Introduction To date, our knowledge of in vivo migration of neutrophils and eosinophils in homeostasis and disease states is based on granulocytes. Here we present a pilot study using purified human eosinophils or neutrophils and demonstrate their differential in vivo kinetics in asthmatic and healthy volunteers. Methods: On two separate occasions 100 ml of blood was obtained from eight human volunteers (4 mild stable asthmatics and 4 non asthmatic, healthy volunteers) Granulocytes were separated using gradient Ficoll-Paque PLUS 1.084 centrifugation. Superparamagnetic particles coupled to a monoclonal antibody against CD16, a surface marker present in neutrophils, were incubated with the granulocytes (containing eosinophils and neutrophils). CliniMACS system (Miltenyi biotec, Bergisch-Gladbach, Germany; and Becton-Dickinson, Oxford, UK) was used to obtain highly purified (>93% pure) human blood eosinophils or neutrophils (>; 97%). Purified cells were labelled with Tc-99m HMPAO (Ceretec, GE Healthcare) under aseptic cGMP conditions and 75–100 MBq of labelled cells were administered intravenously. Dynamic lung images were acquired for the first 30 minutes. Further static scans of 5 minutes each were acquired at 1; 2 and 4 hours. Results: We were able to obtain highly purified neutrophils (positive selection) or eosinophils (negative selection). Kinetics of eosinophils in lung, liver and spleen differed significantly from kinetics of neutrophils. Initial dynamic lung images revealed a significant difference in the time activity curves for eosinophils and neutrophils. Migration of eosinophils from the lungs followed a monexponential clearance (t1/2) of 4.16 min. While neutrophil had significantly different clearance half-lives of 13.72 min (p=0.0019). There were significant differences in eosinophil and neutrophil migration and distribution in the liver and spleen (p<0.0018 and p<0.0325). There was a trend towards faster neutrophil migration in the asthmatics. This was not statistically significant. Conclusions For the first time it has been possible to identify distinct patterns of neutrophil and eosinophil migration through lung, liver and spleen in both healthy volunteers and stable asthmatics. This technique provides the opportunity for rapid throughput screening of novel therapeutic agents designed to alter leukocyte migration in disease conditions, or to further phenotype disease such as asthma.


Voronoi cell decompositions provide a classical avenue to classification. Typical approaches however only utilize point-wise cell-membership information by means of nearest neighbor queries and do not utilize further geometric information about Voronoi cells since the computation of Voronoi diagrams is prohibitively expensive in high dimensions. We propose a Monte-Carlo integration based approach that instead computes a weighted integral over the boundaries of Voronoi cells, thus incorporating additional information about the Voronoi cell structure. We demonstrate the scalability of our approach in up to 3072 dimensional spaces and analyze convergence based on the number of Monte Carlo samples and choice of weight functions. Experiments comparing our approach to Nearest Neighbors, SVM and Random Forests indicate that while our approach performs similarly to Random Forests for large data sizes, the algorithm exhibits non-trivial datadependent performance characteristics for smaller datasets and can be analyzed in terms of a geometric confidence measure, thus adding to the repertoire of geometric approaches to classification while having the benefit of not requiring any model changes or retraining as new training samples or classes are added.


This article considers the role of visualising in the formation of the nation narrative. It foregrounds the significance of gender performance in early twentieth-century Irish cultural nationalism. Prior to the consolidation of a hegemonic narrative of state, spaces existed for the exploration of a range of possible projections of identity. This study focuses on one of those possibilities, namely a series of costume photographs where gender is literally performed. A contextual reading of these photographs is offered in order to situate them within the formation of the nation narrative. The gender of the nation is enacted through performativity, which through its repetition comes to be seen as natural. The photographs under consideration here undermine that process of naturalisation by revealing a more complex and contradictory history of the relationship between gender and nation. The omission of this more complex representation in the Irish narrative, it is argued, reveals how monopoly of narrative is integral to both hegemonic control in the visual field and how we understand the nation.


Abstract Large-scale genome sequencing and the increasingly massive use of high-throughput approaches produce a vast amount of new information that completely transforms our understanding of thousands of microbial species. However, despite the development of powerful bioinformatics approaches, full interpretation of the content of these genomes remains a difficult task. Launched in 2005, the MicroScope platform (https://www.genoscope.cns.fr/agc/microscope) has been under continuous development and provides analysis for prokaryotic genome projects together with metabolic network reconstruction and post-genomic experiments allowing users to improve the understanding of gene functions. Here we present new improvements of the MicroScope user interface for genome selection, navigation and expert gene annotation. Automatic functional annotation procedures of the platform have also been updated and we added several new tools for the functional annotation of genes and genomic regions. We finally focus on new tools and pipeline developed to perform comparative analyses on hundreds of genomes based on pangenome graphs. To date, MicroScope contains data for >11 800 microbial genomes, part of which are manually curated and maintained by microbiologists (>4500 personal accounts in September 2019). The platform enables collaborative work in a rich comparative genomic context and improves community-based curation efforts.


According to the World Health Organization (1986), "health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve their own health." To bring this process and its desired outcomes to fruition, many theories and models for understanding and altering health behaviours have been designed and utilized (Ajzen, 1988; Bandura, 1986; Fishbein & Ajzen; 1975; Freire, 1973, 1974; Jessor & Jessor, 1977; Prochaska, 1979). Practitioners of behaviour change implementation are legion, as therapists, counsellors, social workers and so forth. Coaching (in various iterations such as life coaching, personal coaching, executive coaching) is a recent and growing behavioural intervention. As trained health behaviourists with professional coaching practices, it is our contention that the Co-Active coaching method is an effective and efficient approach for 'doing health promotion'. Furthermore, the success of the Co-Active coaching approach as a tool for health promotion is based, in part, on its integration of key health behaviour change elements such as: personal values; goal setting; self-defined issues; empowerment; self confidence; reinforcement; and self-efficacy. This position paper will examine the relationship of the Co-Active coaching method with several well-established behavioural theories.


Abstract. Black carbon, brown carbon, and mineral dust are three of the most important light absorbing aerosols. Their optical properties differ greatly and are distinctive functions of the wavelength of light. Most optical instruments that quantify light absorption, however, are unable to distinguish one type of absorbing aerosol from another. It is thus instructive to separate total absorption from these different light absorbers to gain a better understanding of the optical characteristics of each aerosol type. During the EAST-AIRE (East Asian Study of Tropospheric Aerosols: an International Regional Experiment) campaign near Beijing, we measured light scattering using a nephelometer, and light absorption using an aethalometer and a particulate soot absorption photometer. We also measured the total mass concentrations of carbonaceous (elemental and organic carbon) and inorganic particulates, as well as aerosol number and mass distributions. We were able to identify periods during the campaign that were dominated by dust, biomass burning, fresh (industrial) chimney plumes, other coal burning pollution, and relatively clean (background) air for Northern China. Each of these air masses possessed distinct intensive optical properties, including the single scatter albedo and Angstrom exponents. Based on the wavelength-dependence and particle size distribution, we apportioned total light absorption to black carbon, brown carbon, and dust; their mass absorption efficiencies at 550 nm were estimated to be 9.5, 0.5 (a lower limit value), and 0.03 m2/g, respectively. While agreeing with the common consensus that black carbon is the most important light absorber in the mid-visible, we demonstrated that brown carbon and dust could also cause significant absorption, especially at shorter wavelengths.


In vision-and-language grounding problems, fine-grained representations of the image are considered to be of paramount importance. Most of the current systems incorporate visual features and textual concepts as a sketch of an image. However, plainly inferred representations are usually undesirable in that they are composed of separate components, the relations of which are elusive. In this work, we aim at representing an image with a set of integrated visual regions and corresponding textual concepts, reflecting certain semantics. To this end, we build the Mutual Iterative Attention (MIA) module, which integrates correlated visual features and textual concepts, respectively, by aligning the two modalities. We evaluate the proposed approach on two representative vision-and-language grounding tasks, i.e., image captioning and visual question answering. In both tasks, the semantic-grounded image representations consistently boost the performance of the baseline models under all metrics across the board. The results demonstrate that our approach is effective and generalizes well to a wide range of models for image-related applications. (The code is available at \url{https://github.com/fenglinliu98/MIA)


The motives that firms have for investing in energy efficiency have been widely analysed in the literature. Particularly, there is a huge literature on barriers to energy efficiency investment and adoption. This paper reviews the econometric analyses carried out in this field. The main objective is to provide a general overview of the state of the econometric literature on the barriers and drivers of energy efficiency. We examine the main features of these studies and particularly the results of the explanatory variables used. We have classified them into three groups, barriers, drivers and firm characteristics. The paper ends with some suggestions for further analysis in order to improve our knowledge of energy efficiency investment.


A GIS-based method for constructing high-resolution (in space) maps of mean seasonal temperature and precipitation is developed for the Mediterranean Basin. Terrain variables and geo- graphical location are used as predictors of the climate variables at all points on a grid with a 1 km res- olution, using a regression-based approach. Variables used for model development include: longitude, latitude, elevation, distance from the nearest coast, direction to the nearest coast, slope, aspect, and the ratio of land to sea within given radii. Seasonal mean temperature and precipitation data, for the obser- vation period 1952 to 1989, were assembled from 248 temperature sites and 285 precipitation sites in order to initialise the regression model. Temperature data from 36 stations and precipitation data from 35 stations were retained for model validation. Climate surfaces were constructed using the regression equations, and refined by kriging the residuals from the regression model and subtracting the result from the predicted 'observation' surface. Latitude, elevation and distance from the sea are found to be the most effective predictors of local seasonal climate. Validation determined that regression plus kriging predicts mean seasonal temperatures with a coefficient of determination (R 2 ), between the expected and observed values, of 0.87 (summer) and 0.97 (winter), and mean seasonal precipitation with an R 2 of 0.46 (autumn) and 0.94 (summer). A simple regression model without kriging yields less


Chatter bots are computer programs that can simulate a conversation through text chat. Current chatter bots perform well in artificial conversations consisting of pairs of utterance exchanges like a question-answer session where the context switches with every pair. But they perform poorly in longer conversations where the context is maintained across several utterance exchanges. Existing approaches to artificial conversation generation focus on linguistic and grammatical modeling to generate individual sentence-level utterances. We present a framework that enables longer and more meaningful conversations by combining concepts of content representation and conversation semantics. We also present a metric for evaluating the conversations based on Grice's maxims, that form the central idea in the theory of pragmatics.


Bytyqi, H., K. Berisha, A. Hamidi, D. Sylejmani and M. Thaqi, 2017. A survey on traditional cheese production and diversity in Kosovo. Bulg. J. Agric. Sci., 23 (1): 42–48 The objective of this study was to identify the diversity of cheeses produced in Kosovo as well as the processing technology made by small-scale households in traditional form. A random sample consisting of 480 household cheese producers for local consumption were randomly selected, by representing all regions of Kosovo. The study was focused on their mode of cheese production, such as milk pasteurization, temperature when adding of rennet enzyme as a way of coagulation, curdling, cutting, pressing, salting, ripening and the use of cheese produced. For this purpose, the questionnaires with different questions were used. The study show that there was a small variety of cheeses produced in the traditional form and in total two types (soft cheese and hard cheese) were identifi ed and differences were registered in the technology of production in both types of cheeses. Technological cheese production process showed lack of standardization which differed slightly according to the regions of production. In general, in terms of fi nal product attributes 73.0% of small-scale farms in Kosovo produce soft cheese whereas 27.0% were hard cheese. However, in some regions special hard cheese forms were produced (Sharri cheese in the region of Prizren and Rugova cheese from Peja region). This study provides important information on the high diversity on the technological process of cheeses produced in traditional form and shows the need of standardization of the technological process as to achieve the desired quality and simultaneously exclude the food safety issues, especially in the case of Sharri cheese produced without pasteurization of milk.


This engrossing book chronicles one of the most exciting, controversial, and extravagant periods in the history of fashion: the reign of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette in 18th-century France. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell offers a carefully researched glimpse into the turbulent era's sophisticated and largely female-dominated fashion industry, which produced courtly finery as well as promoted a thriving secondhand clothing market outside the royal circle. She discusses in depth the exceptionally imaginative and uninhibited styles of the period immediately before the French Revolution, and also explores fashion's surprising influence on the course of the Revolution itself. The absorbing narrative demonstrates fashion's crucial role as a visible and versatile medium for social commentary, and shows the glittering surface of 18th-century high society as well as its seedy underbelly. Fashion Victims presents a compelling anthology of trends, manners, and personalities from the era, accompanied by gorgeous fashion plates, portraits, and photographs of rare surviving garments. Drawing upon documentary evidence, previously unpublished archival sources, and new information about aristocrats, politicians, and celebrities, this book is an unmatched study of French fashion in the late 18th century, providing astonishing insight, a gripping story, and stylish inspiration.


Large sensor-based infrastructures for radio astronomy will be among the most intensive data-driven projects in the world, facing very high power demands. The geographically wide distribution of these infrastructures and their associated processing High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities require Green Information and Communications Technologies (ICT): a combination is needed of low power computing, power and byte efficient data storage, local data services, Smart Grid power management, and inclusion of Renewable Energies. Here we outline the major characteristics and innovation approaches to address power efficiency and long-term power sustainability for radio astronomy projects, focusing on Green ICT for science.


From the Publisher:
Surveying the types of personal records that are available on the Internet and through online services, this encyclopedic book explains how researchers find and use personal data, identifies the most useful sources of information about people, and offers advice for those with privacy concerns. Researchers will learn how to use online tools and databases to gain competitive intelligence, locate and investigate people, access public records, identify experts, find new customers, recruit employees, search for assets, uncover criminal records, and conduct genealogical research. Added to this updated edition is a more comprehensive listing of all vendors of public records.
Carole A. Lane is the owner of TechnoSearch, Inc. a technology research firm. She lives in Vista, California.


Abstract Various biomarkers were used to determine the exposure of fish (Arius felis and Micropogon undulatus) from Galveston Bay (GB), Texas, USA to organic contaminants. Sediment levels of polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in GB ranged from 81 to >1000 ng/g and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were <20 ng/g at all stations. No significant differences in hepatic concentrations of contaminants and ethoxyresorufin O–deethylase (EROD) activity, CYPIA mRNA levels, and DNA adducts were found in A. felis from GB. However, significant differences in biliary concentrations of naphthalene, phenanthrene, and benzo[a]pyrene metabolites were observed. Induced EROD activities and elevated levels of biliary PAH metabolites were measured in M. undulatus from the two most contaminated sites in GB. Induction toxic equivalents (I-TEQs), derived from dosing rat hepatoma H4IIE cells with hepatic extracts of A. felis, were correlated with tissue levels of ≥4–ring PAHs.


Background: Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is the most common malignant tumor in the oral and maxillofacial region. The diagnosis in most cases is made at advanced stages with lymph node metastases and thus has a poor prognosis. Evidence suggests that detection of molecular abnormalities might be useful in screening for early malignancy. Cytokeratins (CKs) are part of the epithelial cytoskeleton. In malignancy, some CK filament fragments might be released in the serum. CK19 fragment Cyfra 21-1 is useful tumor marker for squamous cell carcinoma, but its clinical value in OSCC has not been confirmed. Hence, the aim was to investigate the diagnostic value of serum Cyfra 21-1 in OSCC patients. Materials and Methods: The preoperative serum Cyfra 21-1 concentration of forty OSCC patients and forty healthy controls was detected by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) using a commercial Cyfra 21-1 ELISA kit Xema Co., Ltd., Moscow, Russia. All statistical analyses were performed on STATISTICA statistical software (Windows version 6.0). Results: There was a statistically significant difference (P < 0.001) of mean serum Cyfra 21-1 levels (ng/mL) between OSCC cases (1.76 ± 0.81) and healthy controls (0.43 ± 0.14). The difference between controls and Stage III and Stage IV was also statistically significant (P < 0.001). The mean serum Cyfra 21-1 level was lower in histopathological Grade I cases (1.72 ± 0.78) than Grade II (2.04 ± 1.13), but the difference was not statistically significant (P = 0.459). Conclusion: It could thus be conjectured from the present study that increased serum Cyfra 21-1 level can be used as an adjunctive serological marker for the OSCC disease staging.


General concern about terrorism and sabotage in the United States has grown in the aftermath of the sabotage of Amtrak in Arizona, the bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City, the bomb threat at the New York regional air traffic control center, and the bombing of the World Trade Center. A concomitant concern has developed with regard to the adequacy of security at domestic airports and in commercial aviation. Twice in a three month period in 1995 the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) increased airport security. In August 1995, the FAA ordered heightened airport security procedures due to concern within the Clinton Administration about the threat of more frequent and more deadly terrorist attacks in the United States. (1) Then, in October 1995, the FAA once again increased airport security due to concern about the visit of Pope John Paul II, progress in the Palestinian and Israeli peace process, and the conviction of ten Muslim terrorists. Concern with the security of commercial aviation reached an all-time high after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988. This deadly act of terrorism prompted passage of the Aviation Security Improvement Act of 1990 (1990 Act) which set a number of goals for the enhancement of commercial aviation security. In the early 1990s concern seemed to ebb as acts of terrorism against U.S. targets decreased only to be heightened by the events in Oklahoma City and the explosion aboard TWA Flight 800 in July 1996. (2) There was a realization that terrorists are finding targets in the United States more attractive and attacks on the traveling public were likely to increase. Heightened commercial aviation security, while good for the safety of the traveling public, is not without its costs. Besides the direct costs associated with employing additional security personnel and equipment are the indirect costs--the opportunity costs--associated with the inevitable delays that accompany more careful screening of passengers and their luggage. Tighter security requires the traveler to allot more time to make flights because curbside check-in is not available, metal detectors are more sensitive leading to more false alarms, more luggage is searched, and gate agents are asking passengers more questions. (3) The obvious question is whether the benefits gained from enhanced aviation security justify the costs. During the first part of the 1990s strides have been made in the improvement of commercial aviation security in the United States. Despite these advancements, there is a lot yet to be done. This paper provides an overview of developments in commercial aviation security in the United States during the first part of the 1990s, discussing the accomplishments and setbacks encountered, and outlines the challenges that remain. BACKGROUND The FAA has responsibility for the safety and security of commercial aviation in the United States. The FAA's approach to ensuring security in commercial aviation has evolved over the years in response to changes in the complexion and frequency of terrorism. The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 heightened concern about the security of commercial aviation to such an extent that Congress passed the Aviation Security Improvement Act of 1990. The 1990 Act underscored concern about aviation security shared by Congress and the general public. It contained many mandates and directives for the FAA including: * "FAA and the FBI were required to jointly assess the threats to and vulnerabilities of the nation's airports * FAA was required to review the security programs of foreign air carriers and approve those that provide a level of protection similar to that provided by U.S. carriers serving the same airport * FAA was required to study the need for additional measures to safeguard the transportation of cargo and mail by passenger aircraft * FAA was directed to support the acceleration of research to develop explosive detection equipment" (4) It was hoped these measures would greatly improve commercial aviation security in the U. …


Barebacking - when gay men deliberately abandon condoms and embrace unprotected sex - has incited a great deal of shock, outrage, anger, and even disgust, but very little contemplation. Purposely flying in the face of decades of safe-sex campaigning and HIV/AIDS awareness initiatives, barebacking is unquestionably radical behavior, behavior that most people would rather condemn than understand. Thus the time is ripe for "Unlimited Intimacy", Tim Dean's riveting investigation into barebacking and the distinctive subculture that has grown around it. Audacious and undeniably provocative, Dean's profoundly reflective account is neither a manifesto nor an apology; instead, it is a searching analysis that tests the very limits of the study of sex in the twenty-first century. Dean's extensive research into the subculture provides a tour of the scene's bars, sex clubs, and Web sites; offers an explicit but sophisticated analysis of its pornography; and, documents his own personal experiences in the culture. But ultimately, it is HIV that animates the controversy around barebacking, and "Unlimited Intimacy" explores how barebackers think about transmitting the virus - especially the idea that deliberately sharing it establishes a new network of kinship among the infected. According to Dean, intimacy makes us vulnerable, exposes us to emotional risk, and forces us to drop our psychological barriers. As a committed experiment in intimacy without limits - one that makes those metaphors of intimacy quite literal - barebacking thus says a great deal about how intimacy works. Written with a fierce intelligence and uncompromising nerve, "Unlimited Intimacy" will prove to be a milestone in our understanding of sexual behavior.


The Trump Administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic is a stark reminder that poorly designed government can be a matter of life and death. This article explains how the Administration's careless and delayed response to the crisis was made immeasurably worse by its confused and confusing reallocation of authority to perform or supervise tasks essential to reducing the virus's ravages.

After exploring the rationale for and impact of prior federal reorganizations responding to public health crises, the article shows how a combination of unnecessary and unhelpful overlapping authority and a thoughtless mix of centralized and decentralized authority contributed to the Trump Administration's slow and ineffective effort to stem the virus's tide. Furthermore, the Administration's earlier dismantling of the structure built in the wake of prior outbreaks disabled a mechanism crucial to any federal response to public health threats—its ability to coordinate the efforts of public and private actions to effectively combat the crisis.

The article identifies numerous valuable lessons about government organization from the COVID-19 experience that should guide policymakers' deliberations in the likely event that they embark upon an effort to address the mistakes plaguing the Trump Administration's dismal response. More generally, it uses the government's response to COVID-19 to explore a number of insights about how to better think about and configure government institutions to prepare for and manage complex social problems like a pandemic.


Ongoing downsizing in the media sector has sparked a new start-up culture in the field of journalism. Over the past few years an increasing number of news organizations seeking to leverage social and symbolic rather than financial capital and cultivate employee as well as audience loyalty have entered the market (Wagemans, Witschge and Deuze, 2016). This paper examines El Diario (eldiario.es) and El Confidencial (elconfidencial.com). Qualitative methods involving the on-site observation in their newsrooms and semi-structured interviews with their journalists were employed. Findings indicate that both see themselves as alternative news providers whose emphasis El Diario draws heavily upon the symbolic capital of its founder Ignacio Escolar, El Confidencial, has banked primarily on its social capital.


Chlamydia trachomatis is the most prevalent STI in the United States, with the highest rates of infection reported among adolescent females6. The development of treatment strategies to prevent infection and the associated reproductive pathology requires a better understanding of the CD4+ T-cell immune responses to Chlamydia infection. PBMCs isolated from a seropositive donor and a seronegative donor were stimulated with various concentrations of chlamydial antigens (Serovar D EB and CHSP60-l) and underwent 24and 48-hour incubations. T-cell proliferation and cytokine secretion was quantified by 3H proliferation and dual-color ELISpot assays, respectively. Experimental assays revealed that PBMCs stimulated with 1 uglmL of chlamydial antigens and incubated for 48 hours was optimal for stimulating T -cells from a seropositive donor to proliferate more robustly and to display more specific secretion of IFN-y than T-cells from a seronegative donor. In a follow-up study with a small cohort of adolescent women (13 :'S Mage:'S 25) at high risk for Chlamydia infection, statistical analyses of experimental assays suggested that alamar blue T-cell proliferation and ELISpot assays were less accurate at diagnosing Chlamydia than current PCR diagnostic methods. Furthermore, analyses revealed that experimental assays were unable to predict immune status differences and to detect pathology in adolescent women. Although, exploratory ROC analyses suggested that experimental assays may have the potential to detect pathology among patients, such that AUC values for experimental assays did better than chance (AUC > 0.5) at predicting pathology when CD4+ T-cells were stimulated with chlamydial antigens.


The use of cavitation modeling within the maritime industry area is in a crucial state. The advances in the computer power, the understanding of the numeric's and of the cavitation phenomena do make possible to bring these kinds of simulations into the daily use. The goal is a cavitation method to be applied from the design stage to the problem solving situations. The paper will present cavitating results obtained for a twodimensional case: NACA 0015 profile and for a threedimensional case: Twist11 foil. These cases are the most popular numerical and experimental benchmarks used to validate the cavitation simulations. This step will prove the capability of simulations when using the proposed cavitation modeling and RANS solver approach. For an adequate mesh and proper turbulence modeling, predictions for developed cavitation regions like: sheet, clouds or vortices are possible. In a final step, the cavitation modeling will be put to the test for a real application challenge: a propeller. This last complex case will involve a rotating propeller and therefore moving mesh approach has to be implemented as well. By the end of the paper, the proposed cavitation method used within a RANS code for dedicated flow features grids, proves to give consistent results.


The international growing concern for the human exposure to magnetic fields generated by electric power lines has unavoidably led to imposing legal limits. Respecting these limits, implies being able to calculate easily and accurately the generated magnetic field also in complex configurations. Twisting of phase conductors is such a case. The consolidated exact and approximated theory regarding a single-circuit twisted three-phase power cable line has been reported along with the proposal of an innovative simplified formula obtained by means of an heuristic procedure. This formula, although being dramatically simpler, is proven to be a good approximation of the analytical formula and at the same time much more accurate than the approximated formula found in literature. The double-circuit twisted three-phase power cable line case has been studied following different approaches of increasing complexity and accuracy. In this framework, the effectiveness of the above-mentioned innovative formula is also examined. The experimental verification of the correctness of the twisted double-circuit theoretical analysis has permitted its extension to multiple-circuit twisted three-phase power cable lines. In addition, appropriate 2D and, in particularly, 3D numerical codes for simulating real existing overhead power lines for the calculation of the magnetic field in their vicinity have been created. Finally, an innovative 'smart' measurement and evaluation system of the magnetic field is being proposed, described and validated, which deals with the experimentally-based evaluation of the total magnetic field B generated by multiple sources in complex three-dimensional arrangements, carried out on the basis of the measurement of the three Cartesian field components and their correlation with the field currents via multilinear regression techniques. The ultimate goal is verifying that magnetic induction intensity is within the prescribed limits.


Nanoconstruction of metals is a significant challenge for the future manufacturing of plasmonic devices. Such a technology requires the development of ultra‐fast, high‐throughput and low cost fabrication schemes. Laser processing can be considered as such and can potentially represent an unrivalled tool towards the anticipated arrival of modules based in metallic nanostructures, with an extra advantage: the ease of scalability. Specifically, laser nanostructuring of either thin metal films or ceramic/metal multilayers and composites can result on surface or subsurface plasmonic patterns, respectively, with many potential applications. In this chapter, the photo‐thermal processes involved in surface and subsurface nanostructuring are discussed and processes to develop functional plasmonic nanostructures with pre‐determined morphology are demonstrated. For the subsurface plasmonic conformations, the temperature gradients that are developed spatially across the metal/dielectric structure during the laser processing can be utilized. For the surface plasmonic nanoassembling, the ability to tune the laser's wavelength to either match the absorption spectral profile of the metal or to be resonant with the plasma oscillation frequency can be utilised, i.e. different optical absorption mechanisms that are size‐selective can be probed. Both processes can serve as a platform for stimulating further progress towards the engineering of large‐scale plasmonic devices.


The capacity of actors and institutions to learn and reorganize is central to the resilience of complex systems, particularly in the context of rapidly urbanizing cities. A process of qualitative, reflective research among practitioners within the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN) showed that development projects and programmes can contribute meaningfully to this capacity when they introduce projects as "experiments". While projects did provide desired tangible benefits to certain groups of actors, many of the most significant contributions to resilience were related to knowledge, networks, information, and greater engagement of citizens with the state. This emphasis on the capacity to learn and reorganize provides a counterpoint to ideas around "implementation" and "mainstreaming" normally promoted within climate change adaptation practice – and, importantly, can help enrich these practices to maximize their effectiveness. This paper focuses on international development projects in particular, although findings have implications for other types of adaptation and resilience initiatives supported by governments, private sector, or community-based organizations.


Literacy theorists Freire and Macedo (1987) linked literacy success with the ability to 'read the world' before being able to 'read the word'. This ability is critical for young learners to navigate the transitional phase from their home culture into new education based settings. Such transitions are particularly difficult for young Aboriginal learners, who need to adjust to a range of different experiences, demands and expectations relating to their cultural, language and social skills. Research has clearly shown that Aboriginal learners are a group that generally, will not succeed in the area of literacy and who are at greatest risk of not achieving adequate literacy skills to pursue a career of their choice. Before these learners can become adept with school literacy they need an understanding of how oral language works in the classroom. This paper will use examples from the Narang Guudha (Wiradjuri language meaning little child) research project to demonstrate ways in which young Aboriginal learners, when given the time and opportunities to actively explore, discover and engage with classroom language, attempt to do this and in the process become familiar with the expectations of school. It will conclude with a consideration of the implications of this kind of data in the development of classroom discourse that will support such learners. Discourse is about making meanings i.e. about creating, giving, receiving, and sharing meanings. At the same time discourses are about making meaning (or meaningful activity and interaction) possible. Meaning is absolutely central to human life and human beings, as sociocultural phenomena. (Lankshear, et al 1997, p. 16)


Climate change is predicted to lead to an increasing frequency of natural disasters and humanitarian emergencies, yet scholars have not examined how the humanitarian community is responding to this issue. This article examines its initial engagement with the climate change regime and finds it was remarkably coordinated. Humanitarian agencies coauthored submissions to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the leaders of major humanitarian organizations spoke on co-organized panels on the humanitarian perils of climate change. In fact, the overarching trend was cooperation, not competition, among humanitarian agencies. This is an intriguing finding as it runs counter to the dominant account of a humanitarian marketplace in which actors are constantly competing for resources. Instead, this article suggests that the Inter-Agency Standing Committee played a significant role in mobilizing and coordinating humanitarian organizations' initial efforts. It highlights how and to what extent institutiona...


Recently, the importance of research transparency via replication studies has been greatly discussed in most of the social sciences, political science included. Indeed, as Gherghina and Katsanidou (2013) and Freese (2007) note, to some extent, the discussion has been prompted by the tremendous changes in publishing in the past decade or so. With the enormous expansion in data availability and instant publication made possible by the Internet, there now are many opportunities to verify the findings presented in the discipline's major journals. "Replication, replication" has not only become the mantra for political science, but for economics, psychology, and quantitative sociology as well. These developments opened a debate on how to best "guard the high standards or research practice and allow for the maximum use of current knowledge for the further development of science" (Gherghina and Katsanidou 2013, 1; for similar sentiments see King 1995).


In this article we analyze the reservoirs of the Peri-Pampean region comprised in the arid western corridor, taking into account their biogeographic areas and the characteristics of their basins. Since many of these reservoirs are impacted by agriculture, tourism and effl uents from industries and urban areas, they are typically meso-eutrophic and with low levels of dissolved oxygen in the hypolimnion during summer. The Río Tercero Reservoir receives an additional impact from the change in operation prescribed for the functioning of a nuclear power plant. This water body, located in the "El Espinal" region, is oligo-mesotrophic, and its plankton has varied in composition and biomass during the preand post-operational periods of the plant. In all the reservoirs here studied, blooms have been registered, most frequently and recurrently produced by Cyanobacteria (e.g., species of Dolichospermum and Microcystis), and have been associated with the presence of toxins in the reservoirs of San Luis and in the San Roque Reservoir of Córdoba. Ceratium hirundinella (Pyrrophyta), a species widely colonizing the Peri-Pampean region, was also associated with blooms. In many reservoirs of the area no studies have been performed at all, while in others the investigations have been scarce and motivated by specifi c objectives with the results usually being published in either private or classifi ed reports.


There is continual debate focusing on government's role in determining the well-being of its citizens. Should governments expand the generosity of welfare-state policies or reduce their involvement? This question is especially appropriate in less-developed countries with fewer resources to invest. This paper's findings show welfarestate policy is positively associated with life satisfaction around the world, and the relation holds in subsamples of developed, transition, and less-developed countries. The relation is of similar magnitude as the relation for GDP pc, and is more significant than the relation for quality of governance. The results are based on cross-sectional regressions including 104 countries over the period 2005–2012. Life satisfaction data are from the Gallup World Poll, and welfare-state policy is measured using public social protection expenditures from the International Labor Organization. Previous empirical studies support a positive life satisfaction welfare-state policy relation, but the samples contained few, if any, less-developed countries.


"When an attempt to conciliate an unfair-dismissal claim fails, arbitration may be called upon to determine whether the dismissal was fair or unfair. In the event that the dismissal is deemed unfair, Australia's federal industrial tribunal can reduce the amount of compensation ordered for the worker if their conduct contributed to the dismissal. This article offers original insights about the application of contributory-misconduct provisions to unfair-dismissal remedies by Australia's federal industrial tribunal. A content analysis was performed on arbitration decisions concerning misconduct-related dismissals made between July 2000 and June 2010 that awarded a remedy to the worker. It was found that reductions to remedies were more highly associated with situations where employees engaged in production deviance, had longer service histories, and apologised for their behaviour. Within the 33 decisions that recorded a reduction to the remedy, three typical remedy discounts were identified: reduced back pay, no back pay, or part reductions to compensation. It is concluded that in broad terms, the reductions may provide some sense of restorative justice to the organisation in finalising an unfair-dismissal dispute. However, these reductions may have less meaning to individual victims where the worker's misconduct involved acts of inter-personal deviance."


The Nordic region has a lot to offer visitors, such as beautiful nature and vibrant cities. However, statistics on national tourism performance has shown that the Nordic countries lag behind other OECD countries. This indicates a need for more innovation. The Nordic Innovation Centre has therefore invested more than 11 milion NOK in seven very special projects. In this publication you can read and learn more about these projects and what they achieved.


In recent years the proportion of people who smoke in developed countries has reached a plateau, even though countries like the UK continue to run anti-smoking campaigns. We aim to inform UK policy makers about the effects of anti-smoking campaigns by looking at the beliefs that smokers and non-smokers have about the dangers of passive smoking, with particular interest in whether these beliefs vary amongst smokers of different ages. We envisage two groups of potential smokers. There are the altruists, who are less likely to start to smoke once they are fully aware of the dangers of passive smoking; and there are the non-altruists for whom the effects of passive smoking are an irrelevancy. We hypothesis that anti-smoking campaigns have managed to dissuade the altruists of later generations from ever starting to smoke, but are having no effect on the behavior of the non-altruists and hence the plateau. The older smoking altruists are then captive to their smoking behavior and have to rationalize their smoking behavior by downplaying the effects of passive smoking. Using data from the Health Survey for England we find strong evidence that it is the older smokers who are less prone to believe in the dangers of passive smoking whilst younger smokers essentially have the same beliefs as nonsmokers: a young uneducated smoker is more aware of the dangers of passive smoking than a highly educated older smoker. This conclusion is robust to a number of sensitivity analyses. We conclude that the main effect of current campaigns is the continuing deterrence of potential young altruist smokers.


This case series describes the startup of Farm to School of Park County, an emerging nonprofit organization in the US state of Montana. Case (A) describes the community, the need, and the origins of Farm to School in Livingston, Montana. The leaders of Farm to School face a budget crisis and need to evaluate four options to decide whether, when, and how it should become an independent organization. As Case (B) begins, Farm to School has decided to enter into a fiscal sponsorship agreement with the local community foundation. The next task for the organization's leaders is recruiting founding board members. They need to decide whom to ask and how to do it. In Case (C), the board develops a strategic plan and establishes committees. However, the board members and leaders start to feel fatigue in the face of the demands of a startup organization, leading to questions about what is truly strategic and how work will get done. The Farm to School organization in Case (D) has just issued its first annual report, filled with meaningful accomplishments. The leaders of the organization begin to plan to build an organization that will outlast them and the founding board members.


. The western conifer seed bug, Leptoglossus occidentalis , is an alien invasive species of North American origin. Leptoglossus occidentalis was recorded for the first time in Arsoun-Metn, Lebanon in 2015. Adults and nymphs of L. occidentalis were collected by the authors from various locations in Lebanon and observed on two species of pine, Pinus pinea and Pinus brutia, on Juniperus excelsa and even on Cedrus libani . This could indicate its successful integration in the country and its presence on many coniferous tree species. Studies to investigate the behaviour and the economic impact of this alien insect species in Lebanon are recommended.


Jigger infestation among school going children has affected school attendance among primary school pupils especially those in jigger prone areas. Despite many efforts to fight the menace by different organizations, many pupils are still affected with many dropping out of school. The purpose of this study is to establish the impact of anti-jiggers sensitization on school attendance in primary schools in Mathioya Sub-county in Murang'a County. The study will be guided by the following specific objectives: to find out the prevalence of jiggers infection in primary schools in Mathioya Sub-county, to establish the effect of anti-jiggers campaigns on the affected pupils, to assess the impact of sensitization campaigns on reduction of infestation rates and to determine the effect of anti-jigger sensitization campaigns on attendance in primary schools in Mathioya Sub-county in Murang'a County with a view to recommend ways of improving the effectiveness of anti-jiggers campaigns in the County. The descriptive research design will be used in the study. The study will be carried out in selected primary schools in Mathioya Sub-county with a specific focus on schools with infested pupils. Primary schools in the sub-county have been chosen for the study due to high prevalence of jigger infestation in the schools. The target population for the study will be pupils, class teachers and the Sub-county Quality Assurance and Standards Officer. There are 58 primary schools in Mathioya Sub-county. The study will employ the purposive sampling method .Questionnaires, an interview schedule, documentary analysis guide and observation will be used as the tools of data collection. Questionnaires will be used to collect data from teachers and pupils and the interview schedule from the Sub-county Quality Assurance and Standards Officer. Piloting will be done to test the validity and reliability of the data collection instruments. Quantitative data will be analyzed using descriptive statistics which entail means, standard deviation, frequencies and percentages. Inferential statistics whereby the researcher will employ Chi-square tests, Spearman rank: correlation order test and Anova test will be used. Content analysis techniques will be used to analyze qualitative data collected using interview schedules. The analyzed data will be presented in the form of frequency tables and percentages.


Employee participation is one of the important fields in industrial relations. Research on employee participation in Malaysia is usually conducted through large-scale surveys and quasi-experiments and only focuses on the public sector. Therefore, this research instead uses a qualitative case study approach in investigating employee participation practices in private sector companies in Malaysia. This paper discusses aspects of the methodology of case study research and qualitative data collection and the theory and arguments affecting the choice of research and data gathering strategy in this research. Concludes that carrying out qualitative case study research, in the author's experience, is first and foremost a matter of learning by doing.


In this paper we introduce deep Gaussian process (GP) models. Deep GPs are a deep belief network based on Gaussian process mappings. The data is modeled as the output of a multivariate GP. The inputs to that Gaussian process are then governed by another GP. A single layer model is equivalent to a standard GP or the GP latent variable model (GP-LVM). We perform inference in the model by approximate variational marginalization. This results in a strict lower bound on the marginal likelihood of the model which we use for model selection (number of layers and nodes per layer). Deep belief networks are typically applied to relatively large data sets using stochastic gradient descent for optimization. Our fully Bayesian treatment allows for the application of deep models even when data is scarce. Model selection by our variational bound shows that a five layer hierarchy is justified even when modelling a digit data set containing only 150 examples.


To tell you how to use this workbook would be like giving you instructions on how to grieve. Impossible. The only thing we know for sure is that no two people will approach this work in the same way. If there's one thing you should remember as you begin this process, it is this: You are not alone. With that knowledge, you've already begun to heal. --from "A Mother Loss Workbook" Inspired by Hope Edelman's bestselling "Motherless Daughters, " authors Diane Hambrook and Gail Eisenberg have created a sensitive, m accessible workbook for women suffering the wounds of early mother loss. "A Mother Loss Workbook" is designed to help the, motherless daughter tell the story she needs to tell--her story. Its varied exercises, open-ended questions, writing topics, and activities, drawn from Hambrook's years of work with motherless daughters, provide both careful direction and generous room for self-expression. This book is a safe place where no one will judge a woman, where the work she must do can be done in her own time, at her own pace, and at any stage of mourning. "A Mother Loss Workbook" is an ideal supplement for personal therapy and support groups, but it is an important--and perhaps the only--tool for women just starting their journey or who are hesitant to go public with their feelings. Whether a woman uses it privately or shares it with a group, no matter how long its been since her mother died, "A Mother Loss Workbook" will guide her toward fully understanding her loss and taking charge of her future.


In spite of the high abundance and species diversity of diatoms, only a few bioactive compounds from them have been described. The present study reveals a high number of mammalian cell death inducing substances in biofilm-associated diatoms sampled from the intertidal zone. Extracts from the genera Melosira, Amphora, Phaeodactylum and Nitzschia were all found to induce leukemia cell death, with either classical apoptotic or autophagic features. Several extracts also contained inhibitors of thrombin-induced blood platelet activation. Some of this activity was caused by a high content of adenosine in the diatoms, ranging from 0.07 to 0.31 μg/mg dry weight. However, most of the bioactivity was adenosine deaminase-resistant. An adenosine deaminase-resistant active fraction from one of the extracts was partially purified and shown to induce apoptosis with a distinct phenotype. The results show that benthic diatoms typically found in the intertidal zone may represent a richer source of interesting bioactive compounds than hitherto recognized.


Abstract Polypropylene is increasingly being used for the thermoforming of food packaging. Compared with amorphous materials, such as polystyrene, it is much more difficult to process and within the industry it is generally poorly understood. In the present study the effects of pigments and nucleating agent on the crystallisation, morphology, and mechanical properties of an un-nucleated isotactic polypropylene (iPP) have been investigated. Results were compared with those obtained for a grade of iPP containing a proprietary nucleating agent. Quinacridone red pigment was found to be almost as efficient a nucleating agent as a standard nucleating agent, Millad 3988, and both of these were superior in performance to the iPP containing the proprietary agent. The white pigment (White PE MB) was found to be a nucleating agent for β-crystals. Young's modulus and yield stress'increased with increasing crystallinity and increasing α-crystal content. Elongation at break increased with increasing β content.


ABSTRACT Aim: The prognosis of heavily pretreated patients (pts) with epithelial ovarian carcinoma (EOC) and related malignancies having failed multiple chemotherapy (CTx) regimens is poor, irrespectively of the individual platinum-resistance status. In preceding studies, the combination of treosulfan and prolonged low-dose gemcitabine (GeT) has shown promising activity in platinum-resistant EOC. This non-interventional study has been set up in order to obtain more detailed informations regarding the clinical value of GeT given under routine conditions. Methods: 59 pts with recurrent EOC (n = 54), fallopian tube cancer (FTC; n = 2), peritoneal papillary-serous carcinoma (PPSC; n = 2), and type II endometrial carcinoma (EC-II; n = 1) who did not qualify for recruitment into a controlled clinical trial were included in this study. Pts had failed a median of 3 (range 1-11) prior Ctx, 37 were platinum-resistant (group R) and 22 were sensitive (group S). GeT was administered for 1-11 q2w cycles with treosulfan at 1 g/m2 PO on days 1-4 and gemcitabine at 450 mg/m2 IV (3 h infusion) on day 1. Adverse effects were scored according to CTCAE 4.0, responses were classified according to the integrated GCIG criteria. PFS and OS were calculated from the start of GeT until progression or death from any reason or loss to follow up. Results: GeT was generally well tolerated. Hematological side-effects were frequent but manageable with G3-4 neutropenia seen in 6, G3-4 anemia in 8, G3 fever in 3 and G3 infection in 1 pt. Non-hematological side effects exceeded G2 in only 4 pts. In 1 pt, GeT was prematurely stopped due to toxicity (allergic exanthema). A total of 8 CR and 19 PR accounted for an ORR of 45.8%. Adding 16 pts with SD, the clinical benefit rate (CBR) was 72.9%. PFS was 17.3 weeks (wks) and OS was 67.6 wks. No significant differences between groups R and S were found in regard to ORR (40.5% vs 54.5%), CBR (70.3% vs 77.3%), PFS (17.0 vs 18.4 wks), and OS (63.0 vs 72.6 wks). Moreover, prior Ctx with one of the single agents did not lower the likelihood to benefit from GeT. Conclusions: GeT given under routine conditions is well-tolerated and efficacious in heavily pretreated pts with recurrent EOC, FTC, PPSC, and EC-II by exhibiting chemomodulatory properties. Its particularly promising activity in platinum-resistant disease should be further explored in large-scaled prospective clinical trials. Disclosure: All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.


The Association for Learning Technology (ALT) is an independent educational charity. ALT's charitable object is "to advance education through increasing, exploring and disseminating knowledge in the field of learning technology for the benefit of the general public". This document sets out our strategy for the three years February 2011 to January 2014. The strategy is reviewed and updated annually. Its main purpose is to: · translate ALT's single charitable object into a practical strategy; · provide people and organisations inside and outside ALT with an overview of ALT's approach; · set priority activities to shape the work of ALT's committees, office-holders and staff.


Abstract. We applied a computation method of calculating the sky view factor (SVF) using Google Street View to Shibuya area, Tokyo, for the purpose of examining the relation between the SVF/SVF change and physical elements. The distribution of the SVF calculated by the above method was visualized, and the statistical process showed the tendency of a high SVF in quasi-residential districts and roadsides of high-graded trunk roads. The difference in the SVF change was small at 10-m intervals. The SVF change tended to be more apparent near an intersection and at different elevations.


Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) was an influential Egyptian ideologue who established the theoretical basis for radical Islamism in the postcolonial Sunni Muslim world. Lacking a pure understanding of the leader's life and work, the popular media has conflated Qutb's moral purpose with the aims of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. He is often portrayed as a terrorist, Islamo-Fascist, and advocate of murder. An expert on social protest and political resistance, John Calvert rescues Qutb from misrepresentation and follows the evolution of his thought within the context of his time. Calvert recounts Qutb's life from the small village in which he was raised to his execution at the behest of Abd al-Nasser's regime. His study remains sensitive to the cultural, political, social, and economic circumstances that shaped Qutb's thought, including major developments that composed one of the most eventful periods in Egyptian history. These years witnessed the full flush of Britain's tutelary regime, the advent of Egyptian nationalism, and the political hegemony of the Free Officers. Qutb rubbed shoulders with Taha Husayn, Naguib Mahfouz, and Abd al-Nasser himself, though his Islamism originally had little to do with religion. Only in response to his harrowing experience in prison did Qutb come to regard Islam and kufr (infidelity) as oppositional, antithetical, and therefore mutually exclusive. Calvert shows how Qutb repackaged and reformulated the Islamic heritage to challenge authority, including those who claimed (falsely, Qutb believed) to be Muslim.


Bilingual lexicons are fundamental resources. Modern automated lexicon generation methods usually require parallel corpora, which are not available for most language pairs. Lexicons can be generated using non-parallel corpora or a pivot language, but such lexicons are noisy. We present an algorithm for generating a high quality lexicon from a noisy one, which only requires an independent corpus for each language. Our algorithm introduces non-aligned signatures (NAS), a cross-lingual word context similarity score that avoids the over-constrained and inefficient nature of alignment-based methods. We use NAS to eliminate incorrect translations from the generated lexicon. We evaluate our method by improving the quality of noisy Spanish-Hebrew lexicons generated from two pivot English lexicons. Our algorithm substantially outperforms other lexicon generation methods.


The coronavirus pandemic has not only come as a profound shock to the major economies, but also exposed tensions between leading schools of thought. Uncertainty has arisen about the medium- and long-term consequences of the policy responses to COVID-19. Will the pandemic, and the consequent major upheaval in economic policy, lead to deflation or more inflation? This article—which is intended above all as a contribution to the emerging deflation vs. inflation debate—begins by discussing official policy in recent months. It then states a position in the tradition of the quantity theory of money and develops the argument that inflation will rise significantly in the aftermath of the pandemic.


Courts in Europe, North-America and elsewhere frequently use the language of 'balancing' when dealing with fundamental rights cases. In addition, judges and scholars increasingly often rely on the image of balancing, or 'weighing', to draw (self-)portraits of legal cultures and to frame contrasts and similarities between legal orders. This article argues that this form of discourse occupies a particularly problematic position as a topic of comparative constitutional law, and this for two primary reasons. First, while balancing references, as legal arguments, function primarily to justify the exercise of judicial power in particular - local - settings, their legitimizing force depends to a large extent on explicit and implicit appeals to values that are understood to transcend the local, such as rationality, fairness and reasonableness. The ways in which balancing references voice these appeals, moreover, can be shown to differ between legal systems. These complex ambivalences place balancing squarely in between the two main competing models for comparative legal studies. Second, balancing references, in many of the ways they figure in legal discourse, habitually transcend familiar categories of legal thought, such as doctrine or principle, or traditional conceptual divisions, such as form/substance and legal/political. This means that a number of commonly relied-upon abstractions are not easily available for comparative investigations of this particular topic. The article argues that these two sets of difficulties in situating balancing in terms of traditional comparative law approaches have contributed to an overemphasis on similarities and a comparative neglect of differences in local manifestations of balancing discourse. Underscoring the suggestion that the very idea of balancing can mean different things in different places, the article claims, will be essential in developing of a richer understanding of the legitimizing force of a type of discourse that has become crucial in fundamental rights adjudication.


Whether stemming from rising inequality, economic stagnation, or technological disruption, global processes of transformation are changing European societies. With distrust in EU institutions at an all-time low, a perceived absence of a European demos or polity is attributed in part to the nonexistence of a European public square, a forum for direct communication between EU institutions and EU citizens. So-called 'hearts and minds strategies', such as Citizens' Dialogues and the European Citizens' Initiative, aim to go beyond the rhetorics of convergence criteria, stability mechanisms, and bailout packages that dominate weekly news cycles. In contrast with liberalist discourses of idealisation and universalisation, a reactionary populism fetishises a return to an age when fiscal and migration policy were the sole province of national capitals. This paper critically analyses discourses surrounding 'dialogue' and 'better communication' inside the European Commission in Brussels, drawn from extensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out within its office spaces. Through participant-observation and in-person, semi-structured interviewing with civil servants, it explores the ways in which they seek to fill the dialogical spaces currently occupied by populist voices in order to reaffirm the legitimacy underpinning the existence of the EU and of a supranational, imagined community of Europeans who identify with and belong to it. Its findings suggest that the achievement of 'better communication' with citizens by the European Commission is made all the more intractable by its struggle to define an institutional European identity that is inclusive, coherent, persuasive and distinct.


There are numerous anecdotal examples of drought terminations documented throughout the historical record on most continents. The end of a drought is the critical time during which water resource managers urgently require information on the replenishment of supplies. Yet this phase has been relatively neglected by the academic community, with much of the existing body of research on drought termination assessing the likelihood of droughts ending rather than its temporal profile. In particular, there has been little effort to characterise drought termination events themselves. This is partly explained by existing definitions of drought termination as a specific point in time when drought is considered to have finished, rather than a more holistic consideration based on approaches developed within biological sciences. There is also a lack of understanding about how drought termination propagates through the hydrological cycle. This paper specifically examines and reviews available research on drought termination, highlighting limitations associated with current definitions and offering suggestions for characterising the temporal stages of drought. An alternative definition of drought termination is proposed: a period between the maximum negative anomaly and a return to above-average conditions. Once this phase has been delineated, the duration, rate and seasonality of drought termination can be derived. The utility of these metrics is illustrated through a case study of the 2010–2012 drought in the UK, and the propagation of drought termination between river flows and groundwater levels.


The Japanese antitrust agency (the J-FTC) holds a jurisdictional monopoly over most issues. Because overlapping jurisdictions would enable politicians to gauge relative bureaucratic performance, this monopoly prevents politicians from monitoring the agency on most issues. In response, J-FTC bureaucrats have chosen not to enforce those statutory provisions like criminal penalties that firms might contest. Consequently, firms face virtually no criminal sanctions for violating the antitrust statute. Most Japanese markets are still competitive - but primarily because they are large, fluid, and easy to enter. The J-FTC enforces the law only in areas where politicians can monitor its performance, and politicians have the information they need to monitor only on issues about which they care deeply. All else equal, monopolist agencies will regulate less actively than competitive agencies. Yet politicians do not win elections by creating agencies they cannot control, and even monopolist agencies will regulate actively when politicians can gauge their performance. In equilibrium, therefore, politicians will grant agencies a jurisdictional monopoly over electorally important issues only when they have access through other sources to information by which to monitor their bureaucrats.


This paper surveys in detail the relations between numerical integration and the Hamiltonian (or hybrid) Monte Carlo method (HMC). Since the computational cost of HMC mainly lies in the numerical integrations, these should be performed as efficiently as possible. However, HMC requires methods that have the geometric properties of being volume-preserving and reversible, and this limits the number of integrators that may be used. On the other hand, these geometric properties have important quantitative implications for the integration error, which in turn have an impact on the acceptance rate of the proposal. While at present the velocity Verlet algorithm is the method of choice for good reasons, we argue that Verlet can be improved upon. We also discuss in detail the behaviour of HMC as the dimensionality of the target distribution increases.


ABSTRACT This treatise evaluates the evolution of a taxation tactic used by several state and local jurisdictions known as the "jock tax." This controversial method of taxation involves professional athletes and those associated with professional sport franchises paying taxes on money earned while working in a state in which the individuals do not reside. Implemented in the late 1980s and early 1990s, this form of taxation has added yet another way for some states to generate additional revenue. Specifically, this study examines the issues associated with implementing this form of income taxation including perceived monetary gains for local and state governments, limitations of enforcement, calculation variances, double taxation, and the impact on non-athletes. In addition, an extensive review of the legislative history of the Constitutional Clauses reveals potential violations of the Commerce Clause, Due Process Clause, Privileges and Immunities Clause, and Equal Protection Clause. Most everyone knows about the two certainties in life: death and taxes; although, some Cubs fans would argue for a third with respect to their team's chances of never winning another World Series Championship. Of the three, however, it is the "certainty" of paying taxes that we seem to have the most control over (sorry Cubs fans). Or do we? The current tax structure in this country is convoluted at best and inequitable at worst. Who should pay taxes and how much one should pay are issues that have been debated for centuries in every forum from the kitchen table to the Halls of Congress. Some would suggest that citizens of this great land might as well agree to disagree over issues of taxes because no single answer can satisfy all "payers" involved. There are specific tax issues, however, that arise from time to time that are worthy of debate and should be examined more closely in order to establish or maintain a perception of equity. One such issue involves the state income taxation of nonresident athletes. The "jock tax", as it is more commonly known, is a plan implemented by most states which is designed to generate additional revenue by taxing visiting professional athletes and employees affiliated with professional sport franchises. A BRIEF HISTORY Prior to 1990, the only states and cities that taxed visiting team athletes were Detroit, California, Cleveland and Wisconsin. Cleveland has always imposed an earnings tax, which is withheld at the source and does not require the filing of a tax return, while Detroit has always required the filing of a tax return. While all resident team states have always taxed their nonresident players on the games played in the resident state (which is usually 50%), the aggressive taxing of nonresident visiting players did not begin until mid 1989, in the midst of the battle with the state of Wisconsin. One by one, with New York leading the way, states and localities began "to join the union" in taxing nonresident athletes, especially in light of the average baseball players salaries' increasing from approximately $350,000 in the mid 1980's to $1,084,408 in 1992 (MLB Salaries, 2009). The reason there was such a dramatic increase in player salaries is that there was extensive collusion among the Major League Baseball owners to keep the salaries low (Brown, 2006). While the highest paid player in the league in 2009, was paid in excess of 30 million per year, the average salary in 2009, was $3.24 million (MLB Salaries, 2009). Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming are the only states (and their localities), which do not impose a state income tax on individuals. Therefore, forty-one states are left to exercise their taxing power. Additionally, only four of the nine non-taxing states have professional major league sports teams. ISSUES WITH IMPLEMENTATION There are several issues with implementation of the so called "jock tax". …


Given the tremendous toll in human lives and attendant economic losses, it is appropriate that scientists are working hard to understand better earthquakes, with the aim of forecasting and, ultimately, predicting them. In the last decades increasing attention has been paid to the coseismic effects on the natural environment, creating a solid base of empirical data for the estimation of source parameters of strong earthquakes based on geological observations. The recently introduced INQUA scale (Environmental Seismic Intensity–ESI 2007 Scale) of macroseismic intensity clearly shows how the systematic study of earthquake surface faulting, coseismic liquefaction, tsunami deposits and other primary and secondary ground effects can be integrated with 'traditional' seismological and tectonic information to provide a better understanding of the seismicity level of an area and the associated hazards. At the moment this is the only scientific means of equating the seismic records to the seismic cycle time-spans extending the seismic catalogues even to tens of thousands of years, improving future seismic hazard analyses. This Special Publication covers some of the latest multidisciplinary work undertaken to achieve that aim. Eighteen papers from research groups from all continents address a wide range of topics related both to palaeoseismological studies and assessment of macroseismic intensity based only on the natural phenomena associated with an earthquake.


We study a novel multi-armed bandit problem that models the challenge faced by a company wishing to explore new strategies to maximize revenue whilst simultaneously maintaining their revenue above a fixed baseline, uniformly over time. While previous work addressed the problem under the weaker requirement of maintaining the revenue constraint only at a given fixed time in the future, the design of those algorithms makes them unsuitable under the more stringent constraints. We consider both the stochastic and the adversarial settings, where we propose natural yet novel strategies and analyze the price for maintaining the constraints. Amongst other things, we prove both high probability and expectation bounds on the regret, while we also consider both the problem of maintaining the constraints with high probability or expectation. For the adversarial setting the price of maintaining the constraint appears to be higher, at least for the algorithm considered. A lower bound is given showing that the algorithm for the stochastic setting is almost optimal. Empirical results obtained in synthetic environments complement our theoretical findings.


This study investigated the beliefs about language learning of 100 Bangsamoro Madaris learners in Southern Philippines. The survey instrument, 'Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory' or BALLI (Horwitz 1987) which included 34 items on a Likert-type scale, was used to collect data on the learners' beliefs about English language learning. The primary aim was to describe their beliefs about English language learning, which to date, has remained unexplored. The second aim was to explore the relationship between their beliefs and academic performance represented by their final grades in English subject in order to provide empirical backing of the relationship, otherwise lacking in beliefs literature (Peacock, 1999). Aside from that, the beliefs of the respondents towards Arabic language learning were gathered using a modified BALLI in order to compare their beliefs about Arabic language learning to their beliefs about English language learning.
Findings of the descriptive analysis on the responses to BALLI statements indicate several firmly held beliefs among the respondents with varying degrees of validity.Some of the beliefs identified having important teaching implications are the importance given to excellent pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. Respondents are also highly motivated and optimistic. The Pearson Product Moment correlation analysis between the beliefs and the final scores indicates relationship in five belief items, two of which different from previous studies (Peacock, 1999) which supports to the context specificity of beliefs. Finally, nine out of 21 statements compared in BALLI English and BALLI Arabic through t-tests are found significantly different, providing more evidence of the influence of social and cultural contexts in shaping beliefs.


Risks and challenges associated with recurring natural hazards (especially wet season cyclonic and flooding events; dry season extensive savanna fires) facing remote north Australian Indigenous communities are well recognised. Less well appreciated are longer-term challenges required for building community resilience in the face of responding to natural hazards. We report on detailed surveys of community perceptions of resilience undertaken in two communities, Ngukurr and Gunbalanya, in northern Australia. This assessment highlights the critical challenge for government authorities to effectively engage with remote communities. We then address the equally challenging issue of enhancing resilience through building enterprise opportunities. Currently, only few employment opportunities exist in either community. Based on experience with market-based savanna burning greenhouse gas emissions abatement projects in north Australia, we illustrate the potential for ecosystem service-based enterprises to deliver culturally appropriate employment, which offers evident benefits for local communities in preparing for, responding to, and recovering from major natural disaster events.


The Definitive Guide to Communicating in Any Crisis. "When facing an already difficult crisis, the last thing a company needs is to make it worse through its own communications - or lack thereof. As one who has lived through a number of [business] crises and served as an independent investigator of the crises of others, I consider Steven Fink's book to be an excellent guide to avoiding collecting scar tissue of your own by learning from the scar tissue painfully collected by others". (Norman R. Augustine, former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Lockheed Martin). There are few guarantees in business today. Unfortunately, one of them is the inevitability of a crisis having a potentially major effect on your business and your reputation. When your company finds itself in the midst of a crisis, the ripple effects can disrupt lives and business for the foreseeable future if public opinion is not properly shaped and managed. Skillfully managing the perception of the crisis determines the difference between a company's life or death. Because in the pitched battle between perception and reality, perception always wins. Fortunately, there is a solution. Crisis communications and crisis management legend Steven Fink gives you everything you need to prepare for the inevitable-whether it's in the form of human error, industrial accidents, criminal behavior, or natural disasters. In this groundbreaking guide, Fink provides a complete toolkit for ensuring smooth communications and lasting business success through any crisis. Crisis Communications offers proactive and preventive methods for preempting potential crises. The book reveals proven strategies for recognizing and averting damaging crisis communications issues before it's too late. The book also offers ways to deal with mainstream and social media, use them to your advantage, and neutralize and turn around a hostile media environment Steven Fink uses his decades of expertise and experience in crisis communications to help you: understand and manage the relationship between public; perception and reality; choose the best spokesperson for the crisis; protect your brand and reputation through crises large and small; make wise, vigilant, and defensible decisions under extreme crisis-induced stress; tell the truth no master how tempting it may be to mslead; and, use social media outlets to communicate directly to the public about a crisis. The explosion of the Internet and, especially, social media, has added a new layer to the business leader's skill set: the ability to handle a crisis quickly and professionally within moments of its occurrence. Livelihoods depend upon it. With in-depth case studies of Toyota, BP, and Penn State, Crisis Communications provides everything you need to successfully lead your company through today's rocky landscape of business-where crises large and small loom around every corner, and the lives of businesses and management teams hang in the balance. Praise for Steven Fink's Crisis Management: "Every major executive in America ought to read at least one book on crisis management. In this way, he or she might be better prepared to deal with the disasters striking organizations at an ever-increasing rate...The question is: 'Is Steven Fink's book one that busy executives ought to read?' The answer is a resounding yes". (Los Angeles Times, Front Page Sunday Book Review.


Introduction: Anemia is a common problem in diabetic patients, who usually suffer from a greater degree and severity of anemia based on their level of renal impairment, compared to non diabetic patients. This study investigates the prevalence of anemia in type 2 diabetic patients and aims to determine the role of different stages of nephropathy in development of anemia in these patients. Methods and Materials: For this study, 1962 outpatients, with type 2 diabetes were selected. A full blood count and iron indices were obtained for all patients. Anemia was defined as Hemoglobin<13g/lit in males and <12 g/lit in females. The correlation of anemia with other variables including sex, age, duration of diabetes, fasting blood sugar, glycosylated hemoglobin, glumerolar filtration rate, albuminuria, uric acid and metabolic syndrome was identified with multivariate logistic regression analysis. Results: In males 9.2% and among females 10.4% of patients had anemia. The prevalence of elevated albuminuria (micro or macroalbuminuria) was 38. 1%. Of our patients, 8.1% had moderate (creatinine clearance <60 ml/min/ 1. 73 m2) and 31. 4% had mild (CCr= 60-90) renal impairment. Patients with moderate renal impairment had significantly higher levels of anemia than patients with mild renal failure (30% Vs. 9%, p<0.001). Patients with diabetes and macroalbuminuria were also likely to have more anemia than patients with microalbuminuria (32.4% Vs. 8.4%, p<0.001); also patients with microalbuminuria were also more likely to have anemia than patients without elevated albuminuria (8. 4% vs. 5. 7%, p<0. 001). Conclusion: Anemia has a high prevalence in type 2 diabetic patients. Any degree of renal impairment and albuminuria are risk factors for anemia in such patients. Keyword: Anemia, Type 2 diabetes, Nephropathy, Albuminuria


In Mexico, social service is a mandatory activity performed by undergraduate students as a requisite for graduation. According to national regulations, the social service is managed by higher education institutions. Through social service (also understood as a service-learning experience), students can apply the knowledge they have acquired to produce a benefit to both society and the state. Social service should be oriented to solving relevant social problems about health, housing, social re-adaptation, immigration, technological development, education etcetera. For higher education institutions, this practice can be embedded in other academic activities like teaching, research and the preservation of culture. An example of a research project supported by social service activities is presented by the author in order to reflect how this particular service-learning experience can foster research-oriented learning. More efforts to analyse this possible relationship are needed. This material will be interesting for people studying different ways to approach this particular mode of learning.


In the document "Eight key competences for life-long learning" the first and the most important competence is communication in the mother tongue. If we have good knowledge of mother tongue, then we will be better in the process of foreign language learning. Language competence means to know the language on the level of phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicology, orthography and orthoepy. We have linguistic competence (knowledge about language) and communicative competence (using of language). At this moment, when we speak about European society, it is very important to have good competences in ICT and foreign language speaking. For these reasons, we made this research about language competences in mother tongue (Croatian language) and English in primary school and the attitude of children to Croatian and English language and the way they learn them or not. The research includes 3 primary schools in Zagreb (N = 120) in the first two periods of learning (1st - 6th class). Our aim is to measure linguistic and communicative competence in Croatian and English and how pupils are different in terms of sex, age and attitude. We expect that children in the first two periods of primary school have better developed linguistic competence (theory of language) than communicative competence (using language in everyday situations). It is expected because of methods of teaching and learning. Croatian teachers are more focused on theory than functional literacy in the process of teaching and learning of Croatian language. It is easier with English because teachers of English are more focused on using English in different situations. Also, we expect better results from girls than boys, from older than younger pupils as well as from pupils who have more positive attitudes to Croatian and English language.


The electricity sector worldwide is facing considerable pressure arising out of climate change issues, depletion of fossil fuels and geo-political issues around the location of remaining fossil fuel reserves. Electricity systems are also facing technical issues of bi-directional power flows, increasing long-distance power flows and a growing contribution from fluctuating generation sources. There is a concern that these systems are vulnerable. Investigation of vulnerability has focussed on shocks to the system associated with weather risks, equipment failure, supply (fuel) failure and price shocks, and analysis has been primarily based on financial measures such as the value of lost load. As the UK electricity system makes the transition to a low carbon future, it is unclear what this new future will look like. Transition pathways research using a multi-level perspective has identified a general picture of the drivers in future systems architecture. In such futures, vulnerability becomes multi-dimensional, and security becomes a more complex issue than that of supply of fossil fuels. These issues are not specific to the UK. Electricity systems across the globe face the same issues of multi-dimensional vulnerability and complexity of security. Research into the transition to a low carbon electricity system has, to date, been primarily focussed on the national scale in the UK. The aim of this work is a critical analysis into the use of the resilience concept for electricity systems, applied in particular to the distribution network in a case study urban area in the north east of England. The case study shall examine the low carbon scenarios for the UK, what this means in particular for domestic buildings for the case study area, and the nature of the stress on the electricity distribution system which may result from the expected growth in electrical load.


Pilot studies indicate that shifts in the nematode species composition, life strategies and feeding behavior during composting appear to be fairly consistent and, therefore, promising as a potential tool to assess compost maturity. However, this has been only based on a limited number of, mainly, non-replicated observations. In this study, we tested whether the nematode community succession patterns are recurrent for parallel processes and assessed the relationship between the changes in the nematode community and potential important variables (i.e., temperature, duration of composting and the microbial community). The nematode and microbial community of three simultaneously running Controlled Farm Composting and a reference Green Waste composting process were analyzed through time. Bacterial-feeding enrichment opportunists were most numerous during and directly after the heat peaks. Subsequently, the bacterial-feeding/predator community dominated and the fungal-feeding nematodes became more dominant during maturation, confirming general community patterns from previous experiments. Nematode abundances significantly fluctuated with temperature and the relative abundance of fungal-feeding nematodes increased as the duration of the curing process increased. The amount of fungal-feeding nematodes was associated significantly with both duration of composting and temperature, and the F/(F + B) ratio was only significantly associated with duration of composting. Based on these results, and additional data from an industrial reference compost process and on available literature, a Nematode-based Index of Compost Maturity (NICM) is proposed, combining four nematode-based criteria (i.e., nematode abundance, F/(F + B) ratio, the presence of more than one fungal-feeding taxon and the presence of diplogasterids). Nevertheless, the NICM should be considered as work in progress which should be tested for a wider range of composts from diverse feedstock mixtures, locations (sites) and composting techniques, to validate the use of the index and allow more reliable interpretation of particular values of this index.


This paper is an investigation into the acoustic culture of Stonehenge. It begins by discussing the importance of music and sound in the life of an aural/oral culture, and its importance as ritual technology. It goes on to provide background about the site in prehistory and in popular culture. Thomas Hardy's writing about Stonehenge raises the question of whether there are significant acoustic features at the site. There is then a study of the acoustics of Stonehenge, beginning with existing work on the subject and a theoretical consideration. It goes on to study the acoustics of a full size replica and a digital model before discussing the results of field tests in the stone circle itself. It concludes that the sonic features of Stonehenge were noticeable and significant, and that it is likely that they were a part of the ritual culture of the site.


Regions with a cold winter, as in the Baltic countries, have a problem to meet the nitrogen requirement in the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive 98/15/EC. Especially in the winter season, the temperature of the influent wastewater could arrive also below 10°C and this delays the biological processes that takes place in the wastewater treatment. With the decrease of the temperature, the efficiency of nitrogen removal in the system decreases and leads to a high nitrogen loading in the effluent.The ITEST (Increased Technology and Efficiency in Sewage Treatment) project situated in Hammarby Sjostadsverk in Stockholm has as its main aim to enhance nitrogen removal, thereby increasing the temperature in the incoming wastewater. The pilot plant ITEST is comprised of two treatment lines, one works with natural temperature influent and the other works at the temperature of 20 °C. In order to warm the incoming water a heating system, using waste heat, is used, leading to save energy.The two test lines were compared analyzing different parameters from January to May 2013. Total nitrogen, nitrate-nitrogen and ammonium-nitrogen concentrations were measured in the incoming water and in the effluent from the two treatment lines. Hence, the efficiency of the nitrogen removal was compared between the reference and the temperature line.In the period where the system was well functioning, the results show a nitrogen efficiency with a maximum of 92 % of removal of total nitrogen for the temperature line compared to only 65 % for the reference line. In the period where the system did not have any troubles the total nitrogen is under 10 mg/l, which is the limit of total nitrogen discharges specified in the Directive. Instead, for the sludge volume and the suspended solids any particular difference can be noticed from the two lines of treatment. In conclusion, in the temperature line can be noticed a great efficiency in nitrogen removal compared to the reference line.


The aim of this work was to synthesise a series of hydrophilic derivatives of cis-1,2-dihydroxy-3,5-cyclohexadiene (cis-DHCD) and copolymerise them with 2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate (HEMA), to produce a completely new range of hydrogel materials. It is theorised that hydrogels incorporating such derivatives of cis-DHCD will exhibit good strength and elasticity in addition to good water binding ability. The synthesis of derivatives was attempted by both enzymatic and chemical methods. Enzyme synthesis involved the transesterification of cis-DHCD with a number of trichloro and trifluoroethyl esters using the enzyme lipase porcine pancreas to catalyse the reaction in organic solvent. Cyclohexanol was used in initial studies to assess the viability of enzyme catalysed reactions. Chemical synthesis involved the epoxidation of a number of unsaturated carboxylic acids and the subsequent reaction of these epoxy acids with cis-DHCD in DCC/DMAP catalysed esterifications. The silylation of cis-DHCD using TBDCS and BSA was also studied. The rate of aromatisation of cis-DHCD at room temperature was studied in order to assess its stability and 1H NMR studies were also undertaken to determine the conformations adopted by derivatives of cis-DHCD. The copolymerisation of diepoxybutanoate, diepoxyundecanoate, dibutenoate and silyl protected derivatives of cis-DHCD with HEMA, to produce a new group of hydrogels was investigated. The EWC and mechanical properties of these hydrogels were measured and DSC was used to determine the amount of freezing and non-freezing water in the membranes. The effect on EWC of opening the epoxide rings of the comonomers was also investigated


Colloid-probe-AFM has been widely used to measure the forces of interaction between two surfaces such as particles of different size and functionality or a flat surface and a particle in aqueous environments. However, the applicability of colloid-probe AFM to detect different surface chemistries on chemical or protein patterned surfaces has not been demonstrated. We show that the technique can be used to distinguish the regions of different surface chemistries or biomolecules located within a patterned surface in buffer solution. Our previously developed method, based on evaporation induced self-assembly, was used to generate binary colloidal crystal (bCC) layers of different chemical and/or protein patterns. Particles of different size and functionality, with or without adsorbed protein(s), were used to decorate solid supports with the bCCs. The results from the force measurements on the patterned surfaces revealed that the probe experiences both strong or weak repulsive interactions and attractive interactions depending on the net surface charge present on the particles within the bCC patterns. Measurements on bCC patterns where one particle is coated with a single protein demonstrate that the technique can also be used to probe surface diffusion of adsorbed proteins. Therefore, we are able to detect whether a protein remains adsorbed or diffuses to a region on the bCC containing no proteins. Furthermore, the applicability of this technique was extended to detect the presence of two different biomolecules (i.e., lysozyme and bovine serum albumin adsorbed on both the large and small particles) within the protein patterned bCC surface by their different interaction forces. The study demonstrates that colloid-probe AFM can be used to discriminate between the surface properties of binary colloid crystal patterned surfaces where the binary patterns are comprised of particles of either different surface chemistry or particles with different adsorbed proteins.