This book is a companion text to Active Control of Sound by P.A. Nelson and S.J. Elliott, also published by Academic Press. It summarizes the principles underlying active vibration control and its practical applications by combining material from vibrations, mechanics, signal processing, acoustics, and control theory. The emphasis of the book is on the active control of waves in structures, the active isolation of vibrations, the use of distributed strain actuators and sensors, and the active control of structurally radiated sound. The feedforward control of deterministic disturbances, the active control of structural waves and the active isolation of vibrations are covered in detail, as well as the more conventional work on modal feedback. The principles of the transducers used as actuateors and sensors for such control strategies are also given an in-depth description. The reader will find particularly interesting the two chapters on the active control of sound radiation from structures: active structural acoustic control. The reason for controlling high frequency vibration is often to prevent sound radiation, and the principles and practical application of such techniques are presented here for both plates and cylinders. The volume is written in textbook style and is aimed at students, practicing engineers, and researchers.


The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Smoking and Health is a cross-party group of Peers and MPs that was founded in 1976. ASH provides the secretariat for the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health. Documents produced by the APPG in the course of its work (including reports and letters) are available on this site.


This book evaluates the Confederate Catholic war effort from the preceeding phase of localized insurgency, through the formation of a national self-government in 1642, until the Confederate Catholic regime was finally subsumed in a broad pan-Royalist alliance in 1649. While this alliance held out the prospect of significant religious and constitutional concessons this achievement was nullified by the subsequent Cromwellian catastrophe: the Confederate regime failed. In attributing this failure to political factionalism, historians have neglected the potential and limitations of the Confederate war effort. This study does not substitute crude military determinism but acknowledges that political indecision and strategic incoherence inhibited the war effort at critical junctures. From the conflicting political priorities of Confederates two partially exclusive military strategies, insular, and expeditionary, can be identified. Both strategies were proactive and so demanded standing armies rather than local militia units. This book emphasizes the crucial importance of the tax gathering apparatus in fueling the incremental growth of standing armies. In the absence of large scale foreign patronage, exacting money from an agrarian economy, rather than the shortages of material, or still less, manpower representing the crucial extrinsic limit to Confederate military potential. Given these limits, it was a considerable achievement to contain two British interventions (in 1642 and 1646/7 respectively). The influence of the contemporaneous "military revolution" on the European mainland was mediated by the cadre of returned mercenary officers. Consequently, the Confederates developed a qualitative edge in fortification and siegecraft. The application of the continental model and the shift from putatively "celtic" or irregular tactics of raiding and running battles would be more problematic. This and other explanations for the poor battlefield performance of the Confederate armies are discussed.


This thesis introduces the concept of a heterogeneous decomposition of a balanced search tree and apply it to the following problems: • How can finger search be implemented without changing the representation of a Red-Black Tree, such as introducing extra storage to the nodes? (Answer: Any degree-balanced search tree can support finger search without modification in its representation by maintaining an auxiliary data structure of logarithmic size and suitably modifying the search algorithm to make use of this auxiliary data structure.) • Do Multi-Splay Trees, which is known to be O(log log n)-competitive to the optimal binary search trees, have the Dynamic Finger property? (Answer: This is work in progress. We believe the answer is yes.)


International donors and private citizens have invested billions of dollars to protect biodiversity in developing nations. The most popular investments aim to encourage economic activities that indirectly protect ecosystems and species. An alternative form of investment is to pay directly for conservation outcomes, as is commonly done in high-income nations. While not a "silver bullet," direct approaches may, in many cases, be more effective and efficient than indirect ones, and thus merit greater attention in developing nations.


In the article I demonstrate some of the possible ways by which counterfactual imagination can lead people to innovation and the creation of novel and valuable solutions. I start with adopting the broad definition of counterfactuals, by which counterfactual imagination is understood as the ability to imagine alternative states of affairs which can relate to the past, present or future. I explain how counterfactual imagination differs from other sorts of imaginative and creative thoughts, pointing out that counterfactual types of thinking always rely on facts and involve a change in some features of the actual world, leaving other such features unaltered. I also show that the concept of counterfactual imagination can be useful when we aim to describe the very earliest manifestations of imaginative capacities in children, which can be seen in their make-believe games. All the mentioned characteristics of counterfactual imagination are further used to examine how what if and would be sorts of thinking and imagining might influence people's creative performance. I conclude with the suggestion that—if guided properly—counterfactual imagination could be a truly valuable mental tool for innovation. This demonstration is partly influenced by Ruth Byrne's multi-faceted analysis of counterfactual imagination, mainly from her book, The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality .


Endowment theory holds the mere ownership of a thing causes people to assign greater value to it than they otherwise would. The theory entered legal scholarship in the early 1990s and quickly eclipsed other accounts of how ownership affects valuation. Today, appeals to a generic "endowment effect" can be found throughout the legal literature. More recent experimental results, however, suggest that the empirical evidence for endowment theory is weak at best. When the procedures used in laboratory experiments are altered to rule out alternative explanations, the "endowment effect" disappears. This and other recent evidence suggest that mere ownership does not affect willingness to trade or exchange. Many experimental economists no longer ascribe to endowment theory. Legal scholars, however, continue to rely on endowment theory to predict legal entitlements' probable effects on expressed valuations. That reliance is no longer warranted. Endowment theory's influence in legal scholarship provides important lessons about how legal scholars and policymakers should, and should not, use results from experimental economics.


Mobile Internet and mobile services that make use of mobile data are increasingly popular. However, the cost of content delivery, in particular, multimedia type content over cellular networks is still high and poses a challenge for some users who are not necessarily willing or cannot afford to pay too much for it. The problem is further exacerbated when video content is used, as this type of content is heavier and can lead to higher bills. In this context, this paper presents a novel cost-oriented adaptive multimedia delivery (COMEDY) mechanism that considers the user's willingness to pay for a certain video quality and user's mobile device characteristics to deliver adaptive multimedia content over wireless connection. The goal of the mechanism is to reduce the cost of multimedia delivery for users that are not willing to pay that much. The mechanism is evaluated both through objective and subjective studies. The evaluation shows that the proposed mechanism provides a reduction in the price paid for accessing multimedia content, and the user's perceived quality is not negatively affected.


This study investigates the impact on river discharge simulations of errors in the precipitation forcing, together with changes in the representation of vegetation variables and of plant transpiration. The most recent European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts reanalysis (ERA-Interim) is used to drive the Interactions between Soil, Biosphere, and Atmosphere–Total Runoff Integrating Pathways (ISBA-TRIP) continental hydrological system over Europe and the Mediterranean basin over the 1991–2008 period. As ERA-Interim tends to underestimate precipitation, a number of precipitation corrections are proposed. In particular, the monthly Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) precipitation product is used to bias-correct the 3-hourly ERA-Interim estimates. This correction markedly improves the match between the ISBA-TRIP simulations and the river discharge observations from the Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC), at 150 gauging stations. The impact on TRIP river discharge simulations of various representations of the evapotranspiration in the ISBA land surface model is investigated as well: ISBA is used together with its upgraded carbon flux version (ISBA-A-gs). The latter is either driven by the satellite-derived climatology of the Leaf Area Index (LAI) used by ISBA, or performs prognostic LAI simulations. The ISBA-A-gs model, with or without dynamically simulated LAI, allows a better representation of river discharge at low water levels. On the other hand, ISBA-A-gs does not perform as well as the original ISBA model at springtime.


We introduce neural topic modelling an unsupervised, scalable and interpretable neural data analysis tool which can be applied across different spatial and temporal scales. The aim is an approach that can handle the everincreasing number of neurons recorded by high channel count multi-electrode arrays. Neural topic modelling is based on latent Dirichlet allocation, a method routinely used in text mining to find latent topics in texts. The spike trains are converted into "neural words" the presence or absence of discrete events (e.g. neuron 1 has a higher firing rate than usual). Neural topic modelling results in a number of topics (probability distributions over words) which best explain the given co-occurrences of neural words over time. Applied to an electrophysiological dataset of mouse visual cortex, hippocampus and thalamus neurons, neural topic modelling groups neural words into topics which exhibit common attributes such as overlapping receptive fields or proximity on the recording electrode. It recovers these relationships despite receiving no knowledge about the cortex topography or about the spatial structure of the stimuli. Choosing neural activity patterns as neural words that are relevant to the brain makes the topics interpretable by both the brain and researchers, setting neural topic modelling apart from other machine learning approaches.


We propose a simple method to deconvolute NMR spectra of quadrupolar nuclei in order to separate the distribution of local magnetic hyperfine field from the quadrupole splitting. It is based on an iterative procedure which allows to express the intensity of a single NMR line directly as a linear combination of the intensities of the total experimental spectrum at a few related frequencies. This procedure is argued to be an interesting complement to Fourier transformation since it can lead to a significant noise reduction in some frequency ranges. This is demonstrated in the case of the 11B-NMR spectrum in SrCu2(BO3)2 at a field of 31.7 T, where a magnetization plateau at 1/6 of the saturation has been observed.


ABSTRACT Objective: Previous research has established that both ill health and minority status are associated with unemployment. Less is known, however, about the interplay between having ill health and being from minority background. The present study examines whether immigrants and descendants with ill health are particularly prone to unemployment during an economic downturn in Europe. Design: The European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) cross-sectional data material is utilized, and linear probability models are estimated. The analysis is run for countries in which the two minority samples are acceptably large (N ≥ 100), resulting in 18 included European countries. The year 2011 is chosen because it is possible to identify both immigrants and descendants in EU-SILC due to a module on intergenerational transfer of disadvantages. Results: The results indicate – as expected – that both ill health and minority status are independently related to higher unemployment likelihood. Immigrants and descendants with ill health, however, are not particularly likely to be unemployed. This finding is robust to a number of sensitivity tests, and the empirical pattern is very similar across the 18 included countries. Conclusion: Both minority status and ill health are associated with high unemployment probability in Europe. However, there does not seem to exist a 'double disadvantage' for immigrants and descendants with ill health, which is in line with a human capital perspective on how employers evaluate potential employees. Both a non-native-sounding name and bad health status are interpreted as a risk factor, but there is no reason to expect ill health to lower the productivity level more if the applicant is a descendant or immigrant.


The equity of Bhutan's new community forestry program was assessed after three years of experience with timber harvesting. Despite the impressive achievements of community forestry programs elsewhere in South Asia, there is increasing evidence that poor and disadvantaged members of community forestry management groups benefit less than other members. We compared this with the situation in Bhutan. All households in three villages were ranked by socio-economic status before analyzing the distribution of community forest (CF) products. A household survey and focus group interviews provided more detailed information on how the socio-economic groups participated in the CFs. Economic equity (distribution of benefits) and political equity (participation in decision making) were found to be higher than reports from neighbouring countries. We discuss the cultural context and hypothesise that these unexpected findings can be attributed to four factors: ethnic homogeneity, active participation of women, supportive government policy and intensive extension support. Further study with additional CFs over a longer time period is needed to test this hypothesis and assess the relative importance of these four factors.


Efficient Modeling and Migration in Anisotropic Media Based on Prestack Exploding Reflector Model and Effective Anisotropy Hui Wang This thesis addresses the efficiency improvement of seismic wave modeling and migration in anisotropic media. This improvement becomes crucial in practice as the process of imaging complex geological structures of the Earth's subsurface requires modeling and migration as building blocks. The challenge comes from two aspects. First, the underlying governing equations for seismic wave propagation in anisotropic media are far more complicated than that in isotropic media which demand higher computational costs to solve. Second, the usage of whole prestack seismic data still remains a burden considering its storage volume and the existing wave equation solvers. In this thesis, I develop two approaches to tackle the challenges. In the first part, I adopt the concept of prestack exploding reflector model to handle the whole prestack data and bridge the data space directly to image space in a single kernel. I formulate the extrapolation operator in a two-way fashion to remove the restriction on directions that waves propagate. I also develop a generic method for phase velocity evaluation within anisotropic media used in this extrapolation kernel. The proposed method provides a tool for generating prestack images without wavefield 5 cross correlations. In the second part of this thesis, I approximate the anisotropic models using effective isotropic models. The wave phenomena in these effective models match that in anisotropic models both kinematically and dynamically. I obtain the effective models through equating eikonal equations and transport equations of anisotropic and isotropic models, thereby in the high frequency asymptotic approximation sense. The wavefields extrapolation costs are thus reduced using isotropic wave equation solvers while the anisotropic effects are maintained through this approach. I benchmark the two proposed methods using synthetic datasets. Tests on anisotropic Marmousi model and anisotropic BP2007 model demonstrate the applicability of my approaches.


Modern computing systems are based on multi-processor systems, i.e. multiple cores on the same chip. Hard real-time systems are required to perform particular tasks within certain amount of time; failure to do so characterises an unaccepted behavior. Hard real-time systems are found in safety-critical applications, e.g. airbag control software, flight control software, etc. In safety-critical applications, failure to meet the real-time constraints can have catastrophic effects. The safe and, at the same time, efficient deployment of applications, with hard real-time constraints, on multi-processors is a challenging task. Scheduling methods and Models of Computation, that provide safe deployments, require a realistic estimation of the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) of tasks. The simultaneous access of shared resources by parallel tasks, causes interference delays due to hardware arbitration. Interference delays can be accounted for, with the pessimistic assumption that all possible interference can happen. The resulting schedules would be exceedingly conservative, thus the benefits of multi-processor would be significantly negated. Producing less pessimistic schedules is challenging due to the inter-dependency between WCET estimation and deployment optimisation. Accurate estimation of interference delays -and thus estimation of task WCET- depends on the way an application is deployed; deployment is an optimisation problem that depends on the estimation of task WCET. Another efficiency gap, which is of consequence in several systems (e.g. airbag control), stems from the fact that rarely tasks execute with their WCET. Safe runtime adaptation based on the Actual Execution Times, can yield additional improvements in terms of latency (more responsive systems). To achieve efficiency and retain adaptability, we propose that interference analysis should be coupled with the deployment process. The proposed interference analysis method estimates the possible amount of interference, based on an architecture and an application model. As more information is provided, such as scheduling, memory mapping, etc, the per-task interference estimation becomes more accurate. Thus, the method computes interference-sensitive WCET estimations (isWCET). Based on the isWCET method, we propose a method to break the inter-dependency between WCET estimation and deployment optimisation. Initially, the isWCETs are over-approximated, by assuming worst-case interference, and a safe deployment is derived. Subsequently, the proposed method computes accurate isWCETs by spatio-temporal exclusion, i.e. excluding interferences from non-overlapping tasks that share resources (space). Based on accurate isWCETs, the deployment solution is improved to provide better latency guarantees. We also propose a distributed runtime adaptation technique, that aims to improve run-time latency. Using isWCET estimations restricts the possible adaptations, as an adaptation might increase the interference and violate the safety guarantees. The proposed technique introduces statically scheduling dependencies between tasks that prevent additional interference. At runtime, a self-timed scheduling policy that respects these dependencies, is applied, proven to be safe, and with minimal overhead. Experimental evaluation on Kalray MPPA-256 shows that our methods improve isWCET up to 36%, guaranteed latency up to 46%, runtime performance up to 42%, with a consolidated performance gain of 50%.


It has been argued that the apparent alienation of young Britons from involvement in conventional politics, as seen by their low turn out in the 2001 general election, may be partly due to the mismatch between their experience of, and attitudes towards, illicit drugs, and the traditional policies of the mainstream parties which have favoured their continued prohibition (e.g. Lilley, 2001). In the absence of direct evidence for such a relationship, other evidence from both the illicit drug use and political literatures respectively was examined from the viewpoint of the psychological mediation of behaviour in both areas. It was concluded that illicit drug use might not be regarded as normal behaviour by young people to the extent argued by some researchers, and that given the range of personal social meanings which users have been found to attach to this behaviour, great caution was needed when inferring social and political attitudes in this population. Important future research could include an examination of locus of control and self-efficacy beliefs, especially with those involved in active campaigning on drug related issues. Until such research is conducted, the hypothesised relationship between illicit drug use and political behaviour remains a matter of conjecture.


This paper is a case study of the continuum between standardization and variation in the production of red-figure Athenian fine wares in the first half of the 5th century BC. An investigation of the Pan Painter's pelikai reveals that they fall into 3 distinct groups, according to size. While the pelikai in each group are also distinguishable from each other by shape, pattern, and iconography, the next clearest distinction between the groups (after size) is in their style of decoration. The pelikai in the largest group, which is comprised of small pelikai, are particularly distinct from the Pan Painter's broader oeuvre of ca. 220 vases insofar as they exemplify a lackadaisical painting style, which I have termed banausic, on account of its frequent use for images of craftsmen, women at work, and other such genre images. While this casual style is antithetical to the Pain Painter's refined style, for which he is better known, and which he employs for his large pelikai, affinities between the 2 styles—as judged by his confident line, anatomical details, and other technical features—permit the conclusion that this group of pelikai were executed by one and the same craftsman as the others. As with all of the vases attributed to this talented painter, however, the pelikai—whether large or small—are decorated with a great bariety of images. While most painted Athenian vases are understood to have been individually created, not mass-produced, the Pan Painter's coherent group of small pelikai seem to have been created en masse, in a uniform size and shape and with a distinct decorative style. This group of standardized vases represents a body of work executed under the influence or at the behest of a specific vase workshop. The form of the small pelikai in fact allows us to associate them with the Geras Painter. With his work on these small pelikai, perhaps in the latter part of his career, the Pan Painter may have intentionally minimized variability in favour of standardization, to meet market demands.


The social security system affects people throughout most of their lives, at work and in retirement. The supposed effects of social security on saving, labor supply, and the distribution of income figure prominently in current debates about whether and how to change the system. Theorists have developed alternative analytical frameworks for studying social security, but all involve extreme assumptions introduced for the sake of analytical tractability. Each study seems to describe the behavior of some, but not all or even most people. The shortcomings of available data have created additional roadblocks. As a result, the effects of social security on saving and labor supply are difficult to measure, and how such a complex system influences behavior is not at all well understood.Yet decisions on social security cannot be avoided. If analysts cannot agree, policymakers are likely to increase the weight they attach to perceptions of equity, adequacy of benefits, fairness of taxes, and similar qualitative considerations. Hence it is desirable for lay observers to understand the framework that analysts use and the reasons why there is so much uncertainty.This book sheds light on social security issues by examining evidence from economic studies about how the system affects saving, labor supply, and income distribution. It shows that these studies provide little evidence to support or refute assertions that social security has reduced saving, but they do indicate that it has contributed to the trend toward early retirement. The author finds that the aged are now about as well off on the average as the general population and that social security has played a considerable role in bringing about this equality.This volume is the sixteenth in the second serioes of Brookings Studies of Government Finance.


The aim of this study was to assess the performance of the children in the study on some psychometric tests and to find out whether iron deficiency had any effect on cognitive skills as measured by the selected psychometric tests. The study also wanted to find out if there would be any gender differences on the psychometric tests. A sample of 810 children was selected from eleven schools from the rural Southern part of KwaZulu-Natal. The children were of ages eight to ten years old, were all Zulu speaking and in standard one. Blood samples were taken from all the children to determine iron levels. Psychometric tests viz., the Symbol Digit Modalities Test, Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices, Rey's Auditory Verbal Learning Test and Young's Group Mathematics Test, were all administered to measure cognitive performance. The results showed no significant iron level effects on most of the measured cognitive skills.
There were some significant gender effects on all the psychometric tests except for the Maths test. There was general low performance on all the psychometric tests. Therefore, the results highlighted the importance of designing more tests that can be standardized and thus be applicable to Zulu speaking children and other children with similar backgrounds. The tests should also be able to tap into the cognitive skills that may be affected by iron levels. There is also a great need for studies looking at the lower end of iron deficiency.


I once believed that we only had to put in place the conditions for equality for the remnants of old-fashioned sexism in our culture to wither away. I am ready to admit that I was wrong.' Empowerment, liberation, choice. Once the watchwords of feminism, these terms have now been co-opted by a society that sells women an airbrushed, highly sexualised and increasingly narrow vision of femininity. Drawing on a wealth of research and personal interviews, LIVING DOLLS is a straight-talking, passionate and important book that makes us look afresh at women and girls, at sexism and femininity - today.


Two important ways that a subsidiary can contribute to the multinational corporation's (MNC) competitive advantage are innovation development and transfer activities. However 'the advantage paradox of the MNC' calls into question a subsidiary's ability to effectively and efficiently carry out both innovation development and transfer activities. This thesis investigates the validity of existence of 'the advantage paradox of the MNC' and explores possible solutions for overcoming it. This is done by conducting research around four questions: 1) In what circumstance can a subsidiary develop novel innovations? 2) In what circumstance can an innovation add value to an innovation developing subsidiary and what kind of value can the innovation add? 3) What are the factors that hinder innovation transfer and what kind of mechanisms are needed to overcome these hindrances? 4) Does innovation developed internally at an MNC transfer better within the MNC, compared to innovation developed externally to an MNC?The outcome of this thesis shows that the subsidiary faces a dilemma when managing innovation activities which is connected to 'the advantage paradox of the MNC.' The dilemma comes from tradeoffs that exist due to the subsidiary's duties within the MNC and its involvement with external business counterparts. The studies in this thesis confirm that the subsidiary's business contexts leads to novel innovations but innovation developed with external business partners are more difficult to exploit on a more general basis within the MNC. Although there are solutions to overcome the 'advantage paradox of the MNC,' by remedying transfer barriers, the solutions are complex processes and in many cases subsidiaries face predicament of having to choose one benefit over another.


In this thesis I examined a phenotypically plastic defence in a common freshwater snail, Radix balthica. Adaptive prey defences may involve behavioural, life-history or morphological changes. Snails are important species in freshwater systems. Their role as grazers on periphytic algae makes them particularly important as they have a positive impact on macrophyte growth in lakes and ponds. The structuring role of predators, especially fish, on snails may therefore have a great impact on lake ecosystems. I have studied the occurrence of different shell shapes in this snail in nature. In laboratory studies, I have determined the degree of shell plasticity over many populations, the morphological reaction to multiple predators, costs of expressing plastic traits and the role of plasticity in a community context with other snails. My results show this snail to have different shell shapes in nature that can be attributed to the presence or absence of molluscivorous fish. In the laboratory, I established it to be a phenotypically plastic species with identical reaction norms irrespective if the population originated from a fish or fish free pond. In a test with multiple predators, fish and crayfish that differs in foraging strategies, I showed that this species produces different shell shapes, but that the main defensive change was directed to defend against fish predation and that shape determined the crushing resistance of the shell. I also showed it to be able to compensate differences in shell shape with shell thickness to maintain crushing forces of the shell that are an important factor for defence against fish. The costs for adaptive trait changes like morphology, shell thickness or behaviour seems to be relatively low in this species. Instead, costs mainly emerge from reduced growth rates and lower fecundity. In the competition with other snail species, R. balthica is a strong competitor that dominates the system with or without the presence of predator cues only. Under direct predation from fish, it depends on the higher crush resistance of a morphologically altered shell shape and persists together with another hard shelled species in this environment. The main conclusions from my thesis is that this species is plastic over a large geographical range, probably through high gene flow and that fish has been a key predator in the evolution of a plastic defence. It shows great versatility in many traits in the presence of fish and at relatively low costs. It is a strong competitor and due to the morphologically plastic shell, persistent in many environments. (Less)


The English quotative system (featuring forms such as say, think, zero, go, all and be like used in direct speech reproduction and thought) has been the subject of vigorous, in-depth sociolinguistic investigation, particularly in the past two decades. However, with the notable exception of Winter's (2002) study of quotative be like in the speech of Melbourne adolescents, the Australian English quotative system remains virtually uncharted. I address this gap in the literature by offering a quantitative sociolinguistic analysis of the quotative system of Perth English, investigating to what extent linguistic (grammatical person, content of quote and tense) and social (age and sex) variables are implicated in the use of be like. My results stem from 32.5 hours (325 096 words) of spontaneous narratives of personal experience recorded with 47 speakers in Perth in 2011 and evince an overwhelming increase in the use of be like particularly amongst the youngest speakers — as compared to Winter's (2002) findings for Melbourne in the late 1990s. Multivariate analysis using Goldvarb X (Sankoff, Tagliamonte and Smith 2005) indicates that — although some constraints like the favouring effect of first person subjects behave similarly across the generations and are in line with other Englishes — Australian be like is subject to different constraints across generations of young speakers. Pre-adolescent and adolescent girls are active agents of language change by upping be like's frequency and its use with the historical present in narratives. Young adults are steady users of be like in historical present contexts but the significant effect of sex has reversed: it is young male adults — rather than women — who favour be like in this cohort. The findings are in line with trends noted in the literature on English quotation elsewhere and point once again to the irrevocable link between system-internal forces and social factors as speakers move through life.


Due to inadequate public funding and an increasing demand on infrastructure facilities, many governments worldwide are exploring new arrangements through public private partnerships (PPP), among which the BOT (build-operate-transfer) type model of procurement is a popular option. The BOT arrangement o ers host governments an opportunity to accelerate infrastructure development without incurring large public expenditure and borrowing. Since the frequent use of the BOT approach has had relative success in developing countries (usually a long list of projects have budget restrictions), they are candidates for implementation through this model. Due to some failures, we are aware that not all projects are suitable for the BOT approach, and there is an urgent need to choose a suitable model for the project. In this paper, a decision support system model was made based on a multi criteria decision making model (MCDM). The technique for order preference by similarity of ideal solution (TOPSIS) model assesses the success of a BOT project as a computer program. This program gets the speci cations of a project and delivers its opportunity of success as the output. To construct this model, the success appraisal indexes of the project were de ned in two groups: Critical success factors and risks allocation. BOT projects encounter many situations that are inconvenient risk allocations in dealing with these situations, which probably result in failure to achieve the project's purpose. So, the success of a BOT project depends on the assignment of a proper risk allocation between di erent participants. Thus, a comprehensive structure was proposed for identifying critical success factors and risks, and a framework for appropriate risk allocation to project participants was de ned. It aims to support decision making as a priority to see which project is more appropriate to be delivered by the PPP approach, as well as selecting which incentive should be granted to private parties by governments (and when), to increase the projects chances of success. Consequently, disadvantages can be controlled or mitigated with risk measurement tools.


Background Technology represents a major topic in educational research. Nevertheless, a gap in the research remains concerning how teachers can bring technology into the classroom. This study focuses on the technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK) framework, which aims to consolidate the multidisciplinary professional knowledge related to technology, pedagogy, and content that teachers need so that they can teach and students can learn effectively using technology tools. Purpose The goal of the present study was to investigate the value of modification reflection prompts ("think ahead") as a complementary reflective framework during the teacher preparatory program, beyond the more traditional judgment reflection prompts ("think back"). In particular, we examined how preservice science teachers may capitalize on learning from modification prompts versus judgment prompts versus both ("think back" and "think ahead"), compared with learning from generic prompts ("stop and think") based on the IMPROVE model oriented to TPCK. We examined these four treatments' effects on preservice teachers' actual design of science lessons and development of their own self-reflection abilities. Participants Participants were 199 first-year preservice science teachers in their preparatory programs at a university in central Israel. Research Design We created a quasi-experimental opportunity for four groups of preservice science teachers to systematically contemplate ready-made TPCK-oriented lesson designs. Each used one of four different reflective methods (the independent variable): modification, judgment, combined modification+judgment, or generic prompts. Then we examined the differential contribution of these treatment methods to the two dependent variables: (1) preservice teachers' skills for designing actual science lessons and (2) their judgment-type and modification-type self-reflection ability regarding the planning, monitoring, and evaluation phases of their lesson-design process. Data Collection and Analysis Data were scored by coding schemes and were analyzed by multivariate analysis of variance and follow-up analyses of variance with repeated measures. Findings Results indicated that preservice teachers who contemplated a combination of both judgment and modification reflections in treatment improved more in their lesson-design skills and in their self-reflection ability (of both types at the three phases), compared with preservice teachers who contemplated only a single type of reflective prompt (generic or only judgment or modification). Lasting effects (after a semester without the IMPROVE model, prompts, or TPCK focus) revealed that the combined approach continued to significantly outperform the single approaches. Recommendations The current study reinterprets the instructional-reflective framework of teacher education programs to include modification reflection too as a means of developing preservice teachers' capacity to integrate technology in their lesson designs.


Abstract Flow expansions are a fundamental mechanism of sediment deposition. Here we define flow expansions as self-formed alluvial expanding deposits developing over a larger experimental delta that 1) are characterized by unchannelized flow, comprising a single sheet flow that covers the entire surface of the expansion, and (2) do not interact laterally with still fluid and thus are not related to jets. The flow-spreading mechanism is transverse topographic curvature rather than mixing with ambient fluid; hence we term these expansions "topographic expansions" to distinguish them from jet-related flow expansions. In topographic expansions, transverse bed convexity drives lateral flow, allowing topographic expansions to maintain much higher, and more variable, opening angles than those of jet-related expansions. The characteristic depositional body produced by the expansions is a relatively thin, tabular sand body with a flat base and slightly convex top, comparable to some "sheet flood" deposits in the stratigraphic record. Most of the deposition takes place as the topographic expansion develops, followed by a longer interval of stable sediment bypass, where all measured flow expansions show similar geometries. This stable-bypass phase is typically terminated by the flow abandoning the deposit or by channelization of the deposit itself, after which the cycle can begin again. One of the research questions raised by this study is the mechanism by which topographic expansions are able to maintain themselves in an unchannelized condition at flow aspect ratios that should be unstable according to current theories of bar and channel instability.


It is a clear fact that the Earth's climate has been changing since the pre-industrial era, especially during the last three decades. This change is generally attributed to two main factors: greenhouse gases (GHGs) and solar activ ity changes. However, these factors are not all-independent. Furthermore, contributions of the above-mentioned factors are still d isputed. The aim of th is paper is relation in the longer t ime (1880-2011), between changer of g lobal surface temperature (GST), and solar geomagnetic activ ist represented by sunspot number (Rz) and geomagnetic indices (aa , Kp ), and to what degree they are connected. The geomagnetics aa are more effect ive on global surface temperature than solar activity. Furthermore, the global surface temperature are strongly sensitive to the 21.3-yr, 10.6-yr, and 5.3-yr variations that observed in the considered geomagnetic and sunspot spectra. The present changes in aa geo magnetics may reflect part ially some future changes in the global surface temperatures.


The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship of entrepreneurial orientation and business environment on firm performance, underpinned by Resource based view. Their relationship receives a considerable scholarly attention in the literature, but few studies have been conducted among Nigerian SMEs. SMEs are considered as important to the economic growth of Nigeria and they constitute the major source of employment and significantly contribute to the gross domestic production. Based on the theoretical consideration, a model was proposed to examine this relationship. A quantitative method was used with a total of 640 questionnaires personally distributed to the owner/managers of SMEs in Nigeria. A total of 511 questions was duly completed and returned representing 79.8% response rate. The study finding is in support of previous researchers who have suggested the positive relationship of entrepreneurial orientation and firm performance in many organizations. The finding from the study indicated no relationship between the business environment and firm performance. The finding from this study will benefit SME owner/managers, regulatory agency ie small and medium enterprise development agency of Nigeria, it will also help in policy formulation and will serve as a frame of future reference.


markdownabstractGenerally, the aim of this dissertation is to go beyond the examination of objective factors for measuring progress by complementing them with subjective factors to evaluate under which circumstances economic development is a prerequisite for well-being and whether there are other conditions that can satisfy well-being during hardships.
More specifically, the thesis has three objectives:
__The first objective is to explore the relative performance of an income-based indicator of prosperity compared to a SWB indicator of prosperity and to identify what possibly drives their differences.__
The aim of this exercise is to improve our knowledge on the objective and subjective dimensions that can be relevant in explaining progress.
__The second is to explore why positive economic growth might not be accompanied by respective improvements in SWB.__
A recent case, the social uprising in Arab Spring countries, occurred in a region where, according to many indicators, economic and human development was improving; however, dissatisfaction among citizens was prevalent. I explore several objective conditions and subjective dimensions of dissatisfaction as drivers of general unhappiness. I aim to highlight the value of subjective evaluations of life domains and life in general as tools that can help us evaluate progress in societies.
__The third objective is to identify factors that mitigate the effect of crises on SWB.__
To address the lack of a framework to identify crisis moderators, this dissertation adopts a useful approach originating from the management discipline that is known as the contingency approach or the situational approach (Fiedler, 1964).


The study examines the reference accuracy of two prominent Indian library and information science journals, viz. Annals of Library and Information Studies and DESIDOC Journal of Library and Information Technology . In all, one hundred and eighteen references were considered for verification. Only 39 (33%) references were correct. Among 79 incorrect references, there were total 151 errors of which 71 (47%) errors were major and 80 (53%) were minor errors. The average number of errors (ratio of number of errors) was 1.28. A proper mechanism is needed in both the journals to maintain the quality of references in terms of errors.


By diverting the waters of the Merscy River into a neighbouring basin, the Parangana Darn changed the hydrological character of the downstream river. The flow records of three gauging stations, located at J 0, 67 -and 8R km below the dam, provide the basis for identifying changes. Intermediate discharges have decreased the most and even at the furthest downstream station are 50% lower than before. The flow extremes, at both ends of the scale, have been less affected, and particularly the less frequent discharges which can be augmented by overspill. Indeed the highest flood on record, with a recurrence interval of over 500 years, occurred in the post-dam period. One-day and lO··day minimum flows are markedly lower downstream of the dam, but helow the Dasher, the main tributary of the Mcrsey, they seem to recover and have almost regained pre-dam levels by the mouth. The entry of unregulated tributaries in the middle section separates a much changed upstream hydrology from a dowIlstream one able to mitigate the worst effects of the dam except at intermediate discharges. In the upstream part, the physical, chemical and biological character of the river could be adversely affected by the altered flow regime, particularly in those reaches immediately below the dam.


"An investigation into the impact of 3D digital modelling media on industrial designers' internal and external modes of communication."
Effective communication in product design facilitates effective decision-making, which in turn is essential to a successful design process. The medium of communication is therefore likely to influence the decision making process, making the appropriate selection of media key to the progress of a project. Based on this premise, this study investigates the impact that 3D digital media is having on
designers' internal and external modes of communication, in association with other media tools and techniques which are used.
Analysis of a range of commercial product design case studies has enabled the creation of a tool assisting both the practice of industrial designers or the teaching of
the use of 3D digital media to industrial design students. The tool helps designers appreciate the tactical application of digital technologies, to establish how, when and why digital media might be employed as a communication tool within the design process.
Action Research methodologies were drawn on to develop a research framework for the study. This comprised three core elements: reflective practice, reflection on practice, and reflection on reflective practice. The data derived from these supported the methods used for case study compilation and cross-case analysis.
The tool for practice takes the form of a heuristic map, intended to help the industrial designer understand the appropriate use, and integration of, traditional and digital
media throughout the design process. Central to this understanding is the premise that it is just as important to design practice to consider 3D digital media as a tool for communication, as well as for design.
The study seeks to build a bridge between theory and practice, through the amalgamation of practitioner based research and qualitative observational research methods. Publication of the findings via a CD & website contribute to the accessibility of the process and findings of the research investigation.


Single resident life style is increasing among the elderly due to the issues of elderly care cost and privacy invasion. However, the single life style cannot be maintained if they have dementia. Thus, the early detection of dementia is crucial. Systems with wearable devices or cameras are not preferred choice for the long-term monitoring. Main intention of this paper is to propose deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) classifier for indoor travel patterns of elderly people living alone using open data set collected by device-free non-privacy invasive binary (passive infrared) sensor data. Travel patterns are classified as direct, pacing, lapping, or random according to Martino–Saltzman (MS) model. MS travel pattern is highly related with person's cognitive state, and thus can be used to detect early stage of dementia. We have utilized an open data set that was presented by Center for Advanced Studies in Adaptive Systems project, Washington State University. The data set was collected by monitoring a cognitively normal elderly person by wireless passive infrared sensors for 21 months. First, 117 320 travel episodes are extracted from the data set and classified by MS travel pattern classifier algorithm for the ground truth. Later, 12 000 episodes (3000 for each pattern) were randomly selected from the total episodes to compose training and testing data set. Finally, DCNN performance was compared with seven other classical machine-learning classifiers. The random forest and DCNN yielded the best classification accuracies of 94.48% and 97.84%, respectively. Thus, the proposed DCNN classifier can be used to infer dementia through travel pattern matching.


"The Sioux Indians came into my life before I had any preconceived notions about them," writes Mari Sandoz about the visitors to her family homestead in the Sandhills of Nebraska when she was a child. These Were the Sioux, written in her last decade, takes the reader far inside a world of rituals surrounding puberty, courtship, and marriage, as well as the hunt and the battle.


Linguistic analyses suggest that there are two types of intransitive verbs: unaccusatives, whose sole argument is a patient or theme (e.g., fall), and unergatives, whose sole argument is an agent (e.g., jump).1 Past psycholinguistic experiments suggest that this distinction affects how sentences are processed: for example, it modulates both comprehension processes (Bever and Sanz 1997, Friedmann et al. 2008) and production processes (Kegl 1995, Kim 2006, M. Lee and Thompson 2004, J. Lee and Thompson 2011, McAllister et al. 2009). Given this body of evidence, it is reasonable to assume, as we do here, that this distinction is directly relevant to psycholinguistic theorizing. However, especially in production, exactly how this distinction affects processing is unknown, beyond the suggestion that unaccusatives somehow involve more complex processing than unergatives (see J. Lee and Thompson 2011). Here we examine how real-time planning processes in production differ for unaccusatives and unergatives. We build on previous studies on lookahead effects in sentence planning that show that verbs are planned before a deep object is uttered but not before a deep subject is uttered (Momma, Slevc, and Phillips 2015, 2016). (We use terms like deep subject in a theory-neutral fashion, with no intended commitment to a specific syntactic encoding.) This line of research sheds light on the broader issue of how the theory of argument structure relates to sentence production.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence. Individual articles may be copied or downloaded for private, scholarly and not-for-profit use. Quotations may be extracted provided that the author and The Royal Society of Queensland are acknowledged. Queries regarding republication of papers, or parts of papers such as figures and photographs, should be addressed to the Secretary of The Royal Society of Queensland (firstname.lastname@example.com). The Royal Society of Queensland Award of Life Membership to Craig Walton, 15 June 2021


The HPC2/ELAC2 gene on chromosome 17p was recently identified as a candidate gene for hereditary prostate cancer (HPC). To confirm these findings, we screened 300 prostate cancer patients (2 affected members/family) from 150 families with HPC for potential germ-line mutations using conformation-sensitive gel electrophoresis, followed by direct sequence analysis. The minimum criteria for our families with HPC was the presence of 3 affected men with prostate cancer. A total of 23 variants were identified, including 13 intronic and 10 exonic changes. Of the 10 exonic changes, 1 truncating mutation was identified, a Glu216Stop nonsense mutation. This nonsense variant was found in 2 of 3 affected men in a single family. The remaining nine alterations included five missense, three silent, and one variant in the 3' untranslated region. To additionally test for potential associations of polymorphic variants and increased risk for disease, we genotyped two common polymorphisms, Ser217Leu and Ala541Thr, in 446 prostate cancer patients from 164 families with HPC and 502 population-based controls. The frequency of the Leu217 variant was similar for patients (32.3%) and controls (31.8%), as was the frequency of the Thr541 variant (5.4% among patients versus 5.2% among controls). In contrast to previous reports, we found no association of the joint effects of Leu271 and Thr541 (odds ratio, 1.04; 95% confidence interval, 0.57-1.89). Overall, our results did not reveal any association between these two common polymorphisms and the risk for HPC. The finding of a nonsense mutation in the HPC2/ELAC2 gene confirms its potential role in genetic susceptibility to prostate cancer. However, our data also suggest that germ-line mutations of the HPC2/ELAC2 are rare in HPC and that the variants Leu217 and Thr541 do not appear to influence the risk for HPC. Cumulatively, these results suggest that alterations within the HPC2/ELAC2 gene play a limited role in genetic susceptibility to HPC.


With the "Energiewende", the German term for the transformation of the national energy system, the German government pursues ambitious goals, primarily but not only to reflect the climate change challenge and to react to the risks associated with the use of nuclear power plants. After launching the energy concept in mid-2011, which describes the "Energiewende" goals, Germany was perceived as an international pioneer in energy transition for many years and has been acknowledged for its braveness to combine ambitious greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation targets with a phase out program for nuclear power plants. In this context, this article asks where Germany's energy transition currently stands, what is planned next and how far the set targets have been achieved or where more action is required to stick to this pathway.


This study aimed to describe the role of urban farming in the welfare of the Muslim farmers in four farmer groups in Surabaya from the perspective of Islam. This study used descriptive qualitative approach with case study strategy. The data authenticity technique using construct validity tactics with multiple sources of evidence. The analysis technique using pattern matching logic. The results showed the positive role of urban farming in the material welfare, namely: the creation of job opportunities and self-employment, the creation of small businesses in the agricultural sector and the informal sector, and increase the income of the four members of farmer groups; whereas the non-material welfare, namely: produce farmed commodities and processed products that is classified as halal, income which does not contain usury, implementing the principles of honesty and fairness principles in marketing, as well as undertake community development activities such as counseling and training.


The intense debate of earlier years between off-pump coronary artery bypass (OPCAB) grafting and conventional coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) with the use of cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) has recently given place to a more balanced and targeted approach to surgical coronary revascularisation. Baseline patient characteristics, coronary and aortic pathology and, most importantly, surgeon experience and training are currently the main factors influencing the decision and implementation of OPCAB. In an era where outcomes following CABG are closely monitored and mortality rarely exceeds 3%, the practice of off-pump revascularisation aims at amelioration of morbidity and at achieving equivalent, if not superior, outcomes compared with on-pump CABG. However, a systematic and indepth analysis of the relevant literature highlights an important issue, which is often neglected and could potentially influence decision making in coronary artery surgery: this is intraoperative conversion.1

Institution of CPB during CABG, which was planned or initiated as off pump, is defined as conversion. In the majority of cases, this is an urgent or even emergency process aiming at correction of haemodynamic instability during manipulation of the heart, particularly during coronary anastomosis, or where the anatomy is unfavourable for safe and complete off-pump revascularisation. The impact of conversion on morbidity and mortality has been recognised as a potential shortcoming of OPCAB but studies have only very recently started to examine this phenomenon in a systematic way. In a meta-analysis of randomised trials presented by our group, it appears that mortality rates often exceed 8% in patients undergoing conversion, whereas the incidence of stroke, myocardial infarction, respiratory and renal complications is significantly higher compared …


We consider the sequential optimization of an unknown, continuous, and expensive to evaluate reward function, from noisy and adversarially corrupted observed rewards. When the corruption attacks are subject to a suitable budget $C$ and the function lives in a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS), the problem can be posed as corrupted Gaussian process (GP) bandit optimization. We propose a novel robust elimination-type algorithm that runs in epochs, combines exploration with infrequent switching to select a small subset of actions, and plays each action for multiple time instants. Our algorithm, Robust GP Phased Elimination (RGP-PE), successfully balances robustness to corruptions with exploration and exploitation such that its performance degrades minimally in the presence (or absence) of adversarial corruptions. When $T$ is the number of samples and $\gamma_T$ is the maximal information gain, the corruption-dependent term in our regret bound is $O(C \gamma_T^{3/2})$, which is significantly tighter than the existing $O(C \sqrt{T \gamma_T})$ for several commonly-considered kernels. We perform the first empirical study of robustness in the corrupted GP bandit setting, and show that our algorithm is robust against a variety of adversarial attacks.


Video description is one of the most challenging problems in vision and language understanding due to the large variability both on the video and language side. Models, hence, typically shortcut the difficulty in recognition and generate plausible sentences that are based on priors but are not necessarily grounded in the video. In this work, we explicitly link the sentence to the evidence in the video by annotating each noun phrase in a sentence with the corresponding bounding box in one of the frames of a video. Our dataset, ActivityNet-Entities, augments the challenging ActivityNet Captions dataset with 158k bounding box annotations, each grounding a noun phrase. This allows training video description models with this data, and importantly, evaluate how grounded or "true" such model are to the video they describe. To generate grounded captions, we propose a novel video description model which is able to exploit these bounding box annotations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on our dataset, but also show how it can be applied to image description on the Flickr30k Entities dataset. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on video description, video paragraph description, and image description and demonstrate our generated sentences are better grounded in the video.


The electro-optic properties of Kerr effect based liquid crystal display (LCD) with zigzag electrode structure are studied using a three-dimensional simulator. The optimal bending angle of the zigzag in-plane switching (IPS) electrodes is found to be 90° , which is different from the conventional strip electrodes. Although the zigzag structure exhibits a slightly lower transmittance than the strip IPS electrodes, it significantly suppresses the color shift while providing a relatively wide viewing angle.


The crisis of the urban environment is a systemic one, and it is due to a joint action of socio-cultural, politic, economic, physic and ecologic factors. It is also related to the progressive decay of communitarian sense and policy representativeness as generative factors of the city; to his economic bases transformation; to decentralization processes and loss of public spaces; to his increasing dimension and speculative land annuity phenomena; to his unsustainable energy needs and environmental impacts. Therefore, this crisis is summarizable as a systemical and sustainability one. But the crisis of the city is also due to the inadequacy of urban planning: the poor comprehension of city systemic nature and poor presence of sustainability measures, the formal rigidity of the top-down processes unable to manage the bottom-up self-organized transformations, lead to a lack of operability of its instruments. As a consequence, the perspectives of the study of the city have to be shifted from the urban structures to the related processes; from the urban components to the whole environment; from the juxtaposition of objects to social and cultural interactions. The most interesting trends in this direction seem to move toward urban regeneration processes through Digital Social Economy that, together with the use of Social Web Platforms, could make more publicly visible, shared and effectively participative the planning processes allowing a real involvement of citizens and communities. Aims of this study is to summarily describe these trends toward systemic urban planning processes, through the analysis of literature and examples, in light of a possible sustainable future of the human environmental system definable as city.


FACTORS AFFECTING CONSTRUCTION OF SCIENCE DISCOURSE IN THE CONTEXT OF AN EXTRACURRICULAR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY PROJECT, by HORACE P. WEBB Doing and learning science are social activities that require certain language, activities, and values. Both constitute what Gee (2005) calls Discourses. The language of learning science varies with the learning context (Lemke, 2001,1990). Science for All Americans (AAAS, 1990) and Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 2000) endorse inquiry science learning. In the United States, most science learning is teacher-centered; inquiry science learning is rare (NRC, 2000). This study focused on 12 high school students from two suburban high schools, their three faculty mentors, and two engineering mentors during an extracurricular robotics activity with FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). FRC employed student-centered inquiry focus to teach science principles integrating technology. Research questions were (a) How do science teachers and their students enact Discourses as they teach and learn science? and (b) How does the pedagogical approach of a learning activity facilitate the Discourses that are enacted by students and teachers as they learn and teach science? Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the study examined participants' language during robotic activities to determine how language used in learning science shaped the learning and vice versa. Data sources included videorecordings of participant language and semi-structured interviews with study participants. Transcribed recordings were coded initially using Gee's (2005) linguistic Building Tasks as a priori codes. CDA was applied to code transcripts, to construct Discourses enacted by the participants, and to determine how context facilitated their enactment. Findings indicated that, for the students, FRC facilitated elements of Science Discourse. Wild About Robotics (W.A.R.) team became, through FRC, part of a community similar to scientists' community that promoted knowledge and sound practices, disseminated information, supported research and development and encouraged interaction of its members. The public school science classroom in the U.S. is inimical to inquiry learning because of practices and policies associated with the epistemological stance that spawned the standards and/or testing movement and No Child Left Behind (Baez & Boyles, 2009). The findings of this study provided concrete ideas to accommodate the recommendations by NRC (1996) and NSES (2000) for creating contexts that might lead to inquiry science learning for meaningful student engagement. FACTORS AFFECTING CONSTRUCTION OF SCIENCE DISCOURSE IN THE CONTEXT OF AN EXTRACURRICULAR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY PROJECT by Horace P. Webb


EPON and WiMAX are two promising broadband access technologies for new-generation wired and wireless access. Their complementary features motivate interest in using EPON as a backhaul to connect multiple dispersed WiMAX base stations. In this article we propose four broadband access architectures to integrate EPON and WiMAX technologies. The integrated architectures can take advantage of the bandwidth benefit of fiber communications, and the mobile and non-line-of-sight features of wireless communications. Based on these integrated architectures, we elaborate on related control and operation issues to address the benefits gained by this integration. Integration of EPON and WiMAX enables fixed mobile convergence, and is expected to significantly reduce overall design and operational costs for new-generation broadband access networks.


IMPORTANCE
Septic shock is a clinical emergency that occurs in more than 230,000 US patients each year. OBSERVATIONS AND ADVANCES: In the setting of suspected or documented infection, septic shock is typically defined in a clinical setting by low systolic (≤90 mm Hg) or mean arterial blood pressure (≤65 mm Hg) accompanied by signs of hypoperfusion (eg, oliguria, hyperlactemia, poor peripheral perfusion, or altered mental status). Focused ultrasonography is recommended for the prompt recognition of complicating physiology (eg, hypovolemia or cardiogenic shock), while invasive hemodynamic monitoring is recommended only for select patients. In septic shock, 3 randomized clinical trials demonstrate that protocolized care offers little advantage compared with management without a protocol. Hydroxyethyl starch is no longer recommended, and debate continues about the role of various crystalloid solutions and albumin.

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE
The prompt diagnosis of septic shock begins with obtainment of medical history and performance of a physical examination for signs and symptoms of infection and may require focused ultrasonography to recognize more complex physiologic manifestations of shock. Clinicians should understand the importance of prompt administration of intravenous fluids and vasoactive medications aimed at restoring adequate circulation, and the limitations of protocol-based therapy, as guided by recent evidence.


Abstract. Management of temperate forests has the potential to increase carbon sinks and mitigate climate change. However, those opportunities may be confounded by negative climate change impacts. We therefore need a better understanding of climate change alterations to temperate forest carbon dynamics before developing mitigation strategies. The purpose of this project was to investigate the interactions of species composition, fire, management, and climate change in the Copper–Pine Creek valley, a temperate coniferous forest with a wide range of growing conditions. To do so, we used the LANDIS-II modelling framework including the new Forest Carbon Succession extension to simulate forest ecosystems under four different productivity scenarios, with and without climate change effects, until 2050. Significantly, the new extension allowed us to calculate the net sector productivity, a carbon accounting metric that integrates aboveground and belowground carbon dynamics, disturbances, and the eventual fate of forest products. The model output was validated against literature values. The results implied that the species optimum growing conditions relative to current and future conditions strongly influenced future carbon dynamics. Warmer growing conditions led to increased carbon sinks and storage in the colder and wetter ecoregions but not necessarily in the others. Climate change impacts varied among species and site conditions, and this indicates that both of these components need to be taken into account when considering climate change mitigation activities and adaptive management. The introduction of a new carbon indicator, net sector productivity, promises to be useful in assessing management effectiveness and mitigation activities.


This is the first comprehensive and fully documented study of Philadelphia's architecture (originally published in hardcover in 1974), covering all sections of the city and covering buildings from all periods, from those that have stood since Colonial times to influential and representative works of the twentieth century. The documentation is based on the latest research available to the authors, including their own extensive searches both in the archives and on the streets.In all, some 450 buildings and/or locations are listed, and about 240 of these are illustrated, in almost every case with a contemporary photograph. The location of each building is noted, along with its date of construction and its architect, when these are known. When applicable, late major alterations are also cited, by date, architect, and extent. And in many cases, brief commentaries are included that place individual buildings in their historic context or that offer critical evaluations of their architectural merits.The book opens with a historical review of architecture and planning in Philadelphia. This is followed be a guide to the city, divided into seven sections, and an abstracted map that the reader can use to pinpoint the locations of the listed buildings. These sections cover the Center City, Fairmount Park, North Philadelphia, the Northeast, South Philadelphia, West Philadelphia (including the University of Pennsylvania campus), and Germantown.The authors stress a sense of area development and general trends, as opposed to the isolated consideration of separate monuments. However, the heterogeneity and diversity that have characterized every period are amply illustrated - highly individualized buildings are pictured in these pages side by side with more "typical" examples of various styles. Much of the best work of architects long identified with the city is shown, ranging from Edmund Woolley and Andrew Hamilton (the architects of Independence Hall) in the eighteenth century; to William Strickland, Frank Furman, Theophilus Chandler, and John McArthur, Jr., in the nineteenth; and to Louis I. Kahn and Robert Venturi in the the twentieth.The book is a boon for the architecturally minded tourist, whether actually walking about the city using the book as a guide or touring Philadelphia from afar and using the book as a well-ordered substitute for the city itself.


Diatoms are a major food source for aquatic grazing snails and insects, thereby contributing to aquatic food webs. Diatoms are microscopic and are seldom visible; an exception is colonies of Didymosphenia geminata. Didymosphenia secrete long extracellular stalks that can form mats several centimeters thick. Mats occur on single rocks or may cover areas of a streambed. Recently, this species has expanded from its original boreal or alpine, oligotrophic habitat and is appearing in blooms on rocky habitats below dams in regulated rivers. In April 2009, Didymosphenia geminata was collected in the Mountain Fork downstream of Broken Bow Lake, where colonies up to 13 cm in diameter were observed. This is the first record of this species in Oklahoma and is the southernmost known occurrence in the United States. Oklahoma is outside the modeled area of potential occurrence and the artificially low temperature maintained for the trout fishery likely enabled the establishment of Didymosphenia. Didymosphenia mats are unsightly, alter benthic communities, and may affect fish growth, condition, and spawning. In response to the establishment of Didymosphenia, public education, a surveillance program, and local ecological studies are recommended.


The problem of representation has become a central element for the development of human rights norms, not just within international organizations, but within states as well. The problem has been made acute by two significant changes in the organization of power that became visible after the 1950s. On one hand, the idea of the individual became more abstract. Mass democracy became symptomatic of a general trend toward the dissolution of the individual within a mass population, which was incarnated as the aggregation of its group characteristics, its statistics, and data. On the other hand, states were becoming less solid; the constitution of states, and of state power, formerly quite distinct in their forms and secure within their territories, gave way to a polycentric order in which national territory no longer defined and contained a compulsory and singular legal order sitting atop a hierarchy of governance. These two trends have had a noticeable impact, not just on law and governance generally, but more importantly, on the way that representation is understood and practiced. Today, the representation of individuals has become more problematic at the national level as it gives way to other bases of sovereign power derived from international norms. At the international level the individual loses representative capacity. The will of the consensus of states has supplanted that of the citizens of the state in ways that may undermine the legitimacy of governance systems. This paper considers the problem of representation within these intertwined phenomena. To that end, the paper considers the manifestation of these two macrotrends in the context of the governance of global business and human rights regulatory regimes. In the context of the first trend, the problem of who legitimately represents is considered within international organizations producing norms for transposition to the domestic legal orders of states. The specific context will be the public forums of the U.N. Working Group on Business and Human Rights. In the context of the second, the problem of what is the object of representation is considered at the national level, now the site of transposition of international norms. The specific context is the rise of multiple legal regimes each with a fidelity to a distinct representational community. The boundaries of statehood have been redefined and with them the nature and object of representation. Where states once existed, territories serve as "bowls" in which several national legal orders may operate through individuals and entities. Where international organizations once served the community of states, they now serve as vessels that contain mass interests re-incarnated as representative organizations that produce or negotiate formal law and societal norms for self-application. Within this context, simpleminded projects, and in particular the move toward a single comprehensive public law treaty on business and human rights, becomes an anachronistic exercise.


Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing has generated a great deal of social controversy. While the degree to which DTC testing actually causes harm remains uncertain, there is a consensus that the information provided by these companies should be accurate. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Indeed, there are misrepresentations associated with all forms of testing, be it for superficial cosmetic services, athletic ability or disease predisposition. Countering this phenomenon will require a wide range of actions, including the use of formal regulatory mechanisms, the education of primary healthcare providers (in order to give them the tools necessary to advise patients and respond to questions) and more aggressive action by the genetic research community.


Roads are important assets to a country and need a maintenance programme to ensure that the longest life is achieved. Roads have to be cared for and without any maintenances they will lose their intrinsic value. Construction of road pavement generates instability to the naturally subsoil which encounters numerous engineering problems such as settlement, depression, sinkhole and faulting of subsoil. Conventional method of soil remediation work in subsoil such as crack sealing, patching potholes, overlays and grouting technique provide short term solutions to address those symptoms, but not underlying problem. This study permits a novel technique to solve the subsoil foundation problem precisely in sand that exists in the current pavement designs using Polyurethane (PU) grout. PU is a chemical substance that normally used in polymer industries for instance resilience foam seating, rigid foam insulation panels and microcellular foam seals. The study includes four main parts: the first part aims to optimize the composition of PU by varying the mixture of polyol and isocynate under Unconfined Compression Test (UCT). Two hundred fifty two (252) PU samples with different ratio of PU are tested using UCT and the ideal composition of polyurethane foam with 1:1 ratio is obtained. In addition, an empirical model is derived through the compressive strength of PU foam using numerical analysis (ABAQUS). Based on numerical analysis, the average difference between experimental and numerical results ranging between 3 to 5 % which is satisfactorily. The second part addresses the physical and mechanical properties of treated sand with different percentages of PU. The compressive strength of treated sands are determined by conducting the UCT in accordance with BS 1377: 1990: Methods of Test for Soils for Civil Engineering Purposes: Part 7-Shear Strength Test. The stress-strain relationship of the treated sand is presented. The third phase is to conduct a field evaluation on plate bearing test and mackintosh probe to evaluate the bearing pressure in treated soil. It is found that the performance of the bearing pressure in treated soil has improved almost twice as compared to natural soil. In addition, a great reduction in void ratio and swelling index are found in the treated soil as compared to the natural soil. The last part focuses on a laboratory sample sand model to determine and evaluate the performance of polyurethane in treated sand. Conclusively, this study has presented the reliable results and predictions on behavior of treated sand with PU. This study able to address as alternative remediation method whereby its shorten the time of implementation and eliminate the excavation works. In conclusion, this study is proven beneficial for a better environment and can be used as benchmark of ground improvement technique. This study can contribute to the improvement of pavement rehabilitation and ground modification works in Malaysia.


Tropical storms (cyclones, hurricanes, or typhoons) are the most severe form of mechanical disturbance of coral reefs. In 2005, severe tropical cyclone Ingrid crossed the far northern Great Barrier Reef, a region that had not been affected by a major disturbance for several decades, and where benthic data had been collected before the cyclone crossed. This storm provided a unique opportunity to improve understanding of the extent and type of damage inflicted on inshore and offshore coral reefs along a gradient of wind speeds. Modeled maximum wind speeds ranged from 46 m s−1 (equivalent to category 4) near the path to 22 m s−1 (category 1) ~70 km to either side of the path. Surveys of 82 sites on 32 reefs along the wind gradient showed that the types and intensity of disturbance were well explained by local maximum wind speed, and by spatial and biotic factors. While offshore reefs had the deepest depth of damage, inshore reefs had the greatest rates of coral breakage and dislodgement. On a severely affected inshore reef, hard coral cover decreased about 800%, taxonomic richness decreased 250%, the density of coral recruits decreased by 30%, while massive coral cover remained unaltered. Maximum winds <28 m s−1 for <12 h inflicted only minor damage on any reef, but winds >33 m s−1 and >40 m s−1 caused catastrophic damage on inshore and offshore reefs, respectively. Observations from this cyclone were used to predict potential changes in storm‐related coral loss under altered cyclone‐intensity scenarios.


This contribution will serve as the epilogue to a forthcoming volume on executive-legislative relations in the European Union (EU). It begins by noting that the EU's response to the coronavirus pandemic, encouraging though it may be in some respects, has nonetheless reminded us of the constraints placed on a system of supranational governance that lacks a legislative fiscal capacity of its own. Although there is much excitement about the pandemic 'recovery fund' built on borrowing against the EU budget (and distributed, at least in part, through grants), the fund will still be ultimately backed by the fiscal capacities of the member states severally rather than by the EU's own. Autonomous fiscal capacity, however, is arguably the core attribute of a genuinely 'constitutional' form of governance, and more specifically of a genuinely constitutional 'legislature'. The EU's persistent lack of a fiscal capacity of its own leads this epilogue to pose an admittedly radical question: Semantically speaking, is it right even to speak of the EU possessing 'legislative' power at all, at least in the most robust sense of the term, when it otherwise lacks autonomous fiscal capacity?

This question might seem bizarre given key features of the EU's institutional system, notably the existence of an elected assembly—the European Parliament (EP)—as well as that body's participation in something called the 'ordinary legislative procedure' (OLP) in order to make rules of general and prospective application to govern European integration. According to the 'as if'-constitutional framing that dominates most legal analysis of the EU today, the EP and OLP are so-labelled for a simple reason: they are the focal points of 'legislative' power in the European system. And yet, might this labelling be misleading? Might both the EP and OLP merely serve to inject an electoral component into a regulatory system that is fundamentally executive-technocratic (ie administrative) in character? Might specifically 'legislative' power in the EU—in the sense of the legitimate-compulsory mobilization of fiscal and human resources—still be concentrated entirely at the national level?

With these questions in mind, this epilogue examines the many stimulating topics covered by the chapters in this volume: the application of Rodrik's famous 'political trilemma of the world economy' to the EU context; the role of the EP in counter-balancing the powers of the Commission, Council, and European Council; the expansion of national executive power as a consequence of integration—the so-called 'deparliamentarisation' phenomenon—which operates to the obvious detriment of national parliaments (NPs); and finally the respective roles of the EP and NPs, as the case may be, in such areas as trade policy, the supranational regulation of national budgets, as well as several former 'second' and 'third pillar' domains (security, defense, foreign policy, justice and home affairs). Based on this discussion, this epilogue concludes by reflecting on whether the last decade of upheaval in the EU—from the Eurozone crisis to the current pandemic emergency—has brought the EU to a 'critical juncture', in which some form of supranationalised fiscal capacity is now in the offing and which, if realised, might then allow the EU to transcend the current but misleading 'as if' constitutionalism that continues to characterise discussions of EU public law.


Thesis (MA (Industrial Psychology)) – University of Stellenbosch, 2007.%%%%The primary objective of the study was to describe Professor Christiaan Barnard's career development according to the theoretical model formulated by Greenhaus, Callanan and Godshalk (2000). The research design implemented in the study is a exploratory-descriptive psychobiographical case-study that followed an idiographic-morphogenic research strategy and used qualitative data to present a coherent narrative of Barnard's career development. During the study biographical and autobiographical data pertaining to Barnard's career development were collected and analysed.
Barnard was selected as psychobiographical subject through a purposive sampling strategy. Barnard was regarded as an appropriate subject for the study because of his extraordinary and pioneering contributions in the context of organ transplants.
The study used qualitative data and included both primary (autobiographical material) and secondary data (biographical material). The data collection and data analyses were based on an approach suggested by Yin (2003). This approach uses a theoretical model to determine the relevance of data as well as the nature of data that would facilitate the achievement of the research objective. It is implemented by posing specific questions to the data. The data analysis procedure was based on the approach suggested by Huberman and Miles (1994). Their approach comprises three phases, namely data-reduction, data-display, and conclusion drawing or verification.
The researcher ensured ethical standards throughout the study by obtaining Barnard's consent to conduct the study. The researcher treated personal information with respect, empathy, thoughtfulness and prudence. Only data available in the public domain (published biographical and autobiographical material) were considered during the data analysis phase. Lastly, the researcher attempted to interpret data in a responsible and transparent manner.
The analysis of Barnard's career development according to the theoretical model of Greenhaus et al. (2000) demonstrated the value of the model to accurately describe and interpret the career development of extraordinary individuals.


In this paper we present use cases for affective user interfaces (UIs) in cars and how they are perceived by potential users in China and Germany. Emotion-aware interaction is enabled by the improvement of ubiquitous sensing methods and provides potential benefits for both traffic safety and personal well-being. To promote the adoption of affective interaction at an international scale, we developed 20 mobile in-car use cases through an inter-cultural design approach and evaluated them with 65 drivers in Germany and China. Our data shows perceived benefits in specific areas of pragmatic quality as well as cultural differences, especially for socially interactive use cases. We also discuss general implications for future affective automotive UI. Our results provide a perspective on cultural peculiarities and a concrete starting point for practitioners and researchers working on emotion-aware interfaces.


Welcome to the Connectors Study Podcast, a six-part series celebrating oral culture as a legitimate form of knowledge construction, explores various aspects of doing ethnographic research with children on the ERC funded Connectors Study (2014-2019). Researchers, Melissa Nolas, Christos Varvantakis, and Vinnarasan Aruldoss, all based at Goldsmiths, University of London at the time of recording, recount their experiences doing ethnography with children, the historical contingency of the research, sampling, and team work.

In this episode we join Melissa, Christos, and Vinnarasan as they take us through a 'day in the life' during their research in each of their respective cities. From time management to learning a new language, each location brought its own set of challenges.

Topics covered in this episode:

Vinnarasan takes us through his process of learning Telugu, a new language for him, spoken in Hyderabad and across Andhra Pradesh, immersing himself in local life and current affairs, and the challenge of coordinating a large group of participants.
Christos outlines how he balanced field work and interviews with the need to record data and create field notes each week, as well as making connections with the children and fighting the exhaustion that comes from long visits and and a continuous research cycle over an extended period of time.
Melissa describes the difficulty of managing time with a large number of competing tasks on any given day, and her role as an 'administrator' for the 50 families she was working with.
The commitments each researcher had as well as their research work, and the little things that tend to be forgotten or omitted when people talk about 'the life of a researcher'.
The researchers:

Melissa Nolas
Melissa Nolas is an interdisciplinary social scientist, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Principal Investigator of the ERC funded Connectors Study. Her research focuses on childhood publics and children's relationships to public life; child, youth, and family welfare, well-being and social support; civic and political practices across the life course; multimodal ethnography and publics creating methodologies. She has published widely on these topics. She is the co-editor of the online journal entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.

Christos Varvantakis
Christos Varvantakis is an anthropologist, working as researcher at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has a BA in Sociology (University of Crete, Greece), an MA in Visual Anthropology (Goldsmiths, UK) and a PhD (Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany). His research focuses on the intersections of childhood and public life, politics and urban environments, as well as on visual and multimodal research methodologies. He has carried out ethnographic research in Greece, India and Germany over the last 15 years. Christos is Head of Programming of Ethnofest, an international festival of ethnographic film held in Athens, Greece every year.

Vinnarasan Aruldoss
Vinnarasan Aruldoss is a Research Fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He obtained his PhD in Social Policy at The University of Edinburgh and prior to that worked several years with a number of civil society organisations, government departments and multilateral agencies as a social development practitioner in India. He is interested in inter-disciplinary research that contributes knowledge to the broader domains of childhood, early years provision and social policy analysis. He has published mainly in the fields of sociology of childhood, early years education, political sociology and childhood policy.

Next time
In the final episode of the series our researchers discuss the process of coordinating and collaborating on such a large scale project that took place in such wildly different locations around the world.


For leading law firms in the City of London, diversity and inclusion has become an important human resources strategy over the past 15 years. A recent focus on social class within the sector has been encouraged by increasing governmental concerns relating to social mobility, which acknowledge that elite professions, particularly the law, have become more socially exclusive over the past 30 years. Based on a detailed qualitative study of six leading law firms conducted between 2006 and 2010, this article asks: why do leading law firms discriminate on the basis of social class? It argues that discrimination is a response to conflicting commercial imperatives: the first to attract talent and the second to reduce risk and enhance image. The article describes these dynamics, emphasizing the role played by the ambiguity of knowledge. It argues that until these conflicting demands are reconciled, organizational and state-sponsored initiatives centred on the 'business case' for diversity may achieve only limited success.


Activators (agonists) of the nuclear receptor, peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR?) are therapeutically used to tackle hyperglycemia associated with type 2 diabetes. Current therapeutic compounds, thiazolidinedione used to sensitize cells to insulin have been reported to adversely affect the body. In view of this, the discovery of novel ligands is highly pertinent. Plant products have been documented, to be a promising pool of structures for drug discovery, and the PPAR?-activating potential of a wide range of natural products have been reported. In the present study, Computer-aided drug design techniques were employed in the screening of pharmacologically relevant compounds of medicinal plant. Seventy (70) phyto-ligands (phytochemicals) characterized from Stevia rebaudiana and obtained from literatures were screened for their agonistic effects on peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR?) belonging to the nuclear receptor family. Austroinulin was the lead compound with a binding energy of -8.1kcal/mol. The pharmacological kinetic analysis of austroinulin was determined. The results of this study demonstrated that the phyto-ligand (austroinulin) exhibit agonistic activity on PPAR? and could be a potential insulin sensitizer


This exploration of the Sheffield armaments industry focuses on four in-depth case studies of John Brown, Cammell-Laird, Thomas Firth and Hadfields to examine the business and technology of the industry. It builds on the work of Tweedale and Trebilcock on Sheffield and armaments, and advances the argument that during the period of study from 1900 to 1930, the city was one of the most important centres for armaments research and production anywhere in the world.
The business of the armaments industry is explored through an examination of the evolving links the industry had with the Government against the backdrop of an uncertain trading environment, and the managerial connections established between the state and private industry. Also explored are the collaborative, collusive and independent defensive measures enacted by the industry to counter uncertainty in the industry, through collaborative business arrangements and various approaches to entering international markets for armaments. An examination of the business of the armaments industry also highlights the value of the technological investment made by the industry.
At the centre of exploring the technology of the armaments industry, a reconstruction of its technological history is undertaken using patent and archival records, highlighting the nuances and research dead-ends of development in the industry. Of central importance is the notion of spin-off and the interactions between armaments and metallurgical developments in the creation of a pool of knowledge to be utilised for future research into alloy steels, and the notion of path-dependent technological research. Also advanced is the concept of an innovation system centred on Sheffield, and an exploration of the important national and international links advanced by the industry


Viet Nam's Doi Moi reforms opened the economy to the world and set structural transformations and society in motion. In this context, a relevant question is whether structural transformation has created new employment opportunities and facilitated upwards social mobility. Social mobility, captured by labour and income mobility, is a useful concept to measure the extent to which opportunities exist in a society. Using panel data, this article finds that Viet Nam's labour market shows some flexibility, but does not follow a clear trend. An expected predominance of the industrial and service sectors and wage employment could not be found. The income distribution is open, and four fifths of the households change their position. In essence, income mobility continues to follow traditional patterns: agriculture is still key to advance households' well-being, especially in times of uncertainty. The structural changes are still not an important driving force for income mobility.