Most of the discussion of market or non-market forms of allocating and procuring organs takes as its unit of analysis the nation state, or, less commonly a particular state or province, and asks what should the system look like as to this unit. In this article, the second of two articles I contribute to this issue of Law and Contemporary Problems, I want to expand the viewfinder and examine an issue that has received peculiarly little attention in the scholarly and policy discourse: the desirability of treating the nation state (or its subdivisions) as the right level of distribution for organs, whether through market systems or non-market allocation systems. I will show that when we flirt with using a more global viewfinder, a series of difficult (and thus far largely unexplored) ethical and regulatory questions arise relating to the inclusion of "outsiders." At the very end of this article I explore what relevance this analysis may have to allocation within the nation-state as well. A large number of questions could be discussed under this title, but for this article I largely limit myself to two related questions. For both I will use the U.S. as the "home country" for rhetorical clarity, but the basic issues are the same for any home country. The first issue is: Should the U.S. allow "foreigners" to be on the list of those eligible to receive organs in the U.S. when they become available, and, if so, at what level of priority? Surprisingly the current law allows them to be listed to receive organs and if they are so listed it prohibits any discrimination against them for priority based on their being foreign. Second: should the U.S. maintain its own organ distribution network that is limited to the nation state instead of participating in a more globalized system? I should emphasize that my interest here is organs that come to recipients through typical government-run (or at least government-approved) organ allocation systems rather than foreigners who come to U.S. centers and bring their own living donor. I first describe the two issues and then offer a normative analysis of each. This cluster of issues applies equally to the current U.S. distribution system with its hostility to markets and any of the potential alterations discussed in other articles in this issue of Law and Contemporary Problems. That is, even if we introduce market elements of one form or another to the U.S. organ allocation system -- as I discuss in my companion article in this issue and as do other authors -- we will still have to answer the two questions I am interested in this article: Should non-U.S citizens who are non-residents be allowed to have access to U.S. organs in the domestic system, and should the U.S. as a whole join larger inter-country organ allocation systems? At the end of this paper, I make some comments about what this analysis implies as to organ sharing within a nation state, for example between U.S. states or geographic regions. Let me emphasize a terminological point here. I am using the term "foreigner" in a specific sense to refer to someone who is non-U.S. resident and a non-U.S. citizen. There are several intermediate cases between "foreigner" and citizen-resident, particularly the non-U.S. citizen who is a U.S. resident (like this author at the present moment!), citizen non-residents (e.g., expatriates), legal versus illegal residents (sometimes referred to as documented versus undocumented aliens) as well as various degrees of residency (visa versus permanent resident versus asylum seeker). A full ethical analysis would pick out each of these possibilities and run the analysis for each, but doing so would require a fuller theory of the importance of citizenship versus residency for benefits and burdens of home country law and policy than I intend to tackle in this article. Parts of the analysis I offer suggests resident non-citizens, whether in the U.S. legally or illegally should be treated quite differently for this analysis, but those implications and this category of persons are not my main concern in this article. Instead, in this article I am interested in the relative priority for home country organ allocation of two groups: "Insiders" to the nation state (resident citizens) and "foreigners" (non-resident non-citizens).


If you are a young female in the UK that uses social media (as 96% of 16–24-year-olds do),1 you may have come across an advert for Natural Cycles since they began their media campaign in late 2016, when using platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Natural Cycles is a 'natural contraception' app that was created by a Swedish particle physicist and her partner. For £39.99 per year, users log their body temperature each morning, and occasionally other details, such as their menstruation, and an algorithm determines their fertile days (during which the user would need to use barrier contraception or avoid sexual intercourse). It has been approved as a medical device for contraceptive purposes in Europe.2

The most recent study of the app was funded and primarily run by Natural Cycles. The study was a prospective observational study of 22 785 users who were mostly Swedish and had an average age of 29 (SD=5) years. They do not mention the previous contraceptive practices of their population. Women were considered pregnant if they reported it to the app, or if the timing of when they stopped using the app made it likely they were pregnant. With perfect use, Natural Cycles claims a failure rate of only 1.0 pregnancy per 100 woman-years. With typical use of the app, the failure rate increases from 1.0 to 6.8 pregnancies per 100 woman-years. However, less than 10% of the user data qualified as 'perfect use' and contributed to the analysis. If they included all women for which the pregnancy status was unknown (who could possibly be pregnant) this went up to …


Food safety is the all precautions which are taken to eliminate the physical, chemical and biological damages. There are noteworthy factors in terms of human health and service quality in the all companies which produce food. There are private consulting institutions for companies which really attach important to public and human health in the presence of international standards and obligations. Being aware of the fact, several companies in Turkey carry out these processes by taking serious costs into consideration since they regard it as a necessity of being an outstanding brand. Besides, the increasing world population and the inversely proportional arable cultivated areas which are decreasing bring about some industrial interventions. These interventions are quite significant for both companies and consumers. While preferring safe food, they focus on the label on them, their logos approved by secure institutions and documents of management systems in the company. In a company which produces food, the practice of "The Food Safety Management System" causes consumers to think that company is able to produce the safe food. Since food safety dangers can occur during any phases of food chain, sufficient control in food chain is a fundamental necessity. The aim of ISO 22 000 is to ensure food safety and security within the Food Safety Management System. The main approach of the ISO 22 000 Standard is to practice a preventive system which keeps all the process within the food chain with its effects such as staff and equipment under control. This system has been developed for consumers in order not to be exposed to food borne diseases. In the institutions, The Food Safety Management System includes production control, product control, equipment control; maintenance and hygiene practices; hygiene of staff and visitors; transport, storage, product information; training, choosing and evaluating of supplier; communication and etc. The main objective is to ensure the product quality and consumers' healthy determining intolerable risks which can result from mistakes of process. Food security audits have a potential danger determinant and analyzer role in product, design, product and quality control. ISO 22 000 is not only about food security; but also it constitutes a fundamental and irreplaceable part of quality assurance in industrial production and service practices while increasing sensory and nutritious quality. In the Food Safety Management System, everyone is given responsibility during and after production; and a productive motivation is ensured with a more participation. Besides, local and global productivity is increased while utilizing resources more effectively and decreasing losses and this causes companies to have total quality management.


Introduction: Why public health ethics? ~ Stephen Peckham and Alison Hann Part one: Public health ethics: contexts: Why ethics? What kind of ethics for public health? ~ Alan Cribb Public health ethics: what it is and how to do it ~ Stephen Holland Part two: Ethics and public health practice: What does it mean to 'know' a disease? The tragedy of XDR-TB ~ Ross Upshur The evaluation of public health initiatives on smoking and lung cancer: an ethical critique ~ Peter Allmark, Angela Tod and Jo Abbott Relevance of primary care bioethics committees In public health ethical practice in the community: an experience in an area of extreme poverty in Santiago, Chile ~ Marla Solari and Tatiana Escobar-Koch Unlinked anonymous blood testing for public health purposes: an ethical dilemma? ~ Jessica Datta and Anthony Kessell Constructing the obesity epidemic: loose science, money and public health ~ Alison Hann and Stephen Peckham Politics, ethics and evidence: immunisation and public health policy ~ Alison Hann and Stephen Peckham Avoiding mixed messages: HPV vaccines and the 'cure' for cervical cancer ~ Alison Hann and Stephen Peckham A call for clearer vaccine exemption typology to improve population health ~ Erica Sutton and Ross Upshur Part three: Public health ethics: developing a basis for practice: Theory and practice in public health ethics: a complex relationship ~ Angus Dawson Conclusion: taking forward the debate ~ Stephen Peckham and Alison Hann.


Energy constrained devices, operating on short-range wireless networking standards such as IEEE802.15.4 and IEEE802.11x, are expected to be deployed for the IoT (Internet of Things) applications. However, co-located deployment of such devices based on different standards using the same 2.4 GHz license free Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) spectrum, introduces coexistence issues, specifically intra-and inter cluster interference. The latter would create a much more adverse impact on these devices than the former, resulting in significant performance degradation. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel area packet scheduler that allows co-located 802.15.4 and 802.11 devices to share the transmission channel and coexist with minimal inter-cluster interference any inter cluster interference. A new OPNET simulation model was developed to evaluate the performance of this scheduler. Simulation results show that the packet scheduler can mitigate the coexistence problem while maintaining high throughput and low end-to-end delay, thereby increasing the overall network QoS.


How is crowd organization produced? How are crowd-enabled networks activated, structured, and maintained in the absence of recognized leaders, common goals, or conventional organization, issue framing, and action coordination? We develop an analytical framework for examining the organizational processes of crowd-enabled connective action such as was found in the Arab Spring, the 15-M in Spain, and Occupy Wall Street. The analysis points to three elemental modes of peer production that operate together to create organization in crowds: the production, curation, and dynamic integration of various types of information content and other resources that become distributed and utilized across the crowd. Whereas other peer-production communities such as open-source software developers or Wikipedia typically evolve more highly structured participation environments, crowds create organization through packaging these elemental peer-production mechanisms to achieve various kinds of work. The workings of these 'production packages' are illustrated with a theory-driven analysis of Twitter data from the 2011–2012 US Occupy movement, using an archive of some 60 million tweets. This analysis shows how the Occupy crowd produced various organizational routines, and how the different production mechanisms were nested in each other to create relatively complex organizational results.


We study the solutions of the one-phase supercooled Stefan problem with kinetic undercooling, which describes the freezing of a supercooled liquid, in one spatial dimension. Assuming that the initial temperature lies between the equilibrium freezing point and the characteristic invariant temperature throughout the liquid our main theorem shows that, as the kinetic undercooling parameter tends to zero, the free boundary converges to the (possibly irregular) free boundary in the supercooled Stefan problem without kinetic undercooling, whose uniqueness has been recently established in [DNS19], [LS18b]. The key tools in the proof are a Feynman-Kac formula, which expresses the free boundary in the problem with kinetic undercooling through a local time of a reflected process, and a resulting comparison principle for the free boundaries with different kinetic undercooling parameters.


Abstract:The thematic foci of the Franco-Algerian war films of decolonization have shifted in the last few decades from evoking triumphalist discourses and redemptive fictional narratives to producing powerful transnational antiwar stories. While being critical of the violent history of colonization, defying earlier French governments' oppressive forms of censorship, and addressing the history of colonial barbarity in Algeria, many French documentarians and filmmakers have skillfully used moving images to critique and expose colonial transgressions. In their efforts to reimagine the horrors of violent encounters between the French army and Algerian guerilla fighters, their narratives cover daring eye-witness accounts of war crimes, including acts of torture at times described by the perpetrators themselves while catering to the expectations of a global audience. Florent Emilio Siri's L'ennemi intime (2007) and David Oelhoffen's Far from Men (2014) are among these transnational productions that accomplish both tasks. In the stories told by the two films, the plots show evidence of a fundamental thematic transformation in filmic representations that collapses the differences between colonizer and colonized, situating both as victims of colonization. The article argues that even though both films consistently reproduce the conventional portrait of the colonized as weak, passive, and deeply reliant on French guidance, Far from Men introduces the myth of the vanishing native, a theme that helps legitimize and normalize the settler's "right" to occupy the colonized space.


Query intent prediction is a component of information retrieval which improves result relevance through an understanding of latent user intents in addition to explicit query keywords. We target context-of-use intents, such as the activity for which a product is used and the target audience for a product, which are subjective and not usually indexed as product attributes in the catalog. We describe a method to predict latent query intents: we extract intents from product reviews on amazon.com and, using behavioral purchase signals that associate queries with the reviewed products, train query classifiers that label queries with the intents extracted from reviews. For example, we predict the activity "running" for the query "adidas mens pants." We show that our method can predict latent intents not indexed directly in the product catalog.


Political agreements and entrepreneurial relationships are two key factors for the development of the agri-food trade between the Mediterranean Countries and Europe. For its geographical position, Italy should be able to intercept the primary products from the Mediterranean Countries and work as a logistic base for processing and distribution. This paper aims to examine if the patterns and trends of the fruit and vegetable exports are different from the Mediterranean Countries to Italy and to Europe, confirming the existence of special relationships. At the same time, the paper examines the export trend from Italy to Europe and from Europe to Italy. The Constant Market Share Analysis has been performed to evaluate the import from the Mediterranean Countries as a whole and from several selected nations (Turkey, Egypt, Israel and Morocco). Conclusions show special relations between Italy and Turkey in the trade of shell fruits, while Egypt is increasing its competitiveness in all sectors choosing Italy as preferential partner. Key-words: Agri-food trade, Mediterranean Countries, Fruits and Vegetables.


Motivated by the idea to reduce deployment costs and to dynamically regulate vehicular traffic flows at intersections, inter-vehicle communications based virtual traffic lights are envisioned to replace traditional infrastructure based traffic lights. According to recent studies, virtual traffic lights are expected to increase traffic flow by up to 60%. Yet, those studies were based on the assumption of a perfectly reliable communication, i.e., notification messages which signal a traffic light were always received by vehicles located within a certain distance to the sender. Hence, effects such as signal fading or non-line-of-sight conditions due to buildings were neglected. Such effects, however, can have a negative impact on the dissemination of the notification messages. This poster paper therefore studies whether these effects lead to significantly larger dissemination delays or not, and whether this increase is crucial for the feasibility of virtual traffic lights. According to the results of this study, the delay is not significantly larger, and virtual traffic lights seem to be feasible under such challenging conditions.


The European Union is one of the world's most important actors in assisting fragile and conflict-affected countries, and has made engagement with 'fragile states' a top priority for its development policy. At the policy level, the EU's approach is in line with international best practices defined by the OECD's 2007 Principles and the 2011 Busan 'New Deal' for fragile states. At the operational level, the EU is developing a 'comprehensive approach' to the implementation of its policies. As is the case with most international actors that engage with fragile and conflict-affected countries, a multidimensional gap exists between the intentions expressed at the policy level and the reality of operations at the country level. This paper argues that three sets of factors intervene between the policy and the operations level: cognitive factors related to turning knowledge of partner-country political processes into appropriate actions; issue-related conflicts of interest and trade-offs; and actor-related factors concerning coordination and capacity. This paper discusses how these factors affect the implementation of the EU's policy frameworks with reference to three fragile and conflict-affected countries: South Sudan, Nepal and Liberia.


Single cell RNA-Seq has emerged as a powerful tool in diverse applications, ranging from determining the cell-type composition of tissues to uncovering the regulators of developmental programs. A near-universal step in the analysis of single cell RNA-Seq data is to hypothesize the identity of each cell. Often, this is achieved by finding cells that express combinations of marker genes that had previously been implicated as being cell-type specific, an approach that is not quantitative and does not explicitly take advantage of other single cell RNA-Seq studies. Here, we describe our tool, SingleCellNet, which addresses these issues and enables the classification of query single cell RNA-Seq data in comparison to reference single cell RNA-Seq data. SingleCellNet compares favorably to other methods, and it is notably able to make sensitive and accurate classifications across platforms and species. We demonstrate how SingleCellNet can be used to classify previously undetermined cells, and how it can be used to assess the outcome of cell fate engineering experiments. Highlight SingleCellNet (SCN) enables the classification of scRNA-Seq data across platforms and species SCN is open source and extendible We illustrate the utility of SCN with three example applications


An extremity supporting exercise system is described. The system includes two knee sliders and two hand sliders. Each knee slider includes a knee pad and a knee base. The knee pad includes a recessed portion that is adapted to receive a user's knee. A patella support is disposed within the knee portion to support the user's patella when using the knee slider. Alternatively, each hand slider includes a hand pad and a hand base. The hand pad includes a series of finger indentations that are flanked by thumb receptacles. Importantly, the knee base and hand base are formed of a rigid and slippery material to allow the sliders to easily slide across a ground surface. Thus, through use of the exercise system, a user can support their hands and knees while sliding the hands and knees across a ground surface to perform a variety of exercises.


It is of both practical and scientific significance to study the temperature dependence of contact angles, towards development of surface wettability manipulation techniques for enhanced phase change heat transfer as well as the theoretical estimation of solid interfacial energy. However, the variations of surface wettability of a hydrophobic solid with altering temperature remain unclear. In this work, in situ characterizations of the contact angle of water on Teflon (PTFE) surfaces as well as the surface tension of water over a temperature spectrum from ∼25 °C to 160 °C at pressurized condition (2 MPa) were conducted by employing the sessile drop and pendant drop methods, respectively. A nearly invariant trend of the contact angle of water was observed over the entire temperature range. Moreover, it was shown that the surface tension of water linearly declines with raising the temperature. Based on the theory of surface thermodynamics, the effects of temperature on the contact angles were analyzed with the variations of interfacial tensions.


The effect of transport on core and peripheral body temperatures and heart rate was assessed in ten 18-month-old Coopworth ewes (Ovis aries) Manual recordings of core (rectal) temperatures were obtained, and automated logging of peripheral (external auditory canal and pinna) temperatures and heart rate was carried out on the day prior to (day 1) and during (day 2) a standardised transport procedure. Transport produced a significant increase in the rectal temperature, which declined following unloading. Peripheral measures of body temperature also exhibited changes with transport. However, both ear-canal and pinna temperatures declined during actual transport, reflecting to some extent the decline in ambient temperatures recorded externally by sensors on the ear tags of the animals. Peripheral measurement of temperature, particularly at the readily accessible ear canal, may offer potential as a technique for the long-term monitoring of thermal responses to stress. However, further research is required into the potentially confounding effects of ambient temperature and wind chill factors.


The recent massive increases in US shale oil and gas production results from the widespread use of hydraulic fracturing to increase productivity from low-permeability reservoirs. Understanding the in-situ stress field around the borehole is fundamental to the efficacy and safety of fracturing operations.
Widespread use of high-resolution borehole imaging tools has facilitated new investigation of micro-scale relationships between stress and lithology. Previous dual-caliper log analyses had insufficient resolution to identify these relationships. Indeed borehole breakout analyses using caliper logs simplifies understanding of the stress orientation; the low resolution means that only breakouts zones of many metres in length can be identified. Contrastingly, borehole imaging tools can identify both breakouts as short as 25 centimetres and also sub-centimetre width Drilling Induced Tensile Fractures (DIFs).
Images from two wells in North Yorkshire indicate complex relationships between stress and lithology. Figure 1 shows a 10 metre section of resistivity imaging from Swinefleet 1 well, sampling the Carboniferous Pennine Coal Measures Group. Four distinct breakouts each of ~50 cm length are visible across this 10 m section; breakouts between 703 and 706 m are separated by a less resistive unit without obvious deformation.
Figure 2 shows Melbourne 1 some 23.5 kilometres north. DIFs are clearly visible both above and below a coal seam. Not only do these terminate at the coal's boundary but this seam shows clear breakouts.
These images show that lithologies are experiencing different failure types on sub-metre scales. This demonstrates significant lithological controls on rock failure from in-situ stress.
Both wells have been cored over intervals where breakouts and DIFs have been identified. Borehole imaging allows accurate depth matching of the core which can be sampled for rock testing. This allows a synthesis of failure under in-situ conditions, lithology and rock properties. Understanding these relationships requires detailed knowledge of the rock properties and how these affect deformation.
The strength and brittleness of the facies are indicative of their likely failure-modes which are in turn controlled by their lithology, diagenesis and clay mineralisation. As in-situ stress magnitude data information is unavailable in both wells, further work is required to quantify the geomechanical properties. Detailed examination of borehole images in other wells highlights small-scale stress rotations around lithological boundaries. Deformation style and localised in-situ stress field perturbations can only be understood with detailed lithological understanding.
Borehole imaging therefore improves understanding of unconventional reservoirs. Further work will seek to upscale properties to quantify entire successions.


Most estimates of the cost of crime focus on victims. Yet it is plausible that an even larger cost of crime occurs via its indirect impact on the mental wellbeing of non-victims. To test how crime affects individuals' mental outcomes, we exploit detailed panel data on mental wellbeing, allowing us to observe the relationship between changes in crime in a local area and changes in the mental wellbeing of resident non-victims in that area (controlling for changes in local economic conditions). Our results suggest that increases in crime rates have a negative impact on the mental wellbeing of residents, with the biggest impacts arising from violent crime. We also find that local press coverage of criminal activity enhances the effect of crime on mental well-being. JEL Classifications: I18, K14, R28


In the cloud services industry, a key issue for cloud operators is to minimize operational costs. In this paper, we consider algorithms that elastically contract and expand a cluster of in-memory databases depending on tenants' behavior over time while maintaining response time guarantees.
 We evaluate our tenant placement algorithms using traces obtained from one of SAP's production on-demand applications. Our experiments reveal that our approach lowers operating costs for the database cluster of this application by a factor of 2.2 to 10, measured in Amazon EC2 hourly rates, in comparison to the state of the art. In addition, we carefully study the trade-off between cost savings obtained by continuously migrating tenants and the robustness of servers towards load spikes and failures.


Background: Chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting (CINV) are major adverse effects of cancer chemotherapy. Inadequate control CINV can have a significant negative impact on quality of life and can compromise adherence to chemotherapy treatment. The aim of this prospective clinical trial was to evaluate the antiemetic effect of ondansetrone combined with dcexamethasone against CINV produced by high and moderate emetogenic chemotherapy in Iraqi patients. Patients and Methods: A prospective clinical trial was conducted .Patients completed 5-day daily diaries beginning on the day of single-day chemotherapy and for one to three chemotherapy cycles, the symptoms diary was designed to collect data regarding patient's demographic characteristics, cancer type, chemotherapy regimen to patient receive ondansetrone combined with dexamethasone for the treatment of CINV. Results: A total of 52 patients were enrolled in this study, with age range of 18-63 year (41.4±17.3; Mean ±SD) of both sexes (57.7% male and 42.3% female), 65.38 % of the patients classified as receiving high emetogenic chemotherapy, whereas 34.61% of the patients receiving moderate emetogenic chemotherapy. All the patients received ondansetrone combined with dcexamethasone for the treatment of CINV, the incidence of acute nausea in patients receiving high emetogenic chemotherapy (HEC) was 41.17% compared to 22.22% in patients receiving moderate emetogenic chemotherapy (MEC); The incidence percent of delayed nausea was 35.29% in patients receiving HEC compared to 22.22% in patients receiving MEC; the effect of administered antiemetics on the incidence of acute vomiting was 35.29% in patients receiving HEC compared to 22.22% in patients receiving MEC; unexpectedly, the incidence of delayed vomiting was only 11.76% in patients receiving HEC compared to 22.22% in patients receiving MEC. Conclusion: the results of this study demonstrate that administration of Ondansetrone combined with dexamethasone regimen against CINV produced accepted antiemtic level compared to data reported internationally; this study highlights the need for efficient translation of standard guidelines of antiemetic to clinical practice. Key word: Antiemetic, chemotherapy, nausea, vomiting, ondansetrone, dexamethasone.


To ensure systems sustainability in delivering services, software maintenance (SM) is a necessary condition to solve emerging errors and satisfy new requirements during operation. This maintenance involves a great variety of interdependent elements and processes as well as requires competent and motivated staff.This research aims at developing a model capable of explicitly explaining the complexity of causal feedback-relationships between elements and processes of SM and information systems (IS) staff management related factors. A preliminary causal loop diagram of system dynamics method was developed from literature. A successful e-government system of a Ministry in Indonesia was selected as the case. IS staff and managers of the selected case were deeply interviewed using prepared questionnaires developed based on the preliminary model. Data collected is used to validate and refine the preliminary model. The resulting empirical causal loop model explicitly describes how various factors, which might not be close in space and time, through chains of causal relationships, influence software availability level over time, hence IS sustainability, and how this level influences back those factors. Therefore, the model helps management with further insight about aligning an important domain of information technology with people to attain system sustainability.


Today's rapidly expanding and dynamic information age coupled with users who are becoming more discerning about what information they want and when they want it poses a serious challenge to information retrieval systems in their attempt to match user's information needs with information repositories.

To date most research on information retrieval has concentrated on improving system effectiveness. However as the amount of online information and the number of users concurrently accessing this information continues to grow at an exponential rate the efficiency of information retrieval systems is now a core concern of information retrieval system developers. Users who were previously content to wait for information they needed are no longer willing or able to do so because in today's dynamic information age the 'shelf life' of information is getting shorter and shorter. This results in increasing pressure on information systems to provide the 'right' information at the 'right' time.

This research focuses on the improving the efficiency of information retrieval systems. To this end we have developed and implemented a number of techniques aimed at reducing system response time by reducing the amount of data processed in order to effectively respond to a user's information need.


The study of human hand morphology reveals that developing an artificial hand with the capabilities of human hand is an extremely challenging task. This paper presents the development of a robotic prosthetic hand focusing on the improvement of a tendon driven mechanism towards a biomimetic prosthetic hand. The design of this prosthesis hand is geared towards achieving high level of dexterity and anthropomorphism by means of a new hybrid mechanism that integrates a miniature motor driven actuation mechanism, a Shape Memory Alloy actuated mechanism and a passive mechanical linkage. The synergy of these actuators enables the flexion-extension movement at each of the finger joints within a limited size, shape and weight constraints. Tactile sensors are integrated on the finger tips and the finger phalanges area. This prosthesis hand is developed with an exact size ratio that mimics a biological hand. Its behavior resembles the human counterpart in terms of working envelope, speed and torque, and thus resembles both the key physical features and the grasping functionality of an adult hand. Keywords—Prosthetic hand; Biomimetic actuation; Shape Memory Alloy; Tactile sensing.


This essay has become necessary since after the presentation of Professor Asouzu's inaugural lecture titled Ibuanyidanda: and The Philosophy of Essence. A number of students graduate and undergraduate have accosted me to differentiate between my philosophy of integrative humanism and Asouzu's. Initially I felt there was no point embarking on such a venture because it looked trivial, inconsequential and rather accusational and instigative. I asked myself do they want to know whether I plagiarized Asouzu or is it a genuine interest to understand the dynamics of our individual thoughts.
Again, I said to myself if there is a comparison to make, it should not be me who should make it to avoid the burden of prejudice and inobjectivity. An independent scholar I thought should dispassionately examine the two positions to know the extent of similarities and dissimilarities. But on a more reflective thought, I considered that there is need for a ground clearing comparative analysis from one of the protagonists of the theories at least to provide the authorial perspective on my perception of Asouzu's theory vis a vis my philosophical position. I thought this could throw more light to prevent a blind or misconceived rendering of my objectives in the work. This essay therefore, is to provide a second mirror aside my book The Philosophy and Method of Integrative Humanism in piercing the soul of the author to grasp his own understanding of himself.


The role of foreign capital as a job creator is becoming increasingly important in the context of globalization. Although the purpose and scale of their business activities may vary, foreign investors' entry into a host country often creates a large number of jobs for local populations. In this process, the government usually plays an intermediary role to maximize the benefits generated by foreign firms. This dissertation describes the labor market effects of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in relation to the ways in which government policies and the sources of foreign capital come into play in this process. This study is based on both quantitative and qualitative data. I have drawn data from the U.S. Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP) database, the Bureau of Economic Analysis's (BEA) Foreign Direct Investment in the United States (FDIUS) database, and American Community Survey for quantitative analysis. In addition, I have supplemented the statistical results with in-depth interviews with corporate executives, managers, government officials, and staffing agencies' managers and archival data from both the firms and the local government. The findings focus on labor market changes driven by foreign capital along with institutional shifts. First, I describe the ways in which foreign businesses change their patterns of manufacturing activities and create employment at the state level in response to domestic institutions. Next, I analyze how foreign manufacturing investments originating from different sources result in different labor market outcomes at the local level in response to international institutions. Lastly, I corroborate that state-level institutions, or state governments' economic policies play important intermediary roles in influencing the relationship between foreign investors and the host labor market. I discuss the implications of these findings for research on organizations and the labor market in the global context and for understanding the importance of governmental policies in promoting economic development. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Sociology First Advisor Mauro Guillen Second Advisor Emilio Parrado


Serving as one of the most common measurements in the instrumented Structural Health Monitoring system of bridges, strain response measurement, especially longterm measurement on a continuous basis can provide ongoing information of bridge structures on its structural behavior and health condition under external load. However, the study on strain response is far from adequate. Based on the Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) strain sensors, this paper conduct a study on the strain response feature of steel box girder on the important elements and critical locations, and develop a statistical paradigm for crack detection. The local response property of strain response under vehicle load is highlighted, since it enables the measurement data to tell the vehicle load events that occur to the area nearby the sensors and to tell the health condition of this area. Features of strain response subject to vehicle load is first studied, its timefrequency domain feature is used to detect vehicle load events and break the strain measurement series into segments that corresponded to the detected vehicle load events. Based on the matching technique of segments of strain series from successive sections along the traffic direction, strain response segments of different sections under the identical vehicle load is obtained. Extracting the amplitude of their changes in the value subject to the identical vehicle load and evaluating their mutual ratio (the indicator) to mitigate eliminate different affects due to vehicle weight for each passing heavy vehicle (sample), the paradigm finally collects a dataset of the condition of different sections, by analysing the statistical property of this indicator, it detects the crack on the nearby region of the sensor location and infer the condition of this region.


An objective of the 2005 Academic Emergency Medicine Consensus Conference, "Ethical Conduct of Resuscitation Research," was to identify if consensus exists regarding application of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Final Rule allowing an exception from informed consent in resuscitation research. At the start of the consensus conference, 49 attendees participated in a survey containing three sections: 1) demographic questions characterizing respondents, 2) questions regarding application of the FDA Final Rule, and 3) complexities associated with seeking informed consent in an emergency setting. Consensus analysis was used to determine if a formal consensus was reached, relying on a Bayesian posterior probability of 0.99 to consider survey responses a "consensus." Respondents demonstrated consensus regarding the need to further refine and standardize application of the FDA Final Rule in resuscitation research. However, participants agreed that current regulations provide adequate and appropriate protection to safeguard patients. Complexities associated with seeking informed consent in emergency departments were prevalent among most institutions represented at the conference. There was general agreement that current efforts to safeguard human subjects are effective, but participants agreed that refinements to and standardization of the FDA Final Rule would facilitate resuscitation research and enhance patient safety.


The Millennium Development Goals set the target to "halve by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation". The current international definition of indicators of access is insufficient for measuring this target. Furthermore, the lack of an internationally agreed definition and measurement methodology is causing confusion and uncertainty regarding the figures that are disseminated worldwide. Moreover, the current context, in which almost 70% of funds for the sector are channelled through national governments, emphasises the importance of a monitoring system for national water sectors in developing countries. From this, an improvement in investment efficiency is expected. The water point mapping methodology, promoted and widely developed by the international organization WaterAid, is presented as an alternative way of defining water access indicators. The present paper describes its potential for defining new indicators and making improvements. Our research is based on the results of a pilot study carried out by Ingenieria Sin Fronteras (Engineering without Borders, Spain) in the Same district, Tanzania. The paper concludes with a discussion of the challenges posed by the implementation of this methodology and proposes further steps for improvement.


Although considerable literature can be found concerning the etiology of cigarette smoking, research suggests that a major gap exists pertaining to predictors of adolescent smoking for rural populations. The purpose of this study is to compare risk and protective factors for adolescents living in rural and urban environments. An ecological framework was used to examine variables from the individual, family, peer, school, and community contexts. The influence of these variables was assessed on a sample of (n=3,166) 8, 10, and 12 grade students from Virginia public schools. Linear regression analyses revealed that parental attitudes and best friends' smoking behavior was influential in the smoking behavior of both rural and urban adolescents. School and community level variables were only influential in smoking behavior among the urban adolescents.


The 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report observes that the mean annual temperature increased over the past century in Southeast Asia. The projections are that average changes in mean annual temperature will exceed 3oC in Southeast Asia. The increased occurrence of floods, droughts, and changes in the seasonal rainfall pattern are expected to have negative impacts on crop yields, food security, and livelihoods in vulnerable areas. In parts of Southeast Asia, climate change could exacerbate existing levels of poverty because of the changes in rice crop production and increases in food prices and the cost of living. The consequence of climate change, however, will vary across countries in the region.In the Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR), climate change is expected to modify the frequency, intensity, and location of existing climate hazards, straining existing common coping mechanisms-especially for people living in rural and remote places. With regards to chronic changes, efforts to enhance resilience could result in rewards. Ecosystem-based adaptation (EBA) measures can be suitable for enhancing resilience to climate change, especially for sectors that rely on natural systems. EBA uses biodiversity and ecosystem services as part of a general adaptation strategy to help people adapt to the adverse effects of climate change. This concept is based on the idea that ecosystem services reduce the vulnerability of society to climate change across sectors and subsectors. These measures can complement other adaptation measures and often generate co-benefits for the implementing households.Poor farmers are the most vulnerable group in Lao society. This report, one in a series of studies, explores how forests can reduce the vulnerability of this segment of the Lao PDR population.6 It looks at how forests, through the provision of ecosystem services, contribute to adaptation of other sectors to climate change and aid the adaptation of poor smallholder agriculture households in the southern part of Lao PDR. The objective is to bring evidence to discussions among decision makers in government and development partner organizations about the linkages between agriculture and forests in the context of climate change (that is, about the role of forests in enhancing the resilience of an agricultural subsector) and to examine the implications for development and enhancing resilience to climate change in Lao PDR.


This research investigated the system by which the social effects of oil sands development on Fort McMurray, a city in northeastern Alberta, are assessed and managed. The research focused on Social Impact Assessment (SIA), Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), and the work of an industry initiative, the Regional Issues Working Group (RIWG). The oil sands industry, which involves large, labourintensive mining and drilling operations in a boom-bust cycle, places considerable pressure on Fort McMurray, a city of approximately 50,000 inhabitants and the only urban area within 350 km of the oil sands. The social effects experienced there include exorbitant housing prices, shortages in service industry labour, insufficient social services, at times, to assist individuals and families who can no longer cope with the difficult conditions in the area, and a variety of other negative effects. Sixteen key informant interviews were conducted with urban planners, municipal politicians, provincial employees, a spokesperson for one of the First Nations in the area, community NGOs, and oil sands industry representatives. Data from the interviews were combined with a literature review and a document analysis. A modified McKinsey 7S Integrated Management Framework was used as a structure for describing and analyzing the Social Effects Assessment and Management System (SEAMS) in Fort McMurray. The SEAMS was found to be weak in comparison to the needs of the community. Project-by-project assessment of oil sands development was found to downplay the cumulative nature of social effects. Furthermore, no legislation or regulation existed that demanded action based on the findings of SIA. As a result, mitigation and management of social effects was insufficient, often occurring only when it was directly in the interests of the oil sands industry. While government and industry have plans in place to resolve some of the negative social effects, their actions were criticized by informants as being uncoordinated, inconsistent and often ineffective. The findings indicate that a strategy for exploiting Alberta's oil sands is necessary. The project-by-project evaluation of oil sands development proposals is not addressing the important long-term and regional social issues that arise as a result of construction and operation of the mines and facilities. A tool recommended for incorporating resolutions to long-term, regional social effects into the development plan is SEA with an explicit Strategic Social Assessment component. This strategic assessment and planning process should be undertaken by a publicly-accountable government body empowered to regulate the pace of oil sands development based on social, environmental and economic effects, and to coordinate long-term responses by government and industry.


In recent years, labor unions in the United States have embraced the immigrants' rights movement, cognizant that the very future of organized labor depends on its ability to attract immigrant workers and integrate them into union ranks. At the same time, the immigrants' rights movement has been lauded for its successful organizing models, often drawing upon the vitality and ingenuity of immigrant-based worker centers, which themselves have emerged as alternatives to traditional labor unions. And while the labor and immigrants' rights movements have engaged in some fruitful collaborations, their mutual support has failed to radically reshape the trajectory of either cause.In this Article, I argue that the ongoing legislative debates around immigration reform provide a unique opportunity to reimagine and revitalize traditional organized labor and to strengthen newer, immigrant-centered worker organizations. In my view, this can be accomplished by positioning unions and worker organizations as key actors in immigration processes (for both temporary and permanent immigration) and in any likely legalization initiative. Their specific roles might include sponsoring or indirectly supporting certain visa applications, facilitating the portability of employment-related visas from one employer to another, offering training opportunities to meet immigration requirements, assisting with legalization applications, leading immigrant integration initiatives, and more.Apart from the instrumental objective of attracting immigrants to the ranks of unions and worker organizations, this set of proposals will position these institutions as sites where the virtues of leadership, democratic participation, and civic engagement can be forged in new Americans. Indeed, these virtues coincide with the founding values of most U.S. labor unions; to the extent some unions have strayed from these values, the proposals provide an external imperative to reorient and rebrand unions as core civil society institutions. Moreover, immigrant worker centers have already become known for their focus on leadership development, democratic decision making, and civic education, and are therefore uniquely positioned to play this role. This convergence of utilitarian and transcendent objectives, in the current sociopolitical moment, justifies a special position for unions and worker organizations in the U.S. immigration system.


Objectives The authors investigated self-perceived psychosomatic health in young people (10–24 years of age) in Sweden and analysed different samples during the years 2005 and 2007–2010 via a community website. Design Repeated cross-sectional surveys: (1) single question on a single day in 2005. (2) One specific question delivered on each of eight separate days in 2005. (3) The same eight questions delivered to smaller groups on the same day in 2007 and then again to randomly selected subjects in 2010. Setting Validated questionnaires launched on the internet by a recognised Swedish community site. Study participants were invited to answer questions about their health with full anonymity as they logged into their personal area. Participants 10–24-year-old children, adolescents and young adults. Primary and secondary outcome measures Self-reported psychosomatic health in terms of sex and age over time. Results A large number of responses were obtained (up to 140 000). The response rate for the single item on stress was 41%. A high percentage of young subjects responded that they felt stressed very often/often; the numbers were higher for women (47%) than for men (29%). Older teenaged women had more psychosomatic complaints than did men of similar ages; in contrast, among 10–12-year-old children, the percentage of psychosomatic complaints was similar for men and women. When comparing results obtained in 2010 with those obtained in 2007, young people of both sexes had a slightly better self-perceived health status in 2007. Conclusions During the period 2005–2010 a high percentage of young people, particularly females, 16–18 years of age, had psychosomatic complaints and considered themselves as being often or very often stressed. These complaints were more pronounced in the older age groups. When directing questions to a large community, internet-based surveys appear to be valuable tools.


Isogeny-based cryptography using supersingular elliptic curves — most prominently, the constructions of De Feo-Jao-Plut — is one of the few practical candidates for post-quantum public key cryptography. Its formidable security claim is earned through the continual exploration of quantum algorithms for 'isogeny problems' and the assessment of the threat they pose to supersingular isogeny-based cryptography. We survey the rich history of classical and quantum algorithms for isogeny problems, and close with an original result — a quantum algorithm for the general supersingular isogeny problem, based on the discovery of Delfs and Galbraith in 2013 — that has exponential-complexity in general and subexponential complexity in an important sub-case. As yet, this algorithm poses a limited threat to the schemes of De Feo-Jao-Plut; however, it is an important algorithm to consider, for it provides insight into the structure of supersingular curves and the isogenies between them, and may lead to newer destructive quantum algorithms.


Computational and model-theoretic properties of logical languages constitute a central field of research in logic-based knowledge representation. Datalog is a very popular formalism, a de-facto standard for expressing and querying knowledge. Diverse results exist regarding the expressivity of Datalog and its extension by input negation (semi-positive Datalog) and/or a linear order (order-invariant Datalog). When classifying the expressivity of logical formalisms by their model-theoretic properties, a very natural and prominent such property is preservation under homomorphisms. This paper solves the remaining open questions needed to arrive at a complete picture regarding the inter-relationships between the class of homomorphism-closed queries and the query classes related to the four versions of Datalog. Most notably, we exhibit a query that is both homomorphism-closed and computable in polynomial time but cannot be expressed in order-invariant Datalog.


Aims: Group B Streptococcus (GBS) is one of the most common causes of neonatal sepsis throughout the world. Reports of vaginal colonization of GBS in India are few and variable. A study was conducted on pregnant women in a tertiary care hospital to compare various methods for isolation of GBS, to study the prevalence of GBS in pregnant women in third trimester, and to determine risk factors for GBS colonization. Settings and Design: Observational descriptive study. Materials and Methods: High vaginal swabs from 150 pregnant women in their third trimester were used to compare three methods for isolation of GBS viz. direct culture on 5% Sheep Blood agar, direct culture on selective Columbia Blood Agar and culture in LIM enrichment broth with subsequent culture on 5% Sheep Blood agar. A history of associated risk factors was also taken. Statistical Analysis Used: Statistical analysis was performed by Chi–square test. Results: Isolation was best from LIM enrichment broth with subsequent culture on 5% Sheep Blood Agar. Prevalence of GBS colonization by using culture method was 12.67%. Most frequently associated risk factor was intrapartum fever (42.11%). Conclusions: Standard Culture Method using LIM enrichment should be adopted as standard practice for isolation of GBS from vaginal swabs.


Patterns of change in calcareous nannofossil assemblages during nannozones NP11 to NP16 on the southern Levant margin of the Tethys were observed from sections of early and middle Eocene age sediments of the Avedat Plateau, central Israel. A cooling process following the Early Eocene Climate Optimum (EECO) is supported by several events of biotic change over a 4 Ma interval. The rate of pelagic sedimentation varied from 7.5 at the EECO to 23.6 m Ma–1 at the cooling transition phase. Reduced numbers of discoasters mark the end of the oligotrophic regime within the NP13 nannozone, followed by an increase in nannofossil richness especially marked by Blackites and Chiasmolithus spp. In the middle part of the cooling process a prominent peak of reworked Paleocene taxa, up to 7% of total taxa, suggests that enhanced current activity caused re-sedimentation on the Levant margin slopes. When stability resumed in the upper part of the NP15–16 interval, Coccolithus-type placoliths became rare and Reticulofenestra-type forms became dominant. Calcareous nannoplankton response to this gradual cooling became irreversible in the late Palaeogene, but the change was, however, diachronous across the Tethys.


World markets are highly interlinked and local economies extensively rely on global supply and value chains. Consequently, local production disruptions, for instance caused by extreme weather events, are likely to induce indirect losses along supply chains with potentially global repercussions. These complex loss dynamics represent a challenge for comprehensive disaster risk assessments. Here, we introduce the numerical agent-based model acclimate designed to analyze the cascading of economic losses in the global supply network. Using national sectors as agents, we apply the model to study the global propagation of losses induced by stylized disasters. We find that indirect losses can become comparable in size to direct ones, but can be efficiently mitigated by warehousing and idle capacities. Consequently, a comprehensive risk assessment cannot focus solely on first-tier suppliers, but has to take the whole supply chain into account. To render the supply network climate-proof, national adaptation policies have to be complemented by international adaptation efforts. In that regard, our model can be employed to assess reasonable leverage points and to identify dynamic bottlenecks inaccessible to static analyses.


Unstructured pruning reduces the memory footprint in deep neural networks (DNNs). Recently, researchers proposed different types of structural pruning intending to reduce also the computation complexity. In this work, we first suggest a new measure called mask-diversity which correlates with the expected accuracy of the different types of structural pruning. We focus on the recently suggested N:M fine-grained block sparsity mask, in which for each block of M weights, we have at least N zeros. While N:M fine-grained block sparsity allows acceleration in actual modern hardware, it can be used only to accelerate the inference phase. In order to allow for similar accelerations in the training phase, we suggest a novel transposable fine-grained sparsity mask, where the same mask can be used for both forward and backward passes. Our transposable mask guarantees that both the weight matrix and its transpose follow the same sparsity pattern; thus, the matrix multiplication required for passing the error backward can also be accelerated. We formulate the problem of finding the optimal transposable-mask as a minimum-cost flow problem. Additionally, to speed up the minimum-cost flow computation, we also introduce a fast linear-time approximation that can be used when the masks dynamically change during training. Our experiments suggest a 2x speed-up in the matrix multiplications with no accuracy degradation over vision and language models. Finally, to solve the problem of switching between different structure constraints, we suggest a method to convert a pre-trained model with unstructured sparsity to an N:M fine-grained block sparsity model with little to no training. A reference implementation can be found at https://github.com/papers-submission/structured_transposable_masks.


'The sitter, in this portrait, who was the son of Nathaniel Clements, Irish Deputy Vice-Tresurer and Teller of the Exchequer, was one of a group of Irish visitors to Rome in the 1740s adn 1750s who were Batoni's first Grand Tour patrons.
Robert Clements was born in County Kildare, the son of Nathaniel Clements and his wife Hannah, daughter of William Gore, Dean of Down. His parents lived in considerable style. Robert Clements travelled to Italy in 1753 and is recorded as in Florence in July 1753 by Dr James Tyrell. According to Percival Wood Clement, author of 'Ancestors and Descendants of Robert Clements', Clements wrote a 'rather dull' Grand Tour journal in 1754.
On his return to Ireland, Clements entered public life representing County Donegal in the Irish Parliament (1765-1768)and later Carrick (1768-1776)and Donegal again (1776-1783). Amongst other posts he held were High Sheriff of County Leitrim (1759), Commisioner of the Revenue (1772-1773) and Governor of County Leitrim (1777). In May 1765 he married Lady Elizabeth Skeffington, daughter of Clotworthy, 1st Earl of Massereene and they moved into Killadoon, a fine eighteenth century house at Celbridge in County Kildare.
Clements was made Baron Leitrim of Manor Hamilton in 1783, one of nine Irish baronies created by the Fox Ministry, but in June 1784 was applying vigorously for further advancement. Clements eventually succeeded in his efforts, being created Viscount Leitrim in 1793 and Earl of Leitrim in 1795.
The picture forms a part of a group of portraits of Irish visitors to Rome painted by Batoni in the 1740s and 1750s. The earliest was the portrait of Joseph Leeson, 1st Earl of Milltown, painted in 1744 [see image cgjc0986], and it seems that Leeson introduced Batoni to other Irish sitters including Clements. The Clements portrait is of particular interest as it marks the artist's first use of an antique bust in the background. Later portraits by Batoni are often charaterized by the introduction of a classical bust to show the sitter's appreciation of the beauty of ancient art. The bust in this portrait is of Homer, the great Greek poet and author of the Illiad and the Odyssey. The image of Homer was one of the most celebrated portraits of antiquity and there are many replicas including a Roman example in the Capitoline Museum, but the finest extant example is in the Louvre. Batoni used the same bust in his portraits of Arthur Hill-Trevor (1764) and Thomas Estcourt (1772).' (Sotheby's, 13)


The origins of sound art are usually traced to previous sonorous artistic manifestations such as futurism or fluxus (see Labelle, 2006; Kahn, 1999). However, in non-sonorous manifestations it is also possible to appreciate some features of sound art that go beyond the dominant role that sound plays. By adding to the topic of sound art essential notions of temporality, spatial construction and social recognition, the emergence of a sonorous artistic practice which goes beyond the mere use of sound is revealed. In this sense, research in public sound art, which is the primary topic of this paper, provides three issues to which it is important to pay attention in order to pose new sound art theories and ideas: First, the viewer-listener, considered simply as a citizen; second, the city, understood as a sculptural space and a social space, and finally, derived from the previous two, the transformation of the concept of 'space' in the practices concerning the public sphere of art. The implementation of these concepts, which took place naturally in different artistic domains, represented the beginning of the creative use of sound and, specifically, the awakening of public sound art. For this reason, based on sound art studies, as mentioned above, the projection of the article goes beyond these writings in an attempt to connect sound art with the public space. Literature on sound art has described its origins through music, poetry, architecture and other disciplines. However, this article addresses its origin in connection with the specific area of the city. The sound installation's pioneer, Max Neuhaus, will act as a guide towards this aim. This process allows a rereading of some of the most evocative examples of sound art and, at the same time, provides other references that will be valuable for assessing the growing interest in the creation of sound interventions in public space. The prolific career of Max Neuhaus, which covered a broad range of topics, will establish a connection between public sound art and artists and thinkers who are rarely linked to this medium. These connections will, however, offer new perspectives onto the most widely discussed topics of the discipline: temporality and spatiality. This inquiry into the roots of sound art is an attempt to make a contribution to its history, not only by way of evidence, but also through suggestions provided by works of art that are far removed from the medium of sound and by other contributions from different fields of studies.(1)


Privatization -- the transfer of activities from the public to the private sector -- gained international prominence in the 1980s because of the need to reduce budget deficits and growing concerns about the efficiency of state-owned enterprises and government bureaucracies. This article examines privatization in Canada and its effect on governments' fiscal positions. Privatization has generally been less rapid and extensive in Canada than elsewhere, partly because of the comparatively moderate size of our public sector. Nevertheless, federal, provincial, and municipal governments have increasingly reduced their direct involvement in the Canadian economy by selling Crown corporations, contracting with private firms to deliver public services, and transferring the development of public infrastructure projects to the private sector. The fiscal impact of privatizing Crown corporations varies with such factors as the profitability of the enterprise, the size of the government's initial investment, and past write-downs. In general, when privatizations are part of a broader effort to improve public finances, they can contribute to fiscal consolidation by reducing budgetary requirements and debt levels. When services and infrastructure projects are privatized, it is expected that more efficient private sector management will reduce government expenditures. For example, a private consortium may be better able to manage the financial risks involved in building an infrastructure facility, such as cost overruns or the withdrawal of contractors, than the public sector. The key to raising efficiency and lowering costs, however, is competition, not privatization per se. Therefore, the cost savings arising from the privatization of services or public works depend crucially on the terms of the contract. Overall, when structured to improve economic efficiency, privatization is likely to enhance the economy's performance, thereby producing long-term economic and budgetary gains.


Background, aim, and scope An inclusion of traffic noise effects could change considerably the overall results of many life cycle assessment (LCA) studies. However, at present, noise effects are usually not considered in LCA studies, mainly because the existing methods for their inclusion do not fulfill the requirement profile. Two methods proposed so far seem suitable for inclusion in generic life cycle inventory (LCI) databases, and a third allows for inter-modal comparison. The aim of this investigation is an in-depth analysis of the existing methods and the proposition of a framework for modeling road transport noise emissions in LCI in accordance to the requirement profile postulated in part 1. Materials and methods This paper analyzes three methods for inclusion of traffic noise in LCA (Danish LCA guide method, Swiss EPA method, and Swiss FEDRO method) in detail. The additional basis for the analysis are the Swiss road traffic emission model " SonRoad, " traffic volume measurements at 444 sites in the Swiss road network, vehicle-type-specific noise measurements in free floating traffic situations in Germany, and noise emission measurements from different tires. Results The Danish LCA guide method includes a major flaw that cannot be corrected within the methodological concept. It applies a dose – response function valid for average noise levels of a traffic situation to maximum noise levels of single vehicles. The Swiss FEDRO method is based on an inappropriate assumption since it bases distinctions of specific vehicles on data that do not allow for such a distinction. Noise emissions cannot be distin-guished by the make and type of a vehicle since other factors, especially the tires, are dominant for noise emissions. Several problems are also identified in the Swiss EPA method, but they are not of a fundamental nature. Thus, we are able to base a new framework for vehicle and context-sensitive inclusion of road traffic noise emissions in LCI on the Swiss EPA method. We show Conclusions We show limitations of the existing methods and approaches for improving them. Our proposed model allows for a more specific consideration of the various vehicles and contexts in terms of space and time and thus in terms of speed and traffic volume. This can be used on one hand for a consistent, context sensitive assessment of different vehicles in different traffic situations. On the other hand, it also allows for an inclusion of noise in LCA of transports on which only very little is known. This new LCI model meets five of the six requirements postulated in Part 1. Recommendations and perspectives In a next step, additional noise emissions due to additional traffic needs to be calculated based on the proposed framework and national or regional traffic models. Furthermore, the consideration of noise from different traffic modes should be addressed. The approach presented needs to be extended in order to make it also applicable for rail and air traffic noise, and the methods need to be implemented in LCI databases to make them easily available to practitioners. Furthermore, suitable impact assessment methods need to be identified or developed. They could base on the proposals made in the Swiss EPA and in the Swiss FEDRO methods.


I argue for the originality and interest of Cicero's views on the stability of political communities. After a survey of ancient ideas on the mixed constitution (the framework for thinking about the stability of political communities in the ancient world), I show how Cicero adapted these ideas to analyze the Roman situation of his time. Cicero's version of the theory of the mixed constitution is notable for two innovations: an argument that stability is possible even under conditions of high inequality, and an account of constitutional mixture that emphasizes the role of the "monarchic" element in promoting concord and stability and meeting unexpected challenges. I show, however, that this account unfortunately made it clear that the Roman crisis of Cicero's time was more or less insoluble in ways that would preserve the republic.


This study examined data from convicted offenders in Victoria to examine whether the perpetrators of, and interpersonal triggers for, violence occurring on the roads differ between road and non-road contexts. A case-control methodology was used to compare data from 31 cases of road violence with 31 cases of violence against strangers which resulted in similar charges but which occurred in non-road contexts. Information regarding perpetrators and the triggering incidents leading to the violence was obtained from prosecution legal files. Psychiatric contact information was obtained from the Victorian public mental health database on both cases and controls. There were no significant differences between cases and controls on any demographic, criminological or psychiatric variables, except for ethnicity. Although a sizeable proportion of incidents of road violence were perpetrated by persons who had not previously been criminally violent, this proportion was not significantly different from that found in the controls. Within the road violence sample, those with no prior criminal violence were more likely to be in employment than those with a past history of violent offending. In the road context, the triggering incident was most likely to be coded as an act of recklessness, which appeared to pose a threat to the safety of the other party. Off the roads, the most common trigger was an apparent threat to the other party's status. In both contexts, the initial trigger was a likely to be perpetrated by the eventual victim as the offenders. The study provides support for causal models of road violence that emphasise personological rather than environmental factors, and also has implications for preventative strategies.


In this paper, a Mach-Zehnder silicon nanoplasmonic electro-optic modulator is proposed and theoretically analyzed. It is composed of horizontal metal-SiO2-Si-metal plasmonic slot waveguides for phase shifting and ultracompact V-shape splitter/combiner to link the plasmonic slot waveguides and the conventional Si dielectric waveguides. The proposed modulator can be directly integrated into existing Si electronic photonic integrated circuits (EPICs) and be fabricated using standard Si complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. The modulator's parameters are optimized through systematic 2-dimensional numerical simulations. For a modulator with 3-µm-long Ag-SiO2(2 nm)-Si(50 nm)-Ag phase shifter and 0.35-µm-long splitter/combiner operating at 1.55-µm wavelength, simulation shows an insertion loss of ~-8 dB, an extinction ratio of ~7.3 dB - with a switching voltage of ~5.6 V, and a bandwidth of ~500 GHz. A possible approach to reduce the switching voltage is addressed.


The aim of this scoping paper is to highlight how criminal courts in Australia have evolved over time, the political, economic, social and intellectual forces that have driven these modifications, and how these changes can inform the future of criminal courts in this country. The paper discusses the challenges facing Australia's criminal courts, including the failure of the criminal justice system to reduce crime, the problem of inadequate resources, and the political, economic and social context of cost efficiency, managerialism and consumerism as well as pressure from rights based organisations. The paper also examines the movement of Australian criminal courts towards a more therapeutic model of jurisprudence, as observed in the establishment of court support services for witnesses, offenders and victims, and initiatives such as problem solving courts (e.g. drug courts and domestic or family violence courts) and restorative justice enterprises. The findings of evaluations of drug courts and restorative justice processes are discussed, and the paper concludes by assessing the likely impact of change on Australia's courts in the future, and by setting out an agenda for future research.


A feasible approach for the production of large yields of liposomes (model cell membranes) is demonstrated. The technique involves rapid evaporation of chloroform from a mixture of lipid, chloroform and methanol, which consistently produces giant unilamellar vesicles (liposomes) having a size distribution of 15-75 micrometers. The procedure is feasible at laboratory scale and produces quick results. Different methods for attaching fluorescein labeled liposomes to glass capillaries are presented. The immobilization of liposomes to glass surfaces can be applied as a useful tool for the observation of structural changes taking place on their surface when they are subjected to a uniform flow. This would permit some insight into the configurational variations taking place on a cell membrane surface in the blood stream. As a preliminary model for the computation of forces acting on the liposomes under flow, a mathematical model was developed using the direct radial basis function method. The technique is applied to three dimensional flow in a square channel which replicates the velocity profile inside the rectangular glass capillary tube.


Emerging out of the context of the tricontinental revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, Third Cinema refers to a host of film practices from Latin America, Africa and Asia with the political intent of the decolonization of culture. For contemporary filmmakers and critics, however, the discourse of Third Cinema cannot be easily applied to contemporary times and contexts. In this thesis, I attempt to reconcile the discourse of Third Cinema with contemporary African diaspora film practices in a renegotiation of cinematic resistance. Proceeding from Gilles Deleuze's theory that the evolution of cinema from classical to modern materialized out of the historic rupture produced by World War II, my thesis locates another rupture in the dissonance between Third Cinema and contemporary African diasporic filmmaking. The lingering effects of neo-colonialism and the process of globalization have rendered older categories to describe the world inadequate, and filmmakers all over the world are actively engaged in decentering the grand narratives of Western and Third Cinemas. Because this deconstructive process is most often associated with the diasporic condition by postcolonial theorists, I argue that a "diasporic turn" has occurred within cinema that shapes contemporary film narratives and aesthetics. Although my use of the term "diaspora" is conceptual rather than geographical, in my thesis the African diaspora, historically constructed through the process of forced and voluntary migration, operates as a unit of analysis for exploring the "diasporic turn." Through the analysis of three films from the African diaspora, my thesis not only explores the postcolonial and diasporic issues with which the discourse of Third Cinema must reconcile in order to have contemporary relevance, but it also gestures towards a new discursive framework for characterizing contemporary African diasporic film practices.


Gelcasting is a new method for manufacturing advanced structural ceramics for use, for example, in the aerospace industry. The process involves a drying stage, where moisture, which constitutes approximately a quarter of the mass of the part, is removed in a commercial dryer. The control system design for the gelcast ceramic drying process is complicated by the requirement of minimizing the drying time while avoiding cracking during shrinkage of the part. The paper describes the application of Lyapunov theory for finding an exponentially stablizing controller for the nonlinear drying model. A RealSim/sup (T/)Rapid Prototyping model and the MATRIXx/sup (T)/ design automation environment are used for real time control, as well as feedback system implementation. It is shown that the proposed design and testing automation process with a user friendly interactive animation (IA) graphical user interface (GUI) provides an effective and efficient environment for real time control of the gelcast drying process.


This is a new translation of the most popular Christian tale of the Middle Ages, which finds its roots in the story of the Buddha. To prevent the prediction that his son will convert to Christianity, the pagan King Avenir confines him to the palace, only to know the pleasures of the world, and not illness, death or poverty. As the prince grows up, he wishes to leave, and encounters Barlaam, a hermit who teaches him Christian beliefs through a series of parables. Later, Josphat converts to Christianity and is accepted by his father who shares the government then also converts. Josphat later resigns as ruler and goes to live in the desert, joining his former teacher Barlaam. Barlaam's parables have been appropriated by some of the greatest writers of the Renaissance. References to them and selections appear in the medieval bestseller The Golden Legend, The Merchant of Venice, and in Marco Polo's Travels. Philologists eventually traced the name Josphat as a derivation from the Sanskrit term bodhisattva, the Buddhist term for the future Buddha. Gui de Cambrai was a cleric from Cambrai, in Northern France. Around 1190, he composed Le Vengement Alixandre, a continuation of the popular story of Alexander the Great, and around 1220-1225, he translated Barlaam and Josaphat from Latin into Old French verse. He is thought to have retired to a monastery at the end of his life. Peggy McCracken is Professor of French, Women's Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Her publications on medieval literature and culture include essays, books, edited collections, and, most recently, two co-authored volumes: Marie de France: A Critical Companion, with Sharon Kinoshita, and In Search of the Christian Buddha, with Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (introducer) is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan, in the Department of Asian Languages.


A robot is a mechanical hand and arm, controlled by a computer . It is nothing more than another type of machine. Its ancestry combines two different, but related, technologies: mechanisation and control. The history of the computer has been essential to both. The history of mechanisation began with Oliver Evans' automated mill (1784), continued with Joseph Jacquard's loom (1801), and reached a high state of perfection at the end of the nineteenth century with Steward Babbitt's designs for a motorised crane which had a mechanical gripper to remove ingots from furnaces (1892) . In the 1820s the technology of mechanisation cross-fertilised with the emerging science of information and control technology when the English mathematician, Charles Babbage, sometimes known as 'the father of the computer', developed an automatic calculator which he called his 'Difference Engine' (1823). Joseph Jacquard's loom proved to be the plateau from which all subsequent innovations in mechanisation and control took off . His invention was software, the novel idea that you could program a weaver's loom with punched cards that carried a coded 'model' of the patterns being woven. The Jacquard loom appeared in 1801, the last and most significant of a series of innovations in silk weaving which came out of Lyons from the early nineteenth century. It was so successful that by 1812 there were more than 11,000 in France alone. The punched card was a breakthrough in information technology: a Jacquard loom could carry as much as three megabytes of information on perforated paper . This technique of information storage became one of the fundamental components of the automatic memory calculators which gave birth to computers.


Containing over one hundred selections—most of them published in English for the first time— The Colombia Reader presents a rich and multilayered account of this complex nation from the colonial era to the present. The collection includes journalistic reports, songs, artwork, poetry, oral histories, government documents, and scholarship to illustrate the changing ways Colombians from all walks of life have made and understood their own history. Comprehensive in scope, it covers regional differences; religion, art, and culture; the urban/rural divide; patterns of racial, economic, and gender inequalities; the history of violence; and the transnational flows that have shaped the nation. The Colombia Reader expands readers' knowledge of Colombia beyond its reputation for violence, contrasting experiences of conflict with the stability and significance of cultural, intellectual, and economic life in this plural nation.


Study objectives: To examine the proportion of the recent decline in coronary heart disease (CHD) deaths in Ireland attributable to (a) "evidence based" medical and surgical treatments, and (b) changes in major cardiovascular risk factors. Design setting: IMPACT, a previously validated model, was used to combine and analyse data on the use and effectiveness of specific cardiology treatments and risk factor trends, stratified by age and sex. The main data sources were published trials and meta-analyses, official statistics, clinical audits, and observational studies. Results: Between 1985 and 2000, CHD mortality rates in Ireland fell by 47% in those aged 25–84. Some 43.6% of the observed decrease in mortality was attributed to treatment effects and 48.1% to favourable population risk factor trends; specifically declining smoking prevalence (25.6%), mean cholesterol concentrations (30.2%), and blood pressure levels (6.0%), but offset by increases in adverse population trends related to obesity, diabetes, and inactivity (−13.8%). Conclusions: The results emphasise the importance of a comprehensive strategy that maximises population coverage of effective treatments, and that actively promotes primary prevention, particularly tobacco control and a cardioprotective diet.


Semi-insulating (SI) InP has been industrially produced by doping Fe atoms as deep acceptors. Fe concentrations in InP are, however, largely varied from top to tail along the crystal growth axis due to impurity segregation. In the present work, we have examined the possibility of vapor-phase Fe doping for fabrication of 50- and 75-mm-diameter SI InP wafers with constant Fe concentrations using a wafer annealing procedure. A small amount of Fe was charged with red phosphorus in ampoules in which InP wafers were annealed. It was found that the vapor-phase doping is effective for Fe doping of InP. The present technology can be applied for the fabrication of low Fe-doped SI InP wafers with similar Fe concentrations of all wafers from one InP ingot.


This two-guide set for evaluators and others interested in evaluation grew out of a National Science Foundation funded effort to improve cross project evaluations. Guide 1, Designing a Cross-Project Evaluation, focuses on evaluation design including identification and operationalization of program goals, building of logic models, and selection of indicators and appropriate measures for these indicators. Guide 2, Collecting and Using Data in Cross-Project Evaluation, lays out multiple issues involved in data collection, strengths and weaknesses of different data collection formats, and methods for ensuring data quality, confidentiality, and the protection of human subjects.


Monitoring for species occupancy is often carried out at local scales, reflecting specific targets, available logistics, and funding. Problematically, conservation planning and management operate at broader scales and use information inventories with good scale coverage. Translating information between local and landscape scales is commonly treated in an ad hoc manner, but conservation decision-making can benefit from quantifying spatial-knowledge relationships. Fauna occupancy monitoring, in particular, suffers from this issue of scale, as there are many different survey methods employed for different purposes. Rather than ignoring how informative these methods are when predicting regional distributions, we describe a statistical approach that identifies survey combinations that provide the greatest additive value in mammal detection across different scales. We identified minimal sets of survey methods for 53 terrestrial mammal species across a large area in Australia (New South Wales (NSW), 800,000 km2) and for each of the 18 bioregions it encompasses. Utility of survey methods varied considerably at a landscape scale. Unplanned opportunistic sightings were the single largest source of species information (35%). The utility of other survey methods varied spatially; some were retained in minimal sets for many bioregions, while others were spatially restricted or unimportant. Predator scats, Elliot and pitfall trapping, spotlighting, and diurnal herpetofauna surveys were the most frequently included survey methods at a landscape scale. Use of our approach can guide identification of efficient combinations of survey methods, maximising detection and returns for monitoring. Findings and methodologies are easily transferable and are globally applicable across any taxa. They provide guidelines for managing scarce resources for regional monitoring programs, and improving regional strategic conservation planning.


Background In order to make inferences about strength related to development or treatment interventions, it is important to use measurement instruments that have sound clinimetric properties. Purpose The objective of this review is to systematically evaluate the level of evidence of the clinimetric properties of instruments for measuring upper extremity muscle strength at the "body functions & structures" level of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health for Children and Youth (ICF-CY) for children with cerebral palsy (CP). Data Sources A systematic search of the PubMed, EMBASE, OTseeker, CINAHL, PEDro, and MEDLINE databases up to November 2012 was performed. Study Selection Two independent raters identified and examined studies that reported the use of upper extremity strength measurement instruments and methods for children and adolescents with CP aged 0 to 18 years. Data Extraction The COSMIN (COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health status Measurement INstruments) checklist with 4-point rating scale was used by 2 independent raters to evaluate the methodological quality of the included studies. Best evidence synthesis was performed using COSMIN outcomes and the quality of the clinimetric properties. Data Synthesis Six different measurement instruments or methods were identified. Test-retest, interrater, and intrarater reliability were investigated. Two test-retest reliability studies were rated as "fair" for the level of evidence. All other studies were rated as "unknown" for the level of evidence. Limitations The paucity of literature describing clinimetric properties, especially other than reliability, of upper limb strength measurement instruments for children with CP was a limitation of the study. Conclusions For measuring grip strength, the Jamar dynamometer is recommended. For other muscle groups, handheld dynamometry is recommended. Manual muscle testing (MMT) can be used in case of limited (below MMT grade 4) wrist strength or for total upper limb muscle strength. Based on lacking information regarding other clinimetric properties, caution is advised regarding interpretation of the results.


Games are everywhere: Drivers manoeuvring in heavy traffic are playing a driving game. Bargain hunters bidding on eBay are playing an auctioning game. A firm negotiating next year's wage is playing a bargaining game. The opposing candidates in an election are playing a political game. The supermarket's price for corn flakes is decided by playing an economic game. Game theory is about how to play such games in a rational way. Even when the players have not thought everything out in advance, game theory often works for the same reason that mindless animals sometimes end up behaving very cleverly: evolutionary forces eliminate irrational play because it is unfit. Game theory has seen spectacular successes in evolutionary biology and economics, and is beginning to revolutionize other disciplines from psychology to political science. This Very Short Introduction introduces the fascinating world of game theory, showing how it can be understood without mathematical equations, and revealing that everything from how to play poker optimally to the sex ratio among bees can be understood by anyone willing to think seriously about the problem. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.


This thesis presents a study on built-in type low profile and low volume mobile phone antennas. In a coupling element based antenna, the chassis is the main radiator and the antenna elements are the exciters for the wave modes at low frequency. The main work of this thesis is to demonstrate and investigate the performance of the coupling element based antenna and study a variety of cases with different physical lengths and different physical heights. The investigation is done by using simulators. The performance is evaluated by analyzing the impedance bandwidth and the efficiency. For the study, antenna prototypes integrating miniaturized matching circuits were modeled. Two antenna structure prototypes covering five frequency bands were manufactured and measured. The Measured results are presented and compared with simulations. Finally, the performance of the coupling element based antenna is compared with planar inverter-F antenna (PIFA) and discussed.


The role of UN peacekeeping missions has expanded beyond the traditional tasks of peacekeeping to include a wide range of political, economic, and humanitarian activities. While such expansion indicates an improved understanding of the complexities and challenges of post-conflict contexts, it also raises questions about whether UN peacekeeping missions are equipped to handle peacebuilding tasks. Evidence from a study of the peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone suggests they are not. This article argues that peacekeeping missions are a poor choice for peacebuilding given their limited mandates, capacity, leverage, resources and duration. Peacekeepers should focus on peacekeeping, by which they can lay the foundation for peacebuilding. Peacebuilding should be the primary task of national governments and their populations.


Provides readers with the methods, algorithms, and means to perform text mining tasks This book is devoted to the fundamentals of text mining using Perl, an open-source programming tool that is freely available via the Internet (www.perl.org). It covers mining ideas from several perspectives--statistics, data mining, linguistics, and information retrieval--and provides readers with the means to successfully complete text mining tasks on their own. The book begins with an introduction to regular expressions, a text pattern methodology, and quantitative text summaries, all of which are fundamental tools of analyzing text. Then, it builds upon this foundation to explore: Probability and texts, including the bag-of-words model Information retrieval techniques such as the TF-IDF similarity measure Concordance lines and corpus linguistics Multivariate techniques such as correlation, principal components analysis, and clustering Perl modules, German, and permutation tests Each chapter is devoted to a single key topic, and the author carefully and thoughtfully introduces mathematical concepts as they arise, allowing readers to learn as they go without having to refer to additional books. The inclusion of numerous exercises and worked-out examples further complements the book's student-friendly format. Practical Text Mining with Perl is ideal as a textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses in text mining and as a reference for a variety of professionals who are interested in extracting information from text documents.


The following dissertation focuses on the effect of seasonal variation and sea walls on
beach erosion in Filey Bay, Yorkshire. The Yorkshire coast is one of the fastest eroding
in Europe, mainly due it its geology. This makes the management of sea defences
extremely important. Finding out if sea walls have an effect on erosion is also important
because sea defence is becoming more significant in coastal management due to sea level
rise and increasing storminess due to global warming.
The main type of research carried out on the beach in Filey was performed was beach
profiling. Profiles were taken in locations in front of, and away from a sea wall. They
were performed in summer, autumn and winter to cover as many seasons as possible.
Once data had been collected statistical analysis in the form of a T-Test was performed
on it to find out if the results were significant.
It was found, contrary to previous research that the sea wall reduced the amount of
erosion that occurred on the beach. It was also found that the sea wall had a significant
effect on the shape of the profiles produced. It was also found that considerably more
material was removed from the beach in winter than in summer and slightly more
material was removed in autumn than in summer. The results prove that there is a
seasonal variation in the amount of erosion that occurs on a beach but the data isn't
significant enough to prove that sea walls have an effect on erosion.