Quantification of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in blood samples is believed to provide valuable evidence of cancer progression, cancer activity status, response to therapy in patients with metastatic cancer, and possible cancer diagnosis. Recently, a number of researchers reported that CTCs tend to lose their epithelial cell adhesion molecule (EpCAM) by an epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). As such, label-free CTC detection methods are attracting worldwide attention. Here, we describe a label-free DC impedance-based microcytometer for CTCs by exploiting the difference in size between CTCs and blood cells. This system detects changes in DC impedance between two polyelectrolytic gel electrodes (PGEs) under low DC voltages. Using spiked ovarian cancer cell lines (OVCAR-3) in blood as a model system, we were able to count the cells using a microcytometer with 88% efficiency with a flow rate of 13 μl min(-1) without a dilution process. Furthermore, we examined blood samples from breast cancer patients using the cytometer, and detected CTCs in 24 out of 24 patient samples. Thus, the proposed DC impedance-based microcytometer presents a facile and fast way of CTC evaluation regardless of their biomarkers.


: In February of 2008, the Center forArchaeological Research (CAR) at The University of Texas at SanAntonio (UTSA) conducted a 100 percent pedestrian survey of the Killam Lake Wetland Area located along Chacon Creek in Laredo, Webb County, Texas. Archaeological sites 41WB413 and 41WB414 were revisited as part of the archaeological investigations and eligibility testing was conducted on 41WB414. The archaeological work was completed for the City of Laredo Solid Waste Services Department, who planned to remove construction and industrial debris from the waterway, as part of a wetlands restoration project. Because the removal process has the potential to impact the Chacon Creek waterway, the project falls under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). As such, the undertaking is subject to archaeological investigations as stated in Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). The archaeological survey and eligibility testing were conducted under Texas Antiquities Permit No. 4807 with Leonard Kemp serving as the Project Archaeologist and Antonia L. Figueroa serving as the Principal Investigator. CAR excavated 60 shovel tests and three 1-x-1 m test units within the Area of Potential Effect (APE). No new sites were documented during the pedestrian survey. No evidence of cultural features or intact cultural horizons was noted upon inspection of 41WB413 and no further work on that site is recommended. CAR has proposed that the boundary of 41WB414 be extended to the west. Based on the fi ndings from test unit excavations at 41WB414, CAR concurs with the previous assessment that 41WB414 is not eligible for inclusion to the National Register of Historic Places. The planned improvements to the APE can proceed and no further archaeological work is recommended on this property. CAR recommends that the proposed wetland project proceed as planned. Artifacts collected and records generated during this project were prepared for curation according to Texas Historical Commission guidelines and are permanently curated at the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio.


One of the most important issues facing the international human rights movement is the claim that human rights values are universal and not culturally specific, and thus can be used to understand, evaluate, and influence global actors. This claim has obvious political and philosophical dimensions. That the concept of international human rights is being taken seriously by both governmental and nongovernmental actors is a sign of the importance of human rights today. The number of countries ratifying the basic international human rights treaties has reached an all-time high. Nevertheless, current events are drawing into question the universality and efficacy of the human rights regime. These events include women's rights violations and genocide in BosniaHerzegovina, genocide in Rwanda, violation of the humanitarian laws of war in Chechnya, and the increased use of the death penalty in the United States. It is a tribute to the resiliency and appeal of the human rights idea that efforts to address these situations have begun to attract some of the most thoughtful advocates and philosophers of the twentieth century. On Human Rights is a collection of essays that addresses both the philosophical and political dimensions of the human rights debate, and provides useful guidelines for further advances in international human rights theory and practice. The seven essays in the collection range from philosophical inquiries concerning the source of international human rights norms to powerful critiques of our current understanding of the content of these norms and suggestions about how to create, support, and sustain an international human rights culture. The essays were presented over the course of a year at Oxford University, England, as part of an annual series of lectures sponsored by Amnesty International. It appears that the only thematic demand made of contributors was that they address a subject related to human rights.


In most man-made flight, vehicle control is achieved by deflecting flaps. However, in nature, morphing surfaces are found on both flying and swimming creatures. Morphing is used in nature because it is a more efficient form of control. This thesis investigates using morphing flaps to control a class of UAVs known as ducted fan vehicles. Specifically, this thesis discusses both the challenges and benefits of using morphing control surfaces. To achieve morphing, a piezoelectric device known as Macro Fiber Composites is used. These devices are embedded in the skin of the vehicles control surface, and when actuated, they cause the control surface to increase or decrease camber. This thesis describes experiments that were performed to investigate the performance of this type of actuator. Specifically, the actuation bandwidth of these devices is presented and compared to a servo. Results show that the morphing control surfaces can actuate at frequencies twice as high as a servo.


This research explored progression to higher education (HE) courses from 14–19 diplomas in the West Yorkshire region of the UK. Sixteen HE tutors involved in admitting undergraduates across a range of institutions and subjects were interviewed. There was little evidence to support the fear that the courses would have less status than A levels because of their vocational associations. Where reservations existed they were more complex than this. Tutors working on courses relating to social care valued the diploma's emphasis on generic academic skills and work experience. Those delivering highly focused vocational courses or academic courses requiring prior subject‐specific knowledge were more cautious. The main barriers to securing full commitment from tutors were the breadth of study options within the diplomas, which left tutors unclear about the knowledge and skills candidates would acquire, and tutors' limited understanding of the diplomas.


Background: Endometrial cell implantation after abdominal surgery, mainly after caesarean section, may result in formation of endometrioma, which is usually described to be of various sizes, and adjacent to the surgical scar. Case: A 36-year old woman complaining of a mass of the abdominal wall with pain during the menstrual period, with a caesarean section 5 years earlier, presented a rounded tumour not contiguous to the Pfannenstiel's laparotomy scar, of hard consistence, fixed and adherent to the deep abdominal wall structures, located on the left paramedian epigastric region. Magnetic Resonance imaging showed the nodule, involving the deep layers of the abdominal wall and the distance from the laparotomic scar. Surgical removal was performed with wide excision of the lesion, causing a large wall defect. After histological confirmation (endometriosis) by frozen section, reconstruction of the abdominal wall required prolene mesh grafting. After twelve months the patient is healthy. Conclusion: When abdominal wall endometrioma is located distant from the scar, perhaps more frequently after Pfannenstiel's laparotomic incision, the differential diagnosis may be more difficult and MRI can help differentiating many of these lesions, and histological confirmation should be obtained intraoperatively, by frozen section, to allow an oncological resection if required.


LTL is frequently used to express specifications in many domains such as embedded systems or business processes. Witnesses can help to understand why an LTL specification is satisfiable, and a number of approaches exist to make understanding a witness easier. In the case of unsatisfiable specifications unsatisfiable cores (UCs), i.e., parts of an unsatisfiable formula that are themselves unsatisfiable, are a well established means for debugging. However, little work has been done to help understanding a UC of an unsatisfiable LTL formula. In this paper we suggest to enhance a UC of an unsatisfiable LTL formula with additional information about the time points at which the subformulas of the UC are relevant for unsatisfiability. For example, in "(G p) and (X not p)" the first occurrence of "p" is really only "relevant" for unsatisfiability at time point 1 (time starts at time point 0). We present a method to extract such information from the resolution graph of a temporal resolution proof of unsatisfiability of an LTL formula. We implement our method in TRP++, and we experimentally evaluate it. Source code of our tool is available.


IL-12 is a heterodimeric cytokine that was identified on the basis of its ability to synergize with IL-2 in the induction of cytotoxic effector cells and was originally called cytotoxic lymphocyte maturation factor (CLMF). IL-12 was also found to stimulate the proliferation of PHA-activated lymphoblasts which were greater than 90% CD3+ T cells. In this report we further characterize the effects of IL-12 on lymphocyte proliferation. Studies with purified subpopulations of PHA-activated lymphoblasts and with cloned lines of human T cells indicated that IL-12 caused the proliferation of activated T cells of both the CD4+ and CD8+ subsets. This effect of IL-12 was independent of IL-2 because it was not blocked by antibodies to either IL-2 or IL-2R. The maximum proliferation induced by IL-12 was 31 to 72% of the maximum caused by IL-2; however, IL-12 was active at a lower effective concentration (EC50 = 8.5 +/- 1.3 pM) than IL-2 (EC50 = 52 +/- 8 pM). Combination of suboptimal amounts of IL-12 and IL-2 resulted in additive proliferation, up to the maximum induced by IL-2 alone. IL-12 also caused the proliferation of lymphocytes activated by culture with IL-2 for 6 to 12 days. CD56+ NK cells were among the IL-12-responsive cells in the IL-2-activated lymphocyte population. Unlike IL-2 or IL-7, IL-12 caused little or no proliferation of resting peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC). In this regard, IL-12 was similar to IL-4. However, IL-12 could enhance the proliferation of resting PBMC caused by suboptimal amounts of IL-2, whereas IL-4 inhibited IL-2-induced PBMC proliferation. Thus, IL-12 is a growth factor for activated human T cells and NK cells; however, its spectrum of lymphocyte growth-promoting properties is distinct from that of IL-2, IL-4, or IL-7.


This article describes VRAM, short for Virtual Reality Aided Modeler. VRAM is a conceptual design tool supported by Virtual Reality technology and an ongoing testbed for theory and methodology in the field of three dimensional user interfaces (3DUIs). The outcomes from the project should consist of an intuitive and comprehensive immersive surface modeler, next to a set of taxonomies and guidelines for the development of 3DUIs. Based on a modular structure, VRAMs program architecture allows the easy extension of functionality. The application consists of the seamless integration of four main functionality modules, namely system control, viewing & browsing, editing and modeling. Based on the premise of portability, the software environment runs on both SGI Irix and MS Windows NT platforms. To be relatively independent in developing 3DUI techniques, the VRAM environment supports a multiplicity of input and output devices. Due to the focus on immersive modeling, tracking devices, head mounted displays and stereoprojection devices are the main I/O channels. In this article, we will primary focus on the functionality of the virtual modeller.


OBJECTIVE
To determine the utility of using administrative data for epidemiologic studies of gout by examining the validity of gout diagnoses in claims data.

METHODS
From a population of approximately 800,000 members from 4 managed care plans, we identified patients who had at least 2 ambulatory claims for a diagnosis of gout between January 1, 1999 and December 31, 2003. From this group, a random sample of 200 patients was chosen for medical record review. Trained medical record reviewers abstracted gout-related clinical, laboratory, and radiologic data from the medical records. Two rheumatologists independently evaluated the abstracted information and assessed whether the gout diagnosis was probable/definite or unlikely/insufficient information. Discordant physician ratings were adjudicated by consensus. Based on record reviews, patients were also classified according to the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), Rome, and New York gout criteria and these results were compared with the physician global assessments.

RESULTS
There were 121 patients rated as having probable/definite gout by physician consensus, leading to a positive predictive value of >or=2 coded diagnoses of gout of 61% (95% confidence interval 53-67). There was low concordance between physician assessments and established gout criteria including ACR, Rome, and New York criteria (kappa = 0.17, 0.16, and 0.20, respectively).

CONCLUSION
Use of administrative data alone in epidemiologic and health services research on gout may lead to misclassification. Medical record reviews for validation of claims data may provide an inadequate gold standard to confirm gout diagnoses.


can policies for governing marine fisheries become more effective? How can we engage in developing a new science of fisheries governance that promotes knowledge accumulation and collective learning? We look into these issues by reviewing the current social-ecological status of marine fisheries, common policy approaches in place to govern them, and key learned lessons and shortcomings. While great efforts have been made towards understanding marine governance in the last 50 years, if we are to meet the current and upcoming challenges facing global fisheries, we need to engage with systematic knowledge accumulation about governance performance. To this end we report on a novel classificatory framework which, while nascent, could offer the potential to help us move in that direction.


This paper presents an investigation of metaphoric language in the contemporary discourse of Detroit's "renewal." News articles from local and national news sources from 2009–2011 provide evidence of critical and provocative metaphoric constructions found in the gentrification discourse of Detroit. As harbingers of gentrification, the discourse communities of artists and business entrepreneurs are the focus of this review. The author argues that metaphoric language in journalism must be critically evaluated and challenged to help ensure sustainable, equitable, and historically sensitive "renewal" of the city of Detroit and similar inner-city urban communities experiencing gentrification.


Modern electronic applications demand more and more complex, multifunctional microsystems with performance characteristics which can only be achieved by using best-of-breed materials and device technologies. Three-dimensional (3-D) integration of separate, individually complete device layers provides a way to build complex heterogeneous microsystems without compromising the system performance and fabrication yield. In the 3-D integration approach, each device layer is fabricated separately using optimized materials and processes. The layers are bonded and interconnected through area array vertical interconnects with lengths on the order of microns. This paper will review bonding techniques for high density area array 3-D integration of integrated circuits, focusing on techniques suitable for die-to-die and die-to-wafer bonding configurations.


Abstract 'Internationalisation' became a key theme in the 1990s, both in higher education policy debates and in research on higher education. The process is accompanied by a European policy that seems to favour a de-nationalisation of higher education, a growing responsibility of individual institutions of higher education and an increasing popularity of managerialism. This paper addresses the traditional controversial role of higher education as regards internationalisation and the nation-state, comparing the mainland European and the Anglo-Saxon approach. Assessing the different impacts of internationalisation as a challenge to European and German higher education, it analyses the role of the European Union and the Bologna process, as well as the icebreaker function of internationalisation for higher education reform in Germany. A closer look at the complex and dynamic multi-level set-up of internationalisation in European higher education reveals that it not only means varying border-crossing activities that are on the rise, but rather substantial changes towards systematic policies and a growing awareness of international cooperation and competition in an increasingly global higher education market. Introduction Three major developments occurred in the higher education systems in Europe during the last two decades: - Higher education institutions, but more specifically higher education systems at their institutional level, became more important actors. We can observe many initiatives and debates on institutional management in higher education, institutional evaluation, funding of universities and other related tools for institutional adaptation to changing environments. - Secondly, we note a variety of changes, which can be termed 'internationalisation' of higher education. Two different types of phenomena are frequently referred to in this context: on the one hand, a growth of specific visible international, border-crossing cooperation and operations, such as student and staff mobility, foreign language teaching or cooperative research activities; and, on the other, a trend towards internationalisation, regionalisation or globalisation of the substance and structures of higher education, e.g., convergence of systems in terms of institutional patterns, study programmes or curricula. - Last but not least, both developments--the emphasis on the institutional level, as well as on the international level of higher education--seem to reflect and to contribute to a loosening of traditional ties between the university and the nation-state that some may welcome as the new freedom of universities, while others may see the university in this context as capitalism's final frontier. Thus, the restructuring of the nation-state and the rise of internationalisation run parallel to the reform and transformation of universities. A paper prepared for the meeting in Salamanca of European rectors and institutional managers responsible for higher education provides an example of this new secular religion of institutional autonomy as a tool for the empowering of universities in a competitive global order: "Universities need and want autonomy. In many countries in Europe, over-regulation inhibits progress and innovation and constitutes a serious handicap in the European and worldwide environment. Universities request the power to plan their own futures, striking the right balance between autonomy and responsibility and between diversity and organisation" (Convention of European Higher Education Institutions 2001: 7). The Nationalisation of Higher Education: contrasting assumptions and significant differences In talking about a trend towards internationalisation or de-nationalisation, we claim that higher education in the past has not been--or has been less--international than today, and more so in comparison with the anticipated future. …


Decision support systems based on AI are usually designed to generate complete outputs entirely automatically and to explain those to users. However, explanations, no matter how well designed, might not adequately address the output uncertainty of such systems in many applications. This is especially the case when the human-out-of-the-loop problem persists, which is a fundamental human limitation. There is no reason to limit decision support systems to such backward reasoning designs, though. We argue how more interactive forward reasoning designs where users are actively involved in the task can be effective in managing output uncertainty. We therefore call for a more complete view of the design space for decision support systems that includes both backward and forward reasoning designs. We argue that such a more complete view is necessary to overcome the barriers that hinder AI deployment especially in high-stakes applications.


In his study of nationalism, Benedict Anderson famously identified a notion of simultaneity across "homogeneous, empty time" as the temporal structure underpinning nationness as "imagined community." Since the 18th century, Anderson argued, time was spatialized as newspapers and novels were the prime cultural forms of imagining a community across space. In the era of televisual nation-building, another kind of temporality has emerged as a form for thinking about and feeling the nation. Archival aesthetics, it is argued, is a mode of affective historiography that mobilizes a double temporality: While constructing chronologies in its remixing of archive footage, reproducing conventional narratives of epochs and events, it also engenders, via reappropriations of popular music and cinema, a transhistorical, even mythical notion of the nation as a community of feeling across time. Through a discussion of Finnish TV documentaries by Peter von Bagh, this article returns to Homi K. Bhabha's theorizing of the pedagogical and the performative as the two, intertwined modes of narrating the nation.


Quantitative prediction problems involving both spatial and temporal components have appeared prominently in several disparate research areas including finance, supply chain management, and civil engineering. Unfortunately, either the spatial or temporal aspect tends to dominate the other in many prediction formulations. We briefly examine the underlying formulations used in spatial and temporal prediction. Then, we outline a method that combines these approaches and improves prediction results in high-dimensional economic domains by integrating multivariate and time series techniques which require minimal tuning but achieve superior performance compared to previous methods. We present preliminary results in the context of the Trading Agent Competition for Supply Chain Management.


Oxidative stress plays a fundamental role in abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) formation. Activated polymorphonuclear leukocytes (or neutrophils) are associated with AAA and express myeloperoxidase (MPO), which promotes inflammation, matrix degradation, and other pathological features of AAA, including enhanced oxidative stress through generation of reactive oxygen species. Both plasma and aortic MPO levels are elevated in patients with AAA, but the role of MPO in AAA pathogenesis has, heretofore, never been investigated. Here, we show that MPO gene deletion attenuates AAA formation in two animal models: ANG II infusion in apolipoprotein E-deficient mice and elastase perfusion in C57BL/6 mice. Oral administration of taurine [1% or 4% (wt/vol) in drinking water], an amino acid known to react rapidly with MPO-generated oxidants like hypochlorous acid, also prevented AAA formation in the ANG II and elastase models as well as the CaCl2 application model of AAA formation while reducing aortic peroxidase activity and aortic protein-bound dityrosine levels, an oxidative cross link formed by MPO. Both MPO gene deletion and taurine supplementation blunted aortic macrophage accumulation, elastin fragmentation, and matrix metalloproteinase activation, key features of AAA pathogenesis. Moreover, MPO gene deletion and taurine administration significantly attenuated the induction of serum amyloid A, which promotes ANG II-induced AAAs. These data implicate MPO in AAA pathogenesis and suggest that studies exploring whether taurine can serve as a potential therapeutic for the prevention or treatment of AAA in patients merit consideration.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Neutrophils are abundant in abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA), and myeloperoxidase (MPO), prominently expressed in neutrophils, is associated with AAA in humans. This study demonstrates that MPO gene deletion or supplementation with the natural product taurine, which can scavenge MPO-generated oxidants, can prevent AAA formation, suggesting an attractive potential therapeutic strategy for AAA.


A recent set of studies (Muenks, Miele, & Wigfield, 2016) introduced the concept of perceived effort source to better explain how students reason about the relation between effort and ability when evaluating the academic abilities of other students. These studies showed that participants who were induced to perceive effort as task-elicited (i.e., as being primarily due to the subjective difficulty of the task) were more likely to view effort and ability as inversely related than participants who were induced to perceive effort as self-initiated (i.e., as being due to students' motivation to go beyond the basic demands of the task). The current studies expanded on this research by demonstrating that, in the absence of an effort source manipulation, college students spontaneously invoked beliefs about the source of effort when evaluating their own (Study 2) and other students' (Studies 1-3) abilities. The three studies also showed that our novel measure of individual differences in effort source beliefs was a better predictor of participants' judgments of math ability (Studies 1 and 2) and verbal ability (Study 3) than a standard measure of their ability mindsets (i.e., beliefs about the extent to which intelligence is malleable). Specifically, participants who naturally tended to perceive effort as task-elicited generally rated students who expended relatively little effort as having more ability than did participants who tended to perceive effort as self-initiated. Implications for research on student motivation and for education practice are discussed.


Masked image modeling (MIM) as pre-training is shown to be effective for numerous vision downstream tasks, but how and where MIM works remain unclear. In this paper, we compare MIM with the long-dominant supervised pretrained models from two perspectives, the visualizations and the experiments, to uncover their key representational differences. From the visualizations, we find that MIM brings locality inductive bias to all layers of the trained models, but supervised models tend to focus locally at lower layers but more globally at higher layers. That may be the reason why MIM helps Vision Transformers that have a very large receptive field to optimize. Using MIM, the model can maintain a large diversity on attention heads in all layers. But for supervised models, the diversity on attention heads almost disappears from the last three layers and less diversity harms the fine-tuning performance. From the experiments, we find that MIM models can perform significantly better on geometric and motion tasks with weak semantics or fine-grained classification tasks, than their supervised counterparts. Without bells and whistles, a standard MIM pre-trained SwinV2-L could achieve state-of-the-art performance on pose estimation (78.9 AP on COCO test-dev and 78.0 AP on CrowdPose), depth estimation (0.287 RMSE on NYUv2 and 1.966 RMSE on KITTI), and video object tracking (70.7 SUC on LaSOT). For the semantic understanding datasets where the categories are sufficiently covered by the supervised pre-training, MIM models can still achieve highly competitive transfer performance. With a deeper understanding of MIM, we hope that our work can inspire new and solid research in this direction. Code will be available at https://github.com/zdaxie/MIM-DarkSecrets.


One of the most exciting features in Foucault's work is his analytics of power in terms of forms of visibility. It allows for a reflection on the conditions of seeing and thinking , thus triggering a seemingly paradoxical move: locating the limits of our perspectives entails simultaneously transgressing these limits. In a way, we decipher our own blind spot. Approaching Discipline and Punish through this perspective brings us to identify the digital subject as a characteristic figure of our time. In contrast to its disciplinarian counterpart, it appears to be an active, though not necessarily political subject. The notion of visual citizenship will help us to go a step further and figure out what it could mean to challenge today's surveilling gaze.


Tabular sandstone uranium deposits constitute the largest uranium resource type in the United States. A major point of contention has been the nature and direction of the ground-water flow. This paper presents a quantitative simulation of regional ground-water flow during uranium deposition in the Westwater Canyon Member and Jackpile Sandstone Member of the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation in the San Juan basin. Input for the four-layer finite-difference model was from thicknesses and sandstone/mudstone ratios in each layer from 1,600 drill holes and 100 measured sections and from palcotopographic reconstructions. Topographic slope, shoreline position, and density contrasts in the lake and pore fluids controlled the directions of flow and recharge-discharge areas. The most important results for uranium ore deposit formation are that regional ground water discharged throughout the basin, regional discharge was concentrated along the shore line or playa margin, flow was dominantly gravity driven, and compaction dewatering was negligible. A strong association is found between the tabular sandstone uranium deposits and major inferred zones of mixed local and regional ground-water discharge. The results of ground-water modeling favor the brine interface model over the lacustrine-humate model for uranium deposition.


Three hybrid systems were compared to a solvent-based low-VOC system. The goal of the project was to determine if the hybrid systems met the requirements of the kitchen cabinet and furniture industries. Adhesion of each system to the substrate was first evaluated, and significant differences were recorded. Subsequently, resistance to heat and moisture was evaluated using hot box and hot and cold check tests. These tests indicated that the experimental systems generally performed relatively well in terms of thermal resistance, but the appearance of those prepared from solvent-borne sealers and lacquers were less stable. The chemical resistance of these systems was also studied. The ability of the finish to withstand the effects of substances typically found in a kitchen was tested, as was their resistance to detergents and water. All the systems performed very well in vertical testing. Volatile organic compound emissions were finally measured after conditioning times of 3 and 21 days. These tests showed that the different systems behaved quite differently. The systems prepared with solvent-borne sealers and lacquers produced a high level of VOCs at the beginning of the test, with a rapid decrease thereafter, while the opposite was observed in systems based on water-borne sealers and lacquers.


In this paper we analyze a uniform price electricity spot market that is followed by redispatch in the case of network congestion. We assume that the transmission system operator is incentivized to minimize redispatch cost and compare a cost-based redispatch to a market-based redispatch mechanism. For networks with at least three nodes we show that in contrast to cost-based redispatch, in the case of market-based redispatch the cost-minimizing allocation may not be short-run efficient. As we demonstrate, the possibility of the transmission system operator to reduce market-based redispatch cost at the expense of a reduced welfare may be driven by the electricity supply side or the electricity demand side. Based on these results, we propose a new hybrid approach where the transmission system operator implements the efficient (instead of the cost minimizing) dispatch and uses market-based redispatch compensations.


It is common wisdom that gathering a variety of views and inputs improves the process of decision making, and, indeed, underpins a democratic society. Dubbed ensemble learning by researchers in computational intelligence and machine learning, it is known to improve a decision systems robustness and accuracy. Now, fresh developments are allowing researchers to unleash the power of ensemble learning in an increasing range of real-world applications. Ensemble learning algorithms such as boosting and random forest facilitate solutions to key computational issues such as face recognition and are now being applied in areas as diverse as object tracking and bioinformatics. Responding to a shortage of literature dedicated to the topic, this volume offers comprehensive coverage of state-of-the-art ensemble learning techniques, including the random forest skeleton tracking algorithm in the Xbox Kinect sensor, which bypasses the need for game controllers. At once a solid theoretical study and a practical guide, the volume is a windfall for researchers and practitioners alike.


This article focuses on a study that explored citizen participation in the planning and policy processes in Lesotho with specific reference to Qacha's Nek. Qacha's Nek is one of the districts classified as a remote mountain area of Lesotho and is characterised by a low population density, and in most cases, can be viewed as predominantly rural with a need to develop and focus on policy development and planning. In Lesotho, citizen participation has been encouraged by the different governments since the era of Moshoeshoe in 1824. Since then, Lesotho has gone through many changes and different styles of government until local government was formally established in 2005. Since 2005, one of the main objectives of local government is to promote citizens' participation in decision-making, planning and the implementation of developmental programmes. This article supports the theoretical framework that citizen participation in policy and planning processes is important, since it is through citizen participation that government may be rendered accountable and responsive to the needs of the local community. To determine the current level of citizen participation in Qacha's Nek, interviews were conducted. The research found that, although citizen participation is currently taking place, it is limited and mostly undertaken by the community to get a reward. Although the main purpose of this article was to determine the level of citizen participation in Qacha's Nek, it also aims to make recommendations to improve citizen participation that could be relevant and beneficial to any community.


The research community has responded to the Covid-19 crisis with speed, creativity and innovation. But the pandemic has also shone fresh light on the inner workings of research, and has intensified scrutiny of how research is funded, practiced, disseminated and evaluated, and how research cultures can be made more open, inclusive and impactful. The uncertain possibilities of the present moment follow a period in which concern has intensified over long-standing concerns over aspects of research assessment. As attention shifts from describing these problems, towards designing and implementing solutions, efforts are now coalescing around the idea of responsible research assessment (RRA). This is an umbrella term for approaches to assessment which incentivise, reflect and reward the plural characteristics of high-quality research, in support of diverse and inclusive research cultures.This working paper explores what RRA is, and where it comes from, by outlining fifteen initiatives that have influenced the shape and direction of current RRA debates. It goes on to describe the responses that these have elicited, with a particular focus on the role and contribution of research funders, who have more freedom and agency to experiment and initiate change than other actors in research systems.The paper also presents the findings of a survey of RRA policies and practices in the participant organisations of the Global Research Council (GRC)—mainly national public funding agencies—with responses from 55 organisations worldwide.Published to coincide with a November 2020 Global Research Council (GRC) virtual conference on responsible research assessment—and co-authored by a team drawn from the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), Research on Research Institute (RoRI), CWTS-Leiden and National Research Foundation of South Africa,—the paper serves as a primer for the RRA agenda as it intensifies worldwide.


In this paper I introduce a novel approach to the study of women in parliaments. The point of departure is the debate on descriptive versus substantive representation (Pitkin, 1967). In her influential book The Politics of Presence, Anne Phillips (1995) presented reasons to expect a link between descriptive and substantive representation. She hypothesized that an increased number of women elected (descriptive representation) would lead to transformations of the political agenda and eventually to a strengthened position for women citizens (substantive representation). Empirical research, however, shows that the link is associated with a lot of uncertainty. Women in elected office do not always and everywhere give priority to issues of special concern to women citizens. Moreover, parliaments do not change easily, and women entering politics have met gender-specific obstacles (Lovenduski, 2005). I argue that we need new ways of understanding the prerequisites for turning descriptive representation into substantive representation. The research question is: What are the necessary conditions for women's needs, interests, and concerns to be adequately integrated into parliamentary processes? I introduce a theory on gender-sensitive parliaments based on three principles: (i) the implementation of equal opportunities for women and men to influence internal parliamentary working procedures; (ii) the creation of room for women's interests and concerns on the political agenda; and (iii) the production of gender-sensitive legislation.


A common occurrence in many practical systems is that the desired result is known or given, but the conditions needed for achieving this result are not known. This situation leads to inverse problems, which are of particular interest in thermal processes. For instance, the temperature cycle to which a component must be subjected in order to obtain desired characteristics in a manufacturing system, such as heat treatment or plastic thermoforming, is prescribed. However, the necessary boundary and initial conditions are not known and must be determined by solving the inverse problem. Similarly, an inverse solution may be needed to complete a given physical problem by determining the unknown boundary conditions. Solutions thus obtained are not unique and optimization is generally needed to obtain results within a small region of uncertainty. This review paper discusses several inverse problems that arise in a variety of practical processes and presents some of the approaches that may be used to solve them and obtain acceptable and realistic results. Optimization methods that may be used for reducing the error are presented. A few examples are given to illustrate the applicability of these methods and the challenges that must be addressed in solving inverse problems. These examples include the heat treatment process, unknown wall temperature distribution in a furnace, and transport in a plume or jet involving the determination of the strength and location of the heat source by employing a few selected data points downstream. Optimization of the positioning of the data points is used to minimize the number of samples needed for accurate predictions.


Dominantly inherited mutations in leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2) are a common genetic cause of Parkinson's disease (PD). The importance of the R1441 residue in the pathogenesis is highlighted by the identification of three distinct missense mutations. To investigate the pathogenic mechanism underlying LRRK2 dysfunction, we generated a knockin (KI) mouse in which the R1441C mutation is expressed under the control of the endogenous regulatory elements. Homozygous R1441C KI mice appear grossly normal and exhibit no dopaminergic (DA) neurodegeneration or alterations in steady-state levels of striatal dopamine up to 2 years of age. However, these KI mice show reductions in amphetamine (AMPH)-induced locomotor activity and stimulated catecholamine release in cultured chromaffin cells. The introduction of the R1441C mutation also impairs dopamine D2 receptor function, as suggested by decreased responses of KI mice in locomotor activity to the inhibitory effect of a D2 receptor agonist, quinpirole. Furthermore, the firing of nigral neurons in R1441C KI mice show reduced sensitivity to suppression induced by quinpirole, dopamine, or AMPH. Together, our data suggest that the R1441C mutation in LRRK2 impairs stimulated dopamine neurotransmission and D2 receptor function, which may represent pathogenic precursors preceding dopaminergic degeneration in PD brains.


Problem based learning (PBL) attempts to translate and import real world problems into an educational context, intending to improve learning outcomes. This paper reports on the process of integrating online resources into an undergraduate physiotherapy course in the UK, which is characterised by the extensive use of PBL.

Following a pilot survey, this online enhanced version of PBL (ePBL) was subjected to evaluation using a questionnaire and focus groups. Results suggested that the immediacy of access to shared resources was beneficial; however some concerns revolving around the role and value of the discursive conferencing component emerged. ePBL has now been adopted programme-wide and implications for this approach are discussed.


Abstract Since 1949, China has adopted nine national military strategies, known as "strategic guidelines." The strategies adopted in 1956, 1980, and 1993 represent major changes in China's military strategy, or efforts by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to wage war in a new way. Shifts in the conduct of warfare in the international system offer one explanation for why China, a developing country for most of this period, pursued major change in its military strategy. Such shifts in the conduct of warfare should be especially powerful if a gap exists between a state's current strategy and the requirements of future warfare. The PLA has only been able to change strategy, however, when the Chinese Communist Party leadership is united and agrees on basic policies and the structure of authority. When the party is united, it delegates substantial responsibility for military affairs to the PLA leadership, which changes or adjusts military strategy in response to changes in China's security environment.


The proliferation of social media platforms together with the wide adoption of smartphone devices has transformed how we communicate and share news. During large-scale emergencies, such as natural disasters or armed attacks, victims, responders, and volunteers increasingly use social media to post situation updates and to request and offer help. The use of social media for emergency and disaster response has been a prominent application of information and knowledge management techniques in recent years. There are a number of challenges associated with near real-time processing of vast volumes of information in a way that makes sense for people directly affected, for volunteer organizations, and for official emergency response agencies. As massive amount of messages posted by users are transformed into semi-structured records via information extraction and natural language processing techniques, there is a growing need for developing advanced techniques to aggregate this large-scale data to gain an understanding of the ``big picture'' of an emergency, and to detect and predict how a disaster could develop. This workshop seeks to provide a platform for the exchange of ideas, identification of important problems, and discovery of possible synergies. It will enable interesting discussions and encouraged collaboration between various disciplines, and information and knowledge management approaches is the core of this workshop.


Accurate definition of structural style in subsurface interpretation is critically important for understanding the deformation history of fold-and-thrust belts, as well as assessing the petroleum prospectivity of structural traps. Using two- and three-dimensional seismic reflection surveys, well data, field mapping, forward models, and balanced cross sections, we describe the structural styles across the actively deforming southern Junggar fold-and-thrust belt in northwestern China, a basin undergoing petroleum exploration and development operations. Subsurface interpretations indicate several folds in the basin overlie Jurassic normal faults that were tectonically inverted in the Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous. Following inversion, multiple detachment levels propagated northward from the Tian Shan and formed a series of imbricated fault-related folds. The most prominent fold trend in southern Junggar consists of the Tugulu, Manas, and Huoerguosi anticlines, which trap hydrocarbons in clastic Eocene reservoirs. These structures exhibit complex internal geometries, with coeval forethrusts and backthrusts forming imbricated structural wedges. In the latest stages of deformation, and continuing at present, the uppermost thrust sheet, the Southern Junggar Thrust (SJT), truncated the backlimbs of these structural traps, implying the SJT is a tectonically active, out-of-sequence thrust. From these interpretations, we present a model for how the southern Junggar fold-and-thrust belt developed from Jurassic to present. Moreover, we detail how fold growth, fault activity, and structural style affected charge histories, trap formation, and reservoir compartmentalization. Our results have direct implications for assessment of the southern Junggar petroleum system as well as other complex fold-and-thrust belts.


Generalization to out of distribution tasks in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem. One successful approach improves generalization by conditioning policies on task or environment descriptions that provide information about the current transition or reward functions. Previously, these descriptions were often expressed as generated or crowd sourced text. In this work, we begin to tackle the problem of extracting useful information from natural language found in the wild (e.g. internet forums, documentation, and wikis). These natural, pre-existing sources are especially challenging, noisy, and large and present novel challenges compared to previous approaches. We propose to address these challenges by training reinforcement learning agents to learn to query these sources as a human would, and we experiment with how and when an agent should query. To address the how , we demonstrate that pretrained QA models perform well at executing zero-shot queries in our target domain. Using information retrieved by a QA model, we train an agent to learn when it should execute queries. We show that our method correctly learns to execute queries to maximize reward in a reinforcement learning setting.


For many, Michael Joseph Jackson represented the epitome of entertainment. His lyrical gravity, choreographed precision, and existential spontaneity were unparalleled and may never be seen in one individual again. Because of this, MJ was loved by billions in multiple generations across ethnic and national boundaries. Still, Mike held a special place in the hearts of African Americans because, more than other groups, we understand how the politics of anti-black racism and its preceding notion of race function in the Land of the Free. We understand that through his music, his surgeries, his skin bleaching, and even his rearing of white children that he unsuccessfully sought to transcend the lofty barriers that the American concept of race has so securely set in place. However, much of our understanding was schizophrenic in that we sympathized with his quest and simultaneously felt betrayed by his attempt. In this paper, I will argue that while race in the American context functions largely as a fictive political narrative, it has psychological and sociological implications that surfaced in Michael Jackson's pathology of appearance and America's bipolar obsession with his racially ambiguous expression. Why Michael Matters "Billie Jean?" "Wanna Be Starting Something?" "Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough?" "Thriller?" For many Michael Jackson fans, nothing more needs to be said concerning Michael's relevance as a subject for popular consideration. Globally, vast portions of the population can chart pivotal life moments by the lyrics and syncopations of "Beat It", "Off The Wall", or "Workin' Day and Night". But as Michael grew larger as a performer, he also grew more transcendent and translucent in his appearance. The personable, brown-hued, and afroed adolescent that we fell in love with gradually became a being that lacked visible aspects of both his pigment and personality. Yet within this deficit, Michael achieved greatness and pushed his audience to ascend beyond borders and boundaries with him. Most are aware of his industry feats so that information does not need repeating here. Still, one important reason why Michael matters is because of his gargantuan influence on how the world understands and experiences music. Until Michael, the videos of Black artists were not featured on television, in general, and MTV in particular. His collaboration with Rock Legends like Eddie Van Halen and Popular Music Icons like Paul McCartney of Beatles fame paved the way for groups like Run DMC to partner with Aerosmith, bringing Rap Music into mainstream culture. MJ's movements were precise and graceful in ways no one could have imagined before seeing him execute a dance routine. His music was trans-ethnic and division erasing in both style and content. Michael challenged us to be the change we want to see ("Man In The Mirror"), to identify with the poor and needy ("We Are The World"), and in a color-conscious, racist world he dared to utter that social relations should not be affected by skin color ("Black or White"). So in terms of Music Industry trailblazing, innovative performance, and progressive thought, the world owes a great debt to MJ. As a result, anything regarding Michael Jackson has the full attention of millions of spectators internationally. Not surprisingly, his offstage behavior and private life are intriguing across generational as well as ethic lines; but are particularly interesting to African Americans as his community of origin. Lupus & Vitiligo Americans, in general, are very basic when it comes to perceptions of illness. In the popular imagination, illness is largely explainable and predictable given certain genetic markers and contributing behaviors. For instance, if someone has a family history of Alzheimer's, then Alzheimer's occurrence in a member of that family would not be surprising. Likewise, if someone has been a habitually heavy smoker for a number of years, a precipitating lung cancer would almost be expected. …


The study examined and contrasted the extent that peer influence and self-selection for smoking peers may affect acquisition of smoking by adolescents. Data for a U.S. national cohort sample of adolescents (N = 4,444) who were nonsmokers in the 1989 Teenage Attitudes and Practices Surveys and were re-interviewed in 1993 were included. The information included measures of smoking behavior and smoking status of both boys' and girls' best friends. Analysis demonstrated that, although the effects of both peer influence and self-selection of smoking friends occurred, self-selection may play a greater role in adolescents' beginning to smoke. This implies that, while teaching adolescents to resist peer pressure may be necessary, it is perhaps more important to identify factors that influence adolescents' decisions in choosing friends who smoke. This could lead to more effective preventive strategies.


Cushing's syndrome, a characteristic pattern of obesity with hypertension due to the hyperfunction of the adrenal cortex, is relatively rare in infancy. Thirty‐six infants have been reported in world literature,1,2 most of whom have had adrenal tumours. There are only eight reported cases of infants under the age of 1 year with adrenal hyperplasia responsible for Cushing's syndrome. This is a report of an 8 month old child with bilateral nodular adrenal hyperplasia.


The studies on guava (var.Vietnamese) precooled at 0 hr(immediately) and 4 hr after harvest,and stored at 5°C and
10°C were carried out. Guava stored at 10°C was able to undergo
a ripening process. Chilling injury was observed at sec storage. Precooling did not seem to have any beneficial effect
on guava.The characteristics considered were weight loss ,
colour change of skin, hardness, soluble solids content, pH,
titratable acidity and as corbic acid content.
The effects of various surface treatments on 'Vietnamese'
guava with LDPE shrink and cling wrap packaging, 1%, 5%, 10%
and 20% liquid paraffin, 10% and 20% palm oil.0.75% and 1%
semperfresh (fatty acid sugarester), and 2% and 3% starch on
the storage life at 10˚C were studied. LDPE shrink wrap
packaging was most effective in reducing the weight loss and maintaining the hardness of guava. The skin colour of guava was
maintained by 20% palmoil until 8 weeks storage. Among the
treatments , only cling wrap packaging could maintain the
as corbic acid content o f the guava until 8 weeks storage.
Twenty percent palm oil surface coating was found to be the
mo s t effective treatment for maintaining the quality of fresh
guava stored for 8 weeks at 10°C, followed by shrink wrap and
cling wrap packaging. Semperfresh was less effective and
paraffin was not suitable for guava, as it caused skin
lesioning and impart an unfavourable flavour to the fruit.
Starch surface coating caused greater deterioration of guava
than in control, untreated fruit.
At room temperature, the effect sofcysteine HCI and
sodium metabisulphite on candied and pickled dried guava were
studied. Higher as corbic acid retention and less colour change
were observed in candied dried guava than pickled dried guava.
0.024% cysteine HCI was found to be more effective at
maintaining the as corbic acid content and colour compared to 1%
sodium metabisulphite.


Abstract An airborne photographic system, in which the cameras are coupled with an inertial navigation system, was developed and used in a 1978 convective cloud study, Photogrammetric analysis from such a system is enhanced: cloud-feature positions can be determined without external references such as the earth's horizon or cloud base in the photographs, and the data reduction process can be considerably automated. This paper describes the instrumentation, the photogrammetric theory, and the procedures for obtaining cloud measurements from the photographs. An empirical error analysis based on photographs of terrestrial targets is also presented. Cloud top heights determined without any reference height in the photographs are considered to be accurate to within 440 m at a range of 60 km. The largest source of error in determining cloud top height using the 1978 measurements is the uncertainty in determining the aircraft-to-cloud distance rather than inaccuracy in the photographic system. This error can be ...


Aim and objectives The aim of this study was to explore family caregivers' experiences with palliative care for a close family member with severe dementia in long-term care facilities. Background Dementia not only affects individuals but also affects and changes the lives of close family members. An increasing number of dementia-related deaths occur in long-term care facilities; therefore, it is critical to understand how healthcare professionals support and care for residents with dementia and their families at the end of life. Design A qualitative design with a phenomenological approach was adopted. Methods In-depth interviews were performed with 10 family caregivers of residents in 3 Norwegian long-term care facilities. Results The family caregivers' experiences with palliative care for a close family member with severe dementia in long-term care facilities were characterized by responsibility and guilt. Admission to a long-term care facility became a painful relief for the family caregivers due to their experiences with the poor quality of palliative care provided. The lack of meaningful activities and unsatisfactory pain relief enhanced the feelings of responsibility and guilt among the family caregivers. Despite the feelings of insecurity regarding the treatment and care given during the early phase of the stay, the family caregivers observed that their close family member received high-quality palliative care during the terminal phase. The family caregivers wanted to be involved in the care and treatment, but some felt that it became a heavy responsibility to participate in ethical decision-making concerning life-prolonging treatment. Conclusions The family caregivers experienced ongoing responsibility for their close family members due to painful experiences with the poor quality of the palliative care provided. When their expectations regarding the quality of care were not met, the palliative care that was offered increased their feeling of guilt in an already high-pressure situation characterized by mistrust.


Human genomes are 99.9 percent identical - with one prominent exception. Instead of a matching pair of X chromosomes, men carry a single X, coupled with a tiny chromosome called the Y. Tracking the emergence of a new and distinctive way of thinking about sex represented by the unalterable, simple, and visually compelling binary of the X and Y chromosomes, Sex Itself examines the interaction between cultural gender norms and genetic theories of sex from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, postgenomic age. Using methods from history, philosophy, and gender studies of science, Sarah S. Richardson uncovers how gender has helped to shape the research practices, questions asked, theories and models, and descriptive language used in sex chromosome research. From the earliest theories of chromosomal sex determination, to the mid-century hypothesis of the aggressive XYY supermale, to the debate about Y chromosome degeneration, to the recent claim that male and female genomes are more different than those of humans and chimpanzees, Richardson shows how cultural gender conceptions influence the genetic science of sex. Richardson shows how sexual science of the past continues to resonate, in ways both subtle and explicit, in contemporary research on the genetics of sex and gender. With the completion of the Human Genome Project, genes and chromosomes are moving to the center of the biology of sex. Sex Itself offers a compelling argument for the importance of ongoing critical dialogue on how cultural conceptions of gender operate within the science of sex.


Introduction: Recent Cochrane review has recommended sealants in preventing occlusal caries in children and adolescents but its use in clinical practice is still underutilized all over the world. Aim: The aim was to assess knowledge, opinion, values, and practice among dental practitioners in Bangalore city. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted with a convenience sampling of 312 general dental practitioners (GDP) in Bangalore city. The data was collected using an anonymous, self-reporting 5-point Likert-scaled questionnaire by Martin et al., and analyzed using SPSS version 21 and ANOVA and t-test was utilized for analyzing the results P < 0.05 was regarded as significant. Results: Effectiveness of fissure sealants is supported by strong scientific evidence and also as a restorative material, 76% of the GDP agreed and 86.9% thought that it is difficult to justify the cost of sealants to parents. 62.2% valued that fissure sealants are used less than they should have been. Most of them had a positive attitude toward sealant application. Conclusion: Dental practitioners knowledge of pit and fissure sealant is high and attitude is also positive but when comes to practice it has been underutilized.


Recent research indicates that people with dementia (PwD) prefer to remain living independently at home. Nevertheless, it is not only the deterioration of the condition which leads to institutionalisation, the overpowering burden which informal caregivers can experience is also a contributing factor. ICT based solutions offer the potential to enable PwD to stay at home for longer through the provision of support with ADLs. Additionally, such technologies can provide monitoring services for caregivers to allow them to remotely access the status of the people they care for, while continuing to lead normal lives.Our current research aims to evaluate the utility of a mobile-phone based cognitive prosthetic. This technology empowers the user to engage with tasks independently through the delivery of video reminders, pre-recorded remotely by caregivers. In the current project, a health economic assessment of the technology will be conducted, estimating its value as perceived by persons with mild dementia and their caregivers, in addition to potential cost savings for the health service. The assessment of the economic impact will be considered based on the information from a longitudinal trial involving 8 participants planned for Q3-4 of 2010 along with a series of 4 evaluations which have already been conducted on 40 persons and their carers to date. Specific dementia related QALY scales, such as DEMQOL will be applied to assess the effect of the technology on the quality of life. Proxy Goods and Carer Burden Scales will be used to estimate the utility of the technology for the carer.


A large number of Australian households are experiencing housing stress. Decision makers at the national and regional levels need reliable small area statistics on housing stress, to most efficiently and fairly target assistance and policy design. This paper studies small area housing stress estimation in Australia and examines various distributive scenarios of the estimates through spatial analysis of a synthetically microsimulated data. Results reveal that one in every nine households in Australia is experiencing housing stress, with private renter households being most greatly affected. About two-thirds of Australian households with housing stress reside in the eight major capital cities, principally in Sydney and Melbourne. The statistical local area level estimates of housing stress are much lower in Canberra, compared to the other major cities. Scenarios of the spatial analysis identify small area level hotspots for housing stress across Australia. A new approach for validating the results of microsimulated data produced by the microsimulation modelling technology reveals statistically accurate housing stress estimation for about 94.3 percent of small areas.


Joseph P. Newhouse (*) It is well known that price indexes for service industries are subject to considerable error. However, errors in medical care price indexes are particularly significant because of that sector's share of the economy. Although the United States is an outlier with more than 13 percent of its GDP devoted to medical care in recent years, the share for other developed countries--typically between 7 and 11 percent--generally has been rising. The accuracy--or inaccuracy--of medical care price indexes has become sufficiently important that Alan Greenspan has taken note of it publicly. (1) A group of NBER researchers have been working for several years both to quantify biases and to suggest technical improvements to medical care price indexes. (2) In a recent paper, I attempt to synthesize our results with those of other investigators and to put the work in a larger context. (3) I make two principal points: First, although it is difficult to be precise about the amount of bias in the medical care price index, a number of studies have quantified the effects of its various problems. The results suggest that the bias may be large enough to have a nontrivial effect on the overall index. On the basis of some of the early studies, the Boskin Commission estimates that the medical care component of the consumer price index (CPI) was biased upward by 3 percentage points annually. (4) Second, the amount of bias may change from year to year. This possibility has important implications for monetary policy. Some Causes of Bias in the Indexes There are many reasons why the official medical care indexes may overstate the change in a cost-of-living index. Fortunately, some of the historical reasons have been corrected. For example, the CPI has measured the price of a hospital stay rather than the price of a hospital day since 1997. Between 1980 and 1995, the average length of a patient's stay fell 27 percent. Ignoring any effect on outcomes, this change clearly reduced the cost of treatment. Nevertheless, that reduction in cost was not proportional to the reduction in length of stay because marginal cost falls throughout a stay and care outside the hospital is frequently substituted for the marginal day. Before 1997, the CPI did not register the decrease in cost that resulted from shorter stays because it was pricing the cost of a day in the hospital. Indeed, pricing the cost of a day probably sent a perverse signal: because marginal costs rose as stays shortened, the average cost of a day rose with the fall in length of stay. (When the producer pr ice index for hospitals was introduced in December 1991, it priced the cost of a stay.) Another improvement that was introduced into the medical care CPI in 1997 was the grouping of inpatient and outpatient surgical procedures in a single category. Prior to that time, a given procedure conducted in the hospital was treated as a different service when it was performed Outside the hospital. Of course, because a hospital stay is avoided, performing a procedure on an outpatient basis is much cheaper. Between 1980 and 1996, the percentage of procedures done on an outpatient basis rose from 16 percent to 60 percent. (I have not found a dollar-weighted figure, but it would surely show a smaller--but still substantial--increase.) By treating inpatient and outpatient treatment as separate services, the CPI did not recognize the savings. Irving Shapiro, Matthew D. Shapiro, and David W. Wilcox estimate that between 1969 and 1994, a price index for cataract surgery ignored the shift of the procedure out of the hospital, thus overstating the rate of price increase by 5 percentage points annually. (5) Accounting for improved outcomes is probably the most intractable problem remaining in the medical care indexes. The problem has two sources: first, new services may improve quality; second, better management of care may move the production of health care closer to its potential best outcome. …


As the core of political discourse is the struggle for power and scarce resources, conflict seems to be an essential component of political action and interaction. In addition, conflicts in parliament are manifested in many different ways. They range from disputes during the plenary sessions to more personal attacks in the question time. This paper, however, examines an atypical display of parliamentary discourse, namely a speech by a social democratic MP David Rath, which regarded a vote on his extradition and was delivered on 5 June 2012. This speech obviously did not fulfil the primary function of the parliamentary sessions, i.e. legislating and decision-making. Here the MP was given the opportunity to present his own version of events and ask fellow MPs to maintain his parliamentary immunity. The analysis revealed two intertwining discourse strategies. On the one hand, the MP who is charged with several criminal acts presents himself as a victim of a conspiracy. In that, he aims to divert attention from the criminal case while calling for sympathy and providing self-justification. On the other hand, he uses his time to verbally complain about his arrest, the conditions in which he is held in custody, and the people he holds responsible for his current situation; he uses verbal attacks to undermine and disqualify a number of overt and covert enemies. The key aim of the analysis is to explore how victimhood is constructed in discourse, what discourse strategies are observable at the macro-level and how they are reflected in the discourse structure and in the linguistic style.


Today there are approximately fifty thousand prisoners in American prisons serving life without parole, having been found guilty of crimes ranging from murder and rape to burglary, carjacking, and drug offences. In The Forgotten Men, criminologist Margaret Leigey provides an insightful account of a group of aging inmates imprisoned for at least twenty years, with virtually no chance of release. These men make up one of the most marginalized segments of the contemporary U.S. prison population. Considered too dangerous for rehabilitation, ignored by prison administrators, and overlooked by courts disinclined to review such sentences, these prisoners grow increasingly cut off from family and the outside world. Drawing on in-depth interviews with twenty-five such prisoners, Leigey gives voice to these extremely marginalized inmates and offers a look at how they struggle to cope. She reveals, for instance, that the men believe that permanent incarceration is as inhumane as capital punishment, calling life without parole "the hard death penalty." Indeed, after serving two decades in prison, some wished that they had received the death penalty instead. Leigey also recounts the ways in which the prisoners attempt to construct meaningful lives inside the bleak environment where they will almost certainly live out their lives. Every state in the union (except Alaska) has the life-without-parole sentencing option, despite its controversial nature and its staggering cost to the taxpayer. The Forgotten Men provides a much-needed analysis of the policies behind life-without-parole sentencing, arguing that such sentences are overused and lead to serious financial and ethical dilemmas.


Cardiovascular diseases are main cause of morbidity and mortality in the Western World. Cardiovascular disease increases in its prevalence with age and the burden of this condition is set to increase with an Ageing global population. There are many factors that impact cardiovascular disease risk. The aim of this brief commentary is to explore some of these factors; specifically, we will examine the role of social status, nutrition and, psychological stress in modulating cardiovascular disease risk. Our aim is to emphasise the multidimensional nature of this condition and to stress that a more complete understanding of the mechanisms which underpin its pathology can only be achieved by adopting an integrated approach which treats the progression of this disease in a more holistic fashion.


Episodes of genocide involve both a mental and physical element in their evolution. The mental element appears to be rooted in authoritarian parenting and societies that engender fear and anger in children and stifle their capacity for emotional empathy. The repressed emotions find expression when societies produce false narratives to target particular groups. When these false narratives are internalized by citizens, the stage is set for genocidal actions. It is postulated that authoritative parenting coupled with the modeling of caring behaviors inside and outside the family would immunize societies against perpetrating acts of genocide.


There are few organized systems of referral and care coordination for children and families identified with early developmental delays, complex medical conditions, and difficulties negotiating the medical and related support systems, but some promising models are emerging. This report summarizes lessons from programs in five states that refer families to appropriate community or state programs, help coordinate their care, provide support and follow-up to ensure they receive needed services, and provide a feedback loop to primary care providers. Common features of successful programs include: maximizing efficiencies through shared resources, leveraging and partnering with other organizations, in-depth involvement with pediatric practice staff, appropriate training and tools, flexible program design, measurement and evaluation, and a holistic approach to care. The findings point to a need for greater identification and dissemination of best practices and technical assistance, stable funding sources, and integration of care coordination into new models of health care financing and delivery.


In this paper, we introduce the Rotating skip list, the fastest concurrent skip list to date. Existing concurrent data structures experience limited scalability with the growing core count for two main reasons: threads contend while accessing the same shared data, and they require off‐chip communication to synchronize. Our solution combines the rotation of a tree to maintain logarithmic complexity deterministically, a skip list structure to avoid the tree root bottleneck, and no locks to limit cache line bouncing. This combination requires us to trade usual skip list towers for wheels, a novel algorithmic design that favors spatial locality and allows for a constant‐time restructuring operation. We evaluate the performance of our skip list on AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon multicores, show that its rotations guarantee its balance and compare its performance against seven state‐of‐the‐art skip lists and trees using four different synchronisation techniques. The Rotating skip list shows an unprecedented peak performance of 200 Mops/second. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

publisher-specific, author manuscript: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/termsAndConditions


Ovarian Physiology and Short term Effects of the Menopause

Ovarian anatomy and physiology undergo a continuum of significant changes starting from the embryonal stage, followed by the fetal development and later on throughout a woman's life. These ovarian changes influence steroidogenesis during the reproductive life and later during the menopause. The changes in the ovaries during the menopause impact on steroidogenesis to the extent that even in the short-term women experience significant symptoms during the climacteric. These symptoms range from vasomotor instability, complaints related to urogenital atrophy and consequently having a bearing on the quality of life of the woman. .


The Motion Picture Association of America and its content affiliates would like all consumer electronics and information technology companies to innovate according to the rules - ensuring that Hollywood's movies are specially protected from unauthorized redistribution through adherence to a broadcast flag scheme (proposed to be implemented by the FCC) and through anticipated legislation that will require U.S. manufacturers to follow policies designed to ensure that protection signals are not lost in any digital-analog-digital conversions (so that the analog hole is closed). The arguments made by the MPAA and its content colleagues in support of national (and, eventually, global) control over the functionality of the devices that manipulate content are fundamentally troubling for the future of innovation and the future of law itself. And Social Darwinism of the kind being invoked by the MPAA has a long history in the U.S., and has been used as justification for any number of ultimately undesirable end-goals. But the content industry has hit on a very important way of thinking about law. We should pay attention to the evolutionary ecosystem of the law as the background medium in which innovation occurs, business models evolve, and social factions grow and prosper. This article argues that preserving the flexibility and evolutionary richness of the code/law background medium (code/law) should be our aim. We need to avoid both codes and laws that unduly freeze innovation, so that code/law can continue to evolve. Competitive DRM systems - self-enforcing private ordering - are a better solution in this context than harmonized code/law.


This panel asks what will the future of Facebook and our online connectivity become; or more precisely what are the conceptual notions that emerge from Facebook's future imaginaries. We see Facebook's new product developments as an attempt to govern the future. We follow here Ben Anderson (2010: 778, 793) according to whom futures are anticipated and acted on through the assembling of ' styles , consisting of statements that disclose and relate to the form of the future; practices , consisting of acts that make specific futures present; and logics , consisting of interventions in the here and now on the basis of futures.' We set to explore the style, practices and logics behind Facebook's attempts to connect to people and concepts currently outside their reach. These efforts include internal research on humanist design principles; inventing mobile business models and infrastructures; building data storage spaces to different parts of the world; investing to emerging technologies such as drones; and building an initiative called internet.org which would provide internet access to all over the world. These investments for the future oscillate between materiality and phenomenality of media and can be economic, affective, social, technological and cultural. Given the dominant position of Facebook in our current media ecosystem, these ideals likely reflect the crafting of a future digital global media landscape. These are new forms of media that will potentially 'determine our situation' (Kittler 1999), change the way we think (Hayles 2013) or at least, as Mark Hansen (2014, 37) puts it, demand us to build relationship with them. Thus, these technologies to connect the remaining world are not merely technological innovations but also connect to wider cultural, ideological and economic contexts. These new technologies shape the world and our understanding of it. The papers of this panel approach Facebook's Futures from empirical and theoretical perspectives. On one hand the papers look at current and future software developments from e.g. Buy-button to interent.org app. On the other the papers focus on material products such as mobile phones, tablets and even drones that provide access to the site. These empirical examples lead to questions of agency and value - key concepts of Facebook's futures discussed in each of the papers.


ABSTRACT Research Findings: This study examined the heterogeneity in Spanish-speaking children's (N = 117; M age = 53 months; SD = 5 months; 57% boys) vocabulary and letter-word skills in English and Spanish after one year of preschool and the extent to which early self-regulation abilities (i.e., executive function and effortful control) were associated with that variability. Data were gathered via teacher and parent surveys and standardized assessments. Three distinct profiles of Spanish-speaking preschoolers were identified using cluster analysis. One group exhibited high levels of Spanish and English vocabulary and letter-word skills (a.k.a. high-balanced bilinguals). The other two groups exhibited predominantly Spanish or English vocabulary and letter-word skills (a.k.a. Spanish- or English-dominant). Multinomial logistic regression analyses (controlling for children's nonverbal cognitive ability) revealed that effortful control skills enhanced children's probability of being classified as high-balanced bilinguals versus Spanish-dominant; however, this was evident only for the children whose parents reported speaking exclusively Spanish at home. Executive function abilities appeared to be unrelated to preschoolers' bilingual classification, and thus their English vocabulary and letter-word skills. Practice or Policy: The findings have implications for early education programs working to increase the school readiness of Spanish-speaking children by highlighting the key role that effortful control may play in supporting their learning of English skills, particularly for those whose parents speak exclusively Spanish at home.


The impact of the lockdown induced by the COVID-19 pandemic was devastating for the farm as well as the non-farm sectors of the Indian economy. Even though many authors expressed the apprehensions of hunger, and journalistic accounts of hunger appeared in newspapers, very few studies were undertaken to investigate the nature and extent of lockdown-induced food insecurity experienced by the households and understand the household management strategies adopted by those households. This study was undertaken in a village located in the Birbhum district of West Bengal during the unlock-I phase to fill the above-stated gap. Data for this study were collected from 40 households using a standardized tool known as the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS), and a semi-structured questionnaire. Results showed that inaccessibility of food was experienced by the households in three domains- anxiety and uncertainty (82.5% households), unsatisfactory quality (100% households), and insufficient quantity (77.5% households). However, quantitative scale scores of food insecurity showed that none of the households experienced the highest possible degree of food insecurity. The public distribution system and mid-day-meal programs were most effective in reducing the food insecurity of many families, but the level of support extended was not enough. More than half of the households reported a reduction in animal protein consumption, higher expenditure on vegetables and fruits, and an increase in taking loans. Based on the findings of the study, two specific suggestions were provided for facilitating the management of disruptions caused by lockdown-like emergency conditions.


We provide a theoretical foundation for non-parametric estimation of functions of random variables using kernel mean embeddings. We show that for any continuous function f, consistent estimators of the mean embedding of a random variable X lead to consistent estimators of the mean embedding of f(X). For Matern kernels and sufficiently smooth functions we also provide rates of convergence. Our results extend to functions of multiple random variables. If the variables are dependent, we require an estimator of the mean embedding of their joint distribution as a starting point; if they are independent, it is sufficient to have separate estimators of the mean embeddings of their marginal distributions. In either case, our results cover both mean embeddings based on i.i.d. samples as well as "reduced set" expansions in terms of dependent expansion points. The latter serves as a justification for using such expansions to limit memory resources when applying the approach as a basis for probabilistic programming.


It has been proposed that the addition of chem-crete' to bitumen produces substantial improvements in the properties of bituminous materials. These changes in properties have been evaluated in laboratory tests, in pilot-scale and full-scale trials with rolled asphalt wearing course materials and in pilot-scale trials with roadbase materials. The additive was incorporated into the materials after pre-blending with the binder and, although this was successful, it is suggested that other, more direct ways of adding chem-crete should be investigated. Measurements of Marshall stability, resistance to permanent deformation, fatigue and dynamic stiffness showed that the additive produced improvements in these properties in wearing course and roadbase materials after a period of weeks when the chem-crete reaction had taken place. The results from the full-scale trial will provide an indication of the benefits of this additive which may be obtained in practice. (Author/TRRL)


PALEONTOLOGYFORT LAUDERDALE, FLORIDA-- At a meeting here last week, a nearly complete specimen of an unusually birdlike dinosaur called Bambiraptor feinbergi was unveiled. Also on display was a fossil called Archaeoraptor , which 3 days before the meeting was announced to be a composite containing the remains of at least two different animals. The two fossils show the promise and pitfalls of commercial fossil dealing.


The underlying theme of this analysis is the contradiction, which it is the function of the myths to emphasise, between two meanings of the concept of humanity. Humanity may mean the capacity of man to identify himself with the other, which is the condition of his passage from Nature to Culture. It may also refer to symbolic thinking, to all man's works and conscious elaborations. This involves the distinction of the self from the other, and may tend to identification with the self alone. The myths deal mainly with marriage-exchange. They are analysed in relation to the systems of marriage preferences of the tribes concerned. The sociological code of marriage is correlated with a zoological code of man's relations with animals, Relations in marriage governed by nature and those governed by culture are homologous, in the myths, to relations with different species of animals. Ambivalent animals represent the ambivalence of allies, for allies are friends who were enemies, Two schemes of mediation are analysed. In one, the mediation by the dog between man and animals is homologous to the mediation by allies between the kin-group and outsiders. In the other, the mediation by pigs and fowls is homologous to the mediation by children between the the kin-group and its allies. The integration by opposition in exchange is correlated, by the myths, with the integration of nature by periodicity, The myths of natural periodicity enable a tentative correlation to be made between a difference in the mythical systems of two neighbouring tribes and the difference in their marriage systems. Generalised exchange among the Hrusso is accompanied, in their myths, by an emphasis on unions between a lose marital and sexual partners. Among the Bugun, there is restricted exchange, and, in their myths, emphasis on unions between distant partners. The underlying theme is also elaborated through the analysis of the myths of periodicity in nature. The myths emphasise the danger of taking either aspect of humanity to excess.


In "Racial Things, Racial Forms," Joseph Jonghyun Jeon focuses on a coterie of underexamined contemporary Asian American poets Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and John Yau who reject many of the characteristics of traditional minority writing, in particular the language of identity politics, which tends to challenge political marginalization without contesting more fundamental assumptions about the construction of racial form. In the poets various treatments of "things" (that is, objects of art), one witnesses a confluence of heretofore discrete factors: the avant-garde interest in objecthood and the racial question of objectification.By refashioning avant-garde investigations of "things "into questions about how American discourse visualizes race "in" and "on" the body, these poets implicitly critique dominant modes of racial visibility, seeking alternatives to the unreflective stances that identity politics often unwittingly reproduces. At the heart of Jeon s project is the assumption thatracial form is continually recalibrated to elide ideological ambiguities and ambivalences in contemporary culture. Thus, rather than focusing exclusively on the subject on interiority and individual experience "Racial Things, Racial Forms" also uses the calculated strangeness of the avant-garde art object as an occasion to emphasize the physical and visual oddness of racial constructs, as a series of everchanging, contemporary phenomena that are in conversation with, but not entirely determined by, their historical legacy.In this critical study, Jeon argues that by invoking the "foreignness" of an avant-garde art object as a way to understand racial otherness, these writers model the possibility of a post-identity, racial politics that challenges how race is fundamentally visualized. In addition to appealing to those interested in Asian American studies and race in American literature, "Racial Things, Racial Forms" addresses readers interested in contemporary poetry, art, and visual culture, paying particular attention to the intersections between literary and visual art."


textabstractIn this paper, we examine working parent's use of work-life policies in three financial sector organizations in the Netherlands. We analyse the barriers and support regarding
the actual take up of work-life policies by working parents and to what extent this in turn influence their experienced work-life balance. We collected survey data in three
Dutch financial sector organizations: one public sector organization and two private firms. All three differ considerably regarding their organizational culture and working practices. Two of the organizations are characterised by a contradictory work-life culture,
and one by an approving work-life culture. Findings point out that household characteristics and the work-life culture in the organization determine the take up of work-life policies. With respect to the work-life balance of working parents,
organizational culture is an important determinant, no impact is found of the utilization of policies.


Contemporary political and economic trends impose the necessity of an
 efficient inter-regional connection in Europe, which was the reason for
 establishing the network of Pan-European corridors. The aim is to indicate
 Pan-European corridors as necessary, but not sufficient condition for the
 formation of the overall Serbian touristic offer. It is one element of the
 touristic offer that only in synergy with other primary and secondary
 elements and factors gives full effects to the touristic trade. An endeavour
 was made to examine qualitative features of the Serbian touristic offer along
 corridors through comparative analysis. The conclusion has been derived by
 implementation of some quantitative indicators.


Dipyrrin ligands can be considered as 'half-porphyrins'. They absorb light in the visible region due to a strongly allowed * transition. With the energy crisis being one of the most important issues of our time, the strong absorption in the visible region endows dipyrrinato complexes with promise in solar energy conversion applications. The focus of this project was to undertake some fundamental synthesis and spectroscopy of dipyrrin ligands and dipyrrinato complexes for their applications in photochemical devices. The well-known characteristics of Ru(II)-bipyridine chemistry were combined with the light absorbing properties and synthetic versatility of dipyrrin ligands to prepare and test a range of Ru(II)-dipyrrinato-bipyridine complexes as dyes for applications in dyesensitised solar cells. The preliminary results of the solar cell measurements show evidence that the Ru(II)-dipyrrinato-bipyridine complexes show promise as light harvesters in solar energy conversion applications. A series of Re(I)-dipyrrinato complexes has also been designed and prepared for potential applications as catalysts in carbon dioxide reduction. Metallodipyrrin complexes also exhibit strong exciton coupling. A library of transition metal dipyrrinato complexes has been prepared to investigate the exciton interactions in dipyrrin systems. Understanding the exciton interactions in dipyrrin systems and the ability to control the exciton interactions are desirable for improving the solar energy conversion efficiency of dye-sensitised solar cells containing Ru(II)-dipyrrinatobipyridine complexes as the dye. Raman spectroscopy and more specifically resonance Raman, as a technique for probing the excited state of dipyrrinato complexes, has largely been overlooked in the literature. Therefore the spectroscopy aspect of this thesis has a central focus on the Raman spectroscopy of dipyrrins, including the first full characterisation of dipyrrin ligands by Raman spectroscopy at a variety of wavelengths (visible and near infrared). Strong resonance enhancement was observed for the dipyrrin ligands, which lays the foundation for fundamental single-molecule SERS studies but also for a broad range of bioanalytical applications.


Salaam: When you wrote A System of Dante's Hell, at one point you decided just to start with memory. You sat down and just started to write your first memories--without trying to make any sense of them or to order them, but rather just to write whatever your first memories were. Is that correct? Baraka: Yeah. That's essentially what it is. I was writing to try to get away from emulating Black Mountain, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, that whole thing. It struck me as interesting because somebody else who had done the same thing was Aime Cesaire. Cesaire said that he vowed one time that he was not going to write any more poetry because it was too imitative of the French symbolists, and he wanted to get rid of the French symbolists. So he said he was only going to write prose, but by trying to do that he wrote A Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. It's incredible when you think about that. For me it was the same thing. I was trying to get away from a certain kind of thing. I kept writing like Creeley and Olson, and what came to me was: "I don't even think this." What became clear to me is that, if you adopt a certain form, that form is going to push you into certain content because the form is not just the form, the form itself is content. There is content in form and in your choice of form. Salaam: Is there content or is there the shaping of content? Baraka: I'm saying this: The shaping itself is a choice, and that choice is ideological. In other words, it's not just form. The form itself carries ... Salaam: If you choose a certain form, then the question is why did you choose that form. Baraka: Exactly--Why did you choose that form?--that's what I'm saying. That's the ideological portent, or the ideological coloring of form. Why did you choose that? Why does that appeal to you? Why this one and not that one? Salaam: You said you were consciously trying to get away from the form? Baraka: Yes. Salaam: So, why call it A System of Dante's Hell? Baraka: Because, I thought, in my own kind of contradictory thinking, that it was "hell." You see the Dante--which escaped me at the time ... it shows you how you can be somewhere else and even begin to take on other people's concerns--I wasn't talking about Dante Aligheri. See? I "thought" I was, but I was really talking about Edmund Dante, The Count of Monte Cristo. I had read The Count of Monte Cristo when I was a child, and I loved The Count of Monte Cristo. Edmund Dante, that's who I was talking about, but I had forgotten that. Forgotten that actually it was Dante Aligheri, although I had read that. There was a professor of mine at Howard, Nathan Scott, who went on to become the Chairman of the Chicago Institute of Theology. Nathan Scott was a heavy man. When he used to lecture on Dante, he was so interested in that, that he interested me and A.B. [Spelman] in it. He would start running it down and we would say, Damn, this must be some interesting shit here if he's that into it. So we read it and we got into it. It was like Sterling Brown teaching us Shakespeare. Salaam: So The Count of Monte Cristo is what you were remembering? Baraka: Right. Absolutely. Salaam: But you were saying A System of Dante's Hell. Explain the title. Baraka: I had come up on a kind of graphic which showed the system of Dante's hell. You know, hell laid out in graphic terms, showing what each circle was. First circle, second circle, etc. Salaam: That was Dante Aligheri. Baraka: Right. But seeing that, I wanted to make a statement about that, but the memory itself was not about that. See what I'm saying? I was fascinated by Dante's hell because of the graphic, but when I started reaching into Dante, I wasn't talking about that Dante. I was talking about Edmund Dante. Remember, Edmund Dante, like all those Dumas characters--you know all of Dumas' characters get thrown down, get whipped, somebody steal their stuff and they come back. …


Many computer systems are interactive in some way, that means they are used by human users. A human user perceives the performance of a computer system primarily in terms of its response time. If a system does not respond to a user's input, such as a key press, a mouse motion, or a gesture on a touch screen, within roughly 100 ms, a user perceives the system as sluggish. Developers of interactive software and systems thus are interested in keeping response times below this perceptibility threshold. Existing tools allow the measurement of interactive response times, and the tracing of application behavior. In this paper we present a tool, LagAlyzer, which analyzes and visualizes the information gathered by such latency measurement tools. LagAlyzer enables the characterization of perceptible lag, for example by quantifying to what degree perceptible performance was caused by synchronization bottlenecks, by garbage collection, by the runtime libraries, or by the application. We use LagAlyzer to characterize the perceptible latency found in commonly used interactive Java applications. We believe that this is the first study giving insight into why interactive Java applications sometimes are perceived as sluggish.