With a focus on the Russian Federation, this article examines the adoption by the Council of Europe of Protocol No.14 to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and its long-delayed coming into force. The author starts with the question of the original object and purpose of the Council, and how they have now changed. This leads to an analysis of the nature of the crisis – a crisis of success – now faced by the ECHR system, and the reform process which started, on the 50th anniversary of the ECHR, in 2000. After describing Protocol No.14 itself, and the discussion which has surrounded it, the article turns to the central issue. This is not the question of procedural reform, or even admissibility criteria, but what lies behind – the "soul" of the ECHR system. Should the Strasbourg Court remain a court which renders "individual justice", albeit only for a handful of applicants and with long delays; or should it make become a court which renders "constitutional justice"? The article focuses on the specific problems faced by Russia in its relations with the Council of Europe; and an analysis of the lengthy refusal by the Russian State Duma to ratify Protocol No. 14. The author concludes with an attempted prognosis.


Critique has long been considered a benchmark of design education and practice, both as a way to elicit feedback about design artifacts in the process of production and as a high-stakes assessment tool in academia. In this study, I investigate a specific form of critique between peers that emerges organically in the design studio apart from coursework or guidance of a professor. Based on intensive interviews and observations, this informal peer critique appears to elicit the design judgment of the individual designer in explicit ways, encouraging peers to follow new paths in their design process, while also verbalizing oftenimplicit design decisions that have already been made. Implications for future research in academic and professional practice are considered.


Extending recent research efforts on the effects of personality and moods at work, this study examined the impact of personality traits and mood states in job burnout. Specifically, the field study examined the role of 2 personality traits and positive and negative moods (states) in burnout among nurses working at 2 hospitals. Results indicate that extra-version significantly predicted the diminished accomplishment component of burnout, and neuroticism significantly predicted the exhaustion and depersonalization components. Thus, the findings indicate that personality dimensions predict burnout components differentially. Further, positive moods mediated the relationship between extraversion and accomplishment, while negative moods partially mediated between neuroticism and exhaustion. Thus, moods exhibited both direct and mediating effects. Implications for management and suggestions for figure research are offered.


Researchers conducting randomized clinical trials
with two treatment groups sometimes wish to determine whether biomarkers are
predictive and/or prognostic. They can use regression models with interaction
terms to assess the role of the biomarker of interest. However, although the
interaction term is undoubtedly a suitable measure for prediction, the optimal
way to measure prognosis is less clear. In this article, we define causal
measures that can be used for prognosis and prediction based on biomarkers. The
causal measure for prognosis is defined as the average of two differences in
status between biomarker-positive and -negative subjects under treatment and
control conditions. The causal measure for
prediction is defined as the difference between the causal effect of the
treatment for biomarker-positive and biomarker-negative subjects. We also explain the relationship between the proposed measures and the
regression parameters. The causal measure for prognosis corresponds to the terms
for the biomarker in a regression model, where the values of the dummy variables
representing the explanatory variables are -1/2 or 1/2. The causal measure for prediction is simply the causal effect
of the interaction term in a regression model. In addition, for a binary
outcome, we express the causal measures in
terms of four response types: always-responder, complier, non-complier,
and never-responder. The causal measure for prognosis can be expressed as a function
of always- and never-responders, and the causal measure for prediction as a
function of compliers and non-compliers. This enables us to demonstrate that
the proposed measures are plausible in the case of a binary outcome. Our causal measures should be used to assess whether
a biomarker is prognostic and/or predictive.


Relationships between species composition and its environmental determinants are a basic objective of ecology. Such relationships are scale dependent, and predictors of species composition typically include variables such as climate, topographic, historical legacies, land uses, human population levels, and random processes. Our objective was to quantify the effect of environmental determinants on U.S. mammal composition at various spatial scales. We found that climate was the predominant factor affecting species composition, and its relative impact increased in correlation with the increase of the spatial scale. Another factor affecting species composition is land-use–land-cover. Our findings showed that its impact decreased as the spatial scale increased. We provide quantitative indication of highly significant effect of climate and land-use–land-cover variables on mammal composition at multiple scales.


A new raceway adiabatic flame temperature (RAFT) model has been developed where the effect of injected BOF slag has been considered. A parameter study was performed to evaluate the influence of (i) coke temperature factor, (ii) degree of silica reduction, (iii) coal powder burning degree, (iv) reduction degree of some components in injected BOF slag when leaving raceway, (v) enthalpy of coke burning and (vi) Cp value of coke. The coke burning enthalpy was found to have the largest influence on the absolute value of RAFT. In Swedish blast furnaces, the RAFT is usually kept relatively constant by adjusting the oxygen content in the blast. Therefore, the exchange ratios between the oxygen content in blast and the injected material to retain RAFT were predicted. The burning degree of coal powder was found to have the largest influence when coal powder was evaluated. Silica and silicon carbide reduction was found to have the largest influence when a change of BOF slag rate was evaluated.


Excessive interfacial micromotion endangers the implant primary stability by favoring the formation of a fibrous tissue layer at the bone-implant interface. It was recently proposed that implant micromotion induces fluid flow in the granulation tissue that forms between the implant and bone right after implantation. This fluid flow might in turn affect the differentiation of the mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) hosted in this tissue. Therefore, there is a high interest in characterizing the micromotion-induced fluid flow at the bone-implant interface. In this project, a FE model of the bone-implant interface will be used to study the influence of implant micromotion, implant geometry and material definition on fluid flow in the granulation tissue.


Mankind's constant pursuit of knowledge founded on innovation and creativity has led to a more complex world. A world governed by structures stretching high into the skies, objects flying faster than the speed of sound and exploration of the stars. These advancements have manifested in structures with complex geometrical designs, new building and engineering materials and the need for constant structural health monitoring (SHM). Structures comprising of a handful of components to those enlisting thousands are not impervious to failure. The 'perfect' material, one that will never fail, does not exist and may never. The need to remove the possibility of failure from the ever growing list of materials, components and structures has never been greater. There is an abundance of well suited techniques for a myriad of engineering problems, all suited for individual problem areas but all suffering from different weaknesses. There is no complete solution, only partial, short-lived solutions which are eclipsed by the next. The objective of this PhD is to explore a new and interesting non-destructive testing and evaluation (NDT/E) technique; nonlinear ultrasound. The work looks at assessment of both metallic and composite structures. As of recently, the technique has become well studied and documented, which has highlighted the associated benefits. Theoretically it builds on the fundamental theories of ultrasound testing techniques, but provides solutions that have amplified sensitivity in early damage detection. The techniques follow the main principle that the excitation of damaged regions results in clapping/rubbing mechanisms that give rise to further harmonic production, these further harmonics can be correlated to damage. Nonlinear ultrasound techniques were used to assess various systems that are prone to failure, these systems included adhesively bonded structures, bolted structures, structures susceptible to fatigue, compression loaded structures and impact damage of a composite plate. A series of experiments were undertaken which evaluated the ability of novel nonlinear ultrasound techniques to detect damage within these systems. Initially the primary principles of nonlinear ultrasound techniques those that affect the accuracy and repeatability of these methods were explored. The effects of hysteresis, input and output voltages of piezoelectric transducers (PZTs), modal analysis, and various nonlinear parameters were evaluated. This allowed for a clear understanding of what factors affect the accurate generation of data from these techniques. After determining various influences on results, adhesive and bolted joints were evaluated. With the aim to determine accurate nonlinear techniques that would be able to assess kissing bonds in metallic and composite joints, cracks in loaded structures and the loosened state of an individual bolt. A novel frequency specific nonlinear acoustic moment method was used to evaluate the presence of kissing bonds. The acoustic moment experiments provided good kissing bond detection probability in both metallic and composite joints. Further experiments explored the effects of structurally loading on the production of nonlinear responses. The results provided valuable insight into the potential for these techniques to assess defects in loaded structures. Thus kissing bond detection as well as the loaded state of the structure was possible using the nonlinear acoustic moment method developed. Joints account for a large proportion of mechanical and engineering structures, robust evaluation techniques would provide great savings in terms of maintenance, complete failure and lifetime service costs. The main finding was the ability to measure the loosened state of an individual bolt. Individual bolt loosened state was possible by using only two PZTs while assessing a system which included four bolts. This piece of research provides significant advancement in SHM of these structures, which has implications for small and large scale industrial joints. Fatigue failure is the most prominent failure mechanism in metallic structures, an investigation into a baseline-free method using nonlinear ultrasound was undertaken. A fatigued component was examined over its useful life using a modulated nonlinear ultrasound technique, where the development of a nonlinear ultrasound theory was used to assess the residual fatigue life by comparing the nonlinear modulated response to a theoretical model. Findings showed good correlation between the theoretical and experimental results, paving the way for further studies of baseline-free methods. A baseline-free testing method would provide a great leap forward in current testing procedures; the work highlights the potential of such methods. Further studies explored the possibility of using a computational model to predict damage levels in a material from a measured experimental nonlinear parameter. The findings of this research found good correlation between the second harmonic measured experimentally and that of the computational model. A novel nonlinear ultrasound based thermosonic technique was developed using a dual frequency excitation method. The investigation looked at determining barely visible impact damage (BVID) of a composite plate. The speed and accuracy of the method provided many advantages over current testing methods, which can be slow and deliver inconsistent results. The research relied on the determination of damage-specific resonance frequencies (DSRF), which results in focused heating at the damaged zones. The methodology explored could be used in an autonomous setup which would provide rapid assessment of composites and higher probability of damage detection. Finally the nonlinear ultrasound research completed establishes the broad range of applications for these techniques. The ease of adaptability of the techniques from metallic to composite, loaded and unloaded structures and their ability to improve other NDT/E techniques shows the great potential of nonlinear ultrasound. Through methodical application of the various nonlinear ultrasound techniques to other SHM problems there is a great degree of certainty that these methods would provide further benefits.


Techniques used in reconstruction of the paleo-climate series in China are reviewed. Seasonal and annual mean temperature series have been obtained on the basis of documentary data sources, with decadal resolution for the last 500 years and 50-year resolution for the last millennium. Concerning the precipitation, only the summer rainfall pattern was estimated year by year from 950 AD to the present. Six types of pattern were identified, then changes in the frequency of the types were studied. Finally, general characteristics of climatic change in China for the last millennium are described.


The level of understanding of the risks associated with speed and speeding is increasing. However, this is not fully reflected in the implementation of speed reduction measures nor in an awareness of the significance of these risks by the general population. This paper reviews approaches to three other public health-related behaviours about which public perceptions and attitudes have changed radically - smoking, seatbelt wearing, and drink driving. The paper examines the evolution of policies and strategies designed to manage these public health issues and bring about enduring changes in people's behaviour. In each case, identification and understanding of the problem has derived from epidemiological investigations of the behaviours themselves, which in turn have provided the basis for the introduction of control measures. This has significant implications for improved management of travelling speed. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to assess opportunities for the further development, introduction and acceptance of measures used to control speed and reduce the incidence of speed-related crashes. Keywords: Drink driving, Law enforcement, Restraint usage, Smoking, Speed Language: en


Data validity is a very important aspect of cancer registries in ensuring data quality for research and interventions. This study focused on evaluating the repeatability of manual coding of cancer reports in the South African National Cancer Registry (NCR). This cross-sectional study used the Delphi technique to classify 48 generic tumour sites into sites that would be most likely ("difficult") and least likely ("not difficult") to give rise to discordant results among coders. Reports received from the Charlotte Maxeke Academic Hospital were manually recoded by five coders (2 301 reports, e.g. approximately 400 reports each) for intracoder agreement; and by four coders (400 reports) for inter-coder agreement. Unweighted kappa statistics were calculated and interpreted using Byrts' criteria. After four rounds of the Delphi technique, consensus was reached on the classification of 91.7% (44/48) of the sites. The remaining four sites were classified according to modal expert opinion. The overall kappa was higher for intra-coder agreement (0.92) than for inter-coder agreement (0.89). "Not difficult" tumour sites reflected better agreement than "difficult" tumour sites. Ten sites (skin other, basal cell carcinoma of the skin, connective tissue, other specified, lung, colorectal, prostate, oesophagus, naso-oropharynx and primary site unknown) were among the top 80% misclassified sites. The repeatability of manual coding at the NCR was rated as "good" according to Byrts' criteria. Misclassified sites should be prioritised for coder training and the strengthening of the quality assurance system.


Projection of current trends in maternal and neonatal mortality reduction shows that many countries will fall short of the UN Millennium Development Goal 4 and 5. Underutilization of maternal health services contributes to this poor progress toward reducing maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality. Moreover, the quality of services continues to lag in many countries, with a negative effect on the health of women and their babies, including deterring women from seeking care. To enhance the use and provision of quality maternal care, countries and donors are increasingly using financial incentives. This paper introduces the JHPN Supplement, in which each paper reviews the evidence of the effectiveness of a specific financial incentive instrument with the aim of improving the use and quality of maternal healthcare and impact. The US Agency for International Development and the US National Institutes of Health convened a US Government Evidence Summit on Enhancing Provision and Use of Maternal Health Services through Financial Incentives on 24-25 April 2012 in Washington, DC. The Summit brought together leading global experts in finance, maternal health, and health systems from governments, academia, development organizations, and foundations to assess the evidence on whether financial incentives significantly and substantially increase provision, use and quality of maternal health services, and the contextual factors that impact the effectiveness of these incentives. Evidence review teams evaluated the multidisciplinary evidence of various financial mechanisms, including supply-side incentives (e.g. performance-based financing, user fees, and various insurance mechanisms) and demand-side incentives (e.g. conditional cash transfers, vouchers, user fee exemptions, and subsidies for care-seeking). At the Summit, the teams presented a synthesis of evidence and initial recommendations on practice, policy, and research for discussion. The Summit enabled structured feedback on recommendations which the teams included in their final papers appearing in this Supplement. Papers in this Supplement review the evidence for a specific financial incentive mechanism (e.g. pay for performance, conditional cash transfer) to improve the use and quality of maternal healthcare and makes recommendations for programmes and future research. While data on programmes using financial incentives for improved use and indications of the quality of maternal health services support specific conclusions and recommendations, including those for future research, data linking the use of financial incentives with improved health outcomes are minimal.


We present an integrative review of the development of child anxiety, drawing on a number of strands of research. Family aggregation and genetic studies indicate raised vulnerability to anxiety in offspring of adults with the disorder (e.g. the temperamental style of behavioural inhibition, or information processing biases). Environmental factors are also important; these include adverse life events and exposure to negative information or modelling. Parents are likely to be key, although not unique, sources of such influences, particularly if they are anxious themselves. Some parenting behaviours associated with child anxiety, such as overprotection, may be elicited by child characteristics, especially in the context of parental anxiety, and these may serve to maintain child disorder. Emerging evidence emphasizes the importance of taking the nature of child and parental anxiety into account, of constructing assessments and interventions that are both disorder specific, and of considering bidirectional influences.


Results of a systematic analysis of actual vs. estimated uncertainty in scientific models are presented. Data sets include: i) time trends in the sequential measurements of the same physical quantity; ii) national population projections; iii) projections for the United States' energy sector. Probabilities of large deviations from the true values are parametrized by an exponential distribution with the slope determined by the data. An alternative parametrization by Levy stable distributions, based on the fractal model for the distribution of errors, is described. In practice, one can hedge against unsuspected uncertainties by inflating the reported uncertainty range by a default safety factor determined from the relevant historical data sets. This empirical approach can be used in the uncertainty analysis of the low probability/high consequence events (such as risk to public health from exposure to electromagnetic fields or risk of extreme sea-level rise resulting from global warming).


Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) can be found as far back as the 1940s. However, it was in 1972 that the concept first came into play, originated by Professor Archie Cochrane, in his book, Effectiveness & Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services. This was the foundation for evidence based research, and in 1992 a facility was funded by the UK government, with the aim of performing randomly controlled tests on health services. This is no coincidence since evidence-based medicine suggests a personal responsibility for clinicians to keep abreast of research that would be difficult without the information access that the web provides. Evidence-based medicine is now generally perceived to be the dominant operating system in conventional medicine. The term "evidence-based medicine" first appears in 1991, in a piece by Gordon Guyatt . But EBM came to the attention of a wider audience in 1992 with an article by the Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group 2 that boldly proclaimed EBM as a "new paradigm" in medicine. The National Institutes of Health defines "clinical research" as research conducted with human subjects (or on material of human origin such as tissues, specimens and cognitive phenomena) for which an investigator (or colleague) directly interacts with human subjects. Excluded from this definition are in vitro studies that utilize human tissues that cannot be linked to a living individual. Indeed, Clinical trials are important component of evidence based medicine. A clinical trial is a research study that finds new ways to prevent, diagnose or treat disease . For example, cancer clinical trials test new treatments in people with cancer. These treatments investigate promising new drugs, drug combinations, new approaches to surgery or radiation therapy, and advances in new areas such as gene therapy. Clinical trials are the final step in a long process. There is no doubt that EBM plays an important role in the future of medical biotechnology.


Especially in the course of the past century and a half, many countries have organised fleet reviews to commemorate some or other important event in the history of the concerned country, or in the history of its navy. In this study, three major fleet reviews and concomitant naval events are described, discussed and analysed, in an effort to, inter alia, place the history of these particular events on record, to ascertain just how important they actually were, and to draw conclusions that could be of importance for future naval planning. The three fleet reviews that form the basis of this study are the South African (SA) Navy's 75th anniversary celebrations (SAN75) in and off Simon's Town and Cape Town in 1997, the 200th anniversary of the battle at Trafalgar that was commemorated in and off Portsmouth in 2005, and the 100th anniversary of the arrival of the Royal Australian Navy's first warships in Sydney, which was commemorated in that city's harbour and bay in 2013. Throughout, the emphasis will fall on the SA Navy's role, for example in hosting SAN75 and participating in Trafalgar200; and its non-participation in the 2013 review.


Matrix factorization (MF) is a popular collaborative filtering approach for recommender systems due to its simplicity and effectiveness. Existing MF methods either assume that all latent features are uncorrelated or assume that all are correlated. To address the important issue of what structure should be imposed on the features, we investigate the covariance matrix of the latent features learned from real data. Based on the findings, we propose an MF model with a sparse covariance prior which favors a sparse yet non-diagonal covariance matrix. Not only can this reflect the semantics more faithfully, but imposing sparsity can also have a side effect of preventing overfitting. Starting from a probabilistic generative model with a sparse covariance prior, we formulate the model inference problem as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation problem. The optimization procedure makes use of stochastic gradient descent and majorization-minimization. For empirical validation, we conduct experiments using the MovieLens and Netflix datasets to compare the proposed method with two strong baselines which use different priors. Experimental results show that our sparse covariance prior can lead to performance improvement.


In the three decades from 1910 to 1940, the fraction of U.S. youths enrolled in public and private secondary schools increased from 18 to 71 percent and the fraction graduating soared from 9 to 51 percent. At the same time, state compulsory education and child labor legislation became more stringent and potentially constrained secondary-school aged youths. It might appear from the timing and the specifics of this history that the laws caused the increase in education rates. We evaluate the possibility that state compulsory schooling and child labor laws caused the increase in education rates by using contemporaneous evidence on enrollments. We also use micro-data from the 1960 census to examine the effect of the laws on overall educational attainment. Our estimation approach exploits cross-state differences in the timing of changes in state laws. We find that the expansion of state compulsory schooling and child labor laws from 1910 to 1939 can, at best, account for 5 percent of the increase in high school enrollments and can account for about the same portion of the increase in the eventual educational attainment for the affected cohorts over the period.


Abstract. Medium- to long-range forecasts often guide reservoir
release decisions to support water management objectives, including
mitigating flood and drought risks. While there is a burgeoning field of
science targeted at improving forecast products and associated decision
support models, data describing how and when forecasts are applied in
practice remain undeveloped. This lack of knowledge may prevent
hydrological modelers from developing accurate reservoir release schemes for
large-scale, distributed hydrology models that are increasingly used to
assess the vulnerabilities of large regions to hydrological stress. We
address this issue by estimating seasonally varying, regulated inflow
forecast horizons used in the operations of more than 300 dams throughout
the conterminous United States (CONUS). For each dam, we take actual forward
observed inflows (perfect foresight) as a proxy for forecasted flows
available to the operator and then identify for each week of the year the
forward horizon that best explains the release decisions taken. Resulting
"horizon curves" specify for each dam the inferred inflow forecast horizon
as a function of the week of the water year. These curves are analyzed for
strength of evidence for contribution of medium- to long-range forecasts in
decision making. We use random forest classification to estimate that
approximately 80 % of large dams and reservoirs in the US ( 1553±50
out of 1927 dams with at least 10 Mm 3 storage capacity) adopt medium- to
long-range inflow forecasts to inform release decisions during at least part
of the water year. Long-range forecast horizons (more than 6 weeks ahead)
are detected in the operations of reservoirs located in high-elevation
regions of the western US, where snowpack information likely guides the
release. A simulation exercise conducted on four key western US reservoirs
indicates that forecast-informed models of reservoir operations may
outperform models that neglect the horizon curve – including during flood
and drought conditions.


Clustering is a central unsupervised learning task with a wide variety of applications. Unlike in supervised learning, different clustering algorithms may yield dramatically different outputs for the same input sets. As such, the choice of algorithm is crucial. When selecting a clustering algorithm, users tend to focus on cost-related considerations, such as running times, software purchasing costs, etc. Yet differences concerning the output of the algorithms are a more primal consideration. We propose an approach for selecting clustering algorithms based on differences in their input-output behaviour. This approach relies on identifying significant properties of clustering algorithms and classifying algorithms based on the properties that they satisfy. We begin with Kleinberg's impossibility result, which relies on concise abstract properties that are well-suited for our approach. Kleinberg showed that three specific properties cannot be satisfied by the same algorithm. We illustrate that the impossibility result is a consequence of the formalism used, proving that these properties can be formulated without leading to inconsistency in the context of clustering quality measures or algorithms whose input requires the number of clusters. Combining Kleinberg's properties with newly proposed ones, we provide an extensive propertybase classification of common clustering paradigms. We use some of these properties to provide a novel characterization of the class of linkage-based algorithms. That is, we distil a small set of properties that uniquely identify this family of algorithms. Lastly, we investigate how the output of algorithms is affected by the addition of small, potentially adversarial, sets of points. We prove that given clusterable input, the output of k-means is robust to the addition of a small number of data points. On the other hand, clusterings produced by many well-known methods, including linkage-based techniques, can be changed radically by adding a small number of elements.


Anthropometric data reflect the quality of life, high working capacities and potentiality of individual creative abilities. The physical working and physical fitness capacities depend on physical health, physical development level, physical activity and healthy lifestyle. The aim of the paper is to evaluate the principal anthropometric characteristics, levels of physical activity and sports tests results in a group of cadets. We assessed the principal anthropometric characteristics (height, body mass) as well the anthropometric indices (body mass index) of cadets of the National Defence Academy in their 1st year of study and in the same group of cadets after three years, in their 4th year of study. We provided a questionnaire for the cadets in the study group concerning their physical activity and analysed the data of the standardized Nordic Questionnaire about Musculoskeletal Symptoms. The average values of the main anthropometric characteristics of the respondents in the 1st year of study were the following: height – 180.4±1.3 cm and body mass – 79.5±1.7 kg. After three years, we fixed the changes of body mass in the examined group: in 53% of cadets, the body mass had increased by more than two kg, but in 47% of respondents, body mass had remained at the same level. The average data in the study group of the 4th year students were: height 181.2±1.3 cm and body mass – 81.3±2.5 kg. Physical fitness is an indispensable part in the daily routine of each cadet. Physical fitness characterizes an individual's cardiorespiratory status, muscular strength and endurance as well as velocity and coordination. The fitness level of a person determines the results of the annual sports tests (sit-ups, push-ups and cross-country race). The results were stable for 68% of respondents. We also included the questions related to musculoskeletal symptoms (pain). Musculoskeletal pain symptoms have an impact on each individual's physical fitness level. The physical activity levels in the respondents' group were high. They were closely associated with physical fitness, 76% of the respondents showed high results in annual physical fitness tests.


This article is part of the special section titled The Genealogies of Memory, guest edited by Ferenc Laczó and Joanna Wawrzyniak The article traces certain mnemonic patterns in the ways individuals who belonged to the late-socialist Yugoslav youth elite articulated their values in the wake of Yugoslavia's demise and the ways they make sense of the Yugoslav socialist past and their generational role a quarter of a century later. It detects narratives of loss, betrayed hopes, and a general disillusionment with politics and the state of post-socialist democracy that appear to be particularly frequent in the testimonies of the media and cultural elites. They convey a sense of discontent with the state of post-Yugoslav democracy and with the politicians—some belonging to the same generation—who embraced conservative values and a semi-authoritarian political culture. The article argues that an emerging new authoritarianism and the very process of progressive disillusionment with post-socialist politics allowed for the emergence and articulation of such alternative, noninstitutionalized individual memories that, whilst not uncritical of the Yugoslav past, tend to highlight its positive aspects.


The paper examines the significance of politics in the rise of social assistance programmes in developing countries in the last decade. It finds this is a two-way process. Politics is crucial to the adoption, design and implementation of social assistance programmes. They also have a feedback effect on local and national politics. The paper develops a framework for distinguishing the different dimensions of influence. It applies this framework to study the development of social assistance in India, Brazil and South Africa. It employs a comparative perspective to identify key approaches, findings, and knowledge gaps in the politics of social assistance.


Following the 1994 genocide, several justice initiatives were implemented in Rwanda, including a tribunal established by the United Nations, Rwanda's national court system and Gacaca, a 'traditional' community-run conflict resolution mechanism adapted to prosecute genocide perpetrators. Since their inception in 2001, the Gacaca courts have been praised for their efficiency and for widening participation but criticized for lack of due process, trained personnel and attention to atrocities committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). To evaluate these criticisms, we present preliminary findings from a survey of 227 Rwandans and analyze their attitudes towards Gacaca in relation to demographic characteristics such as education, residence and loss of relatives during the genocide.


Sprouted (96-hour) and pregelatinized (780C) sorghum grains were milled and blended with graded proportions of pigeon pea (100:0, 80:20; 70:30; 60:40; 50:50) and used to formulate flaked breakfast cereal. A commercial ready-to-serve breakfast cereal served as product control. The composite flour blends and the formulated ready-to-serve breakfast cereals were analyzed for selected mineral composition and sensory quality. Results showed significant increase (p.0.05) in phosphorus, sodium and potassium content of sprouted samples and a decrease of calcium in the pregelatinzed samples. The presence of 20% level of pigeon pea flour improved some sensory attributes(colour, consistency flavour, mouth-feel, texture and overall acceptability) of the pregelatinized product and had a significant increase(p commercial product. Both sprouting and pregelatinization treatments, improved the composition of the breakfast cereal unlike their unblended/untreated counterparts.


The aim of this study is to develop customer orientated methods for areal development. Method consists of value proposition creation, customer segmentation, service package creation, value creation in collaboration with customers and areal branding. In Finland numerous old hospitals, barracks and other public service centers are closing down. These buildings usually locate outside the urban structure, in a beautiful nature environment. Facilities and the land are mainly owned by public sector. With good areal development these areas could be developed into valuable residential or service areas. Successful development would ease public sector in financial difficulties as developed land would increase in value. Finnish government is planning to cut down the number of municipalities from 336 to 70. As a part of the municipality renovation social and health care services needs to be reorganized. The reorganization of social and health care services might lead to more centralized service production, where more service centers outside city centers are closing down. Finnish government is also executing reform in military training. As a part of the reform, several barracks around Finland are closing down by the beginning of 2015. Finnish most significant church, Evangelical-Lutheran church is also having economic problems. In order to cut down deficit church is selling its properties all around Finland. The logic of business and marketing has been changing from goods dominant to service dominant logic. In the heart of the service dominant business logic is the idea that the customer is a co-creator of value. Construction industry is also developing new business models to serve customer better to gain better profits. Areal development, in collaboration with future customers, is still unknown. Sold properties around Finland are a good opportunity for investors to develop areas in collaboration with future customers.


The work presents design and development of a system to automatically evolve rules through genetic-fuzzy approach. The work highlights the advantages of genetic and fuzzy hybridization and proposes a framework to evolve rules automatically. The objective of the framework is to reduce the development effort and guide the development procedure in user friendly fashion. The architecture presents a novel approach which integrates fuzzy logic with system design as well as back end of the framework is used to evolve the fuzzy rules using genetic algorithm approach. To experiment the working of the proposed framework, a system to measure multiple intelligence is selected. The paper describes the detail methodology including encoding strategy of rules, suitable genetic operators and fitness function to evolve fuzzy rules for the selected system. The initial population of rules, evolved generations and output results are also described. The paper concludes with the scope and applications of the work to other domains.


A cyber-physical controller (CPC) uses computing to control a physical process. Example CPCs can be found in self-driving automobiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, and other autonomous systems. They are also used in large-scale industrial control systems (ICSs) manufacturing and utility infrastructure. CPC operations rely on embedded systems having real-time, high-assurance interactions with physical processes. However, recent attacks like Stuxnet have demonstrated that CPC malware is not restricted to networks and generalpurpose computers, rather embedded components are targeted as well. General-purpose computing and network approaches to security are failing to protect embedded controllers, which can have the direct effect of process disturbance or destruction. Moreover, as embedded systems increasingly grow in capability and find application in CPCs, embedded leaf node security is gaining priority. This work develops a root-of-trust design architecture, which provides process resilience to cyber attacks on, or from, embedded controllers: the Trustworthy Autonomic Interface Guardian Architecture (TAIGA). We define five trust requirements for building a fine-grained trusted computing component. TAIGA satisfies all requirements and addresses all classes of CPC attacks using an approach distinguished by adding resilience to the embedded controller, rather than seeking to prevent attacks from ever reaching the controller. TAIGA provides an on-chip, digital, security version of classic mechanical interlocks. This last line of defense monitors all of the communications of a controller using configurable or external hardware that is inaccessible to the controller processor. The interface controller is synthesized from C code, formally analyzed, and permits run-time checked, authenticated updates to certain system parameters but not code. TAIGA overrides any controller actions that are inconsistent with system specifications, including prediction and preemption of latent malwares attempts to disrupt system stability and safety. Trustworthy Embedded Computing for Cyber-Physical Control


Clustered failure times often arise from studies with stratified sampling designs where it is desired to reduce both cost and sampling error. Semiparametric accelerated failure time (AFT) models have not been used as frequently as Cox relative risk models in such settings due to lack of efficient and reliable computing routines for inferences. The challenge roots in the nonsmoothness of the rank-based estimating functions, and for clustered data, the asymptotic properties of the estimator from the weighted version have not been available. The recently proposed induced smoothing approach, which provides fast and accurate rank-based inferences for AFT models, is generalized to incorporate weights to accommodate stratified sampling designs. The estimator from the induced smoothing weighted estimating equations are shown to be consistent and have the same asymptotic distribution as that from the nonsmooth version, which has not been developed before. The variance of the estimator is estimated by computationally efficient sandwich estimators aided by a multiplier bootstrap. The proposed method is assessed in extensive simulation studies where the estimators appear to provide valid and efficient inferences. A stratified case-cohort design with clustered times to tooth extraction in a dental study illustrates the usefulness of the method.


Context. Realistic synthetic observations of theoretical source models are essential for our understanding of real observational data. In using synthetic data, one can verify the extent to which source parameters can be recovered and evaluate how various data corruption effects can be calibrated. These studies are the most important when proposing observations of new sources, in the characterization of the capabilities of new or upgraded instruments, and when verifying model-based theoretical predictions in a direct comparison with observational data.
Aims. We present the SYnthetic Measurement creator for long Baseline Arrays (SYMBA), a novel synthetic data generation pipeline for Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observations. SYMBA takes into account several realistic atmospheric, instrumental, and calibration effects.
Methods. We used SYMBA to create synthetic observations for the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a millimetre VLBI array, which has recently captured the first image of a black hole shadow. After testing SYMBA with simple source and corruption models, we study the importance of including all corruption and calibration effects, compared to the addition of thermal noise only. Using synthetic data based on two example general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) model images of M 87, we performed case studies to assess the image quality that can be obtained with the current and future EHT array for different weather conditions.
Results. Our synthetic observations show that the effects of atmospheric and instrumental corruptions on the measured visibilities are significant. Despite these effects, we demonstrate how the overall structure of our GRMHD source models can be recovered robustly with the EHT2017 array after performing calibration steps, which include fringe fitting, a priori amplitude and network calibration, and self-calibration. With the planned addition of new stations to the EHT array in the coming years, images could be reconstructed with higher angular resolution and dynamic range. In our case study, these improvements allowed for a distinction between a thermal and a non-thermal GRMHD model based on salient features in reconstructed images.


Attaching the phosphonated molecular catalyst [ReIBr(bpy)(CO)3]0 to the wide-bandgap semiconductor TiO2 strongly enhances the rate of visible-light-driven reduction of CO2 to CO in dimethylformamide with triethanolamine (TEOA) as sacrificial electron donor. Herein, we show by transient mid-IR spectroscopy that the mechanism of catalyst photoreduction is initiated by ultrafast electron injection into TiO2, followed by rapid (ps-ns) and sequential two-electron oxidation of TEOA that is coordinated to the Re center. The injected electrons can be stored in the conduction band of TiO2 on an ms-s time scale, and we propose that they lead to further reduction of the Re catalyst and completion of the catalytic cycle. Thus, the excited Re catalyst gives away one electron and would eventually get three electrons back. The function of an electron reservoir would represent a role for TiO2 in photocatalytic CO2 reduction that has previously not been considered. We propose that the increase in photocatalytic activity upon heterogenization of the catalyst to TiO2 is due to the slow charge recombination and the high oxidative power of the ReII species after electron injection as compared to the excited MLCT state of the unbound Re catalyst or when immobilized on ZrO2, which results in a more efficient reaction with TEOA.


Why did British politicians initiate, and why did civil servants facilitate, the complete disposal of the government's oil assets, a vital national resource. Public choice theory has traditionally found it difficult to explain the retreat of the state, not because the theory is flawed, but because insufficient attention has been given to the parameters that actors face at both the domestic and international level. Four sets of parameters are particularly relevant to this case: international, industry, bureaucratic and political, which I review in sequence. First, though international factors are rarely incorporated into domestic policy-making analyses, they do have an impact. Realists' issue-specific models can be adapted to these analyses and help explain why Britain was forced to bow to international financial pressures and to work within the international oil structure. A balance of payments crisis in 1976 forced Britain's first asset sale while the development of a free market for oil (not dominated by a monopoly or cartel) made further sales more feasible, but not inevitable. Second, state-owned companies were often obstacles to privatization. A closer examination of the companies' structures explains the differing reactions of the managers of British National Oil Company (BNOC), British Gas Corporation (BGC) and British Petroleum (BP) and their abilities to achieve their preferences. The management of BP favoured privatization while the managers of BNOC and BGC opposed the sales of their oil assets. Though they could not prevent the fulfilment of the government's plans, they were able to cause delays and affect the form which privatization took. Third, contrary to budget-maximizing models, the British civil servants did not impede privatization. As members of a generalist bureaucracy, they were more concerned with their immediate work tasks and future career prospects across the civil service as a whole, than the long term future of the division or department where they were immediately located. In addition, because the Department of Energy was a relatively weak agency, individual level and career-maximizing strategies predominated rather than collective action strategies. Finally, because political demands for privatization were weak, other supply- side factors dominated politicians' decision to select privatization. These included party political pressures to cut public spending by means of asset sales and personal political advantage, which encouraged policy entrepreneurs to bear the initial costs of a potentially hazardous innovation.


Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a remote sensing technique that allows the generation of microwave images of the Earth surface, independently of weather condition and of sun illumination. SAR sensors can be either mounted on spacecrafts (spaceborne systems) or placed on airplanes (airborne systems).
In this thesis the study of problems related to the use of airborne SAR is addressed.
The thesis is organized in five chapters and Chapter 1 presents the basic rationale of SAR technique. The assumption that the sensor flight path is a straight line is adopted in the first chapter, which is preliminary to the subsequent analysis, and allows introducing the formalism adopted in Chapters 2-5, where the assumption of straight flight path, not realistic for airborne systems, is relaxed, and the original results of this thesis are presented.
Airborne SAR acquisition model is deeply analyzed, and realization of an efficient airborne raw data simulator, which represents a useful tool for mission planning, SAR system design and inversion algorithm testing, is presented (Chapter 2).
The analysis of the airborne acquisition model allows also highlighting problems related to airborne SAR focusing. In particular, a quantitative analysis of the accuracy achievable by airborne SAR images is performed; extension to the repeat pass airborne interferometry is also included (Chapter 3). Such an analysis allows, on one side, quantifying the airborne repeat pass interferogram phase accuracy in terms of the expected motion measurement system accuracy (Chapter 3); on the other side, designing a new efficient airborne SAR processor (Chapter 4).
Theoretical results presented in Chapter 3 are, finally, validated by an airborne differential interferometry experiment carried out by using real data (Chapter 5).


Dealing with severe class imbalance poses a major challenge for many real-world applications, especially when the accurate classification and generalization of minority classes are of primary interest. In computer vision and NLP, learning from datasets with long-tail behavior is a recurring theme, especially for naturally occurring labels. Existing solutions mostly appeal to sampling or weighting adjustments to alleviate the extreme imbalance, or impose inductive bias to prioritize generalizable associations. Here we take a novel perspective to promote sample efficiency and model generalization based on the invariance principles of causality. Our contribution posits a meta-distributional scenario, where the causal generating mechanism for label-conditional features is invariant across different labels. Such causal assumption enables efficient knowledge transfer from the dominant classes to their under-represented counterparts, even if their feature distributions show apparent disparities. This allows us to leverage a causal data augmentation procedure to enlarge the representation of minority classes. Our development is orthogonal to the existing imbalanced data learning techniques thus can be seamlessly integrated. The proposed approach is validated on an extensive set of synthetic and real-world tasks against state-of-the-art solutions.


What are the "returns" to policy-oriented research in the social sciences? One presumes that the positive net benefits to society, or at least a certain segment of society, would be treated as returns, but how does one determine what these benefits are? Clearly benefits to some social science research are available because society continued to fund it, albeit at different levels in different locations and times. This paper cannot fully answer the questions of what it is we seek to measure in any empirical sense, although it will discuss this issue. The returns in the marketplace for social science research are those that exist in the eye of the customer who bears the cost of the research. This paper's primary goal is to offer the client some ways of measuring these returns. It does this with particular emphasis on methods that are often overlooked, even though some of them have been available to the analyst for decades. It also explains some of the costs and benefits of each method and explains how some of them may be used together in order to achieve a higher level of efficacy in measurement.


Abstract This paper uses findings from a research study called Net.Weight to examine the concepts of interaction, information quality and Internet-based information from the perspective of people engaged in managing their weight. The Net.Weight study was a two-year project funded by the British government's Department of Health and located in the city of Brighton and Hove. It examined the potential for increased, innovative and effective uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to support the self management of weight. The study had several inter-related research strands and the findings discussed in the paper emerged primarily from participatory learning workshops and evaluative interviews. The paper demonstrates that the interaction between people is an important aspect of the information process, which is often neglected in the literature. It suggests that exploring the user-user dimension might add to the understanding of information effectiveness. It also suggests that an approach to information and health literacy which includes a social as well as an individual perspective is necessary. On quality assessment, it supports findings from other studies that organisational authority is a key measure of reliability for lay users and that quality assessment tools have a limited role in the assessment process. The Net.Weight participants embraced the Internet as a medium for weight management information only when it added value to their existing information and weight management practices and when it could be integrated into their everyday lives.


Smart interactions among the smart grid, aggregators, and EVs can bring various benefits to all parties involved, e.g., improved reliability and safety for the smart gird, increased profits for the aggregators, as well as enhanced self benefit for EV customers. This survey focuses on viewing this smart interactions from an algorithmic perspective. In particular, important dominating factors for coordinated charging from three different perspectives are studied, in terms of smart grid oriented, aggregator-oriented, and customer-oriented smart charging. Firstly, for smart grid oriented EV charging, we summarize various formulations proposed for load flattening, frequency regulation, and voltage regulation, then explore the nature and substantial similarity among them. Secondly, for aggregator-oriented EV charging, we categorize the algorithmic approaches proposed by research works sharing this perspective as direct and indirect coordinated control, and investigate these approaches in detail. Thirdly, for customer-oriented EV charging, based on a commonly shared objective of reducing charging cost, we generalize different formulations proposed by studied research works. Moreover, various uncertainty issues, e.g., EV fleet uncertainty, electricity price uncertainty, regulation demand uncertainty, etc., have been discussed according to the three perspectives classified. At last, we discuss challenging issues that are commonly confronted during modeling the smart interactions, and outline some future research topics in this exciting area.


The tannery effluents are characterized by high toxic pollutants such as sulfides; used in the tanning of animal's skin. The mean objective of this work is the evaluation of the pollution degree of various operating units, and the treatment of tannery effluent generated from unhairing-liming unit. According to physicochemical characterization, this effluent was largely basic and very loaded in sulfides, which have harmful effects on human health and the environment as well. Otherwise, the microbiological characterization showed an absence of pathogenic bacteria and a low concentration of mesophilic aerobic flora, because of this effluent toxicity. Thus, the treatment of this effluent is indispensable before its reject into the environment. In fact, chemical precipitation is a promising approach for the treatment of this effluent. In this regard, ferric chloride was used as chemical agent to reduce and removal sulphide ions from this effluent. As result, this treatment gave an excellent abatement rate of sulphide, which reached more than 90% using a pH of 8.5 and a ferric chloride concentration of 1.4 mol/L.


The empirical relationship between the average growth rate and the volatility of growth rates, both over time and across countries, has important policy implications, which depend critically on the sign of the relationship. Following Ramey and Ramey (1995), a wide consensus has been building that, in the post-World War II data, the correlation is negative. The authors replicate Ramey and Ramey's result and find that it is not robust to either the definition of growth rate or the composition of the sample. They show that the use of log difference as growth rates, as in Ramey and Ramey, creates a strong bias towards finding a negative relationship. Further, they exhaustively investigate this relationship, for various growth rates, across time, countries, within groups of countries, and within states of the United States. The authors use different methods and control variables for this inquiry. Their analysis suggests that there is no significant relationship between the two variables in question.


A fully automated method for the detection and quantification of bird migration was developed for operational C-band weather radar, measuring bird density, speed and direction as a function of altitude. These weather radar bird observations have been validated with data from a high-accuracy dedicated bird radar, which was stationed in the measurement volume of weather radar sites in The Netherlands, Belgium and France for a full migration season during autumn 2007 and spring 2008. We show that weather radar can extract near real-time bird density altitude profiles that closely correspond to the density profiles measured by dedicated bird radar. Doppler weather radar can thus be used as a reliable sensor for quantifying bird densities aloft in an operational setting, which—when extended to multiple radars—enables the mapping and continuous monitoring of bird migration flyways. By applying the automated method to a network of weather radars, we observed how mesoscale variability in weather conditions structured the timing and altitude profile of bird migration within single nights. Bird density altitude profiles were observed that consisted of multiple layers, which could be explained from the distinct wind conditions at different take-off sites. Consistently lower bird densities are recorded in The Netherlands compared with sites in France and eastern Belgium, which reveals some of the spatial extent of the dominant Scandinavian flyway over continental Europe.


Background With the emergence of a completed genome sequence of the freshwater crustacean Daphnia pulex, construction of genomic-scale sequence databases for additional crustacean sequences are important for comparative genomics and annotation. Porcelain crabs, genus Petrolisthes, have been powerful crustacean models for environmental and evolutionary physiology with respect to thermal adaptation and understanding responses of marine organisms to climate change. Here, we present a large-scale EST sequencing and cDNA microarray database project for the porcelain crab Petrolisthes cinctipes. Methodology/Principal Findings A set of ∼30K unique sequences (UniSeqs) representing ∼19K clusters were generated from ∼98K high quality ESTs from a set of tissue specific non-normalized and mixed-tissue normalized cDNA libraries from the porcelain crab Petrolisthes cinctipes. Homology for each UniSeq was assessed using BLAST, InterProScan, GO and KEGG database searches. Approximately 66% of the UniSeqs had homology in at least one of the databases. All EST and UniSeq sequences along with annotation results and coordinated cDNA microarray datasets have been made publicly accessible at the Porcelain Crab Array Database (PCAD), a feature-enriched version of the Stanford and Longhorn Array Databases. Conclusions/Significance The EST project presented here represents the third largest sequencing effort for any crustacean, and the largest effort for any crab species. Our assembly and clustering results suggest that our porcelain crab EST data set is equally diverse to the much larger EST set generated in the Daphnia pulex genome sequencing project, and thus will be an important resource to the Daphnia research community. Our homology results support the pancrustacea hypothesis and suggest that Malacostraca may be ancestral to Branchiopoda and Hexapoda. Our results also suggest that our cDNA microarrays cover as much of the transcriptome as can reasonably be captured in EST library sequencing approaches, and thus represent a rich resource for studies of environmental genomics.


Most readers of Alice Walker's short story, "Everyday Use," published in her 1973 collection, In Love and Trouble, agree that the point of the story is to show, as Nancy Tuten argues, a mother's "awakening to one daughter's superficiality and to the other's deep-seated understanding of heritage" (Tuten 125). (1) These readers praise the "simplicity" of Maggie and her mother, along with their allegiance to their specific family identity and folk heritage as well as their refusal to change at the whim of an outside world that doesn't really have much to do with them. Such a reading condemns the older, more worldly sister, Dee, as "shallow," "condescending," and "manipulative," as overly concerned with style, fashion, and aesthetics, and thus as lacking a "true" understanding of her heritage. In this essay, conversely, I will argue that this popular view is far too simple a reading of the story. While Dee is certainly insensitive and selfish to a certain degree, she nevertheless offers a view of heritage and a strategy for contemporary African Americans to cope with an oppressive society that is, in some ways, more valid than that offered by Mama and Maggie. We must remember from the beginning that the story is told by Mama; the perceptions are filtered through her mind and her views of her two daughters are not to be accepted uncritically. Several readers have pointed out that Mama's view of Maggie is not quite accurate--that Maggie is not as passive or as "hangdog" as she appears. (2) Might Mama's view of her older daughter, Dee, not be especially accurate as well? Dee obviously holds a central place in Mama's world. The story opens with the line: "I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon" (47). As Houston Baker points out, "The mood at the story's beginning is one of ritualistic waiting," of preparation "for the arrival of a goddess" (715). Thus, Dee seems to attain almost mythic stature in Mama's imagination as she and Maggie wait for the as-yet unnamed "her" to appear. Such an opening may lead readers to suspect that Mama has a rather troubled relationship with her older daughter. Dee inspires in Mama a type of awe and fear more suitable to the advent of a goddess than the love one might expect a mother to feel for a returning daughter. Mama, in fact, displaces what seem to be her own fears onto Maggie when she speculates that Maggie will be cowed by Dee's arrival. Mama conjectures that Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eyeing her sister with a mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that "no" is a word the world never learned to say to her. (47) But Mama here emphasizes the perceptual nature of this observation--she says that Maggie thinks these things, encouraging readers to wonder whether or not this first perception of Dee is true. We also find out in the next section, when Mama relates her Johnny Carson television fantasy, that she herself is the one that will be "nervous" until after Dee goes, that she is ashamed of her own appearance and very much seeks her daughter's approval. Mama confesses that, in "real life," she is "a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands" (48). However, in her television fantasy, as Mama tells us, all this does not show.... I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake. My hair glistens in the hot bright lights. Johnny Carson has much to do to keep up with my quick and witty tongue. (48) It is important to remember, though, that this Johnny Carson daydream is Mama's fantasy of a mother-child reunion, not Dee's. In fact, Mama even acknowledges that this particular scenario might not be to Dee's taste--she imagines Dee pinning an orchid on her even though Dee had previously told Mama she thinks orchids are "tacky flowers" (48). …


The volume of raw range image data that is required to represent just a single scene can be extensive; hence direct interpretation of range images can incur a very high computational cost. Range image segmentation and feature extraction have been identified as mechanisms to produce more compact scene representations and hence enable less costly scene interpretation for applications such as object recognition and robot navigation. We present a new approach to multi-scale edge and planar surface detection in range images that can be used directly with any range data, regardless of whether the data have regular or irregular spatial distribution. The approach is evaluated with respect to accuracy of both edge location and planar surface representation. The contribution of our approach is that only a single application of our operator is necessary to both extract object edges and determine representations of the corresponding planar object surfaces.


Solid oxide fuel cell technology can achieve high efficiency when producing electric power. To produce these fuel cells with a high quality and a low cost, inkjet printing can be utilized. This technique is highly dependent on having suitable inks for printing. In this thesis, several inks were made out of spray pyrolized La0.6Sr0.4CoO3 which can be used as a cathode material for solid oxide fuel cells. The inks were tested for stability and characterised by electron microscopy and particle size distribution to see if they were suitable for inkjet printing. Several successful printings were done with an ink which consisted of isopropanol with ethyl cellulose as a dispersant. This ink appears to be suitable for the purpose of printing cathode layers if the maximum particle size can be controlled.


Objectives To examine the effect of spinal manipulation on blood pressure. Design This randomized clinical trial compared the effects of chiropractic spinal manipulation and diet with diet alone for lowering blood pressure in participants with high-normal blood pressure or stage I hypertension. Blood pressure observers were blinded to treatment group. Setting The study was conducted at the Berman Center for Clinical and Outcomes Research in Minnesota. Chiropractic treatments were administered by chiropractic physicians within private practice settings. Participants One hundred and forty men and women, aged 25–60 years, with high-normal blood pressure or stage I hypertension, were enrolled. One hundred and twenty-eight participants completed the study. Interventions (i) A dietary intervention program administered by a dietitian or (ii) a dietary intervention program administered by a doctor of chiropractic in conjunction with chiropractic spinal manipulation. The frequency of treatment for both groups was three times per week for 4 weeks, for a total of 12 visits. Main outcome measures The primary outcomes for this study were change from baseline in diastolic and systolic blood pressure. Results Study groups were comparable at baseline. Changes in potentially confounding covariates did not differ between groups. Average decreases in systolic/diastolic blood pressure were −4.9/5.6 mmHg for diet group and −3.5/4.0 mmHg for the chiropractic group. Between group changes were not statistically significant. Conclusions For patients with high normal blood pressure or stage I hypertension, chiropractic spinal manipulation in conjunction with a dietary modification program offered no advantage in lowering either diastolic or systolic blood pressure compared to diet alone.


Background The superficial resemblance of phylogenetic trees to other branching structures allows searching for macroevolutionary patterns. However, such trees are just statistical inferences of particular historical events. Recent meta-analyses report finding regularities in the branching pattern of phylogenetic trees. But is this supported by evidence, or are such regularities just methodological artifacts? If so, is there any signal in a phylogeny? Methodology In order to evaluate the impact of polytomies and imbalance on tree shape, the distribution of all binary and polytomic trees of up to 7 taxa was assessed in tree-shape space. The relationship between the proportion of outgroups and the amount of imbalance introduced with them was assessed applying four different tree-building methods to 100 combinations from a set of 10 ingroup and 9 outgroup species, and performing covariance analyses. The relevance of this analysis was explored taking 61 published phylogenies, based on nucleic acid sequences and involving various taxa, taxonomic levels, and tree-building methods. Principal Findings All methods of phylogenetic inference are quite sensitive to the artifacts introduced by outgroups. However, published phylogenies appear to be subject to a rather effective, albeit rather intuitive control against such artifacts. The data and methods used to build phylogenetic trees are varied, so any meta-analysis is subject to pitfalls due to their uneven intrinsic merits, which translate into artifacts in tree shape. The binary branching pattern is an imposition of methods, and seldom reflects true relationships in intraspecific analyses, yielding artifactual polytomies in short trees. Above the species level, the departure of real trees from simplistic random models is caused at least by two natural factors –uneven speciation and extinction rates; and artifacts such as choice of taxa included in the analysis, and imbalance introduced by outgroups and basal paraphyletic taxa. This artifactual imbalance accounts for tree shape convergence of large trees. Significance There is no evidence for any universal scaling in the tree of life. Instead, there is a need for improved methods of tree analysis that can be used to discriminate the noise due to outgroups from the phylogenetic signal within the taxon of interest, and to evaluate realistic models of evolution, correcting the retrospective perspective and explicitly recognizing extinction as a driving force. Artifacts are pervasive, and can only be overcome through understanding the structure and biological meaning of phylogenetic trees. Catalan Abstract in Translation S1.


This article concerns an investigation of the full scale evacuation of a building with a configuration similar to that of the World Trade Center (WTC) North Tower using computer simulation. A range of evacuation scenarios is explored in order to better understand the evacuation of the WTC on 11 September 2001. The analysis makes use of response time data derived from a study of published WTC survivor accounts. Geometric details of the building are obtained from architects' plans while the total building population used in the scenarios is based on estimates produced by the National Institute of Standards and Technology formal investigation into the evacuation. This paper attempts to approximate the events of 11 September 2001 and pursue several `what if' questions concerning the evacuation. In particular, the study explores the likely outcome had a single staircase survived intact from top to bottom. More generally, this paper explores issues associated with the practical limits of building size that can be expected to be efficiently evacuated using stairs alone.


When coordinating their actions to accomplish a mission, the agents in a multi-agent system may use a collaboration algorithm to determine which agent performs which task. This paper describes a novel data-driven metareasoning approach that generates a metareasoning policy that the agents can use whenever they must collaborate to assign tasks. This metareasoning approach collects data about the performance of the algorithms at many decision points and uses this data to train a set of surrogate models that can estimate the expected performance of different algorithms. This yields a metareasoning policy that, based on the current state of the system, estimated the algorithms' expected performance and chose the best one. For a ship protection scenario, computational results show that one version of the metareasoning policy performed as well as the best component algorithm but required less computational effort. The proposed data-driven metareasoning approach could be a promising tool for developing policies to control multi-agent autonomous systems.


Humane organizations throughout the United States can9t surgically sterilize homeless cats and dogs fast enough to control their numbers, and developing countries with dangerous feral dog populations—such as China and India—fare even worse. As a result, millions of dogs and cats are euthanized in U.S. shelters each year, and millions more are shot and poisoned around the globe. For the past decade, humane organizations have pushed for a nonsurgical alternative to traditional spay/neuter surgery—something cheaper and faster, such as a vaccine or a pill, that would allow them to reach many more animals with the same resources. Researchers have developed similar products for wildlife, but they have turned out to be ineffective or impractical for use in companion animals. Lack of funding and interest has slowed further progress. That may be about to change, thanks to a U.S. billionaire named Gary Michelson, who has announced $75 million in grants and prize money for the development of a single-use, nonsurgical sterilant for dogs and cats.


The spread of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has triggered a global emergency, that demands urgent solutions for detection and therapy to prevent escalating health, social and economic impacts. The spike protein (S) of this virus enables binding to the human receptor ACE2, and hence presents a prime target for vaccines preventing viral entry into host cells1. The S proteins from SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 are similar2, but structural differences in the receptor binding domain (RBD) preclude the use of SARS-CoV-1–specific neutralizing antibodies to inhibit SARS-CoV-23. Here we used comparative pangenomic analysis of all sequenced Betacoronaviruses to reveal that, among all core gene clusters present in these viruses, the envelope protein E shows a variant shared by SARS and SARS-Cov2 with two completely-conserved key functional features, an ion-channel and a PDZ-binding Motif (PBM). These features trigger a cytokine storm that activates the inflammasome, leading to increased edema in lungs causing the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS)4-6, the leading cause of death in SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 infection7,8. However, three drugs approved for human use may inhibit SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 Protein E, either acting upon the ion channel (Amantadine and Hexamethylene amiloride9,10) or the PBM (SB2035805), thereby potentially increasing the survival of the host, as already demonstrated for SARS-CoV-1in animal models. Hence, blocking the SARS protein E inhibits development of ARDS in vivo. Given that our results demonstrate that the protein E subcluster for the SARS clade is quasi-identical for the key functional regions of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2, we conclude that use of approved drugs shown to act as SARS E protein inhibitors can help prevent further casualties from COVID-2019 while vaccines and other preventive measures are being developed.


The focus of this paper is to raise awareness of the complexity of the concept of flexibility and its occasional misuse. Flexibility as it most often is studied, is defined as the point of departure in capitalism. Even the smallest firms are measured by these criterions. By using the methodological standpoint of critical realism and the structural life mode analysis I have studied the rationality behind adjusting to changes in small firms with focus on adjusting employment levels to variation in workload. By doing this I have answered the question of a possible misuse of the concept of flexibility. My conclusion is that the concept of flexibility, defined with a starting point in the capitalist principles of the economic market, is occasionally misused in literature. Taking the point of departure in capitalism it is assumed that all firms strive to live by the rules of a capitalist market and to adjust to its principles. My structural perspective shows that not all small firms are driven by these motives powers. The rationality to run a firm when the owner lives the so-called independent life mode, derive first of all from independency. This rationality influences adjusting to changes in these firms and it also influences relations between an entrepreneur and an employee. An entrepreneur's trust expressing the independent life mode-specific work values and ethics, is fundamentally different from an employees trust if the employee is living the worker life mode. Thus trust can be a hindrance for adjusting the employment levels to variation in workload.


Distributed memory parallel computers offer enormous computation power, scalability and flexibility. However, these machines are difficult to program and this limits their widespread use. An important characteristic of these machines is the difference in the access time for data in local versus non-local memory; non-local memory accesses are much slower than local memory accesses. This is also a characteristic of shared memory machines but to a less degree.
Therefore it is essential that as far as possible, the data that needs to be accessed by a processor during the execution of the computation assigned to it reside in its local memory rather than in some other processor's memory. Several research projects have concluded that proper mapping of data is key to realizing the performance potential of distributed memory machines. Current language design efforts such as Fortran D and High Performance Fortran (HPF) are based on this.
It is our thesis that for many practical codes, it is possible to derive good mappings through a combination of algorithms and systematic procedures. We view mapping as consisting of wo phases, alignment followed by distribution. For the alignment phase we present three constraint-based methods--one based on a linear programming formulation of the problem; the second formulates the alignment problem as a constrained optimization problem using Lagrange multipliers; the third method uses a heuristic to decide which constraints to leave unsatisfied (based on the penalty of increased communication incurred in doing so) in order to find a mapping.
In addressing the distribution phase, we have developed two methods that integrate the placement of computation--loop nests in our case--with the mapping of data. For one distributed dimension, our approach finds the best combination of data and computation mapping that results in low communication overhead; this is done by choosing a loop order that allows message vectorization. In the second method, we introduce the distribution preference graph and the operations on this graph allow us to integrate loop restructuring transformations and data mapping.
These techniques produce mappings that have been used in efficient hand-coded implementations of several benchmark codes.


Exploration of high-performance fluorescent materials, especially those with two-photon absorption and aggregation-induced emission (AIE) properties, is of great significance to both fundamental research and practical applications. In the present work, a series of triphenylamine–dibenzo[a,c]phenazine adducts (Q1–Q5) with triphenylamine (TPA) moieties decorated by substituents ranging from nil to alkyl (methyl/octyl) and finally to alkoxy (methoxyl/octyloxy) groups were elaborately designed and facilely synthesized. Their photophysical properties including one- and two-photon absorption properties have been systematically investigated to clarify the relationships between their structures and properties and to see how a small change in the structure makes big differences in their performances. The proterotype triphenylamine–dibenzo[a,c]phenazine (TPA–DBP) adduct Q1 and the alkyl-substituted TPA–DBP adducts (Q2 and Q3) show intramolecular charge transfer (ICT) plus aggregation-enhanced emission (AEE) features while the alkoxy-decorated TPA–DBP adducts, i.e., Q4 and Q5, exhibit typical AIE behaviors. The differences in their photophysical properties can be mainly ascribed to the substituent effects, which are closely associated with the RIM (restriction of intramolecular motion) mechanism. Moreover, the AIE-active red luminogen Q5 with the largest two-photon absorption cross-section (σ = 801 GM) and high brightness has been further fabricated into nanoparticles via a simple and well-established method to satisfy the requirements of in vivo two-photon fluorescence imaging of blood vessels. The water-dispersible and biocompatible PEG-modified nanoparticles of Q5 performed well as an effective contrast agent for the visualization of blood vasculature with high signal-to-noise ratios, low photodamage and deep-tissue penetration capability (100 μm).


As part of a larger Service Patrol Pilot Demonstration effort, the Service Patrol Study Steering Committee proposed a separate element, the Instant Tow dispatch program (IT)—also known as an "expedited" rotational call-out tow truck program—to be evaluated for its potential to reduce incident response time. The goals of the IT test program were to decrease congestion and reduce potential safety risk on the highway by providing timely removal of blocking collisions or disabled vehicles. In the original test operations from January through April 2002, the IT dispatch was not successfully implemented as designed because the protocol for the expedited dispatch process was not followed consistently. The project partners subsequently decided that additional effort should be made, and another round of data collection over a three-month period followed from September through November 2002. While efforts were made to ensure that the protocol for the expedited dispatch process was consistently followed, the use of expedited tows in the Tacoma study area was still limited in the coverage area during the hours of its operation. As a result of the limited number of data collected, no definitive conclusion about the program's effectiveness can be established. However, the available information seems to indicate that the IT protocol allows tow vehicles to be notified more quickly than the standard rotational tow truck call-out protocol; hence it would help decrease overall incident time and resulting traveler delay. This supplement summarizes the institutional and operation issues affecting the IT Dispatch pilot program, the evaluation results based on the operations from September through November 2002, and the evaluation's recommendations.


The present study investigates the determinants of collective action in a strategic and fast growing sector - greenhouse vegetables in Albania � looking at the impact of individual farmers� characteristics on their likelihood of cooperating, using a logistic regression model. A Thurnstone scale was constructed to measure the likelihood that farmers will cooperate and a composite index was designed and applied to measure the farmers�stock of social capital. Results show that social capital, human capital, leadership and the problems farmers face in terms of input supply are important determinants of collective action. The results are of both theoretical and practical importance. Theoretically, this study suggests that social capital, human capital, leadership and economic environment characteristics are important determinants of collective action in post-communist transition country agriculture. Practically, the results can provide support to government agencies concerning three issues: (i) better targeting the potential farmers� groups, (ii) improving preconditions for collective action through an increase in the stock of social capital to assist the farmers in their �first collective action experience�, and (iii) designing and implementing capacity-building and leadership programmes.


There are three main categories of interests upon which states can premise standing to sue as plaintiffs in federal court - proprietary, sovereign, and quasi-sovereign interests. Proprietary and sovereign interests, this Note contends, are held independently by states qua states, whereas quasi-sovereign interests are derivative of citizens' collective welfare interests. This Note attempts to correct the pervasive confusion clouding the boundary between sovereign and quasi-sovereign interests, arguing that they are meaningfully distinct and should be treated differently. This argument is especially important in the context of the jurisdictional bar instituted by the Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. Mellon, which prohibits states from pursuing 'parens patriae' suits to shield their citizens from federal law. Parens patriae is a special type of representative standing through which states can vindicate generalized citizen interests. This Note argues that states act as parens patriae in the relevant context when they assert quasi-sovereign standing only - and thus not when they seek to defend their sovereign interests. The Mellon bar, therefore, should disallow only certain quasi-sovereign suits; it should be wholly inapplicable to sovereignty-vindicating claims.Finally, a look at Virginia's current attack on the constitutionality of recent federal healthcare reform, Virginia ex rel. Cuccinelli v. Sebelius, sharpens and contextualizes these issues. Virginia has asserted purely sovereign interests, but the federal government defendant has argued that the Mellon bar should nevertheless apply. This discussion is both timely, given the immediacy and prominence of the standing issues underlying the Virginia healthcare challenge, and significant, given its importance for fundamental and enduring issues of American federalism.


Enabled by current high-speed networks, high-definition (HD)
video transmissions have become an essential tool for many
applications. The HD video brings resolution, which is more
than 4x larger than common PAL resolution, thus capturing much
more details and increasing the image quality dramatically. In
this talk, we would like to focus on using the HD video for two
classes of medical applications: synchronous applications,
which require low latency to provide perception of
interactivity, and asynchronous (unidirectional) applications,
where the latency is not that restrictive. We will describe
(and possibly also demonstrate) uncompressed HD over IP
transmission in both point-to-point (two colleagues consulting)
and multipoint-to-multipoint (council) modes, suitable for
synchronous environments with exceptional requirements on low
latency. The uncompressed HD video is very challenging
regarding capabilities of the underlying networks having
1.5Gbps bandwidth per stream; we will discuss how to utilize
current high-end optical networking to create suitable
environment. We will brief compression technologies, that allow
transmitting HD video without extreme networking requirements
while maintaining high image quality at cost of increased
latency. We will describe HDV over IP transmission suitable for
unidirectional HD video distribution (e.g. streaming for
students) with 30 Mbps bandwidth per stream, that can be
implemented relatively cheaply using easily available
equipment.


Band image is established to create an environment for customers living in green hotels. Customers can participate in environmental protection measures away from home. The goal is to help consumers generate a positive green perceived value, green trust, and green consumption attitude toward green hotels, thereby improving green consumption intention. The present study explores relationships between brand image, green perceived value, green trust, green consumption attitude, and green consumption intention for the green hotel industry. We find significantly positive correlations and impacts among brand image, green perceived value, green trust and green consumption attitude, and green consumption intention. These findings provide perspectives and insights into the impact on green consumption intention. The environmentally friendly hotel industry might use this information to implement environmental protection measures and make strategic suggestions to promote public green consumption


Mars is bitterly cold and dry, but robotic spacecraft have returned abundant data that indicate Mars once had a much warmer and wetter climate in the past. These data, the basis of the search for past or present life on Mars, suggest the possibility of returning Mars to its previous climate by global engineering techniques. Greenhouse gases, such as perfluorocarbons, appear to be the best method for warming Mars and increasing its atmospheric density so that liquid water becomes stable. The process of making Mars habitable for terrestrial organisms is called terraforming or planetary ecosynthesis. The process of introducing terrestrial ecosystems to Mars can be compared with a descent down a high mountain. Each drop in elevation results in a warmer, wetter climate and more diverse biological community. Beginning with a polar desert, the sequence of ecosystems passes through tundra, boreal forest, and temperate ecosystems where moisture determines the presence of desert, grassland, or forest. This model suggests a sequence for the introduction of ecosystems to Mars and the communities to search for potential colonizing species for Mars.


In this study, we provide six complementary models of data envelopment analysis to analyze the financial efficiency of chosen decision-making units for firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange. For this purpose, we consider tapered modeling, the concept of accounting costs and economic costs and divide the whole process into the two sub-processes in modeling. After the modeling process, we choose the seventeen companies and thereby, provide a new method for analyzing the financial efficiency. The proposed method seems to be more appropriate than the methods proposed in the past and it can deliver better understanding of real-world cases. Finally, we understand that how this method works for analyzing the financial efficiency of organizations.


MOTION ARTIFACT EVALUATION OF CORONARY CT ANGIOGRAPHY IMAGES Hongfeng Ma, M.S. Marquette University, 2017 The objective of this dissertation was to develop and validate an automated algorithm to quantify motion artifact level on coronary CT angiography (CCTA) images. Unlike existing motion artifact reduction techniques that evaluate the relative level of motion artifacts within one exam, this dissertation aims to quantify the absolute level of motion artifacts across exams from varying patients. The ability to quantify absolute motion artifact level enables several potential applications, for example, assessing and comparing two motion artifact reduction techniques. This dissertation includes three specific aims. Aim 1 investigated the absolute motion artifact quantification effectiveness of six motion artifact metrics using phantom and clinical images. The six metrics included four existing metrics and two novel metrics: Fold Overlap Rate (FOR) and Low-Intensity Region Score (LIRS). Ground-truth motion artifact level was obtained by pairwise-comparison observer studies. The FOR and LIRS metrics demonstrated good agreement and linearity to the ground-truth observer scores. A compound metric of Motion Artifact Score (MAS), defined as the product of FOR and LIRS, further improved performance. In Aim 1, vessel and artifact regions were identified by thresholding for the phantom images and by manual segmentation for the clinical images. Aim 2 developed an automated Motion Artifact Quantification algorithm for clinical images. The algorithm included identification of right coronary artery (RCA) regions of interest (ROIs) and segmentation of vessel and shading artifacts, followed by calculation of the motion artifact metrics. Each step was validated against ground-truth results obtained by manually reader studies. Results shown that MAS calculated using the algorithm is within 10% of the values obtained using ground-truth segmentations. Aim 3 investigated one application of the Motion Artifact Quantification algorithm. The Motion Image Quality Decision algorithm was developed to automatically identify whether a CCTA dataset is of sufficient image quality or requires further correction. An observer study on 30 clinical datasets was performed to obtain the ground truth decisions. Fifteen of the datasets were used to identify algorithm thresholds for aggregating the MAS across slices. The remaining datasets were used to evaluate the algorithm. Results demonstrated algorithm sensitivity of 100%, specificity of 83.3% and total accuracy of 93.3%.


The main goal of VoIP services is to provide a reliable and high-quality voice transmission over packet networks. In order to prove the quality of VoIP transmission, several approaches were designed. In our approach, we are concerned about on-line monitoring of RTP and RTCP traffic. Based on these data, we are able to compute main VoIP quality metrics including jitter, delay, packet loss, and finally R-factor and MOS values. This technique of VoIP quality measuring can be directly incorporated into IPFIX monitoring framework where an IPFIX probe analyses RTP/RTCP packets, computes VoIP quality metrics, and adds these metrics into extended IPFIX flow records. Then, these extended data are stored in a central IPFIX monitoring system called collector where can be used for monitoring purposes. This paper presents a functional implementation of IPFIX plugin for VoIP quality measurement and compares the results with results obtained by other tools.


Health and life insurers may wish to discriminate based on genetic information by classifying people as high risk or unhealthy based on genetic tests that predict future health problems, rather than on diagnosis of current illness. In the USA, the fear of genetic discrimination by insurers is much greater than the reality, especially for health insurance. The economics of health insurance makes it unlikely that health insurers will want to consider purely predictive genetic information, and there are ample legal threats to keep this possibility from materializing, including the 2008 Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. Empirical studies consistently document the virtual absence of any genetic discrimination by health insurers. Life insurers are more likely to consider results from predictive genetic tests, but this practice currently is not widespread.

Keywords:

genetic discrimination;
health insurance;
life insurance


Visiting thermal springs for medicinal purposes is one of the oldest forms of tourism in many parts of the world, including South Africa. An overview is provided of the concepts of health tourism, including medical and wellness tourism, as well as spa and thermal spring health tourism. Water-based, treatment-based and recreation-based facilities and services offered at selected international thermal spring resorts are assessed and compared to the thermal spring health tourism product in South Africa, where only three out of more than 20 thermal spring resorts offer sophisticated health treatments. It appears that, internationally, the focus of thermal spring tourism is shifting towards wellness activities, although in South Africa it has shifted further, in the direction of recreation. While the product offerings of thermal spring resorts generally contain elements of water-based, treatment-based as well as recreation-based activities, it is suggested that the main focus should be guided by the activity preferences of current markets, which in the case of South Africa are almost exclusively domestic, and South African domestic visitors have far less interest in health facilities and treatments than their counterparts in Europe, although there is a significant minority that would welcome such services. The question therefore arises as to whether thermal spring resorts in South Africa, especially those that do have health-related services, have shifted their product offerings too far in the direction of recreation, and if so, whether South Africa"s thermal spring tourism product should not be repositioned so as to capture a greater portion of the international, and domestic, health tourism markets.