New physics searches are one of the main aims of the CERN Large Hadron Collider. In most cases this entails the study of small expected signals versus huge backgrounds. Therefore, theoretically precise predictions for collider observables are crucial for the analysis of any possible new physics signature. A major improvement in this enterprise can be achieved through the calculation of the Next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections for the process under scrutiny. Thus, in this thesis we focus on the quantitative and qualitative impact of the NLO effects on some important new physics signatures.
To do so we have resorted to the new, fully automized package MadGolem, to which this thesis has made major contributions. The following important LHC search channels are examined herewith: i) scalar color-octet pair production; ii) associated squark--neutralino production; and iii) the pair production of squarks and gluinos. In all these cases we observe important QCD effects which lead to sizable quantum corrections (K~1.3-2) and strongly suppressed theoretical uncertainties, which deplete from O(100%) at leading-order down to O(30%) at NLO. Moreover, we have shown the NLO distributions to be in good agreement with those obtained via multi-jet merging. Finally, we have carried out a comprehensive study on the implications of the usual simplifying assumptions taken in the literature and in current tools, e.g. squark mass degeneracy.


Objective: To compare long term outcome of highly active patients with anterior cruciate ligament ruptures treated operatively versus non-operatively. Design: We reviewed high level athletes with an anterior cruciate ligament rupture on either MRI or arthroscopic evaluation more than 10 years previously, who were treated conservatively. They were pair-matched with patients who had had an anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction with bone-patella-tendon-bone, with respect to age, gender and Tegner activity score before injury. Participants: In total 50 patients were pair-matched. Results: We found no statistical difference between the patients treated conservatively or operatively with respect to osteoarthritis or meniscal lesions of the knee, as well as activity level, objective and subjective functional outcome. The patients who were treated operatively had a significantly better stability of the knee at examination. Conclusion: We conclude that the instability repair using a bone-patella-tendon-bone anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction is a good knee stabilising operation. Both treatment options however show similar patient outcome at 10 year follow up.


PERFORMANCE-ROBUST DYNAMIC FEEDBACK CONTROL OF LIPSCHITZ NONLINEAR SYSTEMS W. Alexander Baker Jr. Marquette University, 2016 This dissertation addresses the dynamic control of nonlinear systems with finite energy noise in the state and measurement equations. Regional eigenvalue assignment (REA) is used to ensure that the state estimate error is driven to zero significantly faster than the state itself. Moreover, the controller is designed for the resulting closed loop system to achieve any one of a set of general performance criteria (GPC). The nonlinear model is assumed to have a Lipschitz nonlinearity both in the state and measurement equations. By using the norm bound of the nonlinearity, the controller is designed to be robust against all nonlinearities satisfying the norm-bound. A Luenberger-type nonlinear observer is used to estimate the system state, which is not directly measurable. The choice of the eigenvalue locations for the linear part of the system is based on the transient response specifications and the separation of the controller dynamics from the observer dynamics. Furthermore, the GPC are incorporated to achieve performance requirements such as H2, H∞, etc. The advantage of using GPC is it allows the designer flexibility in choosing a performance objective to tune the system. The design problem introduced in this dissertation uses various mathematical techniques to derive LMI conditions for the controller and observer design using REA, GPC, and the bounds on the Lipschitz nonlinearities. All work will be demonstrated in both continuousand discretetime. Illustrative examples in both time domains are given to demonstrate the proposed design procedure. Multiple numerical approaches are also presented and compared in simulations for ease of use, applicability, and conservatism.


Small, lighter-than-air (LTA) robotic airship platforms offer an alternative to the more common, rotor-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). LTA vehicles are attractive due to their inherent safety, mobility, low power consumption, and extended flight times, making them suitable for operation in populated indoor environments. This paper explores the use of shared control strategies for teleoperation of miniature indoor robotic airships, paired with an autonomous landing and charging system. The teleoperation scheme passes the operator inputs to the airship actuators in a standardized manner, allowing for simple integration with various control input devices. Specifically, this work employs three different devices with distinctive user input mechanics. The autonomous landing system relies on ArUco markers and an on-board camera for state estimation. The developed docking station relies on a magnet-based winch mechanism that catches and pulls the airship to the appropriate position for charging. Finally, the shared control teleoperation framework is validated through a series of experiments involving user-guided indoor exploration and autonomous landing, with promising results.


Paul in his Letters drew on conventions that would have been familiar to anyone receiving a rudimentary Greek education. The persona used at the end of Romans 1 to denounce the sinners in contemporary culture is based on the alazon or boastful man familiar from satire and the diatribe philosophical style of Bion, Seneca, and later Epictetus. The persona in Romans 7 who prays to be delivered from "this body of death" goes back to Greek tragedy and can be paralleled in the tragic tone of such poets as Ovid and Catullus. The beautiful hymn to love in I Corinthians 13 goes back to Socrates' speech in Plato's Symposium and also owes much to the pattern for an  encomium used  in Aristotle's Rhetoric and followed by Isocrates and Cicero. Paul's discussion of "the Married and Unmarried Man" in I Corinthians 7 and "The Weak Man' in Romans 14 are consistent with stereotypes introduced by Aristotle and Theophrastus and found on stage in comedies such as "The Bad Tempered Man." All these passages are based on cultural commonplaces that would have made Paul's arguments come alive to a Greek speaking audience.Warren S. Smith is a retired Professor of Classics at the University of New Mexico. Among his books is Satiric Advice on Women and Marriage from Plautus to Chaucer (Michigan, 2005). His articles on Apuleius and the New Testament have appeared before inAncient Narrative. His church service includes teaching stints in the Philippines and Kenya, and  weekly visits to a prison in Los Lunas, N.M.


The fate and transport of pharmaceuticals through soil and ground water is an important research topic because of their possible toxic environmental effects. Representative sites are often used for testing the probability of acompound to adsorb to the soil or spread within the groundwater. In this study, the Brisson Farm in North Carolina was selected as a representative site due to the recent disposal of multiple pharmaceuticals into the septic tank on the property and the lack of organic carbon in the soil. This research used batch experiments to calculate sorption coefficients for various pharmaceuticals that were disposed of on August 24, 2012. It is commonly thought thatorganic carbon content is the key factor in determining the fate of such chemicals. Data from this study provides evidence that soil minerals have a distinct role in the adsorption, fate, and transport of a medication. Results fromthe Brisson Farm were compared to other representative soils in the mountains of Western North Carolina and various soil components.


This thesis reports the measurement and applications of molecular axis alignment induced
by strong non-resonant linearly polarised laser fields. The spatial alignment of gas phase
molecules overcomes the loss of information that results from averaging angle-dependent
quantities over all the possible orientations of an isotropic sample. Therefore, laser-induced
molecular alignment techniques are an essential component in new experiments aimed at
measuring the structure of molecules with attosecond time resolution.
In the first part of this thesis an experiment to measure molecular axis alignment is described. This experiment is based on the velocity map imaging technique in conjunction
with time-resolved femtosecond laser Coulomb explosion of the molecular sample by an
intense circularly polarised laser beam. A circularly polarised beam is needed to ensure
a uniform detection efficiency for each possible orientation of the molecular axis in the
polarisation plane. However, such a polarisation produces ion distributions that are not
cylindrically symmetric, preventing the use of the standard Abel inversion technique to
retrieve the three-dimensional ion distributions from the detected two-dimensional images.
A new inversion algorithm is presented that allows the retrieval of molecular axis
distributions from angular distributions of ions without cylindrical symmetry.
The second part of the thesis focuses on the application of laser-induced molecular
alignment to retrieve molecular structure and dynamics from high-order harmonic generation
(HHG) experiments. HHG with a mid-infrared laser source (1300 nm) from aligned
molecular samples of CO2, N2, C2H2, and N2O are presented. The use of a laser source
with a wavelength longer than that used in previous experiments (800 nm) has increased
the amount of information obtainable from such experiments. These experiments have
provided insight into the hole dynamics of CO2 following ionisation, and reveal for the first time structural features in the HHG spectra of molecules with low ionisation potentials
such as C2H2.


Three dimensional beamforming (3D) (also elevation beamforming) is now gaining a growing interest among researchers in wireless communication. The reason can be attributed to its potential to enable a variety of strategies like sector or user specific elevation beamforming and cell-splitting. Since this technique cannot be directly supported by current LTE releases, the 3GPP is now working on defining the required technical specifications. In particular, a large effort is currently made to get accurate 3D channel models that support the elevation dimension. This step is necessary as it will evaluate the potential of 3D beamforming techniques to benefit from the richness of real channels. This work aims at presenting the ongoing 3GPP study item "Study on 3D-channel model for Elevation Beamforming and FD-MIMO studies for LTE", and positioning it with respect to previous standardization works.


A comprehensive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has important implications for both US-EU bilateral trade and the world trading system. If successful, it could strengthen transatlantic economic relations while also spurring trade reforms that could reinvigorate flagging multilateral trade negotiations. Both sides want the TTIP to be a big deal covering all major components of the commercial relationship. They can achieve the pact's ambitious agenda by (1) broadly aligning their respective trade pacts with South Korea and (2) deepening market access commitments covering both tariff and nontariff barriers to trade in goods, agriculture, and services. KORUS and KOREU FTA precedents are instructive but will need to be supplemented or adjusted in three areas if the TTIP is to succeed: intellectual property issues, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, and the environment. In several other areas KORUS-KOREU differences should be easier to bridge, including services, investment, government procurement, and competition policy.


In thinking about what I might say on the topic of civil liberties after 9/11, an idea that occurred to me was to give a snapshot of the Supreme Court's role in the perceived tug-of-war between national security and individual rights, arising out of the "war on terror." How has the Court responded to the government's positions? And in what ways has it attempted to strike the proper balance under the Constitution?The Supreme Court decisions are long and, at points, exceedingly technical. But I think there are a couple of themes we can pull out, and in doing so, frame a discussion about how best to manage this apparent tension between government's duty to make this country safe on the one hand, and its obligation to keep it as free as possible on the other.


Perceptually-tuned grayscale fonts are generated from character outline descriptions by applying to them a set of modifications specifically conceived for strengthening thin character parts, obtaining well-contrasted bars and preserving important relationships between character shape parts. The present study aims at comparing the legibility of perceptually-tuned grayscale and bilevel display fonts at small and very small sizes (6, 8 and 10 pt) The study confirms the results of previous studies indicating that reading speed is to a large extent independent of the typography (bilevel or grayscale) and the font size. However, perceptually-tuned grayscale characters perform better than bilevel characters for an italic string search task in a meaningless text. Regarding the subjective preferences of the test subjects, perceptually-tuned grayscale fonts at 8 and 10 point sizes received a superior rating than bilevel fonts at the same sizes.


The millipede Ommatoiulus moreletii (Lucas) is an introduced nuisance pest in Australia. A survey of the parasites of O. moreletii in its country of origin, Portugal, is reported, and the potential of two, a nematomorphan worm Gordius sp. (Nematomorpha:Gordiodae) and a muscoid fly Eginia sp. (Diptera:Eginiidae), as biological control agents for use in Australia are discussed. Gordius sp. parasitized a maximum of 28.7% of O. moreletii of stadium 9 and older in a Ulex densus-Quercus coccifera shrubland. Gordius sp. castrated its male hosts and inhibited the development of mature eggs in females. Eginia sp. parasitized a maximum of 32.3% of 0. moreletii of stadium 8 and older in a Pinus spp. woodland. The incidence of parasitism by Eginia sp. increased with the stadia1 age of O. moreletii. Ectoparasitic mites (Acari) and oxyurid nematodes (Nematoda) were common on and in O. moreletii but are unlikely to be useful as biological control agents.


A diagnosis of schizophrenia, as in most of psychiatric practice, is made largely by eliciting symptoms with reference to subjective, albeit operationalized, criteria. This diagnosis then provides some rationale for management. Objective diagnostic and therapeutic tests are much more desirable, provided they are reliably measured and interpreted. Definite advances have been made in our understanding of schizophrenia in recent decades, but there has been little consideration of how this information could be used in clinical practice. We review here the potential utility of the strongest and best replicated risk factors for and manifestations of schizophrenia within clinical, epidemiological, cognitive, blood biomarker and neuroimaging domains. We place particular emphasis on the sensitivity, specificity and predictive power of pathophysiological indices for making a diagnosis, establishing an early diagnosis or predicting treatment response in schizophrenia. We conclude that a number of measures currently available have the potential to increase the rigour of clinical assessments in schizophrenia. We propose that the time has come to more fully evaluate these and other well replicated abnormalities as objective potential diagnostic and prognostic guides, and to steer future clinical, therapeutic and nosological research in this direction.


This thesis is divided in two main parts. Part A is focusing on assessing the ability of structural – form framework to predict the spreads and the prices in two different market regimes before and during the credit crisis. In Part B a 2 – factor model with local volatility for oil market is developed.

For the first part three structural form models; Merton's (1974), Leland – Toft (1996) and Longstaff – Schwartz (1995); were implemented using different assumptions for volatility and debt maturity (i) exogenous volatility and actual bond maturity, (ii) exogenous volatility and adjusted maturity, (iii) model determined volatility and actual bond maturity and (iv) model determined volatility and adjusted maturity. To our knowledge it is the first time that the model is calibrated against such four alternatives. Another novel feature of our work is the usage of historical implied volatility was used for equity.

Results were in contrast with Lyden and Saraniti (2000) and Wei and Guo (1997) who argued that Merton's model dominates Longstaff and Schwartz in predictive accuracy as Longstaff and Schwartz model revealed a very good performance. The encouraging results during the first period (January 1998 - April 2006) led to a very critical element of this research – the implementation of the Longstaff and Schwartz (1995) model on 2007 – 2008 bond data. The assumption of simple capital structure is relaxed and a composite implied volatility is calculated. Again the model indicated very good performance in all cases proving an average predicted over actual credit spread ratio of 57%.

The second part of this research proposes a 2 – factor model with local volatility to price Oil Exotic Structures. The proposed approach utilizes the general multi – factor model framework and the interest ate modeling developments as described by Clewlow and Strickland (1999b) and Brigo and Mercurio (2006) respectively.

The model has the flexibility to generate different local volatility surfaces depending on the calibrated data. Moreover the model allows different correlation surface. The model is used to price a number of exotic structures – barrier options, Target Redemption Notes and European and Bermudan Swaptions – that are common in the oil market. Based on the results it is clear that being able to capture the smile dynamics is very important not only for valuation reasons but also for risk management purposes. The model can be calibrated directly and match market traded instruments such us swaptions and monthly strip options.


Electronic noses are being used in the processing industries and in fields such as environmental and occupational hygiene to detect a wide variety of problems from contaminated foods to toxic chemicals in soils. Recently, research has been conducted into the use of these devices for detecting spontaneous combustion in mines with the aim of producing a method for early detection of a developing heating. Gas samples were collected from both Simtars' 16 m 3 large-scale spontaneous combustion reactor and the University of Queensland's two-metre column. The samples were analysed using an electronic nose. GCMS and HPLC were used to identify some of the components present. A number of issues both from a practical mine situation and a scientific standpoint have been identified that need to be addressed before these devices can be used to detect a developing heating. Aluminised bags routinely used in the mining industry to collect gas samples for analysis of the permanent gases are not suitable for use with electronic nose devices as they have a 'fingerprint' from the polymer lining that interferes with the coal heating fingerprint. Tedlar bags used for environmental gas sampling are also unsuitable due to their fingerprint. Gas samples can be collected in glass gas bulbs with aluminium seals and successfully analysed. However the aluminium foil used to seal the bulbs is a restricted item in underground mines. It was also found that the volatile organic fingerprint of the coal heating was extremely weak at temperatures below 130°C. Before a useful application can be developed, further investigation into the chemical species present in the off-gases from Australian coals is required.


Sustainable energy, environmental protection, and global warming are the most discussed topics in today's world. Demand forecasting is paramount for the design of energy generation systems to meet the increasing energy demand. In this chapter, an examination of the causal nexus between energy consumption, total population, greenhouse gas emissions, and per capita GDP was carried out to forecast Zimbabwe's energy consumption by 2030. A time series data from 1980 to 2012 were employed alongside econometric techniques to explore the causal relationship among the variables under review. The stationary test revealed the integration of all the data series of interest of order one ~ I(1). The autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model forecasted Zimbabwe's 2030 energy demand around 0.183 quadrillion Btu as against the current 0.174 quadrillion Btu. The empirical finding is indicative for policy- and decision makers who design the energy policy framework geared towards achieving the universal access to modern energy technologies in Zimbabwe.


Extracted from text ... T"The traditional executive mould has been
shattered. Business is squeezing out the
conventional CEO who can produce only
'improved margins' and 'increased revenues'
and turns in 'excellent performance.'
"A new visionary individual is making
his mark, one not afraid to fail, a charismatic
personality who sweeps his team
with him, selecting talented people who
do not hesitate to challenge him."
At a recent presentation that forms part
of the Milpark Business School guest
speaker programme, group HR director of
Netcare, Italia Boninelli, who has a career
in human resources development, consulting
and executive coaching, said the executive
of the ..


I. INTRODUCTION The mass consolidation of the radio industry is a result of two recent developments: the enactment of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (Telecom Act)(1) and the use of the 1992 Merger Guidelines(2) by federal antitrust enforcement agencies. This Comment explores current merger policy and its effect on the radio industry to determine whether consolidation continues to serve the public interest. The unique characteristics of radio as a scarce spectrum and forum of public expression raise concern as to whether a traditional antitrust analysis provides sufficient guidelines for regulation. Although there are numerous factors acting on the radio industry and it may be too early to determine the outcome of the current merger treatment, this Comment primarily examines the merger analysis employed by the federal antitrust enforcement agencies. First, this Comment addresses the various roles of federal agencies in reviewing radio mergers and policy considerations underlying agency decisions. Second, this Comment examines economic and noneconomic factors of the 1992 Merger Guidelines used by the antitrust enforcement agencies. Third, this Comment discusses implications of the consolidation for the radio industry, including economic benefits and effects on diversity. Finally, in light of the fact that consolidation adversely effects the radio industry, this Comment notes forthcoming deregulation in the radio industry. Amidst the record-breaking wave of mergers that has taken place during the Clinton administration, federal agencies have been faced with the task of reviewing a staggering number of proposed mergers.(3) The underlying movement pushing deregulation forward is well expressed by Vice President Gore's statement regarding mergers in the communication industry: "Competition is always better than monopoly. But monopoly power must never be confused with competition. Two enemies of competition are monopoly power and unwise government regulation. We must remember, after all, that the goal we seek is real competition. Not the illusion of competition; not the distant prospect of competition.(4) In this line of thinking, Congress made a major overhaul of the regulation of the telecommunications market and the Telecom Act became law on February 8, 1996.(5) The Telecom Act's most significant effects in mass media occurred in the radio industry with the elimination of nationwide ownership restrictions and the liberalization of local ownership caps under sections 202(a) and 202(b)(1).(6) II. AGENCY REGULATION OF RADIO CONSOLIDATION A. Consolidation of the Radio Industry Beginning in 1985, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) relaxed radio ownership limits to increase competition and diversity in the radio industry.(7) These effects have been even more dramatic with the Telecom Act,(8) where the radio industry has experienced tremendous consolidation and the number of radio station owners has dropped significantly. The number of radio station owners has declined 11.7%; whereas the number of radio outlets has dropped 2.5%.(9) The decline in radio station owners is the result of a vast amount of trading.(10) In 1996 alone, 2066 radio station transactions were made, comprising about 20% of the total number of stations.(11) In 1996, $2.84 billion were spent in radio transactions and in 1997 another $2.46 billion were spent.(12) Although 1998 radio transactions have decreased, they continue to represent a healthy revenue of roughly $1.6 billion, a slight decrease from dollars spent in 1996 and 1997.(13) Three years after the Telecom Act, industry participants expect that the radio consolidation boom will shortly come to an end.(14) Others project that if consolidation continues it will involve mostly smaller markets.(15) In 1998, the market experienced an overall decrease in FM station transaction revenues; although there was a sixty-five percent increase in the sale of AM stations. …


Extracted from text ... GUIDELINES
4
Guidelines for the management of the overactive bladder
PR De Jong*, CF Heyns**
*MB ChB MMed (O&G) FCOG (SA) FRCOG. Department of Gynaecology, University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital
**MB ChB MMed (Urol) PhD FCSSA (Urol). Department of Urology, University of Stellenbosch and Tygerberg Hospital
INTRODUCTION
The unstable detrusor is one that is shown objectively to contract,
spontaneously or on provocation, during the filling phase while the
subject is attempting to inhibit micturition. Whilst the sufferer may
complain of symptoms including frequency, urgency, urge incontinence
(UI) and nocturia, the diagnosis should be established by a ..


Globalization has sparked renewed interest in the diffusion of ideas and norms across boundaries. Although much work has focused on diffusion at the macro-level and on the groups that transmit ideas, few researchers have studied the cognitive processes of political elites as they weigh the merits of various foreign-inspired models. Drawing on a series of original, in-depth interviews with Russian parliamentarians and high-ranking bureaucrats conducted in 1996, this paper makes two contributions to the study of individual-level borrowing in the Russian context. First, the openness of Russian elites to foreign borrowing is investigated; despite the public rhetoric about Russia's uniqueness, a substantial number of Russian elites are willing to borrow from foreign experience – particularly from models of European welfare capitalism. Second, three explanations of why policy-makers prefer to emulate some countries rather than others are tested – because they are similar to their own country either geographically, historically or culturally (comparability); because they have geostrategic prominence (prestige); or because they excel economically and/or politically (performance). Comparability and prestige are found to be of lesser importance than performance to Russian elites when considering the merits of various foreign models. Given that Russia closely approximates a most-likely case for validating explanations stressing comparability, this suggests that the array of foreign ideas that could become part and parcel of Russia's transition process is probably wider than is usually assumed. It also implies that, in general, the regional dimension of diffusion plays a smaller role than previously theorized.


Interactions between parasites and environmental factors have been implicated in the loss of managed Western honey bee (=HB, Apis mellifera) colonies. Although laboratory data suggest that cold temperature may limit the spread of Nosema ceranae, an invasive species and now ubiquitous endoparasite of Western HBs, the impact of weather conditions on the distribution of this microsporidian in the field is poorly understood. Here, we conducted a survey for Nosema spp. using 18 Swiss apiaries (four colonies per apiary) over a period of up to 18 months. Samples consisting of 60 workers were collected monthly from each colony to estimate Nosema spp. intensity, i.e., the number of spores in positive samples using microscopy. Ambient apiary temperature was measured daily to estimate the proportion of days enabling HB flight (>10 °C at midday). The results show that Nosema spp. intensities were negatively correlated with the proportion of days enabling HB flight, thereby suggesting a significant and unexpected positive impact of cold ambient temperature on intensities, probably via regulation of defecation opportunities for infected hosts.


With the development of pixelated liquid crystal displays, a new paradigm has emerged
in the field of optics. Essentially, these displays enable interfacing a computer program
with light, and therefore allow a wide range of light beams to be created. In this thesis,
I shall be using liquid crystal displays to create phase diffraction patterns and, in this
case, the displays are more commonly referred to as Spatial Light Modulators (SLMs).
One area where SLMs have shown particular promise is that of optical microscopy. Here,
they have been used in two different applications, namely holographic optical tweezers
and SLM microscopy; this thesis concerns both. The aim of the thesis is to explore and
develop new techniques combining SLMs with microscopy.
The first part of this thesis goes into results of the experiments I have carried out
in holographic optical tweezers. Hydrodynamic interactions play an important role in
many physical and biological processes. I present experimental evidence for the partial
synchronisation of the stochastic oscillations of two spheres in a bistable optical trap.
This experiment showed that, even in the absence of an external driving force, a degree
of synchronisation still exists due to the Brownian motion alone. I then describe a new
procedure to protect the optical trap from contamination in sensitive samples. Microrheology
using optical tweezers requires lengthy position measurements in order to obtain
the linear viscoelastic properties of
fluids and this measurement is often compromised
by freely diffusing material entering the trap. I then apply rotational Doppler velocimetry
to a particle spinning in an optical tweezers. This is the first time that structured
illumination has been used to determine rotation rate in the micro regime.
The second part describes the development of an SLM microscope and a series of
experiments I carried out with it. The set up of the microscope is described and images
are characterised in terms of the point spread function. I also demonstrate the multimodal
capabilities by diffracting three different images, each with a unique spatial frequency
filter, onto a single camera chip. Next, I report the development of some new frequency
filters, namely holographic stereo microscopy and three variations, including stereo with
defocus which mimics human binocular vision where we have two eyes (views) of the
world, each having its own lens. I used 3D particle tracking to investigate sedimentation
in a confined microscope sample. This experiment brought together SLM microscopy and
optical tweezers to create a new technique for particle sizing, or study surface effects.
This thesis describes several new applications of SLMs in microscopy, with the common
theme being that the SLM is placed in the Fourier plane of the sample. Both holographic
optical tweezers and SLM microscopy have been expanded by the techniques I have developed.
In future, this work will serve as foundation for the combination for 3D particle
tracking and visualisation with SLM microscopy, whilst microrheology will benefit from the new approaches.


Since the anthrax attacks of 2001 and the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2003, significant efforts have been made to develop and revise a range of legal tools designed to strengthen public health emergency responses. The 2009 H1N1 pandemic provided an unprecedented opportunity to implement and exercise many of these mechanisms. At the global level, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) pursuant to the revised International Health Regulations [IHR (2005)], and many governments declared national or regional emergencies. At the U.S. federal level, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) made public health emergency and Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act declarations. In addition, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) (to allow the emergency use of certain antiviral medications, diagnostic tests, and respirators during the pandemic), and President Obama declared a National Emergency (to authorize the use of temporary waivers or modifications of certain federal requirements related to health care facility responses). Select state and local governments also declared emergencies.


As we learn from Scott Carnicom's informative and thoughtful essay "Honors Education: Innovation or Conservation," the lead essay for this Forum, honors education, the brain child of Frank Aydelotte, was designed to "create a more individualized educational experience for gifted students that focused on the creation of knowledge more than its mere reproduction." From the beginning, honors programs and later colleges have drawn and continue to draw students we often identify as "the best and the brightest," and traditional measures bear out such a designation (for a general overview of honors students across and within colleges and universities, see Achterberg and Kaczvinsky; cf. Freyman for a prescriptive view of honors students). While we may agree that honors colleges and programs bring in gifted students, do these students alone deserve an education focused on the creation of knowledge rather than its reproduction? Shouldn't we aspire to this goal for all university and college students? If so, what role might honors colleges and programs have in furthering this lofty aim? Bell argues in general terms for the intervention of honors in undergraduate education, especially at large research institutions (cf. Braid [2009], who takes this idea further and offers suggestions about how honors education could be employed in K-12). In this essay, I would like to point out ways that honors already benefits all students and how it might expand its outreach to the rest of campus. HONORS STUDENTS Even when an honors curriculum fulfills all the general education requirements of an institution, as it does at the University of Oregon, honors students still take most of their courses outside of honors. one of the "Basic Characteristics of a Fully Developed Honors Program" is that "program requirements themselves should include a substantial portion of the participants' undergraduate work, usually in the vicinity of 20% to 25% of their total course work and certainly no less than 15%" (Spurrier 193), implying that honors students typically take at least 75% of their coursework outside of honors. The influence of honors education beyond the perimeters of a particular program is thus substantial as these bright students interact with their peers and teachers outside of honors. One of the defining features of honors education resides not so much in the stellar array of designer courses we offer as in the students themselves and the kinds of questions they pose. Smart, incisive, quirky, challenging questions coming from students with interests and expertise from across campus do not reproduce knowledge. Rather, they often critique and expose gaps in the basis of that knowledge and have the potential to lead us to new insights and directions of inquiry (for a useful study of the differences between honors and non-honors students, particularly in the area of "deep processing," see Carnicom and Clump). These talented young men and women bring their engaged and sometimes aggressive curiosity to non-honors classes within and outside of their departments, raising the intellectual stakes for all students; they ask questions that transform lectures and discussions into moments of uncertainty, ambiguity or wonder; and they have the potential to inspire or provoke other students to search for answers on their own. Honors students also meet with faculty to discuss social and political issues outside of class with greater frequency than non-honors students, as noted by Shushok, and thus model greater intellectual engagement as well as acumen. A critical impact of honors colleges and programs on home universities, then, resides in the students themselves who populate many non-honors courses and commit to departmental majors with all other undergraduates. Although this impact may be obvious to us, we often need to remind our colleagues, administrative and academic, of the fact that many of our most successful and dynamic students, those who often take leadership roles in class and on campus, choose our respective institutions because of honors. …


The regular principal components (PC) analysis of stochastic processes is extended to the so-called constrained principal components (CPC) problem. The CPC analysis involves extracting representative components which contain the most information about the original processes, The CPC solution has to be extracted from a given constraint subspace. Therefore, the CPC solution may be adopted to best recover the original signal and simultaneously avoid the undesirably noisy or redundant components. A technique for finding optimal CPC solutions via an orthogonal learning network (OLN) is proposed. The underlying numerical analysis for the theoretical proof of the convergency of OLN is discussed. The same numerical analysis provides a useful estimate of optimal learning rates leading to very fast convergence speed. Simulation and application examples are provided.<<ETX>>


This chapter presents some initial attempts at exploring digital technologies for examining Herodotus's Histories geospatially. The basis of this study was a digital copy of Herodotus's Histories from the Perseus classical library: Isaksen and Barker here discuss the process of data cleaning and aggregating the repurposed text, and sketch out the configuration of the geo-referenced database, which stores the spatial co-ordinates of all place-names, their precise references in the narrative, and their categorization (as settlements, physical features or territories). With such a database, some of the ways in which Herodotus's discursive model can be represented and explored visually are then demonstrated, using different kinds of web-mapping technologies, such as: (i) Geographical Information Systems (GIS), through which spatial concepts in the Histories can be queried and visualized; (ii) a KML 'Google Earth' layer that provides users with full English and Greek citations of references to locations in the Histories; and (iii) a narrative Timeline that shows locations appear and 'fade from memory' as the 'reader' moves along it. As well as discussing the advantages of and challenges posed by these varying visualizations,


This study examined the association between the free-time activities in which adolescents participate and their self-reported wellness. Free-time activities provide contexts for adolescents to experiment and develop their identity and interests (Coatsworth et al. 2006). The activity patterns established during the years of adolescence are often indicative of patterns that will continue into adulthood (Myers & Sweeney 2005). While numerous studies have examined the relationship between free-time activities and physical health relatively few studies have investigated the associations between the types of free-time activities and overall wellness. This study relied on The Perceived Wellness Survey as a guiding framework. Questionnaires were administered to preadolescents between the ages of 8-13 who were attending one of five summer camps located in Pitt County North Carolina. Activities were examined in terms of High Yield and Low Yield activities where High Yield included those that required active engagement and Low Yield were more passive activities. The Perceived Wellness Survey was administered. This yields scores for overall wellness as well as for six subscales which included psychological emotional social physical spiritual and intellectual dimensions. This study found no relationship between High Yield or Low Yield activities and overall wellness. However for this sample High Yield activities were associated with Social Wellness. Due to a number of methodological limitations that were encountered further research is recommended to better understand the relationship between various types of activities and outcomes of wellness.


The field of digital forensics has grown from an obscure area of interest amongst computer enthusiasts to become an emerging forensic scientific discipline of great significance in criminal investigations and civil litigations across the globe. The majority of digital forensic laboratories today are faced with ever-increasing legal and regulatory demands to meet internationally accepted rules regarding the admissibility of digital evidence, as well as being faced with various pending regulatory mandates requiring international accreditation of digital forensic facilities. These two major requirements, coupled with ever-increasing case backlogs and limited resources, have left many digital forensic labs to confront what initially seems to be an 'insurmountable challenge' to manage their caseloads, implement new regulatory requirements, and still find ways to improve overall efficiency and effectiveness. Based on the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) paradigms, the Digital Forensics - Comprehensive Capability Maturity Model (DF-C²M²) was born out of the findings of this research and the scientific gap that exists in the current digital forensics standards, best practices, frameworks, and models. This model has been developed through consultations and interviews with digital forensics experts. The DF-C²M² enables the measurement of maturity along three key organisational dimensions: people, processes, and tools, while enabling such an assessment to be tailored to a particular type of organisation, e.g., law enforcement or non-law enforcement. The inclusion of capability maturity across multiple key domains is designed to provide a more comprehensive capability maturity assessment of an organisation – across its three inter-dependants 'influencer' domains, when compared with other capability maturity models that focus on only specific domains such as processes, or on a sub-element of a domain. The model has been tested and evaluated as a management support and Capability Maturity Assessment system within two labs. One of the labs is an ISO 17025 accredited digital forensic lab within a law enforcement agency, while the other one is a non-accredited lab within an academic institute. The model will also serve as a stepping stone towards a timelier, more effective, and more efficient means of developing and implementing digital forensic standards and best practices moving forward. In summary, the DF-C²M² was designed to address the cited challenges by creating a modular management decision support framework to enable labs to better manage and achieve their objectives through a system of assessments and planning tools all geared towards measuring compliance and Capability Maturity across multiple domains.


The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History. By Richard W. Pfaff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xxviii + 593 pp. $124.00 (cloth); $96.00 (Adobe eBook). There is no comprehensive historical study of Christian worship in medieval Europe. In fact, it seems that until the present work by Richard Pfaff, there has been no comprehensive historical study of Christian worship in any substantial region of medieval Europe. We now have this large, complex, and difficult work, which, nonetheless, is incredibly valuable for a broad spectrum of readers. Pfaff, an emeritus professor of history at the University of North Carolina, has focused on the books, feasts, and saints of England from the time of Bede until the Reformation, and The Liturgy in Medieval England is the result ofthat lifetime of study. In the first half of the work, Pfaff takes a primarily chronological approach to exploring the Eucharist and the daily office from just before the Norman Conquest until the differentiation of regional rites in the thirteenth century. This examination is organized by monastic and secular movements in liturgy as well as by time. The second half is a detailed history of the use of Salisbury, and of the smaller regional uses of Exeter, York, Hereford, and London. In addition, Pfaff surveys the monastic liturgies engendered by the regularizations of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, including Augustinian, Benedictine, Cistercian, Carmelite, Dominican, and Franciscan. Excurses on sources, comparisons of texts, ascriptions of books to churches, and books from women's liturgical houses round out the study, and would be valuable if each were expanded into a book by itself. Shoehorning this huge amount of material into (a mere) 600 pages requires a single-minded, even draconian, focus on sources. PfafFs work might more accurately bear the subtitle A Codicology rather than A History. He chooses to exclude, in the main, three crucially important sources for a history from this study: music (it requires a substantially different set of tools and expertise), art and architecture (for the same reasons), and secondary reflection on the performed worship life expressed in theology and spiritual writings (because of the hermeneutical challenges). The Liturgy in Medieval England is mus three interlocking studies: a survey of the changes in the formal cult of the saints and the texts underlying that cult (itself the core of PfafFs own research); a study of rubrical and canonical changes throughout English liturgy; and most completely, an expanded catalogue raisonne of English liturgical manuscripts (but without any facsimiles, which Pfaff notes, would not significandy increase the reader's understanding unless they were provided in full). …


The importance of non-cognitive skills in determining long-term human capital and labor market outcomes is widely acknowledged, but relatively little is known about how non-cognitive skills may shape educational investments by parents early in life. This paper evaluates the parental response to variation in non-cognitive skills among their children in rural Gansu province, China, employing a household xed eects specication. The results suggest that on average, parents invest no more in terms of educational expenditure in children who have better non-cognitive skills relative to their siblings. However, there is signicant heterogeneity with respect to maternal education; less educated mothers appear to reinforce dierences in non-cognitive skills between their children, while more educated mothers compensate for these dierences. The evidence is consistent with this pattern corresponding to greater bargaining power for more educated mothers and dierent preferences for compensation among more educated women. In addition, there is evidence that these compensatory investments lead to catch-up in non-cognitive skills over time for children of more educated mothers.


Abstract The aim was to explore how young riders experience the riding school. By analysing focus groups interviews, a picture emerged showing that young riders' main motive for participating at riding schools was the social aspects. Riding schools could be characterized through an institutional perspective in which the young riders became internalized and socialized into a stable culture. The young riders identified with the norms and values of the riding instructors through master–apprentice learning. In addition, the results revealed a change in the stable culture since the instructors encouraged social interactions and participation in the community that became central to learning and development. Opportunities to influence and interact were important for the individuals and from a child's rights perspective. Through participation in the community of practice at riding schools, young riders not only learn about riding and horse management but also develop important personal social skills.


In 2009, Brown gave a set of conditions which when satisfied imply that a Feynman integral evaluates to a multiple zeta value. One of these conditions is called reducibility, which loosely says there is an order of integration for the Feynman integral for which Brown's techniques will succeed. Reducibility can be abstracted away from the Feynman integral to just being a condition on two polynomials, the first and second Symanzik polynomials. These polynomials can be defined from graphs, and thus reducibility is a property of graphs. We prove that for a fixed number of external momenta and no masses, reducibility is graph minor closed, correcting the previously claimed proofs of this fact. A computational study of reducibility was undertaken by Bogner and L\"{u}ders who found that for graphs with $4$-on-shell momenta and no masses, $K_{4}$ with momenta on each vertex is a forbidden minor. We add to this and find that when we restrict to graphs with four on-shell external momenta the following graphs are forbidden minors: $K_{4}$ with momenta on each vertex, $W_{4}$ with external momenta on the rim vertices, $K_{2,4}$ with external momenta on the large side of the bipartition, and one other graph. We do not expect that these minors characterize reducibility, so instead we give structural characterizations of the graphs not containing subsets of these minors. We characterize graphs not containing a rooted $K_{4}$ or rooted $W_{4}$ minor, graphs not containing rooted $K_{4}$ or rooted $W_{4}$ or rooted $K_{2,4}$ minors, and also a characterization of graphs not containing all of the known forbidden minors. Some comments are made on graphs not containing $K_{3,4}$, $K_{6}$ or a graph related to Wagner's graph as a minor.


The rapid growing of the wide urban residential areas imposes the expansion as well as the modernization of the existing water supply facilities. Along with this one more problem is identified in the water supply channels, some people use ½ HP to 1 HP pump to suck the water directly from the channel of their home street. Process automation system based upon utilization of an industrial PLC and PC systems including all the network components represents the best way to improve the water distribution technological process. The water theft can be best monitored by the flow variations given by the flow sensors mounted on the channels. The system includes Remote Terminal Units - RTU, specific transducers and actuators distributed on a wide geographical area and control and power panels for the pump stations. The reliable instrumentation connected to PLC or RTU assure real time monitoring of the main technological para meters of large water distribution networks. The data acquired of SCADA system (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) represent the support for optimization of the process and data- driven Decision Support System. The system uses HMI implemented on PC to ensure the process supervision and remote control functions based on OPC technologies and wireless communication components for WAN data transfer. The complete SCADA system for water distribution enable the user to get a high operation safety of the network, a cost effective use of equipment, energy efficiency and optimize the daily operation and maintenance procedures.


The production of serum protein (SP) and micellar casein (CN) from skim milk can be accomplished using microfiltration (MF). There are potential commercial applications for both the SP and micellar CN. Our 1 st objective was to demonstrate the impact of: skim milk composition, heat treatment of skim milk, concentration factor (CF) and diafiltration factor (DF), control of CF and DF, and SP rejection of membrane on the performance of a MF system designed to process skim milk and separate CN from SP. A mathematical model of a skim milk MF process was developed and used to predict the effect of the 5 factors on retentate and permeate composition, SP removal, and micellar CN concentrate (MCC) and milk SP isolate (MSPI) yield for a 3 stage process. When skim milk TP increased from 3.2 to 3.8%, the yield of MCC and MSPI increased by 19% and 18%, respectively. Increased heat treatment (72.9 to 85.2 o C) of skim milk caused CN as a percentage of TP in skim milk as measured by Kjeldahl analysis to increase from 81.97 to 85.94% and the yield of MSPI to decrease 22%, while the 3 rd stage cumulative SP removal decreased from 96.96 to 70.08%. A CF and DF of 2X gave a 3 rd stage retentate TP concentration of 5.38% compared to 13.13% for a CF and DF of 5X. Variation in control of the balance between CF and DF (unequal CF and DF) caused either an increase or decrease in TP concentration in the retentate across stages depending if CF was greater than DF (increasing TP in retentate) or CF was less than DF (decreasing TP in retentate). An increased rejection of SP by the membrane from a SP removal factor of 1 to 0.6 caused a reduction in MSPI yield by 17%, 3 rd stage cumulative SP removal decreased from 96.96 to 79.74%. Within the ranges of the 5 factors studied, the TP content of the 3 rd stage retentate was strongly impacted by the target CF and DF and variation in skim milk composition. Cumulative SP removal was strongly impacted by the heat treatment of skim milk, SP removal factor, and target CF and DF. The MCC and MSPI yield was most strongly impacted by initial skim milk composition. MSPI yield was also impacted by the heat treatment of milk and SP removal factor. Our 2 nd research objective was to determine the efficiency of SP removal for a 3X continuous feed and bleed uniform transmembrane pressure (UTP) system with 0.1 μm ceramic membranes, when processing pasteurized skim milk at 50 o C with two stages of water diafiltration (for a total of 3 stages). For each of 4 replicates about 1100kg of skim milk was pasteurized (72 o C, 16s) and processed at 3X through the UTP MF system. Retentate from stage 1 was diluted with reverse osmosis water back to a 1X concentration and again processed through the MF system (stage 2) to a 3X concentration. The retentate from stage 2 was diluted with reverse osmosis water back to a 1X concentration, before running through the MF system at 3X for a total of 3 stages. Theoretically, from the 1 st part of our research a 3-stage 3X MF process could remove 97% of the SP from skim milk. The total SP removal in this experiment was 98.27 ± 2.25%, when SP removal was calculated using the mass of SP removed in the permeate of each stage.


Collusion between business communities and the state can lead to a measure of security for those in power, but this kind of interaction often limits new development. In Syria, state-business involvement through informal networks has contributed to an erratic economy. With unique access to private businessmen and select state officials during a critical period of transition, this book examines Syria's political economy from 1970 to 2005 to explain the nation's pattern of state intervention and prolonged economic stagnation. As state income from oil sales and aid declined, collusion was a bid for political security by an embattled regime. To achieve a modicum of economic growth, the Syrian regime would develop ties with select members of the business community, reserving the right to reverse their inclusion in the future. Haddad ultimately reveals that this practice paved the way for forms of economic agency that maintained the security of the regime but diminished the development potential of the state and the private sector.


ABSTRACT When the United Nations (UN) Security Council needs to authorize a peace enforcement operation in Africa, its partner of choice is the African Union (AU). Africa has developed significant peace operations capacity over the past decade. In addition to deploying eight AU operations, Africa now contributes 50% of all UN peacekeepers. African stability operations, like its mission in Somalia, are often described as peace enforcement operations. In this article, I question whether it is accurate to categorize African stability operations as peace enforcement? I answer the question by considering what the criteria are that are used to differentiate between peace enforcement and peacekeeping operations in the UN context. I then use the peace enforcement criteria to assess whether AU stabilization operations would qualify as peace enforcement operations. In conclusion, I consider the implications of the findings for the strategic partnership between the AU and the UN.


Birth registration, the official recording of a child's birth by a government agency, is one of the most important events in a child's life. Birth registration establishes the existence of the child under law and provides the foundation for ensuring many of the child's rights. Although birth registration alone does not guarantee that a child will have access to adequate health care, receive an education, or be free from abuse or exploitation, its absence leaves a child at greater risk of a range of human rights violations. Despite the importance of birth registration, according to UNICEF, approximately 50 million newborn babies are not registered each year, accounting for over 40 percent of the children born annually. This short article examines the right to birth registration and the implications of birth registration for the child's civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.


In many countries, users acquire private tanks to reduce their vulnerability to water scarcity. In such conditions, water managers often apply intermittent distribution in order to reduce the water volumes supplied to the users. This practice modifies the hydraulic behaviour of the network and determines competition among users that need to collect enough water resource for their uses. Intermittent distribution is thus responsible for the inequality that can occur among users: those located in advantaged positions of the network are able to obtain water resources soon after the service period begins, while others have to wait much longer, after the network is full. This paper analyses the inequalities that take part when intermittent distribution is applied in water scarcity scenarios. Considering the complexity of the process, the analysis was performed by means of an unsteady numerical model. The model was applied to a real case study which provided interesting insights into the network filling process, helping to highlight the advantaged and disadvantaged areas of the network in different water scarcity scenarios.


The objective of this Teaching Fellowship research project was to provide digital resources for students that could potentially enhance graduate attributes. This study was conducted during one semester and concentrated on one aspect of graduate attributes which was presentation skills. A video was scripted, shot and edited that demonstrated a rather inept presenter making a poor presentation. This video was then used in a Communications module specifically during the sessions that focussed on presentation skills. Background data on the participants' experience of formal presentations was gathered to provide a snapshot of their level of previous experience. The video was used to provoke discussion and engagement from the students. Following the lectures the students were canvassed for feedback. The video successfully provoked an awareness of the requirements in making a formal presentation and is now available as a digital resource. It is recommended that further research be carried out to determine the efficacy of utilising videos in the classroom to improve learning.


Background   Boosting the population growth of towns and cities across regional Australia has long been a popular aspiration. However, the reality of many regional locations is long-term population decline.
Aims   Regional development has been underpinned by a growth paradigm which conflates population growth with success. This article explores how some regional communities have experienced renewal, fostered innovation, and enhanced community wellbeing without population growth.
Data and methods  A mixed methods approach informs this paper. Five case studies are used to illustrate ways in which regional communities can experience successful economic and social outcomes without population growth. Literature is provided for context and empirical data are used to illustrate key features of the selected towns.
Results   The case studies reveal themes of connection, place, agency and wellbeing which contribute to 'successful' communities. For example, developing connections with a wider network within the region or across sectors enables economic growth through innovation, irrespective of population growth.
Conclusions   Being able to respond to, or take advantage of, change is an important element in regional development and one which creates community renewal and wellbeing even if not population growth.


Web pages often contain clutter (such as ads, unnecessary images and extraneous links) around the body of an article, which distracts a user from actual content. Automatic extraction of "useful and relevant" content from web pages has many applications, including browsing on small cell phone and PDA screens, speech rendering for the visually impaired, and reducing noise for information retrieval systems. Prior work has led to the development of Crunch, a framework which employs various heuristics in the form of filters and filter settings for content extraction. Crunch allows users to tune these settings, essentially the thresholds for applying each filter. However, in order to reduce human involvement in selecting these heuristic settings, we have extended this work to utilize a website's classification, defined by its genre and physical layout. In particular, Crunch would then obtain the settings for a previously unknown website by automatically classifying it as sufficiently similar to a cluster of known websites with previously adjusted settings - which in practice produces better content extraction results than a single one-size-fits-all set of setting defaults. In this paper, we present our approach to clustering a large corpus of websites by their genre, utilizing the snippets generated by sending the website's domain name to search engines as well as the website's own text. We find that exploiting these snippets not only increased the frequency of function words that directly assist in detecting the genre of a website, but also allow for easier clustering of websites. We use existing techniques like Manhattan distance measure and Hierarchical clustering, with some modifications, to pre-classify websites into genres. Our clustering method does not require prior knowledge of the set of genres that websites fit into, but instead discovers these relationships among websites. Subsequently, we are able to classify newly encountered websites in linear-time, and then apply the corresponding filter settings, with no noticeable delay introduced for the content-extracting web proxy.


Locally linear embedding is an effective nonlinear dimensionality reduction method for exploring the intrinsic characteristics of high dimensional data. This paper proposes a new manifold learning method, which is based on locally linear embedding and growing neural gas and is termed growing locally linear embedding (GLLE). GLLE overcomes the major limitations of the original locally linear embedding, which are intrinsic dimensionality estimation, selection of the number of nearest neighbors, and computational complexity. By embedding the topology learning mechanism in growing neural gas, the proposed GLLE algorithm preserves global topological structures and geometric characteristics of input patterns, which makes the projections more stable. The performed theoretical analysis and experimental simulations show that GLLE results in a faster learning procedure and a lower reconstruction error, which widens the applicability of manifold learning.


An infiltrative nature on ultrasound images is a significant feature of malignant breast lesion. Characterizing the infiltrative nature with highly efficacious and computationally inexpensive features is crucial for computer-aided diagnosis. The local variance can be characterized by a few high octave energies in the 1-D discrete periodized wavelet transform (DPWT). For the realization of high octave energy extraction, a non-recursive DPWT called 1-D RRO-NRDPWT and a segment accumulation algorithm (SAA) are applied. The 1-D RRO-NRDPWT is used to solve the word-length-growth (WLG) problem existing in high octave decomposition. The SAA is used to overcome the filter-tap-growth (FTG) effect existing in the 1-D NRDPWT. Incorporating these two strategies, a SAA-based VLSI architecture is presented for high octave decomposition. The influence of the finite precision process on feature efficacy is also analyzed for hardware efficiency improvement. Hardware simulation shows that with 7-bit filter coefficient representation, the core size of the octave energy feature (D6E5) extractor is about 335.295*335.295 μm2 where the wavelet transformation will take about 54.87% and 2.875 mW.


Access control represents an important part of security in software systems, since access control policies determine which users of a software system have access to what objects and operations and under what constraints. One can view access control models as providing the basis for access control rules. Further, an access control policy can be seen as a combination of one or more rules, and one or more policies can be combined into a set of access control policies that control access to an entire system. The rules and resulting policies can be combined in many different ways, and the combination of rules and policies are included in policy languages. Approaches to access control (AC) policy languages, such as XACML, do not provide a formal representation for specifying ruleand policy-combining algorithms or for classifying and verifying properties of AC policies. In addition, there is no connection between the rules that form a policy and the general access control and business models on which those rules are based. Some authors propose formal representations for ruleand policy-combining algorithms. However, the proposed models are not expressive enough to represent formally classes of algorithms related to history of policy outcomes including ordered-permit-overrides, ordered-deny-overrides, and only-one-applicable. In fact, they are not able to express formally any algorithm that involves history including the class related to consensus such as weak-consensus, weak-majority, strong-consensus, strong-majority, and super-majoritypermit. In addition, some other authors propose a formal representation but do not present an approach and automated support for the formal verification of any classes of combining algorithms. The work presented in this thesis provides a uniform formal approach to business and access control models, policies and their combinations. The research involves a new formal representation for access control rules, policies, and their combination and supports formal verification. In addition, the approach explicitly connects the rules to the underlying access control model. Specifically, the approach • provides a common representation for systematically describing and integrating business processes, access control models, their rules and policies, • expresses access control rules using an underlying access control model based on an existing augmented business modeling notation, • can express and verify formally all known policyand rule-combining algorithms, a result not seen in the literature,


The benefits of country diversification are well-established. This article shows that the same benefits extend to equity factors, such as value, size, momentum, investment, and profitability. Specifically, country factor portfolios reflect both common variation, which we define as the global factor, and local variation. On average, a US investor could enjoy a 30% reduction in portfolio volatility by investing globally. We also document three other properties of equity factors. Like major asset classes, diversification benefits may not been uniform across regions, and factor portfolios of different countries tend to be more correlated during bear stock markets. However, unlike asset classes, the correlations of factor portfolios across countries have not been increasing over the last two decades, making global equity factors particularly desirable additions to a portfolio.


Loud music. Pornography. Burning shit to the ground. These are a few of Hesher's favorite things. And they are what Hesher (Joseph Gordon Levitt) brings into the lives of TJ (Devin Brochu) and his father, Paul (Rainn Wilson) when he takes up residence in their garage uninvited. Grief-stricken by the loss of TJ's mother in a car accident, Paul can't muster the strength to evict the strange squatter, and soon the long-haired, tattooed Hesher becomes a fixture in the household. Like a force of nature, Hesher's anarchy shakes the family out of their grief and helps them embrace life once more.


Since the discovery of nitric oxide as an endothelium-derived relaxing factor in 1987, investigations on its precise modes of action have been carried out at an extraordinary rate. Nitric oxide is now implicated in many physiological and pathological processes — not just in the control of vascular resistance, but in nerve transmission, cell proliferation, inflammatory responses and so on.Despite such rapid progress, no attempt has been made to combine the current knowledge of this subject matter in a single textbook. This volume has been written with the above in mind and presents a topical, comprehensive overview of the biochemistry and the physiological and pathophysiological effects of nitric oxide as they relate to the cardiovascular system. The therapeutic implications of nitric oxide are also considered. The text comprises contributions from many of the leading international authorities on the topic including Professor L J Ignarro, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.


Over two years have passed since the University of Denver Sturm College of Law's Homeless Advocacy Policy Project released its report, Too High a Price, detailing the tremendous expenditures Colorado cities make in an effort to criminalize homelessness. As Colorado housing costs continue to skyrocket, its homeless epidemic has grown as well. Unfortunately, state actors continue to write, pass, and enforce ordinances that criminalize some of our most basic, life-sustaining activities. Laws such as camping, sitting or lying in public, begging, and loitering disproportionately target behaviors associated with homelessness, leaving one of the state's most vulnerable populations living in fear.
As a follow-up to Too High a Price, this Report details the increased efforts to criminalize homelessness in the state of Colorado. Through an examination of three of Colorado's most prominent cities, Denver, Boulder, and Colorado Springs, this Report highlights the stark rise in enforcement of anti-homeless laws, and the disproportionate and inhumane impact they have on the day-to-day lives of people experiencing homelessness.
In the process of examining Colorado's ever-increasing criminalization of homelessness, we found that law enforcement frequently issues "move-on" orders to remove visible poverty from its city streets. A move-on order, also referred to as a police "street check," is a law enforcement technique used to further enforce certain ordinances, including camping bans. In lieu of issuing a citation or making an arrest, officers are directed to instruct homeless individuals, upon contact, to pack up their belongings and "move on" to somewhere else.
At first glance, these move-on orders may seem like a viable alternative to outright issuing citations. However, with the extreme decline in affordable housing and the lack of emergency shelter space to accommodate Colorado's growing homeless population, these move-on orders leave homeless people with nowhere to go. Instead, they are merely pushed from one place to the next.
To analyze the trends of criminalization of homelessness, we utilized Open Records Requests to obtain data detailing the enforcement of anti-homeless laws in Colorado Springs, Denver, and Boulder. This data revealed that Colorado cities have increased enforcement more than we anticipated. Furthermore, we researched the adverse effects move-on orders have on homeless populations. Based on this research and data, we came to the following conclusions:
• The overall number of anti-homelessness ordinances has increased. Between Denver, Colorado Springs, and Boulder, there are at least thirty-seven ordinances that criminalize behaviors associated with people experiencing homelessness. Since Too High a Price was first released, Colorado Springs has added one new anti-homeless ordinance and Denver Law students found four additional ordinances in Denver.
• Colorado Springs and Boulder have increased the number of citations issued under camping bans. In 2017, Boulder issued 376 citations under its camping ban ordinance. Of those 376 citations, an incredible 81.9% were issued to homeless individuals. Additionally, Colorado Springs increased its enforcement of its two camping bans by a staggering 545% over the span of three years.
• Denver's use of move-on orders has skyrocketed at an alarming rate. In 2016 alone, Denver law enforcement made contact with over 5,000 people in move-on encounters. Denver police increased its contact with homeless individuals through the use of street checks by 475% in the span of three years.
• The number of emergency shelter beds cannot accommodate Colorado's homeless population. In all three cities we surveyed, none provide enough beds to meet the needs of its homeless populations. In Colorado Springs, the number of year-round shelter space can only accommodate 38% of El Paso County's homeless population. Boulder has even fewer resources, with only enough beds for roughly 25% of its homeless population. Denver doesn't fare better, with the 2017 Point-in-Time count indicating that on a given night, nearly 1,000 homeless people sleep on the streets.
• Move-on orders have overwhelming collateral consequences on homeless populations. The use of move-on orders has grave consequences on people experiencing homeless, including: pushing people to dangerous areas, pushing people farther away from vital resources, and causing adverse health effects. As homeless people are forced into the shadows, extremely harmful consequences usually follow. Beyond the lack of shelter space and affordable housing, and how criminalization makes homelessness harder to escape, the larger issue is this: why are we so uncomfortable with facing homelessness? Our parks are for everyone. Our streets are for public use. Our free speech rights allow for all citizens to ask for what they may need. We should not view visible poverty as something to be avoided at all costs—especially if that cost results in further degradation and ostracism.
Despite some city officials acknowledging that issuing citations does nothing to solve the homeless crisis, our research reveals that city actors continue to criminalize homelessness. This Report concludes by offering suggested changes for Colorado cities moving forward. First, only through stopping the criminalization efforts will we begin to alleviate the vicious cycle of homelessness in Colorado. Colorado cities should repeal camping bans that merely criminalize the human necessity to sleep and rest, provide new resources to homeless populations such as twenty-four-hour restrooms, and invest in education efforts that promote the dignity of people in poverty. Trying to make homelessness invisible does nothing more than make homelessness inevitable.


Background: The fourth Millennium Development Goal (MDG) aims at reducing childhood deaths in the developing world by 2015.
Objective: To examine the pattern of childhood deaths in a Nigerian tertiary hospital which serves at least three states of the federation between 1996 and 2005?
 Method: A retrospective study of paediatric deaths between January 1996 and December 2005. Subjects admitted in the pre-MDG period were compared with those admitted in the MDG period.
Results: Out of 10,451 paediatric admissions, 1320 (12.6%) died but only 1225 were studied. The male-to-female ratio was 1.4:1. Although the yearly mortality rate ranged from 10.7% to 14.9%, however the overall mortality rate for the pre-MDG period was similar to that obtained during the MDG-period (p = 0.135) Most deaths (69.1%) occurred within 48 hours of hospitalization. Of the 1225 mortalities, 57.3% were neonates. These neonatal deaths were commonly due to prematurity (34.6%), perinatal asphyxia (30.8%) and septicaemia (24.8%) while severe anaemia was the most common cause of death among infants (20.1%) and toddlers (25.1%). Severe malaria, severe anaemia and tetanus formed 33.3% of all the deaths among children older than 5 years.

There was no significant difference in the role of prematurity (p = 0.298) and measles (p = 0.927) as causes of death before and during the MDG. HIV/AIDS (p = 0.046) became commoner as a result of the HIV pandemic while severe malaria (p = 0.041) became less common as causes of death during the same period.
Conclusion: Childhood mortality rate remained high over the ten-year period studied. The causes of the deaths were mostly infectious and other preventable conditions. The utilization of specific target-oriented interventions IMCI and primary health care may reduce the childhood deaths before 2015.


This article is motivated in part by the need to respond to the classical peacebuilding dilemma of 'conflict relapse'. It finds that international peacebuilding efforts rely overwhelmingly on person and position-based leadership perspectives, which provide mixed results at best. It argues that a process-based approach to leadership, rather than one that narrowly focuses only on particular personalities or individuals in formal positions of authority, offers a potential for peaceful solutions that are the product of interaction between those offering peace ideas and the whole of the affected society in response to their common situation. The paper thus proposes a framework for analysis and action in pursuit of sustainable peace. Questions that go to the heart of efforts to study and navigate a path to stable peace in a given situation should be systematically framed to take the following five things into account: the predominant situation; the degree of mutuality; the domains and societal levels in which emergent leadership is occurring to build a shared response to the situation; the quality of the leadership process – how influence is being exchanged between leaders and followers across domains and levels; and the degree of leadership effectiveness and movement toward peace or a return to conflict. This provides opportunities for peacemakers to pursue an inclusive, all-encompassing peace that can be sustained, not least because it concentrates attention on mutually held goals by people of the target society and their leaders.


BACKGROUND
The aim of the study was to determine the incidence of parasitic liver cysts.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
In 1996-2000 at the Department of Infectious Diseases parasitic liver cysts were diagnosed in 31 patients. The diagnosis was based on imaging examinations (ultrasound, computerised tomography), serological reactions (ELISA, IHA) and histopathological investigation of the specimens obtained through fine-needle aspiration biopsy.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSION
The latter followed the pre-treatment with antiparasitic drug and no significant complications were observed. On the basis of the criteria developed by our team (evident, highly probable and probable diagnosis), hydatid disease of the liver was diagnosed in 8 patients (25.8%). The remaining subjects, excluding one patient who underwent surgical treatment, received repeated treatment with imidazole derivatives (Zentel or Vermox).


Two-view structure-from-motion (SfM) is the cornerstone of 3D reconstruction and visual SLAM. Existing deep learning-based approaches formulate the problem by either recovering absolute pose scales from two consecutive frames or predicting a depth map from a single image, both of which are ill-posed problems. In contrast, we propose to revisit the problem of deep two-view SfM by leveraging the well-posedness of the classic pipeline. Our method consists of 1) an optical flow estimation network that predicts dense correspondences between two frames; 2) a normalized pose estimation module that computes relative camera poses from the 2D optical flow correspondences, and 3) a scale-invariant depth estimation network that leverages epipolar geometry to reduce the search space, refine the dense correspondences, and estimate relative depth maps. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms all state-of-the-art two-view SfM methods by a clear margin on KITTI depth, KITTI VO, MVS, Scenes11, and SUN3D datasets in both relative pose and depth estimation.


The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) substantially limited the ability of individuals to deduct state and local taxes (SALT) on their federal income tax returns. Some states are advancing schemes to allow taxpayers a state tax credit for contributions to a charity controlled by the state. The issue is whether state tax benefits are deductible as a charitable contribution for purposes of the federal income tax. Under a general rule of prior law — the full deduction rule — state tax benefits were ignored for purposes of the charitable deduction. If the full deduction rule is applied to the state workaround schemes, then the SALT limitation can successfully be avoided. This Article explains that after the TCJA, the legal basis for the full deduction rule is undermined. The IRS articulated the full deduction rule given the longstanding baseline of deductible state tax payments. Thus, to allow a charitable deduction for state tax benefits under prior law was simply to allow a deduction for an otherwise deductible expense. After the TCJA, this symmetry with the SALT deduction is gone and the full deduction rule is of questionable applicability. A charitable deduction for state tax benefits would allow taxpayers to deduct amounts not spent and even to profit from charitable transfers. The charitable deduction is intended to encourage giving, not tax avoidance. Thus, the Treasury Department and the courts should apply a longstanding principle of charitable contribution law that measures a contribution by the amount of taxpayer sacrifice. After the TCJA, a contribution should be reduced by the value of state tax benefits, whether the benefits take the form of a credit or a deduction. The reasoning applies both to state workaround credits (and deductions) and to existing state tax benefits that previously have been deducted as charitable. Further, denying a charitable deduction for previously deductible expenses is in fact consistent with the status quo prior to the TCJA, in that, given the loss of a SALT deduction, the charitable deduction was an offset that did not provide a meaningful benefit to taxpayers.


The increasing inclusion of exceptions in newly concluded investment treaties, together with the divergent manner in which tribunals and annulment committees have approached these provisions, suggests that a greater understanding of their role and purpose is needed. In particular, the question whether exceptions operate as permissions or as defenses is a crucial but unaddressed issue that has significant implications for both litigation and practice and, in turn, implications for the stability of the regime. This paper argues that as a starting point, exceptions should be understood as permissions that limit the scope of the substantive treaty obligations, and not as defenses invoked to justify prima facie unlawful conduct. Understanding exceptions as permissions has several advantages, including the avoidance of double-counting a government's motivation for its conduct or, more problematically, failing to take regulatory purpose into account when determining whether a government has complied with the treaty's substantive obligations. Understanding exceptions as permissions sends signals to adjudicators in relation to issues such as the appropriate standard of review. The paper also explores the desirability of including exceptions in treaties in light of recent innovations that clarify the substantive content of investment obligations. Although the uncertain analytic character of existing exceptions risks constraining rather than preserving regulatory space, hey may be an important failsafe in light of current institutional arrangements for investor-state dispute settlement, which effectively preclude review for error of law. The paper concludes that the relationship between standards of investment protection and exceptions needs further consideration, and suggests that states negotiating investment treaties ought to take a step back and more holistically consider the aims of the regime and the role of exceptions therein.


"Paradosis and Survival" presents Diskin Clay's fifteen essays devoted to recovering the three main phases of Epicureanism in antiquity: the origin in the first generation of the school in Athens; its spread to Italy in the first century b.c.e.; and its movement to Lycia in the second century c.e. Clay recognizes the subtle intertwining of philosophy and lifestyle, and he makes use of papyri and inscriptions as well as familiar philosophical texts to illuminate both.The first series of essays concentrates on the mechanisms Epicurus devised to assure the survival of the philosophy beyond its Athenian roots. Clay presents social history on an equal footing with doctrine, and offers for the first time evidence for hero cults among philosophers who believed that the soul died with the body. The second set of essays concentrates Epicureanism in the age of Cicero, Philodemus, and Lucretius. In the four essays on "De Rerum Natura," Lucretius is viewed not as a transparency through which we can view the Greek of Epicurus, but a Roman philosopher in control of both doctrine and rhetoric. The book concludes with the study of the philosophy in Oenoanda, Lycia, in which the author brilliantly situates post-1968 discoveries from Oenoanda and the Villa de Papiri in Herculaneum in the context of the second-century mountain city.This study of Epicureanism as a social movement will be of interest to students of ancient philosophy and the philosophy of early modern Europe, when Epicureanism was revived. In addition, scholars of the New Testament will find parallels to the rise and spread of Christianity.Diskin Clay is the R. J. R. Nabisco Distinguished Professor of Classical Studies, Duke University.


The urban traffic state is a self-organized behavior constrained by the road network structure. This study proposed an empirical approach to explain the relationship between the urban traffic state and road network structure from a spatial perspective, which was verified by real link travel speeds derived from floating car data in a typical urban road network. The characteristics of the road network structure were investigated with five quantitative indicators: hierarchy, adjacency, accessibility, efficiency, and density. A regression-kriging model was introduced to explain changes in the traffic state by incorporating the road network structure and the spatial variance caused by the significant spatial characteristics of the state of urban traffic. The model was applied to two designed typical scenarios. The results demonstrated that the model sensitively captured the change of traffic state caused by local changes in the road network structure at historical periods of city development. The process can provide robust initial values for model-driven transportation planning and is useful in practical decision making.


In this paper we describe FIASCO, a location based street game that is played both on a website and on the city streets. In the current technology landscape, data is readily accessed via an array of devices and across a variety of locations. There are many resulting design opportunities, but location based computing poses challenges. With FIASCO, the authors propose game design as a research tool to explore new approaches to computing in public space. Engaging with place, promoting self expression through physical action, and reinterpreting mapping conventions are the driving goals towards an understanding of 'situated computing.' In using a pervasive gaming model FIASCO creates a support mechanism for these exploratory activities, while bringing the challenges inherent to designing for online/offline experience to the forefront.


A new three-year NASA field expedition gets underway this year that will use advanced instruments on airplanes and in the water to survey more of the world's coral reefs in far greater detail than has ever been assessed before. The COral Reef Airborne Laboratory (CORAL) will measure the condition of these threatened ecosystems and create a unique d


Knowledge has become the most valuable resource of the new era and the resource of the future. The intention of this study is to improve knowledge about the problem of migration of educated people from Serbia from the perspective of scholarship holders who, after being abroad, returned to their country. The aim of this research is to show the profile of the scholarship holders of post-academic and post-graduate students, who studied abroad and then returned to Serbia. Their motives for departure and return, as well as their perception of integration into the work environment in Serbia and utilization of their knowledge is presented. Methods: For the purpose of this research a questionnaire was constructed which was distributed online. Collected data were analysed using statistical tools. Results: This research has shown that the primary motive for education abroad is the desire for personal development. It has also been shown that an important factor for the return of students from abroad is their expectation of comparative advantage in the labour market and their belief of getting a desired job. Apart from this, it is shown that the scholarship holders only partially used the acquired knowledge and thus, do not have enough influence in the development of their organizations.Conclusion: The main research contribution is reflected in the improvement of the knowledge about the motivation of scholars to return from developed countries and highlighted problems which scholarship holders have after returning.Implications and research limitation: the results obtained can be generalised to countries that are passing or have recently moved a transition, and are similar in cultural characteristics.  The present contains certain limitations that must be taken into account while interpreting final results. The most significant constraint is the sample size, but the obtained results, especially the motives of the scientific experts for a return to the country, are extremely important and can be considered the starting basis for further research.


Weaving a memoir of her Italian American family through three generations with an analysis of Pietro Di Donato's Christ in Concrete and Richard Gambino's Blood of My Blood, the author studies the conflicting values of the old and new worlds experienced by the third generation. Attitudes about family, work and education are examined to show how they shaped the lives of Italian-American immigrants and the generations that followed.


This paper considers existing coping strategies in times of climate variability and proposes long term strategies for dealing with future projected climate change and variability. A qualitative strategy assessment methodology is proposed and tested for climate conditions in the Northern Cape. The analysis of the results suggests that dry sanitation, education projects and tariff structures are identified as being the most useful strategies. Key factors which were perceived to inhibit the implementation of appropriate drought adaptation strategies are the lack of local capacity and the low financial resource base to cover the capital and running costs of most of the strategies. With the likelihood of increased future rainfall variability, it is important that planners and decision-makers take into account the effects of climate change and variability on water resources. In so doing, they need to adopt sustainable water supply and demand solutions for the longer term.


This research study aimed at investigating the understanding the rural youth have about sexuality and sexual relationships. The study begins with the literature review related to youth sexuality and sexual relationships. The main focus of the research was to gather information regarding the understanding the youth have on sexuality and sexual relationships, their sources of information, and level of comfort with the topic. An exploratory research design guided the study. A systematic random sampling procedure was used to identify twenty youth from grade ten at Zithokozise high school in the Dududu area. Three focus group discussions were conducted with the group followed by a questionnaire, which was administered to individual participants in a group setting. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to in analysing the results from which conclusions were drawn. The findings of the study revealed that rural youth were not well informed on their sexuality and had misconceptions about sexual relationships. The youth that were sexually active were mostly not using safe sex methods. The popular informants of youth on sexuality issues were their own peers who also had inadequate information on the issues. The role of parents and educators in providing information to the youth was minimal and inadequate. Health facilities were not always available and if available were not adequately utilized. Resulting from the findings of the study a youth sexuality manual for rural schools was designed. The facilitators from the Departments of Community Health and Social Work from the University of Natal piloted the manual in the same schools that were involved in the community development projects.


The growing phenomenon of private tutoring has received minimal scholarly attention in the United States. We use 20 years of geocoded data on the universe of U.S. private tutoring centers to estimate the size and growth of this industry and to identify predictors of tutoring center locations. We document four important facts. First, from 1997-2016, the number of private tutoring centers grew steadily and rapidly, more than tripling from about 3,000 to nearly 10,000. Second, the number and growth of private tutoring centers is heavily concentrated in geographic areas with high income and parental education. Nearly half of tutoring centers are in areas in the top quintile of income. Third, even conditional on income and parental education, private tutoring centers tend to locate in areas with many immigrant and Asian-American families, suggesting important differences by nationality and ethnicity in demand for such services. Fourth, we see little evidence that prevalence of private tutoring centers is related to the structure of K-12 school markets, including the prevalence of private schools and charter or magnet school options. The rapid rise in high-income families' demand for this form of private educational investment mimics phenomena observed in other spheres of education and family life, with potentially important implications for inequality in student outcomes.  Corresponding author: Harvard Graduate School of Education, 13 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138 (email@example.com).