slump of part of the southeastern flank of the Pico volcanic ridge in the Azores. Data from a high-resolution digital elevation model, field work, GPS, and radar interferometry show that: (1) the slumping sector is several cubic kilometers in size; (2) the structure involves several curved scars with normal fault kinematics; (3) the central part is undergoing little horizontal displacement toward the southeast (1.6 ± 1.3 mm/yr), but significant downward movement (5–12 mm/yr); and (4) the outer part of the southeastern flank of Pico is subsiding faster than the inner parts; this likely reflects recent individualization of a steep seaward-dipping fault in the moving mass. The slump shares similarities with active slumps recognized elsewhere, although the studied area may represent only the proximal part of a much larger complex potentially affecting the deep submarine base of the island. Displacement of the subaerial part of the southeastern flank of Pico seems to be accommodated by the movement and rotation of large blocks along listric normal faults.


Objective: Economic burden of asthma is an important topic as many patients require chronic therapy and long-term follow up. Severe and uncontrolled asthma and hospitalizations have been shown to be the major factors which increase asthma costs. In this study, we aimed to determine whether the direct costs of asthma changed by evaluating the same 118 patients who participated in our previous study in which direct cost of asthma was investigated in 2000 year. Materials and Methods: Among patients who involved in the previous study, 53 (49%) patients participated to the current study. Direct cost of asthma was assessed by the costs of physician visits, laboratory tests, medications and hospitalizations related to asthma, if exist. Cost was given both in Turkish Lira (TL) and American Dollars (USD) due to economic inflation in our country. Results: Mean annual asthma cost in 2000 [659.8 USD (950.1 TL)], was not statistically different from that in 2008 [830.2 USD (963.1 TL)], (p= 0.153). Similar to 2000, the cost increased with the increased severity of asthma in 2008 [severe asthma= 1563 USD (1814 TL), moderate asthma= 857.4 USD (994.5 TL) and mild asthma= 152.8 USD (177.2 TL)] (p< 0.001). The main components of the direct costs were asthma drugs (45%) and hospitalization (40%). Conclusion: In this preliminary study which evaluated the same patient group within eight years interval, asthma cost has been shown to be unchanged. However, regarding the fact that severe asthma has significant contribution on asthma cost, close follow-up seems to be neccessary of these group of patients. As drugs and hospitalization consisted the major compenents of the direct cost, the strategies which aim to prevent asthma attacks in order to decrease hospitalization need to be included in the health policy. Rationale prescribing should be adopted by physicians in order to prevent unnecessary use of drugs.


The unique way of financing housing through the mandatory savings system in Singapore has created a class of "asset-rich and cash-poor" Singaporeans. This paper provides a framework to assess the viability of a reverse mortgage (RM) market so that such instruments may be harnessed as a source of financing retirement income for home owners. Based on different cost of capital, we estimate the probability of loss for both the private supplier and public provider of RMs. The probability of loss is computed by three major components: choice of replacement ratio and property growth rate; forecast of cohort survival probability by joint-life; and generation of yield curves to discount the future cash flows. The stochastic forecast of survival probability is estimated using the Lee-Carter demographic model based on the abridged life tables. The discount factor for future cash flows are generated from stochastic interest rates. Our simulation results indicate that based on the benchmark scenario, RM instruments by private providers are likely to achieve about 50% replacement ratio for the 4-room public housing owners. However, the market may be missing if a replacement ratio of 70% is required.


Abstract Ever increasingly more, all the actors directly or indirectly involved in the planning processes express the need to know the effects deriving from the implementation of rural development policy. In this direction, evaluation can make an important contribution, fostering the development of a 'good policy' as underlined by EU regulations. Among the specific evaluation questions developed by the Common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework, one of them relates to the improvement of governance. Considering the Adaptive Co-Management (ACM) approach's capacity as a proxy of the quality of network governance, the study aims to propose the ACM theoretical framework as a suitable model with which to study the social interactions between actors in the smallest unit of the LEADER process (i.e., the local action group's (LAG's) partnership governance). The proposed methodology is subsequently tested on a specific case study through the evaluation of the partnership governance of two case studies in the South of Italy. The empirical evidence supports the idea that ACM approach may represent a new model to assess the quality of the implementation process of the LEADER Programme. In addition, the ACM approach can lead to a new organizational and self-evaluation model of LAGs which places an emphasis on the importance of the relational process among its members.


The basic principles of Indian-law jurisprudence often appear disconnected with basic principles of American constitutional law. Indian law, however, has a special significance to important issues of state and federal power. This Article seeks to build on the work of prior scholars who have sought to connect Indian law to American constitutional values.Public Law 280 is a federal law that gives states control over certain aspects of Indian affairs that were traditionally within the scope of the federal government. This Article argues that Public Law 280 is unconstitutional under a doctrine of constitutional preemption. Constitutional preemption is grounded in the system of overlapping sovereignty that forms the structure of the Constitution and should be understood as prohibiting the federal government from delegating inherently and exclusively federal powers to the states. The power to manage Indian affairs is entrusted exclusively to the federal government, and Congress cannot constitutionally delegate it to the states.The constitutional difficulties raised by Public Law 280 are particularly relevant in an era when issues of federalism are at the forefront of legal discussion. It is often accepted that courts may limit the federal government's authority to exercise powers reserved to the states, but we should also take seriously the idea that courts may limit the states' authority to exercise powers reserved to the federal government.


Image and video-based rendering technologies are receiving growing attention due to their photo-realistic rendering capability in free-viewpoint. However, two major limitations are ghosting and blurring due to their sampling-based mechanism. The scene geometry which supports to select accurate sampling positions is proposed using global method (i.e. approximate depth plane) and local method (i.e. disparity estimation). This paper focuses on the local method since it can yield more accurate rendering quality without large number of cameras. The local scene geometry has two difficulties which are the geometrical density and the uncovered area including hidden information. They are the serious drawback to reconstruct an arbitrary viewpoint without aliasing artifacts. To solve the problems, we propose anisotropic diffusive resampling method based on tensor theory. Isotropic low-pass filtering accomplishes anti-aliasing in scene geometry and anisotropic diffusion prevents filtering from blurring the visual structures. Apertures in coarse samples are estimated following diffusion on the pre-filtered space, the nonlinear weighting of gradient directions suppresses the amount of diffusion. Aliasing artifacts from low density are efficiently removed by isotropic filtering and the edge blurring can be solved by the anisotropic method at one process. Due to difference size of sampling gap, the resampling condition is defined considering causality between filter-scale and edge. Using partial differential equation (PDE) employing Gaussian scale-space, we iteratively achieve the coarse-to-fine resampling. In a large scale, apertures and uncovered holes can be overcoming because only strong and meaningful boundaries are selected on the resolution. The coarse-level resampling with a large scale is iteratively refined to get detail scene structure. Simulation results show the marked improvements of rendering quality.


Many years ago I consulted 2 patients suffering from recurrent aphthous ulceration to establish whether they had a toothpaste allergy. I thus proceeded to do many p-tests on the skin but without any positive results. However, replacement of the toothpaste with a simple soap quickly cured the ulcerations. A third case was referred to me with the same symptoms but in this case an unfortunate re-exposure caused a relapse of the ulcerations. At that time, it was unthinkable to speak of any kind of allergy in cases of aphthosis, and I forgot about these observations. I have been retired for a number of years, but 3 months ago, however, I was on a golf course when a competitor mentioned that she had been suffering from a painful aphthosis for many years and asked me how this condition could be ameliorated. I told her to replace her toothpaste with a simple soap. She seemed very skeptical at the time, but 10 days later she informed me that the ulcerations had disappeared. 'Among the different specialists I consulted, why didn't anybody tell me this before?' Research on the Internet reveals that numerous authors are always uncertain about the etiology of aphthosis, whilst others are beginning to suggest a possible allergy. Finally, in a recent WHO monograph, we found that fluorides easily pass through the mouth's mucous membrane but do not cross the skin barrier. This would explain the lack of response of ordinary p-tests. Anyway, in cases of benign aphthosis, replacing toothpaste with normal soap is not such a difficult test. Of course, not all benign recurrent aphthoses respond favorably to this test, but because of its simplicity, it would be unwise not to try it. In cases of fluoride intolerance it would also be important to eliminate, among other items, salts and beverages enriched with fluoride compounds from the family diet and pay more attention to fish and shrimps for example, which concentrate fluorides in their skin.


Empirical studies of static and dynamic diagrams have traditionally collected outcome data indicating the effectiveness of these depictions with respect to comprehension and learning. Because outcome measures alone provide limited insights as to why diagrams are or are not effective, there has been growing interest in studying how people process these depictions. In some cases, the aim of this research is to develop principled approaches for guiding diagram design while in others it is to devise strategies that could support users. This paper presents a selection of examples from varied content domains illustrating how eye tracking data can be combined with other measures to probe how users interact with diagrams. Descriptions of the systems used in these combinations will be described and the synergies between eye tracking and the other measures explained. The illustrations are selected from studies in which the goals ranged from exploring the effects of cueing to comparing visual and haptic search. These different examples show that approaches used for analysing and interpreting eye tracking data need to be carefully matched to the specific goals of individual studies. We conclude with recommendations for using eye tracking as an adjunct to other approaches for gathering diagram processing data.


An understanding of the impact of physical activity on the health of manual wheelchair users (MWUs) could be improved with the development of an accurate and unobtrusive monitoring tool. PURPOSE: (i) to identify the most appropriate anatomical location and accelerometer-based device to predict physical activity energy expenditure (PAEE) in MWUs and (ii) to develop and test associated regression equations to predict PAEE. METHODS: Seventeen manual wheelchair users (36 ± 10 yrs, 72 ± 11 kg) completed ten activities; resting, folding clothes, propulsion on a 1% gradient (3,4,5,6 and 7 km.hr-1) and propulsion at 4km.hr-1 (with an additional 8% body mass, 2% and 3% gradient) on a motorised wheelchair treadmill. GT3X+ and GENEA accelerometers were worn on the right wrist and upper arm. Linear regression analysis was conducted between outputs from each accelerometer and criterion PAEE, measured using indirect calorimetry. Subsequent error statistics were calculated for the developed regression equations for devices at the wrist using a leave-one-out cross-validation analysis. RESULTS: Accelerometer outputs at each anatomical location were significantly (p < .01) associated with PAEE (Upper arm, GT3X+; r = 0.68 and GENEA r = 0.87. Wrist, GT3X+; r = 0.82 and GENEA; r = 0.88). Average PAEE estimation error for all activities using new regression equations at the wrist was 13.8 ± 49.6% and 3.8 ± 25.7% for GT3X+ and GENEA, respectively. Absolute PAEE estimation errors for devices worn on the wrist varied from 17.1 to 122.0% for the GT3X+ and from 16.5 to 32.1% for the GENEA. The larger overall error associated with the GT3X+ worn on the wrist was mostly accounted for by a 1.2 Kcal.min-1 over-prediction of PAEE during the folding clothes activity. CONCLUSION: Of the two accelerometers and anatomical locations considered in this study, the results indicate that the GENEA worn on the wrist provides the most valid prediction of PAEE in MWUs. Variation in error statistics between the two devices is thought to be associated with inherent differences in internal components and on-board filtering processes of each device. The GT3X+ when worn on the wrist appears to lack sensitivity to accurately quantify the PAEE during low intensity activities, with low frequency components, which could lead to erroneous PAEE measurement during free-living monitoring.


This work develops measures for quantifying the effects of field noise upon targeted unitary transformations. Robustness to noise is assessed in the framework of the quantum control landscape, which is the mapping from the control to the unitary transformation performance measure (quantum gate fidelity). Within that framework, a geometric interpretation of stochastic noise effects naturally arises, where more robust optimal controls are associated with regions of small overlap between landscape curvature and the noise correlation function. Numerical simulations of this overlap in the context of quantum information processing reveal distinct noise spectral regimes that better support robust control solutions. This perspective shows the dual importance of both noise statistics and the control form for robustness, thereby opening up new avenues of investigation on how to mitigate noise effects in quantum systems.


Artikkel kasitleb luuletaja Ilmi Kolla (1933–1954) luulet stalinismiperioodi kontekstis kui vastupanu ajastu diskursiivsetele joujoontele. Ilmi Kolla luuletuste enamikku ei olnud voimalik avaldada, sest need ei vastanud sotsialistliku realismi ja stalinliku ideoloogia nouetele. Ka avaldamiseks vastu voetud tekstide puhul heitsid ajalehtede ja ajakirjade toimetused talle sageli ette luuletuste sobimatust kehtivate ideoloogiliste ja esteetiliste nouetega. Selles mottes voib Ilmi Kolla luulet naha sotsiaalse protestina, mis ei olnud kull otseselt selle eesmargiga loodud, kuid mis toimis sellisel moel. The article analyzes the poetry of the Estonian writer Ilmi Kolla as the resistance toward the discursive hegemony of the Stalinist era. The dominant tenor of the Stalinist era was falsely optimistic, leaving no space for articulations of individual experiences and existential questions, the topics which were central for Ilmi Kolla' poetry. The writers could not, in the Stalinist era, publicly oppose the ideological and social demands of Soviet rule. Instead, one could adapt the position of a passive dissenter; in the context of literary production, such a position could mean remaining silent (i.e. not publishing texts) or cultivating aesthetic practices which were out of touch with the official ideological demands of the era – this last option meant writing into the drawer. During the Stalinist period in Estonian SSR, the only officially accepted method of creating literary texts was 'socialist realism.' The acceptance of this method suggested ideological conformism; indeed many authors conformed to the ideological demands of the era. Estonian literature of earlier periods was re-evaluated according to Stalinist ideological demands. In poetry, the newly-established demand for socialist realism prescribed the range of accepted topics; acceptable themes included war, building up the new socialist society, class struggle and the struggle for peace, and the worship of Stalin. Ideological emphasis was laid on the foregrounding of a collective viewpoint and communist values. However, there were several authors who did not conform to the pressure; the poetess Betti Alver, for example, did not publish any poems during the twenty postwar years. Ideological education of authors became one of the cornerstones of producing the socialist realist works; of particular importance was guiding the literal production of young authors. This was arranged through the Writers Union, where advisers of prose and poetry were employed. Journal editors performed the same role and critical articles were published concerning the production of young authors.  As a young author, the position of Ilmi Kolla in the Soviet literary landscape was precarious because she hardly complied with requirements of socialist realism. Therefore, she failed to publish most of her poems. Kolla indeed tried to conform and wrote conforming poetry for earning income, but these poems often failed. Even poems which were accepted by the editorial board for publication were not considered ideological enough and were harshly criticized.  The central theme in Kolla's poetry was individual and erotic love, instead of collective values demanded by socialist realism. Kolla's poetry tended to have existential undertones and was tempered by a sense of sorrow. Such poetic modes were considered unacceptable in the context of Stalinism since these indicated a sense of human weakness, understood according to Stalinist ideology as lacking in optimism and yielding to negativity and decadent feelings. The most well known poem by Kolla, "Sorrowful moments" carries a sense of an approaching death; it focuses on an individual who loves and longs for the happiness, whose soul is sick and who is thinking about the transciense of life and about the appoaching death. This poem was published only after Kolla's death in 1957 and then became widely read. The poem has been considered Kolla's existential outcry; it has been interpreted as a turning point in the poetic practices of the period (Veidemann 2000). Many poems by Ilmi Kolla which she could not publish during her lifetime were distributed from hand to hand in a manuscript form after her death, impacting in this way the attitudes of many people. Readers have recalled how discovering the poetry of Kolla affected them strongly in the Stalinist atmosphere of the 1950s; many remember how Kolla's poems became close to their hearts and were experienced in the context of the era as something extraordinary and out of sync with the official trends. A collection of Kolla's poetry was published after her death in 1957, but the compiler Heljo Mand has acknowledged that she did not dare to publish Kolla's more spiritual poetry because of the fear of criticism. Since individualism was suppressed in the Soviet Union, the expression of poetic individualism can be understood as a form of dissent or opposition  (Hersch 2016). Therefore, the poetry of Ilmi Kolla can be seen as an opposition to Soviet rule and as a protest toward society which repressed individuality. In addition to Kolla's poetry as a poetic dissent, her freeminded personality was also somewhat inappropriate in the Soviet system. As many other writers, Kolla teased the system, conformed where necessary, but also used the system in her own interests. The poetry of Ilmi Kolla can be understood as a social protest which was not directly created for the purpose of dissent, but which functioned in this way in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist society.


In today's competitive automotive market, many of the world's leading organizations utilize the Lean manufacturing philosophy in order to increase productivity and stay competitive. With this philosophy come many great methods for improving processes, where focus is put on reducing or eradicating any actions or process that fail to create value for customers, the so-called waste. However, one question that remains is how fast a process actually can be. Having "40% waste", how can one know if this is the endpoint of a successful efficiency improvement journey, or if the waste can be reduced all the way down to 0%? This Master thesis seeks to identify where this endpoint is located for a specific design of the product, aiming to help organizations allocate improvement work to where it does the greatest impact. Hence, knowing if the endpoint for a process already is reached, organizations can steer improvement work to R&D departments instead of trying to improve something not capable of improving. The findings show that organizations can use the results from this study in more than just one context. Not only will it complement the Lean philosophy by providing a measure of the absolute shortest durations for each individual activity or process under ideal conditions, but also will it facilitate communication between R&D and assembly departments at an earlier stage of the development process by quantifying the impact of different design choices on the total assembly time.


Today we are faced with an increasingly urbanised world with 54 percent of the global population now living in developed areas. By 2050 projections indicate continued urbanisation and population growth will add another 2.5 billion people to our city conurbations. Cities throughout the world are planning and shaping up to this eventuality. As we progress into the 21st century, the pressure exerted on existing infrastructure systems, housing density, energy needs, space and socio-economic provision will pose a significant challenge to our urban populations. How do we reinvent cities in decline? What makes our thriving cities great? How do we realise sustainable growth and keep our cities healthy and convivial places to live, work and play? What might our cities look like in ten, twenty or fifty years? What kind of lifestyles may evolve and how will we move around, where will we live and work? The exhibition explores the visual depiction of future cities over the last 100 years, what such projects sought to communicate and why. Representations of future cities can play a significant role in shaping our thinking on cities and our future urban strategies since they contribute to a wider discourse and enable us to both think and look forward.


Total quality management (TQM) has already grown in industrial organizations but nowadays TQM is applied in almost all fields including education. The purpose of this study is to measure the total quality management perceptions of the Central Library users, University of Delhi. As they relate to quality service and to determine how far the Central Library, University of Delhi has succeeded in delivering such service to its users. A well-structured questionnaire was administered among the users of Central Library, University of Delhi to collect the necessary data regarding the measure total quality management. The present study consists only measuring total quality management of central Library of University of Delhi and the geographical area is restricted to the only Delhi University. The study reveals that the central Library of University of Delhi is not lacking in quality of service It is observed that in the D.U central library, 81% respondents are satisfied with library service quality. There are a number of studies on the utilization of library resources and services, but this is the original study done on Central Library, Delhi University. As such, it should pave the way for Measuring Service Quality in Central Library, Delhi University as well as elsewhere.


The feasibility of developing a neural network to perform nonlinear Bayesian estimation from sparse data is explored using an example from clinical pharmacology. The problem involves estimating parameters of a dynamic model describing the pharmacokinetics of the bronchodilator theophylline from limited plasma concentration measurements of the drug obtained in a patient. The estimation performance of a backpropagation trained network is compared to that of the maximum likelihood estimator as well as the maximum a posteriori probability estimator. In the example considered, the estimator prediction errors (model parameters and outputs) obtained from the trained neural network were similar to those obtained using the nonlinear Bayesian estimator.


Charitable giving has been a foundation of American society almost since the nation began, but the issue of how such giving should be treated for tax purposes has been the subject of frequent debate. Scholars have proposed various theories explaining why the positive effects of this deduction on both donors and donees outweigh the negative impact on government coffers of this tax expenditure, although many still criticize certain features of the deduction in its current form. However, one area of this research that has previously been neglected is how the charitable sector is affected by changes to the economy at large. Contributions to charitable organizations tend to decline during an economic downturn, and such a decline may be catastrophic to the charitable sector. In particular, an economic downturn can affect charitable organizations in three different ways. First, some organizations may experience an increase in donations but simultaneously experience an increase in demand for their services. Other organizations may experience an increase in demand for their services without experiencing an accompanying increase in donations. Finally, some organizations may experience such a steep decline in donations that their very survival is put in jeopardy, regardless of whether the demand for their services increases. In order to meet the recessionary needs of all three types of organizations, the government should: 1) convert the current charitable deduction to a refundable credit that is available to all taxpayers; 2) provide a tax credit to employers who second their employers to work for charitable organizations; and 3) provide direct funding to those charities that can demonstrate dire financial need.


The 21st century has seen a growing importance of India in foreign language education. Not only has globalisation led to a reshaping of life in India itself, but, on a global scale, the enlarging Indian diaspora has resulted in a spreading and reflection of Indian (diasporic) experiences in economy, literature and (pop)culture. This anthology provides perspectives of how to read and teach these 'faces' of postcolonial India. Thereby, it focusses on a variety of literary texts worth implementing in teaching units. The articles take the perspective of literary and cultural studies as base and aim at interconnecting it to major concepts and theories of teaching literature and culture. Finally, it is the aim of this anthology to provide ideas of how to actively teach the different 'faces' of postcolonial India in the (advanced) intercultural EFL classroom.


This article develops an anthropological understanding of the intersection between food and culture in Edmonton's food truck industry. More specifically, I explore how Edmonton food trucks are able to connect local and global cuisines and cultures through the menu items they offer and images they present to customers, which are predominantly influenced by local, ethnic, authentic and fusion creations. I gained data for this study by employing an ethnographic methodology and relational approach, which involved conducting semi-structured interviews with Edmonton food truck vendors and customers, and engaging in participant observation from May through August of 2019. The following food trucks serve as case studies in my research: Explore India, Dosi Rock, Dedo's Food Truck and Catering, Meat Street Pies and The Dog. My findings reveal how advertising themes common to Edmonton food trucks, which include notions of authenticity, traditionalism and high quality ingredients, contribute to the construction of a cultural "Other" for customer consumption. In addition, my findings reveal how Edmonton food truck vendors are inspired to develop menus and dishes rooted in and inspirited by their cultural heritages, transnational identities, world travels and movement across ethnoscapes. In conclusion, I argue that the globally inspired ethnocultural cuisines offered by Edmonton food truck vendors are "localized" in a variety of meaningful ways. This study contributes to an underrepresented literature on street food vending in Edmonton by analyzing how food truck move through, occupy, and create urban spaces in meaningful ways.


Copyright law struggles to provide a coherent framework for analyzing personal uses. Although there is widespread agreement that at least some such uses are non-infringing, the doctrinal basis for that conclusion remains unclear. In particular, the prevailing explanations of fair use and implied license are both flawed in important respects.This Article proposes a new explanation for the favored status of certain personal uses. Drawing on the principle of copyright exhaustion - the notion that once the copyright holder parts with a particular copy of a work, its power to control the use and disposition of that copy is constrained - we argue that many personal uses are rendered lawful by virtue of the simple fact of copy ownership. Owning copies entitles consumers to make certain uses of those copies and the works embodied in them, even in ways that may appear inconsistent with the rights of copyright holders. Under exhaustion, any copy owner has the right to reproduce, modify, and distribute her copy in order to fully realize its value qua copy. In a variety of personal use cases, courts have been swayed by arguments that highlight the defendant's purchase or rightful ownership of a copy. But the prevailing approaches to personal use take copy ownership into account inconsistently and awkwardly, forcing courts to shoehorn their intuitions about ownership into doctrines designed to address very different questions. In contrast, exhaustion places copy ownership at the center of the digital personal use debate. And it helps us reconcile our intuitions about the proper scope of consumer control over copies they own with our formal legal articulations of the scope of infringement liability.


In this study, the task of identifying vocals in monaural music mixtures is explored. We show how presently available algorithms for source separation and predominant f0 estimation can be used as a front end from which features can be extracted. A large set of features is presented, devised to connect different vocal cues to the presence of vocals. Two main cues are utilized; the voice is neither stable in pitch nor in timbre. We evaluate the performance of the model by estimating the length of the vocal regions of the mixtures. To facilitate this, a new set of annotations to a widely adopted data set is developed and made available to the community. The proposed model is able to explain about 78 % of the variance in vocal region length. In a classification task, where the excerpts are classified as either vocal or non-vocal, the model has an accuracy of about 0.94.


Abstract: This paper is both a personal reflection and critical analysis of the circulation of the poem "Rotundamente negra" by Afro-Costa Rican poet and cultural activist Shirley Campbell among Afro-descendant women in Latin America. As I heard various recitations and interpretations of the poem at several meetings of Afro-descendant social movements across the Americas, I was also bearing witness to the process by which creative cultural expressions become politicized and popularized by their audiences, especially Afro-descendant women, to reflect a collective desire, goal, and identity.  When the poem was first published in 1994, its circulation was limited among literary circles in Costa Rica and the local Afro-Costa Rican women's movement. Now a quick search on Google reveals hundreds of "hits" on social media sites and electronic magazines, revealing not only the impact of technology, but also of the physical transnational flows of Afro-descendant women and their ideas at conferences, meeting one another, and finding common ground through political activism and poetry. Most significant is the meaning women attach to the poem and the places where it is interpreted, recited, or posted. The circulation and the appeal of the poem signals that Black women in various parts of the Americas are collectively using it not only as a tool of self-expression, but also as a point of departure for consciousness-raising, identity formation, and collective action.  In a region where Black women live doubly-invisible lives amongst the most marginalized of the hemisphere, the poem is both a self-affirmation and a battle cry. The poem relates to the "everyday" of Black women's lives and reveals itself to be a seemingly "innocent" but influential tool of empowerment. Black women recognize themselves in the verses and they "recognize the array of forces controlling their lives" (Bobo 1995, 6). "Rotundamente negra" politicizes as it circulates through the Americas with its message of racial identification and pride that defies the homogenizing tendencies of mestizaje and blanqueamiento. The poem has become an affirming instrument to support, but also a meaningful platform for Black women's organizations, activists, and individuals.


Upconversion luminescence of Er^(3+)/Yb^(3+)-doped halide tellurite glass is investigated experimentally upon 976-nm excitation. Three intense emissions centered at 525, 545 and 655 nm owing to the transitions (2)^H_(11/2) ? (4)^I_(15/2), (4)^S_(3/2) ? (4)^I_(15/2) and (4)^F_(9/2) ? (4)^I_(15/2), respectively, are observed when pumping power is as low as 20 mW. The upconversion mechanisms and power dependent intensities are discussed. The high-populated (4)^I_(11/2) level is supposed to serve as the intermediate state responsible for the upconversion processes.


Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs) typically require their members to license any standard-essential patent on Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms. Unfortunately, numerous high-stakes disputes have recently broken out over just what these "FRAND commitments" mean and how and where to enforce them. We propose a simple, practical set of rules regarding patents that SSOs can adopt to achieve the goals of FRAND commitments far more efficiently with far less litigation. Under our proposed approach, if an standard-essential patent owner and an implementer of the standard cannot agree on licensing terms, the standard-essential patent owner is obligated to enter into binding baseball-style (or "final offer") arbitration with any willing licensee to determine the royalty rate. This obligation may be conditioned on the implementer making a reciprocal FRAND Commitment for any standard-essential patents it owns that read on the same standard. If the implementer is unwilling to enter into binding arbitration, the standard-essential patent owner's FRAND commitment not to go to court to enforce its standard-essential patents against that party is discharged. We explain how our proposed FRAND regime would work in practice. Many of the disputes currently arising around FRAND commitments become moot under our approach.


For the last 30 years, analysis of the inner workings of the firm has been largely absent from economic assessments of environmental policy. Recent work has highlighted the importance of understanding a firm's commercial motivations, decision-making procedures and organizational structure when designing and implementing public environmental policies. Environmental Policy and Corporate Behaviour responds to this need, investigating the many internal challenges faced by firms seeking to implement new policies and achieve significant and long-lasting environmental progress.


A penchant for the direct, the dramatic and the spectacular remains an
overwhelming feature of the West in its dealings in the world of practical affairs.
In business, corporate success is frequently credited to the highly visible
contributions of heroic individuals ostensibly possessing almost superhuman
qualities, including the vision and acumen to dramatically reverse the fortunes
of faltering or failing enterprises. Leaders are construed as specially endowed
causal agents armed with the capacity to take decisive actions in bringing
about significant changes, thereby warranting their elevated status and their
sometimes excessive rewards. This popular and romantic imagery of heroism
in action derives from an inherited Western propensity to favour direct-causal,
rational-calculative and high-profile actions over more discreet, indirect and at
times understated gestures or responses in engendering a desired outcome.
Consequently, there is a tendency to underestimate the self-transformative
power of dynamic relational configurations and their ability to bring about
desired outcomes. In this paper we show the downsides of the widely
preferred 'spectacular' approach to achieving success and argue for greater
appreciation of a less conspicuous, and less direct mode of engagement
that is more in keeping with a world that is itself ever changing. We call this
more nuanced approach 'Strategic Indirection'. We maintain that, contrary
to popular belief, sustainable success in any field of endeavour is rarely a
consequence of large-scale, attention-grabbing actions. Rather, the true
cause of such success is often found elsewhere in the 'waning candlelight' of
seemingly inconsequential acts and mundane coping actions.


We describe and explain the design methods for the cores, trench layers and core number in multi-core fibers (MCFs) in detail. According to such method, we propose relative optimized design schemes for heterogeneous trench-assisted multi-core fiber (Hetero-TA-MCF), inside which cores are arranged in one-ring structure. This Hetero-TA-MCF is a kind of bend-insensitive MCF with high density of cores and ultra-low crosstalk.


William Risk, Timothy Gosnell and Arto Nurmikko have brought together their diverse expertise from industry and academia to write the first fully comprehensive book on the generation and application of blue-green lasers. This volume describes the theory and practical implementation of three techniques for the generation of blue-green light: nonlinear frequency conversion of infrared lasers, upconversion lasers, and wide bandgap semiconductor diode lasers. In addition, it looks at the various applications that have driven the development of compact sources of blue-green light, and reflects on the recent application of these lasers in high-density data storage, color displays, reprographics, and biomedical technology. Compact Blue-Green Lasers is suitable for graduate-level courses or as a reference for academics and professionals in optics, applied physics, and electrical engineering.


Query translation for Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval (CLIR) has gained increasing attention in the research area. Previous work mainly used machine translation systems, bilingual dictionaries, or web corpora to perform query translation. However, most of these approaches require either expensive language resources or complex language models, and cannot achieve timely translation for new queries. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to automatically acquire query translation pairs from the knowledge hidden in the click-through data, that are represented by the URL a user clicks after submitting a query to a search engine. Our proposed solution consists of two stages: identitying bilingual URL pair patterns in the click-through data and matching query translation pairs based on user click behavior. Experimental results on a real dataset show that our method not only generates existing query translation pairs with high precision, but also generates many timely query translation pairs that could not be obtained by previous methods. A comparative study between our system and two commercial online translation systems shows the advantage of our proposed method.


On October 17, 1989 at 5:04 p.m. a 6.9 magnitude earthquake on the San Andreas Fault shook the Central Coast of California and lasted for fifteen seconds. The epicenter of the quake lay near Loma Prieta Peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains, about ten miles northeast of the city of Santa Cruz, deep in the redwoods of Forest of Nisene Marks State Park. The focus point was at a depth of ten miles. This earthquake killed sixty-three people and injured 3,757 others, and caused an estimated six billion dollars in property damage. It was the largest earthquake to occur on the San Andreas fault since the great San Francisco earthquake in April 1906. While the national media covered the damage in the San Francisco Bay Area extensively, far less attention was paid to the effects of the earthquake in Santa Cruz County, where the earthquake was actually centered. In the city of Santa Cruz much of the downtown Pacific Garden Mall, composed of older brick structures located on unconsolidated river sediments, collapsed, killing three people and injuring others. Ten miles to the south in Watsonville, a largely Spanish-speaking city, buildings also crumbled and people were killed. In the Santa Cruz Mountains, landslides closed many roads including Highway 17, which traverses the rugged mountains between Santa Cruz and San Jose, and for several days traffic was allowed through only in escorted convoys. In the spring quarter of 1990 the Regional History Project sponsored a student internship class entitled, An Interdisciplinary Oral History of the October 17, 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake . Randall Jarrell, who was the project's director for many years, was the instructor for the class, which was co-sponsored with UCSC faculty members John Dizikes in history and Conn Hallinan in journalism. Five students signed up for the course. They completed eleven oral history interviews. One of the interviews is with Barbara Garcia, who was director of Salud Para La Gente, a bilingual primary health care facility serving the greater Watsonville area. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, this community organization stepped in to address the enormous problems created by the lack of bilingual/bicultural volunteers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Red Cross. Diane Chang-Wilson interviewed eleven members of a fifth grade class at Rio del Mar School in Aptos. Chang-Wilson's oral histories provide candid reflections from children on how they felt and experienced the earthquake. Other interviews include Quinton Skinner, who was a UCSC student and an employee at Universes Records on the Pacific Garden Mall at the time of the quake; seventy-two year old Mayme Metcalf, who managed a small apartment complex in the Beach Flats area of Santa Cruz; Ramona Noriega, a UCSC re-entry student and mother of four children; and several narrators who had committed to a program of recovery from addiction to alcohol or other drugs when the earthquake happened. These oral histories illuminate the diverse subjectivity of this historical event in ways that are not captured in news photos and articles, and geological or engineering reports on structural damage.


Construction Site Layout Planning (CSLP) is an important problem because of its impact on time, cost, productivity, and safety of the projects. In this paper, CSLP is formulated by the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP). At first, two case studies including equal and un-equal area facilities are solved by the simulated annealing optimization algorithm. Then, the obtained results are compared with the other papers. The comparisons show that the proposed Simulated Annealing (SA) is as efficient as ACO, PSO, CBO, ECBO, WOA, WOA-CBO, and ACO-PA which have been proposed by other papers for the same problems. As a result, the comparisons show that SA is as capable as other meta-heuristics of solving the combinatorial optimization problems like CSLP, while the hardware properties and computational times have been compared. Besides the comparisons, the design of experiments shows the relationship between each SA parameter and the computational time of the algorithm. Also, the history of convergence of the proposed SA indicates the high speed of reaching the optimal solution and the artificial intelligence of the proposed SA.


Geoarchaeology in Action provides much-needed 'hands on' methodologies to assist anyone conducting or studying geoarchaeological investigations on sites and in landscapes, irrespective of date, place and environment. The book sets out the essential features of geoarchaeological practice and geomorphological processes, and is deliberately aimed at the archaeologist as practitioner in the field. It explains the basics - what can be expected, what approaches may be taken, and what outcomes might be forthcoming, and asks what we can reasonably expect a micromorphological approach to archaeological contexts, data and problems to tell us. The twelve case studies are taken from Britain, Europe and the Near East. They illustrate how past landscape change can be discovered and deciphered whether you are primarily a digger, environmentalist or soil micromorphologist. Based on the author's extensive experience of investigating buried and eroded landscapes, the book develops new ways of looking at conventional models of landscape change. With an extensive glossary, bibliography and more than 100 illustrations it will be an essential text and reference tool for students, academics and professionals.


Abstract This is a transcript of a supervision session with a young therapist caught in the complex world of a woman with multiple personality. Occurring very early in the written literature about treating multiple personalities, the highlight of this paper is the supervision style and technique of Jay Haley. His approach to supervision will make the reader wish that he or she could be in the room during this session.


Arm action should be efficient as it generates various components of running mechanics. While many authors recommend that the arms should be moved with elbows held at about 90 degrees, some distance running athletes have used different arms movements with varying degree of success and failure during competitions. The study investigated how different arm kinematics affected cardio-respiratory parameters and stride patterns during the steady phase of long distance running. Mean values of working heart rate (WHR), estimated percentage of maximum oxygen consumption (%VO2 max), ventilation rate (VR), and rating of perceived exertion (RPE) were used to estimate energy cost of running with different arm actions. Ten elite Kenyan distance running athletes were tested in ten submaximal treadmill trial runs, each trial performed with different arm action for 15 minutes at a speed corresponding to individual's 80% running effort. Repeated Measures ANOVA indicated significant difference in WHR, %VO2 max, RPE, and stride rate (SR) at p < .05. Medium effect size was observed; Omega Squared (ω) = .20. Arm action consisting of about ±20 degrees oscillation of the hands around 90 degrees angle at the elbow is more efficient than running with arms held at 90 degrees angle at the elbows.


In this work, we present a theoretical study on electron collision with interstellar gas molecules in the low energy range, we report, the rotational excitation total and momentum transfer cross sections are calculated for electron collisionwith interstellar gasmoleculesH2O,H2S andHCNin the lowenergy range (0.5 to 16.5 eV.).TheBorn Eikonal Series Approximation method and the hard sphere dipole interaction potential model are employed to present electron-molecule interaction. The results obtained are compared with experiment and theoretical data available in the literature.


To manage tyre waste and conserve natural aggregate resource, this research investigates the use of waste tyre rubber as partial replacement of fine aggregates in non-structural concrete. The research used Taguchi method to study the influence of mix proportion, water-tocement ratio and tyre rubber replacement percentage on concrete. Nine mixes were prepared with mix proportion of 1:2:4, 1:5:4 and 1:2.5:3; water-to-cement ratio of 0.25, 0.35 and 0.40 and rubber to fine aggregate replacement of 20%, 30% and 40%. Compressive strength and water absorption tests were carried out on 100 mm cubes. Compressive strength was directly proportional to the amount of coarse aggregate in the mix. Water-to-cement ratio increased the strength within the range used in the study. Strength was found to be more sensitive to the overall rubber content than the replacement ratio. Seven out of the nine mixes satisfied the minimum strength requirement for concrete blocks set by ASTM. Water absorption and density for all mixes satisfied the limits applicable for concrete blocks. The study indicates that mix proportions with fine to coarse aggregate ratio of less than 1.0 and w/c ratio around 0.40 can be used with tyre rubber replacements of up to 30 % to satisfy requirements for non-structural concrete.


Two case studies – Psychology and Sports Health and Exercise Science (SHES), investigated the influence of personal epistemology on teaching and learning in a higher education context. The investigation used the concept of a socialised habitus of academic personal epistemologies (SHAPE) on which to base the studies contained within the thesis. The theoretical underpinnings of SHAPE can be found in the work conducted on social practice theory (SPT), which includes Bourdieu (2000), Foucault (1984), Reckwitz (2002); and which draws on situated learning theory, activity systems theory, actor network theory, social learning theory (e.g. Bandura, 1977; Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Vygotsky, 1978) as discussed in Trowler (2012). In addition, SHAPE draws on the work of Bourdieu (1977) and his theory of habitus; and the burgeoning research into personal epistemology (epistemological beliefs is also used in the literature before this term, so they will be used interchangeably). This branch of research began with the seminal work of William Perry culminating in his text entitled 'Forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years: A scheme' (1970).
The research was underpinned by an instrumentalist ethos (Dewey, 1930) and adopted a mixed methods research design. Phase One of the research process began with the confirmation of the reliability and validity of a quantitative measure of personal epistemology – The Discipline-focused Epistemological Belief Questionnaire (DEBQ, Hofer, 2000). In Phase One and Two, a shortened, more robust revised version of the DEBQ was then used to test for differences between participants at the group level in different modules of study, and for changes in personal epistemology over the duration of a semester of study. The Approaches to Teaching Inventory (Trigwell & Prosser, 2004) was used in both case studies, as was the DEBQ. The Approaches to Study Skills Inventory for Students (Entwistle, Tait & McCune, 2000) was used in the Psychology Case Study, which also included qualitative data captured via a series of interviews with fourteen students and two teachers from two psychology undergraduate year two modules; and a focus group involving three of the students who had participated in the interview phase. The different phases and methods of data collection allowed the author to make comparisons between the perceptions of, and approaches to, teaching and learning in the two case studies.
3
The analyses in Phase One resulted in a revised, abbreviated version of the DEBQ. The results from all four phases of the investigation suggest the utility of SHAPE as a concept on which to base future research. The findings from this series of studies suggest the personal epistemology of the teacher has the most profound effect on their students' personal epistemologies as a group over a semester of study, whilst also recognising the contribution other elements of the teaching and learning context make. Variation within groups of students was also evident for dimensions of personal epistemology, and this influenced their perceptions of teaching, learning, and assessment; and how they approached their studies.
The conclusions to be drawn are: SHAPE is a useful addition to the 'tribes and territories' (Trowler & Becher, 2001) discipline level of analysis and is a more nuanced, contextual unit of analysis as recognised and recommended in the text entitled 'Tribes and Territories in the 21st Century: Rethinking the significance of disciplines in higher education' (Trowler, Saunders & Bamber, 2012). The strength of SHAPE lies in its recognition of the epistemological, ontological, and axiological influences on the processes of teaching, learning, and assessment within a higher education context. As such, SHAPE has the potential to make a useful contribution in the changing horizon of higher education manifest in the modular, semester based curriculum, and the burgeoning of 'interdisciplinarity' and its challenge to the established academic disciplinary fields.


It is often said that a deep learning model is"invariant"to some specific type of transformation. However, what is meant by this statement strongly depends on the context in which it is made. In this paper we explore the nature of invariance and equivariance of deep learning models with the goal of better understanding the ways in which they actually capture these concepts on a formal level. We introduce a family of invariance and equivariance metrics that allows us to quantify these properties in a way that disentangles them from other metrics such as loss or accuracy. We use our metrics to better understand the two most popular methods used to build invariance into networks: data augmentation and equivariant layers. We draw a range of conclusions about invariance and equivariance in deep learning models, ranging from whether initializing a model with pretrained weights has an effect on a trained model's invariance, to the extent to which invariance learned via training can generalize to out-of-distribution data.


Motivated by the desire to better understand the truly remarkable information processing capabilities of the brain, numerous biologically plausible computational models have been explored in the recent decades. Already today, many applications employ neural networks to solve complex real world problems. Significant progress has been made in areas such as speech recognition, robotic controllers, associative memory and function approximation. This book develops an extension for a machine learning technique called the evolving spiking neural network (eSNN). It allows the automatic tuning of the neural and learning-related parameters of eSNN in order to promote its straightforward application to many different problem domains. The book proposes novel evolutionary algorithms capable of efficiently exploring multiple mixed-variable search spaces simultaneously. The enhanced eSNN is comprehensively investigated on benchmark problems and a real-world case study.


Experimentalists seeking to improve the coherent lifetimes of quantum bits have generally focused on mitigating decoherence mechanisms through, for example, improvements to qubit designs and materials, and system isolation from environmental perturbations. In the case of the phase degree of freedom in a quantum superposition, however, the coherence that must be preserved is not solely internal to the qubit, but rather necessarily includes that of the qubit relative to the "master clock" (e.g. a local oscillator) that governs its control system. In this manuscript we articulate the impact of instabilities in the master clock on qubit phase coherence, and provide tools to calculate the contributions to qubit error arising from these processes. We first connect standard oscillator phase-noise metrics to their corresponding qubit dephasing spectral densities. We then use representative lab-grade and performance-grade oscillator specifications to calculate operational fidelity bounds on trapped-ion and superconducting qubits with relatively slow and fast operation times. We discuss the relevance of these bounds for quantum error correction in contemporary experiments and future large-scale quantum information systems, and discuss potential means to improve master clock stability.


It is widely assumed that criminal defendants who face multiple charges in a single trial have a harder time prevailing than those who face several trials of one count each. Conventional wisdom also has it that a defendant who is joined for trial with other suspects is worse off than one who stands trial alone. Until now, these assumptions have never been tested empirically. Looking at nearly 20,000 federal criminal trials over a five-year period, this Article asks if the traditional beliefs are true, and if so, tries to measure the impact on trial outcomes of joining counts and defendants. It turns out that joinder has a significant prejudicial effect on trials, although not quite the same effect that is usually assumed. Using statistical models that control for a range of variables, the authors discovered that trial defendants who face multiple counts are roughly 10% more likely to be convicted of the most serious charge than a defendant who stands trial on a single count. Surprisingly, however, joining co-defendants in a single trial had virtually no impact on the likelihood of conviction, at least in the aggregate. Using the results of the empirical study, the article then reconsiders the competing policy issues that underlie the joinder and severance doctrine, and explores the implications of the empirical findings.


Japan is a key leading economy in the Asia Pacific region. This study examines the relationship between the financial health, as measured by the Altman Z-Score, and corporate performance, as measured by the Return on Equity (ROE), of listed manufacturing companies in this market (the Tokyo Stock Exchange). A linear regression has been conducted between these variables to determine the magnitude and direction of their relationships. The trends of Z-Scores over a five-year period have also been analysed. The analysis covers the period from 2013 to 2017 (inclusive) and yields a statistically positive correlation between ROE and the Z-Score for the market. Japan registered moderate-to-strong mean and median Z-Scores. These findings further support the strong economic position of this market as an Asian giant.


Characterization and modeling of aquifers is particularly challenging in fractured media, where flow is concentrated into channels that are poorly suited to traditional approaches to analysis. The generalized radial flow model is an alternative method for hydraulic test interpretation that infers an additional parameter, the flow dimension n, to describe the flow geometry. This study was a Monte Carlo analysis of numerical models of aquifer tests in two‐dimensional fractured media, with the objective of understanding the relationships between the parameters of a discrete fracture network (DFN) with lengths distributed as a power law, the flow dimension, and the regime of hydraulic diffusion (e.g., Fickian or non‐Fickian). The diffusion regime of each realization was evaluated using 〈R2〉 ∼ tk, where t is time, 〈R2〉 is the mean squared radius of hydraulic diffusion, and an apparent value of k = 1 indicates normal (Fickian) diffusion and k < 1 indicates anomalous (non‐Fickian) diffusion. For the DFN model, the apparent flow dimension and exponent k depend on both the density and the power of the fracture length distribution, and thus also on the connectivity regime of the fracture network system. Depending on the connectivity regime, the apparent flow dimension stabilizes to less than the Euclidean dimension and the apparent value of k < 1 indicates that hydraulic diffusion is non‐Fickian. These results suggest that the flow dimension and the exponent k may be useful for characterizing flow and transport in fractured media.


It is estimated that by 2020 there could be as many as 4 million visually impaired or blind people living in the UK. These visually impaired or blind people will use assistive technologies such as screen readers to access website content on the internet. Currently the governing body of the internet, the World Wide Web Consortium has released and continues to develop a new standard of the HTML markup language which is used to code website content. This new HTML standard, HTML 5 has been heralded as a new semantically correct markup language. HTML 5 should be more accessible to users of assisted technologies and should also facilitate the incorporation into websites of rich internet applications and other media in a more accessible way. However the Royal National Institute for Blind People (RNIB) have suggested that the opposite may be proving to be true and that HTML 5 websites may be more inaccessible than websites coded in earlier versions of HTML. This study employs a mixed methods methodology, including screen reader accessibility testing and web developer interviews. This methodology will establish the accessibility of HTML 5 coded websites and prove or disprove the hypothesis of the RNIB while adding granularity and perspective to the results of the testing


The environmental history of the Colorado River delta during the past century is one of the most important and most neglected stories of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Thanks to entrepreneurs such as William E. Smythe, the surrounding desert in Arizona, California, Sonora, and Baja California has been transformed into an agricultural oasis, but not without significant ecological, political, economic, and social consequences. Evan Ward explores the rapid development of this region, examining the ways in which regional politics and international relations created a garden in the Mexicali, Yuma, and Imperial Valleys while simultaneously threatening the life of the Colorado River. Tracing the transformation of the delta by irrigated agribusiness through the twentieth century, he draws on untapped archival resources from both sides of the border to offer a new look at one of the world's most contested landscapes. Border Oasis tells how two very different nations developed the delta into an agricultural oasis at enormous environmental cost. Focusing on the years 1940 to 1975 including the disastrous salinity crisis of the 1960s and 1970s it combines Mexican, Native American, and U.S. perspectives to demonstrate that the political and diplomatic influences on the delta played as much a part in the region's transformation as did irrigation. Ward reveals how mistrust among political and economic participants has been fueled by conflict between national and local officials on both sides of the border, by Mexican nationalism, and by a mutual recognition that water is the critical ingredient for regional economic development. With overemphasis on development in both nations leading to an ecological breaking point, Ward demonstrates that conflicting interests have made sound binational management of the delta nearly impossible. By weaving together all of these threads that have produced the fabric of today's lower Colorado, his study shows that the environmental history of the delta must be understood as a whole, not from the standpoint of only one of many competing interests.


The direction of recent research suggests the convergence of digital and biological systems, where researchers designed and engineered technology that share many of the aspects of living organisms. We explore a step towards "growable robotics", a type of robotic system that has the ability to self-grow either a part of or its whole body into a functional shape with minimal help from the external system. We propose the application of microbial cellulose, as a biological exoskeleton of the electrical system with renewable, self-healing, and shape changing properties. We demonstrate the process of creating the growable robot by prototyping a simple rover inspired by NASA folded origami mechanisms. Finally, we analyze the potential applications based on the properties of the material and suggest the future directions in growable and biological augmented robotics.


Migration of the posterior lateral line primordium is a process of directed response to a chemotactic signal. We have observed directional protrusions of the cells at the leading edge of migrating primordia. The p21 activated kinase (Pak) family of proteins are downstream effectors of the small GTPases Rac and Cdc42 and have been shown to play important roles in the regulation of cell adhesion and migration in many organisms. In order to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying directed cell migration in zebrafish we have identified and characterised two zebrafish pak2 genes {lcub}pak2a and pak2b) and found that their functions are important for migration of the lateral line primordium. Pak2a and Pak2b have similar protein sequences suggesting similar functions in development. Knock down of Pak2 using antisense morpholino oligonucleotides resulted in a variety of defects in zebrafish development including retarded migration of the posterior lateral line primordium and aberrant migration of primordial germ cells. Zebrafish pak2 genes may function by dynamically regulating the F-actin reorganisation and focal adhesion formation required for directed migration. Differences in the phenotypes generated by knock down of Pak2a and Pak2b may be explained in part by the observation that Pak2a can bind to the adaptor protein Nek while Pak2b cannot. Pak2b is required to establish and/or maintain F-actin organisation, cadherin- mediated adhesion and tissue integrity within the migrating lateral line primordium. We show that dynamic regulation of the actin cytoskeleton and cell adhesion is involved in the formation of rosette-like structures within the lateral line primordium which are deposited as a unit and represent the nascent neuromast precursors. We have also identified possible roles for Pak2a and Pak2b in regulating gene expression in early zebrafish development. Pak2 proteins may control the expression of several genes involved in mesoderm formation through regulation of transcriptional activators and repressors.


Objective Quantitative determination of fecal fat still is the gold standard for measuring malabsorption. We evaluated the importance of standardized food intake before and under the collection of feces. Material and Methods In a project, evaluating patients with suspected chronic pancreatitis (CP) and healthy volunteers (HC), stools were collected for 72 hours coupled to registration of nutritional intake over five consecutive days. Patient groups were created by a modified Layer score, which includes imaging findings, clinical parameters and pancreas function testing. Results We found 12 patients with CP, 11 patients without CP and 13 healthy individuals in our database. Median fecal fat in CP patients was 12 g/day, in non-CP patients 5 g/day and in healthy controls 5 g/day. Median fat absorption coefficient was 81% in those with chronic pancreatitis, 92% in those without CP and 92% in healthy controls. Corresponding median fat intake was 65 g/day, 68 g/day and 81 g/day in the respective groups. Spearman Rank Order Correlation between fecal fat (g/d) and fat absorption coefficient in all study subjects (n = 36) was good (-0.88 (p<0.001)). When we stratified groups according to fat intake, correlation between fecal fat and fat absorption was also good (-0.86 to -0.95). Conclusion In the diagnoses of fat malabsorption, calculating the ratio of fat absorption did not give additional information compared to fecal fat.


An investigation has been done to study the effect of long-term oral doses vitamin c 100 mg/kgBW pretreatment on hypoglycemic effect of glibenclamide in sprague-dawley rat. The research was purely one-way completely random experimental design. The subject were 30 rat divided to 5 groups, 1st group administered using CMC Na 0,5 %, 2sd group using glibenclamide 0,45 mg/Kg BW, 3rd using vitamin C 100 mg/kgBW once time in day for 1 day and glibenclamide 100 mg/kgBW, 4th group using vitamin C 100 mg/kgBW once time in day for 3 days and glibenclamide 100 mg/kgBW, and 5th group administered vitamin C 100 mg/kgBW once time in day for 7 days and glibenclamide 100 mg/kgBW. Before administered by glibenclamide the subject was fasted during 18 hours. The hypoglycemic effect of glibenclamide after concomitant vitamin C 100 mg/kgBW was measured following an oral glucose tolerance test (GOTT). All of subject was get glucose 1,75 g/Kg BW 20 minutes after administered by glibenclamide. The concentration of blood glucose was established in 0 minute before GOTT and 15, 30, 60, 90, 120, 180, and 240 minutes of blood glucose concentration using enzymatic method used GOD-POD reagent. The data were analyzed statistically with one-way ANOVA, following Tukey test (p keyword : Vitamin C, glibenclamide, hipoglychemic activity


We study self-interacting dark matter coupled to the Standard Model via the Higgs portal. We consider a scenario where dark matter is a thermal relic with strong enough self-interactions that can alleviate the problems of collisionless dark matter. We study constraints from direct-detection searches, the LHC, and big bang nucleosynthesis. We show that the tension between these constraints and the need for sufficiently strong self-interactions with light mediators can be alleviated by coupling the mediator to either active or sterile neutrinos. Future direct-detection data offers great potential and can be used to find evidence of a light mediator and verify that dark matter scatters via long-range self-interactions.


We have analyzed bibliographical observational data and theoretical predictions, in order to probe the environment in which extremely metal-poor dwarf galaxies (XMPs) reside. We have assessed the H i component and its relation to the optical galaxy, the cosmic web type (voids, sheets, filaments and knots), the overdensity parameter and analyzed the nearest galaxy neighbors. The aim is to understand the role of interactions and cosmological accretion flows in the XMP observational properties, particularly the triggering and feeding of the star formation. We find that XMPs behave similarly to Blue Compact Dwarfs; they preferably populate low-density environments in the local universe: ∼60% occupy underdense regions, and ∼75% reside in voids and sheets. This is more extreme than the distribution of irregular galaxies, and in contrast to those regions preferred by elliptical galaxies (knots and filaments). We further find results consistent with previous observations; while the environment does determine the fraction of a certain galaxy type, it does not determine the overall observational properties. With the exception of five documented cases (four sources with companions and one recent merger), XMPs do not generally show signatures of major mergers and interactions; we find only one XMP with a companion galaxy within a distance of 100 kpc, and the H i gas in XMPs is typically well-behaved, demonstrating asymmetries mostly in the outskirts. We conclude that metal-poor accretion flows may be driving the XMP evolution. Such cosmological accretion could explain all the major XMP observational properties: isolation, lack of interaction/merger signatures, asymmetric optical morphology, large amounts of unsettled, metal-poor H i gas, metallicity inhomogeneities, and large specific star formation.


One of the key decisions that economists working on integrated studies of climate change face is the selection of the method of accounting for damages resulting from possible climate change across a long temporal scale and the method for the intertemporal comparison of the costs associated with possible greenhouse gas abatement strategies. Sensitivity tests show that the method applied and the resulting discount rate has a major impact on the optimal climate strategy. The paper provides a short review of the various techniques that have been proposed and applied in various integrated models of climate change. The underlying problem is the following dilemma. One can attempt to be consistent with the economic theory and empirical observations, but in this case the derived discount rate will be on the order of 5 to 8%. As a result, even possibly significant damages from climate change turn out to be negligible when considered at their present value. The artificially low discount rate based on ethical reasoning, on the other hand, makes our climate-related decisions and resource allocations inconsistent with the majority of other public policy decisions.