A generic crop model (STICS) was adapted (STICS-Grassland) to model growth, yield, and environmental impacts of grasslands in France. It is a semimechanistic model combining equations of physiological processes and mathematical relationships between processes in a daily time step. The Information et Suivi Objectif des Prairies (ISOP; Grassland Information and Objective Survey) application was developed to estimate and map the real-time status of grass growth and forage production in the 200 forage regions of France, to help decision makers anticipate forage availability in case of severe deficits. Initially, the model could not simulate long, severe droughts typical of Mediterranean regions when plant and tiller densities are significantly reduced. A tiller density module models the dynamics of tiller death during droughts. Since STICS is based on the concept of a mean plant (tiller) covering the whole field, variability was introduced through a γ law distribution of transpiration deficit by tiller, a threshold value imposing desiccation, and death to tillers reaching this level. Its second part generates incomplete or total recovery of tiller density through new tillering in the next wet season. Species and contrasting groups of cultivars within species can be characterized with a limited number of parameters.


Although the overall cure rate for advanced germ cell tumor (GCT) is high, the prognosis for patients with cisplatin-refractory GCT remains poor. Gemcitabine, paclitaxel, and oxaliplatin have shown significant activity as single agents in these patients. We investigated the activity and tolerance of a weekly gemcitabine, paclitaxel, oxaliplatin chemotherapy regimen. From September 2000 to February 2002, 9 patients with cisplatin-refractory GCT were treated with gemcitabine 800 mg/m2, paclitaxel 70 mg/m2, and oxaliplatin 50 mg/m2, days 1, 8, and 15, every 4 weeks. Only 1 patient stayed on schedule. In 7 patients, chemotherapy treatment was modified due to grade 3–4 hematological toxicity, whereas in another patient, who received high-dose chemotherapy 2 months before, chemotherapy was administered biweekly. In total, 21 cycles were administered with a median of 2 cycles for each patient. One patient achieved a partial remission lasting 5 months, 1 had disease stabilization for 5 months, whereas 7 had progressive disease. This chemotherapy regimen was not feasible in our patient population. Recently, oxaliplatin at full doses, but not as weekly administration, has appeared to possess activity in cisplatin-refractory GCT. Thus, we plan a phase II study protocol of the oxaliplatin and gemcitabine combination at full doses every 3 weeks.


In this paper, a multi-layered network model of the banking system is designed to explain the systemic risk of the banking system of Iran. This model shows how the dependence of the balance sheet structure of banks results in the crisis from one bank to another, and ultimately causes a crisis in the economy as a whole. It is assumed that the banking system is composed of banks with their balance sheet structure dependent on each other. To estimate the systemic risk of the banking system, the daily index data of banks indexes are used between December 2008 and April 2018 and the value at risk of returning daily index data is estimated using an exponential GARCH model. The daily returns of the stock market index are taken as representative of the real economy, Quantile regression is estimated at two levels of 50% and 1%. In the following, based on the estimated parameters in quantum regression and also on the basis of the CoVar Adrian and Brunnermeier (2016), the risk of the banking system is estimated. The results show that the average CoVaR is estimated at -0.8587, which is consistent with negative expectations and represents a high systemic risk of the banking system.


Recent deep-learning models have achieved impressive prediction performance, but often sacrifice interpretability and computational efficiency. Interpretability is crucial in many disciplines, such as science and medicine, where models must be carefully vetted or where interpretation is the goal itself. Moreover, interpretable models are concise and often yield computational efficiency. Here, we propose adaptive wavelet distillation (AWD), a method which aims to distill information from a trained neural network into a wavelet transform. Specifically, AWD penalizes feature attributions of a neural network in the wavelet domain to learn an effective multi-resolution wavelet transform. The resulting model is highly predictive, concise, computationally efficient, and has properties (such as a multi-scale structure) which make it easy to interpret. In close collaboration with domain experts, we showcase how AWD addresses challenges in two real-world settings: cosmological parameter inference and molecular-partner prediction. In both cases, AWD yields a scientifically interpretable and concise model which gives predictive performance better than state-of-the-art neural networks. Moreover, AWD identifies predictive features that are scientifically meaningful in the context of respective domains. All code and models are released in a full-fledged package available on Github (https://github.com/Yu-Group/adaptive-wavelets).


Analytic just war theorists often attempt to construct ideal theories of military justice on the basis of intuitions about imaginary and sometimes outlandish examples, often taken from non-military contexts. This article argues for a sharp curtailment of this method and defends, instead, an empirically and historically informed approach to the ethical scrutiny of armed conflicts. After critically reviewing general philosophical reasons for being sceptical of the moral-theoretic value of imaginary hypotheticals, the article turns to some of the special problems that this method raises for appraisals of warfare. It examines some of the hypothetical examples employed in the construction of Jeff McMahan's revisionist just war theory, and finds that they sometimes stipulate incomprehensible conditions, lead to argumentative impasses of diverging yet uncertain intuitions, and distract attention away from the real problems of war as we empirically know it. In contrast, empirical and historical studies of warfare reinforce the deep connections between facts and values, and compel theorists to face uncomfortable moral ambiguities. Perhaps most importantly, the analytic method of focusing on imaginary hypothetical examples can not only be distracting, but it can also be genuinely dangerous. Hence, the article pays special attention to the way in which a seemingly innocuous fiction like the famous Ticking Time Bomb scenario can come to frame a new paradigm of inhumanity in the treatment of prisoners of war.


This is a new enlarged version of the Ken.To be destroyed exhibition. A collaboration between Davidmann and the UAL Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC), and curated by Prof Val Williams with Robin Christian. The exhibition explores Davidmann's practice-based research project and the new work which has emerged from it, by Davidmann and via a practice-based collaboration between Davidmann and Graham Goldwater.

Ken. To be destroyed began with an archive and a discover her uncle and aunt, Ken and Hazel Houston, from her mother Audrey Davidmann. It emerged soon after they were married that Ken was transgender. In the context of a British marriage in the 1950s, this inevitably profoundly affected both their own relationship and their relationships to their social surroundings.

The archive contains letters, photographs and papers. Hazel and Audrey wrote to each other frequently in the late 1950s and early 60s, after Hazel discovered that Ken was transgender.

For this new iteration of the exhibition, the largest exploration of this project to date, the team have created a new exhibition which will form the basis of a touring show. The exhibition was specifically re-curated for the LCC Upper Gallery space at LCC. For the first time, the series 'The Dress' was shown as very large prints, including some previously unseen works, and the Davidmann/Goldwater series 'Archive' was displayed for the first time. Also included in the exhibition were letters from Ken to Hazel, and from Hazel to her family, plus the series 'Dealt with in Scotland'.

Much of the discussion between artist and curator revolved around different ways of presenting the archive material, and involved explorations of papers stocks and ways of presentation, including vinyl, projection and film.

The Upper Gallery at LCC was a major player in the making of the exhibition. A tall, commanding space, and a throughway for students and staff, the exhibition had to contain enough drama and presence to make an impact in this multi- use space. Working with the Communications Team at LCC and with LCC technicians and installers, the curatorial aims were realized, despite the fact that the space presented some challenges, as well as the advantage of a constantly changing audience. The exhibition also included a book table, and a film about the early stages of the making of the project.

The layout of the exhibition and sizing and presentation on the works was carefully planned. The exhibition was introduced by the series 'Archive' which showed the letters and papers which are contained in the Ken archive. These photographs were framed and mounted, to instill the idea of 'archivalness' , which in turn, informs the whole exhibition. These quiet photographs are followed by the oversize series of nine images from 'The Dress'- disrupting the quiet space which 'Archive' had created. In a dark space off the main gallery, we displayed two letters, from Ken and Hazel, again oversized and printed on a thin, translucent photographic paper. A projection, made originally for the V&A several years ago, re-worked for this exhibition was also shown in this room. Providing documentary context, in a film kiosk, was Ahmed Atteya's 2015 film 'To be Destroyed', which explored the discovery of the archive and the early stages of the project.
In addition to the main exhibition, three other shows were created which explored other aspects of the project and provided context: 'The Ken Project Archive', 'The Dress at the LCC Studio' and new work by Alexander Cooper in response to the Ken archive.


Abstract This paper speaks to the experience of Black British male experience in academia, with emphasis on UK and US colleges and universities. It is an autoethnographic study in terms of relating, witnessing, and noting both learning and teaching experiences within the confines of higher education in the UK and US. The idea behind this paper is to highlight the need for greater access and opportunity for Black scholars to teach and study without stress and strain on their minds and bodies. There are a number of studies that confirm the efficacy in sharing one's experience as an 'insider' within academia as a person of color. But there are few studies that speak directly to the reality of teaching and researching within the context of Africana or Black Studies in higher education. It is noted that academia should be a place whereby liberal arts of all genres are accepted and respected; in this sense, there is still a long way to go before we can attest to the affirmative of this point of view.


This article explores arguments about the legalization of prostitution and how they impact human trafficking. One argument holds that prostitution is a form of sexual liberation, expression, and women's agency. The counterargument views prostitution as a form of violence against women and maintains that, where prostitution is legal, human trafficking will increase to meet the open demand for sex. These arguments, however, do not account for variations in cultural beliefs and traditions, gender inequality, or the impact of the formation of a global society. The complementary theoretical frames of gender inequality and the formation of a global society are viewed through a global criminal justice lens. Through this framework, this article discusses the prostitution and human trafficking laws of the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which have varying stances on the legalization of prostitution, and how their laws create challenges for law enforcement. Without consideration for complementary theoretical frames, differing laws among jurisdictions, and challenges for law enforcement, problems such as overgeneralization, faulty assumptions, and passing ineffective or shortsighted laws will fuel the debate on the legalization of prostitution and, in turn, inhibit progress in efforts to combat human trafficking.


Objective This study examined the impact of a multicomponent intervention to increase physical activity (PA) in adults with type 2 diabetes (T2D) in Oman. Research design and methods This is a cluster randomized controlled trial in eight primary health centers. Participants were physically inactive, aged ≥18 years, and with no contraindication to PA. Patients attending intervention health centers (n=4) received the 'MOVEdiabetes' intervention, which consisted of personalized, individual face-to-face consultations by dietitians. Pedometers and monthly telephone WhatsApp messages were also used. Patients attending comparison health centers received usual care. The primary outcome was change in PA [Metabolic Equivalent(MET).min/week] after 12 months assessed by the Global Physical Activity Questionnaire. The secondary outcomes were changes in daily step counts, sitting time, weight, body mass index, glycated hemoglobin, blood pressure and lipids. Results Of the 232 participants (59.1% female, mean (SD) age 44.2 (8.1) years), 75% completed the study. At 12 months, the mean change in MET.min/week was +631.3 (95% CI 369.4 to 893.2) in the intervention group (IG) vs +183.2 (95% CI 83.3 to 283.0) in the comparison group, with a significant between-group difference of +447.4 (95% CI 150.7 to 744.1). The odds of meeting PA recommendations were 1.9 times higher in the IG (95% CI 1.2 to 3.3). Significant between-group differences in favor of IG were detected for mean steps/day (+757, 95% CI 18 to 1531) and sitting time hours/ per day (−1.5, 95% CI −2.4 to −0.7). Clinical measures of systolic and diastolic blood pressure and triglycerides also showed significant intervention effects. Conclusions 'MOVEdiabetes' was effective in increasing PA, the likelihood of meeting PA recommendations, and providing cardioprotective benefits in adults with T2D attending primary care.


Small business is considered the backbone of the American economy. The University of Georgia's Flavor of Georgia program coordinated through the College of Agriculture's Center for Agribusiness and Economic Development offers small businesses wider public exposure for their locally produced barbecue sauces, jellies, preserves, cheeses, and meats. The program helps small agricultural producers get their products evaluated by food science professionals and marketers. During a statewide competition, entrants' products are evaluated by people from around the state including the governor at a final judging event held in Atlanta each year. This allows small businesses the chance for increased business connections, networking, and to obtain public feedback on their Georgia products. Seventy-seven percent of the 2013 Flavor of Georgia finalists reported increased interest in their products while 86% reported more business contacts according to survey results. Forty-five percent of the finalists reported an increase in sales while 27% reported an increase in profits. Moreover, 5% of the firms indicate that due to the program, they have an increase in employees. Clearly, the Flavor of Georgia has an economic impact primarily in rural Georgia.


ABSTRACTAir-gun arrays can be encoded by firing individual air guns sequentially over a range of time. This marine source encoding is shown to be particularly beneficial for simultaneous source separation, which can exploit the orthogonality of the encoding sequences to improve the source separation. We have developed a method to design encoding sequences for air-gun arrays having minimized crosscorrelation and optimized autocorrelation properties. By varying the firing times of the individual air-gun subelements, different encoding sequences are constructed using a simulated annealing approach so that their orthogonality properties are optimized. These optimized sequences are then used for time-dithered simultaneous source encoding. Realistic synthetic data examples show a significant improvement of simultaneous source separation. We have also determined the robustness of the method for take-off angle variations and possible errors in sequence estimation.


The fact that embryos are specifically created for selection in the use of PGD entails their possible rejection. This, rather than the PGD activity itself, is thought by some to be objectionable as it is said to instrumentalise embryos. Equally, other arguments are used by opponents of PGD, for example that it may have negative effects on resultant children and that there may be risks to the child's physical and/or emotional status. The emotional risks would be the hardest to quantify but some believe that the power of choice put into the hands of parents by PGD could alter the parent/child relationship fundamentally from one of unconditional love to one dictated by the realisation (or not) of specific 'designer' expectations.There are a number of arguments against PGD. One of them is the 'Playing God' objection which is examined from the Christian viewpoints, and from the secular standpoint in terms of interfering with the natural order.The wide and differing range of views held by the general public on the status of the embryo and foetus cannot be ignored. New Zealand legislation already permits abortion and PGD on limited grounds, and so does not reflect the conservative view of the foetus although the limits imposed might be construed as opposing a completely liberal view. There are no conclusive arguments, nor is there any crucial evidence, which can resolve the differences in views from various accounts of the status of the human embryo and foetus. The question of whether PGD should or should not be permitted is ultimately not usefully addressed by seeking an answer to the question of the status of the human embryo or foetus.The moderate or 'gradualist' approach to the human embryo – an approach that sees the embryo as more than a mere collection of cells, but as less than a full person – is adopted in this report. This approach requires that the embryo of the human species is worthy of respect at all stages, but that certain interventions/treatments may be permissible at certain stages, with the limits of permissibility narrowing as the embryo/foetus nears maturity.Selecting embryos on the basis of their genetic status is a matter of considerable concern for many people – particularly those speaking for the disability rights community. Attitudes vary as to whether or not the availability of PGD to screen out genetic conditions will result in disrespecting people with disabilities or whether this use of PGD sends out a eugenics signal.Discussions about these issues in New Zealand are emerging. The New Zealand Organisation for Rare Disorders is open to the use of emerging genetic technologies for parents to choose to avoid the birth of children with disabilities. For the Crippled Children's Society, their focus has been to consider changing their constitution to emphasise that they celebrate the lives of people with disabilities.The place of people with disabilities and the impact of clinical advance on their position is sometimes seen to be somewhat marginalised, and surely deserves special protection. New Zealand does not have a Disability Rights Commission (as, for example, the UK does) although it has a Minister for Disability and an Office for Disability Issues. Additionally, even with a number of statutes relevant in this area (the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990, Human Rights Act 1993, and Health and Disability Commissioner Act 1994), New Zealand has no body directly responsible for issues that fall under the category of promoting good relations between people with disabilities and their communities.The bioethical analyses are informed by the Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights (UDBHR)25 which significantly focuses on the inter-relationship between bioethics and human rights, and helps shape thinking and reflection for both the process of developing policy and determining the content of policy. At the heart of the ethical analysis of PGD is the tension between, on one hand, individual freedom and privacy to make reproductive choices and, on the other hand, social solidarity and responsibility to ensure that human dignity is not eroded or undermined.


This article conceptualizes social capital in communicative terms to describe the social resources available to members of one suburb in Christchurch, New Zealand, as they seek to recover from a natural disaster. It notes how communicative social capital was distributed unequally and frequently experienced as in deficit or as inaccessible. The idea of community was a powerful focal point for residents, but there was little evidence that social connectedness at this level provided the resources for civic engagement more generally. The idea of the city that arose out of people's shared ideals and investment in collective civic institutions appeared to be still broken three years on from the initial disaster.


With the rise of big data as a strategic tool in contemporary firms, researchers and practitioners have been exploring the ways in which such investments yield the maximum business value. Building on the growing importance of information governance as a means of attaining business value form big data investments, this study examines how it influences a firm's dynamic capabilities, and how environmental factors impact these effects. To test our proposed research model, we used survey data from 202 chief information officers and IT managers working in Norwegian firms. By means of partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), results show that big data governance has a positive and highly significant effect on sensing, seizing, and transforming capabilities. These effects are magnified under varying combinations of environmental conditions.


Most introductory texts provide a technology-based survey of methods and techniques that leaves the reader without a clear understanding of the interrelationships between methods and techniques. By providing a strategy-based introduction, the reader is given a clear understanding of how to provide overlapping defenses for critical information. This understanding provides a basis for engineering and risk-management decisions in the defense of information. Information security is a rapidly growing field, with a projected need for thousands of professionals within the next decade in the government sector alone. It is also a field that has changed in the last decade from a largely theory-based discipline to an experience-based discipline. This shift in the field has left several of the classic texts with a strongly dated feel. Provides a broad introduction to the methods and techniques in the field of information securityOffersa strategy-based view of these tools and techniques, facilitating selection of overlapping methods for in-depth defense of informationProvides very current view of the emerging standards of practice in information security


ABSTRACT The aim of the research presented is to determine the influence of socio-economic factors in childhood and mid-life on multiple tooth loss and chewing problems in mid- and late life in three Swedish birth cohorts (1903–1910, 1911–1920 and 1921–1925). Longitudinal national Swedish surveys were used for the analysis. Participants were interviewed in mid-life in 1968 and later in life (77–99 years of age) in 2002. Childhood socio-economic positions (SEP) did not result in different odds of multiple tooth loss and chewing problems in mid- and late life, but persons with higher mid-life SEP had lower odds. Persons born into the 1921–1925 birth cohort had significantly lower odds of multiple tooth loss in late life than the 1903–1910 birth cohort. Women had higher odds of losing multiple teeth than men in late life but not mid-life. Neither gender nor childhood and mid-life SEP predicted chewing problems late in life, but older people with multiple tooth loss had higher odds of chewing difficulty than those with mainly natural teeth. Childhood conditions may contribute to multiple tooth loss in mid-life, which subsequently contributes to multiple tooth loss in late life. Tooth loss in late life is strongly associated with difficulty chewing hard food. Prevalence of multiple tooth loss is higher in women than in men in late life but not in mid-life.


Using keywords as inputs to search engines and receiving documents as responses remains the prevalent way to access information on the Web. Although a shift toward entity awareness is a fairly recent trend in information access, such methods remain devoid of semantics, which are increasingly recognized as the lynchpin of search, integration, and analysis. We argue that relationships are at the heart of semantics, and, as such, we envision a Web of relationships to relate content across Web resources. Under this powerful new paradigm, information access over the Web would switch from a mere document-retrieval operation to an information framework that supports insight elicitation and semantic analytics over Web resources. In this column, we outline our vision and discuss how recent Improvements in content extraction and semantic annotation will ultimately help us realize this relationship Web.


Abstract We compare German institutions of tertiary education (universities and polytechnics) with respect to the cost of and the returns to their educational degrees. Based on cost data from two different sources we find that on average the expenditures of universities are lower than those of polytechnics when we consider expenditures per potential enrollee and per student enrolled during the regular education period. We apply data from the German Socio-economic Panel (2001-2007) to estimate the private returns to tertiary education and find higher returns to university than polytechnic training. These results are robust to a variety of alternative procedures.


ABSTRACT The effect of the generational cohort on language attitudes has hardly ever been studied. However, especially in the bilingual territories in Spain, the literature stresses the importance of being Spanish-speakers or non-Spanish-speakers in the construction of these attitudes. Focusing on the case of Catalonia (Spain), this paper intends to analyse the impact of the family language and the generational cohort on the language attitudes towards Catalan and Spanish that is built by immigrant children (aged 14–16). The nature of the analysis carried out as a result of an attitude questionnaire answered by 527 young people allows differentiation of the effect of both variables individually when included in the same explanatory model. Results indicate that being Spanish-speaking or non-Spanish-speaking is influential in the construction of attitudes towards Spanish and towards Catalan. Moreover, the generational cohort is only influential for attitudes towards Catalan and when a migratory transit has been experienced or not. Since both variables are included in the same model, it is suggested that the effect of the generational cohort is moderated by being Spanish-speaking or not. The new perspectives opened up by these results are discussed as regards the promotion of intercultural communication and a common project of coexistence.


Document representation is a fundamental concept in information retrieval (IR), and has been relied upon in textual IR systems since the advent of library catalogs. The reliance upon text-based representations of stored information has been perpetuated in conventional systems for the retrieval of moving images as well. Although newer systems have added image-based representations of moving image documents as aids to retrieval, there has been little research examining how humans interpret these different types of representations. Such basic research has the potential to inform IR system designers about how best to aid users of their systems in retrieving moving images. One key requirement for the effective use of document representations in either textual or image form is thedegree to which these representations are congruent with the original documents. A measure of congruence is the degree to which human responses to representations are similar to responses produced by the document being represented. The aim of this study was to develop a model for the representation of moving images based upon human judgements of representativeness. The study measured the degree of congruence between moving image documents and their representations, both text and image based, in a non-retrieval environment with and without task constraints. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) was used to examine the dimensional dispersions of human judgements for the full moving images and their representations.


Endurance runners and coaches have tended to neglect weight training and conditioning techniques, often in the belief that they don't benefit performance, add unwanted muscle bulk, or cause excessive soreness. But as standards at elite level have improved, so coaches and runners have become increasingly keen on learning about the latest new training techniques or ways to stay injury free. No longer does the running community view strength and conditioning with scepticism, or as something that can only benefit elite runners. In 'Strength and Conditioning for Endurance Running', Richard Blagrove shows how a strength and conditioning programme can directly improve running performance and reduce the risk of injury, as well as allowing an athlete to tolerate high volumes of running in the future.


The paper empirically investigates the issue of macroeconomic convergence in the West Africa Monetary Zone (WAMZ) using monthly data from 1990:01 to 2010:05 as part of the ongoing discussion on the single currency for West Africa, The ECO initiative. The study specifically examines exchange and inflation rates convergence and finds no evidence of convergence in inflation in the WAMZ and little support for convergence in exchange rate. The findings imply that WAMZ is not ready for a single currency and that the decision to postpone the introduction of the Eco to 2015 is in a right direction. The possibility of introducing the ECO requires a change of macroeconomic policy direction of member countries due to evidence of divergence in inflation across the region and higher distance to convergence.


There has been a considerable interest in sparse representation and compressive sensing in applied mathematics and signal processing in recent years but with limited success to medical image processing. In this paper we developed a sparse representation-based classification (SRC) algorithm based on L1-norm minimization for classifying chromosomes from multicolor fluorescence in situ hybridization (M-FISH) images. The algorithm has been tested on a comprehensive M-FISH database that we established, demonstrating improved performance in classification. When compared with other pixel-wise M-FISH image classifiers such as fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithms and adaptive fuzzy c-means (AFCM) clustering algorithms that we proposed earlier the current method gave the lowest classification error. In order to evaluate the performance of different SRC for M-FISH imaging analysis, three different sparse representation methods, namely, Homotopy method, Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP), and Least Angle Regression (LARS), were tested and compared. Results from our statistical analysis have shown that Homotopy based method is significantly better than the other two methods. Our work indicates that sparse representations based classifiers with proper models can outperform many existing classifiers for M-FISH classification including those that we proposed before, which can significantly improve the multicolor imaging system for chromosome analysis in cancer and genetic disease diagnosis.


Calcification and reef growth processes dominated by corals and calcifying algae are threatened by climate and fishing disturbances. Twenty-seven environmental, habitat, and species interaction variables were tested for their influence on coral and calcifier cover in 201 western Indian Ocean coral reefs distributed across ~20° of latitude and longitude and up to 20 m deep. These variables predicted more of the total between-site variance of calcifying organism cover (~50%) than coral cover (~20%). Satellite-derived environmental variables of temperature, light, and water quality predicted more of the coral and calcifier cover than feeding interactions when groups of related variables were analyzed separately. Nevertheless, when simultaneously eva luating all variables, the environmental variables better predicted coral cover, but proxies of feeding interactions better predicted calcifier cover. Coral and calcifier cover were most consistently negatively influenced by sea surface temperature distributions (right skewness), but the orangelined triggerfish Balistapus undulatus consistently had a strong positive association with coral and calcifier cover. Herbivorous fish and Diadematidae sea urchins were not positively associated with coral and calcifier cover. A primary prey of B. undulatus, the rock-boring sea urchin Echinometra mathaei, had a strong negative association with coral cover and particularly calcifier cover. Island reefs had higher calcifier abundance than fringing reefs, which probably results from high Acropora and B. undulatus but low E. mathaei abundance. When comparing all variables and models, these taxonomic associations had more influence than environmental stress variables on calcifiers. Given the important predatory role of B. undulatus in controlling E. mathaei populations, fishing restrictions on this species could help attenuate calcification losses predicted by climate change.


Introduction: self-regulation is an important construct in motivation through which the students regulate their learning meta-cognition. Self-regulation is one of the most important predictive factors of academic achievement. Therefore evaluating academic self-regulation in learners is critical. The aim of this study was to develop validity and to determine the factors structure a self-regulation scale. Methods: We validated the 34-items of Hong and O'Neil self-regulation scale. The scale consisted of four factors: effort, self-checking, self-efficacy, and planning. The score was translated, back translated and checked by several experts. 336 medical students were chosen through multiple steps random sampling and completed the questionnaire. We analyzed the data using SPSS and LISREL software using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis methods. Results: Principle component analysis revealed that self-regulation scale consists of four factors. The scale accounted for %55 of variance. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that all of the factors confirmed with data. Conclusion: This scale is a valid and reliable instrument in assessing Iranian students', especially medical students', self-regulation.


BACKGROUND
Since the clinical diagnosis of pulmonary embolism is unreliable, various objective diagnostic methods (or combinations thereof) are advocated. Pulmonary angiography is the accepted reference method but is considered less suitable for initial screening due to its invasive nature. Therefore, at least nine different diagnostic management strategies employing invasive and noninvasive diagnostic tests are used in clinical practice. We assessed the cost-effectiveness of these strategies to help identify the optimal approach.

METHODS
Based on assumptions derived from published data, we calculated mortality, morbidity, adequacy for the indication of anticoagulant therapy, and associated diagnostic and therapeutic costs using a decision analytic model. Additionally, a cost-effectiveness analysis was performed using incremental costs per additional life saved.

RESULTS
The analysis identified three separate categories of diagnostic management strategies: (1) Treatment of all patients (or of those with an abnormal perfusion scan) results in the lowest mortality and morbidity rates but the highest costs due to inappropriate treatment of 55% to 70% of patients. (2) Pulmonary angiography strategies with or without prior perfusion-ventilation lung scintigraphy and ultrasonography of the legs have comparable low mortality and morbidity rates, costs savings of approximately 40%, and inappropriate treatment in fewer than 5% of patients. (3) Use of perfusion-ventilation scintigraphy with or without ultrasonography results in unacceptably high mortality rates.

CONCLUSIONS
At present, the optimal diagnostic management strategy should include pulmonary angiography. Use of perfusion-ventilation lung scintigraphy and ultrasonography results in a 40% to 50% reduction in the number of patients requiring pulmonary angiography and is cost-effective.


CEO compensation has increased dramatically in the last few decades, drawing increasing scrutiny from policy-makers, researchers, and the broader public. We find that IT (information technology) intensity strongly predicts compensation of CEO and other top executives. Our examination of panel data from 2507 publicly traded firms over 15 years controls for other types of capital, number of employees, market capitalization, median worker wages, industry turbulence, firm or industry fixed effects, and other factors. Our interpretation of this finding builds on earlier work which found a correlation between CEO pay and firm size. We hypothesize that IT increases the information available to the top executives for decision-making, magnifies their ability to propagate instructions throughout the firm, and improves the monitoring and enforcement of those instructions. When a CEO's instructions are implemented with higher fidelity, the fortunes of the firm will more closely mirror her performance. From the perspective of the CEO, this increases "effective size" of the firm that she controls. In turn, in an efficient market, this will increase overall CEO compensation.


The Zeiformes (dories) are mid-water or deep (to 1000 m) marine acanthomorph fishes with a global, circumtropical, and circumtemperate distribution. Some species have a near-worldwide distribution, while others appear to be regional endemics, e.g., near New Zealand. Six families, 16 genera, and 33 species are currently recognized as valid. Relationships among them, however, remain unsettled, especially in light of recent proposals concerning the phylogenetic placement of zeiforms within the Paracanthopterygii rather than allied with beryciforms or percomorphs. The present study uses both morphological and molecular characters to investigate zeiform interrelationships given their revised phylogenetic placement and attendant changes to their close outgroups. Results indicate that revised outgroups affected the phylogenetic conclusions, especially those based on morphology. All analyses recovered monophyletic Zeidae, Cyttidae, and Oreosomatidae. Zeniontidae were recovered as polyphyletic, with the clade Capromimus + Cyttomimus sister to Oreosomatidae. Based on morphological evidence, Grammicolepididae are paraphyletic. Parazenidae are monophyletic in all results except maximum likelihood based on molecular data. Morphometric analysis revealed a star-like radiation in morphospace with three diverging trends, each trend exemplified by convergences in body form. Overall, our results are suggestive of a rapid diversification among the major lineages of Zeiformes during the Late Cretaceous.


In order to assess the economic benefits of an early discharge (ED) programme for patients with complicated skin and soft tissue infections (cSSTIs) in terms of hospital and regional authority costs, an economic analysis was conducted comparing two possible alternatives: standard hospital management vs. an ED strategy followed by a period of outpatient management. Utilization of resources and costs were derived from the literature and expert panel evaluation. Patients were classified into four groups: low-intensity non-walking (LINW), low-intensity walking (LIW), high-intensity non-walking (HINW) and high-intensity walking (HIW). The overall costs (inpatient/outpatient) of hospitalization with ED for cSSTIs range from Euros 2,079 for LIW to Euros 2,193 for HINW, with the most expensive regimen (HINW) being 50% lower than the costs for 12.6 days of hospitalization alone (Euros 4,619). The weighted average Diagnosis Related Group (DRG) reimbursement for cSSTIs (Euros 2,042) does not cover the costs of such hospitalization. In conclusion, when a patient's conditions allow for early discharge there is an economic advantage for the hospital with an outpatient management plan, especially for patients requiring low-intensity care. However, this could be disadvantageous in terms of regional costs if outpatient management has to be paid in addition to payment by the DRG.


XML is the de facto standard format for data exchange on the Web. While it is fairly simple to generate XML data, it is a complex task to design a schema and then guarantee that the generated data is valid according to that schema. As a consequence much XML data does not have a schema or is not accompanied by its schema. In order to gain the benefits of having a schema - efficient querying and storage of XML data, semantic verification, data integration, etc.- this schema must be extracted. In this paper we present an automatic technique, XStruct, for XML Schema extraction. Based on ideas of [5], XStruct extracts a schema for XML data by applying several heuristics to deduce regular expressions that are 1-unambiguous and describe each element's contents correctly but generalized to a reasonable degree. Our approach features several advantages over known techniques: XStruct scales to very large documents (beyond 1GB) both in time and memory consumption; it is able to extract a general, complete, correct, minimal, and understandable schema for multiple documents; it detects datatypes and attributes. Experiments confirm these features and properties.


Past controversy about the tectonic or eustatic origin of Pennsylvanian cyclothems is resolved by regional basin-subsidence analysis, global paleoclimate, paleogeography, and plate-tectonic evolution. Differences between marine carbonate (Kansas-type) cyclothems of the northern midcontinent and nonmarine clastic (Appalachian-type) cyclothems of the eastern United States are controlled by laterally changing flexural deformation during plate accretion into a supercontinent, coupled with superposed glacial eustasy. Kansas-type cyclothems accumulated on a relatively stable platform affected only moderately by collision tectonics of North American margins; these cycles are eustatic, characterized by a periodicity comparable to Milankovitch orbital parameters. Appalachian-type cyclothems accumulated in response to episodic thrust loading during plate collisions that developed a series of flexurally deformed, wide and shallow, resurgent foreland basins. This resurgent foreland basin evolution during Paleozoic time increased crustal rigidity in the Appalachians, thus yoking the Appalachian and Illinois basins during Pennsylvanian time. With each thrust load, foreland basin deepening favored transgressive cyclothem facies, which changed to a regressive facies because sediment yield increased as denudation rates increased off uplifted orogens. Illinois-type cyclothems are intermediate between the two end-member processes of flexural tectonics and glacial eustasy characterizing Appalachian-type and Kansas-type cyclothems, respectively. Thus, the Pennsylvanian coal-bearing cyclothems of North America owe their origin to the remarkable coincidence of supercontinent development, concomitant glaciation and eustatic sea-level change, and associated episodic thrust loading and foreland basin subsidence of small magnitude on progressively more rigid crust.


[1] Islands are natural dust traps, and San Clemente Island, California, is a good example. Soils on marine terraces cut into Miocene andesite on this island are clay-rich Vertisols or Alfisols with vertic properties. These soils are overlain by silt-rich mantles, 5–20 cm thick, that contrast sharply with the underlying clay-rich subsoils. The silt mantles have a mineralogy that is distinct from the island bedrock. Silt mantles are rich in quartz, which is rare in the island andesite. The clay fraction of the silt mantles is dominated by mica, also absent from local andesite, and contrasts with the subsoils, dominated by smectite. Ternary plots of immobile trace elements (Sc-Th-La and Ta-Nd-Cr) show that the island andesite has a composition intermediate between average upper continental crust and average oceanic crust. In contrast, the silt and, to a lesser extent, clay fractions of the silt mantles have compositions closer to average upper continental crust. The silt mantles have particle size distributions similar to loess and Mojave Desert dust, but are coarser than long-range-transported Asian dust. We infer from these observations that the silt mantles are derived from airborne dust from the North American mainland, probably river valleys in the coastal mountains of southern California and/or the Mojave Desert. Although average winds are from the northwest in coastal California, easterly winds occur numerous times of the year when "Santa Ana" conditions prevail, caused by a high-pressure cell centered over the Great Basin. Examination of satellite imagery shows that easterly Santa Ana winds carry abundant dust to the eastern Pacific Ocean and the California Channel Islands. Airborne dust from mainland North America may be an important component of the offshore sediment budget in the easternmost Pacific Ocean, a finding of potential biogeochemical and climatic significance.


An analytical and experimental study is conducted to investigate the effect of isolator locations on the effectiveness of vibration isolation systems. The study uses isolators with fixed properties and evaluates potential improvements to the isolation system that can be achieved by optimizing isolator locations. Because the available locations for the isolators are discrete in this application, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used as the optimization method. The system is modeled in MATLAB{trademark} and coupled with the GA available in the DAKOTA optimization toolkit under development at Sandia National Laboratories. Design constraints dictated by hardware and experimental limitations are implemented through penalty function techniques. A series of GA runs reveal difficulties in the search on this heavily constrained, multimodal, discrete problem. However, the GA runs provide a variety of optimized designs with predicted performance from 30 to 70 times better than a baseline configuration. An alternate approach is also tested on this problem: it uses continuous optimization, followed by rounding of the solution to neighboring discrete configurations. Results show that this approach leads to either infeasible or poor designs. Finally, a number of optimized designs obtained from the GA searches are tested in the laboratory and compared to the baseline design. These experimental results show a 7 to 46 times improvement in vibration isolation from the baseline configuration.


In the field of dairy cattle research, it is of great interest to improve the detection and prevention of diseases (e.g., mastitis and ketosis) and monitor specific traits related to the state of health and management. During the standard milk performance test, traditional milk traits are monitored, and quality and quantity are screened. In addition to the standard test, it is also now possible to analyze milk metabolites in a high-throughput manner and to consider them in connection with milk traits to identify functionally important metabolites that can also serve as biomarker candidates. We present a study in which 190 milk metabolites and 14 milk traits of 1,305 Holstein cows on 18 commercial farms were investigated to characterize interrelations of milk metabolites between each other, to milk traits from the milk standard performance test, and to influencing factors such as farm and sire effect (half-sib structure). The effect of influencing factors (e.g., farm) varied among metabolites and traditional milk traits. The investigations of associations between metabolites and milk traits revealed groups of metabolites that show, for example, positive correlations to protein and casein, and negative correlations to lactose and pH. On the other hand, groups of metabolites jointly associated with the investigated milk traits can be identified and functionally discussed. To enable a multivariate investigation, 2 machine learning methods were applied to detect important metabolites that are highly correlated with the investigated traditional milk traits. For somatic cell score, uracil, lactic acid, and 9 other important metabolites were detected. Lactic acid has already been proposed as a biomarker candidate for mastitis in the recent literature. In conclusion, we found sets of metabolites eligible to predict milk traits, enabling the analysis of milk traits from a metabolic perspective and discussion of the possible functional background for some of the detected associations.


A new blind adaptive multiuser detection scheme based on a hybrid of Kalman filter and subspace estimation is proposed. It is shown that the detector can be expressed as an anchored signal in the signal subspace and the coefficients can be estimated by the Kalman filter using only the signature waveform and the timing of the desired user. The resulting subspace-based algorithm brings the benefit of lower computational complexity than the full-rank approach, and the theoretical analysis indicates that the proposed algorithm is also superior in convergence performance. The adaptive implementation in a dynamic environment such as a variable number of users is obtained by seamlessly integrating a subspace tracking algorithm. The new subspace-based method is effective in AWGN channels as well as in slowly time-varying Rayleigh fading channels. Moreover, the proposed detector is much more robust against the signalling waveform mismatch and inaccurate knowledge of the amplitude of the desired signal than the full-rank one, as demonstrated by computer simulations.


Thesis (MPA (School of Public Management and Planning)) – Stellenbosch University, 2008.%%%%Since 1994, the newly elected democratic government of the Republic of South Africa,
starting with the government of National Unity, has introduced various policies and
legislation in an endeavour to place the country on a path to recovery after the demise of
apartheid. The national government has placed this responsibility in the hands of
municipalities, or local government as they are commonly referred to. As a result,
municipalities have an active duty to create conducive environments to enable local
communities to participate in the preparation, implementation and review of their
Integrated Development Plan (IDP).
The purpose of this study is to assess the public participation of Rosendal-Mautse, one
area among the five towns that comprise Dihlabeng Municipality, in the IDP process of
Dihlabeng Municipality. In view of the anthology of legislation governing "public
participation" at local government level, the study poses two hypotheses, which were
tested against the data collected. Furthermore, two additional research questions were
formulated to guide the research process. Results of the research are provided in a way
that will enable the reader to draw his or her own conclusions on the value of this study.
The literature review on international understanding and practices of public participation
suggest that participation has grown and that its role has extended in development. This
has resulted in the birth of new approaches that cut across theory, policy and practice,
with each approach in turn producing its own trajectory and contextual specificities that
are characterised by unique debates and empirical evidence.
Municipalities are currently burdened with the responsibility to achieve socio-economic
goals associated with public participation. However, despite compliance with legal
requirement for public participation, only an appropriate knowledge of the process
leading to meaningful participation and the relevant skills hold the key to success in this
quest to reconstruct and develop the country where all will live a better life.


Growing demands for capacity have stimulated the development of high-speed optical shared media networks. At present, most research on optical networking has concentrated on wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM). Optical time-division multiplexing (OTDM), which offers advantages over WDM networks, is considered as an alternative to WDM for future networks proving a single stream data rates of 100 Gb/s using a single wavelength. In such systems all optical routers, which overcome the bottleneck of optoelectronic conversion, play an important role. This thesis concentrates on the modelling and simulation of a novel optical router, which uses two terahertz optical asymmetric demultiplexers (TOAD) as the routing element for OTDM systems.In this work, the author has developed a mathematical model of an all optical router based on TOADs. The model architecture is based on a system, which has as its input an OTDM packet containing header and payload information. The model simulates extraction of header information, using one TOAD, from the data stream, which is subsequently used to make a routing decision. The payload information is routed through a second TOAD according to the information contained in the header. A comprehensive theoretical analysis supported by computer simulations has been carried out to study characteristics of crosstalk, noises, signal to noise ratio (SNR), Bit error rate (BER), and power penalty of the router. The results obtained, whenever possible, have been compared with the experimented data.The performance analysis of the all optical router is shown by the simulation results. The proposed router is capable of routing packet containing data in excess of 250 Gb/s all in optical domain. New models of all optical router with multi-input and outputs have been developed i.e. 1x4 router, 2x2 router, which are based on 1x2 TOAD routers. Results show that threshold switching energy is present at 0.2 pJ. Higher values result in a decrease in crosstalk and lower values result in negligible switching. Also shown is crosstalk induced penalty depends on the crosstalk level of individual 1x2 switches as well as on the size and architecture of the switching fabric.Finally, it has been shown that the proposed all-optical router has potentially useful characteristics as a component for high-speed optical TDM networks due to its ultrafast switching capability compared with existing devices. At this stage a simple 8 by 8 Banyan network is presented, however further work will enhance the model to a network with more inputs and outputs.


The purposes of the regulation of customs work are different and sometimes even contradictory. On the one hand international trade and free movement of goods, provision of as fast as possible customs examination and simplification of customs procedures and formalities are promoted, on the other hand protection of the interests of the national market and local manufacturers, control of movement of goods, getting full information about goods and also assurance of inevitable disclosing of customs law violations are the subjects to be guaranteed. The purposes of customs law are competitive: one part of them is related with the public interests and the other – with the private ones. These interests differ, so it makes an impression they are compete. Disclosing the content of the purposes it becomes clear these purposes do not deny each other, on the contrary, there is specific connection and subordination between them. For example, simplification of the procedures is inevitable to guarantee the control of movement of the commodities, etc. Correlation of the purposes of the Customs work is inescapable but conflict and incompatibility of them should be avoided. The main aims of the legal regulation of customs work are lied down in the General agreement on Traffics and Trade (GATT) of the WTO, Customs Code of the EC and Customs Code of the Republic of Lithuania. General statements of these legal acts reflects the competitive nature of the purposes of the customs regulation as it is said in the preamble of the Customs Code of the EC: to secure a balance between the needs of the customs authorities in regard to ensuring the correct application of customs legislation, on the other hand, and the right of traders to be treated fairy, on the other . As the content and reciprocity of purposes is defined, the next step while reaching the balance of purposes of customs regulation is possible. Such correlation of purposes may be defined as changing the essence of the content of purposes, the interpretation and the measures in order to minimize the inter-objection of customs law purposes. It is important to invoke general principles of the legal reasoning and legal application as well as to understand the peculiarity of the content of the purposes. That's why the correlation of the purposes should be carried out in a few levels: – Establishing legal standards (the process of the legislation); – Disclosing the content of the laws (the process of the interpretation); – Applying the laws (the process of the implementation). It is necessary to pay attention to the accordance of the content of the purposes to the legal sources of the customs law at all levels. Cooperation of the subjects of customs law when the rights and duties are respected is very important in order to reach the balance of the competitive purposes. The ways of the cooperation vary: consultations, discussions, analysis of the legal precedents, international communication, etc. The commentary of customs law probably could be the most effective way to eliminate the different perception of the customs law and its purposes. Such commentary could promote development of the customs law as well as reduce of the number of the litigations between public and private subjects. This article does not seek to set down final conclusions or decisions. The aim is to point out the backgrounds of the contest of the purposes, to stress the significance and the ways of the correlation and to pay attention of the scientists to the complexity of the topicalities of the customs law.


Background: A mesoporous bioactive glass (MBG) with a highly specific surface area and well-ordered pores is a suitable material to carry antibiotics. Fibrin and mesenchymal stem cells are used in promoting tissue repair and osteogenesis, respectively. Purposes: Tobramycin-loaded mesoporous bioactive glass (TMBG), fibrin and mesenchymal stem cells are used in this study to promote osteogenesis and against bacterial contamination in vitro. Methods: MBG was synthesized in a two-step acid-catalyzed self-assembly process with hydrothermal treatment. Tobramycin was loaded with MBG and fibrin to make a TMBG fibrin complex. The cell proliferation, osteogenic differentiation, Live/Dead staining and antibiotics inhibition zone test were evaluated for TMBG fibrin complex. Results: The experimental results showed a well-ordered hexagonally structured bioactive glass was synthesized. The TMBG fibrin complex cultivated with rabbit bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (RBMSCs) showed good biocompatibility and increased expression of collagen type I, OPN, OCN and RUNX2 in cultivation period. The inhibition zone of TMBG fibrin complex increased while the concentration of tobramycin increased against Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. In addition, the TMBG fibrin complex (with 0.5% tobramycin) had the same antibacterial effect as 10 mg tobramycin. Conclusions: Based on the results mentioned above, the TMBG fibrin complex showed antibacterial effect and exhibited great biocompatibility a potential biomaterial for bone tissue engineering.


Functional robustness is one of the primary challenges for embedded memories as voltage levels are scaled below 1 V. A low-power high-speed tunneling SRAM (TSRAM) memory array including sense amplifiers and pre-charge circuit blocks operating at 0.5 V is designed and simulated using available MOSIS CMOS 90 nm product design kit coupled with VerilogA models developed from this group's Si/SiGe resonant interband tunnel diode experimental data. 1 T and 3 T- 2 tunnel diode memory cell configurations were evaluated. The memory array assigns 0.5 V as a logic "1" and 0 V as a logic "0". Dual supply voltages of 1 and 0.5 V and dual threshold voltage design are used to ensure high sensing speed concurrently with low operating and standby power. Read access time of 1 ns and write access time of 2 ns is achieved for the 3 T memory cell. Write access time can be reduced to 0.5 ns for 32 bit write operations not requiring a preceding read operation. Standby power dissipation of 6×10-5 mW per cell and dynamic power dissipation of 1.8×10-7 mW/MHz per cell is obtained from the TSRAM memory array. This is the first report of TSRAM performance at the array level.


Moi, un Noir. Reloaded, is a tribute to Jean Rouch, and provides an update / re-interpretation of Moi, un Noir, the film the French anthropologist made in 1957. While the original film was directed to satisfy eager curiosity of the western gaze for knowledge about otherness from the safe distance of a film, Reloaded tries to minimize cultural differences and avoid the exotic, particularly in reference to corporeality. The film seeks to work through two gazes simultaneously and not meet either of them. To the Western viewer, the pleasure of voyeuristic security is denied, showing lives that do not differ from their own, thus confronting them to consider whether as citizens they exercise that power position that legitimizes cultural difference as a producer of inequalities. Non-Western viewers are urged to consider colonization as a historical period that is not closed, which like the capitalism that generated it is undergoing continuous mutations, allowing it to change its surface while maintaining the dynamics of domination and exploitation imply in it. We invite them to consider that, while it is true that the West offers the possibility of economic improvement, there is a high emotional and psychological cost for it. Under these assumptions, the film plunges into the daily lives of the main characters, into their thoughts and reflections on their experiences as black, Muslim and immigrant subjects in contemporary Europe.


In this paper, we report on the effect of patterned non-adhesive hydrogel nanosurfaces on the self-assembly of highly ordered colloids. Polyethylene glycol (PEG) hydrogel is employed as the substrate material in the study, for its desired non-adhesive property, and biocompatibility as well as photopatternability. Ultrafine PEG features are photopatterned onto glass substrates with minimal feature resolution of 500 nm using ultraviolet or deep ultraviolet exposure. By simply controlling the colloidal concentration of the nanoassembly solutions and the dimensions of the wells, a range of highly organized nanocolloidal patterns are formed inside the PEG wells. Unlike the traditional surface modification techniques, ours takes advantage of the unique non-adhesive property of PEG hydrogels to achieve extremely high selectivity in the pattern-assisted nanoassembly. Our experiments show that with oxygen plasma treatment, the non-adhesive property of the PEG surface deteriorates significantly, leading to non-selective assembly with complete surface coverage of nanocolloidal beads under the same processing condition. Therefore, benefiting from the unique non-adhesive surface property, the pattern-assisted nanoassembly method enables a highly predictable and robust process for colloidal nanofabrication, and the obtained nanocolloidal arrays with well organized patterns could potentially find applications in photonic crystal fabrication, biological sensing and analytical detection.


DIRAC (Distributed Infrastructure with Remote Agent Control) is the grid solution designed to support production activities as well as user data analysis for the Large Hadron Collider "beauty" experiment. It consists of cooperating distributed services and a plethora of light-weight agents delivering the workload to the grid resources. Services accept requests from agents and running jobs, while agents actively fulfill specific goals. Services maintain database back-ends to store dynamic state information of entities such as jobs, queues, or requests for data transfer. Agents continuously check for changes in the service states, and react to these accordingly. The logic of each agent is rather simple, the main source of complexity lies in their cooperation. These agents run concurrently, and communicate using the services' databases as a shared memory for synchronizing the state transitions. Despite the effort invested in making DIRAC reliable, entities occasionally get into inconsistent states. Tracing and fixing such behaviors is difficult, given the inherent parallelism among the distributed components and the size of the implementation. In this paper we present an analysis of DIRAC with mCRL2, process algebra with data. We have reverse engineered two critical and related DIRAC subsystems, and subsequently modeled their behavior with the mCRL2 toolset. This enabled us to easily locate race conditions and live locks which were confirmed to occur in the real system. We further formalized and verified several behavioral properties of the two modeled subsystems.


AIM
The objective was to investigate factors influencing patients' willingness to pay (WTP) and physician's views on the cost of therapy for two contrasted chronic diseases, chronic heart failure and psoriasis.

METHODS
A cross-sectional survey was conducted in ten developing countries, using a stated WTP contingent valuation method. Multivariate analyses were performed by linear regression.

RESULTS
Independent factors influencing patient WTP were income (+0.04 $PPP [purchasing power parity] in WTP per $PPP in monthly income; p < 0.001) and purchase of branded treatment for chronic heart failure therapy, and income, out-of-pocket treatment costs but also education level higher than secondary school (+115 $PPP in WTP comparatively to patients with none/primary school level; p = 0.008) for psoriasis therapy, suggesting the influence of sociopsychological factors in this disease.

CONCLUSION
Disease-specific factors may affect WTP for treatment that should be accounted for to support effective public health programs in developing countries.


Increased conflict between the states and federal government over offshore activities, cuts in federal support for ocean programs, and the New Federalism rhetoric of the Reagan administration appeared to spur expanded state interest in ocean policy. Based on a review of news items, journal articles, and conversations with state ocean policymakers, it appears that few states have actually made full-fledged efforts to grapple with marine policy issues raised by federal activities. Posing the issue in terms of federal/state relations, however, obscures another important change, namely the development of state institutions for dealing with marine issues. Although these institutions vary widely in their political influence and effectiveness within different states, they have the potential to enhance the ability of the states to adapt to marine issues within their own jurisdictions.


Abstract Indirect effects are important considerations when making consequence analyses in general and in strategic environmental assessments in particular of potential transport solutions and infrastructure plans. The primary objective of this paper is to emphasize the need for a deeper understanding of the long‐term system effects of investments in transport infrastructure with a focus on the structuring effects that roads and railways have on society, e.g. altered transport patterns, altered settlement structures and changes in use of the built environment. Special attention is given to the following potential indirect effects: increased total transport volume, increased share of private motorists and truck transport, increased urban sprawl, and increased energy use in buildings. The conditions that determine the power of the effects are discussed and a number of key factors to be considered in transport infrastructure planning, especially in strategic environmental assessments, are suggested. Since many indirect effects emerge over time, an extended time perspective is of essence. Therefore, scenario techniques may be useful when analysing indirect effects in transport planning processes.


We experimentally demonstrate the operation of a low-birefringence (low-bi) nonlinear-optical loop mirror (NOLM) that has the advantages of low switching energy, tolerance to timing jitter, and cascadability. Because cascading two all-optical logic gates is an important step toward high-speed optical signal processing and header processing in time-division-multiplexed networks, we also demonstrate the cascaded operation of two low-bi NOLM's. Using a passively mode-locked fiber laser that produces 450-fs pulses at a wavelength of 1.55 microm, we achieve a 10.7:1 switching contrast ratio and a 2.7-pulse-widths-wide timing window after the cascaded gates. The results agree well with theoretical predictions and confirm the advantages of the long interaction length associated with orthogonally polarized pulses in low-bi (Deltan ~ 3.0 x 10(-6)) polarization-maintaining fiber.


This paper concerns the phenomenon of the sharing economy and aims to understand, how companies can enter this new economy by innovating in services and developing new business models. The scientific approach to the paper is hermeneutic. Therewith the focus is on understanding the above named phenomenon and contributing with new insights and understandings.

The first part describes the method that has been used writing this thesis. The second part provides an overview on the scientific literature on the sharing economy (van den Hoff, Gansky); service innovation (Sundbo) and new business models (Chesbrough) and builds the framework for the later analysis. The third part introduces the cases of car2go and let´s go, two car sharing providers. This provides the basis for the discussion of the cases in the framework of the above mentioned theories in the analysis. The paper concludes that there are different ways of engaging in service innovation and different business models that are appropriate to allow companies to enter the sharing economy, depending on the structure of the company and its goals. Furthermore the thesis comes to the result that the formerly important social aspect of the sharing economy is decreasing whereas traditional capitalistic rules are emerging.


Literary studies are being transformed today by the expansive and disruptive forces of globalization. More works than ever circulate worldwide in English and in translation, and even national traditions are increasingly seen in transnational terms. To encompass this expanding literary universe, scholars and teachers need to expand their linguistic and cultural resources, rethink their methods and training, and reconceive the place of literature and criticism in the world. This book integrates comparative, postcolonial, and world-literary perspectives to offer a comprehensive overview of comparative studies and its prospects in a time of great upheaval and great opportunity. The book looks both at institutional forces and at key episodes in the life and work of comparatists who have struggled to define and redefine the terms of literary analysis over the past two centuries, from Johann Gottfried Herder and Germaine de Staël to Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Franco Moretti, and Emily Apter. With literary examples ranging from Ovid and Kālidāsa to James Joyce, Yoko Tawada, and the internet artists Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, the book shows how the main strands of comparison—philology, literary theory, colonial and postcolonial studies, and the study of world literature—have long been intertwined. A deeper understanding of comparative literature's achievements, persistent contradictions, and even failures can help comparatists in literature and other fields develop creative responses to today's most important questions and debates. Amid a multitude of challenges and new possibilities for comparative literature, the book provides an important road map for the discipline's revitalization.


Background and Purpose—In Western Europe, mortality from ischemic stroke (IS) has declined over several decades. Age–sex-specific IS mortality, IS incidence, 30-day case fatality, and 1-year mortality after hospital admission are essential for explaining recent trends in IS mortality in the new millennium. Methods—Data for all IS deaths (1980–2010) in the Netherlands were grouped by year, sex, and age. A joinpoint regression was fitted to detect points in time at which significant changes in the trends occur. By linking nationwide registers, a cohort of patients first admitted for IS between 1997 and 2005 was constructed and age–sex-specific 30-day case fatality and 1-year mortality were computed. IS incidence (admitted IS patients and out-of-hospital IS deaths) was computed by age and sex. Mann–Kendall tests were used for trend evaluation. Results—IS mortality declined continuously between1980 and 2000 with an attenuation of decline in the 1990s in some of the age–sex groups. A remarkable decline in IS m...


Despite recent progress, energy poverty remains pervasive in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This challenge is generally more severe in rural areas. However, rapid urbanization adds a significant challenge to often under-capacitated urban local authorities that struggle to provide services to new urban dwellers. In the case of South Africa and other SSA countries, this has resulted in a proliferation of under-serviced informal urban settlements on the urban periphery, where a lack of energy access is compounded by a lack of access to other services and job opportunities, resulting in sites of concentrated and multidimensional deprivation. This paper presents the first analysis of the relationship between rural- urban migration and energy poverty in South Africa, and to the authors' knowledge in Africa, using a nationally representative panel dataset. Using a difference in differences approach, energy poverty changes for both migrants and non-migrants is tracked over a ten-year period. It is found that, on average, moving to urban areas results in reductions in energy poverty for migrants themselves, with especially dramatic reductions in the use of traditional cooking fuels. However, roughly one in five new urban arrivals moves into informal shack dwellings where the gains from migration are negligible from an energy poverty perspective, given the rapid increase in grid access and access to electrical appliances taking place in South African rural areas.


Calcitonin (CT) is an important tumor marker for medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC). Recent CT assays chiefly recognize the monomeric form of CT (mCT). It was the objective of this study to examine the consequences of the higher specificity of the assay for interpretation of the postoperative CT values in MTC patients. The postoperative mCT concentration was measured in 214 patients with differentiated thyroid carcinoma (MTC excepted; non-MTC patients) to determine a reference range of mCT in totally thyroidectomized patients. Monomeric CT was also determined with a two-site chemiluminescence immunoassay (Nichols) in 94 healthy subjects and in 68 MTC patients. The mCT concentrations were below the detection limit in all examined completely thyroidectomized non-MTC patients. Basal and stimulated mCT values were also below the detection limit in 32 of the 68 MTC patients. The biochemical and imaging diagnosis of the latter patients did not give any indication of tumor recurrence. We conclude that completely thyroidectomized patients with non-MTC do not show any measurable mCT concentrations. In comparison with an unspecific CT-RIA, the more specific mCT determination by immunoluminometric assay permits a more precise differentiation between postoperative normal and pathological values and an earlier diagnosis of recurrent MTC.


Despite the rapidly growing innocence movement, five unusual innocence cases have escaped the attention of most commentators: in Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Texas, courts have recently exonerated wrongfully convicted defendants following their deaths in prison. This article identifies this extension of the innocence movement and argues that posthumous exonerations give courts a rare opportunity - seized upon in the 2009 posthumous exoneration of Timothy Cole in Texas - to make a detailed investigation of the causes leading to a defendant's wrongful conviction. The article argues that these exonerations are important not only in providing justice for victims, communities, and the families of criminal defendants, but also because of their potential contribution to the effort to discover the causes of - and ultimately prevent - wrongful convictions. Legislatures should therefore expand the currently tenuous jurisdictional and procedural bases for posthumous exonerations, perhaps using the quasi-inquisitorial judicial model followed in Cole. This is particularly important in states without innocence commissions, which are the best suited institutions to conduct this sort of inquiry. Recognition of the errors that led to an innocent defendant's conviction - whether the defendant is now alive or dead - is essential in preventing the future conviction of innocent defendants.


Unconventional oils have taken the global oil industry by storm and have secured an 8% share in the global liquid fuels production in under 20 years. And it is without a doubt that these resources will continue to play an important role in the future. Cost analysis of unconventional oil types has shown that Light Tight Oil (LTO) or shale oil still holds potential for technological and economical improvement, however, the revolutionary stage in development has probably already been passed in the US. For the rest of the world, the issue of kick starting LTO production lies as much in the fields of adapting the existing technologies, as overcoming economic, legislative and environmental barriers. The same cannot be said for heavy oil and bitumen production, as open pit mining is demonstrating cost escalation and resource base depletion, while in situ production approach has reached the limit of technological progress and production costs are mostly determined by external factors. Oil price fluctuation and the emergence of more economically viable unconventional oil sources have shifted attention away from kerogen oil and substantially halted production technologies development. The forecast of unconventional oil was conducted along two scenarios: Baseline (a business-as-usual scenario) and Technological (scenario of forced technology development and transfer). The share of unconventional oil in global crude production will increase to 17–21%, depending on scenario. The main difference between scenarios is the rate of kerogen production, which benefits from the favorable conditions of the Technological scenario. Large-scale LTO production will remain a local North American phenomenon in both scenarios. More important than geological or technological factors is the unique business environment, characteristic for the USA, which would be impossible to replicate in any other country. Expansion of unconventional oil production as stimulated competition on the liquid fuels market. Conventional oil producers have mostly adapted to the new environment and will continue to dominate in the forecast period. The greatest pressure is put on the more costly alternative supply sources: biofuels, coal-to-liquid and gas-to-liquid; which have the least promising prospects in the current market.


Based on in-depth interviews with twenty-three Israeli mothers, this article seeks to contribute to an ongoing inquiry into women's subjective experiences of mothering by addressing an understudied maternal emotive and cognitive stance: regretting motherhood. The literature teaches us that within a pronatal monopoly, threatening women that they will inevitably regret not having children acts as powerful reproducer of the ideology of motherhood. Simultaneously, motherhood is constructed as a mythical nexus that lies outside and beyond the human terrain of regret, and therefore a desire to undo the maternal experience is conceived as an object of disbelief. By incorporating regret into maternal experiences, the purpose of the article is twofold: The first is to distinguish regret over motherhood from other conflictual and ambivalent maternal emotions. Whereas participants' expressions of regretting motherhood were not bereft of ambivalence, and thus were not necessarily exceptional or anomalous, they foreground a different emotive and cognitive stance toward motherhood. The second purpose is to situate regret over motherhood in the sociopolitical arena. It has been suggested that the "power of backward thinking" might be used to reflect on the systems of power governing maternal feelings in two ways: first, through a categorical distinction in the target of regret between object (the children) and experience (maternity), which utilizes the cultural structure of mother love; second, by opposing the very essentialist presumption of a fixed female identity that naturally befits mothering or progressively adapts to it and evaluates it as a worthwhile experience.


The international community has made great progress in improving global health. But staggering health inequalities between rich and poor still remain, raising fundamental questions of social justice. In a book that systematically defines the burgeoning field of global health law, Lawrence Gostin drives home the need for effective global governance for health and offers a blueprint for reform, based on the principle that the opportunity to live a healthy life is a basic human right.Gostin shows how critical it is for institutions and international agreements to focus not only on illness but also on the essential conditions that enable people to stay healthy throughout their lifespan: nutrition, clean water, mosquito control, and tobacco reduction. Policies that shape agriculture, trade, and the environment have long-term impacts on health, and Gostin proposes major reforms of global health institutions and governments to ensure better coordination, more transparency, and accountability. He illustrates the power of global health law with case studies on AIDS, influenza, tobacco, and health worker migration.Today's pressing health needs worldwide are a problem not only for the medical profession but also for all concerned citizens. Designed with the beginning student, advanced researcher, and informed public in mind, "Global Health Law" will be a foundational resource for teaching, advocacy, and public discourse in global health.


Introduction: This study aimed at examining body image and eating attitude with regard to reasons of exercising among non-athlete women attending sport centers. Materials and methods: The present study has an ex-post facto design. 315 female sports center users were selected by multi-phase random clustering and completed the following rating scales: Eating Attitudes Test-26 (EAT-26), Body Image Concern Inventory (BICI) and a set of questions regarding their reasons to exercise. Results: Pierson correlation showed a significant positive correlation between body image concept and eating attitudes (r = 0.36, p < 0.001). Independent T-test showed that there were significant differences between reasons of exercising and eating attitude (p < 0.006), and also reasons of exercising and body image concept (p < 0.029). Conclusion: Women with higher scores of eating attitude or body image favored exercise more due to shape reasons than health reasons.


Coordinating distributed robots to work in formation becomes one of the complex problems in multi-robot systems during the last years. The main contribution in the proposed work is to control non-holonomic mobile robots to maintaining a desired formation during navigation and the way to change formation shape when the robots detect a hindering obstacle. The robots are anonymous and randomly distributed. The developed control strategy, modeled using the Petri Nets formalism, combines together formation control, navigation and obstacle avoidance. The formation control is based on a leader-follower formation approach and the obstacle avoidance is based on modified limit-cycle method [1]. The overall control architecture is validated through a multitude of simulation.


Developments in science, technology and sophisticated interconnected social networks increase the speed and volatility of the flow of economic-related energies, such as financial and intellectual capital. These developments require an information theory on corporate financial reporting that is stable at a fundamental level and focused on the disclosure of those systemic attributes that are pivotal to the sustenance of business entities operating in the global economy, or in economies with similar traits. The limited success in attaining stability is caused by, among others, the application of diverse, restricted and even opposing perspectives, resulting in random theoretical development, often unaligned with economic reality. The main aim of the article is to investigate whether the introduction of an underlying concept, principle or theorem, founded on the phenomenon of flow, to generalpurpose corporate financial reporting theory could contribute to rendering stable guidance for coherent theoretical development while simultaneously enhancing alignment with the current global economy. As the study was conducted at conceptual level, a qualitative, transdisciplinary theoretical research methodology was applied by taking into account related basic concepts of philosophy, corporate financial reporting theory, economics, management accounting, physics and complexity. The study suggests that the conceptualisation of flow in general-purpose corporate financial reporting theory could contribute to rendering stable guidance for further coherent theoretical development, and improve on the alignment of the theory with the dynamics of the current global economy. This finding creates the opportunity to explore a variety of new reporting approaches from a scientific perspective, which could aid to enhance the disclosure of useful financial information.


Finding innovative, non-invasive methods for continuously measuring body temperature minimizing human interference is important for accurate data collection. The objective of this study was to assess feasibility and accuracy of continuous body temperature measurements with loggers placed in the vaginal cavity of bitches. First, an in vitro experiment was performed to compare values obtained by temperature loggers (n = 26) to a calibrated liquid-in-glass thermometer. The mean differences between the two methods were low. Next, an in vivo experiment was performed using five healthy bitches, and values obtained by the vaginal loggers were compared to measurements collected rectally with digital thermometers. The results show that rectal and vaginal temperatures were correlated. The mean differences between rectal and vaginal temperatures were negligible. We conclude that the utilized temperature loggers provide accurate and reliable data.


Questions of metropolitan governance were not on the agenda in Switzerland for decades. Swiss metropolitan areas are highly fragmented and the political entities rather compete than cooperate. Scholars therefore argued that Switzerland followed the idea of the public choice approach in metropolitan governance. However, recent changes indicate a move towards the ideas of the new regionalism approach. There are a few amalgamations of communes that took place recently and the federal state has installed an agglomeration program with financial incentives for cooperation schemes in metropolitan areas. The article looks at the overall picture of recent trends in Swiss metropolitan areas and especially at the installation of the 'Verein Metropolitanraum Zurich'. I conclude that these recent trends are rather first attempts to implement aspects of metropolitan governance into a static federal system than part of a major restructuring of it.


The combined application of organic fertilizer with mineral fertilizer increases the yield of sugarcane. It promotes greater residual beneficial effect in relation to the use of each fertilizer in isolation. The organo-mineral fertilizer presents gradual solubilization dur- ing the period of development of the crop. Thus, when compared to soluble mineral sources, its agronomic efficiency may be higher. Various types of organic material can be used, such as pig manure, poultry litter, filter cake and sewage sludge, among others. Organic matter is responsible for maintaining and increasing soil porosity to improve water retention and to ensure soil microbial balance. The efficiency in nourishing the sug arcane crops or availing the available nutrients is maximized. The use of biostimulants in world agriculture has achieved significant growth rates in the last decades. Hormone compounds ensure the sustainability of crops. It can be an alternative to improve plant nutrition, support of abiotic and biotic stresses. They act in the activation and potentia-tion of the metabolism of the cells, give more vigor to the immune system and help to enable the physiological processes in the different stages of development. The emergence and use of new technologies is the way to achieve greater productivity, sustainability and profitability.


Polarimetric imaging in the infrared and submm offers the possibility of identifying magnetic field configurations in astronomical objects. To test this conjecture a set of field geometries within internally heated discs has been modelled and polarization transfer followed for a range of view angles with respect to the disc axis. The wavelength range considered is from the mid-infrared to submm, the dominant polarization processes then being only dichroic emission and absorption by aligned grains. A sample of the resulting polarization images is presented and their salient features discussed. There are obvious, and some not so obvious, associations of polarization structure with the parent model field and, while these are not always unique, they will usually lead to strong constraints on the field configuration. For star formation regions the polarization structure is likely to be on a small spatial scale and then the full potential of this technique must await the advent of millimetre synthesis systems.


This paper presents an analysis of an assumed contact-induced change in the Livonian modes of expressing perfective aspect: the adoption of Latvian-origin verbal prefixes expressing perfective aspect. The main objective of this article is to determine whether long-standing contact between Livonian and Latvian has led to the introduction of verbal prefixes as both pure lexical elements and, in parallel, as markers of grammatical functions that distinguish Livonian from its closest cognate languages. The current study is based on the data derived from unpublished recordings and published written material representing spoken Livonian, already extinct as a first language in the traditional speech area.
There are a total of eleven Latvian-origin verbal prefixes in Livonian, a language which usually does not display this category. The prefixes are as follows: aiz-, ap-, at-, ie-, iz-, nuo-, pa-, pie-, pōr-, sa-, and uz-. In Latvian, most of these items can be used as bound verbal prefixes and also prepositions marking adverbial functions. In Livonian, these prefixes can be combined with both Livonian and Latvian verbs but, as a rule – except for pa- – they do not occur as prepositions. The frequency of their occurrence in the data varies considerably and, presumably, corresponds to the degree that a given prefix may derive perfective verbs. In fact, verbal prefixation can be considered, to some extent, a means for expressing perfective aspect in Livonian, thereby adding a secondary strategy to the inherent Finnic way of expressing aspectual oppositions, namely the object case alternation and verbal particles.


Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shores legendary Uncommon Places has influenced a generation of photographers. Among the first artists to take colour beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, Shores large-format colour work on the American vernacular landscape stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition over the past thirty years. Uncommon Places: The Complete Works is the definitive collection of this landmark series. An essay by noted critic and curator Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen and a conversation with Shore by fiction writer Lynne Tillman examine his methodology as they elucidate his roots in the pop and conceptual art movements of the late sixties and early seventies. The texts are illustrated with reproductions from Shores earlier series American Surfaces and Amarillo: Tall in Texas.


For humans, the process of grasping an object relies heavily on rich tactile feedback. Most recent robotic grasping work, however, has been based only on visual input, and thus cannot easily benefit from feedback after initiating contact. In this letter, we investigate how a robot can learn to use tactile information to iteratively and efficiently adjust its grasp. To this end, we propose an end-to-end action-conditional model that learns regrasping policies from raw visuo-tactile data. This model—a deep, multimodal convolutional network—predicts the outcome of a candidate grasp adjustment, and then executes a grasp by iteratively selecting the most promising actions. Our approach requires neither calibration of the tactile sensors nor any analytical modeling of contact forces, thus reducing the engineering effort required to obtain efficient grasping policies. We train our model with data from about 6450 grasping trials on a two-finger gripper equipped with GelSight high-resolution tactile sensors on each finger. Across extensive experiments, our approach outperforms a variety of baselines at 1) estimating grasp adjustment outcomes, 2) selecting efficient grasp adjustments for quick grasping, and 3) reducing the amount of force applied at the fingers, while maintaining competitive performance. Finally, we study the choices made by our model and show that it has successfully acquired useful and interpretable grasping behaviors.


We report here that cultured airway smooth muscle cells contain transcripts of endothelial differentiation gene 1 (EDG-1), a prototypical orphan Gi-coupled receptor whose natural ligand is sphingosine 1-phosphate (S1P). This is consistent with data that showed that S1P activated both c-Src and p42/p44 mitogen-activated protein kinase (p42/p44 MAPK) in a pertussis toxin (PTX)-sensitive manner in these cells. An essential role for c-Src was confirmed by using the c-Src inhibitor, PP1, which markedly decreased p42/p44 MAPK activation. We have also shown that phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI-3K) inhibitors (wortmannin and LY294002) decreased p42/p44 MAPK activation. An essential role for PI-3K was supported by experiments that showed that PI-3K activity was increased in Grb-2 immunoprecipitates from S1P-stimulated cells. Significantly, Grb-2 associated PI-3K activity was decreased by pretreatment of cells with PTX. Finally, we have shown that the co-stimulation of cells with platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) and S1P (which failed to stimulate DNA synthesis) elicited a larger p42/p44 MAPK activation over a 30 min stimulation compared with each agonist alone. This was associated with a S1P-dependent increase in PDGF-stimulated DNA synthesis. These results demonstrate that S1P activates c-Src and Grb-2-PI-3K (intermediates in the p42/p44 MAPK cascade) via a PTX-sensitive mechanism. This action of S1P is consistent with the stimulation of EDG-1 receptors. S1P might also function as a co-mitogen with PDGF, producing a more robust activation of a common permissive signal transduction pathway linked to DNA synthesis.


We consider a set of learning agents in a col-laborative peer-to-peer network, where each agent learns a personalized model according to its own learning objective. The question addressed in this paper is: how can agents improve upon their locally trained model by communicating with other agents that have similar objectives? We introduce and analyze two asynchronous gossip algorithms running in a fully decentralized manner. Our first approach , inspired from label propagation, aims to smooth pre-trained local models over the network while accounting for the confidence that each agent has in its initial model. In our second approach, agents jointly learn and propagate their model by making iterative updates based on both their local dataset and the behavior of their neighbors. Our algorithm to optimize this challenging objective in a decentralized way is based on ADMM.