We surveyed crustacean larvae in the plankton in the lee of Bodega Head, California, for 2 months during late spring and summer and cross‐correlated the larval abundance and stage of development of 16 taxa with 8 indicators of upwelling‐relaxation conditions. Larvae in all stages of development for 11 of these taxa were entrained and accumulated in a recirculation feature in Bodega Bay, found in the lee of this small headland as soon as upwelling‐favorable winds began, and persisted until winds weakened. The remaining taxa were more prevalent during relaxation events when the recirculation feature dissipated and a poleward coastal current transported larvae into and through the bay. During upwelling conditions, a vertically sheared flow occurs in the lee of the headland that accounts for the accumulation of plankton. However, larval behavior did not have a substantial effect on density and persistence in the lee of the headland, regardless of whether taxa were more prevalent during upwelling or relaxation conditions or whether they developed entirely nearshore or migrated offshore later in development. Thus, larvae and postlarvae of many, diverse taxa are concentrated in the plankton in the lee of small headlands in upwelling areas, which is consistent with previously reported recruitment hot spots in small upwelling bays. These headland‐related hot spots increase spatial structure in population density and community structure in recruitment‐limited upwelling regions and other wind‐driven coasts.


Pavements tend to deteriorate with time under repeated traffic and/or environmental loading. By detecting pavement distresses and damage early enough, it is possible for transportation agencies to develop more effective pavement maintenance and rehabilitation programs and thereby achieve significant cost and time savings. The structural health monitoring (SHM) concept can be considered as a systematic method for assessing the structural state of pavement infrastructure systems and documenting their condition. Over the past several years, this process has traditionally been accomplished through the use of wired sensors embedded in bridge and highway pavement. However, the use of wired sensors has limitations for long-term SHM and presents other associated cost and safety concerns. Recently, micro-electromechanical sensors and systems (MEMS) and nano-electromechanical systems (NEMS) have emerged as advanced/smart-sensing technologies with potential for cost-effective and long-term SHM. This two-pronged study evaluated the performance of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) MEMS sensors embedded in concrete pavement (Final Report Volume I) and developed a wireless MEMS multifunctional sensor system for health monitoring of concrete pavement (Final Report Volume II).


Investment of resources in international development continues to grow, but evidence suggests that progress is patchy and that parameters such as losses resulting from disasters of all scales continue to grow. It is suggested that critical thought and reflection, as an adjunct to action, is vital for both individuals and organisations concerned for social development. It is further argued that disruption is often required in order to dynamically pursue transformation of structures and institutions in order to secure progress towards sustainable livelihoods.


Talanoa Research is the most culturally appropriate research design in the ethnic Fijian community in Fiji. Talanoa asks researchers to establish a good interpersonal relationship and rapport with ethnic Fijian participants. Talanoa research expects researchers and participants to share not only their time and interests but also emotions. Researchers need to use culturally appropriate procedures in conducting talanoa research effectively. For this purpose, researchers should be aware of ethnic Fijian cultural values and beliefs in sharing, giving and typical ethnic Fijian transactions of discussion including their non-verbal communication cues. If protocols are ignored, research results are most unlikely to be reliable, since many ethnic Fijian participants may end the talanoa. They might even deliberately elicit a wrong response to teach researchers a lesson.


In this paper, the electromagnetic susceptibility of electro-explosive devices (EEDs) including their connection wires is assessed statistically. The electromagnetic coupling and the thermal power dissipation are modeled to determine the activation condition due to an excitation with an external electromagnetic field. The reception properties of the connection wires are obtained numerically and validated experimentally; variations in their geometry are considered by means of a Monte Carlo approach. The optimal coupling frequency and the probability of activation of a typical wired BED as function of the magnitude of the excitation are obtained. A detonation probability of 95 per cent is obtained for a wired EED illuminated with a 2447 V/m incident field.


Autosegmental Phonology is studied in the framework of Formal Language Theory, which classifies the computational complexity of patterns. In contrast to previous computational studies of Autosegmental Phonology, which were mainly concerned with finite-state implementations of the formalism, a methodology for a model-theoretic study of autosegmental diagrams with monadic second-order logic is introduced. Monadic second order logic provides a mathematically rigorous way of studying autosegmental formalisms, and its complexity is well understood. The preliminary conclusion is that autosegmental diagrams which conform to the well-formedness constraints defined here likely describe at most regular sets of strings.


For more than a decade, long‐range acoustic propagation measurements have been used to remotely infer characteristics of the oceans' interior structure. The most prominent efforts have been those focused on the application of tomographic methods to measure the sound speed and current fields, and by inference the temperature field. To a large degree, the genesis of this activity was earlier measurements taken on the U.S. Navy's undersea surveillance system, and IUSS remains a central part of many experiments being conducted today. This paper will illustrate the importance of the Navy's assets to several recent experiments and will highlight the role of IUSS in the multi‐institutional Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate (ATOC) Program. [Work supported by ONR and ARPA.]


In this work, simultaneous energy regeneration and motion control for robot manipulators with brushless direct current (BLDC) motors is considered. All joints of the robot are connected to regenerative drives powered from a single ultra-capacitor. A new voltage-based control method is developed to individually command each phase of the BLDC motor. Three independent regenerative drives are interconnected in a wye configuration, and each drives a phase of the motor. The objective is to determine the control inputs for each drive to minimize energy consumption from the ultra-capacitor for a given motion task. To this end, the problem is formulated as constrained quadratic optimization problem that gives the control inputs based on the desired torque generated by a virtual controller. An experimental evaluation is performed using a pendulum actuated by a BLDC motor. It is shown that the suggested control method can accomplish the motion task and it is capable of energy regeneration. The results show a reduction of about 40% in energy consumption for the condition of the study, relative to non-regenerative case.


This paper proposes an unsupervised training approach for SLU systems that leverages the structured semantic knowledge graphs of the emerging Semantic Web. The approach creates natural language surface forms of entity-relation-entity portions of knowledge graphs using a combination of web search retrieval and syntax-based dependency parsing. The new forms are used to train an SLU system in an unsupervised manner. This paper tests the approach on the problem of intent detection, and shows that the unsupervised training procedure matches the performance of supervised training over operating points important for commercial applications.


A traditional method of reclaiming salt‐affected soils involves ponding water on a field and leaching salts from the soil through a subsurface tile drainage system. Because water and salts move more slowly in areas midway between drain lines than in areas near the drains, achieving a desired level of desalinization across the entire field requires that ponding continue long after areas close to the drains are already free of salts, thus causing an inefficient leaching process that wastes water. A partial ponding method of leaching was recently suggested to improve the leaching efficiency by up to 85%. In this study, we tested the partial ponding method for its potential to save water and time by simulating the leaching of salts from salt‐affected profiles with various soil textures, tile‐drain depths, and soil depths. Simulations for laboratory sand tanks and field conditions both showed that transport velocities midway between drains are greater under partial ponding than under total ponding because the local hydraulic head gradient is larger under partial ponding conditions. As the ponded area increases toward the drain, water originating from areas near the drain moves faster than water from midway between the drains. By adopting partial ponding, water and time savings of 95 and 91%, respectively, were found possible for a sandy soil. The method also showed water savings of 84% when applied to a loam soil and 99% for a layered sand over loam soil but only 13% when applied to a layered loam over sand soil.


Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a progressive, genetic disease characterized by frequent, prolonged drops in lung function. Accurately predicting rapid underlying lung‐function decline is essential for clinical decision support and timely intervention. Determining whether an individual is experiencing a period of rapid decline is complicated due to its heterogeneous timing and extent, and error component of the measured lung function. We construct individualized predictive probabilities for "nowcasting" rapid decline. We assume each patient's true longitudinal lung function, S(t), follows a nonlinear, nonstationary stochastic process, and accommodate between‐patient heterogeneity through random effects. Corresponding lung‐function decline at time t is defined as the rate of change, S′(t). We predict S′(t) conditional on observed covariate and measurement history by modeling a measured lung function as a noisy version of S(t). The method is applied to data on 30 879 US CF Registry patients. Results are contrasted with a currently employed decision rule using single‐center data on 212 individuals. Rapid decline is identified earlier using predictive probabilities than the center's currently employed decision rule (mean difference: 0.65 years; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.41, 0.89). We constructed a bootstrapping algorithm to obtain CIs for predictive probabilities. We illustrate real‐time implementation with R Shiny. Predictive accuracy is investigated using empirical simulations, which suggest this approach more accurately detects peak decline, compared with a uniform threshold of rapid decline. Median area under the ROC curve estimates (Q1‐Q3) were 0.817 (0.814‐0.822) and 0.745 (0.741‐0.747), respectively, implying reasonable accuracy for both. This article demonstrates how individualized rate of change estimates can be coupled with probabilistic predictive inference and implementation for a useful medical‐monitoring approach.


Quantifying Mass Sediment Movement in Deer Creek Reservoir During Spring Runoff and Potential Water Quality Impacts Colin Rodger Ricks Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, BYU Master of Science The accurate prediction of water quality is essential for management of reservoirs used for drinking water supply. Since algae are a major source of taste and odor problems in drinking water, understanding and controlling algal growth and production is an important task. Deer Creek Reservoir supplies drinking water for over one million people in northern Utah and has been highly eutrophic in the past. Despite major reductions in external nutrient loading, including phosphorus, seasonal algal blooms in Deer Creek have not decreased to desired levels. Resuspension of sediment has been suggested as a potential source of internal nutrient loading for water bodies (including reservoirs in the Utah/Wyoming area) and may be responsible for delays in water quality improvement. I investigated sediment deposition and resuspension rates at the upper end of the reservoir and evaluated these sediments as a possible internal source of phosphorus. Sonar and GPS systems were used to make measurements of recently deposited sediment in the submerged Provo River delta of Deer Creek Reservoir during the period of May, June, July, and August 2011. ArcGIS 10 was used to interpolate survey points and calculate sediment volume changes, including areas of deposition and erosion. These data were used to develop approximate sedimentation rates for the soft sediment – which is most susceptible to resuspension during reservoir drawdown. I used previously measured field phosphorous concentrations in the sediment to estimate if these processes could affect reservoir phosphorous concentrations. The study used two survey areas, a small area near the Provo River inlet early in the year, and an extended larger area starting on June 23 rd . I found that sediment volume in the smaller study area was increasing at a rate of 27-109 m 3 /day during the spring season. Data show that rates are slightly correlated with flow and reservoir elevation. Typically by August, Deer Creek reservoir would have been drawn down 2 to 4 m. However, due to a heavy snow pack in 2011, Deer Creek reservoir was not drawn down. When the reservoir is drawn down, the sediments in the upper region of the delta, where the survey was conducted, will be resuspended and deposited lower in the reservoir. These processes will likely result in releasing the phosphates currently bound to the sediment into the water column. Based on previous measurements of readily soluble phosphates bound to the sediment, this resuspension could release between 80 and 230 kg of phosphorus from the study area into the water column during critical times during the warm months–conditions well suited for algal growth. This amount of phosphorus, while an upper bound of what could be expected under actual field conditions, could raise phosphorus concentrations in the survey area by as much as 0.38 mg/L. The potential P (80-230 kg) release could account for 14%-42% of the TMDL. This is a potentially significant amount, especially if released during the critical late-summer period, and warrants more detailed study.


The Pachino-Capo Passero centre, located at the south-easternmost portion of Sicily, represents an Upper Cretaceous volcano within the Pelagian Block, a fragment in lithospheric continuity with the African Plate. The volcanic rocks of the Pachino-Capo Passero centre show fairly homogeneous mafic characteristics with a typical within-plate signature. Two groups with different levels of alkali and incompatible trace element enrichment have been recognised. Trace element modelling indicates that the two groups might be originated at different degrees of partial melting. The geochemical data suggest that Cretaceous rocks of Pachino-Capo Passero originated at greater depth than the neighbouring Neogene volcanic products of the Hyblean Plateau, likely from an asthenospheric mantle source. Sr-Nd-Pb isotope compositions of Pachino-Capo Passero rocks are presented along with those of Paleocene and Eocene lamprophyric dikes and small intrusive bodies from the adjacent Adria block, now representing the Apulian foreland ( i.e ., Pietre Nere and La Queglia dykes) in the context of investigating the presence and origin of a Common Mantle Reservoir beneath the Central Mediterranean area. The Sr-Nd-Pb isotopes of the Pachino-Capo Passero rocks are extremely similar to the recently redefined FOZO component whilst other suites ( i.e ., Pietre Nere) might require additional enriched components. Highly radiogenic Pb isotopes, along with high TiO 2 contents and fractionated MREE/HREE argue for the presence of significant amount of recycled mafic oceanic crust in the mantle sources of these magmas as eclogitic lithologies dispersed within a depleted peridotitic mantle. The Sr-Nd-Pb isotope compositions of the studied rocks are also compared with literature data from the Canary Islands, as representative of a putative plume component contaminating the mantle region. The data show a clear distinction, especially in Δ7/4 vs . Δ8/4, indicating that the age and composition of the mafic crust recycled within the source of Pachino-Capo Passero rocks must be older and bear higher time-integrated U/Th ratios. The geochemical and isotope composition of Pachino-Capo Passero magmas, Pietre Nere and La Queglia is interpreted as a feature of the ambient asthenospheric mantle, due to the extremely widespread process of prolonged subduction and recycling of mafic oceanic crust of variable age and composition. Therefore no need for a unique reservoir related to a mantle plume is envisaged.


The article covers the problem of relations between civil society, governance and sustainable development. It assumes that the integration and cooperation of all social actors as well as the forms of knowledge they use to define development objectives are indispensable conditions to sustainable development, and that civil society and governance structures are crucial mechanisms in such integration. The article argues that the meaning of sustainable development is the object of a struggle between the values shared by different actors and represented by different types of knowledge. It discusses the changing meanings of sustainable development as well as the role of civil society and governance structures as mechanisms in the integration of various actors and their rationales in decision-making about development. It identifies the different models of civil society and governance structures and analyses their impact on sustainable development. To illustrate the role of various models of civil society and governance structures in the implementation of sustainable development programs, the article provides case studies from rural Poland.


Social, cultural and economic influences have combined to create a shortage of national manpower in Saudi Arabia. This study aims to investigate the extent of those shortages in port labour. The main focus is on port labour problems and prospects in the ports of Eastern Saudi Arabia on the Arabian Gulf, the selected ports being Jubail, Ras Tannurah and Dammam. The thesis is divided into two main parts. The first deals with setting the scene including analysis of development planning and manpower problems as well as the impacts of cultural and social background on labour supply. This part also includes an analysis of port hinterland and an investigation of port labour management of the studied ports. The second part includes field investigation starting with general characteristics of port labour, training problems, the problems of housing and the journey to work and how employees from various organisations in ports suffer from commuting problems. This part also includes discussion of employees' perceptions of various factors leading to shortage of indigenous manpower in port work. Finally, in order to present a clear understanding of employment problems and port labour prospects, investigation of employees' job satisfaction is undertaken. This will be particularly relevant during the transfer of port operations to the private sector. The study findings indicate that the majority of port employees are expatriates. Little has been achieved to increase recruitment of national manpower among port private contractors. It was found that the manufacturing sector was prominent in the port and port-related industries, particularly in Ras Tannurah and Jubail ports. The increased use of new cargo handling techniques in those ports reduced the dependence on low paid labour-intensive work, which is mainly carried out by expatriate labourers. However, trade sector activities continued to depend on foreign labour in stevedoring, containerisation and other technical port work which is mainly conducted by port contractors. There was little evidence that privatisation of port operation will increase recruitment of domestic manpower. This study shows that most public vocational schools and training centres did not provide the port sector with adequate skilled national manpower. A model was suggested to benefit from those institutions by on- the-job training leading to full-time employment. However, due to the tribal background of most of Saudi individuals, it has been found that several behavioural attitudes prevail which have a negative effect on training and other work issues. It was revealed that long distance and time of commuting, along with weather conditions clearly make training rather unattractive to most port employees. Regarding national manpower shortages in the port sector, it was revealed that the beneficial effect of the lower cost of hiring foreign employees was seen as affecting the recruitment of Saudis in ports. However all segments of employees showed low levels of satisfaction with pay and other port job benefits.


Burden of Poverty Lacking money or time can lead one to make poorer decisions, possibly because poverty imposes a cognitive load that saps attention and reduces effort. Mani et al. (p. 976; see the Perspective by Vohs) gathered evidence from shoppers in a New Jersey mall and from farmers in Tamil Nadu, India. They found that considering a projected financial decision, such as how to pay for a car repair, affects people's performance on unrelated spatial and reasoning tasks. Lower-income individuals performed poorly if the repairs were expensive but did fine if the cost was low, whereas higher-income individuals performed well in both conditions, as if the projected financial burden imposed no cognitive pressure. Similarly, the sugarcane farmers from Tamil Nadu performed these tasks better after harvest than before. Being poor is a state of mind. [Also see Perspective by Vohs] The poor often behave in less capable ways, which can further perpetuate poverty. We hypothesize that poverty directly impedes cognitive function and present two studies that test this hypothesis. First, we experimentally induced thoughts about finances and found that this reduces cognitive performance among poor but not in well-off participants. Second, we examined the cognitive function of farmers over the planting cycle. We found that the same farmer shows diminished cognitive performance before harvest, when poor, as compared with after harvest, when rich. This cannot be explained by differences in time available, nutrition, or work effort. Nor can it be explained with stress: Although farmers do show more stress before harvest, that does not account for diminished cognitive performance. Instead, it appears that poverty itself reduces cognitive capacity. We suggest that this is because poverty-related concerns consume mental resources, leaving less for other tasks. These data provide a previously unexamined perspective and help explain a spectrum of behaviors among the poor. We discuss some implications for poverty policy.


The purpose of this study was to determine if there were any beneficial or detrimental effects regarding delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), serum creatine kinase (CK), and maximum concentric strength at 80% of 1-RMconc, if a bout of eccentric exercise was repeated at 48 h after an initial bout. A secondary purpose was to determine whether unaccustomed eccentrics might affect plasma cholesterol (TC). Twenty-six men were randomly assigned to a control (Group 1) or experimental group (Group 2). Both groups performed three sets (12 repetitions per set) of the eccentric phase of a chest press, at 80% of one repetition maximum (1-RMconc); Group 2 repeated this exercise 48 h later. DOMS and CK were measured before, and every 24 h for 8 days after; TC was measured before, and every 24 h for 4 days. Maximum strength during the concentric phase of a chest press (1-RMconc) was measured before and at 48-h intervals after. A repeated measures analysis of variance revealed a significant time effect (P < 0.05) for DOMS, CK and strength, but no significant difference between groups (P < 0.05). An interesting finding was the significant (P < 0.05) reduction in TC at 24, 48 and 72 h, after exercise in both groups, which we hypothesized was associated with cellular repair. From these results we concluded that when a bout of eccentrics is repeated 48 h after an initial bout, there is no change in the characteristic time-course and/or intensity of DOMS, CK or 1-RMconc.


Introduction: There is a well-established relationship between high physical activity at leisure time and decreased mortality risk. On the other hand, high physical demands at work seem to increase this risk. However, the underlying mechanism behind this effect remains unknown. Heart rate variability (HRV) measurements may bring some insight into the mechanism. Thus, the aim of this study was to determine whether HRV differs between work and leisure time among blue-collar workers.Methods: This study was based on data from the cross-sectional NOMAD study among blue-collar workers from seven workplaces in Denmark. One hundred thirty-eight blue-collar workers, which had at least 7 recording hours during work and leisure time were included in the analysis. Data from physical activity and HRV were obtained for four days using tri-axial accelerometers (Actigraph GT3X+) and heart rate monitor (Actiheart), respectively. Parametric (paired t test) and nonparametric (Wilcoxon signed-ranks test) tests for pairwise comparisons were applied to compare mean HRV indices in time and frequency domains between work and leisure time.Results: The mean age of the workers was 45.2 years, 51% were females, 42% were smokers, 18% reported lifetime occurrence of hypertension and 45% reported to perform lifting and carrying for more than half of the work time. A significant higher overall HRV was found during leisure time compared to work. Leisure time showed higher parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) measures of HRV (p<.05), while sympathetic nervous system (SNS) related indices (p<.05) were reduced in comparison to work.Conclusions: Leisure time showed high HRV and PNS indices and work time showed high SNS-related indices. The higher SNS modulation during work can be related to a greater risk of developing heart diseases among blue-collar workers.


For many in the United States, marking the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Columbus in the New World is cause for historical reflection and special events of all kinds. For Native Americans the occasion presents an opportunity to use public relations to set the record straight and focus attention on Indian issues and concerns. "Five hundred years ago, Columbus washed up on Indian shores. There went the neighborhood." This remark by J.T. Goombi, a Kiowa, and first vice president of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), sums up the point of view of the peoples whose ancestors had lived on this continent for centuries before Christopher Columbus "discovered" it for the Europeans in 1492. NCAI, based in Washington, DC, showcased American Indian perspectives in a program on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol on Oct. 11. The special event kicked off the organization's week-long convention on Indian affairs, held in Arlington, VA. At press time, many of the sources quoted in this article were planning to attend this major national gathering. It's no accident that the NCAI chose the U.S. Capitol lawn as the site for its rally. As Executive Director Michael Anderson, a Creek, stated: "We chose to come to the nation's capital on the Quincentenary to make a statement to the American people. American Indian and Alaskan Native people have survived 500 years of European contact aimed at exterminating, assimilating, dividing, persecuting, relocating and redefining who we are as indigenous cultures and sovereign nations. "We are here to stay," he added. "It is time to recognize this fact and to begin fulfilling the many promises made to our people by the federal government in the U.S. Constitution and more than 300 treaties which were signed and ratified. We fulfilled our part of the bargain by giving up 99% of the real estate. It is time for America to fulfill its side of the deal." For some Americans, the Quincentenary of the arrival of Columbus in the New World is a cause for celebration. For Native Americans, it is an occasion for mourning. But it is also an opportunity to apply public relations strategies and tactics to disseminate positive information about the Native American heritage and the problems and issues that concern this segment of society. Suzan Shown Harjo, who is both Cheyenne and Muscogee, gave PRJ some disheartening statistics on Native Americans since the time of Columbus. She's president of both the Morning Star Foundation and the 1992 Alliance, two Indian organizations also based in Washington, DC. Between 1492 and 1500, eight million of the indigenous people in the Caribbean died, either of diseases brought by the Europeans or by violence at their hands. At the time of Columbus, Harjo stated, the most conservative estimate of the native populations in what are now the contiguous 48 United States was about 50 million. By 1900, there were only 250,000 Native Americans. "Now the number is two million, so it takes a long time to catch up," she observed. Create positive awareness Most, if not all, American Indian tribes view the Quincentenary as a chance to set the historical record straight, to confront current wrongs, to attack ethnic stereotypes and negative images, and to create a positive awareness of this country's original peoples. But the tactics and specific activities organized by native groups to get their messages across vary greatly. Some accentuate the positive in Indian life and minimize any sense of confrontation. For instance, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma sponsored a 20-mile walk on June 6, open to Indians and non-Indians alike, retracing a portion of the 500-mile "Trail of Tears." Thousands of Choctaws were relocated to Indian Territory during the winter of 1931-'32, and an estimated one-third died along the way from starvation, exposure and disease. The walk was not so much a reaction to the Columbus fanfare as it was a celebration of the state of Oklahoma's "Year of the Indian," explained Choctaw spokeswoman Judy Allen, who is editor of the tribe's Bishinik Newspaper, based in Durant, OK. …


[1] In this paper regional values of equatorial components of the atmospheric excitation function of polar motion, which are proportional to the equatorial components of angular momentum (AAM), were computed at high spatial resolution in 3312 equal-area sectors from the surface pressure fields of the NCEP-NCAR reanalyses in order to improve our knowledge of patterns of atmospheric excitation functions of polar motion. The inverted barometer (IB) model of oceanic isostatic adjustment is applied to readjust the effective atmospheric pressure fields. To identify the influence of different geographic regions of the atmosphere on the excitation of polar motion, correlations and covariances between these regional excitations values and either the global geodetic excitation function, determined from the geodetic observational data, or the atmospheric excitation functions, equivalent to the sum of such excitations in all regions, were computed in different spectral bands, from subseasonal to interannual period ones. The covariances show the regional contribution to the global excitation, whereas the correlations show an overall similar relationship. Furthermore, these analyses determine regional sources of polar motion excitation by surface pressure variations in the atmosphere in different spectral bands. The broad regions over Eurasia and North America were identified as principal atmospheric excitation sources for polar motion. The results revealed that atmospheric excitation over land regions in the northern middle latitudes, especially over Asia, is exceptionally strong, a point generally noted in previous studies, though without identifying detailed features. Over the Himalayan Mountains the covariance of local with global atmospheric excitation in the annual band forms a small minimum surrounded by larger values in a ring-like formation. For other terms, maxima of atmospheric excitation have a longitudinal formation mostly across the Eurasian continent. The atmospheric excitation of polar motion over the ocean is weak when subject to the IB correction, but it contains nevertheless a clear annual signal and is highly correlated with the annual oscillation of the global geodetic excitation function of polar motion.


Humans are masters at quickly learning many complex tasks, relying on an approximate understanding of the dynamics of their environments. In much the same way, we would like our learning agents to quickly adapt to new tasks. In this paper, we explore how model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) can facilitate transfer to new tasks. We develop an algorithm that learns an action-conditional, predictive model of expected future observations, rewards and values from which a policy can be derived by following the gradient of the estimated value along imagined trajectories. We show how robust policy optimization can be achieved in robot manipulation tasks even with approximate models that are learned directly from vision and proprioception. We evaluate the efficacy of our approach in a transfer learning scenario, re-using previously learned models on tasks with different reward structures and visual distractors, and show a significant improvement in learning speed compared to strong off-policy baselines. Videos with results can be found at this https URL


Enrollment declines in natural resources programs across the nation since the midnineties have raised concerns about the future of natural resources education. Since its peak in 1998, enrollment in Penn State's School of Forest Resources has dropped from a record high of 535 to 315 in fall 2003. At the same time state and federal agencies seeking to maintain and diversify their workforce are facing unprecedented rates of retirement. To address this issue, the School of Forest Resources is continually evaluating its recruitment and retention efforts. Gone are the days of waiting for students to come to us. Current recruitment and retention strategies include: 1) marketing to the large pool of existing undecided Penn State students, 2) marketing to Penn State advisors in other programs and at other Penn State locations, 3) recruiting at other "feeder" institutions, 4) summer natural resources experience programs, 5) increased personal contact with potential students, 6) peer-to-peer recruiting, 7) increased scholarship funds, and 8) retooled marketing materials and web presence. These strategies are under constant evaluation and unsuccessful efforts discarded so that new tactics may be tested. While we wait to discover the ultimate effectiveness of these new strategies, their very nature reflects an important and fundamental change in attitude toward student recruitment and retention at Penn State's School of Forest Resources.


Nanopatterning of biomaterials is rapidly emerging as a tool to engineer cell function. Bulk metallic glasses (BMGs), a class of biocompatible materials, are uniquely suited to study nanopattern–cell interactions as they allow for versatile fabrication of nanopatterns through thermoplastic forming. Work presented here employs nanopatterned BMG substrates to explore detection of nanopattern feature sizes by various cell types, including cells that are associated with foreign body response, pathology, and tissue repair. Fibroblasts decreased in cell area as the nanopattern feature size increased, and fibroblasts could detect nanopatterns as small as 55 nm in size. Macrophages failed to detect nanopatterns of 150 nm or smaller in size, but responded to a feature size of 200 nm, resulting in larger and more elongated cell morphology. Endothelial cells responded to nanopatterns of 100 nm or larger in size by a significant decrease in cell size and elongation. On the basis of these observations, nondimensional analysis was employed to correlate cellular morphology and substrate nanotopography. Analysis of the molecular pathways that induce cytoskeletal remodeling, in conjunction with quantifying cell traction forces with nanoscale precision using a unique FIB-SEM technique, enabled the characterization of underlying biomechanical cues. Nanopatterns altered serum protein adsorption and effective substrate stiffness, leading to changes in focal adhesion density and compromised activation of Rho-A GTPase in fibroblasts. As a consequence, cells displayed restricted cell spreading and decreased collagen production. These observations suggest that topography on the nanoscale can be designed to engineer cellular responses to biomaterials.


This paper describes a control mechanism for dynamic selection of Quality of Service (QoS) parameters used in a IEEE 802.11e Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). The 802.11e specification, still under development, provides a new contention-based access method, called Enhanced Distributed Coordination Function (EDCF). This method uses distinct values for interframe space and for contention window size to establish priorities between Access Categories (ACs). The proposed mechanism selects these values based on the actual network load condition and on the applications delay requirements. Such mechanism improves the new QoS functionality, aiming to promote better channel utilization as well as to keep the desired service levels.


A goal of artificial intelligence is to construct an agent that can solve a wide variety of tasks. Recent progress in text-guided image synthesis has yielded models with an impressive ability to generate complex novel images, exhibiting combinatorial generalization across domains. Motivated by this success, we investigate whether such tools can be used to construct more general-purpose agents. Specifically, we cast the sequential decision making problem as a text-conditioned video generation problem, where, given a text-encoded specification of a desired goal, a planner synthesizes a set of future frames depicting its planned actions in the future, after which control actions are extracted from the generated video. By leveraging text as the underlying goal specification, we are able to naturally and combinatorially generalize to novel goals. The proposed policy-as-video formulation can further represent environments with different state and action spaces in a unified space of images, which, for example, enables learning and generalization across a variety of robot manipulation tasks. Finally, by leveraging pretrained language embeddings and widely available videos from the internet, the approach enables knowledge transfer through predicting highly realistic video plans for real robots.


Point clouds are challenging to process due to their sparsity, therefore autonomous vehicles rely more on appearance attributes than pure geometric features. However, 3D LIDAR perception can provide crucial information for urban navigation in challenging light or weather conditions. In this paper, we investigate the versatility of Shape Completion for 3D Object Tracking in LIDAR point clouds. We design a Siamese tracker that encodes model and candidate shapes into a compact latent representation. We regularize the encoding by enforcing the latent representation to decode into an object model shape. We observe that 3D object tracking and 3D shape completion complement each other. Learning a more meaningful latent representation shows better discriminatory capabilities, leading to improved tracking performance. We test our method on the KITTI Tracking set using car 3D bounding boxes. Our model reaches a 76.94% Success rate and 81.38% Precision for 3D Object Tracking, with the shape completion regularization leading to an improvement of 3% in both metrics.


The article briefly summarizes some of the components of an integrated system of mediator regulation. It also briefly discusses the current debate about whether the mediation field requires more regulation and, if so, what kind of regulation the field should create. Section IV discusses the research on mediation party satisfaction and malpractice lawsuits filed against mediators in courts. While eight states have created mediator grievance systems, this article summarizes the number and nature of complaints filed against mediators with program administrators in the five states with well-developed, state-sponsored grievance systems. The appendices to the article, however, include data for seven state grievance systems. In addition, this article does not discuss the South Carolina grievance system, which the courts have not fully implemented. Section V considers the advantages of developing complaint handling systems. It identifies the problems created when states do not provide effective mechanisms for dissatisfied mediation parties to file claims against mediators. Section VI of the article compares the regulatory systems in place in Florida, Virginia, Georgia, Minnesota, and Maine, with a particular focus on the procedures followed in handling complaints filed against mediators. It also considers the revised grievance system in North Carolina and the proposed system in Maryland. In addition, this section considers other regulatory infrastructure that a state or court may first need to provide before it can successfully implement a grievance system. It also describes the components of a well-designed system. It considers issues of public access to grievance related information, the process for filing grievances, and any time limitations or restrictions the designers should consider. It discusses who should determine whether a formal complaint has any merit, who should investigate the complaint, informal procedures for handling complaints, formal hearing requirements, and appeals. It also considers the disciplinary approaches the grievance system can take when it resolves a complaint with merit. It discusses concerns about confidentiality of the complaint process and information about complaints and their resolution. Finally, it looks at the legal protections states have provided for persons handling complaints. This section shows that the complaint systems in these five states are only one part of a highly-structured system of mediator regulation. Section VII discusses the factors designers may want to consider when designing a complaint handling system for a court-connected mediation program. It also considers the procedural justice and due process concerns that arise in the complaint processing context.


In this work, for the first time, the quality of restoration in wide-field microscopy images after deconvolution was analyzed as a function of different Point Spread Functions using one deconvolution method, on a specimen of known size and on a biological specimen. The empirical Point Spread Function determination can significantly depend on the numerical aperture, refractive index of the embedding medium, refractive index of the immersion oil and cover slip thickness. The influence of all of these factors is shown in the same article and using the same microscope. We have found that the best deconvolution results are obtained when the empirical PSF utilized is obtained under the same conditions as the specimen. We also demonstrated that it is very important to quantitatively check the process' outcome using several quality indicators: Full-Width at Half-Maximum, Contrast-to-Noise Ratio, Signal-to-Noise Ratio and a Tenengrad-based function. We detected a significant improvement when using an indicator to measure the focus of the whole stack. Therefore, to qualitatively determinate the best deconvolved image between different conditions, one approach that we are pursuing is to use Tenengrad-based function indicators in images obtained using a wide-field microscope.


Yoga is hugely popular around the world today, yet until now little has been known of its roots. This book collects, for the first time, core teachings of yoga in their original form, translated and edited by two of the world's foremost scholars of the subject. It includes a wide range of texts from different schools of yoga, languages and eras: among others, key passages from the early Upanisads and the Mahabharata, and from the Tantric, Buddhist and Jaina traditions, with many pieces in scholarly translation for the first time. Covering yoga's varying definitions across systems, models of the esoteric and physical bodies, and its most important practices, such as posture, breath control, sensory withdrawal and meditation, Roots of Yoga is a unique and essential source of knowledge.


The recent rise in popularity of social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace, has created large quantities of data about interactions within these networks. Such data contains many private details about individuals so anonymization is required prior to attempts to make the data more widely available for scientific research. Prior work has considered simple graph data to be anonymized by removing all non-graph information and adding or deleting some edges. Since social network data is richer in details about the users and their interactions, loss of details due to anonymization limits the possibility for analysis. We present a new set of techniques for anonymizing social network data based on grouping the entities into classes, and masking the mapping between entities and the nodes that represent them in the anonymized graph. Our techniques allow queries over the rich data to be evaluated with high accuracy while guaranteeing resilience to certain types of attack. To prevent inference of interactions, we rely on a critical "safety condition" when forming these classes. We demonstrate utility via empirical data from social networking settings. We give examples of complex queries that may be posed and show that they can be answered over the anonymized data efficiently and accurately.


R.F. sputtering was used to deposit thin films of YBCO onto a variety of substrates. The films were found to be superconducting with critical temperatures in excess of 77 Kelvin. Using x-ray diffraction the orientation of the YBCO thin films on MgO(lOO) was found to be c-axis. The films deposited on SrTiO3(100) were found to be a and c axis orientated, where as on SrTiO3(110) the thin films were (110/013) orientated. Using scanning electron microscopy the films were found to be granular in nature. The films deposited on MgO(lOO) had circular grains. The films deposited on SrTiO3(110) had elongated sausage like grains. The shape of the grains is due to spiral and ridge type growth respectively. Electrical measurements were taken using a 4 probe contact technique. The rf experiments were used to calculate the paraconductivity. The coherence length and superconducting sheet thickness where calculated for c-axis YBCO thin films using the Lawrence-Doniach theory. The coherence length was found to be 4 A, the sheet thickness was 11 A for T=0 Kelvin. Examination of the transition region revealed a flux flow region in films deposited on MgO(lOO). The temperature dependence of the flux flow region was found to be in agreement with that predicted by Kosterlitz-Thouless and independently by Berezinskii. This implies that the films were 2 dimensional in nature. Some films deposited on SrTiO3(110) do not appear to have a flux flow region. Films deposited on SrTiO3(110) may be 3 dimensional. Examination of the magnetic properties were in agreement with existing theory, namely that the resistance was directly proportional to the applied magnetic field. In order to perform critical current measurements the films were wet etched into strips. The temperature dependence of the critical current of the granular thin films was found to be in agreement with Ambegaokar-Baratoff theory for a 2 dimensional film of Josephson junctions. An ac electrical technique was used to investigate the reactive properties of YBCO thin films. Results show that the normal inductance was very anisotropic. The inductance for temperature below Tc was used to calculate the penetration depth. The penetration depth, for T=0K, was found to be between 2.24-10.58[xm. Penetration depths of this magnitude are predicted by Ambegaokar-Baratoff for certain cases. The temperature dependence of the penetration depth was investigated in terms of the London theory and good agreement was found. Anomalous behaviour was found to occur in certain thin films. The anomaly was present as a change in the temperature dependence of the kinetic inductance. The anomaly may be due to 2D-3D crossover, known to occur in YBCO thin films. An anomalous resonance effect was observed in very thin film at 48 Kelvin. The behaviour of the anomaly is very similar to a dielectric but may be due to substrate effect.


Radio relics are Mpc-scale diffuse radio sources at the peripheries of galaxy clusters which are thought to trace outgoing merger shocks. We present XMM-Newton and Suzaku observations of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744 (z = 0.306), which reveal the presence of a shock front 1.5 Mpc east of the cluster core. The surface-brightness jump coincides with the position of a known radio relic. Although the surface-brightness jump indicates a weak shock with aMach number M = 1.7(-0.3)(+0.5), the plasma in the post-shock region has been heated to a very high temperature (similar to 13 keV) by the passage of the shock wave. The low-acceleration efficiency expected from such a weak shock suggests that mildly relativistic electrons have been re-accelerated by the passage of the shock front.


Fast-paced and easy to use, this concise book teaches you the basics of Windows Vista so you can start using this operating system right away. Written by "New York Times" columnist, bestselling author, Emmy-winning CBS News correspondent and "Missing Manuals" creator David Pogue, the book will help you: Navigate the desktop, including the fast, powerful and fully integrated desktop search function; Use the Media Center to record TV and radio, present photos, play music, and record all of these to a DVD; Breeze across the Web with the vastly improved Internet Explorer 7 tabbed browser; and Become familiar with Vista's beefed up security, and much more. Windows Vista is a vast improvement over its predecessors, with an appealing, glass-like visual overhaul, superior searching and organization tools, a multimedia and collaboration suite, and a massive, top-to-bottom security-shield reconstruction. Every corner of the traditional Windows operating system has been tweaked, overhauled, or replaced entirely. Aimed at new and experienced computer users alike, "Windows Vista for Starters: The Missing Manual" is right there when you need it. This jargon-free book explains Vista's features quickly and clearly - revealing which work well and which don't.


The purpose of this study was to examine performance trends of advanced w ind instrumentalists with regard to intervallic tuning. Factors of interest were tuning system, location (above or below a referential stimulus), interval type, and group (student or professional). Also of interest was the direction of deviation of the target pitches, sharp or flat, from equal temperament. Subjects (N =16) were experienced wind instrumentalists, eight experienced professionals, and eight advanced university students. Subjects were recorded performing a two-part reduction of a Bach chorale, first playing the melody with a synthesized harm ony line, then vice versa. Performances were transferred to a NeXT com puter where target intervals were analyzed and converted to cent distance. Results indicated that overall cent deviation was greatest when compared to just tuning and least when compared to equal tem pered tuning. For cent deviation from equal temperament, thirds and sixths were performed slightly less in-tune than fourths, fifths, unisons, and octaves. Location also affected the direction of deviation from equal temperament as it appeared that subjects tended to play sharp and less in tune when performing below the stimulus. There were no differences found between groups for the magnitude of deviation, however, considering direction of deviation from equal temperament, it was observed that the student group performed less sharp than the professionals when performing below the stimulus and less in-tune when perform ing above.


Abstract Although the US–Russia relations are hardly the central axis of contemporary international relations, the systemic confrontation between Moscow and Washington, which began in 2014, will become a decisive factor for the emerging international order. This confrontation was caused by factors much deeper than a mere clash of national interests in Ukraine or Syria. It came as a result of their fundamental disagreement about the basic rules and norms of international relations and a clash of the visions of international order which Moscow and Washington have been promoting since the end of the Cold War. Moreover, this confrontation is a part—and currently the epicentre—of a broader rift between the US and major non-Western centres of power about the nature of a post-hegemonic international order. It put an end to the post-Cold War period of the International System development, and reflects unwillingness of the non-Western power centres to accept the US' global leadership, and US attempts to restore it. Since none of the sides is ready for one-way compromise and all bet on the weakening of the opponent, continuation of the US–Russia confrontation will deepen the split in the Atlantic and Pacific, and intensify the general tendency of global governance bifurcation and emergence of a global divide into two major political and economic communities.


Seasonal and spatial variations in foliar nitro- gen (N) parameters were investigated in three European forests with different tree species, viz. beech ( Fagus sylvat- ica L.), Douglas fir ( Pseudotsuga menziesii(Mirb.) Franco) and Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) growing in Denmark, the Netherlands and Finland, respectively. The objectives were to investigate the distribution of N pools within the canopies of the different forests and to relate this distribution to factors and plant strategies controlling leaf development through- out the seasonal course of a vegetation period. Leaf N pools generally showed much higher seasonal and vertical vari- ability in beech than in the coniferous canopies. However, also the two coniferous tree species behaved very differently with respect to peak summer canopy N content and N re- translocation efficiency, showing that generalisations on tree internal vs. ecosystem internal N cycling cannot be made on the basis of the leaf duration alone. During phases of inten- sive N turnover in spring and autumn, the NH + concentra- tion in beech leaves rose considerably, while fully developed green beech leaves had relatively low tissue NH + , similar to the steadily low levels in Douglas fir and, particularly, in Scots pine. The ratio between bulk foliar concentrations of NH + and H + , which is an indicator of the NH3 emission po- tential, reflected differences in foliage N concentration, with beech having the highest values followed by Douglas fir and Scots pine. Irrespectively of the leaf habit, i.e. deciduous ver- sus evergreen, the majority of the canopy foliage N was re- tained within the trees. This was accomplished through an effective N re-translocation (beech), higher foliage longevity (fir) or both (boreal pine forest). In combination with data from a literature review, a general relationship of decreasing N re-translocation efficiency with the time needed for canopy renewal was deduced, showing that leaves which live longer re-translocate relatively less N during senescence. The Dou- glas fir stand, exposed to relatively high atmospheric N depo- sition, had by far the largest peak summer canopy N content and also returned the largest amount of N in foliage litter, suggesting that higher N fertility leads to increased turnover in the ecosystem N cycle with higher risks of losses such as leaching and gas emissions.


In the design of flight control systems for large flexible boosters, it is common practice to utilize active feedback control of the first lateral structural bending mode so as to suppress transients and reduce gust loading. Typically, active stabilization or phase stabilization is achieved by carefully shaping the loop transfer function in the frequency domain via the use of compensating filters combined with the frequency response characteristics of the nozzle/actuator system. In this paper we present a new approach for parametrizing and determining optimal loworder recursive linear digital filters so as to satisfy phase shaping constraints for bending and sloshing dynamics while simultaneously maximizing attenuation in other frequency bands of interest, e.g. near higher frequency parasitic structural modes. By parametrizing the filter directly in the z-plane with certain restrictions, the search space of candidate filter designs that satisfy the constraints is restricted to stable, minimum phase recursive low-pass filters with well-conditioned coefficients. Combined with optimal output feedback blending from multiple rate gyros, the present approach enables rapid and robust parametrization of autopilot bending filters to attain flight control performance objectives. Numerical results are presented that illustrate the application of the present technique to the development of rate gyro filters for an exploration-class multiengined space launch vehicle.


This study examined the auditory status of females with Rett syndrome (RS) using auditory brainstem response (ABR) testing and measures of acoustic admittance. Prevalence of hearing impairment in 81 female patients (age range 1 year 3 months to 39 years 8 months; mean age 8 years 7 months, SD 6 years 4 months) was evaluated with ABR measurements. If the ABR latencies at 20dB nHL exceeded those of the normative group, a slight hearing loss was diagnosed. For ABR thresholds in the range 30 to 40dB nHL, a mild hearing loss was determined; moderate hearing loss was diagnosed for ABR thresholds in the range 50 to 60dB nHL. Bilateral hearing loss was found in 16 (19.3%) patients and unilateral hearing loss in 13 (16%) patients. Bilateral hearing loss of moderate degree was found in one patient. No patient was found with severe hearing loss (ABR threshold of 70dB nHL and above) in either ear. Slight hearing loss was found in 10.5% of ears (17 of 162), mild hearing loss in 14.2% of ears(23 of 162), and moderate hearing loss in 3.1% of ears (5 of 162). In 72.2% of ears (117 of 162), findings indicated the presence of normal peripheral auditory sensitivity. Prevalence of sensorineural hearing loss was 17.3% (28 of 162). Evidence of conductive involvement (conductive and mixed hearing loss) was observed in 9.9% of ears (16 of 162). In this cross‐sectional study, the prevalence of hearing loss was increased in older RS participants and in those with seizures requiring the use of anticonvulsants. Neither the type of hearing loss nor the presence of preserved speech seemed to be correlated with the type of mutation in methyl‐CpG‐binding protein 2 (MeCP2) gene that is associated with RS.


Wireless local-area networks (WLANs) are increasingly common in public locations such as urban areas, universities, airports or shopping centers. A clear understanding of usage behavior in real hotspots is critical information for those who develop, deploy, and manage WLAN technology as well as those who develop systems and application software for wireless networks. This thesis analyzes user behavior and network performance in public wireless networks in Helsinki, collecting traffic traces over several days at different access points. The analysis covers locations, which provide hotspots connectivity in different social environments including, libraries, museums or cafeterias. The capture process focuses of open access point infrastructures, where the access to the Internet is free and becoming ubiquitous. This enables the study of user behavior in urban environments. The first part of the thesis introduces the research field on a general basis, a literature survey is given to present the current state-of-art. The survey covers technologies and issues in open WLAN networks, relevant terminology and privacy aspects concerning the traffic collection. The performed research and capture methodology is then presented. The focus is on the challenges in wireless monitoring and data collection. The findings and part of the thesis discusses the results from the capture analysis to evaluate the Internet usage in a public wireless LAN environment. As an outcome, the thesis describes how free hotspots provide services to a diverse population that use the WLAN through open access points. In particular, web based applications are the most popular with the clients in this study. The traces show variable web response delay and different connectivity durations for browsing behavior and diversity of user attitudes depending on the location.


The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether there exist differences in website visualization according to the gender of the respondents as young consumers. For the main purpose, a questionnaire was designed from the literature review, and data were collected from 252 undergraduate students. Analyses of chi-square and t-tests were conducted for hypotheses testing. The results show that six website visualization characteristics are different by young consumers' gender. These gender-based differences include different color preferences, not using a derogatory statement about rivals, using rounded lines and shapes, 4-6 colors in typeface, female figures in photos and expert language in the websites. The findings of this study reveal how e-marketing executives can harmonize the visualization of websites based on the gender of the targeted young consumers. The main value of this paper is the empirical analysis of the website visualization from a gender perspective. The study explicates to what extent website visualization is important in online purchasing decisions of the young consumers by gender and provides useful information for e-marketing executives. Better understanding of young consumers' perspectives of website visualization by gender is critical for designing and managing effective websites that can help businesses attract and retain online young customers.


Because the traditional acid-alkali-acid method for pretreating archaeological artifacts prior to radiocarbon dating is destructive to most materials, the possibility of developing an alternative pretreatment is important to preserving culturallyand historically-significant artifacts. The alkali step usually involves a 1M or higher concentration NaOH wash to remove humic acid contamination. The purpose of this work is to replace the alkali step with an equally effective, yet less harsh treatment. Charcoal soaked in a humic acid standard was used to mimic a contaminated artifact. Residues from treatments with NaOH, phosphate buffer (pH 8), and deionized water were characterized using THM-GC-MS. Preliminary results show that both NaOH and phosphate buffer are at least equally effective. The phosphate treatment was also used on two archaeological artifacts that were prepared nondestructively by using the plasma chemical oxidation (PCO) pretreatment. The resulting radiocarbon dates from these were statistically indistinguishable from dates produced by the traditional treatment process coupled with standard destructive combustion.


This research investigates the gendered nature of video arcades and video games, in
relation to the perceptions and attitudes of the users to them. Video arcades are
relatively recent sites of leisure and engagement with electronic games. Very little
research (if any) in this area has been done in South Africa.
This research is concerned with both media and gender and draws on a theoretical
framework informed by poststructural understandings of gender construction and
discourse.
The research also examines users' habits and attitudes to and perceptions of the video
arcades, the games and their narrative scenarios, in relation to gendered behaviours.
As a Media Educator, these findings reinforce the researcher's belief in an urgent
need for Media Education in South African schools.


An archlike zone of seismic reflectivity, interpreted as an uplifted zone of ductilely deformed middle and lower crust, is imaged below the Pinaleno Mountains core complex in southeast Arizona. The top of the reflective zone coincides with the base of an inferred mid Tertiary detachment fault beneath the Safford basin but diverges from the detachment fault as an apparent mylonite front to form a culmination at ∼1.9 s (∼4 km) beneath the Pinalenlo Mountains. From this culmination, the zone of reflectivity dips to the southwest below the Eagle Pass detachment fault and flattens at ∼4.8 s (∼13.5 km) beneath the relatively unextended upper crust of the Galiuro Mountains. Most of the reflective fabric probably formed during mid-Tertiary extension, although some of it may be older. These data suggest that mylonite zones form not only as the continuation of detachment faults into the brittle-ductile transition, but also along a regional zone of decoupling between the middle and upper crust. Highly extended and relatively unextended domains in the Basin and Range may be separated by zones of discrete (simple) shear in the upper crust, but both are rafted above regional bulk pure shear in the middle and lower crust.


Professional C# 2008 starts by reviewing the overall architecture of .NET in Chapter 1 in order to give you the background you need to be able to write managed code. After that the book is divided into a number of sections that cover both the C# language and its application in a variety of areas. Part I: The C# Language gives a good grounding in the C# language itself. This section doesnt presume knowledge of any particular language, although it does assume you are an experienced programmer. You start by looking at C#s basic syntax and data types, and then explore the object-oriented features of C# before moving on to look at more advanced C# programming topics. Part II: Visual Studio looks at the main IDE utilized by C# developers world-wide: Visual Studio 2005. The two chapters in this section look at the best way to use the tool to build applications based upon either the .NET Framework 2.0 or 3.0. In addition to this, this section also focuses on the deployment of your projects. Part III: Base Class Libraries looks at the principles of programming in the .NET environment. In particular, you look at security, threading localization, transactions, how to build Windows services, and how to generate your own libraries as assemblies. Part IV: Data looks at accessing databases with ADO.NET and LINQ, and at interacting with directories and files. This part also extensively covers support in .NET for XML and on the Windows operating system side, and the .NET features of SQL Server 2008. Within the large space of LINQ, particular focus is put on LINQ to SQL and LINQ to XML. Part V: Presentation focuses on building classic Windows applications, which are called Windows Forms in .NET. Windows Forms are the thick-client version of applications, and using .NET to build these types of applications is a quick and easy way of accomplishing this task. In addition to looking at Windows Forms, you take a look at GDI+, which is the technology you will use for building applications that include advanced graphics. This section also covers writing components that will run on Web sites, serving up Web pages. This covers the tremendous number of new features that ASP.NET 3.5 provides. Finally, this section also shows how to build applications based upon the Windows Presentation Foundation and VSTO. Part VI: Communication covers Web services for platform-independent communication, .NET Remoting for communication between .NET clients and servers, Enterprise Services for the services in the background, and DCOM communication. With Message Queuing asynchronous, disconnected communication is shown. This section also looks at utilizing the Windows Communication Foundation and the Windows Workflow Foundation. Part VII: Appendices (Online): This section includes three appendices focused on how to build applications that take into account the new features and barriers found in Windows Vista. Also, this section looks at the upcoming ADO.NET Entities technology and how to use this new technology in your C# applications. You can find these three appendices online at www.wrox.com.


Information systems development (ISD) is fundamentally a search process by which the team seeks to find an optimal system configuration that produces the highest performance. As information systems are embodiments of business-domain knowledge and technical knowledge, ISD requires both. The business unit is ultimately responsible for making business design choices whereas the IS unit is largely responsible for making technical design choices. Complexity in ISD arises when these design choices are interdependent. We argue that knowledge overlaps between business and IS play an important role in the ISD process. Using an NK fitness landscapes model of ISD, this research investigates how knowledge overlaps influence ISD performance (1) when the level of interdependencies among design choices varies, (2) for different distributions of within-unit and between-unit interdependencies, (3) when between-unit interdependencies are balanced or skewed, and (4) when inter-unit trust exists or doesn't. We report the results of a simulation study and discuss their implications and insights.


We model a duopoly in which ex ante identical firms must decide where to direct their innovation efforts. The firms face market uncertainty about consumers' preferences for innovation on two product attributes and technology uncertainty about the success of their research and development (R&D) investments. Firms can conduct costly market research before setting R&D strategy. We find that the value of market information to a firm depends on whether its rival is expected to obtain this information in equilibrium. Consequently, one firm may forgo market research even though its rival conducts such research and learns the true state of demand. We examine both vertical and horizontal demand structures. With vertical preferences, firms are a priori uncertain about which attribute all consumers will value more. In this case, a firm that conducts market research always attempts innovation on the attribute it discovers that consumers prefer and expends more on R&D than a rival that has not conducted market research. With horizontal preferences, distinct segments exist---each caring about innovation on only one attribute---and firms are a priori uncertain how many consumers each segment contains. In this case, a firm that conducts market research may follow a niche strategy and attempt innovation to serve the smaller segment to avoid intense price competition for the larger segment. A firm that conducts market research may therefore invest less in R&D and earn lower postlaunch profits than a rival that has forgone such research.


This brief summarizes research into the theories underlying financial coaching and the effects of financial coaching on participant outcomes. In practice, financial coaching remains an unregulated field, and individuals and organizations use the term "financial coaching" to refer to an array of interventions. This brief concentrates on coaching interventions that explicitly focus on working with clients to identify behavioral outcomes, set goals, brainstorm strategies, set concrete action plans, identify strengths and build motivation, and provide monitoring and accountability, all of which are features of a more theoreticallygrounded coaching approach (Grant, Cavanagh, and Parker 2010). This brief includes literature gathered through searches for briefs, reports, book chapters, academic articles, and other sources.


Academic research on state crime has focused on the illegal actions of individuals and organizations (i.e., syndicates and corporations). Interchangeably labeled governmental crime, delinquency, illegality, or lawlessness, official deviance and misconduct, crimes of obedience, and human rights violations, state crime has largely been considered in relation to insurgent violence or threats to national security. Generally, it has been seen as a phenomenon endemic to authoritarian countries in transitional and lesser developed contexts. We need look no further than today's headlines to see the evidence of state crime. Rwanda, where government troops massacred countless Hutus and Tutsis, governmental atrocities in Kosovo, at the hands of the Yugoslavian Army, and East Timor where both individuals and property have been decimated, largely perpetrated by the Indonesian military. The study of how to control state crime has been difficult. There are definitional, conceptual, theoretical, and methodological problems, as well as difficulties in designing of practical methods to abolish, combat, control or resist this type of behavior. Jeffrey Ian Ross reviews these shortcomings, then develops a preliminary model of ways to control state crime. His intention is stimulating scholarly research and debate, but also encouraging progressive-minded policymakers and practitioners who work for governmental and nongovernmental organizations. The hope is that they will reflect upon the methods they advocate or use to minimize state transgressions. This new edition will be of compelling interest to students of political science and criminology, as well as general readers interested in human rights, state crime, and world affairs.


The electromagnetic scattering from a cylindrical dielectric object of arbitrary cross-section buried in a lossy dielectric half-space having a periodic surface is investigated using a new numerical method. The method is outlined for TM z (horizontally) polarised incident wave. The surface equivalence principle and a decomposition method are employed to form a set of electric field integral equations (EFIEs) for the currents on the object and the portion of the surface most strongly interacting with the object. Then, the method of moment (MoM) is used to solve the EFIEs in the frequency domain to obtain the scattered electric field.


The use of nanoparticles (NPs) for efficient, environmentally benign catalysis is receiving increasing attention, with gold and palladium NPs being an important area of research. Herein we present a simple, reliable and cost-effective preparation of a catalytically active gold-palladium NP system that is stabilized by an aqueous titania dispersion (AuPd/TiO2) in the absence of organic ligands. The major advantages of this system are that it is catalytically active in the as-prepared colloidal state, eliminating the need for drying and sintering before use and is colloidally stable in oxidative conditions. The AuPd/TiO2 system exhibits efficient oxidative catalysis in both the presence of hydrogen peroxide and atmospheric oxygen, even at ambient temperatures for our model aqueous phase reaction of 1-phenylethanol oxidation. The preparation and characterization of the AuPd/TiO2 system is described with respect to the effects of colloidal stability, particle size and morphology on aqueous oxidative catalysis. The major finding is that NPs with a gold core and thin palladium shell (70 mol% gold, 30 mol% palladium, Au70Pd30/TiO2) provides the most catalytically active system. The ability of the catalyst to use atmospheric oxygen at ambient temperatures in aqueous media highlights the strong potential of the developed catalytic system for green oxidative processes. The presented approach provides a new platform of all-inorganic colloidal nanoparticle systems for future development of industrially viable, environmentally friendly catalysts.


The p53 protein functions as a tumor suppressor, preventing aberrant cellular proliferation in response to various genotoxic and non-genotoxic stress signals. Although p53's ability to induce apoptosis is critical to its capacity to suppress tumorigenesis, the role of transcriptional activation in p53's apoptotic function has been highly controversial. To address this issue, our laboratory generated a p53 mutant knock-in mouse strain in which residues 25 and 26, previously shown to be critical for p53's transactivation function, were mutated from leucine and tryptophan to glutamine and serine, respectively. Our analysis of cells derived from these mice provided significant insight into p53 activity at both the molecular and cellular level. In particular, our data suggest that p53 utilizes discrete mechanisms to transactivate different target genes, and that p53 employs distinct mechanisms to induce apoptosis in response to different stresses. This p53QS mutant mouse strain represents a powerful means to dissect p53 function in vivo


Bidirectional typechecking, in which terms either synthesize a type or are checked against a known type, has become popular for its scalability, its error reporting, and its ease of implementation. Following principles from proof theory, bidirectional typing can be applied to many type constructs. The principles underlying a bidirectional approach to indexed types (generalized algebraic datatypes) are less clear. Building on proof-theoretic treatments of equality, we give a declarative specification of typing based on focalization. This approach permits declarative rules for coverage of pattern matching, as well as support for first-class existential types using a focalized subtyping judgment. We use refinement types to avoid explicitly passing equality proofs in our term syntax, making our calculus close to languages such as Haskell and OCaml. An explicit rule deduces when a type is principal, leading to reliable substitution principles for a rich type system with significant type inference. We also give a set of algorithmic typing rules, and prove that it is sound and complete with respect to the declarative system. The proof requires a number of technical innovations, including proving soundness and completeness in a mutually-recursive fashion.


Mucopolysaccharidosis IVA (MPS IVA, Morquio A syndrome) is a rare autosomal recessive lysosomal storage disorder caused by mutations in the N‐acetylgalactosamine‐6‐sulfatase (GALNS) gene. We collected, analyzed, and uniformly summarized all published GALNS gene variants, thus updating the previous mutation review (published in 2014). In addition, new variants were communicated by seven reference laboratories in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, and the United States. All data were analyzed to determine common alleles, geographic distribution, level of homozygosity, and genotype‐phenotype correlation. Moreover, variants were classified according to their pathogenicity as suggested by ACMG. Including those previously published, we assembled 446 unique variants, among which 68 were novel, from 1190 subjects (including newborn screening positive subjects). Variants' distribution was missense (65.0%), followed by nonsense (8.1%), splicing (7.2%), small frameshift deletions(del)/insertions(ins) (7.0%), intronic (4.0%), and large del/ins and complex rearrangements (3.8%). Half (50.4%) of the subjects were homozygous, 37.1% were compound heterozygous, and 10.7% had only one variant detected. The novel variants underwent in silico analysis to evaluate their pathogenicity. All variants were submitted to ClinVar (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/clinvar/) to make them publicly available. Mutation updates are essential for the correct molecular diagnoses, genetic counseling, prenatal and preimplantation diagnosis, and disease management.


Since the 1990s, development agencies and international institutions have promoted private-sector involvement in infrastructure, assuming that this would inject both investment and efficiency into the under-performing public sector. In the water and energy sectors, these expectations have not been fulfilled. Private-sector investment in developing countries is falling, multinational companies have failed to make sustainable returns on their investments, and the process of privatisation in water and energy has proved widely unpopular and encountered strong political opposition. This paper examines the role of this opposition in delaying, cancelling, or reversing the privatisation of water and energy. Local civil society has successfully mobilised highly effective political activity, its opposition being based on the perceived conflicts between privatisation and equity, and over the role of the state and community in these sectors. Such opposition has involved dynamic interactions with existing political parties and structures, including the use of existing electoral and judicial mechanisms. Its success poses challenges for the multilateral and donor community, NGOs, the opposition campaigns themselves, and the future of national systems of electricity and water.


Modern big data workflows, found in e.g., machine learning use cases, often involve iterations of cycles of batch analytics and interactive analytics on temporary data. Whereas batch analytics solutions for large volumes of raw data are well established (e.g., Hadoop, MapReduce), state-of-the-art interactive analytics solutions (e.g., distributed shared nothing RDBMSs) require data loading and/or transformation phase, which is inherently expensive for temporary data.
 In this paper, we propose a novel scalable distributed solution for in-situ data analytics, that offers both scalable batch and interactive data analytics on raw data, hence avoiding the loading phase bottleneck of RDBMSs. Our system combines a MapReduce based platform with the recently proposed NoDB paradigm, which optimizes traditional centralized RDBMSs for in-situ queries of raw files. We revisit the NoDB's centralized design and scale it out supporting multiple clients and data processing nodes to produce a new distributed data analytics system we call Distributed NoDB (DiNoDB). DiNoDB leverages MapReduce batch queries to produce critical pieces of metadata (e.g., distributed positional maps and vertical indices) to speed up interactive queries without the overheads of the data loading and data movement phases allowing users to quickly and efficiently exploit their data.
 Our experimental analysis demonstrates that DiNoDB significantly reduces the data-to-query latency with respect to comparable state-of-the-art distributed query engines, like Shark, Hive and HadoopDB.


Maintaining and enhancing soil fertility are key issues for sustainability in an agricultur‐ al system with organic or low input methods. On-farm–produced green manure as a source of soil organic matter (SOM) plays a critical role in long-term productivity. But producing green manure requires land and water; thus, increasing biodiversity, such as by intercropping with green manure crops, could be an approach to enhance the efficiency of renewable resources especially in developing countries. This article discusses soil fertility and its maintenance and enhancement with leguminous intercropping from four points of view: soil fertility and organic matter function, leguminous green manure, intercropping principles, and soil conservation. Important contributions of leguminous intercropping include SOM enhancement and fertility building, biological nitrogen (N) and other plant nutrition availability. Under a well-designed and managed system, competition between the target and intercropping crops can be reduced. The plant uptake efficiency of biologically fixed N is estimated to be double that of industrial N fertiliz‐ ers. After N-rich plant residues are incorporated into soil, the carbon (C):nitrogen ratio of added straw decreases. Another high mitigation potential of legume intercropping lies in soil conservation by preventing soil and water erosion. Many opportunities exist to introduce legumes in short-term rotation, intercropping, living mulch, and cover crops in an organically managed farm system. Worldwide, long-term soil fertility enhance‐ ment remains a challenge due to the current world population and agricultural practices. Cropping system including legumes is a step in the right direction to meeting the needs of food security and sustainability.


The Shiloh Indian Mounds archaeological site, a National Historic Landmark, is a late prehistoric community within the boundaries of the Shiloh National Military Park on the banks of the Tennessee River, where one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War was fought in April 1862. Dating between AD 1000 and 1450, the archaeological site includes at least eight mounds and more than 100 houses. It is unique in that the land has never been plowed, so visitors can walk around the area and find the collapsed remains of 800-year-old houses and the 900-meter-long palisade with bastions that protected the village in prehistoric times. Although its location within a National Park boundary has protected the area from the recent ravages of man, river bank erosion began to undermine the site in the 1970s. In the mid-1990s, Paul Welch began a four-year investigation culminating in a comprehensive report to the National Park Service on the Shiloh Indian Mounds. These published findings confirm that the Shiloh site was one of at least eight Mississippian mound sites located within a 50 km radius and that Shiloh was abandoned in approximately AD 1450. They also establish other parameters for the Shiloh archaeological phase. This volume is intended to make information about the first 100 years of excavations at the Shiloh site available to the archaeological community.


The paper examines the role of »democracy« in the process of European integration. In the first part the author traces the development of a formal legitimacy deficit that turned into a material deficit when the European Union was established. At this point the question of democracy came to the fore and very likely is to influence the prospects of any further move towards greater unity in the European Union. The European Union falls short of traditional democratic standards in many respects. A comprehensive account of the diverse deficiencies forms the bulk of the second part of the paper. The democratic quality of the EU's political system is not measured by any specific organizational blueprint but draws on a structured inventory of critiques found in the literature. The last part of the paper examines if the European Union with its singular political structure qualifies at all for a democratic transformation. By critically discussing the applicability of the concept of statehood to the European Union, the role of community and citizenship as a presumed prerequisite for democracy, and the relationship between economic and democratic development the author argues that both the underlying concepts as well as the political structures and processes have to be adapted to further democratize the European Union.


The present study examined the plasticity of the lexical selection mechanism in bilingual word production by training a group of unbalanced Chinese–English bilinguals with a language switching task. The experimental group received an 8-day language switching training, while the control group received no training. Before and after training, the behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) data of both groups in a cued picture naming task were collected. ERP results revealed a training effect such that after training, the N2 peak latency in cue-locked ERPs was shortened only in the experimental group. These results suggest that short-term language switching experience could improve the efficiency to establish the target language task schema, and that the language control mechanism of word production in unbalanced bilinguals could be modulated by language switching experience.


The objective of this study is to investigate the performance of a heat recovery heat pump dryer using a R245fa refrigerant experimentally. In this study, the main components of the heat pump dryer were an evaporator, a compressor, a condenser, and an expansion valve. As a result, when the amount of refrigerant varied from 15 kg to 16 kg, the hot air outlet temperature in the condenser and the heat transfer rate were almost kept constant. Therefore, the amount of refrigerant at 16 kg was considered to be a suitable amount in the heat pump. As the air inlet velocity varied from 0.5 m/s to 1.5 m/s, the highest temperature in the condenser could be obtained when the air inlet velocity was 0.5 m/s. The heat transfer rate, system (COP), and hot air outlet temperature were 5.6 kW, 3.4, and 102.5℃, respectively, when the bypass ratio and water temperature were 0% and 60℃


Fifty percent of people all over the world are suffering from a lack basic needs. Even poor women are denied their equality of human rights. Equality of rights for these women would mean access to food, clothing, shelter, and credit as well as liberation from exploitative forms of income generation such as domestic work, child labor and trafficking. Women in Bangladesh suffer from inequality of rights on quite an unimaginable level and their socio-economic development has been largely impeded. Thus, these poor women depend on others to survive. Human capability services like education and skills development services are not generated nor tailored to them particularly at the village level which affects the basic human rights of these women. Without educational, health, economic and social services at the village grass-roots level, poor people suffer most in Bangladesh. Although the Constitution of Bangladesh appears to strongly approve gender equality and positive action that guarantees women's full participation in social, economic and political life, it is clear that full support is absent. Ironically, the disadvantaged poor people specifically are struggling to fulfill their basic human needs and are aware of their basic human rights. Although some steps have been made to reduce gender inequality, some laws still lag behind and many discriminatory practices are found in the customary laws, which still remain in force. A solution that has offered to assist poor women in Bangladesh through micro-credit organizations (MFIs) like Grameen Bank credit, that create opportunities for these women to help educate themselves and overcome poverty in Bangladesh. However, human rights education at the grass roots level is very nominal. Hence focus on human rights education extension programs are urgently required to establish basic human rights.


This chapter discusses the properties and the derivation of the lexical item pa in Papiamentu (Pp). The form pa fulfils several functions: preposition, mood marker, complementizer, and possibly case marker. The first objective of the chapter is to provide a description of the properties of pa for each of its functions. The second objective of the chapter is to trace the origin of the properties of pa. While the label of the Pp lexical entry pa is derived from Portuguese para, very few of its semantic and syntactic properties are derived from those of this lexical item. Several of the semantic and syntactic properties of Pp pa are derived from those of corresponding lexical entries in the substrate languages of Pp. The results of our three-way comparison will lead us to considering a scenario of the origin of the properties of Pp pa that involves the process of relabeling. In this case, however, two substrate lexical entries appear to have been relabeled on the basis of a single superstrate form para, yielding the creole lexical entry pa, cumulating the functions of the two substrate entries. The match between the creole entry and the substrate corresponding lexical entries is not perfect. The mismatches between the lexical entries will be considered in detail showing that the make up of the lexical entry pa has also involved extension and grammaticalization.


Fuzzy measures and integrals have been used in multiple applications in the area of information fusion. They can be used to aggregate information when information sources are not independent. Fuzzy measures are used to represent our background knowledge on the information sources. In particular, they can be used to model the dependencies between the variables. One of the applications of Choquet integrals is for defining distances between objects. In this case, we can use the Choquet integral as an alternative to e.g. weighted Euclidean distance. In this paper we discuss the problem of comparing pairs of fuzzy measures. We introduce two distances inspired in the Hellinger distance and use them to compare the measures for some different Choquet integral-based distances. Fuzzy measures are also known by non-additive measures, capacities, and monotonic games. Monotonic games are used in game theory. Because of that the results presented here can be used in other contexts as in game theory.


PURPOSE
This multicentre phase II trial was conducted in South Africa to evaluate the activity of a combination of vinorelbine, administered in a new schedule, and cisplatin, in chemonaive patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

PATIENTS AND METHODS
Between September 1995 and December 1996, 35 patients were enrolled. All patients had at least one bidimensionally measurable lesion. Vinorelbine was administered intravenously on day 1 and day 8 at a dose of 30 mg/m2 and cisplatin was administered intravenously on day 1 at a dose of 100 mg/m2. The chemotherapy cycle was repeated every three weeks.

RESULTS
Of 35 evaluable patients, 14 (40%) achieved a response (one complete response and 13 partial responses). The median time to progression was 6.4 months (range 12-572 days) and the median survival was 15.7 months (range 12-882+ days). One-year survival was 56%. Toxicity was manageable and consisted of nausea and vomiting (grade 3 in 45% of patients) and grade 3-4 neutropenia seen in 13 patients with three patients experiencing grade 3 infection. Other side-effects were mild, including constipation grade 3 in 9.1%. A total of 153 courses were administered with patients receiving a median dose intensity of 81.7% for vinorelbine, while that of cisplatin was 74.1%.

CONCLUSION
The combination of vinorelbine and cisplatin demonstrated substantial activity in terms of objective response and survival with manageable side-effects in patients with advanced NSCLC. These findings confirm the data from previous randomised studies. Further studies are ongoing in order to evaluate the efficacy of this combination in the neoadjuvant and adjuvant setting.


Hepatocarcinoma (HCC) is the fifth most common cancer, with more than one million fatalities occurring annually worldwide. Multiple risk factors are associated with HCC disease etiology, the highest incidence being in patients with chronic hepatitis B virus and hepatitis C virus, although other factors such as genetic makeup and environmental exposure are involved. Multiple genetic alterations including the activation of oncogenes and inactivation of tumor suppressor genes are required for malignancy in human cancers and are correlated with increased stages of carcinogenesis and further tumor progression. In this study of 21 HCC patients, we analyzed pRb2/p130, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), p27, and proliferating cell nuclear antigen as potential HCC molecular biomarkers. In our sample set, we found that p27 was absent. Univariate survival analysis showed that proliferating cell nuclear antigen expression (diffuse staining >50% of positive cells in tumor) was confirmed as a significant HCC prognostic biomarker for determining patient survival agreeing with previous studies (P 0.0126, log-rank test). Lower pRb2/p130 expression was associated to a borderline P value of inverse correlation with tumor malignancy and to a positive correlation with respect to the time from HCC diagnosis (Spearman coefficient 0.568; P < 0.05). Conversely, higher VEGF expression was associated with a poor survival (P 0.0257, log-rank test). We demonstrate for the first time that pRb2/p130 is inversely correlated with VEGF expression and tumor aggressiveness (P < 0.05) in p27-negative HCC patients. pRb2/p130 and VEGF expression are independent from tumor staging, suggesting their possible role as independent prognostic molecular biomarkers in HCC. Furthermore, we have evidence that VEGF together with pRb2/p130 may act as new HCC biomarkers in a p27independent manner. Additional studies with larger numbers of patient data would allow the use of multivariable techniques and would be able to further identify patients with poorer survival.