BACKGROUND
In healthy individuals, ketamine hydrochloride and amphetamine sulfate produce cognitive, behavioral, and subjective effects resembling endogenous psychoses. Studying the comparative and interactive effects of these agents may provide insights into the roles of the glutamate and monoamine systems in psychosis and cognition.

OBJECTIVES
To directly compare the effects of ketamine and amphetamine and to explore their interactive effects within individuals.

DESIGN
Placebo-controlled, randomized, double-blind psychopharmacologic trial.

SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS
Forty-one healthy individuals recruited from the community who completed up to 4 test days.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
On each test day, participants received amphetamine (a 1-minute infusion of amphetamine sulfate, 0.25 mg/kg, or saline) and ketamine (a 1-minute intravenous infusion of ketamine, 0.23 mg/kg, followed by a 1-hour infusion of 0.5 mg/kg or an identical saline bolus and infusion). The order of amphetamine and ketamine infusions was randomized.

RESULTS
At the doses studied, ketamine and amphetamine produced positive symptoms and euphoria. However, perceptual changes were produced only by ketamine, and hostility, grandiosity, and somatic concern were stimulated only by amphetamine. Amphetamine and ketamine produced conceptual disorganization, but only ketamine produced concrete ideation and unusual mannerisms. Ketamine produced negative symptoms and disrupted delayed recall. Ketamine and amphetamine showed 3 types of interactive effects: (1) amphetamine attenuated the impairment of working memory produced by ketamine; (2) amphetamine and ketamine had additive effects on thought disorder, arousal, and euphoria; and (3) amphetamine and ketamine had less-than-additive effects on psychosis.

CONCLUSIONS
These findings implicate N-methyl-D-aspartate glutamate receptors and dopamine systems in psychosis. However, glutamate and dopamine may differentially contribute to psychosis, thought disorder, and euphoria. Regarding medication development for cognitive dysfunction, the pattern of the interactive effects of ketamine and amphetamine is consistent with the hypothesis that facilitation of prefrontal cortical dopamine levels would attenuate some cognitive impairments associated with deficits in N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor function.


We discuss a phase synthetic hologram, for encoding arbitrary complex fields, whose design is based on a sinusoidal phase grating with a spatially modulated phase depth. An important feature of the hologram is that it encodes the complex field at the zero diffraction order of the carrier grating. The smoothness of this sinusoidal carrier grating facilitates the implementation of the hologram with a pixelated spatial light modulator. We take advantage of the hologram reconstruction at the zero-diffraction order for the simultaneous generation of a collection of complex beams.


Medical management is rapidly becoming a very important part of the armamentarium of the urologist involved in the treatment of benign prostatic hyperplasia. The commonest options for medical management include alpha-blockers, 5-alpha reductase inhibitors, and progestational anti-androgens. We present a double-blind randomized controlled trial evaluating the safety and efficacy of terazosin, finasteride and allylestrenol, the prototype drugs in each of these respective categories. A total of 140 patients who satisfied the inclusion and exclusion criteria were inducted into the trial after an informed consent. They were randomized into 4 groups, which received placebo, terazosin, finasteride and allylestrenol respectively for 6 months. Since 29 patients did not complete 6 months of therapy, there were 111 evaluable patients at the end of the study. We found that these 3 drugs produce comparable improvement in symptom score (-40%), flow rates (-60%) and PVR (-50%) which is significantly better than that in the placebo group. Both allylestrenol and finasteride bring about a comparable reduction in prostate volume (-23%), which is statistically significant as compared to the placebo and terazosin groups. Terazosin in doses of I and 2 mg/ day was, found to be effiective and well-tolerated in the vast majority of our cases. No adverse effects were seen in the placebo and finasteride groups, while 9.6% in the terazosin group had postural hypotension and 10.7% in the allylestrenol group had some loss of libido, problems which were reversible upon cessation of therapy.


Over the past few years Personal Navigation Systems have become an established tool for route planning, but they are mainly designed for outdoor environments. Indoor navigation is still a challenging research area for several reasons: positioning is not very accurate, users can freely move between the interior boundaries of buildings, path network construction process may not be easy and straightforward due to complexity of indoor space configurations. Therefore the creation of a good network is essential for deriving overall connectivity of a building and for representing position of objects within the environment. This paper reviews current approaches to automatic derivation of route graphs for indoor navigation and discusses some of their limitations. Then, it introduces a novel algorithmic strategy for extracting a 3D connectivity graph for indoor navigation based on 2D floor plans.


The present methods available for determining these properties of fresh concrete are operator sensitive and thus, the properties for same mix of concrete made under same conditions will vary depending upon the workmanship. Even the IS code suggesting different methods for different workability and different placing condition. Thus, more judicious methods for determining the physical properties of fresh concrete are required. This seminar consists of such methods for determining the physical properties of concrete viz. shear stress and viscosity. In addition to this the research carried out by various researchers in the field of rheology of concrete has been studied such as the comparison of various types of rheometers, the use of rheometers and workability boxes, rheological properties of self-compacting concrete, rheological properties of ultra-high performance concrete and the various types of rheogarphs has been studied. KeywordsConcrete, Shear Stress, Rheology, Rheogarph, Rheometer, Workability


During the first semester of 2009 Revista Médica de Chile has received an increasing number of manuscripts. Close to 30% were rejected while most other are in the process of being improved by the authors after receiving criticisms by external peer reviewers and the editors. The time lag between acceptance and publication of manuscripts is on an average six months. During 2008, 10% of articles published were submitted by authors from countries other than Chile and most of them were printed in English. Impact factor and other indexes provided by the ISI Web of Knowledge showed a promising improvement in 2008. The International Advisory Committee and the National Editorial Committee were renewed, a new Section on Laboratory Medicine was incorporated and several minor changes were done in design and format, in the title page and the issues' content. The main problems to be faced relate to the increasing cost of editing and printing, with a reduction in commercial advertising historically contributed by the pharmaceutical industry. Another major concern is to stimulate governmental agencies, scientific societies and universities to establish a national independent registry of clinical trials, that should become a mandatory requisite for every manuscript submitted to Chilean medical journals, reporting clinical trials performed in the country; foreign manuscripts should document the satisfaction of an identical requisite in their original source.


This forum is dedicated to exploring the notion of meaningfulness in design processes, taking the perspectives of community groups, nongovernmental organizations, and those who are marginalized in society as starting points. Authors will reflect conceptually and methodologically on practical engagements. --- Rosanna Bellini and Angelika Strohmayer, Editors


Application of expert system currently has entered most aspects of human life. The purpose of creation of expert system is adopting an expert knowledge into computer applications in order to solve the real problem that can only be resolved by experts. The process of identifying a type of wood can only be done by experts that are experienced in the identification and properties of wood. This study adopts the expert's knowledge of identification and properties of wood in computer application that produced an expert system to identify the wood based on the physical characteristics of wood including wood general characteristics yields the color, pattern, texture, direction of the fiber, gloss, the impression of sense, violence. Wood anatomical characteristics of leaf width is includes: kinds of cells and functions, vessels, vessels of the distribution, composition, shape of vessel perforation vessel, the contents of fields (parenkima and wooden fingers), growing place and durability class. This research uses a rule-based reasoning and forward chaining inference engine. Knowledge base gained from interviews with experts the identification and properties of wood, as well as literature supporting literature. This computer application system was created by using Delphi 7.0. From the testing that has been done obtained a conclusion that the expert system application that is created is capable of identifying type of wood based on the physical properties of wood are entered by the user


Police investigations of major crimes are typically conducted in contexts where there is contested or ambiguous knowledge about what occurred and such challenges are also routinely faced in the investigation of missing persons. This article examines ways in which attempts to 'manufacture certainty' in missing persons cases are strongly informed by geographical notions of space and place. The article is structured around the key phases of police investigations, each of which involves the mobilization of different forms of geographical knowledge. In the first stage of 'identifying and acquiring' information, the process of search is structured by knowledge about the possible spatial behaviours of missing people often generated using spatial profiling techniques. In the second phase of 'interpreting and understanding', more nuanced accounts of what may have happened to a missing person are constructed as the police attempt to 'place' a person's disappearance within a particular narrative based on their reading of the intelligence picture that emerges during the investigation. In the concluding phase of 'ordering and representing', the case to internal (senior police management) and external (relatives of the missing person and wider public) audiences investigators will often invoke a notion of 'the end of the world' referring not just to how they have defined the geographical limits of the police search if the person is still unaccounted for but also the boundaries of reputational risk and the proportionality of the police response.


Context. Interest in searches for extraterrestrial civilizations (ETCs) has been boosted in recent decades by the discovery of thousands of exoplanets.
Aims. We turn to the classification of ETCs for new considerations that may help to design better strategies for searching for ETCs.
Methods. This study is based on analogies with our own biological, historical, technological, and scientific development. We took a basic taxonomic approach to ETCs and investigated the implications of the new classification on ETC evolution and observational patterns. Finally, we used the quantitative scheme of Kardashev and considered its implications on the searches for ETCs as a counter example to our qualitative classification.
Results. We propose a classification based on the abilities of ETCs to modify and integrate with their environments: Class 0 uses the environment as it is, Class 1 modifies the environment to fit its needs, Class 2 modifies itself to fit the environment, and a Class 3 ETC is fully integrated with the environment. Combined with the classical Kardashev scale, our scheme forms a two-dimensional method for interpreting ETC properties.
Conclusions. The new framework makes it obvious that the available energy is not a unique measure of ETC progress: it may not even correlate with how well that energy is used. The possibility for progress without increased energy consumption implies a lower detectability, so in principle the existence of a Kardashev Type III ETC in the Milky Way cannot be ruled out. This reasoning weakens the Fermi paradox, allowing for the existence of advanced, yet not energy hungry, low-detectability ETCs. The integration of ETCs with the environment will make it impossible to tell technosignatures and natural phenomena apart. Therefore, the most likely opportunity for SETI searches to find advanced ETCs is to look for beacons, specifically set up by them for young civilizations like ours (if they would want to do that remains a matter of speculation). The other SETI window of opportunity is to search for ETCs at technological level similar to ours. To rephrase the famous saying of Arthur Clarke, sufficiently advanced civilizations are indistinguishable from nature.


The scope of climate change impacts is expected to be extraordinary, touching every ecosystem on the planet and affecting human interactions with the natural and built environment. From increased surface and water temperatures to sea level rise and more frequent extreme weather events, climate change promises vast and profound alterations to our world. Indeed, scientists predict continued climate change impacts regardless of any present or future mitigation efforts due to the long-lived nature of greenhouse gases emitted over the last century. The need to adapt to this new future is crucial. Adaptation may take a variety of forms, from implementing certain natural resources management strategies to applying principles of water law to mimic the natural water cycle. The goal of adaptation efforts is to lessen the magnitude of these impacts on humans and the natural environment through proactive and planned actions. The longer we wait to adopt a framework and laws for adapting to climate change, the more costly and painful the process will become.This publication identifies both foundational principles and specific strategies for climate change adaptation across the Puget Sound Basin. The projected impacts themselves of climate change in the region were well studied in a landmark 2009 report by the state-commissioned Climate Impacts Group. This publication analyzes adaptation options within the existing legal and regulatory framework in Washington. Recognizing the economic and political realities may not lead to new legislation, the recommendations focus on how existing laws can be applied and made more robust to include climate change adaptation.


We show that country characteristics explain most of the cross-sectional variation in bank board independence. In contrast, country characteristics have little explanatory power for the fraction of outside bank directors with experience in the banking industry. Exploiting the time-series dimension of the sample, we show that changes in bank characteristics are not robustly associated with changes in board independence, while changes in board experience are positively related to changes in bank size and negatively related to changes in performance. The evidence suggests that country-specific laws and regulations affect the composition of boards of banks mainly through requirements for director independence.


Breast cancers (BCs) comprise heterogeneous subtypes of various prognoses. An active anti-tumor immune profile usually correlated with a better survival. Two current major challenges of BC research are to understand the inter-relations between BC and anti-tumor immunity, and to identify candidates whose targeting would contribute to enhance anti-tumor efficiency.


In this paper, using an algorithm based on the retrospective rejection sampling scheme, we propose an exact simulation of a Brownian diffusion whose drift admits several jumps. We treat explicitly and extensively the case of two jumps, providing numerical simulations. Our main contribution is to manage the technical diffculty due to the presence of two jumps thanks to a new explicit expression of the transition density of the skew Brownian motion with two semipermeable barriers and a constant drift.


Building reservoir release schedules to manage engineered river systems can involve costly trade‐offs between storing and releasing water. As a result, the design of release schedules requires metrics that quantify the benefit and damages created by releases to the downstream ecosystem. Such metrics should support making operational decisions under uncertain hydrologic conditions, including drought and flood seasons. This study addresses this need and develops a reservoir operation rule structure and method to maximize downstream environmental benefit while meeting human water demands. The result is a general approach for hedging downstream environmental objectives. A multistage stochastic mixed‐integer nonlinear program with Markov Chains, identifies optimal "environmental hedging," releases to maximize environmental benefits subject to probabilistic seasonal hydrologic conditions, current, past, and future environmental demand, human water supply needs, infrastructure limitations, population dynamics, drought storage protection, and the river's carrying capacity. Environmental hedging "hedges bets" for drought by reducing releases for fish, sometimes intentionally killing some fish early to reduce the likelihood of large fish kills and storage crises later. This approach is applied to Folsom reservoir in California to support survival of fall‐run Chinook salmon in the lower American River for a range of carryover and initial storage cases. Benefit is measured in terms of fish survival; maintaining self‐sustaining native fish populations is a significant indicator of ecosystem function. Environmental hedging meets human demand and outperforms other operating rules, including the current Folsom operating strategy, based on metrics of fish extirpation and water supply reliability.


In July 2018, the Israeli Knesset passed Basic Law: Israel – The Nation-State of the Jewish People (Nation-State Law). This article highlights three of the law9s central premises: the entrenched supremacy of Jewish settlers; the erasure of indigenous Palestinians; and, with reference to borders, the effective annexation of those parts of historic Palestine that were occupied in 1967. The authors reflect on the passage of the law within a broader history of settler colonialism and in the current global context of growing authoritarianism and overt institutionalized racism. The passage of such a colonial piece of constitutional legislation in 2018 is a testament to the continued resistance of Palestinians and the growing movement for Palestinian rights. The authors argue that the alternative to the exclusionary Nation-State Law, a rights-based, people-centered framework, is a promising avenue to not only secure Palestinian rights, but also advance a universal struggle for equality and historical justice.


BACKGROUND
Bile acids have been proposed to promote colon carcinogenesis. However, there are limited prospective data on circulating bile acid levels and colon cancer risk in humans.

METHODS
Associations between pre-diagnostic plasma levels of 17 primary, secondary and tertiary bile acid metabolites (conjugated and unconjugated) and colon cancer risk were evaluated in a nested case-control study within the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) cohort. Bile acid levels were quantified by tandem mass spectrometry in samples from 569 incident colon cancer cases and 569 matched controls. Multivariable logistic regression analyses were used to estimate odds ratios (ORs) for colon cancer risk across quartiles of bile acid concentrations.

RESULTS
Positive associations were observed between colon cancer risk and plasma levels of 7 conjugated bile acid metabolites, i.e. primary bile acids glycocholic acid (ORQuartile 4 vs. Quartile 1=2.22,95 % confidence interval[CI]=1.52, 3.26), taurocholic acid (OR = 1.78, 95%CI=1.23, 2.58), glycochenodeoxycholic acid (OR = 1.68, 95%CI=1.13, 2.48), taurochenodeoxycholic acid (OR = 1.62, 95%CI=1.11-2.36), and glycohyocholic acid (OR = 1.65, 95%CI=1.13, 2.40) as well as the secondary bile acids glycodeoxycholic acid (OR = 1.68, 95%CI=1.12, 2.54) and taurodeoxycholic acid (OR = 1.54, 95%CI=1.02, 2.31). By contrast, unconjugated bile acids and tertiary bile acids were not associated with risk.

CONCLUSIONS
This prospective study showed that pre-diagnostic levels of certain conjugated primary and secondary bile acids were positively associated with risk of colon cancer. Our findings support experimental data to suggest that a high bile acid load is colon cancer promotive.


According to the surveys conducted by Central Banks in the region, 2016 growth expectations fell by 0.1% in March compared to the previous month and inflation expectations rose by 0.1%. At the individual country level,
growth expectations fell in six countries, remained constant in one and rose in another one. Inflation expectations decreased in one country, remained constant in four and rose in three. Growth expectations fell by 0.3% in Paraguay, by 0.2% in Brazil, Chile and Guatemala and by 0.1% in Mexico and Uruguay. They remained constant in Colombia and increased in Peru by 0.2%. Growth expectations are highly heterogeneous for the eight countries of the sample ranging from -3.6% in Brazil to 3.6% in Guatemala. Inflation expectations for 2016 increased by 0.2% in Colombia, Guatemala and Uruguay, remained constant in Chile, Mexico, Paraguay and Peru, and fell by 0.2% in Brazil. Inflation expectations range from 3.3% in Mexico to 9.9% in Uruguay.


The problems of the essence of law determined by the globalization process are analyzed in this article. The author puts a hypothesis that present globalization processes determine changes in the essence and content of law as well as it's features. That determines the futurology problems in law, when the law appears as one of the elements of a certain world model. The author analyses the main theories of the essence of law (law as a measure of justice, freedom etc.) and moreover the main law interpretation concepts (philosophic, normative, sociological, law as integrity), the main conclusion is they are interconnected as every project emphasizes only a one side of the law being. The hypothesis is checked by the analysis of the widely used law features and law conceptions and it's critique from the point of contemporary globalization processes. It affords to make a conclusion that some features change it's content but law saves its essence as a method of the most significant social relations regulation thus ignoring changing of law values.


In recent years, the installation of photovoltaic systems in China has increased steadily to gradually become large-scale, having a significant impact on the urban landscape. Research on this impact mostly focuses on visual impact and glare risk. However, differences in urban land use types may lead to differences in the impact of photovoltaic applications on the landscape. This study adapts visual Q methodology to assess the impact of photovoltaic applications on the landscape in urban areas. Landscape photographs of photovoltaic applications in different cities of China are collected and used during the concourse and Q sorting. The final Q sample is composed of 36 photographs of different photovoltaic materials at different levels of integration in six urban land use types. The P set is composed of 36 respondents, including experts and non-experts. In conclusion, environmental harmony, power generation, innovative design, installation height, and social benefits of photovoltaic systems are the main impacts of photovoltaic systems on urban landscapes. Photovoltaic systems in different urban land use types have different impacts on the landscape. The conclusions have policy implications for different urban land use types, which has significance for the construction of urban photovoltaic systems in the future.


In a period of shrinking fiscal resources it is especially important that budgetary decision-making processes be based upon empirical data relating to the actual health and social service needs of the elderly. The present study consisted of a comprehensive survey of the social service needs of a random sample of 75 normative elderly citizens drawn from a multi-ethnic population. The results provide a preliminary data-base for administrative and policy-making bodies to allocate scarce social service resources. In an era of shrinking fiscal resources and drastic cuts in the provision of human services, funding decisions and budgetary allotments are often made on the basis of special interest group pressures, arbitrary preference or in response to the latest fad 'need' which has caught the public interest. Obviously it is vital that the available resources allocated to community mental health and other social service needs be distributed on a more equitable and rational basis.


Misrepresentation of Data and Typographical Error: In the Original Investigation article by Rockett et al titled "Self-injury Mortality in the United States in the Early 21st Century: A Comparison With Proximally Ranked Diseases," published online August 24, 2016,1 there was a summary misrepresentation of data in the Conclusions and Relevance section of the Abstract and the Conclusions section as well as a typographical error in Table 1. The first sentences of both the conclusions should read, "The burgeoning SIM [self-injury mortality] rate has converged with the mortality rate for diabetes, but there is a 6-fold differential in the proportion of SIM vs diabetes deaths involving people younger than 55 years and SIM is increasingly affecting women relative to men." Additionally, the ninth row under "Sex-adjusted model fit" in Table 1 should read "Sex (male)." This article was corrected online.


Evidence from the literature widely supports the efficacy of screening for colorectal cancer (CRC) in reducing mortality. A blood-based assay, potentially, represents a more accessible early detection tool for the identification of circulating tumour cells originating from a primary tumour site in the body. The present work aimed at identifying a set of specific mRNAs expressed in colon tissue but not in blood cells. These mRNAs may represent useful markers for early detection of circulating colon cancer cells by a simple, qualitative RT-PCR assay, following RNA extraction from peripheral blood samples. Using a data-mining tool called cDNA digital gene expression displayer (DGED), based on serial analysis of gene expression (SAGE) from the Cancer Genome Anatomy Project (CGAP) database, 4-colon and 14-blood cDNA libraries were analyzed. We selected 7 genes expressed in colon tissue but not in blood and were able to test 6 of them by RT-PCR in peripheral blood of CRC patients and healthy controls. We present a relatively easy and highly reproducible technique for the detection of mRNA expression of genes as candidate markers of malignancy in blood samples of patients with colon cancer. SAGE DGED provided a list of the best candidate mRNAs predicted to detect colon cells in the blood, namely those encoding the following proteins: hypothetical protein LOC644844 (LOC644844, whose cDNA was not amplifiable), fatty acid binding protein 1 (FABP1), carcinoembryonic antigen-related cell adhesion molecule 5 (CEACAM5), mucin 13 cell surface associated (MUC13), guanylate cyclase activator 2A (GUCA2A), amiloride binding protein 1 (ABP1), galactoside-binding, solute carrier family 26, member 3 (SLC26A3). The mRNA expression of these genes was evaluated in 8 samples from subjects diagnosed with CRC and 9 from healthy controls. We observed the expression of 2 of the 6 investigated genes in the blood samples of the vast majority of patients considered, but also in a subset of the controls. Our data confirm the extreme sensitivity of RT-PCR, making this technique able to detect minimal amounts of mRNA expressed in a non-tissue-specific manner. Moreover, DGED remains a powerful tool to identify candidate epithelial markers in blood, such as colon related mRNAs. However, to date, none of these qualified as tumour markers.


For the past fifty years, there has been a great deal of interest using water-based explosion suppression systems in mitigating/reducing the impact of thermal explosions and their consequential overpressures. Previous research focused on the suppression and mitigation with sprays containing droplets 200µm ≤ D32 ≤ 1000µm. The present study is focused on the mitigation of slow-moving deflagrations with speeds of less than or equal to 30 m/s. Consequently, the droplets within the spray must be small enough to extract heat in the short finite moments that the flame and droplets interact at about 0.03 ms for a 1 mm thick flame front. An apparatus was thus designed to simulate 'partly confined and/or vented' conditions, venting upstream of the propagating flame. Previous theoretical studies have suggested that droplets in the order of 10 µm to 20 µm will enable to mitigate combustion without relying on further droplet break up. This investigation, herewith, is presenting the full details of qualitative and quantitative analysis of using Spill Return Atomiser (SRA) to provide fine water spray. The spray cone angle was increased from 34.7˚ to 49.2˚and the exit orifice flow rate was raised from 0.295 l/min to 1.36 l/min. Increasing the flow rate provided a number of spray options ranging from 17µm ≤ D32 ≤ 29µm, with liquid volume flux of 0.011 cm³/s/cm² to 0.047 cm³/s/cm² and mean droplet velocity of 0 to 21.4 m/s, with the resulting of complete explosion mitigation qualities.


Contract-drafting courses are gaining in popularity in law school, and they are a pleasure to teach. In July 2005, Northwestern School of Law provided the location and on-site assistance in hosting the first national conference, in recent times, on the topic of Teaching Contract Drafting. Approximately 100 participants attended, indicating the need and growing enthusiasm for guidance on how to develop and teach contract-drafting courses. At the conference, presenters addressed teaching contract drafting to both first-year students and upper-level students. Law schools may offer an upper-level course as a stand-alone, such as the one I have been teaching, in which the students (and the professor) are not linked to a particular doctrinal basis. Alternatively, upper-level professors may focus their contract-drafting course around a specific topic, such as intellectual property, or have their students research actual corporations. The number of credits the course is worth affects classroom instruction; the more time in the classroom, the more in-class drafting and negotiations can occur. This article provides suggestions regarding selecting books, structuring the course, incorporating negotiations, offering learning-styles assessments, and grading assignments. It also offers a comparison to first-year legal writing courses. A contract-drafting course can foster students' self-confidence and enthusiasm for learning, as well as provide them with the necessary tools for practice.


Abstract Objective: The objective of the study was to determine the amount of home-fortified maize flour products consumed and wasted by women aged 15–49 years, and children aged ≤ 5 years. Design: This was a descriptive cross-sectional study. Setting: The study took place in Ekwendeni, a home fortification project area in Mzimba District, Northern Region, Malawi. Subjects: The study subjects were members of a random sample of 205 households practising home fortification. Outcome measures: The study's outcome measures included weighing fortified nsima, a thick maize flour-based porridge which was consumed, and its leftovers, using a kitchen scale. Using systematic random sampling, fortified maize flour and nsima samples were collected from households for energy, iron, zinc and vitamin A analysis. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics. Results: The food intake and plate waste of fortified food products pertaining to 94 children (49% male and 51% female) and 173 women was analysed. Predominantly, nsima (55%) was the main food product made from fortified maize flour. Other foods were porridge and chigumu, whole maize flour-based bread. Overall, the daily average consumption of fortified foods (nsima, porridge and chigumu) was 332 g/day for children, and 1011 g/day for women. Plate waste accounted for 25% of the food served to the children, and 12% served to the women. Discarding fortified nsima resulted in a 23% loss of energy and micronutrients in the children, and a 11.2% loss in the women. Conclusion: Commonly consumed home-fortified maize flour products were nsima, porridge and chigumu. The plate waste of the fortified foods, primarily nsima, resulted in considerable loss of energy and micronutrients, especially in the children. Home-fortification interventions should include nutrition messages on food budgeting to minimise food and nutrient losses in women and children in northern Malawi.


We have studied the structural and electronic properties of pure, deffect and doped chalcopyrite semiconductors using Density functional theory (DFT) based first principle technique within Tight binding Linear Muffin Tin orbital (TB-LMTO) method. Our calculated structural parameters such as lattice constant, anion displacement parameter(u) in case of pure chalcopyrite and anion displacement paramete (ux, uy,uz) in case of deffect and doped chalcopyrite, tetragonal distortion(=c/2a) and bond length are in good agreement with other work. Our band structure calculation suggest that most of chalcopyrites are direct band gap semiconductors.In our study the CuInSe2 is a direct bandgap semiconductor having band gap = 1.35 . Calculated band gaps are in good agreement with other experimental and theoretical works with LDA limitation.


Although the biblical books of the Second Temple period are of exceptional importance for understanding the development of Israel, the Book of Ezra-Nehemiah (hereafter: E-N) (1) poses a daunting problem to the modern reader. The ubiquitous name lists (especially in Ezra 2, 8, 10; Nehemiah 3, 7, 10-12) appear to detract from the narrative by digressing from the main story line. In fact, this problem is not limited to the modern reader. Some 2000 years ago, Josephus already recognized the obstacles presented to the flow of the narrative by these name lists. When describing Zerubbabel's arrival in Israel (Ezra 2), Josephus writes in Antiquities of the Jews, Book XI: Thus, then, did they depart, from each family a fixed number. But I have thought it better not to give a list of the names of the families lest I distract the minds of my readers from the connexion of events and make the narrative difficult for them to follow. (2) Similarly, when discussing the lengthy list in Ezra 10 of those who had terminated their intermarriages, Josephus adds, "We have not, however, thought it necessary to give their names." (3) Despite modern literary sensibilities, however, these name lists were not always viewed as distracting. In a recent discussion of the literary role of biblical lists, Elhanan Samet observes: Lists of various types are an important and common literary phenomenon in Tanakh, and the modern reader tends to ignore them --generally for lack of interest ... The main reason for the lack of interest is the change in literary taste of the modern reader as opposed to that of the ancient one who, after all, represented the initial audience to which the Tanakh was addressed. Readers of ancient times were very fond of these lists, and some were even a sort of "poetry" for them. Many lists are recorded in Tanakh specifically for the purpose of introducing a more celebratory and elevated note into the "routine" biblical story, and some lists are poetical in nature even in the form in which they are written in the Torah. (4) Rather than following Josephus' lead in shying away from them, we will exploit these lists as an opportunity to shed light on the overall meaning of EN. EZRA 1-6 These chapters begin with the proclamation of King Cyrus allowing Jews to return to their land and to rebuild the Temple. As we prepare for an exciting narrative to unfold, however, we instead are confronted with an inordinately lengthy list in Chapter 2, enumerating the people who returned with Zerubbabel and Jeshua. What purposes could this detailed list serve? On a literary level, the sheer magnitude of the list gives the impression that a great many Jews returned to the Promised Land. Similarly, the particular attention ascribed to each group indicates the importance of each individual in the return. As Tamara Cohn Eskenazi writes: This beginning introduces us to one of Ezra-Nehemiah's distinguishing characteristics: lists, primarily of people.... The people who will build the house of God are the central focus of the book.... It is these people--listed with tiresome specificity--whose story Ezra-Nehemiah narrates. (5) Additionally, this name list almost eclipses another feature conspicuously lacking attention in Ezra 1-6. While the Books of Exodus-Leviticus-Numbers go to great lengths in describing the construction and dedication of the Tabernacle (Ex. 25-31, 35-40; Lev. 8-10; Num. 7), and the Book of Kings allocates significant space to the First Temple construction and dedication (I Kg. 6-8), E-N offers only a three-verse description of the dedication of the Second Temple (Ezra 6:17-19). On one level, this contrast may highlight the deficiencies of the Second Temple as opposed to the Tabernacle and the First Temple. Indeed, the older generation wept during the construction process, even as the younger generation celebrated with gusto: Many of the priests and Levites and the chiefs of the clans, the old men who had seen the first house, wept loudly at the sight of the founding of this house. …


What is the relationship between human rights and inequalities in income and wealth? Different approaches to understanding inequality have distinct implications for how we think about issues of well-‐being and social justice. The human rights framework offers an approach that stands in marked contrast to neoclassical economic theory. The human rights approach has started to engage more thoroughly with the question of inequalities in income and wealth, but offers only partial guidance on the implications of increasingly polarized societies. This paper looks at how income and wealth inequality affects realized outcomes with regard to the enjoyment of specific rights and how the distribution of resources affects political dynamics and power relations within which specific rights are realized.


Any educator, passionate about his / her discipline, works on techniques and methods to inspire learners. If such an educator 'gets the recipe' right, it will translate into learners applying themselves to the subject and both their understanding of content and acquisition of required skills will increase exponentially. This will impact positively on assessment results. Buy-in for the subject will increase as the inspired learners become the most influential marketing agent for the subject. This holds true especially with the teaching of History. One technique and method which can serve to inspire learners beyond the walls of the classroom and confines of the covers of a text book, is their experience of gradeand curriculum-relevant excursions. Due to perceived organisational hurdles, departmental obstacles, and the consequences of an educator's in loco parentis responsibility, many educators would not consider excursions as an option, let alone overseas excursions. In this article, an educator shares his experience in the organising of Grade 12 curriculumbased "History Tours" for his learners, and provides the what, why, who, where, when and how for organising such tours.


It is known, that nowadays almost every indoor positioning and navigation system (IPNS) consists of a radio signals part (Wi-Fi or BLE) and a part based on smartphone inertial sensors. Both parts contain a number of challenges complicating a precise user positioning using mobile phones or tablets. In the paper, we describe several contributions. Firstly, a problem of BLE packets recovering is considered. A specific version of a Kalman filter for received signal strength indicator (RSSI) data analysis is developed. The proposed modification allows recovering lost data as well as providing sufficient signal smoothing. Secondly, a custom step detection procedure based on an inertial navigation system (INS) is developed. Unlike to a common solution based on the thresholding of linear acceleration amplitude, an advanced version of the detector is highlighted. Finally, a hybrid indoor localization and navigation (HILN) system developed on the basis of a particle filter (PF) and the proposed modifications for BLE and INS parts is described. Experimental results are provided.


This paper addresses the current discussion on links between party politics and production regimes. Why do German Social Democrats opt for more corporate governance liberalization than the CDU although, in terms of the distributional outcomes of such reforms, one would expect the situation to be reversed? I divide my analysis into three stages. First, I use the European Parliament's crucial vote on the European takeover directive in July 2001 as a test case to show that the left-right dimension does indeed matter in corporate governance reform, beside cross-class and cross-party nation-based interests. In a second step, by analyzing the party positions in the main German corporate governance reforms in the 1990s, I show that the SPD and the CDU behave "paradoxically" in the sense that the SPD favored more corporate governance liberalization than the CDU, which protected the institutions of "Rhenish," "organized" capitalism. This constellation occurred in the discussions on company disclosure, management accountability, the power of banks, network dissolution, and takeover regulation. Third, I offer two explanations for this paradoxical party behavior. The first explanation concerns the historical conversion of ideas. I show that trade unions and Social Democrats favored a high degree of capital organization in the Weimar Republic, but this ideological position was driven in new directions at two watersheds: one in the late 1940s, the other in the late 1950s. My second explanation lies in the importance of conflicts over managerial control, in which both employees and minority shareholders oppose managers, and in which increased shareholder power strengthens the position of works councils.


The Constitution's Progress Clause purports to restrict Congress's copyright power to works that "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." For most of the past two centuries, this Clause has set a minimal content-based standard for copyright eligibility. It denied protection for a work whose content did not rise to the level of useful knowledge, in that the work either lacked compositional value or portrayed an immoral or unlawful subject matter. As evidenced by judicial and scholarly writings, this construction of the Progress Clause was consistent with the 1903 decision in Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Co., where the Court warned against judges imposing their own aesthetic values in determining copyright eligibility. In recent years, however, courts and commentators have subtly changed the standard of the Progress Clause from useful knowledge to general knowledge. And some courts have construed the Progress Clause as applying only to the Copyright Act as a whole — not to individual works. These changes in the interpretation of the Progress Clause have led some courts to extend copyright to all subject matter, ignoring the content-restrictive function of the Progress Clause altogether. Yet that function serves a valuable constitutional purpose. Some types of expression fail to promote, and even impede, the progress of science and useful arts. Although standards of progress may change, the law's ability to apply standards should remain constant under the Progress Clause. This Article proposes that the Progress Clause once again serve as a content-based standard for copyright eligibility.


Antimicrobial chemotherapy is a highly valued medical science which has shaped modern humanity in a phenomenal fashion. Within the past half century, a wide variety of antimicrobial substances have been discovered, designed and synthesized; literally hundreds of drugs have been successfully used in some fashion over the years. Today, the world wide anti-infective market exceeds $20 billion dollars annually and overall antimicrobial agents comprise the bulk of this trade. A number of general classes of antimicrobial drugs have emerged as mainstays in modern infectious disease chemotherapy. Regardless of a better understanding of infectious disease pathogenesis and the importance of sanitation, most individuals will become infected with a microbial pathogen many times, throughout their lives and in developed countries, anti-infective chemotherapy will be periodically administered. Antibacterial amount for the majority of antiinfective agents in comparison to antifungals, antivirals and antiparasitic agents. An antimicrobial is a chemical substance produced by microorganisms that can inhibit the growth of, or kill other microorganisms. The goal of antimicrobial in disease such as gastroenteritis is to decrease stool water and electrolyte losses, thus limiting the morbidity resulting from dehydration. Most antiretroviral only suppress the pathogen and boast the immune status but does not provide cure. To date, several drugs have been tried in the treatment of acute diseases such as diarrhea, HIV/AIDS but none has met the requirements enumerated above. They are therefore of very limited value in the department of diarrhea, especially in children as well in department of HIV/AIDS (Afr. J. Biomed. Res. 11: 235 - 250 ) Key Words; Antimicrobials, microbial resistance, diseases


The Derby Functional Communication Scale (DFCS) was developed to assess functional communication in patients in hospital and rehabilitation settings. The validity of the DFCS and its sensitivity to low mood was also examined. In this study, correlation analysis was undertaken between DFCS and other existing measures of communication and mood. Assessments took place on local Stroke and Rehabilitation units. Sixteen hospital inpatients with acquired communication problems due to mixed aetiologies were assessed on the DFCS and other measures of communication and mood. Measures used included the DFCS, Frenchay Aphasia Screening Test (FAST), Edinburgh Functional Communication Profile (EFCP), Speech Questionnaire (SQ) and speech and language therapists (SaLT) ratings of global communication ability were used to assess communication. The Visual Analogue Mood Scales (VAMS) and the Stroke Aphasic Depression Questionnaire (SADQ) were administered as measures of low mood. The data indicated that DFCS scores were significantly related to other measures of communication (r = .75-.9, p 0.05) correlations between DFCS and measures of mood were found. In conclusion, the DFCS may be used for assessing observable communication skills in patients with acquired communication disorders. However, further validation and evaluation of the sensitivity to low mood is required.


The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) has developed and systematically updated the system of radiological protection, which now recommends optimisation of protection measures within or guided by appropriate restrictions, such as dose constraints or reference levels, in all circumstances. This applies to all exposure situations (planned, emergency and existing) and all categories of exposure (occupational, medical, and public). Optimisation of protection is intended to reduce exposures to levels that are as low as reasonably achievable, economic and societal considerations being taken into account, and to manage medical exposures commensurate with the medical purpose.


This master thesis is based on a field study, conducted in Lugufu 1 and Mtabila 1 refugee camps in Kigoma, western Tanzania, where we held twenty-eight interviews with Congolese and Burundian refugee women. The Congolese and Burundian refugees have fled to Tanzania due to long-lasting conflicts in Congo and Burundi respectively; most arrived in mid-1990s. Thereby, the camps are no longer in phases of emergency and refugees have, since long, established everyday routines and habits that shape their everyday lives; our main interests lie in these. Accordingly, our aim with this study has been to attain a deepened understanding of how these refugee women experience their everyday lives with regards to safety. Since the women themselves were the narrators, security-related problems connected to firewood collection were, inevitably, frequently brought up and are therefore given much space throughout the study. Of great importance for the study is the Sphere Project, in particular the three Cross-Cutting issues Gender, Environment, and Security – which are all, we believe, intimately related to Feminist Geography. Moreover, our purpose has been to interpret the answers given by these refugee women through arguments and concepts included in Feminist Geography and thereby enable new ways of understanding how, for example, the physical environment affects the everyday routines of refugee women. Furthermore, as several feminist geographers (who, to this date, mainly have focused on western, urban areas) approach women's fear by looking at the prevailing social and power structures, such structures have also been given much space in our study. Consequently, our study sheds light on security-related issues, which refugee women face in their everyday lives. From the results found in our study, we believe, that if feminist geographers were to include refugee women residing in a non-western, rural context, they would stand to gain a broadened knowledge of how different women experience and are affected by fear and safety.


Three formaldehyde lines were observed (H$_2$CO 3$_{03}$--2$_{02}$, H$_2$CO 3$_{22}$--2$_{21}$, and H$_2$CO 3$_{21}$--2$_{20}$) in the protoplanetary disk around the Herbig Ae star HD 163296 with ALMA at 0.5 arcsecond (60 AU) spatial resolution. H$_2$CO 3$_{03}$--2$_{02}$ was readily detected via imaging, while the weaker H$_2$CO 3$_{22}$--2$_{21}$ and H$_2$CO 3$_{21}$--2$_{20}$ lines required matched filter analysis to detect. H$_2$CO is present throughout most of the gaseous disk, extending out to 550 AU. An apparent 50 AU inner radius of the H$_2$CO emission is likely caused by an optically thick dust continuum. The H$_2$CO radial intensity profile shows a peak at 100 AU and a secondary bump at around 300 AU, suggesting increased production in the outer disk. Different parameterizations of the H$_2$CO abundance were compared to the observed visibilities with $\chi^2$ minimization, using either a characteristic temperature, a characteristic radius or a radial power law index to describe the H$_2$CO chemistry. Similar models were applied to ALMA Science Verification data of C$^{18}$O. In all modeling scenarios, fits to the H$_2$CO data show an increased abundance in the outer disk. The overall best-fit H$_2$CO model shows a factor of two enhancement beyond a radius of 270$\pm$20 AU, with an inner abundance of $2\!-\!5 \times 10^{-12}$. The H$_2$CO emitting region has a lower limit on the kinetic temperature of $T > 20$ K. The C$^{18}$O modeling suggests an order of magnitude depletion in the outer disk and an abundance of $4\!-\!12 \times 10^{-8}$ in the inner disk. The increase in H$_2$CO outer disk emission could be a result of hydrogenation of CO ices on dust grains that are then sublimated via thermal desorption or UV photodesorption, or more efficient gas-phase production beyond about 300 AU if CO is photodisocciated in this region.


Summary Background: Central nervous system (CNS) Tuberculosis (TB) meningitis is a progressive disease that can present in many forms. CNS TB is encountered frequently in areas of high prevalence of tuberculosis and dissemination is common, but TB meningitis is a disease that has a relatively low prevalence in North America. Case Report: 27 year-old African American male presented with complaints of headache, altered mental status (AMS), and seizure activity. He was found to have fever, encephalopathy, and leukocytosis. Work up of his AMS revealed cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) consistent with acute lymphocytic meningitis and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) revealed right basilar meningeal enhancement with acute right basal ganglia infarction. Given the characteristic CSF and MRI finding for Tuberculosis (TB) a computed tomography (CT) of the chest was performed which revealed right upper lobe nodules with central cavitations. Biopsy results revealed Tuberculosis. The patient showed significant improvement once empiric tuberculosis therapy was begun. Conclusions: CNS TB is a treatable disease that will be fatal if not recognized early. It is imperative to be aware of the key clinical features of TB meningitis, and maintain a high level of suspicion when dealing with CNS infection if the cause is unknown.


In Pearson v. Callahan, the U.S. Supreme Court altered the contours of the qualified immunity defense with the intention of changing when and how federal courts make constitutional law. Qualified immunity is the primary defense to constitutional torts against government officials. Before Pearson, courts were required to determine if an official had violated a constitutional right even when that official was already protected by qualified immunity. After Pearson, courts now have the discretion to avoid such constitutional determinations when an official has qualified immunity. To determine Pearson's impact, this Comment presents an empirical study of qualified immunity cases. The findings are surprising. While circuit courts have generally begun avoiding constitutional determinations as expected, district courts have not done so. Because Pearson was motivated by significant criticism of mandatory engagement in constitutional analysis, the district courts' reaction is troubling. However, this reaction does indicate that courts tend not to avoid constitutional determinations in order to promote judicial efficiency. If this were the case, such a motivation would affect district courts more than circuit courts. Instead, it seems that a court's decision to avoid a constitutional determination is a product of its interest in controlling constitutional precedent. In sum, Pearson has given courts substantial control over what precedent enters the body of constitutional law, and at least circuit courts appear to be consciously using it—a finding with implications for how constitutional law will develop in the future.


Abstract Lobanovite, K2Na(Fe2+4 Mg2Na)Ti2(Si4O12)2O2(OH)4, is a new mineral of the astrophyllite supergroup from Mt. Yukspor, the Khibiny alkaline massif, Kola Peninsula Russia. It has been known previously under the following names: monoclinic astrophyllite, magnesium astrophyllite, magnesiumastrophyllite and magnesioastrophyllite but has never been formally proposed and approved as a valid mineral species by the Commission on newMinerals, Nomenclature and Classification of the International Mineralogical Association. It has now been revalidated and named lobanovite after Dr. Konstantin V. Lobanov, a prominent Russian ore geologist who worked in the Kola Peninsula for more than forty years (Nomenclature voting proposal 15-B). Lobanovite has been described from pegmatitic cavities on Mt. Yukspor where it occurs as elongated bladed crystals, up to 0.04 mm wide and 0.2 mm long, with a straw yellow to orange colour. Associated minerals are shcherbakovite, lamprophyllite, delindeite, wadeite, umbite and kostylevite. Lobanovite is biaxial (-) with refractive indices (λ = 589 nm) α = 1.658, βcalc. = 1.687, γ = 1.710; 2Vmeas.= 81.5-83°. Lobanovite is monoclinic, space group C2/m, a = 5.3327(2), b=23.1535(9), c = 10.3775(4) Å, β = 99.615(1)°, V = 1263.3 (1) Å3, Z = 2. The six strongest reflections in the powder X-ray diffraction data [d (Å), I, (hkl)] are: 3.38, 100, (003); 2.548, 90, (063); 10.1, 80, (001); 3.80, 60, (042,131); 3.079, 50, (132,062); 2.763, 90, (1̅71). The chemical composition of lobanovitewas determined by electron-microprobe analysis and the empirical formula (K1.97Ba0.01)Σ1.98(Na0.65Ca0.14)Σ0.79(Fe2+3.18Mg2.02Na1.00Mn0.72)Σ6.92(Ti1.99 Nb0.06)Σ2.05[(Si8.01Al0.06)Σ8.07O24]O2(OH)4.03F0.19 was calculated on the basis of 30.2(O + OH + F) anions, with H2O calculated from structure refinement, Dcalc. = 3.161 g cm-3. In the structure of lobanovite, the main structural unit is the HOH block, which consists of one close-packed O (Octahedral) and two H (Heteropolyhedral) sheets. The M(1-4) octahedra form the O sheet and the T4O12 astrophyllite ribbons and [5]-coordinated Ti-dominant D polyhedra link through common vertices to form the H sheet. The HOH blocks repeat along [001], and K and Na atoms occur at the interstitial A and B sites. The simplified and end-member formulae of lobanovite are K2Na [(Fe2+,Mn)4Mg2Na]Ti2(Si4O12)2O2(OH)4 and K2Na(Fe2+4Mg2Na)Ti2(Si4O12)2O2(OH)4, respectively.


In this chapter, we have attempted to do three things. First, we have illustrated an approach to Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) that focuses on sequential and categorial analysis and shows the way categories, and the resourcefulness of their inference-rich quality, can be used prospectively and retrospectively to proffer and solidify on-going accounts, states of affairs, event descriptions, and 'fact'. In addition to the analysis of different kinds of spoken and written interaction, we have also shown how the movement between description and categorisation functions to construct, constrain and produce accounts of 'what is happening' and 'what happened' in news reporting.

Second, we have tried to show Sacks's machinery of membership categorisation in practice. While one reads many descriptions of the terms of MCA, including the notions of 'inference-rich' and so on, these terms can seem complex and can also be used to justify the kinds of 'wild and promiscuous' analysis that Schegloff has criticised MCA for conducting. In contrast, we have shown how the inference-rich nature of categories is built into people's categorial practices. As noted earlier, it is not just that categories are, in theory and before empirical observation, 'inference rich', but that we can see that, and how, people treat categories as carrying inferential resources, in the design of their turns in which categorial formulations appear (Stokoe, 2012b). In other words, the inference-rich nature of categories is observable from the endogenous orientations of participants and is a resource for constructing accounts that can be reconstructed, contested, provisional, deniable – on their way to becoming solid, factual and beyond construction.

Third, we have shown how one can build MCA studies of the identification of practices from different sorts of large datasets. As Stokoe (2012b) has argued elsewhere, for MCA to survive as a method, in any way distinct from the more dominant conversation analysis, or as adding something to the analysis of social interaction, studies of practices that can be transferred across settings are required. Not only does such an approach provide an empirical base for other researchers, in the same way that CA has done, but it provides for the possibility of applying research findings to create impact for users and practitioners (Stokoe, 2013). Stokoe (2012b) has described a number of principles and steps for beginning and proceeding with a categorisation study, whether they start with an interest in a particular category in mind (e.g., 'nutter') or categorial phrase (e.g., 'it's human to get angry'; 'speaking as a parent'), or with a more inductive 'noticing' of a set of spoken or written interactional materials. The key is to collect data across different sorts of settings; including both interactional and textual materials. Data collection may be purposive (e.g. gathering together instances of particular categories in use because of an a priori interest in that category) or unmotivated (e.g. noticing a category's use and pursuing it within and across multiple discourse sites). Once collected and organised, analysis should look for evidence that, and how, recipients orient to categories, devices or inferences for the [Page 70]interactional consequences of a category's use; for co-occurring component features of categorial formulations; and for the way participants within and between turns build and resist categorisations. In this way, a 'categorial systematics' approach to MCA works with collections of instances of possible categorial phenomena gathered from different discourse contexts, with the aim of uncovering the systematic centrality of categories and categorial practices to action.


This paper examines Arthur Danto's contention, put forward in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, that at a certain point in its history art becomes philosophy. The similarities and differences between Danto's view and the Hegelian one from which it is derived are examined. Using Danto's favorite example of a philosophical work of art, Andy Warhol's Brillo Box (1965), it is argued that a more plausible interpretation of the meaning of the work undermines Danto's claims about art's transformation into philosophy.


Last year, in Lafler v. Cooper and Missouri v. Frye, a five-to-four majority of the Supreme Court held that incompetent lawyering that causes a defendant to reject a plea offer can constitute deficient performance, and the resulting loss of a favorable plea bargain can constitute cognizable prejudice, under the Sixth Amendment. This commentary, published as part of the Harvard Law Review's Supreme Court issue, analyzes both decisions. The majority and dissenting opinions almost talked past each other, reaching starkly different conclusions because they started from opposing premises: contemporary and pragmatic versus historical and formalist. Belatedly, the Court noticed that "ours 'is for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials.'" Now the big question is which institutions can and will ameliorate poor defense lawyering retrospectively or prospectively. The upshot, I predict, will depend on semiprivate ordering: few reversals in court, but much more prospective extrajudicial reform. Lafler and Frye will not cause courts of appeals to invalidate many convictions for constitutional error. Courts are poorly equipped to remedy poor lawyers, particularly as plea bargaining creates little record and judges are reluctant to reverse final judgments. Moreover, judges cannot fix the massive underfunding and overwork that plague indigent defense counsel. But Lafler and Frye will probably have much bigger effects indirectly, in prompting solutions beyond the courts. Plea bargaining's semiprivatized justice is best suited to semiprivatized remedies and reforms, backstopped by judges but driven by other actors. Other actors have the incentives and power to achieve, prospectively and flexibly, much that after-the-fact judicial review cannot. In the real world of plea bargaining, the parties' stances are no longer antagonistic. Counterintuitively, even prosecutors and defendants have strong incentives to collaborate in explaining, promoting, and bulletproofing plea bargains.


A learning style is an issue related to learners. In one way or the other, learning style could assist learners in their learning activities if students ignore their learning styles, it may influence their effort in understanding teaching materials. To overcome these problems, a model for reliable automatic learning style detection is needed. Currently, there are two approaches in detecting learning styles: data driven and literature based. Learners, especially those with changing learning styles, have difficulties in adopting these two approach since they are not adaptive, dynamic and responsive (ADR). To solve the above problems, a model using agent learning approach is proposes. Agent learning involves performing activities in four phases, i.e. initialization, learning, matching and, recommendations to decide the learning styles the students use. The proposed system will provide instructional materials that match the learning style that has been detected. The automatics detection process is performed by combining the data-driven and literature-based approaches. We propose an evaluation model agent learning system to ensure the model is working properly.


We present a geometric approach for the analysis of dynamic scenes containing multiple rigidly moving objects seen in two perspective views. Our approach exploits the algebraic and geometric properties of the so-called multibody epipolar constraint and its associated multibody fundamental matrix, which are natural generalizations of the epipolar constraint and of the fundamental matrix to multiple moving objects. We derive a rank constraint on the image points from which one can estimate the number of independent motions and linearly solve for the multibody fundamental matrix. We prove that the epipoles of each independent motion lie exactly in the intersection of the left null space of the multibody fundamental matrix with the so-called Veronese surface. We then show that individual epipoles and epipolar lines can be uniformly and efficiently computed by using a novel polynomial factorization technique. Given the epipoles and epipolar lines, the estimation of individual fundamental matrices becomes a linear problem. Then, motion and feature point segmentation is automatically obtained from either the epipoles and epipolar lines or the individual fundamental matrices. We test the proposed approach by segmenting a real sequence.


the effect of pathological aging on explicit memory is very well documented, but relatively few studies have addressed this issue in the musical domain. To examine learning and consolidation of melodies, we designed a melodic recognition task involving immediate and delayed recognition of 16 target melodies (8 familiar and 8 unfamiliar). Seventeen patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer9s disease (AD) and 17 age-matched controls were tested. During the initial presentation of the targets, the participant had to decide whether or not the melody was familiar. Recognition was tested after one and three presentations of the target melodies using a yes/no recognition paradigm. Delayed recognition was tested after 24 hours to evaluate consolidation. In keeping with the findings of Bartlett, Halpern, and Dowling (1995), age-matched controls showed better recognition of familiar than unfamiliar melodies. Controls also showed improved performance with multiple presentations for both familiar and unfamiliar melodies, without forgetting after 24-hour delay. In contrast, patients with AD showed impaired learning and recognition of both unfamiliar and familiar melodies with no benefit of familiarity on recognition. Nevertheless, the familiarity decision-based ratings of patients was in keeping with controls. These findings suggest that musical recognition memory is impaired in AD, but the musical lexicon (as assessed by familiarity ratings) is preserved. These findings highlight the need to use both familiar and unfamiliar music in experimental tasks to study the different processes underlying recognition memory.


Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is a sample efficient technique to obtain control policies, yet unavoidable modeling errors often lead performance deterioration. The model in MBRL is often solely fitted to reconstruct dynamics, state observations in particular, while the impact of model error on the policy is not captured by the training objective. This leads to a mismatch between the intended goal of MBRL, enabling good policy and value learning, and the target of the loss function employed in practice, future state prediction. Naive intuition would suggest that value-aware model learning would fix this problem and, indeed, several solutions to this objective mismatch problem have been proposed based on theoretical analysis. However, they tend to be inferior in practice to commonly used maximum likelihood (MLE) based approaches. In this paper we propose the Value-gradient weighted Model Learning (VaGraM), a novel method for value-aware model learning which improves the performance of MBRL in challenging settings, such as small model capacity and the presence of distracting state dimensions. We analyze both MLE and value-aware approaches and demonstrate how they fail to account for exploration and the behavior of function approximation when learning value-aware models and highlight the additional goals that must be met to stabilize optimization in the deep learning setting. We verify our analysis by showing that our loss function is able to achieve high returns on the Mujoco benchmark suite while being more robust than maximum likelihood based approaches.


G20 leaders met for the second time in London on 2 April, as the global economic crisis began to crash across the borders of poor countries with ever-greater severity. Oxfam's research shows rising human impacts in the shape of job losses, falling remittances to the families of migrant workers and a particularly severe impact on women workers in global supply chains. Based on the latest forecasts, published on the eve of the summit, Oxfam estimates that the crisis could push 100 million people into poverty in 2009 alone.


Federal agencies issued eight major interim final regulations in 2010 to quickly implement major provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Our previous reviews found that the regulatory impact analyses for these regulations were seriously incomplete, often omitting significant benefits, costs, or regulatory alternatives. Analysis of equity was cursory at best. For these regulations, the quality and use of regulatory analysis fell well below the standards set by other federal agencies and even by HHS. This paper demonstrates that the low-quality analysis was a predictable result of the way that the administration and Congress chose to manage the regulatory process. Presidential and congressional decisions, in turn, reflected the political incentives both actors faced in 2010. This suggests that institutional rather than personal factors explain the poor quality of analysis and decisions that occur when agencies implement important presidential priorities in the face of tight legislative deadlines. To promote transparency and informed decision making, additional checks and balances in the regulatory process are needed to prevent politics from short-circuiting analysis.


Thomas J. Joudrey, "'Well, we must be for ourselves in the long run': Selfishness and Sociality in Wuthering Heights " (pp. 165–193) This essay traces a problem that has long dogged criticism of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847): why is a novel concerned with passionate love for others populated by characters who are radically selfish? Bronte, drawing on the Byronic tradition and eschewing contemporary exhortations to self-renunciation, validates selfish desire even at the expense of communal responsibility. In so doing, she is forced to contend with the possibility that selfishness risks disabling sociality and marooning the self in shame, isolation, or solipsism. Bronte shows, however, that selfishness and sociality are symbiotically implicated, in that selfishness acts as a precondition of robust sociality. After a series of failures—represented in Lockwood's shame-saturated retreat into childish sociality, Heathcliff and Catherine's self-destroying soul fusion, and Linton Heathcliff's masturbatory selfishness—Bronte ultimately locates a brokered compromise between selfishness and sociality in the relationship of Cathy and Hareton. By maintaining their respective boundaries of self and yet making them selectively permeable, the two demonstrate that susceptibility to interpersonal exchange proves vital to fostering their autonomy as discrete selves. Wuthering Heights wages battle on two fronts, excoriating the temptation to enclose the self behind impenetrable barriers, but simultaneously denouncing the other extreme that would eradicate all difference through metaphysical soul-fusion. Bronte posits instead that mature selfhood can only be yielded by a posture of openness to external influences, even as the coherence of the self must be fortified against appropriation by those influences.


All across America people trying to do business are being victimized by frivolous lawsuits and civil judgments that have no relation to elementary principles of justice. President Bush has pledged to make reform of the legal system one of his principal objectives of his second term if he is re-elected. One need look no further than the president's own state of Texas to discover a tort crisis of epic proportions. Texans have traditionally regarded their state as an entrepreneurial center. Today, however, litigation is the largest growth industry in the Lone Star State. Lawyers and courts have turned Texas from one of the nation's most attractive business climates into a litigation war zone from which major corporations are fleeing. Texas has become America's "Queen of Torts" through a bizarre array of pro-plaintiff decisions handed down over the last 15 years by the Texas courts. The National Center for State Courts reports a 70 percent increase in the yearly number of Texas tort filings between 1981 and 1989. Home to 6.7 percent of the U.S. population, Texas now accounts for 10.3 percent of all major product liability suits, according to the American Insurance Association--some 50 percent more than the national average. The litigious environment takes a heavy toll on Texas employers and the workers who depend on them. A burgeoning injured-worker litigation industry has pushed workmen's compensation insurance to three times the national average. Meanwhile, thousands of manufacturers are considering pulling out of Texas because of the state's liability laws. Ray Perryman, an economist at Baylor University, recently estimated that "liability costs" have contributed to the layoffs of some 30,000 Texas workers. He also wrote that 3,300 manufacturers employing a total of 340,000 Texans were considering stopping all manufacturing operations in the state because of concern over legal liability. Boys Named Sue A horrible accident in September 1989 illustrates litigiousness run amok in Texas. A soft-drink truck in the town of Alton ran a stop sign and rammed a school bus broadside, sending it skidding into a gravel pit with 12 feet of water. Twenty-one of the 81 children on the bus were killed in the tragedy. Even before all the bodies had been recovered, a barrage of lawyers descended on Alton and began to solicit business from grieving parents at the hospital, during wakes, and through the mail. Ambulance-chasing is not uncommon in America; what made the case unusual is that claims by the children's families represented only a fraction of the more than 100 suits filed. The plaintiffs included the truck driver, several rescuers, and at least one bystander who sued for the emotional distress he suffered from simply watching the 14-hour rescue. Seven volunteer firefighters filed a lawsuit related to the rescue in March 1992, citing mental anguish and physical injuries. Another plaintiff, a police officer, was persuaded to drop his case after his chief pointed out that his only duty had been serving Gatorade at the rescue site. Alton is not alone. Two hours south of Houston lies Bay City, the unofficial litigation capital of the United States. The Matagorda County courthouse in Bay City offers lawyers the enviable combination of Texas's lenient liability statutes and an almost totally pro-plaintiff jury pool. Matagorda County juries have produced some of the largest jury-awarded settlements on record. In December 1984, one of these juries attracted national attention by awarding $8.5 million to a rancher for the loss of his prized Santa Gertrudis bull, "Superman." The animal died from a reaction to an insecticide applied in clear contradiction of the instructions. Unfortunately, the Mexican workers could not read the label's English-language warning against using the chemical undiluted. The jury ordered the insecticide's manufacturer to pay $1.5 million to cover the bull's value, and another $7 million in punitive damages. …


Abstract The Arkansas Advanced Initiative for Math and Science (AAIMS) is program with the goal to increase Advanced Placement (AP) participation and increase the passing rate of AP exams. The program offers monetary incentives and support to students and teachers for one year, effectively creating a natural experiment. This paper exploits the one year treatment to empirically show that the program is effective at increasing a school's AP participation rate by nudging the schools to increase AP offerings and satisfying a latent student demand for AP classes.


The present descriptive study considers different translation strategies adopted by Italian translators of Oscar Wilde's The importance of being Earnest (1895). The focus of attention is on the phenomenon of the pun involving the speaking name Ernest, whose homophony with earnest is exploited in the play's title. Italian translators of The importance have thus been faced with the bind of having to decide on whether to render the said wordplay, even though only unsatisfactorily, by replacing the transparent name Ernest with a target language 'equivalent', or safeguard the cultural-onomastic 'reality' of the play, i.e. leave the Victorian given name Ernest in its source text form. It turns out that the latter policy is generally compensated for — as part of the metatextual/metalinguistic discourse — within prefaces, glosses and, more significantly, via intratextual additions. The translators opting for substituting Ernest for an Italian counterpart, in turn, have, as a direct consequence of their basic choice, been able to enrich their versions of The importance with unprecedented puns, which underlines the 'creative' dimension involved in producing literary translations. Besides the two core translation policies described above, the translators have also opted for introducing the nativized form Ernesto, thus showing little concern with the questions of 'cultural purity' or punning, respectively. The present paper suggests that translators make very different demands on themselves and have very different ideas of what constitutes the 'optimal' strategy with regard to punning and the representation of the source cultural world.


As a fast-growing discipline, artificial intelligence has been applied to many fields, especially contributing to product design. How to make artificial intelligence technology enhance human creativity is not only the trend of field development, but also the motivation of the SCORE! project. In this project, we designed and developed a plug-in for electronic music production embedding deep learning method for video-to-audio mapping. And study how this method can be integrated in a specific electronic music production application to assist music creation. Through the survey questionnaire, we obtained the user requirements and preferences for the development of the audio plug-in. After the design and implementation of SCORE! plug-in, we conducted a user study with experts in field of electronic music production and collected feedback with a questionnaire. In the evaluation results, the user found the SCORE! plug-in is a creative support audio plug-in that provides an efficient workflow of video selection and previewing, MIDI clips generation, MIDI clips importing for music production and synthesizer.


This paper presents a benchmark steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) dataset acquired with a 40-target brain– computer interface (BCI) speller. The dataset consists of 64-channel Electroencephalogram (EEG) data from 35 healthy subjects (8 experienced and 27 naïve) while they performed a cue-guided target selecting task. The virtual keyboard of the speller was composed of 40 visual flickers, which were coded using a joint frequency and phase modulation (JFPM) approach. The stimulation frequencies ranged from 8 Hz to 15.8 Hz with an interval of 0.2 Hz. The phase difference between two adjacent frequencies was  $0.5\pi $ . For each subject, the data included six blocks of 40 trials corresponding to all 40 flickers indicated by a visual cue in a random order. The stimulation duration in each trial was five seconds. The dataset can be used as a benchmark dataset to compare the methods for stimulus coding and target identification in SSVEP-based BCIs. Through offline simulation, the dataset can be used to design new system diagrams and evaluate their BCI performance without collecting any new data. The dataset also provides high-quality data for computational modeling of SSVEPs. The dataset is freely available from http://bci.med.tsinghua.edu.cn/download.html.


Looking from the Outside In: Social Science and Sexual Identity in Today's Churches Books Discussed God, Sex, and Politics: Homosexuality and Everyday Theologies. By Dawne Moon. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbians and Gays in Black Churches. By Horace L. Griffin. Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 2006. Coming Out in Christianity: Religion, Identity, and Community. By Melissa Wilcox. Bloomington, Ind., and Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2003. Gay Religion. Edited by Scott Thumma and Edward R. Gray. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Alta Mira Press, 2005. The tenor of many mainstream media reports notwithstanding, the potentially church-dividing debate over homosexuality did not suddenly appear in the early years of the twenty-first century. In the United States more than several Christian denominations have been struggling with this issue in some fashion since the 1960s. Many Episcopalians likewise know that openly lesbian and gay people were ordained as priests and deacons and have also served in positions of lay leadership long before Gene Robinson was elected Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003. Despite that history, and perhaps also in some ways because of it, in §135 of the Windsor Report the Lambeth Commission on Communion asked the Episcopal Church in the U.S. to explain, both biblically and theologically, how a non-celibate homosexual person can be eligible for the episcopate.1 Tb casual observers, this request may suggest that no such "explanation" had to date been articulated. Those well familiar with the decades of struggle over this issue within the Episcopal Church know this is not the case, as many publications, curricular materials, and task force reports illustrate.2 For some of the "insiders" to that history, the Windsor Report's request provokes a pointed question: What precisely constitutes suitable "explanation" for ordaining openly gay and lesbian people? Others will want to ask the flip-side of that same question: What will it take to persuade the church that such ordinations are simply wrong-biblically, theologically, and ethically? Elizabeth Stuart has described well the kind of theological stalemate so many churches have reached over human sexuality in response to such questions. Comparing these ecclesial deliberations to a wrestling match, neither side, she writes, "is prepared to admit defeat, too much is at stake, so they continue to maintain a token grasp upon one another. Unable to let go and unable to resolve the situation, they are trapped by the rules of the game." Today, she notes, both sides in this struggle have simply collapsed from exhaustion.3 As with any protracted institutional debate, this one that has been preoccupying American and European churches and increasingly nonNorth Atlantic communities as well stands in need of fresh insights from outside the debate itself; or to borrow from Stuart's image, our churches would benefit from expanding the field on which this "game" is played. Each of the four books considered in this article offers in some fashion a view of sexual identities in today's churches from the "outside," that is, from the perspective of sociologists and ethnographers. (Horace Griffin is partly an exception to this "outsider" characterization, but in ways, as I suggest below, that scramble what inside and outside actually mean when dealing with these topics.) Historically, Anglicans have not shied away from strictly non-theological sources such as these for doing theological work and in many cases have drawn eagerly from them. Nearly without exception the "giants" in nineteenth-century Anglican traditions-whether Evangelical, Anglo-Catholic, or Christian socialist-all consulted assiduously both the physical and social sciences for insights into the theological, spiritual, and liturgical quandaries of the day.4 Likewise today's theological quandaries over human sexuality would benefit from renewed attention to the research modalities and data employed by those "outside" the narrower parameters of the theological disciplines. …


The analytical far-field expressions for the TE and TM terms and energy flux distributions in two off-axis superimposed nonparaxial Laguerre-Gaussian beams with azimuthal and radial indices l(1) = -l(2) = +1, p(1) = p(2) = 0 are derived and used to study the far-field properties including phase singularities and energy flux distributions of the resulting beam, where our main attention focuses on the dependence of phase singularities on the controlling parameters such as the off-axis distance, relative phase, amplitude ratio, and waist widths of superimposed beams, and the symmetry property of edge dislocations and energy flux distributions. The results are interpreted and compared with previous work.


This PhD thesis proposes an Irish-Scottish comparative framework for examining a range of shared ethical, socio-political and theoretical concerns, pertaining to aspects of class and gender, in contemporary Irish, Northern Irish and Scottish literature. My approach galvanises Lévinasian ethics with the socio-cultural category of the 'subaltern' in relation to postcolonial, Marxist and feminist theories in order to trace what I term a 'subaltern aesthethics' between selected works of Scottish, Northern Irish and Irish writing that show a specific sensibility to the social inequalities and inequities that are part of the current restructuring of the global capitalist system. My work explores how these texts engage with both the processes of political and economic transformation in the Atlantic archipelago, and critical-theoretical approaches which, I argue, show the tendency to subsume the specificity and intensity of subaltern concerns. The first chapter delineates key debates in Irish and Scottish studies, offering a critique of conventional applications of postcolonial and postmodern theory. I demonstrate that dominant versions of postcolonialism are analytically entrapped in the nation as a paradigm. Additionally, I show that for all its apparent celebration of difference, postmodernism reduces otherness to the terms of the self. Chapter 2 outlines the model of a subaltern counter-history as a theoretical framework for reading ethical issues of historicity on the basis of texts by James Kelman, Patrick McCabe and Robert McLiam Wilson. This engagement with history is continued in chapter 3, which investigates the desire to archive Northern Ireland's recent past in the context of its peace process in Glenn Patterson's and Eoin McNamee's recent novels. The emphasis of the three subsequent chapters turns the attention of my counter-historical method to issues of gender. The fourth chapter evaluates the material consequences that the gendering of the imagined nation has on female bodies in particular. Whereas the focus lies here specifically on the Irish context, the following chapter 5 engages in a comparative reading of traumatic herstories in three Irish and Scottish novels by Roddy Doyle, Janice Galloway and Jennifer Johnston. The purpose of both of these chapters is to examine women's experience of disempowerment and their struggle to reclaim agency. My last chapter then investigates the relationship between men, gender and nation in the allegorical imagiNation of Alasdair Gray and McCabe with specific regard to the turn to the feminine that has taken place in contemporary criticism. URI http://hdl.handle.net/1842/3305 Collections Literatures, Languages, and Cultures PhD thesis collection Privacy & Cookies Takedown Policy Accessibility Contact Subaltern aesthethics: Tracing counter-histories in contemporary Scottish, Irish and Northern Irish literature


X-ray backscatter (XBS) and millimeter wave (mmW) whole body imaging are currently deployed worldwide to screen individuals at security screening checkpoints. The detection of impermissible objects carried by passengers via XBS and mmW screening shares many commonalities with medical radiological screening and diagnosis. A primary objective of this project is to leverage radiological imaging science onto the whole-body screening problem Further, application of radiological imaging science may also lead to metrics which could be applied to all XBS and mmW equipment. An assumption which underlies this study is that improvements in the ease with which objects of interest can be visualized in XBS and mmW datasets will lead to a corresponding increase in the probability of detection and a decrease in the probability of false alarm. For this study we utilized XBS and mmW datasets acquired by Sandia National Laboratory for this purpose. The dataset was specifically acquired to permit comparison of coupons present on given individuals as imaged by equipment from four vendors. The dataset consists of ~1500 distinct combinations of (1) person, (2) coupon (i.e. object from a defined list), and (3) placement of coupon on body (again, from a defined list of placements); each combination is designated as a "case" (neither the coupon list nor coupon placement list is contained in this report.) Each case was acquired in prompt sequence on each of four TSA-certified systems (two XBS-type and two mmW-type) that were employed in the manufacturer-recommended workflow. Within this overall dataset, we examined 30 selected cases in detail, which contained 30 separate placements of 74 total distinct coupons. This data was examined by four independent research scientists in Massachusetts General Hospital's Department of Radiology. This work was performed at the SSI level, and an SSI final report was generated and sent to the ALERT Program Manager.


Andy Warhol is recognized today as the most important exponent of the Pop Art movement. He overturned the traditional understanding of art and placed in its stead a concept that retracts the individuality of the artist. Warhol was a critical observer of American society, exposing his compatriots' consumerism in his paintings ("Campbell-" and "Brillo" series), as well as their fascination for sensational journalism. In 1963 Warhol founded his "Factory" in New York, literally a manufactory of ideas and work, which influenced film in the 1960s, published the influential magazine "Interview" in the late 1970s, and also produced Warhol's own artwork: Warhol conceived the idea, and a "worker" in his factory carried it out. The work remained (consciously) unsigned - a fact which nevertheless did nothing to diminish Warhol's reputation. He once complained that rich New Yorkers would willingly hang his "Electric Chain" in their living rooms - as long as its colours co-ordinated with the wallpaper and draperies.


The first chapters of this thesis attempt to isolate the factors responsible for the making of a Tudor 1aiigt. Birth (noble and gentle), education, wealth, conrtexiona, reli&.on, activity in royal service, war, and the general auninons to take up knighthood are all surveyed and, together with an analysis of the fluctuating numbers of knights throughout the century, provide material f a discussion of royal attitudes towards the honour, Dubbing ceremonies and the occasions deemed suitable are next described and a discussion of the aigniticance of the ceremonies for both crown and subject is undertaken. Finally, a study of the work of knights as members of parliament, justices of the peace, sheriffs and deputy lieutenants seeks to determine whether knights had taken up new duties to replace the moribund military ones, and a brief conclusion suggests how and wby knighthood was transformed during the century to survive the decline of feudalism and chivalry.


Aim: Acne is the disease which agitates the face during the primary phase of life, i.e. pubescent to adulthood. In Ayurvedic has been quoted as Mukhadushika or Yuvanpidika. At present, acne is anticipated to affect 9.4% of the global population, making it the eighth most prevalent disease globally. The cosmetics available are not suitable to all the condition; it may worsen the condition, as well as conventional treatment, is having its own precincts. The present study was undertaken, to validate the ancient Ayurvedic wisdom in light with the present day knowledge. Materials and Methods: Thus, in this study, after observing all Ayuvedic literature and many clinical reports, total six drugs, namely Shankha Bhasma, extract of Shalmali Kantak, Haridra, Manjistha, Nimba, and Rakta-chandan were selected to prepare oil-in-water (o/w) herb-mineral cream formulation with the suitable combination of the oil phase and aqueous phase along with preservatives. It was subjected to various physiochemical parameters such as type of emulsion, pH, spreadability, rheological studies, viscosity, and primary skin irritation. Results and Discussion: The result obtained was shown that viscosity of cream was in the range of 27001-27089 cps which indicates that the cream is easily spreadable by small amounts of shear. The rheological study showed pseudoplastic flow behavior of cream. Type of emulsion cream was o/w type. Primary skin irritation test showed the absence of redness, edema, inflammation, or irritation during irritancy studies. Conclusion: Thus, the Mugdha cream prepared is safe for use and could be a better remedy to cure acne.


Like many other countries, Germany has experienced rapid population and workforce ageing, yet with substantial variation across regions. In this paper we first use this spatial variation between 1975 and 2014 to estimate quasi-causal supply effects of ageing on regional labour market outcomes, drawing on the identification strategy of Böhm and Siegel (2020). We find in our panel of German labour market regions that workforce mean age has considerable negative effects on the wage returns to age. We also obtain suggestive evidence that relative employment rates of older workers decline when mean age rises. A decomposition of the heterogeneous regional trends using our estimates shows that ageing of rural regions is mainly driven by supply (reflecting local population dynamics) whereas urban ageing is driven by demand (reflecting responses to economic conditions). We discuss the differential implications of these drivers for regional policy.


This article constitutes a pragmatic consideration of how to orchestrate access to 'powerful' individuals and a theoretical reflection on what efforts to negotiate access reveal about the anthropologist's subterranean assumptions about power, collaboration and ethnographic data. Too frequently, powerful actors and the contemporary settings they inhabit appear to be obstacles to ethnographic research. In contrast, I propose that we explore the ways in which working with powerful actors can enhance, rather than inhibit, the possibilities of anthropological data collection. In this article, I present several examples from my field research in the Mexican government to show how the ethnographic encounter can be constructive of the political process, not jut an appendage to it. By directing attention to the ways in which our actual research practices (and not just our findings) intervene in the political space, we can re-orient our expectations about data and the ontology of anthropological expertise.


The Indian major carp Catla catla is a promising species for aquaculture exploitation for its growth and good market potential. It is commonly preferred, consumed and considered as a low cost fish by all the economic group of people. To gain knowledge on the nutritional stand point of this fish , the nutritive value and fatty acid contents of muscle tissue was analysed based on feeding formulated diet which included freeze dried tubifex instead of fish meal to aseess the nutritional value. The feed comprised of groundnut oil cake as control diet, freeze dried tubifex combined with groundnut oil cake as experimental diet. The results show better nutritive values and an increased fatty acid content in fishes fed with freeze dried tubifex combined with groundnut oil cake mixture.