Finite‐difference calculations of strong pulses propagating downslope in typical littoral environments were performed using the NPE program [B. E. McDonald and W. A. Kuperman, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 81, 1406–1417 (1987)], modified to include a seabed depth that varies with range and which provides for a specification of sound‐speed gradients in the bottom as well as in the water column. In these simulations, the bottom is modeled with a (compressional wave) sound‐speed profile that corresponds to mud and silt overlying a sandstone bedrock; an attenuation coefficient of 0.6 dB per wavelength is applied throughout the bottom. Results indicate that a significant fraction of the acoustic energy will generally reach deep water off the continental shelf, although this is strongly influenced by the water depth at the source and the distance of shallow‐water propagation leading to the shelf. In addition, the strong refraction of the pulse in the upper seabed layers and the subsequent reradiation into the water colum...


Jeremy Shearar's book is "in essence an historico-legal survey", which sets out to explore the mindset of the members of the South African government and "administration officials behind events, whose public faces have often been chronicled". It aims to contribute to the "'external' study of the history of human rights law by considering the constitutional, political, economic and social factors which have impacted on the development of that law and in which South Africa might have played a part" (p 2).


We have evaluated the planktonic foraminiferal biostratigraphy of several Gulf of Mexico Eureka boreholes, emphasizing the Miocene depositional history of the northeastern region (De Soto Canyon). The E68-136 borehole (De Soto Canyon; 1826', 557m present depth) provides the most continuous Miocene record, although deposition was punctuated by several short (<2.0 m.y.) hiatuses. The E66-73 borehole (De Soto Canyon; 2802', 854m present depth) provides an uppermost lower to upper Miocene and upper Pleistocene record. E68-151 (north of the Florida Escarpment; 4340', 1323m present depth) provides a discontinuous record of lower, upper middle, and upper upper Miocene sediments. By integrating planktonic foraminiferal biostratigraphy with nannoplankton biostratigraphy and Sr-isotope stratigraphy, we were able to estimate the ages of the hiatuses associated with six distinct unconformities at E68-136 (23.7-23.2 Ma; 18.0-16.5 Ma; 16.3-15.2 Ma; 14.1-13.6 Ma; -10.4-9.5 Ma, 5.0-1.9 Ma), three at E66-73 (-11.5-10.8 Ma, 10.3-9.2 Ma, 6.5-1.7 Ma), and two at E68-151A (19.0-12.6 Ma, 12.5-6.9 Ma). We correlate these unconformities with previously reported unconformities from other deep-sea locations, although their causes (i.e., whether related to sea-level or deep-water changes) remain uncertain. We relate a distinct Pliocene unconformity to intensification of the Loop Current associated with the closure of the Isthmus of Panama.


This paper emerged from a larger project about Australian high performance school age athletes self-identified problems in balancing their academic and sporting lives. Teachers of student-athletes are ideally placed to observe stresses faced by these students, but little is published about teacher perspectives on this topic. A qualitative analysis of interview data from 10 teachers, across 10 Australian secondary schools, revealed critical information about the similarities and differences in their perspectives compared to those of student-athletes and parents. Teachers identified five main areas where student-athletes required dedicated support, and provided examples of solutions to address these. Their practical strategies complement the characteristics of the 'athlete-friendly' school and serve as examples of best practice support that other schools could adopt. On analysis, these strategies align with the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. Consequently, the focus of this paper relates to the teacher perspectives and how this impacts teacher practice.; Supporting data: https://doi.org/10.5064/F6ZP448B ; ;


Pregnancy has always been a major concern in patients with heart disease. Although many women with pre-existing heart disorders tolerate pregnancy well, complications are frequent and in some cases include life threatening conditions for mother and child. In western countries maternal heart disease has indeed become the major cause of maternal death during pregnancy. Furthermore, pregnancy can have a negative impact on the long term course of heart disease.1 Thus, screening for heart disease, appropriate risk assessment, and counselling are crucial. In women at risk who nevertheless desire pregnancy or who present already pregnant, adequate measures during pregnancy and delivery that may reduce complications and optimise outcome have to be taken.

The spectrum of heart disease in pregnancy has changed and differs among regions around the world. In the western world, the risk of cardiovascular disease in pregnancy has increased because of advanced age at first pregnancy and the increasing prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors such as diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. More importantly, the improvement of congenital heart disease treatment has resulted in a significant number of women with heart disease now reaching childbearing age, and these represent the majority of pregnant women with heart disease. In a prospective multicentre study comprising 562 consecutive women and 599 pregnancies, Siu et al 2 reported congenital heart disease in 74%. Acquired valvular heart disease was present in 22% of cases, and arrhythmias without structural heart disease in 4%. Coronary artery disease and cardiomyopathies (except for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy) were each reported in <1% of the women. In the non-western countries that still struggle with rheumatic fever, acquired valvular heart disease predominates by far. This article focuses on congenital and valvular heart disease as the two most common pre-existing cardiac disorders in pregnant women.

The European Society of Cardiology (ESC) has recently published …


South Africa is often regarded to be at the forefront of water reform, based on Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) ideas. This paper explores how the idea of IWRM emerged in South Africa, its key debates and interpretations and how it has been translated. It maps out the history, main events, key people, and implementation efforts through a combination of reviews of available documents and in-depth semi-structured interviews with key actors. While South Africa sought to draw on experiences from abroad when drawing up its new legislation towards the end of the 1990s, the seeds of IWRM were already present since the 1970s. What emerges is a picture of multiple efforts to get IWRM to 'work' in the South African context, but these efforts failed to take sufficient account of the South African history of deep structural inequalities, the legacy of the hydraulic mission, and the slowness of water reallocation to redress past injustices. The emphasis on institutional structures being aligned with hydrological boundaries has formed a major part of how IWRM has been interpreted and conceptualised, and it has turned out to become a protracted power struggle reflecting the tensions between centralised and decentralised management.


Abstract Background and aims Endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) in patients who have undergone Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) is technically challenging. We describe our multicenter experience using lumen-apposing metal stents (LAMSs) to create an endoscopic ultrasound-guided transgastric fistula (EUS-TG) to facilitate peroral ERCP in these patients. Patients and methods Thirteen patients with RYGB who underwent EUS-TG at three tertiary centers were included. EUS was used to guide puncture of the excluded stomach from the gastric pouch or jejunum; a LAMS was placed across the transgastric fistula. ERCP was performed via a duodenoscope passed through the LAMS. Results The technical success of EUS-TG was 100 % (13/13). ERCP through the LAMS was successful and clinical success was achieved in all patients. LAMS dislodgement during ERCP occurred in two patients and the stent was successfully repositioned without sequelae. After removal of the LAMS, the fistula was closed in 92 % of patients, either by endoscopic closure devices or argon plasma coagulation. None of the patients experienced procedure-related adverse events. Conclusion EUS-TG is an effective and safe method of accessing the excluded stomach and performing ERCP in patients with RYGB.


Direct isolation of nucleic acids from the environment may be useful in several respects, including the estimation of total biomass, detection of specific organisms and genes, estimations of species diversity, and cloning applications. We have developed a method that facilitates the concentration of microorganisms from aquatic samples and the extraction of their nucleic acids. Natural water samples of 350 to greater than 1,000 ml are concentrated on a single cylindrical filter membrane (type SVGS01015; Millipore Corp., Bedford, Mass.), and cell lysis and proteolysis are carried out within the filter housing. Crude, high-molecular-weight nucleic acid solutions are then drawn off the filter. These solutions can be immediately analyzed, concentrated, or purified, depending on the intended application. The method is simple, rapid, and economical and provides high-molecular-weight chromosomal DNA, plasmid DNA, and speciated RNAs which comigrate with 5S, 16S, and 23S rRNAs. The methods presented here should prove useful in studying both the ecology and the phylogeny of microbes that resist classical culture methods.


This paper addresses documents and celebrates the many remarkable success stories that have figured so prominently in the study of the history of classical linguistics in recent years. Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC) and his De Lingua Latina provide a striking case in point. Varro enjoyed an unparalleled reputation as ancient Rome's most authoritative language scientist, but a century ago we were embarrassed even to attempt to justify that reputation. Today, however, we know, inter alia, that he reconstructed earlier, unattested forms to explain contemporary ones and that he also discovered the declensions and conjugations of his native language. Indeed, almost all major ancient grammarians and texts have received fresh and novel attention from classical scholars and historians of linguistics. Even a cursory survey therefore reveals that during the past half century or so we have not just been rethinking the history of the language sciences in classical antiquity but have in fact been rewriting that history.


This Article offers a formal legal definition of "leadership" drawn from an unusual quarter: criminal sentencing. Sentencing guidelines that include adjustments based on the extent to which a defendant was a "leader" have spawned hundreds of appellate court cases attempting to develop a thoughtful, workable definition of the term. Reviewing these cases, this Article offers 25 separate characteristics courts have found material to a legal judgment as to whether an individual has been a leader within a criminal enterprise. Eleven of these characteristics can be organized into three categories, which operate on the boundaries of the leadership concept. The first category contains those circumstances courts have found do not, by themselves, confer leadership status. For example, courts have found that controlling property alone does not make one a leader. The second category of leadership characteristics are those circumstances that are not, in themselves, sufficient to show a defendant is not a leader. For example, there may be more than one leader in a group, so the identification of one or more other leaders in a group does not preclude the possibility of characterizing a defendant as a leader as well. A third category of leadership focuses on the external group functions of leadership, the ways in which a leader monitors and mediates the points of contact between the group as a separate entity and important elements outside the group. The remaining 14 characteristics comprise a fourth category that resides at the center of what courts find establishes leadership status. To courts, the gravamen of leadership is the control, organization, and responsibility for other group members. Examples of characteristics in this category are that a leader inspires members to make sacrifices for the group, possesses decision-making authority within the group, carries ultimate responsibility for the group's success, and resolves disputes within the group. This Article concludes by noting this formal legal definition of leadership, given its basis in criminal sentencing, has generated a set of leadership characteristics all of which appear to enjoy the possibility of general applicability to a broad range of factual contexts including standard business settings, but still notes how very far the formal legal definition of leadership is from conventional definitions grounded explicitly in a moral, value-laden context.


The present study investigates whether the Early Development Instrument (Offord & Janus, 1999) measures school readiness similarly across different groups of children. We employ ordinal logistic regression to investigate differential item functioning, a method of examining measurement bias. For 40,000 children, our analysis compares groups according to gender, English-as-a-second-language (ESL) status, and Aboriginal status. Our results indicate no systematic measurement differences regarding Aboriginal status and gender, except for 1 item on which boys are more likely than girls to be rated as physically aggressive by Kindergarten teachers. In contrast, ESL children systematically receive lower ratings on items of the language and communication domains—as expected by definition of ESL status—but not within the physical, social, and emotional domains. We discuss how our results fit with child development research and the purpose of the Early Development Instrument, thus supporting its validity.


Existing offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods face a few major challenges, particularly the distributional shift between the learned policy and the behavior policy. Offline Meta-RL is emerging as a promising approach to address these challenges, aiming to learn an informative meta-policy from a collection of tasks. Nevertheless, as shown in our empirical studies, offline Meta-RL could be outperformed by offline single-task RL methods on tasks with good quality of datasets, indicating that a right balance has to be delicately calibrated between"exploring"the out-of-distribution state-actions by following the meta-policy and"exploiting"the offline dataset by staying close to the behavior policy. Motivated by such empirical analysis, we explore model-based offline Meta-RL with regularized Policy Optimization (MerPO), which learns a meta-model for efficient task structure inference and an informative meta-policy for safe exploration of out-of-distribution state-actions. In particular, we devise a new meta-Regularized model-based Actor-Critic (RAC) method for within-task policy optimization, as a key building block of MerPO, using conservative policy evaluation and regularized policy improvement; and the intrinsic tradeoff therein is achieved via striking the right balance between two regularizers, one based on the behavior policy and the other on the meta-policy. We theoretically show that the learnt policy offers guaranteed improvement over both the behavior policy and the meta-policy, thus ensuring the performance improvement on new tasks via offline Meta-RL. Experiments corroborate the superior performance of MerPO over existing offline Meta-RL methods.


This paper seeks to theorise the role that gender plays in the careers of junior female managers. We do this by drawing upon two separate empirical studies, firstly a largescale study based on interviews with female managers in the West Midlands (UK) is used to explore the growth of female participation in junior managerial roles with reference to the notion of managerial careers as seduction. We explore the routes the women have taken into junior management careers and the barriers that exist to progression toward more senior roles. Secondly, a small-scale ethnographic study of a large service-based organization, also based in the West Midlands, is documented in an attempt to theorise the organizational role of female junior managers. While the dominance of masculine values and practices in organisations is explored, we also argue that growing female participation at junior managerial levels can only partly be explained by female managers adopting, or appearing to adopt, masculine behaviours. We seek to contribute to a fuller explanation by drawing attention to the way in which senior managers in the case study sought to employ female junior managers particularly for their perceived feminine skills. Significantly, however the ethnography reveals the ambiguously gendered construction of female junior managers roles through an exploration of the enactment of both masculine and feminine practices during the 'doing' of management.


Domestic goats in Syria may provide an interesting source of genetic variability due to its proximity to the centers of domestication. This study aimed to assess the morphological variation, genetic diversity and population substructure of the Syrian goat populations. Commonly, three goat genotypes are distinguished in Syria, namely Jabali or mountain goat, Baladi or local goat and Shami or Damascus (a well-known dairy goat). A pre-tested semi-structured questionnaire was used in recording both qualitative (coat color, eye color, horn length, horn orientation, nose profile) and quantitative (height  at wither, chest girth, cannon length, body length, ear length and ear width) morphological data. Data  from a total of 5,730 individual goats of the three goat populations reared in ten representative  provinces of Syria were collected and analyzed using GenStat version 14 statistical packages. Results of the morphological analysis confirmed that there were clear morphological variations among the three  goat populations. The three goat populations are mainly distinguished by their straight (Baladi, 71.1%  and Jabali, 82.8%) and curved (Shami, 89.5%) nose profiles. Substantial phenotypic variability was found among and within the breeds suggesting that these goat breeds have not yet undergone an organized breeding program. The genetic variability and population substructures from 398 individual animals of the three breeds were genotyped using 12 DNA microsatellite markers from Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) panel. All microsatellites typed were found to be polymorphic and a total of 41 distinct alleles were detected on Baladi, Jabali and Shami goat populations. The Syrian goat populations had observed and expected heterozygosity values that ranged from 0.50 to 0.62 and 0.74 to 0.85, respectively, and an average of 13.97 alleles per locus across breeds. For all loci, an average inbreeding values (FIS) of low to moderate level was obtained across the three goat breeds, which ranged from 0.29 (Shami goats) to 0.34 (Baladi goats) indicating the absence of mating between close relatives within these populations. The observed positive FIS coefficients among the studied goat breeds also suggested heterozygote deficiencies. The analyses of the molecular data using STRUCURE program indicated there were two  primary populations, which did support the results based on morphological data of the same goat populations that clustered these goat populations into two main groups and confirmed the admixture nature of the Baladi and Jabali goat populations, while the Shami goat breed was well differentiated and grouped into a separate cluster that suggests its evolutionary and genetic uniqueness. The analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) results detected genetic variations within individuals in a population (96%). The high genetic variability within individuals in a population provides a good base for  designing genetic improvement programs under the existing goat management systems. Key words : Characterization, cluster, genetic differentiation, population structure, Syria.


Abstract. A major proportion of flow in the Indus River is contributed by its snow- and glacier-fed river catchments situated in the Himalaya, Karakoram and Hindukush ranges. It is therefore essential to understand the cryosphere dynamics in this area for water resource management. The MODIS MOD10A2 remote-sensing database of snow cover products from March 2000 to December 2009 was selected to analyse the snow cover changes in the Hunza River basin (the snow- and glacier-fed sub-catchment of the Indus River). A database of daily flows for the Hunza River at Dainyor Bridge over a period of 40 yr and climate data (precipitation and temperature) for 10 yr from three meteorological stations within the catchment was made available to investigate the hydrological regime in the area. Analysis of remotely sensed cryosphere (snow and ice cover) data during the last decade (2000–2009) suggest a rather slight expansion of cryosphere in the area in contrast to most of the regions in the world where glaciers are melting rapidly. This increase in snow cover may be the result of an increase in winter precipitation caused by westerly circulation. The impact of global warming is not effective because a large part of the basin area lies under high altitudes where the temperature remains negative throughout most of the year.


Motivated by the rising abundance of observational data with continuous treatments, we investigate the problem of estimating the average dose-response curve (ADRF). Available parametric methods are limited in their model space, and previous attempts in leveraging neural network to enhance model expressiveness relied on partitioning continuous treatment into blocks and using separate heads for each block; this however produces in practice discontinuous ADRFs. Therefore, the question of how to adapt the structure and training of neural network to estimate ADRFs remains open. This paper makes two important contributions. First, we propose a novel varying coefficient neural network (VCNet) that improves model expressiveness while preserving continuity of the estimated ADRF. Second, to improve finite sample performance, we generalize targeted regularization to obtain a doubly robust estimator of the whole ADRF curve.


Apparent discrepancies between velocity measurements made with different frequencies in a formation at the Gypsy test site are explained in terms of elastic scattering and intrinsic attenuation. The elastic scattering component of the dispersion (38%) in a marine interval above the Gypsy sandstone is estimated via simple models constructed from well log information. Any dispersion above the predicted value for elastic scattering in this interval is assigned to intrinsic attenuation (62%). Using the vertical measurements in the well, the marine interval directly above the Gypsy sandstone has an estimated intrinsic Q{sub I} = 51 and an effective Q because of the scattering of Q{sub SC} = 85. The total Q of the combined mechanisms is 32. The dispersion of the vertical measurements through the heterogeneous sands and shales of the Gypsy formation can be explained using an intrinsic Q{sub I} = 30 and neglecting the effects of scattering. The horizontal observations require a more detailed modeling effort to unravel the relative roles of path and volume effects, elastic scattering, attenuation, and intrinsic anisotropy. Thin layers barely resolvable on the sonic logs play a significant role in modifying the crosswell response. Potentially, the dispersion can be a key to mapping reservoirmore » properties using crosswell and surface seismic data.« less


In early modern Protestant England, traditional Catholic worship and sacraments, particularly the Mass, declined, and many Catholics feared for their salvation. At the same time, an increased veneration of Mary Magdalene focused no longer on penance and redemption, but on Mary's discovery of Christ's empty tomb. Magdalene's distress at losing the corporeal body of Christ mirrored English Catholic anxiety over losing the body of Christ as contained in the Eucharist in the absence of regular Mass. English Catholics chose to revive and adapt this form of Magdalene symbolism to best meet their spiritual needs, thus emphasizing the many uses and flexibility of such a familiar symbol as Mary Magdalene and suggesting types and nuances of Magdalene worship that have yet to be fully investigated by scholars.


The air dense medium fluidized bed separator which has been developed for the dry beneficiation of coal and recognized as a low cost and high efficiency process. In some cases the efficient beneficiation process are not found to be very effective for the Indian coals due to their typical washability characteristics. So a systematic study has been carried out to verify the suitability of this process by considering three different Indian coals of different characteristics. The results show that this separation process is quite efficient for the beneficiation of coal in the size range of -50+25 mm with Ep values in the range of 0.037-0.055. However, lower separation efficiency for finer coal of -13+4.75 mm size indicates towards the non-suitability of the process. Based on this study, the air dense medium separation process was established to be a possible alternative to the conventional wet beneficiation method for processing coarser size Indian coals.


Objective: The aims of the study were to evaluate the characteristics of children with atopic dermatitis and presence of concurrent atopic diseases among these patients. Materials and Methods: One hundred and eightyone patients followed-up with a diagnosis of atopic dermatitis were evaluated. The age of the patients ranged from 2 months to 13 years and 70.2% were male. Of these patients, 146 had been diagnosed with atopic dermatitis, 29 with atopic dermatitis and asthma, and 6 with atopic dermatitis and allergic rhinitis. Results: Of the patients 37.6% were found to have allergic sensitization by skin prick test. The IgE level and eosinophil count of the sensitized group were higher (p: < 0.001, 0.002; respectively). The rate of concurrent asthma or rhinitis in the sensitized group was 38.2%, while it was 8% in the group without sensitization (p: < 0.001). Conclusion: The most important factors affecting sensitization were high IgE levels and eosinophilia. In the presence of sensitization, asthma or rhinitis development is more common. More cohort studies are OZ


We analyze large systems of interacting proteins, using techniques from the non-equilibrium statistical mechanics of disordered many-particle systems. Apart from protein production and removal, the most relevant microscopic processes in the proteome are complex formation and dissociation, and the microscopic degrees of freedom are the evolving concentrations of unbound proteins (in multiple post-translational states) and of protein complexes. Here we only include dimer-complexes, for mathematical simplicity, and we draw the network that describes which proteins are reaction partners from an ensemble of random graphs with an arbitrary degree distribution. We show how generating functional analysis methods can be used successfully to derive closed equations for dynamical order parameters, representing an exact macroscopic description of the complex formation and dissociation dynamics in the infinite system limit. We end this paper with a discussion of the possible routes towards solving the nontrivial order parameter equations, either exactly (in specific limits) or approximately.


The article presents research results of physico-chemical and environmental issues for the dust generated during dedusting of the installation for the processing and preparation of moulding sand with bentonite. Particular attention was paid to the content of heavy metals and emission of gases from the BTEX group, which is one of the determinants of the moulding sands harmfulness for the environment. The analysis of heavy metals in the test samples indicate that there is an increase of the content of all metals in the dust compared to the initial mixture of bentonite. The most significant (almost double) increase observed for zinc is probably related to the adsorption of this element on the dust surface by contact with the liquid metal. The study showed, that dust contained more than 20% of the amount of montmorillonite and had a loss on ignition at a similar level. The addition of 1% of dust to the used moulding sand results in almost 30% increase in the total volume of gases generated in casting processes and nearly 30% increase of the benzene emission.


A large number of characterization tools for semiconductor based heterostructures are available nowadays. Most of these techniques deliver high temporal resolution (down to hundreds of femtoseconds) or good spatial resolution (down to sub nanometer resolution), but not both simultaneously. However, to get a complete picture of carrier recombination and diffusion processes in heterostructures, one needs a spectroscopic tool which simultaneously yields high temporal and spatial resolutions. The same kind of tool is also needed to obtain local excited carrier lifetimes in a disordered material. Due to the need of such a characterization tool, we have developed an original picosecond time resolved cathodoluminescence (pTRCL) setup using an ultrafast pulsed electron gun mounted on a scanning electron microscope (SEM). The basic idea of the construction was to replace the original thermionic electron gun by a pulsed electron gun. Electron pulses are produced in the gun by the photoelectric effect: ultraviolet (UV) light pulses illuminate a gold photocathode which leads to electron extraction. This setup reaches simultaneous spatial and temporal resolutions of 50 nm and 12 ps, respectively. Motivated by the exceptional luminescence efficiency of nitride based optoelectronic devices despite of the large defect densities, we first study local luminescence lifetime in the vicinity of threading dislocations (TDs) on GaN surface. We show that the effective luminescence lifetime decreases when approaching a TD. This variation is most probably due to the decrease of the non-radiative lifetime meaning that non-radiative recombination becomes predominant when approaching a dislocation. We measure cathodoluminescence (CL) on InGaN based double quantum well (QW) structures. The structures are optimized to improve spatial resolution for monochromatic CL measurements. The study of these structures reveals the particular surface morphology of InGaN QWs by atomic force microscopy (AFM) and its connection to optical properties: The InGaN QW exhibits deep valleys oriented in the directions where the QW thickness almost decreases to zero. TDs populate these valleys. pTRCL measurements show that excited carriers diffuse away from the TDs in the valleys which act as energy barriers hindering the excited carriers from non radiative recombination on the TDs. This possibly explains the high luminescence efficiency of InGaN based heterostructures despite the high TD density. Results on bulk BN samples are presented in the last chapter on experimental results. BN presents a very high bandgap, estimated around 6 eV , which makes optical excitation difficult in addition to a very high luminescence efficiency. These two properties make BN an ideal candidate for future UV lasers and light sources. Another exciting fact about BN is the possibility to synthesize multi- and single wall nanotubes. We show that the near bandgap luminescence peaks have very short lifetimes (between 20 ps and 32 ps) despite the indirect bandgap structure (theoretical prediction) of BN. Nevertheless, we associate the observed luminescence peak to direct exciton recombination of the Frenkel type.


While educational systems have
been governed by the policies of the nation-state and have been
contained within state borders, the transformations brought about
by the economic, social, and political repercussions of
globalization have added layers of complexity to issues in
education. This is true in particular of agrarian communities, such
as Villa Juarez, San Luis Potosi, Mexico. National educational
policies have led to new challenges in agrarian societies as they
undergo not only ideological exchanges but the movement of
populations that have led to international and national demographic
shifts. One of the main issues that this research will investigate
is the relationship between education and migration, and whether
the changing conditions of that rural setting have had any effect
on how locals perceive the purpose of education. This study examines the way teachers, students and
government officials view the purpose of education in the agrarian
village of Villa Juarez that, like other communities in central
Mexico, is undergoing the influence of globalization, manifested
most notably in emigration to the United States. If post-basic
education competes with international migration as another form of
economic mobility, as William A. Kandel discusses in his study of
traditional migrant communities, then what is the purpose of
education as viewed by teachers, students and government officials
in a rural community? Villa Juarez, a town with a long-standing
history of migration to the United States, has experienced
continually diminishing depopulation and school closings since the
Bracero Program of 1942, which marked the onset of a pronounced
trend of migration to the United States for temporary employment
opportunities. The effects of a culture of migration and
globalization on education in the municipality and town of Villa
Juarez have led to the undermining of education as a vehicle to
social and economic mobility for future generations of
students.


We report a new design of an optical biochip based on a double integrating sphere system to quantify the absolute number of the emitted photons or the total photon flux by a whole cell bioluminescent biosensor, for water toxicity detection, based on genetically engineered Escherichia coli bacteria carrying a recA::luxCDABE promoter-reporter fusion. The new design of the double integrating sphere system does not require any external standard light source for calibration of the tested bioluminescent solution and allows a direct determination of the total photon flux of the bioluminescent solution. In our design, we required that the two spheres are symmetric (have the same radius and reflectance) with a surface area larger than the cut cap area between the spheres.


This paper deals with numerical methods for high frequency wave scattering. It introduces a new hybrid technique that couples a directional fast multipole method for a subsection of a scattering surface to an asymptotic formulation over the rest of the scattering domain. The directional fast multipole method is new and highly efficient for the solution of the boundary integral formulation of a general scattering problem but it requires at least a few unknowns per wavelength on the boundary. The asymptotic method that was introduced by Bruno and collaborators requires much fewer unknowns. On the other hand the scattered field must have a simple structure. Hybridization of these two methods retains their best properties for the solution of the full problem. Numerical examples are given for the solution of the Helmholtz equation in two space dimensions.


MUSIC ELICITS PROFOUND EMOTIONS; HOWEVER, THE time-course of these emotional responses during listening sessions is unclear. We investigated the length of time required for participants to initiate emotional responses ("integration time") to 138 musical samples from a variety of genres by monitoring their real-time continuous ratings of emotional content and arousal level of the musical excerpts (made using a joystick). On average, participants required 8.31 s ( SEM = 0.10) of music before initiating emotional judgments. Additionally, we found that: 1) integration time depended on familiarity of songs; 2) soul/funk, jazz, and classical genres were more quickly assessed than other genres; and 3) musicians did not differ significantly in their responses from those with minimal instrumental musical experience. Results were partially explained by the tempo of musical stimuli and suggest that decisions regarding musical structure, as well as prior knowledge and musical preference, are involved in the emotional response to music.


As one component of a program improvement grant provided by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEPs), the authors' teacher preparation program (TPP) underwent substantial program redesign. In this article, the authors provide a detailed overview of the process they undertook to revamp their program based on the fundamental question, "Upon graduation, what should our graduates know and be able to do?" Using a q-sort technique as the foundation, faculty identified "high priority" topics and used these topics as a guide for developing new courses, assignments, and experiences within the authors' TPP. An overview of the q-sort technique and how the authors applied it to bring about specific, programmatic changes will be detailed. In addition, information on how this process can be applied to other TPPs is presented.


Social movements literature has repeatedly stressed the importance of ingrained dispositions to activism. Scholarship on political participation has pinpointed how socio-economic inequalities largely determine the propensity to get involved in politics. Therefore certain social groups – with little cultural and political capital, and no background in activism – are generally expected to remain outside of political life. Yet recent movements like the Yellow Vests in 2018-20 France have thrust "ordinary citizens" into the limelight. To what extent did their unprecedented commitment contribute to giving the movement some of its unique features? Did this experience of protest affect their relationship with politics?
Based on ethnographic biographical interviews with first-time protestors, we argue that becoming Yellow Vests has fostered a two-pronged politicization process: first, through their increased defiance towards specialized politics; second, through their criticism of social order, which brings the social question back in after years of interpreting conflict as "cultural".


Medicaid is vastly more important than Medicare or private insurance in funding long-term care (LTC). However, states vary tremendously in their commitment to Medicaid LTC. This article advances knowledge of the origins, nature, and implications of this variation. After examining the degree of variation in state spending on Medicaid LTC, we show how federal policy has over the past fifty years steadily increased state discretion to shape these services. This decentralization largely reflects the potency of the intergovernmental lobby-governors and other state officials-in influencing federal policy. While fueling state variation, the intergovernmental lobby has also provided valuable political support that has helped Medicaid grow and resist retrenchment. After considering policy options that could mitigate Medicaid LTC inequities rooted in state differences, we assess how the catalytic forces that have fueled growth in Medicaid LTC may be insufficient to protect the program from future erosion.


Municipal solid waste management (MSWM) constitutes one of the most crucial health and environmental problems facing authorities in the Khartoum State (Sudan). The analysis showed that Khartoum State produced around 1,040,250 tons of solid municipal waste annually 12.7% of it plastic which is 132,112 tons. Studies say that the liquid (oil) yield of thermal pyrolysis of plastic waste is between 80-90%. Modification made by Aspen Hysys program for thermofuel process to improve the efficiency of the process.


Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a promising 2.4 GHz technology for Body Area Networks (BAN) in health care and lifestyle applications. However, the global increase of wireless devices using the crowded spectrum in the 2.4 GHz frequency band can create coexistence issues. This work studies the performance of BLE in environments with multiple BLE devices. An experimental setup consisting of 10 BLE nodes is used to measure BLE application throughput with different connection parameters and under different interference sources, such as other BLE devices and WiFi. The results quantify the decrease of the application throughput and the influence of BLE connection parameters in the experimental settings, as well as suggest parameter values suitable for densely deployed environments.


Dynamical systems having many coexisting attractors present interesting properties from both fundamental theoretical and modelling points of view. When such dynamics is under bounded random perturbations, the basins of attraction are no longer invariant and there is the possibility of transport among them. Here we introduce a basic theoretical setting which enables us to study this hopping process from the perspective of anomalous transport using the concept of a random dynamical system with holes. We apply it to a simple model by investigating the role of hyperbolicity for the transport among basins. We show numerically that our system exhibits non-Gaussian position distributions, power-law escape times, and subdiffusion. Our simulation results are reproduced consistently from stochastic continuous time random walk theory.


When under threat, it pays to be flexible. That may explain why scientists have been able to use viruses to reprogram differentiated cells into stem cells, an advance that was recognized as part of this year9s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. A U.S. research team reports that a cell9s defensive reaction to viruses seems to make it more open to expressing genes that are usually shut down—whether they trigger inflammation or are active in stem cells. The find could help scientists better understand how cellular reprogramming works, and may also help them develop more efficient and safer ways to reprogram cells.


This Essay considers the problem of understanding intellectual sharing/pooling arrangements and the construction of cultural commons arrangements. We argue that an adaptation of the approach pioneered by Elinor Ostrom and collaborators to commons arrangements in the natural environment may provide a template for the examination of constructed commons in the cultural environment. The approach promises to lead to a better understanding of how participants in commons and pooling arrangements structure their interactions in relation to the environment(s) within which they are embedded and with which they share interdependent relationships. Such an improved understanding is critical for obtaining a more complete perspective on intellectual property doctrine and its interactions with other legal and social mechanisms of governing creativity and innovation. We propose an initial framework for evaluating and comparing the contours of different pooling arrangements with an eye toward developing an understanding of the institutional and structural differences across arrangements and industries as well as the underlying contextual reasons for such differences. The proposed approach would draw upon case studies from a wide range of disciplines. Among other things, we argue that a theoretical approach to cultural constructed commons should consider rules pertaining to membership criteria, contribution and use of pooled resources, internal licensing conditions, management of external relationships, and institutional forms along with the degree of collaboration among members, sharing of human capital, degrees of integration among participants, and whether there is a specified purpose to the arrangement.


STUDY QUESTION
Does a reduced FSH dose in women with a predicted hyper response, apparent from a high antral follicle count (AFC), who are scheduled for IVF/ICSI lead to a different outcome with respect to cumulative live birth rate and safety?

SUMMARY ANSWER
Although in women with a predicted hyper response (AFC > 15) undergoing IVF/ICSI a reduced FSH dose (100 IU per day) results in similar cumulative live birth rates and a lower occurrence of any grade of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS) as compared to a standard dose (150 IU/day), a higher first cycle cancellation rate and similar severe OHSS rate were observed.

WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY
Excessive ovarian response to controlled ovarian stimulation (COS) for IVF/ICSI may result in increased rates of cycle cancellation, the occurrence of OHSS and suboptimal live birth rates. In women scheduled for IVF/ICSI, an ovarian reserve test (ORT) can be used to predict response to COS. No consensus has been reached on whether ORT-based FSH dosing improves effectiveness and safety in women with a predicted hyper response.

STUDY DESIGN SIZE, DURATION
Between May 2011 and May 2014, we performed an open-label, multicentre RCT in women with regular menstrual cycles and an AFC > 15. Women with polycystic ovary syndrome (Rotterdam criteria) were excluded. The primary outcome was ongoing pregnancy achieved within 18 months after randomization and resulting in a live birth. Secondary outcomes included the occurrence of OHSS and cost-effectiveness. Since this RCT was embedded in a cohort study assessing over 1500 women, we expected to randomize 300 predicted hyper responders.

PARTICIPANTS/MATERIALS, SETTING, METHODS
Women with an AFC > 15 were randomized to an FSH dose of 100 IU or 150 IU/day. In both groups, dose adjustment was allowed in subsequent cycles (maximum 25 IU in the reduced and 50 IU in the standard group) based on pre-specified criteria. Both effectiveness and cost-effectiveness were evaluated from an intention-to-treat perspective.

MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE
We randomized 255 women to a daily FSH dose of 100 IU and 266 women to a daily FSH dose of 150 IU. The cumulative live birth rate was 66.3% (169/255) in the reduced versus 69.5% (185/266) in the standard group (relative risk (RR) 0.95 [95%CI, 0.85-1.07], P = 0.423). The occurrence of any grade of OHSS was lower after a lower FSH dose (5.2% versus 11.8%, RR 0.44 [95%CI, 0.28-0.71], P = 0.001), but the occurrence of severe OHSS did not differ (1.3% versus 1.1%, RR 1.25 [95%CI, 0.38-4.07], P = 0.728). As dose reduction was not less expensive (€4.622 versus €4.714, delta costs/woman €92 [95%CI, -479-325]), there was no dominant strategy in the economic analysis.

LIMITATIONS, REASONS FOR CAUTION
Despite our training programme, the AFC might have suffered from inter-observer variation. Although strict cancellation criteria were provided, selective cancelling in the reduced dose group (for poor response in particular) cannot be excluded as observers were not blinded for the FSH dose and small dose adjustments were allowed in subsequent cycles. However, as first cycle live birth rates did not differ from the cumulative results, the open design probably did not mask a potential benefit for the reduced dosing group. As this RCT was embedded in a larger cohort study, the power in this study was unavoidably lower than it should be. Participants had a relatively low BMI from an international perspective, which may limit generalization of the findings.

WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS
In women with a predicted hyper response scheduled for IVF/ICSI, a reduced FSH dose does not affect live birth rates. A lower FSH dose did reduce the incidence of mild and moderate OHSS, but had no impact on severe OHSS. Future research into ORT-based dosing in women with a predicted hyper response should compare various safety management strategies and should be powered on a clinically relevant safety outcome while assessing non-inferiority towards live birth rates.

STUDY FUNDING/COMPETING INTEREST(S)
This trial was funded by The Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMW, Project Number 171102020). SCO, TCvT and HLT received an unrestricted research grant from Merck Serono (the Netherlands). CBL receives grants from Merck, Ferring and Guerbet. BWJM is supported by a NHMRC Practitioner Fellowship (GNT1082548) and reports consultancy for OvsEva, Merck and Guerbet. FJMB receives monetary compensation as a member of the external advisory board for Ferring pharmaceutics BV and Merck Serono for consultancy work for Gedeon Richter (Belgium) and Roche Diagnostics (Switzerland) and for a research cooperation with Ansh Labs (USA). All other authors have nothing to declare.

TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER
Registered at the ICMJE-recognized Dutch Trial Registry (www.trialregister.nl). Registration number: NTR2657.

TRIAL REGISTRATION DATE
20 December 2010.

DATE OF FIRST PATIENT'S ENROLMENT
12 May 2011.


It has been argued by Kayne and Pollock (1978a-b) that, in French, full NP subject inversion (henceforth SI) can be reduced to a stylistic rule of the form Move NP, the application of which would be triggered by WH. To be descriptively accurate, a general analysis of SI would have to take into account on the one hand that not all WH-words are compatible with SI (e.g. *pourquoi part Jean?) as noted for instance by Cornulier (1974) and on the other that SI does occur in the absence of WH (e.g. in sentences with list interpretation, live coverage of sports events). These apparent exceptions can all be explained when we take into account a number of pragmatic factors such as focusing and discourse context. Taking these factors into account provides a basis for ex-plaing why some uses of SI are conditioned by style or register while others are not, and why consequently French syntax has to include at least two distinct rules of subject inversion.


The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual model of maternity leave transition adapting the work of Arman (2009) and specifically the application of the Framework of Repatriation Adjustment model to mothers returning from maternity leave. The conceptual model is tailored to the specific circumstances of the women's experiences of maternity leave and their subsequent transition back to work.

The paper adapts and applies Arman's (2009) Framework of Repatriation Adjustment model to the experience of women transitioning back to work following a period of maternity leave. The paper argues that the experiences of expatriates returning to their home country following a period abroad is not dissimilar to those experiences of mothers returning to work following a period of maternity leave.

An outcome of this paper is the development of a new conceptual model of maternity leave transition.

Research limitations/implications – This paper suggests a number of emergent areas for future research. The model offers researchers a new line of investigation in terms of the antecedents which are likely to impact on women's decision regarding their return to work. Female employment rates have almost doubled in the past five decades yet despite this, female labour force participation rates remain behind their male counterparts particularly with regard to mothers. There are also organisational risks associated with a poor readjustment process for returning mothers. The proposed conceptual model suggests a number of possible areas for HR practitioners to consider to assist with retention of this cohort of employees.

This paper is unique in its approach to the examination of maternity leave transition and in particular, offering a new perspective on the factors which potentially impact upon whether or not a woman decides to return to work and how positive or otherwise this transition may be.


There has been growing public concern about vehicle speeds in rural areas, particularly through villages. To examine this problem, the Department of Transport is participating in the VIllage SPeed Control Working Group (VISP) with the County Surveyors' Society, and the Scottish and Welsh Offices. Alongside this initiative, Devon and Gloucestershire County Councils, as well as other highway authorities, have installed speed reducing measures, known as 'gateways', on the approaches to villages. These measures are intended to impart to drivers that they are about to enter a different environment from the open road and that they should reduce their speed. During 1992, eight villages (Beaford, Newton Tracey, Roachill, Landkey, Swimbridge Newland, Swimbridge, Halberton and Woodbury) and two small towns in Devon (Dawlish and Tavistock), and eight villages in Gloucestershire (Bishops Cleeve, Dymock, Fairford, Frampton- on-Severn, Littledean, Maisemore, Whelford and Whiteshill) were treated. In Devon, the measures include redesigned village nameplates, speed limit signs, hatched road markings and speed limit roundels painted on the carriageway, contrasting surfacing, central islands (some with planting) and night-time gateway illumination. In Gloucestershire, each gateway has village nameplates incorporating a "drive carefully" message, with red and white bars beneath them. Edge-of-carriageway markings and reflector posts compliment the signing. At two sites advance warning of traffic calming and rumble areas were installed in advance of the gateway. Gateways with visual impact, a central island, advance warning of traffic calming, and those on wider roads tended to be more effective, reducing 85th percentile speeds by up to 9mph. Less effective were gateways sited where, for example, a bend or blind summit was already limiting speeds. There was less impact on speeds within the villages, where additional measures seem necessary to achieve a reasonable reduction. The results will help towards the formulation of advice to assist highway engineers in designing appropriate speed reducing measures, particularly on village approaches. The need for public consultation when designing measures has been demonstrated. (A)


The Second World War stands across the 20 th century like a colossus. Its death toll, geographical spread, social dislocation and genocidal slaughter were unprecedented.  It was literally a world war, devastating Europe, China and Japan, triggering massive movements of population, and unleashing forces of nationalism in Asia and Africa that presaged the end of European colonialism. The international order was changed irrevocably, most notably in the rise of the two superpowers and the decline of Great Britain. For Australia too, though the loss of life in the conflict was comparatively small, the war had a profound impact. Yet for all this, the Second World War is relegated to a secondary place in the Australian national memory of war vis-a-vis the war of 1914-18. It is a lesser war in every respect. Why this is so, when the war itself was fought on such a monumental scale globally, is addressed in this article. The subordination of the Second World War is ultimately attributable to the fact that the signifier of 'ANZAC' leads in the imagination and national mythic representation not to any battle or experience of 1939-45 but to 25 April 1915.  ANZAC is now irrevocably entrenched in the national political culture as a complex secular signifier of identity and belonging to the nation.


In Indonesia, political bickering against Sukarno has started long before his rise to power and escalated towards his 1959 declaration of Guided Democracy (GD), which he believed was an alternative to liberal democracy. GD turned out to be politically repressive. Sukarno had never concealed his support of the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party). Sukarno appointed Suharto as army commander in chief, who would eventually lead to the former's overthrow. The latter, by abusing his powers, defied the former. These instances served as premises to Sukarno's overthrow and to Suharto's assumption as president. Suharto's New Order government, which was established in 1966, has been using manipulation, pressure, and intimidation to maintain its rule. Its original structure, which was supposedly built on the alliance among the bureaucrats, military, students, and political parties, had crumbled.


Blended learning is a hybrid of classroom and on-line learning that includes some of the conveniences of on-line courses without the complete loss of face-to-face tact. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate student achievement and satisfaction with blended learning course delivery compared to a traditional face-to-face class format in a general health course. Method: Surveys were distributed to randomly selected classes during the fall 2007 semester: three blended and one traditional sections participated (n=251). Results: Total satisfaction scores between blended (54.986) and traditional (49.788) classes were significantly different (p< 0.01). Achievement by students of blended and traditional sections brought mixed findings, yet blended students' overall grades were significantly higher (p=0.048). Conclusion: Results indicated that a blended course delivery is preferred over a traditional lecture format, and promising data emerged to challenge teachers' traditional approach to teaching general health courses at the university level.


Abstract Spermatozoa from members of Hemerobiidae, Chrysopidae and Mantispidae (Arthropoda; Hexapoda: Neuroptera) have been examined by electron microscopy. In all species examined, the nucleus is surrounded by a nuclear envelope that in its anterior domain, fans out laterally into one (Chrysopidae) or two wings (Hemerobiidae and Mantispidae). Furthermore, the anterior sperm region is surrounded by external dense material. In Mantispidae, sperm dimorphism with two types of spermatozoa is also confirmed: paraspermatozoa (not fertilizing), provided with giant axoneme and mitochondrial derivatives, and euspermatozoa (fertilizing). Spermatozoa of Chrysopidae and Mantispidae are characterized by the lack of an acrosome while sperm cells of Hemerobiidae are provided with a bilayered acrosome. Spermatozoa from all the investigated species have axonemes of the conventional insect type, with a 9+9+2 microtubular pattern and with accessory tubules provided with 16 protofilaments. In all the examined taxa the intertubular material has the same localization also observed in all other previously analysed Neuroptera. The mitochondrial derivatives and the accessory bodies in the three families are also described. Hemerobiidae are characterized by the presence of a large groove of the plasma membrane along the right side of the anterior sperm region, which results in an eccentric position of the axoneme. Chrysopidae have large mitochondrial derivatives, which encircle the axoneme. The peculiar feature regarding the nuclear envelope was not seen in other members of neuropteroid insects. These data are discussed in the light of the phylogenetic relationships of the taxa examined.


Recent interest in the development of drug particle-laden strip-films suggests the need for establishing standard regulatory tests for their dissolution. In this work, we consider the dissolution testing of griseofulvin (GF) particles, a poorly water-soluble compound, incorporated into a strip-film dosage form. The basket apparatus (USP I) and the flow-through cell dissolution apparatus (USP IV) were employed using 0.54% sodium dodecyl sulfate as the dissolution medium as per USP standard. Different rotational speeds and dissolution volumes were tested for the basket method while different cell patterns/strip-film position and dissolution media flow rate were tested using the flow-through cell dissolution method. The USP I was not able to discriminate dissolution of GF particles with respect to particle size. On the other hand, in the USP IV, GF nanoparticles incorporated in strip-films exhibited enhancement in dissolution rates and dissolution extent compared with GF microparticles incorporated in strip-films. Within the range of patterns and flow rates used, the optimal discrimination behavior was obtained when the strip-film was layered between glass beads and a flow rate of 16 ml/min was used. These results demonstrate the superior discriminatory power of the USP IV and suggest that it could be employed as a testing device in the development of strip-films containing drug nanoparticles.


We present a fixed time-step algorithm for the simulation of multi-rigid-body dynamics with joints, contact, collision, and friction. The method solves a linear complementarity problem (LCP) at each step. We show that the algorithm can be obtained as the stiff limit of fixed time-step schemes applied to regularized contact models. We do not perform collision detection. Instead, a noninterpenetration constraint is replaced by its linearization, which, together with a judicious choice of the active constraints, guarantees geometrical constraint stabilization without the need to perform a reduction of the time step to detect new collision or stick-slip transition events. Partially elastic collisions are accommodated by a suitable modification of the free term of the LCP.


Minimally invasive therapies by applying cavitation bubbles, such as histotripsy and gene transfer, have recently attracted attention. As a method to generate bubbles, the use of expansion waves is expected to be more effective than using shock waves or ultrasound. However, few studies have con rmed the effectiveness of expansion waves in generating bubbles. Previous studies have investigated this issue using biological targets. When contrast agents were injected prior to exposure to expansion waves, a larger hemorrhage was observed after the exposure. However, without contrast agents, little difference in hemorrhage was observed. Thus, at least with biological targets, it is still uncertain whether cavitation bubbles are generated more effectively by expansion waves or by shock waves. In this study, we developed a novel cavitation bubble observation system, and used it to observe bubble dynamics created by either expansion waves or shock waves. A spherical wave generated by electric discharge was focused using two re ectors: one was made of stainless steel for focusing shock waves, and the other was made of polydimethylsiloxane for focusing expansion waves. Using the new system, we clearly observed the generation and growth of bubbles. Comparing the dynamics of bubbles produced by expansion waves with those produced by shock waves, both generation and growth of bubbles were more remarkable with expansion waves. To understand the impact of albumin, which is present in vivo, on the generation of bubbles, bovine serum albumin (BSA) concentration at the focus region was altered. However, BSA concentration had little effect on the effectiveness of the expansion waves. Moreover, several parameters of the expansion wave, such as peak negative pressure and full width of half maximum (FWHM), were investigated to clarify which was the main contributor to the observed promotion of bubble dynamics. The results showed that peak negative pressure contributed substantially to the generation of bubbles when produced by expansion waves. In contrast, FWHM contributed mainly to the growth of bubbles. These results provide insight to understand the mechanisms of cavitation and may lead to clinical applications of expansion waves.


"There is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J. P. court in the land, or this honorable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal."1


Abstract This paper focuses on evidence from firewood remains from a Napoleonic camp located at Étaples (in the north of France), inhabited between 1803 and 1805. The combination of archaeological and relevant historical records indicates that wood resources, stockpiled for lighting and heating by the soldiers, may have originated from two distinct areas: the army's official forest and also the area around the camp, indicating possible difficulties in wood supply at the end of its occupation. This study, therefore, uses archaeological charcoal to reinforce military historical sources in understanding firewood economy and the harsh everyday life of the Napoleonic soldier at the beginning of the nineteenth century.


Abstract Specimens of Colominella (agglutinated Foraminifera) from a Pliocene Mediterranean succession were analysed through a scanning electron microscope (SEM) equipped with an energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometer (EDX) to document their test microstructure. Colominella develops a complex large test with a mostly biserial chamber arrangement, but with the internal chamber lumens partitioned by vertical and horizontal plates that form a labyrinthine structure of alcoves. This internal partition occurs from the first chambers but is completely masked from the outside by the thick wall. The test-wall microstructure is characterized by canaliculi (parapores) that are externally covered by a pavement of agglutinated grains. The mineralogical characterization of the agglutinated grains and the secreted cement shows that the grains are strongly selected as regards to size, arrangement and composition, with the coarse grains placed close to the outer wall. Moreover, these coarse grains, forming a pavement, are made of monocrystalline quartz, whereas the inner part of the skeleton is mostly composed of dolomite. The carbonate cement is less abundant and appears as cloudy light grey areas among the detrital grains. These shell features can be interpreted as functional adaptations to perform kleptoplastidy and/or to house functional photosymbionts, probably induced by stable environmental conditions as in warm shallow waters characterized by low nutrient flux.


Deriving global parameters for velocity-based pore pressure predictions in a complex overpressure origins regime is normally difficult and nonrobust. Applying large variations in Eaton's exponent is an unsatisfactory work practice for velocity-based pore pressure prediction. This study investigates an alternative potential method to reduce the variation of Eaton's exponent values in an environment of mixed disequilibrium compaction and fluid expansion overpressure mechanisms. Using 25 input wells, the fluid expansion components are estimated using velocity-vertical effective stress plot and then subtracted from the pressure measurements to obtain the disequilibrium compaction components. Eaton's exponents are then derived only from the disequilibrium compaction components. The spatial variation of Eaton's exponent is greatly reduced from the range of 1–5 to the range of 1–1.9 after removing the fluid expansion components from the raw overpressure data set. A constant Eaton's exponent of 1.44 is used throughout the field to predict the disequilibrium compaction components and the fluid expansion components are predicted from gridding of the well data. The two components are combined to produce a final pore pressure prediction profile, which yields less uncertainty than the traditional Bowers method.


After outlining a conceptual and phenomenological framework for my approach to sound I will reflect on how the detritus of anthropocentric sound in our environments, including sounds from everyday devices, may be more consciously considered in terms of general well-being and livability. I will suggest how an acoustic ecology 2.0 approach might be used to rethink sonic design for both environmental and economic benefit. Finally, I will touch on three projects which apply these ideas: (1) the Listenn project which brings together citizen science and creative place-making in national parks and nature preserves of the American Southwest to build nature stewardship and community agency for the conservation of iconic environments, (2) EcoRift, a series of virtual reality experiences that provides youth, mobility-impaired and global communities with access to nature sanctuaries and serves as a scientific archiving system to track environmental change in these sites; and (3) the Psychoacoustic Mapping Project for the Central Arizona Long-Term Environmental Monitoring initiative.


A Dissertation Submitted to the University of Gazira in Partial Fulfillment of the Requierments for the Award of the Degree of Master of Science in Biosciences and Biotechnology ( Biotechnology ) Center of Biosciences and Biotechnology Faculty of Engineering and technology ,May 2015


With an Overview by Paul Smith and a Checklist to Hemingway Criticism, 1975–1990

New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway is an all-new sequel to Benson's highly acclaimed 1975 book, which provided the first comprehensive anthology of criticism of Ernest Hemingway's masterful short stories. Since that time the availability of Hemingway's papers, coupled with new critical and theoretical approaches, has enlivened and enlarged the field of American literary studies. This companion volume reflects current scholarship and draws together essays that were either published during the past decade or written for this collection.

The contributors interpret a variety of individual stories from a number of different critical points of view—from a Lacanian reading of Hemingway's "After the Storm" to a semiotic analysis of "A Very Short Story" to an historical-biographical analysis of "Old Man at the Bridge." In identifying the short story as one of Hemingway's principal thematic and technical tools, this volume reaffirms a focus on the short story as Hemingway's best work. An overview essay covers Hemingway criticism published since the last volume, and the bibliographical checklist to Hemingway short fiction criticism, which covers 1975 to mid-1989, has doubled in size.

Contributors. Debra A. Moddelmog, Ben Stotzfus, Robert Scholes, Hubert Zapf, Susan F. Beegel, Nina Baym, William Braasch Watson, Kenneth Lynn, Gerry Brenner, Steven K. Hoffman, E. R. Hagemann, Robert W. Lewis, Wayne Kvam, George Monteiro, Scott Donaldson, Bernard Oldsey, Warren Bennett, Kenneth G. Johnston, Richard McCann, Robert P. Weeks, Amberys R. Whittle, Pamela Smiley, Jeffrey Meyers, Robert E. Fleming, David R. Johnson, Howard L. Hannum, Larry Edgerton, William Adair, Alice Hall Petry, Lawrence H. Martin Jr., Paul Smith


This paper proposes an idea of charging eco-driving connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) which drive smoothly passing signalized intersection above a dynamic wireless power transfer (DWPT) system consisting of segmented coils at the upstream of approaching lanes. Mixed traffic streams with different penetration levels of eco-driving CAVs passing through a DWPT system-equipped signalized intersection are simulated using microscopic traffic simulation software PTV-VISSIM. Energy stored, which is defined as the result of energy transferred to the vehicle battery by DWPT system subtracting energy consumed by the vehicle battery whilst travelling the same distance, is used to evaluate the total impact of eco-driving behavior on energy consumption and charging capacity. The simulation results show that at full CAV penetration rate, there are 62% reduction of average energy consumption of all types of vehicles and 10% increase of average energy stored per battery electric vehicle compared to full HVs case. This indicates that the eco-driving driving behavior has a positive impact on the energy stored powered by the DWPT system designed in this paper.


We examined the effect of running velocity upon magnitude and range of asymmetry in the main kinetics and kinematics of treadmill running at constant, submaximal velocities. Nine well-trained, un-injured distance runners ran, in a random order, at seven running velocities (10, 12.5, 15, 17.5, 20, 22.5, and 25 km.h−1) for 60 s (separated by > 90 s of rest) on an instrumented treadmill (ADAL3D-WR, Medical Development, France). Continuous measurement (1,000 Hz) of spatio-temporal, horizontal force production, and spring-mass characteristics was performed and data over 10 consecutive steps (5 right and 5 leg foot contacts after ~50 s of running) were used for subsequent comparisons. Group mean and the range of asymmetry scores were assessed from the "symmetry angle" (SA) formulae where a score of 0%/100% indicates perfect symmetry/asymmetry. Mean SA scores for spatio-temporal variables were lower than 2%: contact time (0.6 ± 0.1%; range: 0.4–0.7%), aerial time (1.7 ± 0.2%; range: 1.3–2.1%) as well as step length and step frequency (0.7 ± 0.2%; range: 0.5–0.9%). Mean loading rate (5.3 ± 1.1%; range: 4.1–6.9%) and spring mass model [peak vertical force: 3.2 ± 1.6% (range: 2.9–3.4%); maximal downward vertical displacement: 11.2 ± 6.0% (range: 9.2–14.0%); leg compression: 3.6 ± 1.9% (range: 2.9–5.6%); vertical stiffness: 8.8 ± 1.9% (range: 7.1–11.6%); leg stiffness: 1.6 ± 0.6% (range: 1.2–2.9%)] presented larger mean SA values. Mean SA scores ranged 1–4% for duration of braking (1.3 ± 0.3%; range: 0.9–2.0%) and push-off (1.6 ± 0.9%; range: 1.2–2.4%) phases, peak braking (2.4 ± 1.1%; range: 1.6–3.6%), and push-off (1.7 ± 0.9%; range: 1.2–2.2%) forces as well as braking (3.7 ± 2.0%; range: 2.8–5.8%) and push-off (2.1 ± 0.8%; range: 1.3–2.6%) impulses. However, with the exception of braking impulse (P = 0.005), there was no influence of running velocity on asymmetry scores for any of the mechanical variables studied (0.118<P<0.920). Modifying treadmill belt velocity between 10 and 25 km.h−1 induced large adjustments in most running kinetics and kinematics. However, there was no noticeable difference in group mean and the range of asymmetry values across running velocities, with the magnitude of these scores being largely dependent on the biomechanical variable of interest. Finally, the relatively large range of asymmetry between participants for some variables reinforces the importance of assessing asymmetry on an individual basis.


Web applications incorporate important business assets and offer a convenient way for
businesses to promote their services through the internet. Many of these web applica-
tions have evolved from simple HTML pages to complex applications that have a high
maintenance cost. This is due to the inherent characteristics of web applications, to
the fast internet evolution and to the pressing market which imposes short development
cycles and frequent modifications. In order to control the maintenance cost, quantita-
tive metrics and models for predicting web applications' maintainability must be used.
Maintainability metrics and models can be useful for predicting maintenance cost, risky
components and can help in assessing and choosing between different software artifacts.
Since, web applications are different from traditional software systems, models and met-
rics for traditional systems can not be applied with confidence to web applications. Web
applications have special features such as hypertext structure, dynamic code generation
and heterogenousity that can not be captured by traditional and object-oriented metrics.
This research explores empirically the relationships between new UML design met-
rics based on Conallen's extension for web applications and maintainability. UML web
design metrics are used to gauge whether the maintainability of a system can be im-
proved by comparing and correlating the results with different measures of maintain-
ability. We studied the relationship between our UML metrics and the following main-
tainability measures: Understandability Time (the time spent on understanding the soft-
ware artifact in order to complete the questionnaire), Modifiability Time(the time spent
on identifying places for modification and making those modifications on the software
artifact), LOC (absolute net value of the total number of lines added and deleted for com-
ponents in a class diagram), and nRev (total number of revisions for components in a class diagram). Our results gave an indication that there is a possibility for a relationship
to exist between our metrics and modifiability time. However, the results did not show
statistical significance on the effect of the metrics on understandability time. Our results
showed that there is a relationship between our metrics and LOC(Lines of Code). We
found that the following metrics NAssoc, NClientScriptsComp, NServerScriptsComp,
and CoupEntropy explained the effort measured by LOC(Lines of Code). We found that
NC, and CoupEntropy metrics explained the effort measured by nRev(Number of Revi-
sions). Our results give a first indication of the usefulness of the UML design metrics,
they show that there is a reasonable chance that useful prediction models can be built
from early UML design metrics.


Abstract. Arthropods are known to display a variable number of eye lenses and this number mostly increases during their development. In trilobites, most species possessing schizochroal eyes exhibit a notable intraspecific variation in the number of dorso ventral files of eye lenses that can be age related (i.e., growth) or not (i.e., living environment). Several previous studies have shown that some trilobite groups (e.g. phacopids) tend to have fewer lenses/files in representatives from the deeper habitats than those from shallower habitats. In this study, we analyzed the pattern of variation in the number of dorso ventral files of eye lenses in two Devonian phacopid trilobites from the Prague Basin of the Czech Republic. We quantified their intraspecific variability. To better understand the patterning, we compared more than 120 individuals. Data first reveal evidence of a bimodal distribution of lens/file number without intermediate forms among each of two studied populations of Prokops prokopi (Chlupáč, 1971) and throughout the ontogeny of Pedinopariops insequens (Chlupáč, 1977). Our results indicate that caution must be taken for taxonomical affiliation and biodiversity analyses of taxa in which the intraspecific variability is unclear. Additionally, we investigated possible relations of these bimodalities to the stratigraphical position of studied populations and to the paleoenvironment. In Prokops prokopi, a slightly different age of both populations, together with supposed differences in the local environments can be responsible for observed variability. In Pedinopariops insequens, stress conditions possibly related to the approaching onset of the Basal Choteč Event can be responsible for surprising intrapopulation variability. We speculate that the stress conditions could cause a bimodal selection and possibly also the change of ontogenetic trajectory within this species. Pedinopariops insequens was the only phacopid in the Prague Basin that crosses the Lower/Middle Devonian boundary and survived also the onset of Basal Choteč Event.


We present an approach to identify non-cooperative individuals at a distance from a sequence of images using 3D face models. Most biometric features (such as fingerprints, hand shape, iris or retinal scans) require cooperative subjects in close proximity to the biometric system. Even top 2D face recognition systems today are only reliable at a distance when presented with frontal images. Our approach is accomplished by processing images acquired with an ultra-high resolution video camera, inferring the location of the subjects' head, using this information to crop the region of interest, building a 3D face model, and using this 3D model to perform biometric identification. To build the 3D model, we use an image sequence, as natural head and body motion provides enough viewpoint variation to perform stereo-motion for 3D face reconstruction. The 3D face model allows the use of true shape invariants for recognition against 3D galleries. Also the 3D model can assist in matching non-frontal faces against 2D galleries by rotating and rendering the 3D reconstruction into a 2D frontal image when only a 2D gallery is available. This approach constitutes a considerable step forward in solving the challenging problem of biometric identification at a distance.


In these excerpts from a presentation to a conference in Toronto, Deputy Governor Charles Freedman analyses the way in which the monetary conditions index (MCI) enters into the Bank's thinking and actions. He describes how the Bank works in the context of a forward-looking assessment of economic developments and inflationary pressures to decide upon a desired path for the MCI that will result in a rate of inflation, six to eight quarters ahead, that is within the Bank's target band. Mr. Freedman also uses specific examples to explain how various shocks to the economy can change the Bank's desired path for monetary conditions. He describes the role that tactical considerations relating to market circumstances play regarding the timing of Bank actions to bring monetary conditions onto the desired path and emphasizes the need to give precedence to steadying nervous markets.


In West Africa, climate variations and droughts have always affected livelihoods but have also triggered adaptation strategies. A better understanding of the impacts of drought and the responses of West African populations is indispensable for researchers and decision makers in the current and future context of multiple socioeconomic and environmental changes, including climate change. We conducted a systematic review of the literature on drought in West Africa. In this paper, we highlight controversial issues and identify knowledge gaps. Although drought has been widely considered as a major problem in West Africa, there is a need to frame it within a set of multiple threats faced by local populations and to understand how droughts act as a trigger in economic, societal, and environmental contexts. The literature on responses to drought focuses on agricultural and individual responses, while diversification, migration, and tree‐based or livestock‐based responses are less frequently addressed. More research is needed on the effectiveness and on the unexpected effects of responses of populations, states, and NGOs, as well as on the interactions between different responses. To understand the complexity of impacts and responses, the context in which they occur and how individual and collective actions interact within households or communities needs to be taken into account. Ecosystems and agriculture offer many goods and services that are suitable for adaptation and the different landscape components should be analyzed together. Such historical, contextual, and integrated analyses would better inform new policies and projects for adaptation to climate change. WIREs Clim Change 2016, 7:666–681. doi: 10.1002/wcc.411


Talent rules! Talent is a company's most important asset. This book shows why talent must be managed to generate maximum profits for the organization. The Talent Era presents a complete strategy for leveraging talent to maximize business value. Author Subir Chowdhury helps you discover how to measure talent and explains why there's more to attracting talent than raising salaries. He also discusses how managers handle talented subordinates, how to measure the value of talent, and much more.


OBJECTIVE
To determine whether differences in the osteochondral junction (OCJ) in two different age groups could be detected with ultrashort time-to-echo (UTE) MRI in vivo.

METHODS
10 healthy controls aged 20-30 years (Group 1) and 10 patients aged 40-50 years with knee pain but no evidence of osteoarthritis (OA) (Group 2) underwent 3-T MRI of the knee using a two-dimensional UTE sequence. Evaluation of the presence/absence of a high-signal-intensity (SI) line at the medial tibial/lateral tibial (MT/LT) OCJ was performed. Regions of interest (ROI) were created at the MT OCJ and LT OCJ. The peak OCJ SI ratio was calculated by measuring peak OCJ SI using averaged craniocaudal SI profiling, then dividing by the mean SI of a background ROI to standardize between studies. Groups were compared using χ(2) and Mann-Whitney U tests.

RESULTS
A high SI line was present in significantly more Group 1 subjects at both MT (p < 0.001) and LT (p = 0.002). There was a significant difference (p < 0.001) in MT peak OCJ SI ratio between Group 1 (mean ± SD = 0.85 ± 0.10) and Group 2 (0.77 ± 0.12). There was no significant difference (p = 0.19) in LT peak OCJ SI ratio between Group 1 (0.81 ± 0.23) and Group 2 (0.80 ± 0.13).

CONCLUSION
Significant differences in the UTE MR characteristics of the OCJ were demonstrated between the two age groups.

ADVANCES IN KNOWLEDGE
Alterations in the UTE appearances of the tibial plateau OCJ in the older group with knee pain compared with a younger, healthy control cohort may reflect the very early stages of OA.


Major
 depressive
 disorder
 affects
 people's
 productivity
 and
 ability
 to
 function
 in everyday
 life.
 The
 disorder
 can
 be
 attributed
 to
 neurochemical
 imbalances
 of
 various neurotransmitters
 including
 but
 not
 limited
 to
 serotonin,
 dopamine,
 and norepinephrine.
 Conventional
 pharmacological
 treatments
 have
 focused
 primarily
 on these
 three
 neurotransmitters,
 and
 have
 been
 shown
 to
 be
 effective
 in
 alleviating
 most of
 the
 major
 symptoms
 of
 depression.
 Although
 these
 treatments
 are
 effective
 with most
 patients,
 they
 are
 known
 to
 have
 adverse
 side
 effects,
 causing
 patients
 to
 seek alternative
 treatments.
 Sceletium
 tortuosum,
 a
 succulent
 plant
 found
 in
 the
 Cape
 region of
 South
 Africa,
 has
 been
 shown
 to
 have
 anxiolytic
 effects
 when
 used
 recreationally. Studies
 have
 confirmed
 the
 presence
 of
 a
 family
 of
 alkaloids
 mesembrines
 that
 are present
 within
 the
 plant
 and
 believed
 to
 be
 responsible
 for
 the
 calming
 effects. Pharmacological
 analyses
 have
 revealed
 that
 individual
 members
 of
 the
 alkaloid
 family act
 as
 either
 serotonin
 reuptake
 inhibitors
 (SRI)
 or
 phosphodiesterase-‐4
 (PDE4) inhibitors.
 The
 current
 study
 seeks
 to
 elucidate
 the
 antidepressant
 properties
 of
 the mesembrine
 alkaloids
 in
 a
 mouse
 model
 of
 depression.
 Isolated
 alkaloids
 were administered
 at
 a
 low
 dose
 (10
 mg/kg)
 and
 a
 high
 dose
 (80
 mg/kg)
 to
 BALB/c
 mice
 in the
 forced
 swim
 test
 a
 rodent
 model
 of
 behavioral
 despair.
 This
 was
 compared
 with paroxetine
 (Paxil)
 (1
 mg/kg),
 a
 selective
 serotonin
 reuptake
 inhibitor
 with
 proven antidepressant
 efficacy,
 and
 0.9%
 saline.
 Each
 trial
 of
 the
 forced
 swim
 test
 was administered
 for
 six
 minutes
 and
 the
 duration
 of
 swimming
 and
 immobility
 was measured.
 In
 order
 to
 assess
 any
 locomotor
 effects
 of
 the
 drug
 treatments,
 an
 open
 field exploration
 test
 was
 also
 employed
 one
 week
 following
 the
 forced
 swim
 task.
 Results from
 the
 forced
 swim
 test
 revealed
 a
 statistically
 significant
 reduction
 in
 the
 duration
 of immobility
 (behavioral
 despair)
 between
 the
 low
 dose
 of
 alkaloids
 and
 saline.
 No significant
 effects
 in
 immobility
 were
 found
 across
 the
 other
 drug
 treatment
 conditions (high
 dose
 mesembrine,
 paroxetine,
 and
 saline).
 Further,
 none
 of
 the
 treatment
 groups showed
 statistically
 significant
 locomotor
 interference
 effects
 in
 the
 open
 field exploration
 test.
 We
 conclude
 that
 the
 mesembrine
 alkaloids
 present
 in
 Sceletium tortuosum
 have
 antidepressant
 properties
 and
 may
 represent
 a
 suitable
 alternative
 for the
 treatment
 of
 major
 depressive
 disorder.


The Evarts Act (26 Stat. 826) altered the federal courts more extensively than any statute since the Judiciary Act of 1789 (1 Stat. 73), which set up the Supreme Court and the subordinate federal courts. The new law created an intermediate federal appellate court system (the circuit courts of appeals profiled here) and rejiggered the relationships and jurisdictions of the various parts of the new system. This map lays out the details of the new courts' first day on the job, and flags a few intriguing aspects of their early work.


Abstract A general education teacher completed an action research project in order to serve his students with special needs better by truly incorporating a special education teacher in co-teaching. By doing so with a set routine each day, the students were able to gain more mathematics understanding and experience a more positive learning experience in mathematics class. The class time was split into four distinct segments each day, and a template was provided to each student in order to make taking notes and understanding concepts easier. Both teachers taught important concepts reaching all students. The data is supportive of increased student achievement after t-tests were completed on student test scores from the first year of co-teaching (with little structure and little teaching by the special education teacher) to the second year of co-teaching where the class structure and effective co-teaching guidelines were used. Background This study is based on an action research project that focused on using data to improve teaching students with special needs. The instructor who engaged in action research was in his first few years of teaching, and had only experience teaching general education mathematics classes. In his second year of teaching, he was given the opportunity to teach a "class within a class." The instructor was informed that this type of class had a specific balance of students diagnoses with learning disabilities versus students with no diagnosis, as well as a teacher from the Special School District present in class to help co-teach the class. In a typical "class within a class" (CWC) structure, a group of students, some with disabilities and some without, are taught together with a general education teacher and a special education teacher in one classroom. Traditionally co-taught classrooms involve the general education teacher teaching the lesson with the special education teacher assisting by helping keep students on task and answering individual questions as needed (Magiera, Smith, Zigmond, & Gebauer, 2005; Friend & Reising, 1993). In general, the special education teacher often is more supportive while the general education teacher often leads the class. In many instances, the first year of co-teaching is exactly what is listed above: the mathematics teacher leading the class while the special education teacher is the support. However, for co-teaching to be effective, teachers must move beyond this kind of arrangement. There are, in fact, a variety of methods for co-teaching, and the description below explains only two models (see Friend & Reising, 1993, for descriptions of various methods). The first year the instructor taught the "class within a class," he taught it the same "traditional" way he always taught his Algebra IB classes. For example, he provided examples on the board, engaged students to work problems at their desks and answer questions, and encouraged students to take notes and write down examples. The only difference was that a CWC teacher helped students one-on-one during lectures, made copies of notes for students who were absent, helped keep students on task, and occasionally made a comment to support what the general education teacher taught. At the end of the year, there was not a noticeable difference in the performance of the students in the CWC classes compared to the previous year (classes with few documented students with disabilities). The discipline was better, but student understanding did not seem affected. The instructor realized that having a second adult in the room did not really impact student achievement. Therefore, the mathematics instructor and special education teacher began to examine the classroom environment with the following questions: 1. How could student understanding and retention improve? 2. How could the CWC teacher's skills be utilized the best? 3. How could both teachers sustain the attention of more students for a greater period during class? …


Non-radially symmetric residual birefringence in laser rods due to pump edge effects is analyzed both theoretically and experimentally. For cubic crystals such as yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG), this depolarization has a unique sixfold symmetry that is closely connected to the crystal's cubic symmetry. While this depolarization is small compared to that observed with linear or circular polarizations, it is measurable and important when using radial or azimuthal polarizations in rods generating heat powers in excess of 70 W/cm. A simple criterion was defined in order to help estimate the amount of depolarization in a high-power laser rod system.


The parallel paradigm is accepted by computer scientists as playing a role of increasing importance in their discipline area. To enable operation in the parallel paradigm, Linda may be used to extend existing and well understood programming languages such as C, Eiffel, Prolog, and Lisp. Linda is not a complete programming language in its own right, but rather a coordination language which is injected into a host programming language thereby creating a parallel dialect of that host language. The behaviour of every component, whether hardware or software, may be defined by a service specification. Thus, a failure may be defined as occurring when a component behaves in a manner not consistent with its service specification. The ability of a system to tolerate failures of any of its components is called fault-tolerance. The probability of failure occurring is higher in parallel systems and distributed systems than in single-processor systems due to increased hardware and software complexity. Furthermore, as many computations on such systems are long lived, the ability to tolerate failures is particularly important. Personal Computers represent an abundant computing resource. Connecting multiple Personal Computers via a Local Area Network, a common practice in medium to large scale organisations, results in a computing resource which is typically idle, but which is readily useable in the parallel paradigm. By exploiting this idle resource a fault-tolerant Linda may be implemented. Such a Linda implementation achieves low-cost fault-tolerance by distributing and replicating a tuple space in a ring arrangement over the Local Area Network. This thesis describes the development of a fault-tolerant Linda injected into the ANSI C programming language running on a Local Area Network of Personal Computers, each one running under OS/2. The Local Area Network is accessed using NetBIOS, as provided by OS/2's Communication Manager.


Economists and policymakers disagree on the lengths central banks should go in pursuit of price stability and, in fact, on exactly what price stability means. This essay advocates that central banks try to maintain stable price levels in their countries, and it argues that the benefits of achieving this objective are worth the transition costs. The essay reviews some of the relevant academic literature on the economic effects of inflation and specifically addresses the issues of transition cost, fiscal dominance, and credibility.


Abstract This paper explores, from a Foucauldian perspective, the emergence and nature of the current EU education policy priority issue of 'early school leaving'. The paper suggests that a number of problematisations developing from the failure to secure Lisbon Strategy objectives have served to create a much stronger focus on the issue of young people deemed to be leaving education and training early in EU states. In examining how EU policy discourse positions such young people (subjectivation), the paper highlights how this has narrowed to a concern with young people as economic problems and principally positioned as economic units which are required to be more productive. Education and training are understood as investments in human capital and as the principal means to secure the dominant global economic position desired by the EU. The paper suggests, however, that human capital theory has been modified within this approach so that merely being retained in an educational setting is seen as proxy for the investment which education and training represent. This is a weaker policy position than previously espoused but, born of economic crisis, one which addresses related EU political aims of softening youth unemployment figures, dampening associated unrest and reducing risks to social cohesion.


The aim of this dissertation is to illustrate and assess the waste minimisation practices in the
food processing industry with particular emphasis on the reduction of food and packaging.
The study entailed a visit to a local supermarket for an exploratory in-situ investigation into
the practices and procedures of their waste reduction processes. The purpose was to
determine the key influences (internal or external) which are motivating the industry to review
and improve their environmental performance in the waste minimisation sector. The final
aspect of the site investigation was to review the future aspirations and projections envisaged
by the supermarket at national level. In addition, it was perceived that the knowledge and
perceptions of primary school children in relation to waste and the environment would be
beneficial to the study. Therefore, a questionnaire was distributed to a local primary school
for completion by 8-11 year olds. The questions were related to the food processing industry
with reference to packaging.
The industry is promoting its public image through improved environmental performance due
to imposed pressures from various sectors. In recent years the industry has had to implement
environmental management practices and adhere to regulatory requirements, were noncompliance
has resulted in prosecution.
The study highlights three significant factors that are conducive to the decision making
process within the food retail industry namely from regulatory framework, consumer and
economic pressures. These factors have a symbiotic relationship in where they have a
dynamic flow between them. The findings from the questionnaire reveal that a majority of
the primary school children had a good environmental knowledge and awareness; however,
further investigation into their mindset would have been beneficial to the study.