This study examined the factors affecting student dropouts in an online certificate program. In this research, a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was used. Online Course Dropout Survey was developed and used to determine which factors affect student attrition from the program. The dropout survey was sent by e-mail to 98 students who had dropped the program. Twenty-six students returned the survey. The findings show that the most important factor affecting student retention is finding sufficient time to study. Having personal problems and affordability of the program took second and third place.


Undoped and Ti-doped ZnO (TZO) films were deposited by atomic layer deposition (ALD). Titanium was introduced by alternating consecutive ZnO cycles between each TiO2 single layer (Ti nominal concentration of 2%). The electrical, optical, morphological, and structural properties of the films (less than 80 nm thick) were tested as a function of the deposition temperature (from 120 to 240 °C). The TZO films deposited at 200 °C showed the lowest resistivity: 3.0 × 10−3 Ω cm. All the resulting TZO films were highly transparent, with an absorbance in the visible range of less than 3%. Thanks to an accurate investigation through transmission electron microscopy we ruled out the well-assessed explanation of an extrinsic doping mechanism of transparent conductive oxide (TCO), suggesting an alternative mechanism. These results demonstrate that the ALD is a promising technique to grow thin TZO films with remarkable electrical and optical properties.


This article presents discussion suggesting that healing from complex trauma, including the intergenerational transmission of trauma, not only requires holistic treatment, but also training and educational resources for healthcare professionals to better facilitate healing. The training program is based on the mentoring process held in many Indigenous traditions throughout British Columbia, where one learns methods and theories through life experience. Tracing the contributing factors of trauma as it relates to colonisation and Indigenous wellbeing, this paper offers discussions for the necessity of reconceptualising the concept of trauma and its relationship with expressions of cyclical violence and compensatory behaviours to avoid reality, including sexual violence and substance use, respectively.  This reconceptualisation of trauma, founded on ancestral teachings of a unity of heart, mind, and culture; draws on strengths of Western science while grounding itself in common Indigenous ancestral wisdom, informed an experimental curriculum entitled Healing Complex Trauma 1: Finding the Internal Language that served as both treatment and training module for 16 Indigenous (and two non-Indigenous) health and wellness service providers for Indigenous populations.  The curriculum was developed by Dr Vickers in consultation with the Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute and Dr Bessel van der Kolk, and was delivered in Tk'emlups territory British Columbia, Canada from May 28th—June 29th, 2018.  The program found success through three distinctly hybrid treatment and educational streams, including a) the neurobiology of trauma, Beginner levels I, II, and III from the Somatic Experiencing (SE) Training Institute; b) group therapy for personal processing and experiential learning of SE methodologies; c) integration through art therapy and qi gong movement.  The program was grounded on common cultural values and principles of respect and unity. One participant, an Indian Residential School Survivor, fluent in his Indigenous language and on faculty at an Indigenous training Institute remarked: "this program will always work." It is recommended that locations throughout the world experiencing high rates of trauma-related violence and compensatory behaviours, including sexual violence and substance use, integrate and promote curriculums that underline this aforementioned connection, including its deep colonial roots and intergenerational nature.


Kidney transplantation in patients with end stage renal disease is preferred to dialysis because transplantation provides a better quality of life and improved survival. However, the gap between the supply and demand for a renal allograft is widening and the waiting time is increasing. Iranian protocol, a controlled transplant program supported by the government for living unrelated donors, was initiated for solving the problem of organ shortage. Although this system might experience challenges, clearly it has advantages over other organ procurement systems primarily that thousands in need do not die while waiting for a compatible donor. In the present review I discuss the history of renal transplantation in Iran, "Iranian model" protocol, the situation of Iran's kidney transplantation from either living or deceased donors compared with the Middle East countries, and our experiences of unrelated renal transplantation. Iran J Med Sci 2010; 35(1): 1-8.


ANCESTRAL ANALYSIS OF THE FRENCH COLONIAL MORAN CEMETERY BILOXI, MISSISSIPPI by Danielle Nicole Cook December 2011 The Moran site (22HR511) in Biloxi, Mississippi, dates from 1719 to 1723 and is the earliest known French Colonial cemetery in the United States. Historical records suggest that those interred likely represent immigrants from Western Europe as well as Africa who were relocated in an effort to colonize the Louisiana Territory. Given the variety of cultural backgrounds at the site, an ancestral analysis of the 25 individuals uncovered has been conducted. Traditional markers such as cranial and tooth morphology and metrics, and enamel composition, were evaluated in all individuals, and DNA was analyzed in five. Stable isotope levels were also assessed to reconstruct diet. The sample consists of two infants, 21 males and three female adults aged 18 to 45. Results support that most individuals are of European ancestry with strong consensus among those markers employed. Cranial morphology and osteometrics did suggest the presence of two Africans and one possible African. One of these individuals was found with a rosary; the only grave good recovered which leads to the conclusion that slaves were more than likely being converted to Christianity. Thus, data gained from osteological observations, more recently developed analytical techniques, and presence of variant mortuary practices suggest that this French Colonial site exhibited a complex composition of ancestral backgrounds instead of a highly segregated population.


This paper documents the integration of microsimulation tools for direct taxation, indirect taxation, and social benefits in the context of the European tax and benefit simulator, EUROMOD. Integration has been developed in parallel for two countries: Belgium and Germany. The paper at hand documents the process and presents simulation results for the case of Belgium. An integrated database underlying EUROMOD that contains householdlevel information on income and consumption is generated. Consumption micro data from the 2009 cross section of the household budget survey for Belgium is used to impute information on spending for durable and non-durable commodities into EU-SILC data, applying regression-based imputation techniques. Engel curves are estimated at the household level for total non-durable spending, expenditures on durable goods, as well as non-durable expenditure share equations. The imputed household spending is then used to simulate the baseline VAT system in EUROMOD, for which we report an incidence analysis. Finally, several arbitrary policy reforms implementing VAT rate uniformity are analyzed with respect to their distributional impact.


Background The aim of the study was to explore the implementation of school based diet and physical activity interventions with respect to the barriers and facilitators to adoption, implementation and sustainability; supportive actions required for implementation and recommendations to overcome identified barriers. Two interventions rolled out nationally in Ireland were chosen; Food Dudes, a programme to encourage primary school children to consume more fruit and vegetables and an Active Travel to School Programme in primary and secondary schools. Trained school coordinators (teachers) cascade the programmes to other teaching staff. Methods Multiple case study design using qualitative semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders: primary and secondary school teachers, school coordinators, project coordinators/managers, funders and intermediaries. Fifteen interviews were conducted. Data were coded using a common categorization matrix. Thematic analysis was undertaken using the Adoption, Implementation and Maintenance elements of the RE-AIM implementation framework. Results Good working relationships within and across government departments, intermediaries and schools were critical for intervention adoption, successful implementation and sustainability. Organisational and leadership ability of coordinators was essential. Provision of participation incentives acted as motivators to engage children's interest. A deep understanding of the lives of the target children was an important contextual factor. The importance of adaptation without compromising core components in enhancing intervention sustainability emerged. Successful implementation was hindered by: funding insecurity, school timetable constraints, broad rather than specific intervention core components, and lack of agreement on conduct of programme evaluation. Supportive actions for maintenance included ongoing political support, secure funding and pre-existing healthy lifestyle policies. Conclusion Successful implementation and scale up of public health anti-obesity interventions in schools is dependent on contextual factors, engagement and leadership at multiple levels and secure funding. Recommendations to overcome barriers include: capacity to deliver within an already overcrowded curriculum and clear specification of intervention components within a conceptual framework to facilitate evaluation. Our findings are generalisable across different contexts and are highly relevant to those involved in the development or adaptation, organisation or execution of national public health interventions; policy makers, guidelines developers, and staff involved in local organisation and delivery.


Intracranial hemorrhage is bleeding within the skull cavity (cranium) that usually progresses rapidly and often results in permanent brain damage and death. The incidence of intra cranial hemorrhage in infants is rare. Here we are presenting a rare case of intracranial hemorrhage in which infant developed fever, seizures, vomiting after 45 days of immunization. A 2 months old male infant was brought to the pediatric casualty with chief complaints of 6 episodes of seizures for one night, fever for last 4 days and vomiting immediately after breast feeding since 2 days. Baby was apparently normal before the baby was brought for immunization (DT, OPV), the baby developed the above complaints after the immunization. In the past there were also similar complaints at time of birth. Baby was on anticonvulsant drug, phenobarbital, since seizure occurrence was found with the help of electroencephalogram. The CT scan report have showed, left front to back subdural hygroma with left frontal, temporal, parietal intracranial hemorrhage (ICH). There was a shift in the midline, which was toward right side of the brain with the association of inter hemispherical bleed along hygroma. Treatment was initiated with anticonvulsant, phenobarbital, antibiotics cefotaxime and amikacin and antipyretic paracetamol and loop diuretic, furosemide, was also administered with peripheral vasodilator and cerebral activator, nimodipine. We conclude that (1) In all difficult deliveries, the baby should be screened for intracranial hemorrhage by doing neurosonogram (2) early recognition of intra cranial hemorrhage is of paramount importance for initiating appropriate management to prevent complications and (3) early diagnosis and prompt therapy will lead to complete recovery.


The recovery of Fourier phases from measurements of the bispectrum occupies a vital role in many astronomical speckle imaging schemes. In arecent paper [J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 7, 14 (1990)] it was suggested that a least-squares solution to this problem must fail if the bispectrum phase is known only modulo 2π. Here an alternative nonlinear least-squares algorithm is presented that differs from the linear method discussed in the aforementioned paper and that permits the fitting of Fourier phases directly to modulo 2π measurements of the bispectrum phase, thus eliminating any need for phase unwrapping. Numerical simulations of this method confirm that it is reliable and robust in the presence of noise and verify its enhanced performance when compared with a linear least-squares method that includes the unwrapping of the bispectral phase before Fourier phase retrieval.


To rebuild gender relations in the church we need to unpack the source of the current complementarian beliefs, which take their origin in the teachings of the church fathers. In this interpretative paper, I will attempt to provide a new reading of St. Augustine's philosophy regarding women in light of The Trinity and City of God. It is my argument that Augustine has a twofold vision of the Imago Dei in humans. One based on the rational "inner man" —in which women do not participate— and another based on shared humanity. In this view women retain their own and independent part in the image of God and have their own unique and necessary role in earthly affairs. I further compare gender relation to Augustine's vision of relation between celibacy and married life, as one focuses towards the spiritual, the other towards temporal. Both are equally good in God's eyes, for both are based on calling and necessity. One is, however, the preferred option and appointed for leadership over the other.


The number of forms of interference microscope which have been described is growing yearly, and this paper presents an analysis of the various types in terms of the qualities desirable in an interference microscope.Three classes are recognized based on the manner in which the reference field differs from the image field. several instruments in each class are discussed, and it is concluded that, so far, the design of interference microscopes is of the nature of a compromise, some qualities being sacrificed in order to obtain others.A current example of such a compromise is described, where accuracy of path difference measurement is the desired end.


Breast cancer is the most frequent cancer among women especially in the Western world where, despite improved survival, it is one of the leading causes of death (1). Furthermore, for several decades there has been an increase in incidence, though recently there seems to be a stabilization in risk or even a small decline in typical high-risk areas such as Europe and the USA but at the same time a steep increase in typical low-risk societies such as Japan (2).

Breast cancer is often regarded as a singular disease, but recent discoveries are pointing to a variety of types of potentially different etiology. Thus, the female breast undergoes substantial changes beginning from the time in the fetus and throughout life, especially in response to hormonal changes during puberty, pregnancy, lactation and menopause. Consequently, breast tumors are often characterized by at least the status of, for example, menopause and by functional hormonal receptors, such as estrogen receptor positive (ER+) or estrogen receptor negative (ER-) (3).

The causes of breast cancer have been explored during many decades, and especially sex hormones play a pivotal role in the most established risk factors such as early menarche, late menopause, nulliparity, late first pregnancy, oral contraceptives, and hormone replacement therapy. Overall, however, these and other established risk factors for breast cancer explain only a minor fraction of the diseases (4). Non-hormonal avenues of potential risk factors for breast cancer have also been pursued. Recently, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified shiftwork that involves circadian disruption as a probable cause for human breast cancer, and the evidence for this association is mounting (5). Further, even exposure to ill-timed light-at-night beyond night work, ie, social jetlag and living in highly lit urban areas, may be associated with breast cancer (6).

It has recently been suggested that exposure to ambient noise may also be involved in breast cancer risk. Noise is defined as unwanted and unpleasant sounds, and apparently evolution has programmed humans and animals to be aware of high sounds as possible sources of danger. Thus, traffic noise from aircrafts, cars, railways and trains are relatively new environmental pollutants, which have expanded after World War II and are now widespread especially in urban areas and around airports. It is well documented that loud noise can cause hearing loss. It is also well known that nocturnal noise disturbs both the length and quality of sleep (7). The evidence supporting the long-term non-auditorial effects from noise, however, remains to be established (8).

In 2005 Visser et al (9) first reported on noise exposure and cancer incidence, including breast cancer, in an ecological study of people living around Schiphol international airport in The Netherlands. The estimated relative risk of breast cancer was close to unity when compared to the reference population of The Netherlands. Two similar studies of residents near the airport of Cologne-Bonn and residents in Bremen exposed to noise from road traffic, railroads, and aircrafts found increased risk of breast cancer in the subgroup with the highest estimated aircraft noise levels, although only adjusted for age and socioeconomic status (10, 11). A Danish cohort of post-menopausal woman, adjusted for most potential confounders, observed no overall breast cancer risk for either noise from road traffic or railways (12). In secondary analyses of the relatively rare ER- breast cancer, exposure to both residential road traffic and railway noise was elevated, including a linear dose–response relationship (12). Based on the same cohort, no association between road traffic noise and either overall mortality or breast-cancer-specific mortality was found in the 1759 breast cancer cases (13).

In this issues of the Journal, Hegewald et al (14) reports on breast cancer risk among women aged ≥40 years, thus both pre- and postmenopausal women, in relation to exposure to aircraft, road and railway noise among residents near Frankfurt international airport in Germany. In contrast to the study from Denmark, only exposure to aircraft noise was clearly increased, whereas exposure to noise from road traffic and railways was not. Aircraft noise was also assessed in the Danish study, but the results were not reported separately. Interestingly, the increased breast cancer risk was only present for the ER- subgroup in both the German and the Danish studies. Whether this is random remains to be explored in future studies.

The shorter sleep among persons who are exposed to nocturnal noise has been suggested to be implicated in the link between noise and breast cancer risk. There is, however, no consistent elevated risk for breast cancer observed among women with short sleep duration. Thus, a recent meta-analysis based on seven studies estimated a relative risk of breast cancer close to unity (15), and same tendency is seen for hormone-related cancers, including breast cancer and cancer in general in another meta-analysis (16). Also the most recent meta-analysis by Erren et al (17) confirms no association between "poor sleep" and breast cancer risk (17). Finally, no association between sleep duration and breast cancer prognosis has been found among breast cancer survivors (18). Interestingly, Wang et al (19) observed a significantly increased risk for breast cancer primarily among Chinese premenopausal women who slept ≤6 hours per day, but this observation was only seen in the subgroup of night shift-workers and not for women with short sleep duration who had never done night shift-work (19). This indicates that mechanisms primarily related to night work and menopausal status, rather than short sleep duration in general may be involved in the observed increased breast cancer risk. Therefore, it is suggested that future studies on noise and cancer adjust for exposure to night shiftwork and menopausal status.

Melatonin is a strong antioxidant and may also have other oncostatic effects (20), and marginally decreased melatonin levels are observed among women during night shift work (21). Low melatonin due to decreased sleep among people exposed to nocturnal noise exposure has been suggested as a potential mechanism for breast cancer (12), but this effect may be minimal, if at all, because decreased melatonin is caused by ill-timed light exposure and not by short sleep duration or noise. Further, melatonin has anti-estrogenic effects and inhibits the proliferation of ER+ breast cancer cells, which is why it should be expected that primarily this subtype of breast cancer should be elevated, thus in contrast to the observations in the Danish and recent German studies. Further, it has recently been indicated that short sleep duration has no effect on circadian disruption, which is suggested as a main pathway between nightwork and breast cancer (22). Stress may also follow noise exposure and has also been suggested as a risk factor for breast cancer, but perceived stress and low levels of estrogens have been associated with decreased breast cancer risk in Denmark (23).

Environmental air pollution – including exposure to polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), which may be correlated with traffic noise (24) – has also been suggested as a risk factor for breast cancer (25), though the association is not clear (26). Regardless, attempts to adjust for this obvious potential confounder should also be included in future studies on noise and cancer.
Investigation of noise and breast cancer is at an early phase. There are only few studies, including somewhat inconsistent results both regarding type of noise exposure and breast cancer subtypes, and results have not been adjusted for the potential effect of exposure to traffic exhaust or light-at-night. Moreover, proposed biological mechanisms, such as short sleep or low levels of melatonin are not supported by epidemiologic results for breast cancer. Therefore, the current evidence for noise exposure and breast cancer appears inadequate. However, because exposure to ambient traffic noise is widespread and breast cancer is a frequent disease, new well-designed studies on this issue, including better adjustment for potential confounders, should be considered.


Sustainable forest management (SFM) has become one of major environmental debates for the international community. This is because of the multifunctional importance of forest resources for the entire planet, namely ecological, socio-economic, cultural and climatic balance. General awareness of the multifunctional importance of forests unfortunately coincides with the observed increase of threats to these 'international public goods'. To tackle continuous deforestation and degradation, the international community through the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) and its predecessors has attempted to adopt an international legally-binding agreement on sustainable management based on the Forest Principles. The narrow success of such international negotiations led to explore another option to this issue through the review of some regional agreements based on the inductive approach. This method is used by International Court of Justice for seeking the customary international law through the States behaviours or conducts. The paper is focussed on two regional regimes on SFM: the Central America Regional Convention and the European Union Resolution related sustainable forests management. The examination of States practice shows that such regional instruments fulfil all the requirements for having the status of the emerging customary law at these regions.


Pentoxifylline is a haemorheologic
drug with complex pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics due to both
reversible metabolism and the formation of active metabolites. In
humans, pentoxifylline is metabolised to at least seven phase 1
metabolites (M1-M7). The reversible metabolism of pentoxifylline to
the enantiomers of M1 has only been partly studied. This thesis investigates the pharmacokinetics of
pentoxifylline and metabolites and their contributions to the
haemorheological effects. When
pentoxifylline is administered either orally or intravenously to
healthy humans the plasma concentrations of M5 and S-M1 are higher
than the pentoxifylline concentrations, whereas the ones for M4 are
lower and R-M1 much lower. In-vitro studies showed that this can be
mainly explained by a 15 times faster formation of S-M1 than R-M1
from pentoxifylline. Had the enantiomers been present at equal
concentrations the reversible metabolism would have been 4 times
faster from S-M1 than from R-M1.
Pentoxifylline, R-M1, and M5 increases retinal blood flow after
administration of pentoxifylline to healthy humans. In the following potency order R-M1, rac-M1, S-M1,
pentoxifylline and M4 significantly inhibit platelet aggregation in
a concentration-dependent manner in whole blood from healthy
humans. The thesis also includes a phase
two, double-blind, placebo-controlled randomised clinical trial
investigating pentoxifylline and vitamin E treatment for prevention
of radiation-induced side effects in 83 women with breast cancer.
The study showed that the combination of pentoxifylline and vitamin
E was well tolerated and may be used for prevention of some
radiation-induced side effects, e.g. increased arm volume and pain
described as stiffness in the skin.


Low serum high-density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C) is an independent coronary risk factor, because HDL acts to mediate the uptake of peripheral cholesterol and return it to the liver. Therefore, raising HDL-C may be one of the goals in the management of atherogenic dyslipidemia for cardiovascular disease risk reduction. Although lifestyle modification such as diet and exercise may be important to increase HDL-C, effects of dietary factors on HDL-C remained largely unknown. Interracial differences on HDL metabolism may exist. Here we reviewed published articles about effect of alcohol consumption on HDL metabolism in Asian populations, regarding systematic review and meta-analysis and also clinical studies performed in Asian populations as important articles in this review. J Endocrinol Metab. 2014;4(3):47-50 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14740/jem217w


To investigate molecular mechanisms controlling plant morphogenesis, we examined the morphology of primary roots of Arabidopsis thaliana and the organization of cortical microtubules in response to inhibitors of serine/threonine protein phosphatases and kinases. We found that cantharidin, an inhibitor of types 1 and 2A protein phosphatases, as previously reported for okadaic acid and calyculin A (R.D. Smith, J.E. Wilson, J.C. Walker, T.I. Baskin [1994] Planta 194: 516–524), inhibited elongation and stimulated radial expansion. Of the protein kinase inhibitors tested, chelerythrine, 6-dimethylaminopurine, H-89, K252a, ML-9, and staurosporine all inhibited elongation, but only staurosporine appreciably stimulated radial expansion. To determine the basis for the root swelling, we examined cortical microtubules in semithin sections of material embedded in butyl-methyl-methacrylate. Chelerythrine and 100 nM okadaic acid, which inhibited elongation without causing swelling, did not change the appearance of cortical arrays, but calyculin A, cantharidin, and staurosporine, which caused swelling, disorganized cortical microtubules. The stability of the microtubules in the aberrant arrays was not detectably different from those in control arrays, as judged by similar sensitivity to depolymerization by cold or oryzalin. These results identify protein phosphorylation and dephosphorylation


Coastal communities in Suriname are highly vulnerable to sea level rise and will need to adapt. Global assessments of climate risk and vulnerability, such as IPCC reports, play an important role in the development of local adaptation policies. The aim of this article is to explore global and national discourses on climate change vulnerability and their local expressions in national policies. These discourses are juxtaposed with local understandings of vulnerability and adaptation possibilities. These different epistemologies are examined to understand how different knowledge claims and existing power structures lead to contested adaptation solutions. In Suriname, conflict arises in understandings of the coastal geomorphology and ecology of mangroves, and what role they play in adaptation to sea level rise. Conflicting environmental knowledges of mangrove ecology, species diversity, and their potential role in coastal erosion have led to conflict between the state and some local communities, resulting in potential maladaptations. New approaches for a 'situated environmental science' are explored to find more socially inclusive adaptation solutions. Key words: Adaptation, sea level rise, mangrove, seawall, knowledge, Suriname


Retailers are in difficult times. The recession, global competition, government regulation and the growth of the Internet mean that costs are rising but margins are increasingly squeezed. Cor Molenaar's Shopping 3.0 offers an engaging, convincing and well-researched manifesto for the future of retailing; a manifesto which encourages retailers to switch their approach from a strategy that is based around transactions to one that is based around customers. Logic dictates that there is no one single strategy that will work for all retailers; some of them may indeed benefit from investing in e-retailing solutions and the Internet but for others, success will lie in developing a service based on customer experience or one with some apparently bespoke elements; a strategy to appeal to customers as individuals. Shopping 3.0 examines all these changes. It sketches the world of consumers; those who make their purchases from the comfort of their armchair and those who enjoy shopping with friends. Cor Molenaar explores the impact of changing consumer attitudes to shopping; the role of new technology in future retailing and the changing face of both city centre and out of town shops and malls. Shopping 3.0 offers a welcome helping hand for retailers, both physical and web-based shopkeepers; something to help you make sense of the ongoing revolution in shopping and to plan or adjust your business strategy to enable you not just to survive but to thrive in a world that will look very different in a few years time.


The effects of injection pressure and swirl ratio on the in-cylinder soot oxidation are studied using simultaneous PLIF imaging of OH and LII imaging of soot in an optical diesel engine. Images are acquired after the end of injection in the recirculation zone between two adjacent diesel jets. Scalars are extracted from the images and compared with trends in engine-out soot emissions. The soot emissions decrease monotonically with increasing injection pressure but show a non-linear dependence on swirl ratio. The total amount of OH in the images is negatively correlated with the soot emissions, as is the spatial proximity between the OH and soot regions. This indicates that OH is an important soot oxidizer and that it needs to be located close to the soot to perform this function. The total amount of soot in the images shows no apparent correlation with the soot emissions, indicating that the amount of soot formed is a poor predictor of the emission trends. (Less)


The goal of software-defined radio (SDR) is to move the processing of radio signals from the analog domain to the digital domain – to use digital microchips instead of analog circuit components. Until faster, higher-precision analog-to-digital (ADCs) and digital-to-analog converters (DACs) become affordable, however, some analog signal processing will be necessary. We still need to convert high-radio frequency (RF) signals that we receive to low intermediate-frequency (IF) or baseband (centered on zero Hz) signals in order for ADCs to sample them and feed them into microchips for processing. The reverse is true when we transmit. Amplification is also needed on the receive side to fully utilize the dynamic range of the ADC and power amplification is needed on the transmit side to increase the power output from the DAC for transmission. Analog filtering is also needed to avoid saturating the ADC or to filter out interference when receiving and to avoid transmitting spurs. The analog frequency conversion, amplification and filtering section of a radio is called the RF front end. This thesis describes work on a new RF front end daughterboard for the Universal Software Radio Peripheral, or USRP. The USRP is a software-radio hardware platform designed to be used with the GNU Radio software radio software package. Using the Motorola RFIC4 chip, the new daughterboard receives RF signals, converts them to baseband and does analog filtering and amplification before feeding the signal into the USRP for processing. The chip also takes transmit signals from the USRP, converts them from baseband to RF and amplifies and filters them. The board was designed and laid out by Randall Nealy. I wrote the software driver for GNU Radio. The driver defines the interface between the USRP and the RFIC chip, controls the physical settings, and calculates and sets the hundreds of variables necessary to operate this extremely complex chip correctly. It allows plug-and-play compatibility with the current USRP daughterboards and supplies additional functions not available in any other daughterboard.


In November of 2002, the Justice and Development Party swept to victory in the Turkish parliamentary elections. Because of the party's Islamic roots, its electoral triumph has sparked a host of questions both in Turkey and in the West: Does the party harbor a secret Islamist agenda? Will the new government seek to overturn nearly a century of secularization stemming from Kemal Ataturk's early-twentieth-century reforms? Most fundamentally, is Islam compatible with democracy? In this penetrating work, M. Hakan Yavuz seeks to answer these questions, and to provide a comprehensive analysis of Islamic political identity in Turkey. He begins in the early twentieth century, when Kemal Ataturk led Turkey through a process of rapid secularization and crushed Islamic opposition to his authoritarian rule. Yavuz argues that, since Ataturk's death in 1938, however, Turkey has been gradually moving away from his militant secularism and experiencing "a quiet Muslim reformation." Islamic political identity is not homogeneous, says Yavuz, but can be modern and progressive as well as conservative and potentially authoritarian. While the West has traditionally seen Kemalism as an engine for reform against "reactionary" political Islam, in fact the Kemalist establishment has traditionally used the "Islamic threat" as an excuse to avoid democratization and thus hold on to power. Yavuz offers an account of the "soft coup" of 1997, in which the Kemalist military-bureaucratic establishment overthrew the democratically elected coalition government, which was led by the pro-Islamic Refah party. He argues that the soft coup plunged Turkey into a renewed legitimacy crisis which can only be resolved by the liberalization of the political system. The book ends with a discussion of the most recent election and its implications for Turkey and the Muslim world. Yavuz argues that Islamic social movements can be important agents for promoting a democratic and pluralistic society, and that the Turkish example holds long term promise for the rest of the Muslim world. Based on extensive fieldwork and interviews, this work offers a sophisticated new understanding of the role of political Islam in one of the world's most strategically important countries.


Abstract Background: The pathophysiology of sepsis is incompletely understood. Impaired bioavailability of L-arginine, the substrate for NO synthesis, is linked to sepsis severity, and plasma arginase has been linked to hypoargininemia in other disease states. Circulating neutrophils are increased in sepsis and constitutively express arginase. We investigated whether plasma arginase activity is increased in human sepsis and whether this is associated with neutrophil numbers and activation. Methods: We used HPLC and a radiometric assay to evaluate plasma amino acid concentrations and plasma arginase activity. The relationships between plasma arginase activity, neutrophil count, neutrophil activity and plasma L-arginine and arginine metabolites were evaluated in 44 sepsis patients and 25 controls. Results: Plasma arginase activity was increased in sepsis patients, correlated with neutrophil count (r=0.44; p=0.003), but was independent of sepsis severity (SOFA or APACHE II score). Plasma HNP1-3 correlated with neutrophil count (r=0.31; p=0.04), was elevated in shock (median 180 ng/mL vs. 83 ng/mL sepsis without shock, p=0.0006) and correlated with SOFA score. Sepsis patients with high neutrophil counts had significantly higher plasma HNP1-3 and arginase activity and lower plasma L-arginine concentrations than those with lower neutrophil counts and controls. Conclusions: Plasma arginase activity, potentially derived in part from neutrophil activation, is elevated in sepsis, and may contribute to impaired bioavailability of L-arginine in sepsis.


We report propagation loss measurements in single-mode GaAs-AlGaAs racetrack microresonators with bending radii from 2.7 /spl mu/m to 9.7 /spl mu/m. The experimental data were found to be in good agreement with a physical-loss model which accounts for the bending loss, the scattering loss due to surface roughness on the waveguide sidewalls, and the transition loss at the straight-to-bend waveguide junctions. The model also enables us to identify the dominant loss mechanisms in semiconductor microcavities. We found that for racetracks with large bending radii (greater than 4 /spl mu/m, in our case) the loss due to surface-roughness scattering in the curved waveguides dominates, whereas for small-radius rings, the modal mismatch at the straight-to-bend waveguide junctions causes the biggest loss. This result suggests that circular-shaped rings are preferable in the realization of ultrasmall low-loss microcavities. We also show that the round-trip propagation loss in small-radius racetrack microresonators can be minimized by introducing a lateral offset at the straight-to-bend waveguide junctions.


Abstract. The term space weather is used for the solar driven variability in particle and electromagnetic conditions of the near-Earth space that may harm the performance of ground-based and space-borne technology. The European Union (EU) and the European Space Agency (ESA) have started a common programme called the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES). Many of the GMES operational services will rely on technology prone to space weather phenomena. For long-term environmental monitoring this is not a problem, but for applications of risk management in emergency situations the impact of space weather should be considered and evaluated. In this paper, we discuss how ESA's previous activity together with European national initiatives in the space weather area can be used to support GMES and how EU could participate in this work in its Framework Programmes and within the European Research Area (ERA).


The 3-SAT problem consists in determining if a boolean formula with 3 literals per clause is satisfiable. When the ratio between the number of clauses and the number of variables increases, a threshold phenomenon is observed: the probability of satisfiability appears to decrease sharply from 1 to 0 in the neighbourghood of a threshold value, conjectured to be close to 4.25. Although the threshold has been proved to exist for the 2-SAT formulae and for closely related problems like 3-XORSAT, there is still no proof for the 3-sat problem. Recent works have provided so far upper and lower bounds for the threshold's potential location. We present here a unified approach to upper bounds that is based on urn models, generating functions, and saddle-point bounds. In this way, we re-derive some of the most significant upper bounds known in a simple and uniform manner.


The private provision of educational services has been representing an increasing fraction of the Peruvian schooling system, especially in recent last decades. While there have been many claims about the differences in quality between private and public schools, there is no complete assessment of the different impacts of these two type of providers on the labor markets. This paper is an attempt to provide such a comprehensive overview. We explore private-public differences in the individual returns to education in Urban Peru. Exploiting a rich pair of data sets (ENNIV 1997 and 2000) that include questions on type of education (public vs. private) for each educational level (primary, secondary, technical tertiary and university tertiary) to a representative sample of adults we are able to measure the differences in labor earnings for all possible educational trajectories. The results indicate higher returns to education for those who attended private schools than those who attended the public system. Nonetheless, these higher returns also show higher dispersion, reflecting wider quality heterogeneity within the private system. The private-public differences in returns are more pronounced at the secondary than at any other educational level. On the other hand, the private-public differences in returns from technical education are almost non-existent. A cohort approach paired with a rolling-windows technique allows us to capture generational evolutions of the private-public differences. The results indicate that these differences have been increasing during the last two decades.


We consider downlink transmission of a fronthaul-constrained cloud radio access network. Our aim is to maximize the system sum data rate via jointly designing beamforming and user association. The problem is basically a mixed integer non-convex programs for which a global solution requires a prohibitively high computational effort. The focus is thus on efficient solutions capable of achieving the near optimal performance with low complexity. To this end, we transform the design problem into continuous programs by two approaches: penalty and sparse approximation methods. The resulting continuous nonconvex problems are then solved by the successive convex approximation framework. Numerical results indicate that the proposed methods are near-optimal, and outperform existing suboptimal methods in terms of achieved performances and computational complexity.


This paper accumulates the recent advances in scientific understanding of the problem of seismo-ionospheric coupling. Present research focuses on three main areas: the physical mechanism, main phenomenological features of ionospheric variations associated with earthquakes, and their statistical properties permitting use of them in practical applications. In this paper, the developed physical model bridges the traditional precursors of earthquakes and ionospheric ones, demonstrating that the latter belong to the same family. In this regard the earthquake preparation zone is key generating the scaling law and the relationship between geochemical precursors, anomalous electric field involved in ionospheric variations initiated, and the ionospheric irregularities themselves. Revealed ionospheric precursor phenomena and their statistical parameters are used to develop a pattern recognition technique and other statistical processing techniques that can be used in short-term earthquake prediction. Finally a possible system of ground based measurements and satellite monitoring is proposed for regional and global monitoring and possible short-term prediction of destructive earthquakes.


There are many reasons to expect an ability to reason in terms of objects to be a crucial skill for any generally intelligent agent. Indeed, recent machine learning literature is replete with examples of the benefits of object-like representations: generalization, transfer to new tasks, and interpretability, among others. However, in order to reason in terms of objects, agents need a way of discovering and detecting objects in the visual world - a task which we call unsupervised object detection. This task has received significantly less attention in the literature than its supervised counterpart, especially in the case of large images containing many objects. In the current work, we develop a neural network architecture that effectively addresses this large-image, many-object setting. In particular, we combine ideas from Attend, Infer, Repeat (AIR), which performs unsupervised object detection but does not scale well, with recent developments in supervised object detection. We replace AIR's core recurrent network with a convolutional (and thus spatially invariant) network, and make use of an object-specification scheme that describes the location of objects with respect to local grid cells rather than the image as a whole. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate a number of features of our architecture: that, unlike AIR, it is able to discover and detect objects in large, many-object scenes; that it has a significant ability to generalize to images that are larger and contain more objects than images encountered during training; and that it is able to discover and detect objects with enough accuracy to facilitate non-trivial downstream processing.


As our institutional archives mature and we gain more insight into what materials our researchers use, we become more discerning in what we collect and preserve. Real estate in any archives or special collections is valuable, and overcrowding is a common lament. In time, we become laser focused as to what collections within our holdings resonate with users. Equally, we all have collections that for whatever well-intentioned reason were accessioned, processed, and maintained, but that are inappropriate for our institutions. In her book Reappraisal and Deaccessioning in Archives and Special Collections, Laura Uglean Jackson has compiled 13 case studies describing various archival situations that focus on using reappraisal and deaccessioning as collection development tools to help build robust collections (p. ix). Rather than viewing it as a negative process, the archivists in Jackson's book advocate for thorough reappraisal and targeted deaccessioning to address holdings in their repositories that are outside their collection scope or institutional mission. Jackson's introduction includes concise abstracts of each chapter that provide a succinct description of each of the case studies summarized.


The Australian government established the Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI) in 2011, and by 2014 it was merged into the newly introduced Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF). The aim of the CFI-ERF was to encourage the abatement of greenhouse gasses (GHG) from different sectors of the economy (e.g. energy efficiency, transport and the land sector), and to meet Australia's Kyoto Protocol (KP) emissions reduction target. The potential for GHG abatement in the Australian land sector (farming/agriculture and forestry) presents an excellent opportunity for the development of carbon farming projects while providing other crucial environmental/ecosystem benefits. This thesis investigates the role that demography, knowledge, motivation, capacity and barriers (DKMCB) play in the adoption of the CFI-ERF/carbon sequestratoin activities from an Australian landholders perspective. A methodological framework was developed to explore the influence of DKMCB factors on adopting the initiative. The study employed a mixed methods sequential explanatory research design which comprised two phases: a quantitative and a qualitative. The quantitative phase used a survey questionnaire addressed to landholders Australia wide: 214 participants completed the questionnaire. The qualitative phase used in-depth, semi-structured interviews targeting only adopters of the policy. Seven of thirteen adopters – identified through the survey form employed in the first phase – accepted the invitation to take part in the interviews.

Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations (DOI) theory, proposed in 1962, provided the conceptual framing for this research. The DOI seeks to explain how and why intended adopters implement some new ideas and reject others. The DOI claims that the uptake of innovations, among other factors, depends on the demographic characteristics of the target population (e.g. age, gender, education level and occupation) and their networks, the features of the proposed innovation and the channels through which innovations are communicated. The quantitative results revealed that higher levels of knowledge about the CFI-ERF were associated with a decreased likelihood of adoption. Similarly, the higher the financial capacity landholders had, the less likely they were to adopt the initiative. Moral responsibility (to implement environmental practices), followed by economic return and availability of technical support were associated with an increased likelihood of adoption, while government regulations were associated with a reduction of the probability of adopting the CFI-ERF. The qualitative results showed that there were two main types of adopters: associated adopters (associated with carbon consulting enterprises) and independent adopters (implemented CFI-ERF projects independently). Associated adopters contribution to the study was not significant since Carbon Consulting Enterprises (CCE) did all the CFI adoption process. In the case of independent adopters, level of education and motivation had a strong influence on the decision of adopting the CFI-ERF. Environmental benefits of the application of CFI-ERF activities were strong motivations of adoption for all the informants. Economic return was not as an important motivation as frequently assumed in the literature. Costs and uncertainty (policy, carbon price, and project financial-viability uncertainty) were the strongest barriers to adopting the initiative.

This study contributes to the existing knowledge on diffusion research in the environmental field and particularly to research on the adoption of the CFI-ERF. The results of this study suggest the need to rethink the design of the CFI-ERF, the way carbon credits are traded, efficiently integrate environmental benefits (ecosystem services) in the pricing of ACCUs and improve communication strategies to better communicate the environmental/ecosystem benefits to potential adopters, since the results show that environmental benefits are the strongest motivation to adopt the CFI-ERF. Additionally, the methodological framework developed for this study, along with mixed methods research designs, present a practical approach to assessing the role that specific factors (i.e. demography, knowledge, motivation, capacity and barriers) play in the adoption of innovations in the environmental area, as well as in other disciplines, using quantitative and qualitative methods.


The GRACE satellite mission provides monthly estimates of the gravity field of the Earth. Differences between the monthly solutions are induced by mass redistribution on the Earth. Over the continents, the hydrological cycle represents the largest signals, which are readily observed by GRACE. Over the oceans, however, gravity field changes are about an order of magnitude smaller, close to the accuracy limits of the present GRACE solutions. Nevertheless, GRACE measurements may prove as an important tool to obtain integral estimates of water mass redistribution, sea level changes and geostrophic current variability. In order to validate and improve the gravity field products, GRACE is to be compared against ocean models and in-situ observations of Ocean Bottom Pressure (OBP). Time series of OBP sensors deployed by Alfred-Wegener-Institut in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, as well as measurements from other locations of the global ocean are included in a OBP database that is currently under development at AWI, in close cooperation with Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory (POL, Liverpool). The mutual comparison of in-situ and ocean model data with different GRACE products provided by CSR, GFZ, GRGS, ITG and JPL will help to optimize data processing methods and corrections applied to GRACE, and to identify the performance of GRACE to detect oceanic mass flux variability in different regions of the global ocean.


A persistent theme underlying contemporary debates about financial regulation is how to protect investors from the growing complexity of financial markets, new risks, and other changes brought about by financial innovation. Increasingly relevant to this debate are the leading innovators of complex investment strategies known as hedge funds. A hedge fund is a private investment company that is not subject to the full range of restrictions on investment activities and disclosure obligations imposed by the federal securities laws, that compensates management in part with a fee based on annual profits, and typically engages in the active trading of financial instruments. Hedge funds engage in financial innovation by pursuing novel investment strategies that lower market risk (beta) and may increase returns attributable to manager skill (alpha). Despite the funds' unique costs and risk properties, their historical performance suggests that the ultimate result of hedge fund innovation is to help investors reduce economic losses during market downturns. In 2008, as losses from the U.S. subprime mortgage market transformed into an international financial crisis, the value of global equities dropped 42 percent while hedge funds worldwide lost a comparatively smaller 19 percent for their investors. By increasing investors' ability to maximize risk-adjusted returns, hedge funds advance the same goal that federal investor protection regulation seeks to advance. This Article argues that the beneficial outcomes hedge funds attain for their investors are largely attributable to the legal regime under which they operate. The hedge fund legal regime includes not only federal securities law but also the entity and contract law provisions governing the fund, its manager, and its investors. Federal law applicable to hedge funds enables the funds to pursue innovative investment strategies employing the trifecta of leverage, short sales, and derivatives. The entity and contract law governance of hedge funds provides high-powered incentives for fund managers to engage in and capture the gains from financial innovation.A general lesson from the law and economics of hedge funds is that when a legal regime permits financial intermediaries to be flexible in their investment strategies and aligns the incentives of investors and innovators through performance fees and co-investment by managers, financial innovation is likely to complement investor protection without wide-ranging regulation. The role of hedge funds in advancing the same goal as investor protection regulation suggests that they should legally be available to a broader class of investors.


Noreen C. Glading-Hill Promoting Staff Development at Midway School 1999 Dr. Theodore Johnson School Administration Midway School loses forty percent of its teaching staff on a yearly basis. The purpose of this study was to identify specific factors and their relationship to the absence of a professional development program. The study was designed to answer the questions of how professional development affects the attitudes and outlook of teachers, and was staff development the most effective way of achieving positive attitudes or enthusiasm for the teaching profession. The researcher used six teachers from three distinct groups, all with at least ten years in the teaching profession. All six teachers had experienced either traditional or individual forms of staff development. The teachers were placed equally into three groups. Group 1 teachers had left the teaching profession due to job dissatisfaction. Group 2 comprised those who were teaching, but very dissatisfied with the profession. Group 3 teachers were teaching and satisfied with the profession. Triangulation of previous research data, and interview data from the current study, led to the classification of Career Decision Circles. The CDCs represented individual beliefs, needs, decision-making processes and important life events to the informants. A staff development circle was added as a link between professional development programs leading to personal efficacy of teachers and individual readiness factors. The researcher concluded staff development was an appropriate vehicle to promote a positive attitude and enthusiasm among teachers, and individual readiness factors affected job satisfaction through interaction of professional development and personal life.


Evidence concerning the position of women in Anglo-Saxon England, particularly during the early period, is sparse and often difficult to assess. Surviving law-codes constitute an important source of information, but due to their cryptic phraseology and sometimes archaic vocabulary they are notoriously open to misinterpretation. Two clauses from the earliest extant code, issued by King Æthelberht of Kent towards the beginning of the seventh century, are commonly treated as evidence of the independent status of divorced women in early Kentish society. So far as I am aware this view has never been challenged, although it remains uncorroborated by other sources and is by no means the only possible interpretation of the text. In this paper I wish to put forward an alternative reading.


Objectives To investigate patients' and family members' perceptions and experiences of disclosure of healthcare incidents and to derive principles of effective disclosure. Design Retrospective qualitative study based on 100 semi-structured, in depth interviews with patients and family members. Setting Nationwide multisite survey across Australia. Participants 39 patients and 80 family members who were involved in high severity healthcare incidents (leading to death, permanent disability, or long term harm) and incident disclosure. Recruitment was via national newspapers (43%), health services where the incidents occurred (28%), two internet marketing companies (27%), and consumer organisations (2%). Main outcome measures Participants' recurrent experiences and concerns expressed in interviews. Results Most patients and family members felt that the health service incident disclosure rarely met their needs and expectations. They expected better preparation for incident disclosure, more shared dialogue about what went wrong, more follow-up support, input into when the time was ripe for closure, and more information about subsequent improvement in process. This analysis provided the basis for the formulation of a set of principles of effective incident disclosure. ConclusionsDespite growing prominence of open disclosure, discussion about healthcare incidents still falls short of patient and family member expectations. Healthcare organisations and providers should strengthen their efforts to meet patients' (and family members') needs and expectations.


This paper concerns a pilot exploring the use of openly licensed content in secondary schools. Specifically it looks at the use of the Open University's (OU) OpenScienceLab (OSL) in two remote rural schools in the West Highlands of Scotland. OSL is a series of online experiments openly licensed for anyone to use, they are about learning through experimentation, and are part of a wider OU interest in how to support and develop inquiry based learning at a distance (Scanlon 2012). This area is of particular relevance to Scottish schools, as the underlying pedagogy of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) promotes interdisciplinary thinking and learning through inquiry (Macintyre 2014).
The idea of the pilot was to work on how "open content" might be used in schools to understand what openness might mean in and for educational practice. While our initial intention was simply to run these in schools after the first workshops it became apparent while the technical and licences were open and it was relatively clear how to do the experiments, people were uncertain how to use them in their educational practice. Emphasising the need to attend to Educational Practice as well as Openness in OEP.

The pilot took a participatory design approach (Sanders and Westerlund 2011; Mor et.al 2012), to developing and support practices around the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in classroom. Through a series of workshops and schools visits we looked to solve these problems from the classroom out, using the teachers experience to develop learning journeys that worked for teachers and pupils. With teachers we created a learning journey using the OU's free platform OpenLearnWorks to wrap the experiments in a mixture of existing and newly developed OER.

Two journeys were created, these will be run in two locations with with two sets of teachers in December 2014. The paper will report on the outcomes for pupils and teachers of this final stage. In doing so it will reflect on the participatory design process, highlighting the practices developed to support the use of open content, drawing out broader conclusions might support the use open materials in the classroom.


1. Intravascular pressures and angiographic records have been made on the giant earthworm, Glossoscolex giganteus. The measurements were made on unanaesthetized animals after previous implantation of indwelling catheters. 2. The pressures developed by the peristaltic activity of the dorsal vessel showed an average systolic value of 24 cm. H2O while the diastolic value was 14 cm. H2O. The frequency was variable around 6-8 contractions per min. 3. Angiographic analysis showed the peristaltic activity to include about 25 segments and to move at a velocity of 12 segments per second at 18° C. The lumen of the dorsal vessel was almost fully constricted during peristalsis. 4. The peristaltic activity of the dorsal vessel was responsible for the filling of the lateral hearts. These in turn showed an increased force of contraction at each peristaltic contraction. 5. The five pairs of lateral hearts usually contracted in synchrony. Their frequency of contraction was considerably higher than the peristalsis of the dorsal vessel (20 beats per min.). 6. The pressures developed in the ventral vessel in response to the lateral heart contractions were considerable and exceeded 100 cm. H2O during vigorous activity. All intravascular pressures were markedly increased by general motor activity of the earthworm.


The failure of the centralised state particularly in developing countries to facilitate development has resulted in an alternative tool being introduced, namely decentralisation. The author seeks to present decentralisation not only as an integral part of development, but more importantly as one of the key components of good governance. Given the fact that the new local government dispensation in South Africa has a developmental focus, the author found it both appropriate and convenient (he was based at the Community Law Centre at the University of Western Cape) to use his host country as a case-study as he 'believes that it offers a new and original attitude to local government". The book is basically a reproduction of the author's doctoral thesis in public law. Apart from the Introduction, the chapters of the book focuses on Institutional Principles for Decentralised Development; South Africa's Choices for local government, Autonomy in South African local government; Supervision in South African local government; Cooperation in South African local government; General assessment and institutional model for developmental local government. A notable feature of the book is the positive linkage developed between the theory and practice of development and decentralisation, thereby ensuring that it will appeal to more than an academic audience as it also highlights possible lessons that can learnt by other countries on the continent.


Often lost in the discourse regarding educational policy-making and implementation are the micropolitical experiences of the individuals who are most affected by policy: students. Policymakers often develop policy under the guise of making schools better, but in effect they often lose sight of insuring that all students receive a good education regardless of gender, race, or class distinctions. In the quest to satisfy constituents and competing value systems, the possible negative effects of policies on students are often ignored. Most policymaking relies on traditional assumptions of a meritocratic system, that implicitly supports the hierarchical structure of society (Gakes & Lipton, 1999). Since there is only so much room at the top, a certain number of students are doomed, or expected, to fail. Within the bureaucratic structure of educational systems, important goals such as providing a quality education for all children are ignored, or forgotten about, in order to preserve the existing hierarchy. As Ferguson (1984) posits. "The strict hierarchical arrangement of roles within bureaucracies, and the need to maintain this hierarchy in order to achieve predictability and control, exacerbates the problem of goal displacement and inflexibility." (p. 22) This analysis will approach the implementation of policy from a unique perspective; viewing it in relation to the cultural experiences of students. Utilizing a retrospective case study approach to examine desegregation policy, a specific student culture within a high school magnet school will be studied at the micro political level. In order to do) this, I will draw upon my life experiences as a student at Northeast High School (NHS) in Oklahoma City during the period of 1981-1985. By critically examining the cultural experiences of students who are experiencing the effects of desegregation policy, I hope to expose how the micropolitics of NHS's magnet program supported inequitable distributions of power and resources and reinforced cultural assumptions concerning racism and classism. Methodology My reasons for taking this approach are due to a dearth of critical analysis of policy implementation from the perspective of students, who are often neglected voices in the policy-making process (Anderson & Herr, 1993). This paper is grounded in feminist theory and critical theory. My retrospective case study approach will rest on the feminist belief "that an emphasis on the everyday experiences of women and the need for the researcher to locate herself in terms of her own subjectivity is fundamental to a feminist methodology," and further that, "... this methodology admits and employs other resources such as intuition, emotions, and feelings both in ourselves and in those we want to investigate" (Weiler, 1988, p. 63). My aim in reflecting on my high school experience is heuristic. As Merriam (1998) suggests, case studies provide a way to focus research on a defined topic in order to "... illuminate the reader's understanding of the phenomenon under study." (p. 30). My approach will borrow heavily from Metz's (1988) assertion that societal inequities can be reinforced by magnet programs that create two separate schools; one resource-rich and prestigious program for the magnet school students and one less respected program for the students not in the magnet program. Metz suggests that these distinctions can have a negative effect on teachers who teach the indigenous group of students. Building upon Metz's (1988) work I will use my personal experience to examine culture as an influence on students, instead of teachers, within a magnet school. Specifically, my analysis will operate under Metz's (1988) assertion that: Cultural understandings are tacit: They are rarely articulated as abstract propositions. They are elements of common sense so well known by persons sharing the culture that sensible adults have no need to mention them. …


We introduce an event driven communication logic for decentralized control of a network of robotic vehicles (agents). The strategy proposed is robust to packet losses and drives the vehicles to predefined paths while holding a desired geometric formation pattern. To this effect, the paper extends an existing cooperative path following framework to consider the practical case where communications among the vehicles occur at discrete instants, instead of continuously. The introduced communication logic takes into account the topology of the communication network, the fact that communications are discrete, and the cost of exchanging information. We also address explicitly communication losses and bounded delays. Conditions are derived under which the overall closed loop system is input-to-state practically stable. The communication logic is applied to a cooperative path-following control system of multiple underactuated autonomous marine robots. Simulation results are presented and discussed.


BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: CITIZENS OF THE WORLD. By Adriana Craciun. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xii + 225. ISBN 1 4039 0235 6. £45.00. WOMEN ROMANTIC POETS: ANNA BARBAULD AND MARY ROBINSON. By Anne Janowitz. Writers and their Work. Tavistock: Northcote House. 2004. Pp. 128. ISBN 0 7463 1029. £25.00. These two valuable studies emphasise how central women's writing has now become to our understanding of the writing and culture of the Romantic period. While Craciun and Janowitz both provide excellent close analyses of specific texts, they are perhaps most concerned with seeking to situate the women writers they study historically, geographically and in relation to the various cultural formations sometimes labelled 'Romanticism'. Both authors stress not only how their chosen writers create their sense of self through composition but also how important they become as shaping forces on the world they inherit. In her lively and stimulating study, Anne Janowitz focuses on two of the best-known and most influential women poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Anna Barbauld and Mary Robinson. Her study provides an excellent introduction to these two very different writers, combining close readings of their texts with informative and entertaining accounts of their lives. But Janowitz's focus on these two writers is also part of a more ambitious project, for she makes them representative of what she sees as the two main modes of women's writing in the period, 'Sense' and 'Sensibility', a neat formulation whose origins in Austen are indicative of the lightly ironic manner in which it is used here. Anna Barbauld, the offspring of Dissenting culture, becomes the poet of Sense, working up 'the poetic language of Enlightenment rationalism from within the religious perspective of deism, reflecting her own education through the polite restraint of Dissenting sociability'. Mary Robinson, actress, celebrity and sometime mistress of the Prince of Wales, is defined in terms of Sensibility, her poetry an overflow of powerful feelings that have their origin in her personal experiences and that make her 'the harbinger of the sentimental romanticism of individualism'. As Janowitz epigrammatically puts it, 'Mrs Barbauld is seemly; Mrs Robinson bursts at the seams'. Janowitz herself argues that these 'vivid contrasts are overly schematic', but they do provide productive ways of thinking about her chosen writers and enable her to develop her sense of their 'antithetical complementarity' in a number of ways. For example, she draws on Schiller's distinction between the naive and the sentimental when comparing the two poets' early work, finding an immediacy in Barbauld's first volume of verse that contrasts with Robinson's selfawareness. On a more general level, Janowitz sees the two writers as representatives of different ways in which writers constructed their self in the period, arguing that while Barbauld could fall back on the values and networks of the Dissenting environment in which she grew up for a sense of identity, Robinson's less stable background compelled her to build up a strong sense of an interior self disconnected from environment, place or family connection. Ultimately, Janowitz suggests, by considering these writers as representative figures, we gain a fuller understanding of the cultural forms they both inherited and contributed to; as she comments in her discussion of a volume of Odes published in 1800 to which both poets contributed, 'Romantic poetry was founded at the meeting place of Enlightenment theories of liberty and enfranchisement and the poetics of subjectivity and sensibility'. Central to Janowitz's account of the development of these two writers are the events of the French Revolution which proved enabling for both of them as poets. …


H.G. Wells popular novel 'The War of the Worlds' involved the invasion of Earth by Martians who arrived via cylinders fired from enormous space guns mounted on Mars. This report explores the logistics of such artillery based on the technology of the time. By calculating the required escape velocity of Mars and considering the mass of the cylinders, an estimate of the necessary gunpowder is found to be over 120 tonnes. The resulting acceleration is then explored and found to be upwards of 100g. It is hypothesised that, whilst this would prove fatal to humans, Martians may be able to survive and so Wells theory is not entirely without merit.


Little information is available on how insects are affected by anthropogenic influences in the bottomland forests of the West Gulf Coastal Plain. This study investigates one genus of ground beetles that lives in managed forested landscapes to discover which species are positively and negatively influenced by human disturbances. Ground beetles (Carabidae) were collected from a bottomland hardwood forest in the Mississippi River floodplain that received three harvesting treatments in 1995 (three replicates each of clearcut, selection, and control). Beetles were analyzed to assess the effects of forest disturbance over time. Four species in the genus Brachinus accounted for about 66 percent of all specimens collected. Brachinus larvae are ectoparasites on the pupae of water beetles, and the adults prefer moist habitats. In 1996, the year after applying treatments, the selection cuts yielded almost three times as many Brachinus (63 percent of 3,696 total) as the control (19 percent) and clearcut (19 percent) treatments. One year later, in 1997, both the control (45 percent of 2,572 total) and selection cuts (40 percent) yielded almost three times the number of Brachinus than the clearcuts (14 percent). In 2000 (an exceptionally dry summer), both the control (44 percent of 465 total) and selection cuts (45 percent) yielded four times the number of Brachinus than the clearcuts (11 percent). The steady loss of beetles during the study is believed to be due to several summer floods followed by several summer droughts. Nonetheless, this study demonstrates that the selection cuts continued to provide the habitat needs of these beetles, and the clearcuts continued to provide less suitable habitat, despite a lush growth of plants in 2000.


BACKGROUND
Among the many aspects of the rehabilitation process that may be relevant for its outcome, the impact of encounters with various professionals has received little attention.

OBJECTIVE
The objective was to gain a deeper understanding of how individuals with experiences of being on sick leave perceive their encounters with professionals, and how such encounters affected their ability to return to work, as well as their attitudes towards the sickness insurance system.

METHODS
An inductive qualitative approach was used to analyze data from 20 interviews with men and women, aged 33-59, in Sweden who had experience of being on sick leave for at least 28 days.

RESULTS
The study shows how interviewees encounters with professionals affected their self-confidence and perception of their ability to return to work. Professionals' treatment of people on sick leave seems to be affected by the structural prerequisites for offering support, where sickness insurance regulations are suggested to have a large impact.

CONCLUSIONS
An encouraging and supportive attitude on the part of the professionals is essential for empowering people to handle obstacles during the rehabilitation process; whereas feeling rejected and belittled in the return to work process may lead to disempowerment, and/or delays in measures and longer periods on sick leave.


Whilst knowledge and technology transfer unarguably present an important source of wealth for a nation and an important component of a modern university's offering to society, the management of this activity is complex and as a result, many economies struggle to realise their expectations. Academics and commercial organisations are quick to blame inflexible and bureaucratic university transfer offices and administrators for this shortfall. This paper takes an approach of exploring the structural arrangements of knowledge transfer offices across various countries to identify if different structures help overcome different strategic and operational challenges involved in university-industry knowledge transfer. The findings identify that interdependent and complex management practices coupled with equally complex organisational architectures lead to issues of conflicting pressures and ambiguous governance. Furthermore, this research illustrates a number of 'structural' solutions that universities have adopted to try to side-step some of the problems.


This thesis is an overall attempt to examine man and his environment in Bahrain after the First World War and to define, if possible, his strengths and weaknesses, his failures and successes in meeting the demands of modern civilization. Bahrain, although not possessing large oil reserves, owes its existence as a modern state to the revenues of oil which it has enjoyed for a longer time than many of her neighbours. Therefore as a case study it is possible to examine the impacts of wealth, modernisation and education on this island community and the impulse given by these factors to the social changes and political awareness between the First World War and the present day. In attempting to study the social and political changes in Bahrain we cannot ignore the two decades immediately prior to the oil era, as during these years events occurred which made future changes easier. Items such as the establishment of a modern administration and education and the fact that they were a relatively stable community gave them the opportunity to observe and adopt further Western innovations, and as oil revenues became available, enabled them to build on this base and extend its social services. The material benefits had their impact on the social existence and political life of the people and naturally enough this produced certain stresses. These stresses were either of a personal or group nature or between the community and their changing environments. This work attempts to examine the development of this community, the problems which arose and the impact they had upon a traditional society. As the British had, and probably still have, a voice in the affairs of the Gulf, the work also tries to examine the role they played in Bahrain, and their triumphs and failures in shaping the events with the islands.


An image processing technique for the extraction of parameters characteristic of the shape and angularity of abrasive powder particles is proposed. The image data are not analyzed directly. Information concerning angularity and shape is extracted from the parametric transformation of the 2D binarized edge map. The transformation process used, the Radon transform, is one to many, that is, each image point generates in transform space the parameters of all the possible curves on which it may lie and the resulting distribution is an accumulation of that evidence. Once the image data are segmented, the technique has the potential to deliver a comprehensive numerical description of the shape and angularity of the particles under investigation without the need for further interaction by the operator. The parameters obtained are arranged into a taxonomy according to their usefulness in categorizing the shapes under inspection. The technique is novel in that it offers an analytical definition of a corner and its apex and it automatically selects only those protrusions coincident with the convex hull of the shape and, hence, those most likely to contribute to the process of abrasion. The advantages and potential pitfalls of using the technique are illustrated and discussed using real image data.


Since the early 1990s Croatia has defined membership of the European Union as one of its primary goals. However, the immediate post-war period and the difficult transition to democracy left Croatia in relative isolation from Western European states and its aim of joining the European Union seemed unattainable and distant. Croatia's involvement in the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and President Tuđman's politics proved to be great obstacles to its further democratisation and development. The parliamentary and presidential elections in the year 2000 and the defeat of Tuđman's party offered a unique opportunity to change the direction of Croatian politics and to move closer to achieving the goal of EU membership. This thesis addresses changes in Croatia's identity and it does so through the analysis of discourses surrounding Croatia's cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and its changing attitudes towards the protection of minority rights during the year 2000. Both cases fall under the Copenhagen Criteria of Accession whose implementation was crucial for Croatia's moving closer towards EU membership. They are also closely linked to Croatia's identity and are rooted in the civilisational discourse that juxtaposes 'the West'/ EU and 'the East'/ the Balkans as both geographical and civilisational spaces. The two case studies are both concerned with questions of sovereignty, justice, victims of the Homeland War and the role of Serbia in Croatia's recent past and in its future. Serbia features as Croatia's radical other and is discursively constructed as an embodiment of the Balkans civilisation. The study of cooperation with the ICTY and of discourses surrounding minority protection analyses the links between different civilisational spaces that Croatia navigates and their implications to the reconstruction of discourses central to Croatian identity. Despite different subject material both case studies reveal the centrality of the Serbian other for the Croatian identity and the need to redefine that relationship without undermining Croatia's identity as a Western country and attempts to differentiate itself from the Balkans.


The ancient problem of fatalism, more particularly theological fatalism, has resurfaced with surprising vigour in the second half of the twentieth century. Two questions predominate in the debate: (1) Is divine foreknowledge compatible with human freedom and (2) How can God foreknow future free acts? Having surveyed the historical background of this debate in The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez (Brill: 1988), William Lane Craig now attempts to address these issues critically. His wide-ranging discussion brings together a thought- provoking array of related topics such as logical fatalism, multivalent logic, backward causation, precognition, time travel, counterfactual logic, temporal necessity, Newcomb's Problem, middle knowledge, and relativity theory. The present work serves both as a useful survey of the extensive literature on theological fatalism and related fields and as a stimulating assessment of the possibility of divine foreknowledge of future free acts.


Objective methods for assessing perceptual image quality traditionally attempted to quantify the visibility of errors (differences) between a distorted image and a reference image using a variety of known properties of the human visual system. Under the assumption that human visual perception is highly adapted for extracting structural information from a scene, we introduce an alternative complementary framework for quality assessment based on the degradation of structural information. As a specific example of this concept, we develop a structural similarity index and demonstrate its promise through a set of intuitive examples, as well as comparison to both subjective ratings and state-of-the-art objective methods on a database of images compressed with JPEG and JPEG2000. A MATLAB implementation of the proposed algorithm is available online at http://www.cns.nyu.edu//spl sim/lcv/ssim/.


This articles charts a recent conference training event for TENet hosted in Spetses. The article explores several techniques resulting from longitudinal PhD research studies considering means to increase possibilities for change and impact within educational settings with vulnerable young people. The article draws upon social psychological, social constructionism and educational rhetoric as a conceptual framework to explore strategies offered by participatory theatre to challenge dormant prejudice in light of the rise of Golden Dawn and blame culture results from the current economic crisis. The article proposes the need for changes in thinking and political motivation of theatre in education, most specifically exploring links between participatory theatre, witnessing and doubt as forms of action to awaken critical though, shift social blame and thereby propose strategies to challenge detrimental constructs that lead to violence, aggression and prejudice. The paper explores two new strategies, which have been trialled and proven successful in deprived schools in inner city London, used as training tools as part of the conference/summer seminar series in July 2013


The diversity of service activities means that service innovations and innovation processes take various forms. In this paper, we use input/output and other data to depict how service industries vary in such areas as products, markets, work organization, and technological characteristics-most being very distinctive from primary industries (i.e., extractive industries such as agriculture, fisheries, forestry, mining, petroleum, quarrying, and the like) and secondary industries (i.e., manufacturing, construction, and utilities). Innovation survey data indicates that some service organizations behave very much like high-technology manufacturing. This is especially true of technology-based, knowledge-intensive business services (T-KIBS). Distinctive innovation patterns are displayed by KIBS based more on professional knowledge and by large network-based service firms, while many smaller service firms conform to a supplier-driven pattern. Only a small segment of service innovation conforms to the typical manufacturing-based model, in which innovation is largely organized and led by formal research and development (R&D) departments and production engineering. Project management and on-the-job innovation are common ways of organizing service innovation. Innovation policy and management have to be much more than R&D policy and R&D management: This is recognized by some national governments and in some business schools, but the full implications of a service-dominant logic are still rarely found.


We studied the amphibian community structure, spatial overlap and herpetofaunal assemblage at Mannampandal, Tamil Nadu during October, 2010 to January, 2011. The survey methods involved careful visual estimation of amphibians in all the possible microhabitats present in the study area. Five different microhabitat categories were selected, viz., leaf litters, temporary water pools, tree holes, shrubs & grasses (ground vegetation), pathways, open floor & outer edges of buildings. We identified 26 species of reptiles and 14 species of amphibians. There was a significant difference found among the amphibian species occupying in different microhabitats. Species diversity was calculated, Shanon-Wiener H'= 1.55. The high niche overlap was found between Duttaphrynus scaber and Uperodon systoma followed by Fejervarya sp. and Sphaerotheca breviceps. The present study on amphibian community is just a representation to show the microhabitat occupancy and adjustment by the amphibians in human settlements and competition among them as, spatial resource partitioning.


An inter-disciplinary study has been undertaken in Start Bay, Devon. Geophysical data show that infilled channels dissect the bedrock surface of the Bay shoreward of a buried cliffline. Beyond this feature the surface resembles an abrasion platform. The three lithological units within superficial material are referred to as barrier, bay and bank deposits, Foraminiferal and sedimentological evidence, together with C-14 dates, indicate that a barrier-lagoon complex has migrated to its present position in response to oscillations of sea level during the latter stages of the Flandrian transgression. Analysis of vibrocore and other samples shows that wave and current processes are variously dominant in the upper 2 m of the superficial deposits. The relative stability of the Skerries Bank may be explained by the values of the residual currents which approach zero along its crest. Water particle velocities nearshore off Slapton Beach suggest that short period edge waves are responsible for shoreline cusps observed in the Bay. While experiments with tracer material indicate that longshore movement may variously depend on linear dimension, ratio or shape index, no clear relationship has been established with nearshore wave parameters. Evidence suggests that Start Bay is a closed system under present-day conditions, there being no nourishment of the foreshore from outside the area. The 1917 Hallsands disaster can be attributed to the legacy of dredging shingle from the intertidal zone between 1897 and 1902, combined with a critical combination of storm waves, gales and spring tides.


We investigate an explicit tamed Euler scheme of stochastic differential equation with random coefficients driven by Lévy noise, which has super-linear drift coefficient. The strong convergence property of the tamed Euler scheme is proved when drift coefficient satisfies one-sided local Lipschitz condition whereas diffusion and jump coefficients satisfy local Lipschitz conditions. A rate of convergence for the tamed Euler scheme is recovered when local Lipschitz conditions are replaced by global Lipschitz conditions and drift satisfies polynomial Lipschitz condition. These findings are consistent with those of the classical Euler scheme. New methodologies are developed to overcome challenges arising due to the jumps and the randomness of the coefficients. Moreover, as an application of these findings, a tamed Euler scheme is proposed for the stochastic delay differential equation driven by Lévy noise with drift coefficient that grows superlinearly in both delay and non-delay variables. The strong convergence property of the tamed Euler scheme for such SDDE driven by Lévy noise is studied and rate of convergence is shown to be consistent with that of the classical Euler scheme. Finally, an explicit tamed Milstein scheme with rate of convergence arbitrarily close to one is developed to approximate the stochastic differential equation driven by Lévy noise (without random coefficients) that has super-linearly growing drift coefficient.


This article seeks to explore why, after significant financial investment and a history of nearly 50 years of civil society activity, there is a paucity of explicitly codified and consolidated indigenous theory that has emerged from peacebuilding practice in Northern Ireland. Methodologically, this apparent contradiction is explored, utilizing both empirical research (interviews with key peacebuilders) and the wide practitioner experience of the authors. It is argued that two complex dynamics have contributed to the subordination of local practice-based knowledge, namely, the professionalization of peace and the dominance of research over practice within academia. These two dynamics have played a mutually exacerbatory and significant role in creating barriers to constructing local peacebuilding theory. Phronesis, an Aristotelian term for practical knowledge, is explored to discover what insights it may contribute to both research, theory and practice in the field of peacebuilding, followed by examples of institutions demonstrating its value for practice–theory reflexivity. The article concludes with a call for peace research that validates and values practical knowledge. By doing so, the authors argue, new avenues for collaborative partnership between practitioners and academics can open up, which may play a constructive role in bridging practice–theory divides and, most importantly, contribute to building more effective and sustainable peacebuilding processes in Northern Ireland and in other conflict contexts.


Cloud computing is an opened and distributed network that guarantees access to a large amount of data and IT infrastructure at several levels (software, hardware...). With the increase demand, handling clients' needs is getting increasingly challenging. Responding to all requesting clients could lead to security breaches, and since it is the provider's responsibility to secure not only the offered cloud services but also the data, it is important to ensure clients reliability. Although filtering clients in the cloud is not so common, it is required to assure cloud safety. In this paper, by implementing multi agent systems in the cloud to handle interactions for the providers, trust is introduced at agent level to filtrate the clients asking for services by using Particle Swarm Optimization and acquaintance knowledge to determine malicious and untrustworthy clients. The selection depends on previous knowledge and overall rating of trusted peers. The conducted experiments show that the model outputs relevant results, and even with a small number of peers, the framework is able to converge to the best solution. The model presented in this paper is a part of ongoing work to adapt interactions in the cloud.


We propose a simple low-cost technique that enables civil global positioning system receivers and other civil global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers to reliably detect carry-off spoofing and jamming. The technique, which we call the power-distortion detector, classifies received signals as interference-free, multipath-afflicted, spoofed, or jammed according to observations of received power and correlation function distortion. It does not depend on external hardware or a network connection and can be readily implemented on many receivers via a firmware update. Crucially, the detector can with high probability distinguish low-power spoofing from ordinary multipath. In testing against more than 25 high-quality empirical datasets yielding more than 900,000 separate detection tests, the detector correctly alarms on all malicious spoofing or jamming attacks while maintaining a  $<$0.6% single-channel false alarm rate.


We define and characterize Lipschitz–Killing invariants for lattices of compact sufficiently tame subsets of ℝN. Our main example are definable subsets with respect to an o–minimal system ω. We also investigate the ring M0(ω), which is the metric counterpart of the universal ring K0(ω). The Lipschitz–Killing invariants give rise to a homomorphism M0(ω) ↦ ℝ[t], the kernel of which is the closure of {0}. Here the construction of suitable topologies plays an essential role. The results are also interpreted in terms of spherical currents.


The concept of cloud computing was first put forward in 2007. Efficient operational capability, infinite storage capacity and effective allocation and dispose of resource are the greatest advantages of cloud computing. After put forward, more and more people begin to study cloud computing, especially in universities which apply cloud computing to the construction of superior resource sharing platform positively. This research put forward a superior resource sharing platform which can realize the informationization, networking and automation of education, through a further study of existing superior resource sharing platform. The platform can provide a strong technical support for a better and faster service, a rapid development and a major revolution in universities. Applying cloud computing to superior resource sharing platform, this research put forward a superior resource sharing platform based on cloud computing. This platform can integrate service information resources of education and improve service quality of universities. Public education information service platform based on cloud computing can be realized by analyzing and studying characteristics of cloud computing and superior resource sharing. Practices show that this platform made great progress compared with information service of traditional education in respects of informationization, networking, reducing of education cost and flexibility. It could be argued that efficient computing capability and powerful computing and storage capacity are fully manifested on public education information service platform, making an overall improvement of superior resource sharing for education.


Main trends in criminal justice in the three Baltic countries were investigated. The research has shown quite different (even opposite) trends in criminal law and criminal procedure, on the one hand, in Lithuania and Latvia, and, on the other one, in Estonia. The former two countries have been developing rather restrictive, repressive and on strict criminal punishment based criminal policy. Contrary to this, Estonia has developed rather liberal policy. But most recent trends in Estonia also show disappointment with the liberal policy and a turn to a more rigid one.