In view of the entrusted transportation management model of High‐Speed Railways (HSR) in China, some questions have been exposed during its operation (eg, the supervision and inspection power of HSR company is not fully implemented, the poor management of safety investments, and no incentive and restraint mechanism). Through the analysis of the current situation of the HSR safety supervision system, a system dynamics (SD) model that is composed of an HSR company, the State Railway Administration (SRA) and the commissioned Railways Bureau (RB) have been established based on evolutionary game theory. The behavioral characteristics and the steady state of the decision‐making of all parties involved in the system are proved by the combination of evolutionary game theory and a system dynamics simulation. The results show that, under the clear incentive and restraint mechanism assumptions, the safety supervision and inspection rate of the system has been effectively improved and the supervision power of HSR company has been implemented.


Live virus vaccines for human use, 29 monovalent vaccines against measles, mumps, rubella or polio, eight polyvalent vaccines against measles-mumps-rubella and one bacterial polyvalent vaccine against Streptococcus pneumoniae, were tested by reverse transcriptase-nested PCR for the presence of petivirus or pestivirus RNA. Twenty-four samples were selected from European manufacturers, ten were from U.S.A. and four from Japan. Five (13.1%) out of 38 tested samples were positive for pestivirus RNA. Three vaccines (rubella and two measles) were from Europe and two (mumps and rubella) from Japan. The 5'-untranslated genomic region of the contaminant pestivirus RNA were amplified by reverse transcription-PCR and sequenced. Analyses based on primary nucleotide sequence homology and on secondary structures, characteristic to genotypes, revealed that the cDNA sequences belonged to bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV). A cDNA sequence, detected from one measles sample, belonged to BVDV-1b genotype. Pestiviral cDNA detected from the Japanese mumps and rubella vaccine samples, belonged to the BVDV genotypes 1a and 1c, respectively. Analysis on two cDNA sequences detected from measles and rubella vaccine samples from Europe showed their appurtenance to a new genotype, BVDV-1d. These findings indicate that contamination by animal pestivirus may occur in biological products for human use.


Background: Wong and Deyo (2001) believe that 98% of the LBP cases are musculoskeletal (mechanical) in origin and 51,7% of these individuals are chronic sufferers (Andersson, 1999). Weak spinal stability muscles have shown to be an aetiological cause (Chok, Lee and Latimer, 1999). Wolff, Weinik and Maitin (2003) agree a combination of brace aided pelvic stabilization combined with a spinal stability programme may be the best treatment intervention for chronic low back pain (CLBP). Objective: The purpose of this research was to determine the relative effectiveness of three treatment protocols with (Group A-Groovi-SI-Belt®; Group B-standard SI belt) and without (Group C-control) brace aided pelvic stabilization in patients with CLBP. Method: Forty-six patients suffering from CLBP were randomly allocated to one of the three treatment groups. A spinal stability programme was progressively taught and enforced in all three groups. Weekly follow-up consultations were required to assess subjective and objective outcomes of the three treatment interventions. Outcomes were obtained by using the Numerical Pain Rating Scale (NRS); Quebec disability scale; Active straight leg raiser test; Biofeedback device and the static trunk extensor endurance test. Results: Data was analysed using the SPSS version 15.0 (SPSS Inc. Chicago, Ill, USA).Comparing pre and post outcome measurements using a p value <0.05 which was considered to be statistically significant. All three treatments improved most outcomes significantly over time. The Groovi-SI-Belt® showed non significant trends of quicker rates of improvement. . Conclusion: This study revealed that brace aided pelvic stabilization combined with a spinal stability programme was a beneficial treatment intervention with the Group A being superior to Group B.


Marine reserves are being widely implemented as a tool for fisheries management and biodiversity conservation. Although the siting of marine reserves often includes a surrogate measure of diversity, the precision of these measures is rarely tested. To create the marine park at Lord Howe Island, Australia, the New South Wales Marine Parks Authority used habitat as a surrogate for com- munity diversity. The aims of this study were to test the precision of habitat in predicting reef fish assemblage structure, and to investigate changes in precision when varying resolutions of baseline habitat data were available. To achieve this, visual counts of reef fish species and habitat surveys were conducted at 31 sites around the island. Overall, the variations in fish assemblage among sites were moderately correlated with habitat variations, while fish assemblages were weakly spatially autocorrelated, strongly affecting sites within a proximity of 1 km. This spatial autocorrelation demonstrates that both habitat and geographical data combine for greater surrogate precision than habitat alone at this spatial scale. The ability of habitat classes to predict reef fish assemblage struc- ture was dependent on the quality and quantity of baseline data. Differences in assemblage structure were found among habitat classes derived from detailed high-resolution data, but not among habitat classes defined from low-resolution data. This study highlights the need for accurate in situ ecologi- cal information to establish precise habitat surrogates and complementary assemblage information to more effectively site marine reserves. Otherwise, reserves may misrepresent fish diversity and be unsuccessful at long-term conservation of marine biodiversity.


ABSTRACT Adopting Linacre's guidelines for evaluating rating scale effectiveness, we examined whether and how a six-point rating scale functioned differently across raters, speech acts, and second language (L2) proficiency levels. We developed a 12-item Computerized Oral Discourse Completion Task (CODCT) for assessing the production of requests, refusals, and compliment responses among 109 examinees of L2 Chinese. Their oral productions were evaluated by two L1 Chinese raters based on a holistic rating scale simultaneously tapping communicative function, situational appropriateness, and grammaticality. Rating scale functioning differed across raters, speech acts, and proficiency levels. Such variations were caused by multiple factors: (1) the two raters interpreted the rating scale differently, (2) the generic rating scale was unable to represent the nuances in different speech acts, (3) the two proficiency groups drew on different portions of the rating scale, and (4) the rating scale categories were redundant due to an excessive focus on the descriptive rather than the interpretive function during rating scale development.


Dental clinicians have a responsibility to teach patients the importance of oral health care, and this book shows adult patients what can happen if they neglect their teeth. It presents full-page images to show what plaque, decay, and gingivitis look like and how they can contribute to periodontal disease and tooth loss. It also instructs the reader on the proper brushing and ossing techniques to prevent such negative outcomes. With the combination of exquisite clinical images and descriptive yet succinct text, What's in Your Mouth?: Your Guide to a Lifelong Smile is an excellent chairside tool for patient education on oral hygiene.


Industrial experimental design is an important area under design of experiments and factorial design hold a firm place in industrial experiments. The generalization of factorial designs results in split-plot type designs when complete randomization of runs is not possible. More specifically, hard-to-set factors lead naturally to split-plot type designs and mixed models. Mixed models are used to analyze multi-stratum designs as each stratum may have a random effect on the responses. The study of random effects in mixed models might be difficult using likelihood methods because of small number of groups or whole plots in multi-stratum and split-plot designs. Also, zero estimates of variance components could be due to estimating multiple variance components in a hierarchical model. Therefore, likelihood-based inference is often unreliable with the variance components being particularly difficult to estimate for small samples. A Bayesian method considering some noninformative or weakly informative priors for variance components could be a useful tool to solve the problem. Fuel economy experiments, conducted by Shell Global Solutions UK, fall under small sample trap during variance components estimation. Using SAS procedure MIXED, experimenters estimated the variance components to be zero which were unrealistic. Also, the experimenters were unsure about the parameter estimates obtained by likelihood method from linear mixed models. Therefore, we looked for an alternative to compare and found the Bayesian platform to be appropriate. Bayesian methods assuming some non-informative and weakly informative priors enable us to compare the parameter estimates and the variance components. Profile likelihood and bootstrap based methods verified that Bayesian point and interval estimates are not absurd. Also, simulation studies have assessed the quality of likelihood and Bayesian estimates in this study. A polypropylene experiment was conducted by four Belgian automobile industries to look for economical plasma treatments which lead to a good adhesion to various coatings. The effects of several additives were also studied in addition to the plasma treatments. The likelihood-based estimates were not reliable completely due to the existence of moderate number of whole-plots. Also, some of the variance components due to batch were zero for some coatings. Assuming noninformative priors for fixed effects and some weakly informative priors for variance components we have obtained more sensible estimates of variance components which were inestimable or poorly estimated by the likelihood-based method using SAS procedure GLIMMIX. In this study, the Bayesian methods appeared to give comparable results with classical methods. One response variable in the polypropylene experiment was categorical which was converted to binary to see the effects of additives on the outcome of interest. Unfortunately for binary responses we failed to obtain estimates of the logistic parameters for some of the coatings as the system did not converge. One of the reasons for this was due to having the separation problem in the data. When one or more explanatory variables completely separate the responses, the problem is known as separation. This problem causes the non-existence of likelihood estimates of logistic regression parameters. We have done some novel methodological works on the separation issue to minimize the problem in the light of optimal design techniques. Though the information based D-optimality criterion is widely used in practice, it fails to handle the separation problem appropriately. We have proposed new probability-based optimality criteria to handle the separation problem at the design stage of a study. Our proposed criteria Psand DPsmight be worthwhile to take into account reduction of the separation problem. However, Ps-criterion alone is not suitable to deal with separation problem as it produces worse designs in terms of precision of the parameter estimates, i.e. with respect to D-optimality. On the other hand the compound DPs-criterion makes a balance between Dand Ps-optimality and produces better designs. To make designs less sensitive to parameter misspecification, pseudo-Bayesian design criterion DPSBhas been proposed. Simulation studies have verified that Bayesian designs perform better than non-Bayesian designs by providing less bias, less median squared errors and above all less probability of separation. Thus, newly devised Bayesian and non-Bayesian design criteria could be useful in practice to control separation problem at the design stage of a study.


Inflammatory biomarkers are released during tumour growth, and they are highly associated with stages of cancer progression. C-Reactive protein is one of the widely studied marker proteins, which is associated with inflammation. CRP levels have been used to predict survival in patients with different cancers. The assimilation of CRP into prognostic models for cancers improves their predictive accuracy. The analysis of changes in CRP concentration over time can allow for the prediction of tumour aggressiveness and treatment efficacy. Therefore CRP can be an important biomarker for cancer diagnosis and prognosis, and the monitoring of treatment outcomes. This critical review focuses on the role of C-reactive protein in different types of cancers and its relation to the different stages of cancer. This article also focuses on recently reported methods for the detection of CRP.


When a mixture of particles, which differ in both their size and their density, avalanches downslope, the grains can either segregate into layers or remain mixed, dependent on the balance between particle-size and particle-density segregation. In this paper, binary mixture theory is used to generalize models for particle-size segregation to include density differences between the grains. This adds considerable complexity to the theory, since the bulk velocity is compressible and does not uncouple from the evolving concentration fields. For prescribed lateral velocities, a parabolic equation for the segregation is derived which automatically accounts for bulk compressibility. It is similar to theories for particle-size segregation, but has modified segregation and diffusion rates. For zero diffusion, the theory reduces to a quasilinear first-order hyperbolic equation that admits solutions with discontinuous shocks, expansion fans and one-sided semi-shocks. The distance for complete segregation is investigated for different inflow concentrations, particle-size segregation rates and particle-density ratios. There is a significant region of parameter space where the grains do not separate completely, but remain partially mixed at the critical concentration at which size and density segregation are in exact balance. Within this region, a particle may rise or fall dependent on the overall composition. Outside this region of parameter space, either size segregation or density segregation dominates and particles rise or fall dependent on which physical mechanism has the upper hand. Two-dimensional steady-state solutions that include particle diffusion are computed numerically using a standard Galerkin solver. These simulations show that it is possible to define a Péclet number for segregation that accounts for both size and density differences between the grains. When this Péclet number exceeds 10 the simple hyperbolic solutions provide a very useful approximation for the segregation distance and the height of rapid concentration changes in the full diffusive solution. Exact one-dimensional solutions with diffusion are derived for the steady-state far-field concentration.


An electrically small antenna connected directly to a complementary pair of switching transistors is driven with a pulsewidth modulated HF signal, eliminating the requirement for a frequency-dependent impedance-matching network. The intrinsic reactance of the transmit and receive antennas acts as a filter to recover the HF signal from the digital pulse train. This is defined here as the digitally driven antenna architecture. A circuit simulator with broadband equivalent-circuit models for the transmit and receive antennas is used to predict the received signal in the time domain, and the expected received spectrum is calculated using Maxwell's equations and the fast Fourier transform. The simulated circuit is realized using a highly capacitive electrically small dipole antenna driven at 1 MHz with a 10-MHz reference signal on the pulsewidth modulator as the transmitter and a highly inductive 470- μH ferrite-loaded loop as the receive antenna. The 1-MHz signal is clearly evident in the time-domain received signal on an oscilloscope, and also in the received spectrum, as observed on a spectrum analyzer. This demonstrates that indeed it may be possible to produce efficient radiation across a wide bandwidth from an electrically small antenna by driving the antenna directly with a digital pulse train.


In the last four years, public opinion polls have found an increasingly high level of public support for the methods applied in the war on terror. A significant majority of the population now expresses support for targeted killing through drone strikes and for the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. While there are undoubtedly many dynamics at play in the public's changing views of national security and due process, this Article examines one piece of the puzzle: how the concept of due process fits within the structure of the American identity.This Article examines due process and national security through the lens of social psychology, and its approach helps to shed light on how and why public opinion has changed. It opens by contrasting the doctrinal view of due process as a legal principle with an opposing view of due process as an expression of American values, and it concludes that both views can give rise to similar policy choices — but for fundamentally different reasons. The Article then applies two related theories from social psychology to explore how people's views of due process interact with their national identity to create support for different policy choices. Finally, it argues that separating these strands in the public debate on the war on terror can facilitate the conscious consideration of our national identity. In turn, this explicit recognition of the intertwining of identity and policy can create the opportunity to intentionally shape national identity. In order to do so, however, we must broaden the discussion beyond the legality of national security policies — or even their instrumental value — and move the discussion into an examination of more fundamental questions of who we are as a nation and who we want to be.


Americans today often associate scientific and technological change with progress and personal well-being. Yet underneath our confident assumptions lie serious questions. In Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? Amy Sue Bix locates the origins of this confusion in the Great Depression, when social and economic crisis forced many Americans to re-examine ideas about science, technology, and progress. Growing fear of "technological unemployment"-the idea that increasing mechanization displaced human workers-prompted widespread talk about the meaning of progress in the new Machine Age. In response, promoters of technology mounted a powerful public relations campaign: in advertising, writings, speeches, and World Fair exhibits, company leaders and prominent scientists and engineers insisted that mechanization ultimately would ensure American happiness and national success. Emphasizing the cultural context of the debate, Bix concentrates on public perceptions of work and technological change: the debate over mechanization turned on ideology, on the way various observers in the 1930s interpreted the relationship between technology and American progress. Although similar concerns arose in other countries, Bix highlights what was unique about the American response: "Discussion about workplace change," she argues, "became entwined with particular musings about the meaning of American history, the western frontier, and a sense of national destiny." In her concluding chapters and epilogue, Bix shows how the issue changed during World War II and in postwar America and brings the debate forward to show its relevance to modern readers.


August Wilson and the African-American Odyssey by Kim Pereira. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1996. $12.95 paper. With the publication and performance of Jitney/(1979), Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1985), Fences (1987), Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988), The Piano Lesson (1990), and Two Trains Running (1992)--as well as several apprentice and shorter works--August Wilson has become the best-known contemporary African American playwright. The past few years have seen a groundswell of publishing concerning his work. Given the success of his plays, the depth of his cultural commitment, and the breadth of his artistic vision, it is clear that the time is ripe for serious scholarship ,on his work. Kim Pereira's August Wilson and the African-American Odyssey and Sandra D. Shannon's The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson are two of the most recent contributions to this discussion about the meaning and value of Wilson's work. Distillations of African American folk traditions, the blues, and 1960s radicalism, Wilson's plays are potent reminders that the past, present, and future of African American lives matter, that the fact of the black presence in the United States is fundamental to the very existence and prominence of the nation. In this respect, Wilson's works are the very stuff of the American Dream; they are celebrations of history, endurance, and achievement. Indeed, Wilson has placed his works in close connection with a complex of African American cultural forms and figures: African American folk wisdom, the blues, Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden. In addition, Wilson has developed a plan to dramatize a black perspective on each decade of the twentieth century. Much criticism about Wilson reflects the close interaction between history and African American experience that is a fundamental feature of Wilson's plays. Both Kim Pereira in August Wilson and the African-American Odyssey and Sandra D. Shannon in The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson make Wilson's articulated intention to re-examine history and retrieve culture the starting point for their readings of the plays. Pereira performs a strong, traditional reading of Wilson, while Shannon constructs a biography-based investigation into the origins and practices of Wilson's work. In both studies, Wilson emerges as an extraordinary artist, and yet the sum of that creative strength is not entirely identified. Both works succeed in claiming more critical space for Wilson, and yet both works leave more complex, less duty-bound readings for others to attempt. Kim Pereira's August Wilson and the African-American Odyssey asserts a traditional reading of Wilson's works based on the proposition that the significance of the plays lies in their relationship to American history. Pereira traces the outline of what he calls the African American odyssey through three phases: separation, migration, and reunion. Appropriately, these phases can be superimposed comfortably onto his readings of Wilson's plays. The movement of conflict and resolution in Pereira's hands becomes a cultural odyssey which each play re-enacts in one way or another. Conscientiously laying a foundation for his historical analysis with references to the work of Eric Foner, Sterling Stuckey, and Ralph Ellison, Pereira links his conception of the African American odyssey to large-scale historical, cultural moments: the removal from Africa, the cultural disruptions caused by slavery; as well as the migrations from South to North. Such a historical/cultural reading allows Pereira to focus sharply on the articulations of "odyssey" in the plays he reads. The disadvantages of this approach, however, are also clear. Such flatly-defined, starkly-drawn lines of inquiry--while well approved amongst many commentators on Wilson--lend a quality of inflexible determinism and repetitiveness to the study. Treating Wilson's four major plays--Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (the 1920s), Fences (the 1950s), Joe Turner's Come and Gone (the 1910s), and The Piano Lesson (the 1930s)--Pereira suggests that the plays are examinations of the "effects of separation, migration, and reunion on the descendants of slaves who migrated from the rural South to the urban North. …


Geochemical analyses of groundwater samples from the Djeffara confined aquifer (Southern Tunisia) were performed. The distribution of saline waters was investigated to identify the origin of the groundwater contamination. The aquifer was shown to be affected by an abnormal increase in groundwater salinity. Near the recharge zone, the groundwater salinity does not exceed 2.5 g l −1 but reaches 7 g l −1 in the northeast of the study area. Due to over pumping, groundwater level decline is so important that it disturbs the equilibrium between fresh and saline waters. The salinity distribution coupled with the structure and geology of the Djeffara aquifer suggest current seawater intrusion is possible through the deep fault systems affecting the zone. The groundwater level was shown to be highly correlated with the sea level fluctuation in the area near the fault systems, suggesting a communication between the sea and the confined aquifer. Groundwater salinization is probably related to infiltration of seawater through the faults. However, an intrusion on the side of the discharge area of the aquifer may also be possible. The bromide and chlorine analyses coupled with the SO 4 /Cl ratio confirmed that the mixing between fresh and saline waters is the main origin of groundwater salinization.


Several years ago, the USA experienced a major power grid outage in the northeast of the country that focused attention on looming power shortages in the country. As the population grows in the USA, the demand for electricity continues to increase dramatically. The governmental selected solution has been to look towards the increase of nuclear power as a viable energy source. The USA has not built a new nuclear power plant in the country in over 25 years. Even government encouragement in research and development in the use of nuclear power was limited after the 1986 accident in Chernobyl. But in 2008, the USA is about to engage in a nuclear renaissance by accepting a plethora of applications for the development of new power plants. Ultimately, the long-term success of the government regulation and energy company participation in this renaissance depends upon the transfer of knowledge amongst its senior employees, who are members of the baby boomer generation, and its development employees. With so many US federal government employees ready for retirement, the ability to nurture employees requires a well-defined methodology for mentoring as a knowledge management and knowledge transfer mechanism.


Objective To clarify the impact of digoxin on death and clinical outcomes across all observational and randomised controlled trials, accounting for study designs and methods. Data sources and study selection Comprehensive literature search of Medline, Embase, the Cochrane Library, reference lists, and ongoing studies according to a prospectively registered design (PROSPERO: CRD42014010783), including all studies published from 1960 to July 2014 that examined treatment with digoxin compared with control (placebo or no treatment). Data extraction and synthesis Unadjusted and adjusted data pooled according to study design, analysis method, and risk of bias. Main outcome measures Primary outcome (all cause mortality) and secondary outcomes (including admission to hospital) were meta-analysed with random effects modelling. Results 52 studies were systematically reviewed, comprising 621 845 patients. Digoxin users were 2.4 years older than control (weighted difference 95% confidence interval 1.3 to 3.6), with lower ejection fraction (33% v 42%), more diabetes, and greater use of diuretics and anti-arrhythmic drugs. Meta-analysis included 75 study analyses, with a combined total of 4 006 210 patient years of follow-up. Compared with control, the pooled risk ratio for death with digoxin was 1.76 in unadjusted analyses (1.57 to 1.97), 1.61 in adjusted analyses (1.31 to 1.97), 1.18 in propensity matched studies (1.09 to 1.26), and 0.99 in randomised controlled trials (0.93 to 1.05). Meta-regression confirmed that baseline differences between treatment groups had a significant impact on mortality associated with digoxin, including markers of heart failure severity such as use of diuretics (P=0.004). Studies with better methods and lower risk of bias were more likely to report a neutral association of digoxin with mortality (P<0.001). Across all study types, digoxin led to a small but significant reduction in all cause hospital admission (risk ratio 0.92, 0.89 to 0.95; P<0.001; n=29 525). Conclusions Digoxin is associated with a neutral effect on mortality in randomised trials and a lower rate of admissions to hospital across all study types. Regardless of statistical analysis, prescription biases limit the value of observational data.


INTRODUCTION
Postgraduate teaching involves training the residents in all spheres including professionalism, communication and interpersonal skills in addition to the basic clinical skills. Therefore, 360 degree evaluation has gained focus due to increased standards of medical care as shown in this study.

AIM
To evaluate interpersonal and communication skills and professionalism in residents doctors using 360 degree evaluation method.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
The present study was a descriptive study conducted at a tertiary care hospital affiliated with a medical college. Taking up as a pilot project, 26 residents from four departments were recruited in this study. A five point likert scale (1 to 5,1 meaning poor, 5 meaning excellent) was used for scoring them on for their interpersonal and communication skills and professionalism by the persons working around their sphere like teachers, peers, nursing staff, undergraduate students and patients/or relatives (360 degree).

RESULTS
Though the ratings by the peers and consultants were found to be slightly lower compared with nursing staff, undergraduate students and patients, there was good agreement between all of them. The mean score of all traits showed an increasing trend over the years of residency.

CONCLUSION
Regular orientation programs for professionalism with 360 degree evaluation and subsequent feedback to the resident doctor about their strength and weaknesses can definitely bring out behavioural change in the resident doctor in practice.


The present works is part of my doctoral dissertation for getting title of Doctor of Philosophy with major in Science and Specialization in the Economics of Agriculture and Local Development. The research hypothesis was: ܉f agricultural and forest activities apply agricultural economics, then it highlights the important element for sustainable local development, useful for the policy maker and decisions takerݮ Therefore, the study makes emphasis in the importance for applying agricultural economics to the forest and agricultural activities. The agricultural economics basic text is an elemental document for the agricultural economics curricular component; it is a component for the agricultural and economic science careers. The academic objective is to bring to students, professionals, and academics a basic document for developing the agricultural economics curricular component and make available the analytic instruments for developing practice exercises and examples of the all pertinent issues. Hence, I pretend highlights the importance of the agricultural economics for sustainable local development and his applicability to the forest and agricultural sector. I offer the methodology for making analysis the sector, the adequate strategies for accomplishment the sustainable rural development. Generally, we find us in the sector forest and agricultural the academic tasks and the researching with the necessary to validate, or to demonstrate the profitability of experiment, or the introduction a new technology, or the building a cost structure for a determinate agricultural item, or the marketing study for a agricultural item, etc., this issues are themes where the agricultural economics have a directory roll in the solution of this alternatives where the policy makers will have to choose. Therefore, the reader will find, in this book, the necessary techniques for contributing to sustainable local development with research that measures the impact for the policy and the measures taken for the local actors.


Embedded software is implementing more and more functions in aerospace, including critical ones. Model Driven Engineering has changed software life cycle development by introducing models in the early steps of software development. Verification and validation is essential, at model and at code levels, and still mostly done by simulation and test. However, formal methods, which are based on the analysis of the program or software model, are being transferred to industry for verification of critical software. This paper presents the context of aerospace software development, a brief overview of formal methods and of the associated industrial practice, and the work done at Onera on formal verification of critical Aerospace software at model and at code levels.
This work addresses four themes: • Specifics of application of formal methods to aerospace ; • Model driven engineering at platform level ; • Cooperation of analysis techniques ; • Automating test using formal methods.
Each of these four themes is a research domain in itself; it is thus impossible in a single paper to provide a detailed state of the art and an exhaustive list of research challenges for each of them. This paper rather aims at giving a broad vision and at presenting work done at Onera in these domains.


the work you hereby accept the Terms. Non-commercial uses of the work are permitted without any further permission from Dove Medical Press Limited, provided the work is properly attributed. For permission for commercial use of this work, please see paragraphs 4.2 and 5 of our Terms correspondence: sonya Marshall-gradisnik national centre for neuroimmunology and emerging Diseases, Aim: The aim of this paper was to determine natural killer (NK) cytotoxic activity and if single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and genotypes in transient receptor potential (TRP) ion channels and acetylcholine receptors (AChRs) were present in isolated NK cells from previously identified myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME)/chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) patients. Subjects and methods: A total of 39 ME/CFS patients (51.69±2 years old) and 30 unfatigued controls (47.60±2.39 years old) were included in this study. Patients were defined according to the 1994 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention criteria. Flow cytometry protocols were used to examine NK cytotoxic activity. A total of 678 SNPs from isolated NK cells were examined for 21 mammalian TRP ion channel genes and for nine mammalian AChR genes via the Agena Bioscience iPlex Gold assay. SNP association and genotype was determined using analysis of variance and Plink software. Results: ME/CFS patients had a significant reduction in NK percentage lysis of target cells (17%±4.68%) compared with the unfatigued control group (31%±6.78%). Of the 678 SNPs exami ned, eleven SNPs for TRP ion channel genes (TRPC4, TRPC2, TRPM3, and TRPM8) were identified in the ME/CFS group. Five of these SNPs were associated with TRPM3, while the remainder were associated with TRPM8, TRPC2, and TRPC4 (P,0.05). Fourteen SNPs were associated with nicotinic and muscarinic AChR genes: six with CHRNA3, while the remainder were associated with CHRNA2, CHRNB4, CHRNA5, and CHRNE (P,0.05). There were sixteen genotypes identified from SNPs in TRP ion channels and AChRs for TRPM3 (n=5), Conclusion: We identified a number of SNPs and genotypes for TRP ion channels and AChRs from isolated NK cells in patients with ME/CFS, suggesting these SNPs and genotypes may be involved in changes in NK cell function and the development of ME/CFS pathology. These anomalies suggest a role for dysregulation of Ca 2+ in AChR and TRP ion channel signaling in the pathomechanism of ME/CFS.


Objective: To identify clinical and quantitative relationship between vaccinations and small fiber neuropathy (SFN). SFN refers to damaged unmyelinated or thinly myelinated sensory and/or autonomic fibers. Diagnosis is primarily based on clinical presentation. Intraepidermal nerve fiber density can provide diagnostic confirmation with a sensitivity of 88% and a specificity of 91%. However, the possible association between vaccination and small fiber polyneuropathy is not well defined. Methods: Case study. Results: Fourteen-year-old white adolescent girl presented with intractable generalized pain for 1.5 years. Burning dysesthetic pain began in the lower back and progressed to all extremities 9 days following human papillomavirus vaccination. The pain persisted despite various pain medications. Examination was significant for allodynia of right scapula (T4–T6) and decreased pinprick sensation in feet. MRI Brain with and without contrast, MR Face, Orbit with and without contrast, and MR Cervical, Lumbar spines with and without contrast were all normal. Nerve Conduction Studies/Electromyogram studies were unremarkable, and skin biopsy of the right thigh and foot showed low intraepidermal nerve fiber density with normal sweat gland nerve fiber density. Conclusions: This case report describes an acute onset of non–length-dependent SFN potentially related to human papillomavirus vaccine administration. Literature review includes several similar case studies, and various pathological processes have been proposed for vaccine-associated polyneuropathies. Some theories describe immune-mediated hypersensitivity to the solvents/adjuvants and/or invasion of nervous system through a prolonged, less virulent infection. However, the lack requires that evidence must be carefully reviewed.


PROSODIC CHARACTERISTICS OF ORKNEY AND SHETLAND DIALECTS: AN EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH. By Klaske van Leyden. Utrecht: Landelijke Onderzoekschool Taalwetenschap (LOT) 2004. Graduating PhD students in the Netherlands are required to publish their doctoral theses in book form, the customary print run for which is 150 copies. Klaske van Leyden clearly understands her potential readership better than did her printers, however, who reportedly thought her request for a print run of twice this size excessively, and expensively, optimistic. Van Leyden's hunch was in the event more than borne out: her thesis Prosodic Characteristics of Orkney and Shetland Dialects (henceforth PCOSD) was for a while last year one of the biggest selling titles in the bookshops of Kirkwall and Lerwick, despite its narrowly focussed topic and frequently demanding technical content. Evidently, then, Orcadians and Shetlanders seem to have an above average interest in their respective dialects, and even if much of van Leyden's book will be inaccessible to those lacking specialisms in phonological theory, acoustic phonetics and formal statistical methods, the sections which deal with the historical background and development of the Orkney and Shetland dialects (including Norn), the relationships of the archipelagos with Scandinavia, Scotland and continental Europe, and some of the contemporary dialects' key phonological properties, are likely to be both comprehensible and of interest to the general reader in and furth of the Northern Isles. Van Leyden had the foresight also to produce for non-specialist readers a short, non-technical companion volume summarising the chief findings of the study, a copy of which was unfortunately not available to the reviewer. As indicated by PCOSD's full title, van Leyden's approach is experimental rather than purely descriptive. Its particular strength lies in the fact that rather than drawing conclusions about the prosodic structure of the two dialects solely on the basis of speakers' productions and informal observations, she has also elicited Orcadian and Shetland listeners' fine-grained perceptual judgments about carefully prepared stimulus recordings exemplifying prosodic aspects of the two dialects. She has also been careful throughout to include data from 'control' dialects, such as Scottish Standard English (SSE) and (Bokmal) Norwegian, so as to attempt to relate the characteristics of contemporary Orkney and Shetland speech to neighbouring language varieties. In the design and implementation of the perception experiments, the results of which account for the bulk of PCOSD, she has exploited recent innovations in speech analysis software which allow sophisticated multi-parametric manipulation of sound signals by selective editing and resynthesis, besides equipping the researcher with a formidable battery of spectrographic analysis tools (with which one can, if desired, make durational measurements to within millionths of a second, and almost instantaneously extract huge volumes of data about frequency properties and acoustic intensity from digital files sampled thousands of times per second, just at the click of a mouse button). In this respect, her study represents an excellent example of how questions in phonological theory that would have been extremely troublesome to answer before the relatively recent advent of cheap, fast and user-friendly speech analysis programs can now be addressed with great effectiveness and comparative ease. Van Leyden's experiments focus on two major prosodic characteristics of the two dialects, namely their intonational properties and the relative durations of certain vowels and consonants. The experiments investigating the consonant/vowel duration parameter were, like the phenomenon itself, relatively straightforward: Orcadian and Shetland speakers were asked to read aloud a list of monosyllabic words containing vowel + consonant (VC) sequences in which the duration of the vowel is traded off against the duration of the consonant which follows it. …


BACKGROUND
Medical screening programs were begun in 1996 and 1997 at three Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear weapons facilities (Hanford Nuclear Reservation, Oak Ridge, and the Savannah River Site) to evaluate whether current and former construction workers are at significant risk for occupational illnesses. The focus of this report is pneumoconiosis associated with exposures to asbestos and silica among workers enrolled in the screening programs through September 30, 2001.

METHODS
Workers provided a detailed work and exposure history and underwent a respiratory examination, which included a respiratory history and symptom questionnaire, a posterior-anterior (P-A) chest radiograph, and spirometry. Both stratified and multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to explore the risk of disease by duration of DOE employment and frequency of exposure, while controlling for potential confounders such as age, race, sex, and other work in the construction and building trades.

RESULTS
Of the 2602 workers, 25.2% showed one or more chest X-ray changes by ILO criteria and 42.7% demonstrated one or more pulmonary function defects. The overall prevalence of parenchymal changes by ILO criteria (profusion 1/0 or greater) was 5.4%. In the logistic regression models, the odds ratio for parenchymal disease was 2.6 (95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.0-6.6) for workers employed 6 to 20 years at Hanford or Savannah River and increased to 3.6 (95% CI = 1.1-11.6) for workers employed more than 35 years, with additional incremental risks for workers reporting routine exposures to asbestos or silica.

CONCLUSIONS
Continued surveillance of workers is important given their increased risk of disease progression and their risk for asbestos related malignancies. Smoking cessation programs should also be high priority and continued abstinence for former smokers reinforced. Although the observed respiratory disease patterns are largely reflective of past exposures, these findings suggest that DOE needs to continue to review industrial hygiene control programs for work tasks involving maintenance, repair, renovation, and demolition.


The confluence of cloud computing, parallelism and advanced machine intelligence approaches has created a world in which the optimum knowledge system will usually be architected from the combination of two or more knowledge-generating systems. There is a need, then, to provide a reusable, broadly-applicable set of design patterns to empower the intelligent system architect to take advantage of this opportunity. This book explains how to design and build intelligent systems that are optimized for changing system requirements (adaptability), optimized for changing system input (robustness), and optimized for one or more other important system parameters (e.g., accuracy, efficiency, cost). It provides an overview of traditional parallel processing which is shown to consist primarily of task and component parallelism; before introducing meta-algorithmic parallelism which is based on combining two or more algorithms, classification engines or other systems. Key features: * Explains the entire roadmap for the design, testing, development, refinement, deployment and statistics-driven optimization of building systems for intelligence * Offers an accessible yet thorough overview of machine intelligence, in addition to having a strong image processing focus * Contains design patterns for parallelism, especially meta-algorithmic parallelism - simply conveyed, reusable and proven effective that can be readily included in the toolbox of experts in analytics, system architecture, big data, security and many other science and engineering disciplines * Connects algorithms and analytics to parallelism, thereby illustrating a new way of designing intelligent systems compatible with the tremendous changes in the computing world over the past decade * Discusses application of the approaches to a wide number of fields; primarily, document understanding, image understanding, biometrics and security printing * Companion website contains sample code and data sets


Solubility data for Belle Fourche montmorillonite plotted on 2pH — pMg²⁺ vs. pSi (OH)⁰₄ axes, demonstrate that the monophase model can accurately represent smectite formulas in hydrolysis reactions. The smectite was equilibrated with gibbsite and goethite over a pH range of 3.26 to 8.16. Equilibration was from both undersaturation and supersaturation with regard to Si(OH)⁰₄, H⁺, and Mg²⁺. When the composition of the smectite phase actually controlling sample solubility was accurately known, experimental and predicted solubility results agreed within experimental error. Such favorable circumstances may be rare, but when they occur they show that metastable equilibria can be determined for complex aluminosilicates.


Studies into Virtual Reality (VR) and embodied cognition reveal that VR is capable of altering one's behavior, body schema and body image. This study aims to determine whether the particular trait of "super strength" commonly associated with superheroes can be induced in males by using Virtual Reality. Specifically, it is hypothesized that embodiment in the body of Superman through VR leads to increased exertion capabilities. In an affordance test, male participants were asked to estimate how long they thought they would be able to perform a planking exercise. They then had to perform this exercise for as long as possible. This was done three times: setting up the baseline, after being embodied in an Average Body (AB), and after being embodied in a Superman Body (SB). The order of the AB and SB conditions alternated per participant. Sense of presence was measured through a questionnaire after each condition. No significant effects that support the hypothesis were found within the affordance test results, but a significant relation in support of the hypothesis was found between average presence and the change score of SB Exertion. Further experimentation is needed in order to confirm this effect, see whether it exists in females, and to come to definitive conclusions about the effects of embodiment on exertion capabilities.


The work of Herbert A. Simon has drawn increasing attention from modern scholars who argue that Simon's work changed during the Cold War. This is due to the fact that Simon seemingly changed the substance of his research in the 1950s. This paper argues that Simon did not change in any significant way, but was lead by his interest in decision making and rationality into areas of economics, political science, sociology, psychology, organization theory, and computer science. He used elements of different disciplines to address his overall interest and there is therefore a considerable continuity in Simon's work. This paper also provides part of a background for the recent increase of interest in Simon's ideas by providing some details of the RAND Corporation and the Ford Foundation's support of scientific research through the post war years in general, and their connections to the behavioral science research at Carnegie Mellon University in particular.


Augmented reality has recently become a popular interface for various learning applications, but it is not always clear that AR is the right choice. We provide a theoretical grounding that explains the underlying value of AR for learning and identify when it is a suitable interface. Our list of operational design advantages includes AR's use of reality, virtual flexibility, invisible interface, and spatial awareness. This list is backed by four underlying cognitive theories: mental models and distributed, situated, and embodied cognition. We argue that the more design advantages a learning system incorporates, the better AR works as an interface. We also identify a set of questions to be used in the design and evaluation of AR projects. With this, we can begin to design AR for learning more purposefully.


This paper analyzes all-pay auctions where the bidders have affiliated values for the object for sale and where the signals take binary values. Since signals are correlated, high signals indicate a high degree of competition in the auction and since even losing bidders must pay their bid, non-monotonic equilibria arise. We show that the game has a unique symmetric equilibrium, and that whenever the equilibrium is non-monotonic the contestants earn no rents. All-pay auctions result in low expected rents to the bidders, but also induce inefficient allocations in models with affiliated private values. With two bidders, the effect on rent extraction dominates, and all-pay auction outperforms standard auctions in terms of expected revenue. With many bidders, this revenue ranking is reversed for some parameter values and the inefficient allocations persist even in large auctions.


In this paper I defend the compossibility of presentism and time travel from two objections. One objection is that the presentist's model of time leaves nowhere to travel to; the second objection attempts to equate presentist time travel with suicide. After targeting some misplaced scrutiny of the first objection, I show that presentists have the resources to account for the facts that make for time travel on the traditional Lewisian view. In light of this ability, I argue that both of the objections fail.


Extending the QuikSCAT Data Record with the Oceansat-2 Scatterometer Joshua P. Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Master of Science Originally designed for wind velocity estimation over the ocean, scatterometers have since been applied to climate studies of the Earth's cryosphere and bioshere. As an integral part of climatological studies of the planet, the NASA Scatterometer Climate Record Pathfinder (SCP) supplies scatterometer-based products designed to aid researchers in climatological studies of the planet. In this thesis, necessary steps are taken to facilitate data from the Oceansat-2 Ku-band scatterometer (OSCAT) to be used in extending the Ku-band SCP dataset of conically scanning pencil-beam scatterometers begun by the Seawinds scatterometer flown on the QuikSCAT mission 1999-2009. As a standard SCP product, a temporal resolution enhancement technique for the scatterometer image reconstruction (SIR) algorithm is applied to OSCAT data. A relative cross-calibration method is developed to ensure consistency amongst datasets of conically scanning pencil-beam scatterometers in the SCP data time series. By application of the method, both raw data and SIR image data of OSCAT is cross-calibrated with QuikSCAT. To enable creation of SCP products requiring knowledge of the spatial response function (SRF) with OSCAT data, a method of estimating the SRF of pencil-beam scatterometers is developed. The estimation method employs rank-reduced least-squares to invert the radar equation using measurements over islands. A simulation is performed to validate the efficacy of the method and provide optimum choice of island size and number of singular values used in rank-reduced least-squares. The utility of the SRF estimates is demonstrated by applying an estimate of the OSCAT SRF to SIR image construction with OSCAT data.


The stone marten is a widely distributed mustelid in the Palaearctic region that exhibits variable habitat preferences in different parts of its range. The species is a Holocene immigrant from southwest Asia which, according to fossil remains, followed the expansion of the Neolithic farming cultures into Europe and possibly colonized the Iberian Peninsula during the Early Neolithic (ca. 7,000 years BP). However, the population genetic structure and historical biogeography of this generalist carnivore remains essentially unknown. In this study we have combined mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequencing (621 bp) and microsatellite genotyping (23 polymorphic markers) to infer the population genetic structure of the stone marten within the Iberian Peninsula. The mtDNA data revealed low haplotype and nucleotide diversities and a lack of phylogeographic structure, most likely due to a recent colonization of the Iberian Peninsula by a few mtDNA lineages during the Early Neolithic. The microsatellite data set was analysed with a) spatial and non-spatial Bayesian individual-based clustering (IBC) approaches (STRUCTURE, TESS, BAPS and GENELAND), and b) multivariate methods [discriminant analysis of principal components (DAPC) and spatial principal component analysis (sPCA)]. Additionally, because isolation by distance (IBD) is a common spatial genetic pattern in mobile and continuously distributed species and it may represent a challenge to the performance of the above methods, the microsatellite data set was tested for its presence. Overall, the genetic structure of the stone marten in the Iberian Peninsula was characterized by a NE-SW spatial pattern of IBD, and this may explain the observed disagreement between clustering solutions obtained by the different IBC methods. However, there was significant indication for contemporary genetic structuring, albeit weak, into at least three different subpopulations. The detected subdivision could be attributed to the influence of the rivers Ebro, Tagus and Guadiana, suggesting that main watercourses in the Iberian Peninsula may act as semi-permeable barriers to gene flow in stone martens. To our knowledge, this is the first phylogeographic and population genetic study of the species at a broad regional scale. We also wanted to make the case for the importance and benefits of using and comparing multiple different clustering and multivariate methods in spatial genetic analyses of mobile and continuously distributed species.


The evolution of modern market economies can be evaluated in terms of distribution- as distinguished from efficiency. But distribution is not only given in economic terms. Ecological conflicts in modern market economies indicate that there is also some ecological distribution in the background influencing economic distribution as well as being influenced by the latter. This interdependency between ecological and economic distribution is specified in two dimensions: (i) the economic access to ecological benefits and yields and (ii) the emergence of ecological costs by way of internalizing ecological impacts. By introducing these dimensions into a simple production economy the role of distribution to shape the economic-ecological possibilities of evolution of modern societies can be approached.


Supercapacitors are promising energy storage and power output technologies due to their improved energy density, rapid charge-discharge cycle, high cycle efficiency and long cycle life. Free standing poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) poly(styrene sulfonate)/single walled nanotube films have been characterised by scanning electron microscopy, Raman spectroscopy and thermo-gravimetric analysis to understand the physical properties of the films. Films with varying compositions of poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene)/poly(styrene sulfonate) and single walled nanotubes were compared by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, cyclic voltammetry and galvanostatic charge/discharge to understand their electrochemical properties. A comparison of the results shows that having single walled nanotubes dispersed throughout the polymer matrix increase the capacitance by 65% and the energy density by a factor of 3 whilst achieving good capacity retention over 1000 cycles.


This book highlights views on responsive, participatory, and democratic approaches to evaluation from
an ethos of care. It critically scrutinizes and discusses the invisibility of care in our contemporary
Western societies and evaluation practices that aim to measure practices by external standards. Alternatively, the book proposes
several foci for evaluators who work from a care perspective or wish to encourage a caring society. This is a society that sees
evaluation and care as a continuously unfolding relational praxis of moral-political learning contributing to life-sustaining webs.
'At one level is the evaluator's immediately responsive and interpersonal encounter with the personal troubles of social actors, most
visible, as Mills originally pointed out, in an individual's biography and in those social settings directly open to the individual's lived
experience. (…) At another level, the sociological and political level, the evaluator operates at what Mills called the arena of public
issues where immediate personal troubles are seen not only as problems encountered by individuals but as the result of structural
and political arrangements in society (…)evaluation for a caring society is thought to operate at both levels' (Thomas A. Schwandt,
Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).
'The intricate relationship between evaluation and care is hardly addressed by evaluators or
caregivers. This book fills a gap, as it focuses on the relationship between evaluation and
care and provides a multitude of examples of evaluation as a caring practice (…) the book
can serve as an antidote to the present-day haste in social practices, and contribute, in form
and content, to developing an evaluation practice which may foster a caring society' (Guy
Widdershoven, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine and head of the Department of
Medical Humanities at VU University Medical Center, VU University Amsterdam).


We propose a variant of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm for solving a class of sparse/low-rank optimization problems. Our formulation includes Elastic Net, regularized SVMs and phase retrieval as special cases. The proposed Primal-Dual Block Frank-Wolfe algorithm reduces the per-iteration cost while maintaining linear convergence rate. The per iteration cost of our method depends on the structural complexity of the solution (i.e. sparsity/low-rank) instead of the ambient dimension. We empirically show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on (multi-class) classification tasks.


While rehabilitation is reemerging as an important penological goal, the Supreme Court is eroding the long-revered divide between capital and non-capital sentences. This raises the question of whether and how rehabilitation applies in the capital context. Courts and scholars have long concluded that it does not — that death is completely irrelevant to rehabilitation. Yet, historically, the death penalty in this country has been imposed in large part to induce the rehabilitation of offenders' characters. Additionally, there are tales of the worst offenders transforming their characters when they are facing death, and several legal doctrines are based on the idea that death spurs rehabilitation. Courts' and scholars' conclusion that death is irrelevant to rehabilitation likely stems from changes in our understanding of rehabilitation. While it was once understood as referring to an offender's character transformation, references to rehabilitation now often focus on offenders' direct impacts on society. This has the effect, though, of distracting from the humanness of the worst offenders and consequently not providing them with true opportunities to transform their characters — a denial which challenges the Eighth Amendment's focus on respecting the human dignity of the condemned.


In this paper we propose an hierarchical architecture for organizing the hybrid network of the LEO-satellite based space network and terrestrial sensor nets. The hybrid network has unique advantages in providing global monitoring, tracking, and query capabilities. We assess these three capabilities of the network, and seek the optimal design in terms of the cooperation of the MAC and routing protocols. We evaluate six combinations of the MAC and routing protocols, and identify the best solution. Extensive simulation results are provided. Application models and performance metrics for the three capabilities are developed. The work provides a reference framework for pursuing global monitoring, tracking, query capabilities with hybrid space-terrestrial networks.


Piezoelectric fans have been studied extensively and are seen as a promising technology for thermal management due to their ability to provide quiet, reliable cooling with low power consumption. The fluid mechanics of an unconfined piezoelectric fan are complex which is why the majority of the literature to date confines the fan in an attempt to simplify the flow field. This paper investigates the fluid mechanics of an unconfined fan operating in its first vibration frequency mode. The piezoelectric fan used in this study measures 12.7mm × 70mm and resonates at 92.5Hz in air. A custom built experimental facility was developed to capture the fan's flow field using phase locked Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV). The phase locked PIV results are presented in terms of vorticity and show the formation of a horse shoe vortex. A three dimensional A2 criterion constructed from interpolated PIV measurements was used to identify the vortex core in the vicinity of the fan. This analysis was used to clearly identify the formation of a horse shoe vortex that turns into a hairpin vortex before it breaks up due to a combination of vortex shedding and flow along the fan blade. The results presented in this paper contribute to both the fluid dynamics and heat transfer literature concerning first mode fan oscillation.


Responses in lake temperatures to climate warming have primarily been characterized using seasonal metrics of surface‐water temperatures such as summertime or stratified period average temperatures. However, climate warming may not affect water temperatures equally across seasons or depths. We analyzed a long‐term dataset (1981–2015) of biweekly water temperature data in six temperate lakes in Wisconsin, U.S.A. to understand (1) variability in monthly rates of surface‐ and deep‐water warming, (2) how those rates compared to summertime average trends, and (3) if monthly heterogeneity in water temperature trends can be predicted by heterogeneity in air temperature trends. Monthly surface‐water temperature warming rates varied across the open‐water season, ranging from 0.013 in August to 0.073°C yr−1 in September (standard deviation [SD]: 0.025°C yr−1). Deep‐water trends during summer varied less among months (SD: 0.006°C yr−1), but varied broadly among lakes (–0.056°C yr−1 to 0.035°C yr−1, SD: 0.034°C yr−1). Trends in monthly surface‐water temperatures were well correlated with air temperature trends, suggesting monthly air temperature trends, for which data exist at broad scales, may be a proxy for seasonal patterns in surface‐water temperature trends during the open water season in lakes similar to those studied here. Seasonally variable warming has broad implications for how ecological processes respond to climate change, because phenological events such as fish spawning and phytoplankton succession respond to specific, seasonal temperature cues.


This paper studies the problem of adaptively sampling from K distributions (arms) in order to identify the largest gap between any two adjacent means. We call this the MaxGap-bandit problem. This problem arises naturally in approximate ranking, noisy sorting, outlier detection, and top-arm identification in bandits. The key novelty of the MaxGap-bandit problem is that it aims to adaptively determine the natural partitioning of the distributions into a subset with larger means and a subset with smaller means, where the split is determined by the largest gap rather than a pre-specified rank or threshold. Estimating an arm's gap requires sampling its neighboring arms in addition to itself, and this dependence results in a novel hardness parameter that characterizes the sample complexity of the problem. We propose elimination and UCB-style algorithms and show that they are minimax optimal. Our experiments show that the UCB-style algorithms require 6-8x fewer samples than non-adaptive sampling to achieve the same error.


This book is a corpus-based study examining thou and you in three speech-related genres from 1560–1760, a crucial period in the history of second person singular pronouns, spanning the time from when you became dominant to when thou became all but obsolete. The study embraces the fields of corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics, and historical sociolinguistics. Using data drawn from the recently released A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 and manuscript material, the aim is to ascertain which extra-linguistic and linguistic factors highlighted by previous research appear particularly relevant in the selection and relative distribution of thou and you . Previous research on thou and you has tended to concentrate on Drama and/or been primarily qualitative in nature. Depositions in particular have hitherto received very little attention. This book is intended to help fill a gap in the literature by presenting an in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis of pronoun usage in Trials, Depositions, and, for comparative purposes, Drama Comedy.


The aim of the present work was to build a novel 3D object recognition system capable of classifying man-made and natural objects based on single 2D views. The approach to this problem has been one motivated by recent theories on biological vision and multiresolution analysis. The project's objectives were the implementation of a system that is able to deal with simple 3D scenes and constitutes an engineering solution to the problem of 3D object recognition, allowing the proposed recognition system to operate in a practically acceptable time frame. The developed system takes further the work on automatic classification of marine phytoplank(ons, carried out at the Centre for Intelligent Systems, University of Plymouth. The thesis discusses the main theoretical issues that prompted the fundamental system design options. The principles and the implementation of the coarse data channels used in the system are described. A new multiresolution representation of 2D views is presented, which provides the classifier module of the system with coarse-coded descriptions of the scale-space distribution of potentially interesting features. A multiresolution analysis-based mechanism is proposed, which directs the system's attention towards potentially salient features. Unsupervised similarity-based feature grouping is introduced, which is used in coarse data channels to yield feature signatures that are not spatially coherent and provide the classifier module with salient descriptions of object views. A simple texture descriptor is described, which is based on properties of a special wavelet transform. The system has been tested on computer-generated and natural image data sets, in conditions where the inter-object similarity was monitored and quantitatively assessed by human subjects, or the analysed objects were very similar and their discrimination constituted a difficult task even for human experts. The validity of the above described approaches has been proven. The studies conducted with various statistical and artificial neural network-based classifiers have shown that the system is able to perform well in all of the above mentioned situations. These investigations also made possible to take further and generalise a number of important conclusions drawn during previous work carried out in the field of 2D shape (plankton) recognition, regarding the behaviour of multiple coarse data channels-based pattern recognition systems and various classifier architectures. The system possesses the ability of dealing with difficult field-collected images of objects and the techniques employed by its component modules make possible its extension to the domain of complex multiple-object 3D scene recognition. The system is expected to find immediate applicability in the field of marine biota classification.


Nature's fastest motors are the cochlear outer hair cells (OHCs). These sensory cells use a membrane protein, Slc26a5 (prestin), to generate mechanical force at high frequencies, which is essential for explaining the exquisite hearing sensitivity of mammalian ears. Previous studies suggest that Slc26a5 continuously diffuses within the membrane, but how can a freely moving motor protein effectively convey forces critical for hearing? To provide direct evidence in OHCs for freely moving Slc26a5 molecules, we created a knockin mouse where Slc26a5 is fused with YFP. These mice and four other strains expressing fluorescently labeled membrane proteins were used to examine their lateral diffusion in the OHC lateral wall. All five proteins showed minimal diffusion, but did move after pharmacological disruption of membrane-associated structures with a cholesterol-depleting agent and salicylate. Thus, our results demonstrate that OHC lateral wall structure constrains the mobility of plasma membrane proteins and that the integrity of such membrane-associated structures are critical for Slc26a5's active and structural roles. The structural constraint of membrane proteins may exemplify convergent evolution of cellular motors across species. Our findings also suggest a possible mechanism for disorders of cholesterol metabolism with hearing loss such as Niemann-Pick Type C diseases.


In Defending Humanity, internationally acclaimed legal scholars George P. Fletcher and Jens David Ohlin tackle one of the most important and controversial questions of our time: When is war justified? When a nation is attacked, few would deny that it has the right to respond with force. But what about preemptive and preventive wars, or crossing another state's border to stop genocide? Was Israel justified in initiating the Six Day War, and was NATO's intervention in Kosovo legal? What about the U.S. invasion of Iraq? In their provocative new book, Fletcher and Ohlin offer a groundbreaking theory on the legality of war with clear guidelines for evaluating these interventions. The authors argue that much of the confusion on the subject stems from a persistent misunderstanding of the United Nations Charter. The Charter appears to be very clear on the use of military force: it is only allowed when authorized by the Security Council or in self-defense. Unfortunately, this has led to the problem of justifying force when the Security Council refuses to act or when self-defense is thought not to apply-and to the difficult dilemma of declaring such interventions illegal or ignoring the U.N. Charter altogether. Fletcher and Ohlin suggest that the answer lies in going back to the domestic criminal law concepts upon which the U.N. Charter was originally based, in particular, the concept of "legitimate defense," which encompasses not only self-defense but defense of others. Lost in the English-language version of the Charter but a vital part of the French and other non-English versions, the concept of legitimate defense will enable political leaders, courts, and scholars to see the solid basis under international law for states to intervene with force-not just to protect themselves against an imminent attack but also to defend other national groups.


The formation of an inverted dimer plasmid on transformation with linear molecules is formally analogous to the fusion of the daughters of a broken chromosome at their broken ends. In the latter case, this leads to the formation of a dicentric chromosome, which could break at anaphase. Hence the process is cyclic. Similarly, when our linear molecules are modified by the addition of a cloned yeast centromere, dicentric inverted dimers are not obtained. Instead, we obtain monocentric plasmids with partial duplication and deletion that apparently derive from a process of fusion, bridge-breakage, and fusion. This is not surprising, since it is known that dicentric plasmids undergo breakage in yeast (Mann and Davis 1983). However, any apparent similarity of this process to that which occurs with a broken chromosome in maize must be tempered by the special nature of the transformation process. Most significantly, inverted dimers are rare when sonicated carrier DNA is not present during the transformation. This requirement is not understood, but it is a condition that may not be met in a yeast cell harboring a broken chromosome. It is possible that carrier DNA induces a repair process that results in fusion. On the other hand, a property of the transformation process that results in an inhibition of fusion may be overcome by the presence of carrier DNA. Most inverted dimers are apparently formed from an interaction between two input linear molecules. We cannot rule out the possibility that a minor fraction derive from a single molecule. Thus, the fusion of two input molecules is a much more efficient process than a replicative process that could occur with single linear molecule. For a similar fusion process to occur with a broken yeast chromosome, replication would be required. We do not know if a broken yeast chromosome can replicate. Evidence consistent with the presence of a breakage-fusion-bridge process in yeast has been obtained through the formation of dicentric chromosomes via meiotic recombination (Haber et al. 1984). Spores from these meioses sometimes give rise to a clone that is mixed for markers of the chromosome that could have been dicentric. A process of fusion-bridge-breakage could account for the formation of some of these mixed clones. However, the dicentric chromosomes apparently often survive meiotic disjunction and break in the spore's first mitotic anaphase or possibly in a later generation. Thus, the interpretation of the origin of these mixed clones is uncertain. Some aspects of the fusion process are especially intriguing.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)


Unitary cardinals are a common source for indefinite markers. This thesis is a quantitative diachronic study of the development of Spanish un, from its cardinal value to its use as an indefinite article. Based on a corpus comprising texts from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, I present an analysis and chronology of the main changes undergone by un throughout this period, notably its increasing use as a marker of non-specific indefinites, and its further incorporation in generic noun phrases and predicates. Additionally, I demonstrate that the development of the plural indefinite determiner unos is, with a few restrictions, parallel to that of its singular counterpart, not only in its increasing frequency, but also in its introduction into new contexts. Furthermore, I present a comparison between un and algún in terms of specificity and conclude that although there are evident links between them, both being indefinite determiners derived from Latin ūnus, they have always had different functional domains. Finally, I show that one of the consequences of the incorporation of un into generic contexts is the rise of the so-called impersonal uno, and explain that this event is crucial to explain the disappearance of another generic pronoun, omne, whose last examples are found in the sixteenth century, that is, precisely the moment where the first instances of impersonal uno occur.


This paper examines marine geophysical and geological data, and new multibeam bathymetry data to describe the Pleistocene sediment and landform record of a large ice‐stream system that drained ∼3% of the entire British−Irish Ice Sheet at its maximum extent. Starting on the outer continental shelf NW of Scotland we describe: the ice‐stream terminus environment and depocentre on the outer shelf and continental slope; sediment architecture and subglacial landforms on the mid‐shelf and in a large marine embayment (the Minch); moraines and grounding line features on the inner shelf and in the fjordic zone. We identify new soft‐bed (sediment) and hard‐bed (bedrock) subglacial landform assemblages in the central and inner parts of the Minch that confirm the spatial distribution, coherence and trajectory of a grounded fast‐flowing ice‐sheet corridor. These include strongly streamlined bedrock forms and megagrooves indicating a high degree of ice‐bed coupling in a zone of flow convergence associated with ice‐stream onset; and a downstream bedform evolution (short drumlins to km‐scale glacial lineations) suggesting an ice‐flow velocity transition associated with a bed substrate and roughness change in the ice‐stream trunk. Chronology is still lacking for the timing of ice‐stream demise; however, the seismic stratigraphy, absence of moraines or grounding‐line features, and presence of well‐preserved subglacial bedforms and iceberg scours, combined with the landward deepening bathymetry, all suggest that frontal retreat in the Minch was probably rapid, via widespread calving, before stabilization in the nearshore zone. Large moraine complexes recording a coherent, apparently long‐lived, ice‐sheet margin position only 5–15 km offshore strongly support this model. Reconstructed ice‐discharge values for the Minch ice stream (12–20 Gt a−1) are comparable to high mass‐flux ice streams today, underlining it as an excellent palaeo‐analogue for recent rapid change at the margins of the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets.


Since the collapse of communism, Poland has distinguished itself as one of the best performing economies in the European Union. However, the recent deceleration in growth has raised concerns about a "middle income trap". Poland ranks among the lowest in the European Union on various measures of innovation, and its innovation system is relatively weak. In this context, the injection of EU funds focused on novel product R&D by private firms is a valuable opportunity. The main fear is that this EU-funded "innovation tsunami" may have negative side effects as well. Accordingly, we offer some policy recommendations under the constraints of an already agreed upon EU programme.


Using a local adaptive Forward Intensities Approach (FIA) we investigate multiperiod corporate defaults and other delisting schemes. The proposed approach is fully datadriven and is based on local adaptive estimation and the selection of optimal estimation windows. Time-dependent model parameters are derived by a sequential testing procedure that yields adapted predictions at every time point. Applying the proposed method to monthly data on 2000 U.S. public rms over a sample period from 1991 to 2011, we estimate default probabilities over various prediction horizons. The prediction performance is evaluated against the global FIA that employs all past observations. For the six months prediction horizon, the local adaptive FIA performs with the same accuracy as the benchmark. The default prediction power is improved for the longer horizon (one to three years). Our local adaptive method can be applied to any other speci cations of forward intensities.


The second week of the U.S. government shutdown found scientists more worried than ever about its long-term impact on research. Three state-of-the-art radio telescopes were forced to shut down, and the U.S. Antarctic program is hanging by a thread. A prolonged shutdown could also halt the construction of two new observatories being funded by the National Science Foundation.


Design and operation of a practical, accurate alignment diagnostic system is important for the grating tiling technology, which is supposed to be applied in a chirped-pulse amplification system to increase the output power. A diagnostic method is proposed and demonstrated for grating tiling. Provided that the wavelength and incident angle of the diagnostic beam are properly set, the far-field of the main laser beam and that of the diagnostic beam can vary in the same way with the tiling errors between the sub-aperture gratings. Therefore, rotational and translational errors can be controlled and compensated according to the far-field of the diagnostic beam. The real-time monitoring and alignment can be achieved without disturbing the main beam.


CT angiography and CT perfusion are used in patients with acute ischemic stroke for diagnostic purposes and to select patients for treatment. In this thesis, the reproducibility of CT angiography and CT perfusion is examined, the additional value of CT angiography and CT perfusion for stroke outcome prediction is investigated, and the importance of collaterals is studied.

Chapter 2 describes the rationale, aims, and study procedures of the Dutch acute stroke study (DUST).

In chapter 3, the reproducibility of the assessment of ischemic changes was investigated for CT angiography and CT perfusion. Good reproducibility is important, especially between observers with varying experience. Agreement for CT perfusion was excellent between observers with a different level of experience and was much better than for non-contrast CT and CT angiography. The agreement for CT angiography was similar to the agreement for non-contrast CT. We concluded therefore that CT perfusion could be a very reliable addition to non-contrast CT.

The main results of the DUST are described in chapter 4 and chapter 5. For the prediction of clinical outcome, poor leptomeningeal collaterals and the presence of a proximal intracranial occlusion were the strongest predictors of clinical outcome on CT angiography. On CT perfusion, the extent of ischemic changes on cerebral blood volume (CBV) maps and mean transit time (MTT) maps and the size of the infarct core were the strongest predictors. Multivariable prediction models showed that the combination of clinical information and non-contrast CT already had a high prognostic value. When CT angiography and CT perfusion were added to the multivariable prediction models, there was a very small improvement of the prognostic value, but this difference was too small to be clinically relevant.

For the prediction of the infarct volume, paradoxically, CT angiography and CT perfusion improved the prognostic value of the basic prediction model including clinical information and non-contrast CT. We explained this paradox by factors other than infarct volume that also contribute to the clinical outcome, including infarct location, new ischemic events, post-stroke infection, or non-stroke related events.

Leptomeningeal collaterals are important in acute ischemic stroke as they can protect the brain against ischemic damage. In chapter 6, possible determinants of leptomeningeal collaterals were explored. Higher admission glucose level, presence of a proximal middle cerebral artery occlusion, and an incomplete posterior circle of Willis were related to poor leptomeningeal collaterals. We confirmed previous findings that patients with poor leptomeningeal collaterals have worse clinical outcome than patients with good leptomeningeal collaterals, and showed that this was also the case after adjusting for the determinants of leptomeningeal collaterals. The circle of Willis was investigated further in chapter 7. We showed that the combination of an incomplete anterior circle of Willis and an incomplete posterior circle of Willis was related to the occurrence of anterior circulation stroke in high-risk patients without prior cerebrovascular disease.

In conclusion, this thesis improves our knowledge of the prognostic value of CT angiography and CT perfusion in acute ischemic stroke and provides more insight in the importance of collaterals.


Significance A potential new target for anxiolytic drug development is the oxytocin (OXT) neuropeptide system. An emerging question is whether OXT has similar effects on the neural microcircuitry of fear compared with clinically established compounds such as benzodiazepines. The present functional MRI study showed that both OXT and its benzodiazepine comparator lorazepam (LZP) reduced centromedial amygdala responses to fear signals. OXT, but not LZP, increased extra-amygdalar connectivity between the centromedial amygdala and frontoparietal regions. Thus, while both compounds inhibited the centromedial amygdala, OXT, but not LZP, elicited large-scale connectivity changes of potential therapeutic relevance. Benzodiazepines (BZDs) represent the gold standard of anxiolytic pharmacotherapy; however, their clinical benefit is limited by side effects and addictive potential. Consequently, there is an urgent need to develop novel and safe anxiolytics. The peptide hormone oxytocin (OXT) exhibits anxiolytic-like properties in animals and humans, but whether OXT and BZDs share similar effects on the neural circuitry of fear is unclear. Therefore, the rationale of this ultra-high-field functional MRI (fMRI) study was to test OXT against the clinical comparator lorazepam (LZP) with regard to their neuromodulatory effects on local and network responses to fear-related stimuli. One hundred twenty-eight healthy male participants volunteered in this randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled, between-group study. Before scanning using an emotional face-matching paradigm, participants were randomly administered a single dose of OXT (24 IU), LZP (1 mg), or placebo. On the behavioral level, LZP, but not OXT, caused mild sedation, as evidenced by a 19% increase in reaction times. On the neural level, both OXT and LZP inhibited responses to fearful faces vs. neutral faces within the centromedial amygdala (cmA). In contrast, they had different effects on intra-amygdalar connectivity; OXT strengthened the coupling between the cmA and basolateral amygdala, whereas LZP increased the interplay between the cmA and superficial amygdala. Furthermore, OXT, but not LZP, enhanced the coupling between the cmA and the precuneus and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. These data implicate inhibition of the cmA as a common denominator of anxiolytic action, with only OXT inducing large-scale connectivity changes of potential therapeutic relevance.


In coloured media, the index of refraction does not decrease monotonically with increasing wavelength, but behaves in a quite non-monotonical way. This behaviour is called anomalous dispersion and results from the fact that the absorption of a material influences its index of refraction. So far, this interesting fact has not been widely acknowledged by the graphics community. In this paper, we demonstrate how to calculate the correct refractive index for a material based on its absorption spectrum with the Kramers-Kronig relation, and we discuss for which types of objects this effect is relevant in practice.


Evaluating the effectiveness of XML retrieval systems requires a test collection where the relevance assessments are provided according to a relevance criterion that takes into account the imposed structural aspects. A test collection as such has been built as a result of two rounds of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval (INEX). This initiative provides an opportunity for participants to evaluate their XML retrieval approaches using uniform scoring procedures and a forum for participants to compare their results. The second round of INEX, INEX 2003, started in March 2003 and ended in December 2003. On December 15-17, 2003, INEX 2003 held its annual workshop in Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany. We first describe the INEX testbed. We then give a brief survey over the approaches presented at the INEX workshop. We continue with a summary of the outcomes of the working group. We finish with some conclusions and outlook for INEX 2004
 In: SIGIR Forum ; 38,1 (2004)


Activity-based microsimulation models are gaining increasing attention from MPOs around the country. These models earn their reputation by having shown their theoretical superiority over the traditional four-step models. The New York Best Practice Model (NYBPM) is one of a relatively few operating activity-based microsimulation models in the country and thus provide us a working platform to test their practical advantages over the traditional four-step models. The authors accomplish this goal by examining the sensitivity of the model in response to changes in the input. More specifically, they conduct a series of sensitivity analysis to the NYBPM by modifying the inputs relating to changes in policy, socioeconomic characteristics, and population and employment levels and comparing the results to those in the 2002 base scenario. The results suggest that the model results are mostly consistent with the authors' expectations, except the total journey productions when they change the population and employment levels in selected locations. While the results provide empirical support to the model and validate its wide applications in the region, they call for further investigation in the journey production aspect.


A hyperspectral data processing tool "HyDAT" has been developed in MATLAB environment for processing of Field Spectroradiometer data for vegetation studies. Several basic functions e.g. data visualization, pre-processing, noise removal and data transformation and features like automatic absorption feature recovery and their characterization have been introduced. A new concept of spectral geometry has been included as a separate module which is conceptualized as triangle formed over spectral space joining the vertices of green reflectance peak, red well and inflection point and is extremely useful for vegetation health analysis. A large variety of spectral indices both static and dynamic, have been introduced which is useful for remote estimation of foliar biochemicals. Keeping in view the computational requirement, MATLAB was used in the programming environment. It has various in-built functions for statistical and mathematical analysis, signal processing functions like FFT (Fast Fourier Transform), CWT (Continuous Wavelet Transform), direct smoothing function for moving average, Savitzky-Golay smoothing technique, etc. which can be used with ease for the signal processing and field data analysis. FSF (Field Spectroscopy Facility) Post processing Toolbox can also be freely downloaded and can be used for the direct importing and pre-processing of Spectroradiometer data for detector overlap correction, erroneous water band removal and smoothing. The complete package of the software has been bundled for standalone application of shared libraries with additional files for end users. The software is powered by creation of spectral library and customized report generation. An online help menu guides the user for performing different functions. The tool is capable of reducing the time required for processing field based hyperspectral data significantly and eliminate the need for different software to process the raw data and spectral features extraction.


This research studies is undertaken to examine the impact of government spending on economic growth in Nigeria. Government spending is thought to be growth enhancing especially when it is productive in nature. The time series data for the period between (1970-2010) was used in this study. Data for this study were obtained from the Central Bank of Nigeria statistical Bulletin. Some selected macro economic variables such as government expenditure, educational expenditure, health expenditure, government investment expenditure and government consumption were captured in the model, after which the model was estimated. The results shows that overall government expenditure on health and transport are positive and significantly related to economic growth. While the expenditure on agriculture had an increase growth of 0.7%. This is as a result of the current diversification drive of the economic base of the country. It is therefore important that government should continue to spend more in the economy to push it to the desired level. Government should also spend more on health care service, transportation and educational sector of the country for better developed health and educational sector of the economy.


Abstract For the study behind this report, Shell Donax TC 30 oil is added by percentages of 1 and 2 vol.-% to sea water samples which are taken from the beach of Florya near Istanbul in Turkey. Additionally, active and inactive rubber powder has been added by various percentages of 1, 2, and 5 vol.-% to such mixtures. After this, the result of cleaning process efficiency has been investigated after 1, 3, and 5 minutes. For comparison, carbon black has been used in another series of experiments. At the end of the different time periods, the process of cleaning by using rubber powders shows that a cleaning of over 98 % is achieved. During the cleaning process it is observed that oil is absorbed by the rubber powder and that its size becomes larger. The results make evident that rubber powders can be easily used in such new cleaning processes (at least 4 times) after the respective drying.


Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder characterised by abnormal social–emotional behaviours, repetitive or stereotyped behaviours and delayed or impaired development of language skills. Neuropathological studies have revealed that multiple brain areas are affected in the disorder including the limbic system (hippocampus, amygdala and cingulate cortex), cerebellum, brain stem (inferior olivary nucleus) and parts of the cerebral cortex. There is a decrease in the number of cerebellar Purkinje cells in many individuals with autism. The cerebellum normally functions as an error correction system for fine motor behaviours and has also been implicated in cognitive behaviours. Over the past decade, research has focused on two transmitter systems, serotonin and γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA). It has been reported that specific types of enzymes and receptors are deficient in individuals with autism. Despite these research findings, effective pharmacotherapies have not yet been developed and treatment outcomes vary.

Key Concepts:

Autism is characterised by deficits in social–emotional behaviour, stereotyped or repetitive behaviours and delayed/impaired development of language.

Many individuals with autism have decreased numbers of cerebellar Purkinje cells.

Neuropathology findings indicate that changes in the brain begin in prenatal development and extend into the postnatal period.

Brain overgrowth occurs during the early postnatal period especially in the frontal lobe region in individuals with autism suggesting abnormal connectivity.

Consistent results from postmortem studies indicate that in the central nervous system, the inhibitory GABA neurotransmitter system is involved in the disorder.

Specific types of GABA, serotonin, acetylcholine and glutamate neurotransmitter receptors appear to be affected in the disorder.

Imaging studies have demonstrated that in some brain areas in autistic individuals, differential activation patterns within a particular structure and in laterality.

Research efforts are continuing to report interesting findings but no cure or consistent effective treatments have been found.

Keywords:

autism;
autistic;
neuropathology;
GABA;
serotonin;
GAD;
limbic system;
cerebellum


In this paper, the authors examine a number of ways of implementing characteristic three arithmetic for use in cryptosystems based on the Tate pairing. Three alternative representations of the field elements are examined, and the resulting algorithms for the field addition, multiplication and cubing are compared. Issues related to the arithmetic of supersingular elliptic curves over fields of characteristic three are also examined. Details of how to compute the Tate pairing itself are not covered, since these are well documented elsewhere.


Due to heightened global migration and transnational mobility, many residents of the world's cities lack national citizenship in the places to which they have moved for work, refuge, or retirement. The disjuncture between citizenship and daily life has led to devolution of claims from national to urban space. Within nation-states characterized by structured inequalities, citizens have not reduced their social differences. This leads increasingly to calls for greater direct involvement of marginalized classes in reshaping the institutions and spaces directly affecting their lives. These concerns—cities without citizenship and people without political power—inform the agendas of organizations that seek to restructure urban citizenship in more democratic directions. Remaking Urban Citizenship focuses on the uses and limits of such political organizations and coalitions, shows the various ways they pursue expanded rights within the city, and describes the institutional changes necessary to empower global migrants and popular classes as urban citizens. Offering individual or comparative case studies of cities in the United States, Europe, and China, contributions to this volume describe the development of actual practices of organizations working to reinvigorate citizenship at the urban scale. Collectively, they locate institutional forms that help migrants lay claim to their cities, show how migrants can become politically empowered, and identify how they can expand their rights or find other ways to belong.