This article presents methodological reflections on the different streams of knowledge that are drawn upon during interpreted interviews and the shifts of power between (1) the interviewer, (2) the interpreter/co-researcher, and (3) the interviewee. Interpreters are increasingly seen as active agents in the interview process, and they act as cultural brokers. Interpretation by a nurse researcher introduces further challenges and benefits to the interview dynamic, which was explored through reflexive discussions with an independent researcher. These challenges include conducting interviews in a clinical setting, where the health professional–patient relationship remains active. A modified discourse analysis was used to examine the subject positioning in the interview situation and the power negotiations that ensued. The main conclusion that can be drawn from these reflexive accounts is that the use of different streams of knowledge (experiential, clinical, cultural, and academic) enhanced the interview interaction, and power relations were successfully negotiated to facilitate rapport and data collection. Reflexivity provides an important tool for identifying, and learning from, the challenges and benefits of working with an interpreter, who is also a co-researcher with multiple professional roles.


Purpose The pharmacokinetics of phenytoin is complicated by genetic and environmental differences. It is, therefore, important to monitor the serum concentrations in patients who receive phenytoin. Because most of the phenytoin in serum is bound to proteins, the level of serum albumin influences the amount of free phenytoin. Materials and Methods We compared the measured and calculated free phenytoin levels in epileptic patients who were taking phenytoin monotherapy, using the Sheiner-Tozer equation. A total of 49 patients (30 men and 19 women; age range, 15 - 87 years) were included in the study and their trough serum phenytoin and albumin concentrations were analyzed. Results The linear correlation between free and total phenytoin concentrations was moderate (r = 0.822, p < 0.001). The mean difference between measured and calculated free phenytoin was large (0.65 ± 0.88 µg/mL; 95% confidence interval (CI), -1.11 to 2.41). After dividing the patients into groups by albumin concentration, hypoalbuminemic patients (< 3.5 g/dL) more often had a greater percent difference (≥ 20%) than observed in the normoalbuminemic (≥ 3.5 g/dL) group. Conclusion In hypoalbuminemic patients, the measurement of free phenytoin level is necessary to properly evaluate the phenytoin level than that calculated from total phenytoin level.


Based on theoretical basis of modernism, this research aims to explore the influence of institutionalizated subisolation of convicts in enclosed zones of penitentiaries. The research attempted to explore indicators of psychosocial crises of subisolated convicts, reveal the influence of psychological pain on the behaviour of crisis-ridden subisolated convicts, and verify the basic blocking force of channels that should satisfy the needs of subisolated convicts, that is, psychological pain. The applied methods included analysis of scientific literature and documents, longitudinal (ten-year) observation, case analysis, interrogation, mathematical statistics, and triangulation. The research was granted permission (Oxford, USA, 2002) to adapt the tanatology professor E.S. Shneidman's suicidologic research, which analyses the influence of psychological pain on the behaviour of crisis-ridden subisolated convicts. Participants of the research: psychosocial crisis-ridden subisolated convicts, and suicidal convicts subisolated in solitary cells. The research results revealed the following: 1) the psychosocial pattern shamehumiliation was identified as a major primary reason for psychological pain; 2) accumulation of unsatisfied needs provokes psychological pain, which, unless need satisfying channels are freed from blocking harmful agents, becomes a blocking agent itself; 3) the hypothesis that it is possible to overcome psychosocial crises by removing psychological pain was substantiated. Conclusions: 1) the earlier indicators of psychosocial crises of subisolated convicts are identified, the more effective can be controlling of the crisis-ridden behaviour; 2) after introduction of conditions eliminating shame and humiliation, needs of subisolated convicts become harmonious and positively hierarchical; 3) meeting the needs of subisolated convicts leads to psychosocial health.


In the last 20 years, several authors have described the possible changes that computers may effect in language testing. Since ARAL's last review of general language testing trends (Clapham, 2000), authors in the Cambridge Language Assessment Series have offered various visions of how computer technology could alter the testing of second language skills. This chapter reflects these perspectives as it charts the paths recently taken in the field. Initial steps were made in the conversion of existing item types and constructs already known from paper-and- pencil testing into formats suitable for computer delivery. This conversion was closely followed by the introduction of computer-adaptive tests, which aim to make more, and perhaps, better, use of computer capabilities to tailor tests more closely to individual abilities and interests. Movement toward greater use of computers in assessment has been coupled with an assumption that computer-based tests should be better than their traditional predecessors, and some related steps have been taken. Corpus linguistics has provided tools to create more authentic assessments; the quest for authenticity has also motivated inclusion of more complex tasks and constructs. Both these innovations have begun to be incorporated into computer-based language tests. Natural language processing has also provided some tools for computerized scoring of essays, particularly relevant in large-scale language testing programs. Although computer use has not revolutionized all aspects of language testing, recent efforts have produced some of the research, technological advances, and improved pedagogical understanding needed to support progress.


Over the last decade, a lot of research has been directed toward integrating performance analysis into the software development process. Traditional software development methods focus on software correctness, introducing performance issues later in the development process. This approach does not take into account the fact that performance problems may require considerable changes in design, for example, at the software architecture level, or even worse at the requirement analysis level. Several approaches were proposed in order to address early software performance analysis. Although some of them have been successfully applied, we are still far from seeing performance analysis integrated into ordinary software development. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of recent research in the field of model-based performance prediction at software development time in order to assess the maturity of the field and point out promising research directions.


There is a somewhat pervasive belief in much of the fisheries literature (especially that relating to small-scale fisheries in the developing world) that fishers are among the 'poorest of the poor'. The purpose of this review therefore is to review historic and contemporary research into fisher poverty. Our review commences by acknowledging the paucity of studies on the levels of (income) poverty within the sector and highlights the fact that, somewhat paradoxically, a growing number of studies are suggesting that average incomes for fishing households outstrip those recorded by non-fishing households in the same areas. Nevertheless, these findings must be qualified as poverty cannot be captured exclusively in income terms ‐ and social manifestations of poverty (low literacy levels, reduced access to health care, education, water and sanitation facilities) may be more acute within the fisheries sector. Equally, while fisher households may be more vulnerable (given their lifestyles/location) to exogenous shocks (such as tsunamis), the sector is not a homogenous one and factors such as technological change may also induce the impoverishment of certain subgroups of fishers over time. As a consequence, fisher households have derived a variety of coping mechanisms, mechanisms which (we argue) militate against considering 'fishing' as an activity in isolation from other facets of the household livelihood strategy. One response, as we note, to this has been the application of livelihoods analysis as a technique for assessing (and redressing) fisher poverty. Championed initially by the Sustainable Livelihoods Fisheries Programme (SFLP) operating in West Africa from 1999 to 2006, the technique has subsequently been deployed in a number of other regions/fisheries. Our review then moves on to assess how interventions within the fisheries sector can contribute to fisher poverty reduction. At the macroeconomic level, while, the emphasis historically has been on the sector's contribution to domestic nutritional requirements and the goal of food security, more recent research has examined the prioritization of the sector within national development plans and poverty reduction strategies. At the microeconomic level, we provide two contrasting examples to show that, while poverty-reducing policy interventions are to be welcomed at the local level, the heterogeneity of the local environment militates against the prescription of a 'one size fits all' approach to poverty reduction. This theme is picked up in the concluding comments of the review, where directions for further research are also highlighted.


Cognitive behavioral analysis system of psychotherapy (CBASP) is designed to help patients with chronic depression improve the negative social and personal impacts of this disorder. This volume, written by experienced practitioners of CBASP, creatively explores the principles and practice of CBASP in a new, unusual, and engaging fashion. Interspersed between theoretical chapters, you will find yourself in the therapy room with Maggie (the therapist) and Chris (the patient).
Using authentic dialog, you will experience how the different stages of therapy unfold: How, from their first-person perspectives, Christopher and Maggie experience the application of the CBASP model, and how Helen (the supervisor) helps Maggie to understand difficult encounters in therapy. This book helps you prepare for your CBASP sessions by providing essential information and prompts in a clearly arranged manner, as well as exercises to verify your progress and learning goals.
This creative and descriptive approach to understanding the hopes, fears, and concerns of patients and therapists engaged in a course of CBASP psychotherapy is essential reading for clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, other mental health professionals, as well as students wanting to know how to successfully apply CBASP.


Digital signal processors (DSP) are beginning to dominate the communications industry. The demand of the industry is to provide smaller, lighter, lower powered communication technology without sacrificing performance. This study investi gates the application of an alternative method of implementation for a digital frequency modulation receiver, the cross-correlator. Instead of using a traditional fixed point DSP based platform, residue number systems (RNS) are applied to the application. The main focus of this work iey to evaluate the performance of an RlNS based cross-correlator receiver and compare it to the same receiver using traditional fixed point DSP techniques. Theoretical calculations are performed on the receiver and a model is developed. The model is developedto allow for the analysis of both the fixed point DSP based receiver as well as the RNS based receiver. This model is used to analyze the bit error rate (BER) performance of the receiver for various input signal to noise ratios. Comparison of the model's BER results indicates that an RNS based receiver using 6-bits for quantization of all receiver inputs and 6-bits at the output of the receiver performs as well as an 8-bit fixed point DSP based receiver. 11 The cross-correlator receiver is also simulated to determine the accuracy of the model. Both the RNS and DSP based methods of implementation are simulated. The BER results from the simulation show that the RNS based receiver using 6-bits for quantization and output does not perform as well as the 8-bit DSP based system. However by using 8-bits for the quantization of the low pass filter coefficients, the BER performance of the RNS based system significantly improves. The model and simulation provide similar performance ratings, however the model is not as affected by the characteristics of the low pass filters.


Connect and engage across channels with the new customersConnect is the ultimate marketing guide to becoming more relevant, effective, and successful within the new marketplace. Written by a team of marketing experts serving Fortune 500 brands, this book outlines the massive paradigm shift currently taking place within the industry, and provides the insight and perspective marketers need to stay on board. Readers will find guidance toward reaching a customer base that sees marketers as an unnecessary annoyance, and strategies for engaging those customers at touch points throughout the customer lifecycle. The book's scope encompasses both digital and real-life avenues, discussing the new ways of thinking and the new tools and processes that allow marketers to function in the new era where digital customer experiences are increasingly important.Marketing is undergoing a revolution to rival the impact of Gutenberg's printing press. Customers are in control, with more choice and more access than ever before, and they refuse to be "sold to" or "managed." Many marketing professionals are flailing for a new strategy while the winners are clearly jumping ahead Connect takes readers inside the winners' world to learn the approach that's engaging the new consumer.Discover the technology and processes that allow marketers to remain relevantCraft a personal, relevant, and accessible customer journey that engages the connected customerKeep in touch throughout the customer's life cycle, both online and offlineLink digital goals and metrics to business objectives for a more relevant strategySmart marketers have moved to a higher level that achieves business objectives while increasing relevance to the customer. Connect provides readers a roadmap to this new approach, and the tools that make it work.


In the rapidly evolving world of the New Economy, there is an explosion of opportunities. New players are appearing on the scene and new forms of cooperation are continuously experimented. In this frame, one of the major problems is represented by the difficulty of establishing a partnership among different players (who may not know each other before), making them sharing a common understanding of a given application domain in a short time. The construction of a common Ontology is a promising solution to this problem. In this paper, we present the motivations and the main lines of SymOntos, an Ontology management system under development at LEKS (Laboratory for Enterprise Knowledge and Systems, IASI-CNR), and its use within of the tourism domain. Such a work has been developed within the FETISH European Project.


The authors present case histories relating to experience gained over 18 months of using deantigenic osseous grafts together with platelet growth factor for posterior spine arthrodesis. The spinal column was the last section of the skeleton to recover from the use of this kind of bone graft to promote spinal fusion. This is due to the negative experience encountered during the proposals bought forward during the 1960s and 1970s by French orthopaedic surgeons who used heterologous lyophilised bone for long vertebral arthrodesis. The high incidence of pseudoarthrosis developed as a result of difficulties in absorption of the skeletal implant, which, in order to ensure sufficient mechanical resistance, should have been thicker (8 mm). Therefore it could not be assimilated. This then resulted in relying only on external protection (plastered brace) to provide the necessary rigidity during the process of fusion. The beginning of stable synthesis obtained with transpeduncular fixation and double instrumentation as used in the Cotrel Doubousset technique and methods derived from it made it possible to maintain primary stability over time, therefore positively influencing the process of consolidation. This is why the practice of exclusively using osseous derivations has grown only in the past few years in vertebral surgery, preferring to implant small chips which can be assimilated much easier and to avoid having to search for mechanically resistant areas for bone replacement. In conclusion, the use of heterologous bone grafts in the vertebral column represents a situation similar to that in other mobile osseous areas, in which the immobilisation depends on the use of a mechanical instrument (when it concerns short arthrodesis 2–3 segments). In the case of long spinal fusion such as in correcting vertebral deformity (scoliosis and kyphosis), the problem is more complicated, even though today's new biological tools (large extension of the bed of arthrodesis) make this possible and offer the advantages of the lack of problems at the donor site. In these cases it is particularly suitable to routinely combine heterologous bone replacement with growth factors (osteoinductive bone proteins) for treatment, which according to our preliminary results should notably shorten the period of assimilation and the fusion healing.


The need of a better adaptation of crops to drought is an issue of increasing urgency. However, enhancing the tolerance of maize has, therefore, proved to be somewhat elusive in terms of plant breeding. In that context, proper phenotyping remains as one of the main factors limiting breeding advance. Topics covered by this review include the conceptual framework for identifying secondary traits associated with yield response to drought and how to measure these secondary traits in practice.


Domestic central heating systems result in micro bubble nucleation and detachment at the boiler wall due to the presence of supersaturated conditions in the system. Such conditions originate due to the widespread use of untreated tap water in such systems and due to the air leakage into the system's closed loop circuit during the daily thermal cycling. The presence of air bubbles in such systems results in a number of undesired effects such as corrosion, blockages, noise and the filling of radiators with air due to the deposit of the micro bubbles in the radiators. As a result, a loss in the heat transfer area of the radiator occurs thus resulting in an inefficient use, consequently increasing the carbon footprint of such widely used systems. Therefore, the capture of micro bubbles at the exit point of the boiler should result in improved system efficiencies. A comprehensive knowledge of the expected bubble production rate and bubble size is important for an efficient deaeration system. To date, no studies have been published on the fundamentals of bubble production and size in wet central heating systems, therefore, the importance of this paper for the building services industry. Experimental results on a test rig incorporating a typical 19 kW (rated) domestic gas fired boiler show typical micro bubble production rates ranging between 0.03 to 0.47 litres of nitrogen gas per hour with a shift in the system heating load. An analysis of the expected bubble diameters was done at different system conditions. Bubbles with average diameters within the range of 0.13 and 0.39 mm were observed. A comparison with Winterton's finite angle force balance model resulted in reasonable predictions.


Evidence from animal studies points to the importance of the parahippocampal region (PHR) [including entorhinal, perirhinal, and parahippocampal (PHC) cortices] for recognition of visual stimuli. Recent findings in animals suggest that PHR may also be involved in visual associative recognition memory for configurations of stimuli. Thus far, however, such involvement has not been demonstrated in humans. In fact, it has been argued that associative recognition in humans is critically dependent on the hippocampal formation (HF). To better understand the division of function between HF and PHR during recognition memory in humans, we measured the activity of both areas in healthy young adults during an associative recognition memory task using functional magnetic resonance imaging. To more precisely characterize the nature of the associations that might be coded by the HF and PHR during recognition, subjects were required to learn and were later tested for associations based on either the spatial arrangements of two stimuli or the identity of two stimuli (a face and a tool). An area in the PHC was found to be more active for recognized old configurations than new configurations in both the spatial and identity conditions. The HF, on the other hand, was more active for recognition of new configurations than old configurations and also more active in the spatial than the identity condition. These data highlight the involvement of PHR in the long-term coding of associative relationships between stimuli and help to clarify the nature of its functional distinction from the HF.


Abstract Acrorumohra subreflexipinna, an endemic fern of Taiwan, has been suspected to be a hybrid species. The aims of this study were to detect possible multiple origins of this species, determine the genetic variation in different populations, and clarify their lineages. One nuclear and three organellar DNA fragments were sequenced to determine parentage of this putative hybrid and to examine genetic differentiation among populations. Sequence data support the conclusion that A. subreflexipinna arose from the hybridization of A. hasseltii and A. diffracta, and the hybridization was uni-directional, i.e., based on the assumption of maternal inheritance in organellar DNA, the former was its maternal species while the latter was its paternal source. A convincing interpretation is that the female gametes of A. hasseltii gametophyte could be fertilized by the male gametes from apogamous A. diffracta. Unique nuclear alleles present in different populations of A. subreflexipinna and A. hasseltii demonstrated that hybridization occurred many times independently. The nuclear haplotypes present in A. subreflexipinna were subsets of those found in the parental species, and A. subreflexipinna always had lower haplotype diversity than A. hasseltii at sympatric sites. Our results show that any genetic variation of A. subreflexipinna came from its parents and that it maintains this significant genetic variability because of recurrent hybridization.


The extensive use of the Geographical Information Systems, but also of their extensions, in fields that do not necessary connect to geography, but allow for the implementation of methodologies based on the analysis of spatially referenced data, had resulted into new applications and methodological approaches to answer specific research questions. This paper proposes such an extension from the real space define by longitude and latitude to a virtual space defined by two time parameters, month and year, in order to reveal specific temporal patterns of climatologic and ecological phenomena. The methodology is applied in two studies, one aiming to analyze temperature and precipitation data in Romania over a long period, and the other to analyze the effects of anthropic impact and ecological restoration on the density of specific groups of aquatic organisms. In the first study, the method was able to detect climate hazards, while in the second the results had shown different behaviors of analyzed groups, relevant to their ecology. In both cases, the proposed methodology proves its potential for being used as an exploratory research tool in climatology, ecology, and other fields as well. Quantitative Methods Inquires 81


This book is the result of a collective research effort performed during many years in both Sweden and Spain. It is the result of attempting to develop a new field of research that could we denominate «human act informatics.» The goal has been to use the technologies of information to the study of the human act in general, including embodied acts and disembodied acts. The book presents a theory of the quantification of the informational value of human acts as order, opposing the living order against entropy. We present acting as a set of decisions and choices aimed to create order and to impose Modernity. Karl Popper's frequency theory of probability is applied to characterize human acts regarding their degree of freedom and to set up a scale of order in human decisions.
The traditional theory of economics and social science characterize the human act as rational, utilitarian and ethical. Our results emphasize that the unique significance of an act lies in its capacity to generate order. An adequate methodology is then presented to defend such hypothesis according to which, the rationality respective irrationality of acting, is in fact only a function of the act's organizational capacity. From this perspective, it has been necessary to define «order» respective «disorder» as operative concepts that allowed the comparison of the organizational differences generated by each kind of act. According to the presented conclusions, the spontaneity of living, as unconscious thinking, dreaming, loving, etc. and the mainstream of the human acts, are utilitarian, but in an irrational way; they are rooted in unconscious drifts and therefore must be considered irrational-utility acts.


My concern in this paper is to contribute to the recovery of the therapeutic dimension of the early modern notion of imagination, which demands further interrogation despite the increased scholarly attention of recent years, by looking at the context of seventeenth-century practical English treatises on the faculties and passions of the soul. What I would like to argue is that this literature makes room for a set of prescriptions aimed at achieving mental, bodily and moral well-being that rely on the imagination and the passions and involve maintaining the two in constant activity. My claim is that this remedy emerges as a consequence of the authors" close allegiance to the Greek-Arab medical tradition and its physiological account of mental and affective motion, which erodes the Stoic ideal of "tranquillity" and reinterprets it as a form of "idleness" or "stagnation". My paper then looks at what vision of the good life and what type of interaction among the faculties of the mind is consistent with such prescriptions. Building on the work of McMahon (1976), Jackson (1989; 1990), James (1998; 2006) and Lyons (2005), I shall investigate this set of questions in a selection of texts authored by Thomas Wright (1601, 1604), Robert Burton (1621), Edward Reynolds (1640) and Walter Charleton (1674).


The aim of the present study is to analyze the adnominal adjective in Attic and Modern Greek. In both languages the adjective can precede or follow the modified noun while a definite article can precede both the adjective and the noun. It is stated in literature that the adjective functions either as attributive or as predicative modifier. Using alternative terminology (by Huddleston and Pullum 2002) for all functions, firstly I propose that in Modern Greek there can be also one function, namely parathesis, which is assumed to be a function realized only by nouns. I also suggest for both languages that the predictive modifier is actually the same function as what is called predicative adjunct. A further aim of this project is to examine whether the variation in constructions found in both languages is just for emphasis, as suggested in the literature. It is argued that the presence and position of the definite article, the word order and the kind adjective (ascriptive/associative) are factors affecting the function and semantics of AdjP. It is also argued that the same constructions in these two languages are not equal: the default word order is different (Noun, Adjective for Attic Greek and Adjective, Noun for Modern Greek), while the less common constructions in both languages are used in different situations.


Contains more than 3,000 ASL Sign Illustrations, fully searchable full-color DVD featuring every sign, special ASL classifier section, and complete index of English Synonyms for every sign. Created by an unparalleled board of experts led by renowned ASL linguist and poet Clayton Valli, "The Gallaudet Dictionary of American Sign Language" represents the culmination of more than five years of meticulous assessment and labor. More than 3,000 illustrations arrayed in this volume display the most useful selection of signs to be found in any single ASL reference resource. Each sign illustration, including depictions of fingerspelling when appropriate, incorporates a complete list of English synonyms. A full, alphabetized English index enables users to cross-reference words and signs throughout the entire volume. The comprehensive introduction lays the groundwork for learning ASL by explaining in plain language the workings of ASL syntax and structure. It also offers examples of idioms and describes the antecedents of ASL, its place in the Deaf community, and its meaning in Deaf culture. This extraordinary reference also provides a special section unique to this volume on ASL classifiers and their use. Readers will find complete descriptions of the various classifiers and examples of how to use these integral facets of ASL. The full-color DVD included with this dictionary features a diverse group of native ASL signers demonstrating how to form each of the 3,000 signs. Fully searchable, users can view a sign and quickly go to its synonyms. This and the many other exclusive features in "The Gallaudet Dictionary of American Sign Language" combine to make it the outstanding ASL reference for all instructors, students, and users of ASL.


Multi-headed attention heads are a mainstay in transformer-based models. Different methods have been proposed to classify the role of each attention head based on the relations between tokens which have high pair-wise attention. These roles include syntactic (tokens with some syntactic relation), local (nearby tokens), block (tokens in the same sentence) and delimiter (the special [CLS], [SEP] tokens). There are two main challenges with existing methods for classification: (a) there are no standard scores across studies or across functional roles, and (b) these scores are often average quantities measured across sentences without capturing statistical significance. In this work, we formalize a simple yet effective score that generalizes to all the roles of attention heads and employs hypothesis testing on this score for robust inference. This provides us the right lens to systematically analyze attention heads and confidently comment on many commonly posed questions on analyzing the BERT model. In particular, we comment on the co-location of multiple functional roles in the same attention head, the distribution of attention heads across layers, and effect of fine-tuning for specific NLP tasks on these functional roles. The code is made publicly available at https://github.com/iitmnlp/heads-hypothesis


In the paper I take up the defence of a theological ignorance of the authors connected with the so called New Atheism intellectual movement. Many criticisms have been directed at them concerning their lack of a deep knowledge in theology. The charges put forward was related to what I consider two levels of objections raised by theistic critics: epistemological and practical. Answering these two issues of epistemological validity of theology and practical consequences of institutionalized religions I show that the charges are not applicable. Although the opinion that the New Atheists are largely ingnorant on theological questions may well be true, nevertheless it cannot be considered as a charge.


We study learning statistical properties from strategic agents with private information. In this problem, agents must be incentivized to truthfully reveal their information even when it cannot be directly verified. Moreover, the information reported by the agents must be aggregated into a statistical estimate. We study two fundamental statistical properties: estimating the mean of an unknown Gaussian, and linear regression with Gaussian error. The information of each agent is one point in a Euclidean space.Our main results are two mechanisms for each of these problems which optimally aggregate the information of agents in the truth-telling equilibrium:• A minimal (non-revelation) mechanism for large populations — agents only need to report one value, but that value need not be their point.• A mechanism for small populations that is non-minimal — agents need to answer more than one question.These mechanisms are "informed truthful" mechanisms where reporting unaltered data (truth-telling) 1) forms a strict Bayesian Nash equilibrium and 2) has strictly higher welfare than any oblivious equilibrium where agents' strategies are independent of their private signals. We also show a minimal revelation mechanism (each agent only reports her signal) for a restricted setting and use an impossibility result to prove the necessity of this restriction.We build upon the peer prediction literature in the single-question setting; however, most previous work in this area focuses on discrete signals, whereas our setting is inherently continuous, and we further simplify the agents' reports.


This paper describes a method of generating a Kanji hierarchical structured dictionary for stroke-number and stroke-order free handwriting recognition based on sub-stroke HMM. In stroke-based methods, a large number of stroke-order variations can be easily expressed by just adding different stroke sequences to the dictionary and it is not necessary to train new reference patterns. The hierarchical structured dictionary has an advantage that thousands of stroke-order variations of Kanji characters can be produced using a small number of stroke-order rules defining Kanji parts. Moreover, the recognition speed is fast since common sequences are shared in a substroke network, even if the total number of stroke-order combinations becomes enormous practically. In experiments, 300 different stroke-order rules of Kanji parts were statistically chosen by using 60 writers' handwritings of 1016 educational Kanji characters. By adding these new stroke-order rules to the dictionary, about 9000 variations of different stroke-orders were generated for 2965 JIS 1st level Kanji characters. As a result, we successfully improved the recognition accuracy from 82.6% to 90.2% for stroke-order free handwritings.


This study set out to analyse how parenting and the needs of the children are assessed by social authorities and courts in families where one or both parents have an intellectual disability (ID). The texts of child welfare investigations and court judgments in 16 cases of care orders concerning parents (30) with IDs and their children (29) in two counties in Sweden were analysed by a hermeneutic case study. The study shows that even though many of the children are described as already harmed by neglect, clear assessments of care needs are not presented and it is uncertain which of the children's needs a placement in a family home is assumed to satisfy. The conclusion of the article is that, even though no direct discrimination can be established, the particular individual and structural difficulties of the families' life circumstances are not taken into consideration. This can be seen as a discriminatory practice.


The well-known Lighthill-Whitham-Richards (LWR) kinematic model of traffic flow models the evolution of the local density of cars by a nonlinear scalar conservation law. The transition between free and congested flow regimes can be described by a flux or velocity function that has a discontinuity at a determined density. A numerical scheme to handle the resulting LWR model with discontinuous velocity was proposed in [J.D. Towers, A splitting algorithm for LWR traffic models with flux discontinuities in the unknown, J. Comput. Phys., 421 (2020), article 109722]. A similar scheme is constructed by decomposing the discontinuous velocity function into a Lipschitz continuous function plus a Heaviside function and designing a corresponding splitting scheme. The part of the scheme related to the discontinuous flux is handled by a semi-implicit step that does, however, not involve the solution of systems of linear or nonlinear equations. It is proved that the whole scheme converges to a weak solution in the scalar case. The scheme can in a straightforward manner be extended to the multiclass LWR (MCLWR) model, which is defined by a hyperbolic system of \begin{document}$ N $\end{document} conservation laws for \begin{document}$ N $\end{document} driver classes that are distinguished by their preferential velocities. It is shown that the multiclass scheme satisfies an invariant region principle, that is, all densities are nonnegative and their sum does not exceed a maximum value. In the scalar and multiclass cases no flux regularization or Riemann solver is involved, and the CFL condition is not more restrictive than for an explicit scheme for the continuous part of the flux. Numerical tests for the scalar and multiclass cases are presented.


How do we get a new chief justice? Traditionally, the President decides between nominating a newcomer and promoting a sitting associate justice, and places either nominee before the Senate for its advice and consent. But this is not constitutionally required, or at least not evidently so, and there is no better time to confront this fact. This short essay explains that Congress could develop a different mechanism for promoting justices without subjecting them to a second appointment - providing, for example, that the position would rotate among sitting justices based on seniority, or that the justices would elect a chief from among themselves. This could be the exclusive method for selecting a chief justice, or merely a default that would confront the President and the Senate with incumbents to be dispossessed if they lacked merit. In any case, there is a good argument as a matter of law that our tradition can be changed, and that argument - and the potential advantages of alternative methods, in terms of decreasing the opportunities for strategic behavior by the political branches and by the justices themselves - deserves fuller consideration.


What do Dizzy Dean, Catfish Metkovich, John Boccabella, Bill Buckner, Mark Prior, and Kevin Hart all have in common? They all wore number 22 for the Chicago Cubs, even though seven decades have passed between the last time Dizzy Dean buttoned up a Cubs uniform with that number and the first time reliever Kevin Hart performed the same routine. Since the Chicago Cubs first adopted uniform numbers in 1932, the team has handed out only 71 numbers to more than 1,100 players. That's a lot of overlap. It also makes for a lot of good stories. "Cubs by the Numbers" tells those stories for every Cub since '32, from 1930s outfielder Ethan Allen to current ace Carlos Zambrano. This book lists the players alphabetically and by number, but the biographies help trace the history of baseball's most beloved team in a new way. For Cubs fans, anyone who ever wore the uniform is like family. "Cubs by the Numbers" reintroduces readers to some of their long-lost ancestors, even ones they think they already know.


I Got up, dressed, and walked to the airport. Everyone else was driving as fast as they could to beat it out of the city, out of New Zealand, to catch the first flight leaving for the colonies - Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, even Darwin. There were incredible statistics. Every week, thirty thousand people - equal to the population of Gisborne, that lovely, beachy city on the East Coast, where Captain Cook first made landfall - were fleeing New Zealand, wanting away, deserting the ship that wasn't so much sinking as going round in circles.


A novel online-computation approach to optimal control of nonlinear, noise-affected systems with continuous state and control spaces is presented. In the proposed algorithm, system noise is explicitly incorporated into the control decision. This leads to superior results compared to state-of-the-art nonlinear controllers that neglect this influence. The solution of an optimal nonlinear controller for a corresponding deterministic system is employed to find a meaningful state space restriction. This restriction is obtained by means of approximate state prediction using the noisy system equation. Within this constrained state space, an optimal closed-loop solution for a finite decision-making horizon (prediction horizon) is determined within an adaptively restricted optimization space. Interleaving stochastic dynamic programming and value function approximation yields a solution to the considered optimal control problem. The enhanced performance of the proposed discrete-time controller is illustrated by means of a scalar example system. Nonlinear model predictive control is applied to address approximate treatment of infinite-horizon problems by the finite-horizon controller.


Theories to explain the prevalence of sex and recombination have long been a central theme of evolutionary biology. Yet despite decades of attention dedicated to the evolution of sex and recombination, the widespread pattern of sex differences in the recombination rate is not well understood and has received relatively little theoretical attention. Here, we argue that female meiotic drivers—alleles that increase in frequency by exploiting the asymmetric cell division of oogenesis—present a potent selective pressure favoring the modification of the female recombination rate. Because recombination plays a central role in shaping patterns of variation within and among dyads, modifiers of the female recombination rate can function as potent suppressors or enhancers of female meiotic drive. We show that when female recombination modifiers are unlinked to female drivers, recombination modifiers that suppress harmful female drive can spread. By contrast, a recombination modifier tightly linked to a driver can increase in frequency by enhancing female drive. Our results predict that rapidly evolving female recombination rates, particularly around centromeres, should be a common outcome of meiotic drive. We discuss how selection to modify the efficacy of meiotic drive may contribute to commonly observed patterns of sex differences in recombination.


General Game Playing aims to create AI systems that can understand the rules of new games and learn to play them effectively without human intervention. The recent proposal for general game-playing robots extends this to AI systems that play games in the real world. Execution monitoring becomes a necessity when moving from a virtual to a physical environment, because in reality actions may not be executed properly and (human) opponents may make illegal game moves. We develop a formal framework for execution monitoring by which an action theory that provides an axiomatic description of a game is automatically embedded in a meta-game for a robotic player--called the arbiter -- whose role is to monitor and correct failed actions. This allows for the seamless encoding of recovery behaviours within a meta-game, enabling a robot to recover from these unexpected events.


Extracted from text ... U
Understanding cause
and effect relationships for
strategy development
48 Management Today Yearbook 2006
Rakesh Sondhi is part of the international
associate faculty at Henley
Management College and managing
director of BMC Global Services based in
the UK. Rakesh is the author of Total
Strategy, published by BMC Global
Services Publishing in 2003.
Unfortunately, no one knows when a strategy
is right or wrong. Only time will tell.
However, it is possible to make a better
informed decision by ensuring that all perspectives
are taken into account and that a
thorough understanding of the situation is
gained prior to ..


Mobile networks can be formed in bus, train, aircrafts, satellites with a wide variety of on-board IP-enabled devices and Network Mobility (NEMO) protocols are required to support uninterrupted services to ongoing sessions. Earlier works have not demonstrated seamless handover for NEMO architecture. In this work, we proposed a handover scheme for NEMO that exploits the multi-homing feature of the Mobile Router and uses make-before-break strategy to ensure seamless handover for NEMO. Using experimental testbed, we have presented a thorough handoff performance evaluation of multihomed NEMO and compared it with basic NEMO. Results demonstrate that the proposed multihomed NEMO outperforms the basic NEMO while achieving seamless handover.


Multi-winner social choice considers the problem of selecting a slate of K options to realize some social objective. It has found application in the construction of political legislatures and committees, product recommendation, and related problems, and has recently attracted attention from a computational perspective. We address the multi-winner problem when facing incomplete voter preferences, using the notion of minimax regret to determine a robust slate of options in the presence of preference uncertainty. We analyze the complexity of this problem and develop new exact and greedy robust optimization algorithms for its solution. Using these techniques, we also develop preference elicitation heuristics which, in practice, allow us to find near-optimal slates with considerable savings in the preference information required vis-a-vis complete votes.


Many industrial facilities utilize pressure control gradients to prevent migration of hazardous species from containment areas to occupied zones, often using proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control systems. When operators rebalance the facility, variation from the desired gradients can occur and the operating conditions can change enough that the PID parameters are no longer adequate to maintain a stable system. As the goal of the ventilation control system is to optimize the pressure gradients and associated flows for the facility. Linear quadratic tracking (LQT) is a method that provides a time-based approach to guiding facility interactions. However, LQT methods are susceptible to modeling and measurement errors, and therefore the additional use of soft computing methods is proposed for implementation to account for these errors and nonlinearities.


This paper discusses some of the basic philosophical concepts – the concepts of "space and time†- and their relation to social evolution. The work presents the characteristics of social forms of space and time, shows the specifics of their formation in connection with human activity and the system of social relations.It was found that time duration has different manifestations in the context of historically different cultural epochs. Acceleration of social time takes place in the course of human historical practice development.Meanwhile, some social systems sometimes take the form of a certain deceleration in time. This usually occurs because of the inadequacy of the control system for the capabilities of the social organism.Social space is primarily connected with the dynamics of changes in social bonds and relationships. In the process of historical formation of social systems, social space assumes a more complex structure and expands. In the period of globalization growth, social space takes the form of a truly global integral system.


The primary concern of Congress in enacting the Railroad Retirement and Survivor's Improvement Act of 2001 was the risk of political influence on investment decisions. A secondary concern was the financial performance of the redesigned program. The experience to date supports the notion that reforms created an exemplary manager of public pension assets. Of more concern is the financial performance of the redesigned program. The program weathered the challenging financial conditions during the first decade of reform. The experience nevertheless exposed limitations in the ability of its innovative automatic stabilizer to steady the program's finances.


We present efficient implementations of the balance-and-truncate model reduction technique for large-scale systems. The key observation that distinguishes our approach is that Krylov subspace methods (Arnoldi and Lanczos) directly yield approximate low-rank square roots of the system Gramians; the balancing transformation can then be constructed from these square roots, obviating the need for solving any Lyapunov equations. In addition, the order of the reduced model is not fixed a priori as with some existing methods, but is determined from the problem data. Numerical simulations show that our approach performs very well over a range of examples, and offers considerable savings in practice.


A textbook has a set of characteristics that show its educational structure. Structurally, each lesson of a textbook should at least include goals, a pre-organizer, a text, a summary, a practice and resources for further study. A book that does not meet these standards desperately lowers the quality of education. Therefore, one of the main ways to evaluate the quality of textbooks is to review them critically in terms of structural indicators. Since Islamic Ethics is a general course for all the students of academic disciplines, we decided to critically review Islamic Ethic: Principles and Concepts that is one of the textbooks in this field. This book was written by Dr. Mehdi Alizadeh and his colleagues in 2011. Among different methods of textbook critical review, the method of quantitative content analysis has been used in this paper. This kind of analysis includes seven models in both descriptive and relational domains that just five models among them were applicable in this study. The results show that this book, despite its relative superiority to other relevant books, has serious drawbacks in terms of structure. This book lacks important sections such as pre-organizer, summary, and resources for further reading. According to the descriptive content analysis, 89% of the goals and 36% of the exercises are nonstandard. According to relational content analysis, 92% of the goals are related to the content, but 35% of the goals are not related to the exercises.


During the last two decades, High-Performance Computing (HPC) has grown rapidly in performance by improving single-core processors at the cost of a similar growth in power consumption. The single-core processor improvement has led many scientists to exploit mainly the process level parallelism in their codes. However, the performance of HPC systems is becoming increasingly limited by power consumption and power density, which have become a primary concern for the design of new computer systems. As a result, new supercomputers are designed based on the power efficiency provided by new homogeneous and heterogeneous architectures.
The growth in computational power has introduced a new approach to science, Computational Physics. Its impact on the study of nuclear fusion and plasma physics has been very significant. This is because the experiments are difficult and expensive to perform whereas computer simulations of plasma are an efficient way to progress. Particle-In-Cell (PIC) is one of the most used methods to simulate plasma. The improvement in the processing power has enabled an increase in the size and complexity of the PIC simulations. Most PIC codes have been designed with a strong emphasis on the physics and have traditionally included only process level parallelism. This approach has not taken advantage of multiprocessor platforms. Therefore, these codes exploit inefficiently the new computing platforms and, as a consequence, they are still limited to using simplified models.

The aim of this thesis is to incorporate in a PIC code the latest technologies available in computer science in order to take advantage of the upcoming multiprocessor supercomputers. This will enable an improvement in the simulations, either by introducing more physics in the code or by incorporating more detail to the simulations.

This thesis analyses a PIC code named EUTERPE on different computing platforms. EUTERPE is a production code used to simulate fusion plasma instabilities in fusion reactors. It has been implemented for traditional HPC clusters and it has been parallelized prior to this work using only Message Passing Interface (MPI). Our study of its scalability has reached up to tens of thousands of processors, which is several orders of magnitude higher than the scalability achieved when this thesis was initiated.
This thesis also describes the strategies adopted for porting a PIC code to a multi-core architecture, such as introducing thread level parallelism, distributing the work among different computing devices, and developing a new thread-safe solver. These strategies have been evaluated by applying them to the EUTERPE code. With respect to heterogeneous architectures, it has been possible to port this kind of plasma physics codes by rewriting part of the code or by using a programming model called OmpSs. This programming model is specially designed to make this computing power easily available to scientists without requiring expert knowledge on computing.
Last but not least, this thesis should not be seen as the end of a way, but rather as the beginning of a work to extend the physics simulated in fusion codes through exploiting available HPC resources.


This dissertation addresses the adsorption of proteins in microchannels with the aim of improving the result of an immunoassay. To observe the adsorption of fluorescently labelled immunoglobulins G in laser ablated polymer microchannels, a confocal microscope was built. By optically scanning the specimen, and observing one focal plane at time, this tool allows for a high signal-to-background, which leads to a low limit of detection (10-9 M). A numerical model for the adsorption kinetics of proteins on the walls of a microchannel has been developed using the finite element method (FEM). The model illustrates the adsorption limitation sometimes observed when the microdimensions of these systems induce a global depletion of the bulk solution. A new non-dimensional parameter is introduced to predict the final value of the coverage of any microsystem under static adsorption. A working curve and a criteria (h/KΓmax > 10) are provided in order to choose, for given adsorption characteristics, the value of the volume-to-surface ratio (i.e. the channel height h) avoiding depletion effects on the coverage (relative coverage at least 90% of the theoretical one). Simulations were compared with confocal microscopy measurements of IgG antibody adsorption on the walls of a PET (poly(ethylene terephthalate)) microchannel. The fit of the model to the experimental data show that the adsorption is under apparent kinetic control. Two ways of loading proteins on microchannel surfaces for immunological applications have been analysed with the FEM model: the "stop-flow" and the continuous flow processes. The "stop-flow" method consists of successive static incubation periods where the bulk solution depletes upon the adsorption process. A multi-step "stop-flow" protein coating is studied and compared to a coating under continuous flow conditions. For the "stop-flow", a non-dimensional parameter is here introduced, indicating the adsorbing capacity of the system, by which it is possible to calculate the number of loads necessary to reach the optimum coverage. For the continuous flow, the effects on the adsorption of the kinetic rates, flow velocity and wall capacity have been considered. This study shows the importance of a careful choice of the fluid velocity to minimise the sample waste. For diffusion controlled and kinetics controlled processes, two flow velocity criteria are provided in order to obtain the best possible coverage, with the same amount of sample as with the "stop-flow". Surface modifications have been conceived in order to improve the adsorption and the activity of the physisorbed antibodies. The microchannels have been coated with titania nanomaterials, chosen because of their biocompatible properties. Crystalline and amorphous TiO2 have been used and the adsorption with respect to the native PET was improved by 3 times. A study of adsorption as a function of the pH solution and different ionic strengths has been done in order to infer the forces acting during the adsorption: it was found that hydrophobic forces helped by electrostatic ones occur during IgG adsorption onto titania phases. The "stop-flow" method was employed to coat the TiO2 modified microchannels with the capture antibodies and improve the result of a microimmunoassay. When strong adsorbing phases are used, the limit of detection of the assay was lowered by one order of magnitude. The FEM model was used to obtain the kinetic rates of adsorption and desorption of IgG antibodies on PET with a novel biosensor conceived in this lab, which measures capacitive changes in the surface microchannel while the adsorption takes place. As the FEM model foresees a three-dimension region where the adsorption might take place, it can be used to study the adsorption in TiO2 gels developed in our lab.


A new scheme is developed for optimal location area design in wireless systems. New algorithms based on intercell traffic prediction and traffic-based cell grouping are used to select the optimal set of cells for location areas (LAs). The expected intercell movement patterns of mobiles are determined by using the new intercell traffic prediction algorithm. Further, the cells are partitioned into LAs by applying the new traffic-based cell grouping algorithm where the cell pairs with higher intercell mobile traffic are grouped into the same LA. Hence, the inter-LA mobile traffic is decreased by increasing the intra-LA mobile traffic. Experimental results show that this cell grouping algorithm reduces the number of location updates by 27 percent to 36 percent on average compared to proximity-based cell grouping schemes.


With its decision in Maryland v. King, the Supreme Court finally stepped into the debate about the use of DNA databases in the American criminal justice system. With King, the Court decided a newly emerging database issue rather than an old one: whether the Fourth Amendment prohibits the collection of DNA samples from arrestees without a warrant or any individualized suspicion. According to the five member King majority, such compulsory collections are reasonable Fourth Amendment searches, given the outcome of a balancing of interests between the individual and government. The problem with King is that it may become influential in ways that weren't fully contemplated by the Supreme Court. While some may lament the micromanagement of policing by the modern Supreme Court's jurisprudence, the reality is that police investigation practices are unevenly regulated. Indeed, what King reveals is the extent to which the Court leaves many matters untouched by Fourth Amendment constraints and subjects them, for better or worse, to the control of the other political branches (as well to likely squabbling in the lower courts). This essay discusses three notable revelations in the Court's decision about the future of policing and genetic privacy. As the essay argues, what the Court introduces it also fails to regulate or even guide in any significant sense.


Atherosclerosis has been leading cause of deaths in several countries. Recent technical advances has allowed
the investigation of stenotic flows and in understanding the implications with increased severity. Such studies
shall provide detailed understanding of flow across stenosis and its progression. In the present study, a large
artery representing segment of aorta is considered as test specimen. Experimental study is carried out by
generating the pulsatile flow through pulsatile duplicator. Flow across normal and various severities of stenosis
such as 25%, 50% and 75% are studied. Numerical simulation using CFD is also carried out in similar normal
and stenosed models. A novel concept of using pulse duplicator to generate pulsatile waves and investigate the
different stenosed models has been adopted. Results obtained experimentally and numerically are compared
and agree well with that of clinical observations. This study demonstrates significant variation of haemodynamics
in post-stenotic region with increased stenosis. Increased pulse pressure, phase lag is observed with increased
severity. It is also observed that stenosis greater than 75% is significant as flow complexity is induced with
considerable disturbance even in early and latter part of pulse cycle. Such study shall be useful in understanding
the flow changes in stenosis and enhance clinical observation.


The assessment of the sustainability of agricultural systems is multidimensional in nature and requires holistic measures using indicators with different measurements and units reflecting social, economic, and environmental aspects. To simplify the assessment process, various indicators have different units, and measurements are grouped under broad indicator heads, and normalization and/or transformation processes are carried out in order to aggregate them. In this study, a total of 50 indicators from agricultural sustainability categories of productivity, stability, efficiency, durability, compatibility, and equity are employed to investigate which normalization technique is the most suitable for further mathematical analysis for developing a final composite indicator. To understand the consistency and quality of normalization measurement techniques and compare the benefits and drawbacks of the various selected normalization processes, the indicators of agricultural sustainability are considered. Each of the different techniques for normalization has advantages and drawbacks. This study shows that the proportionate normalization and hybrid aggregation rules of the arithmetic mean and the geometric mean are appropriate for the selected data set, and that this technique has a wider applicability for developing composite indicators for agricultural sustainability assessment.


Point cloud is an important type of geometric data structure. Due to its irregular format, most researchers transform such data to regular 3D voxel grids or collections of images. This, however, renders data unnecessarily voluminous and causes issues. In this paper, we design a novel type of neural network that directly consumes point clouds and well respects the permutation invariance of points in the input. Our network, named PointNet, provides a unified architecture for applications ranging from object classification, part segmentation, to scene semantic parsing. Though simple, PointNet is highly efficient and effective. Empirically, it shows strong performance on par or even better than state of the art. We also provide analysis towards understanding of what the network has learnt and why the network is robust with respect to input perturbation and corruption.


A photonic heterostructure with multi-channel and sharp angular defect modes by combining two different one-dimensional defective photonic crystals is proposed. The filters designed on the basis of this heterostructure possess both functions of multi-channel narrow band filtering and sharp angular filtering. The channels, channel interval, and number of channels can be tuned by adjusting the geometric and physical parameters of the heterostuctures. This kind of filters will benefit the development of multi-channel interstellar or atmosphere optical communication.


In India and in the hilly regions, crop residues, cultivated forages, pastures and grasslands are the main sources of livestock feed, but inadequate availability of qualitative feed and fodder adversely affects livestock productivity. Although, shortage of animal feed and fodder is a major issue that needs to be addressed but simultaneously quality of feed and forage cannot to be ignored. Green forage availability is very important to maintain livestock health and productivity and this is particularly essential in dairy entrepreneurship where consistent and regular supply of green fodder is imperative to sustain the milk production. Green herbage in addition to energy also provides vitamins, minerals with better dry matter digestibility. Good quality forage helps to meet out 90 per cent of energy and protein requirement of ruminants. In the country, farmer faces rapid inflation in the cost of animal feed. Feed accounts for 70 per cent of the cost of production and this can be brought down to 30-40 per cent, if sufficient quantity of quality forage is available. Sorghum and pearl millet are two of the tropical region's gifted genera that provide food, feed, stove, and fuel for millions of poor farming families and their livestock. This paper reviews the literature on intercropping of sorghum and pearl millet hybrids along with other essential cereal legume mixture.


Introduction: Activity-based costing system is one of the new systems of costing price of products and services for providing the required information for managers. It helps the users with correct and appropriate deciesions. The present study aims at determining the costing price of the services based on activity costing method in Lamerd Valiyeasr Hospital. Methods: The present study is a cross-sectional and practical study. In this study, 9 activity centers were evaluated based on activity-based costing in Lamerd Valiyeasr Hospital in 2013. Data collecting instruments were check list of the direct and indirect costs of the related activity centers. In this study the costs were evaluated by direct allotment method. Results: The results indicate that the costing price in these 9 activity centers is more than the tariff rate enacted in 2011-2012 with a significant difference. Conclusion: The present study showed that there is a significant difference between the real price of the studied activities and the enacted traiffs. The costing price of the services can be reducted by improving functions, specially, by revising human resource management actions and also by standardizing the services utilization to reduce the utilizing costs.


A growing number of investors want to integrate information about company sustainability into their investment decision processes to avoid risk, satisfy an asset owner's needs, or find a new alpha-generating factor. Few new users of environment, social, and governance (ESG) data understand how ESG ratings behave over time. We use the CSRHub data set to show that ESG ratings regress strongly toward the mean. These ratings include both data from most commercial ESG ratings firms and another 640 sources. The observed regression persists within the ratings data across nine years, for a sample set of more than 8,000 companies. Newly-rated companies show even more reversion than "seasoned" companies. It is rare that a company maintains an especially high or low ESG rating. Investors and company managers should both realize that ESG ratings are likely to change toward the mean and that this pattern does not necessarily mean that a good company is getting worse or a bad one is getting better. TOPIC: ESG investing Key Findings • ESG ratings exhibit behavior that may make them difficult to use in an investment process. • ESG-based investment strategies that seek to "buy the best and sell the worst" may not perform as well as might be expected. • Both investors and corporate managers should adjust their understanding of the significance of ESG ratings and their expectations about how they change.


The media have become a key site for the production and reproduction of language ideologies in modern societies. This is typically reflected in language ideological debates in 2010 in the Chinese media. In 2009, an article entitled "English ants are digging holes in the Chinese levee" got wide media coverage and aroused much controversy in the Chinese media in the following year. The crusade for linguistic purism ended with the promulgation of new regulations banning China's media organizations and publishers from randomly mixing foreign languages with Chinese in publications. The present study aims to explore the inherent language ideologies naturalized in the debates of Chinese linguistic purism and various strategies adopted for the construction of the ideologies. The findings reveal that the ideology of "one nation and one language" and standard language ideology play an important role in the sociolinguistic imagination of a homogeneous Chinese society and protection of "pure" Chinese against English invasion. It is hoped that the present study will contribute to language ideology studies and shed new light on Chinese sociolinguistic studies.


There is little evidence about the prevalence of absence of sexual attraction, or the characteristics of people reporting this, often labelled asexuals. We examine this using data from two probability surveys of the British general population, conducted in 1990–1991 and 2000–2001. Interviewers administered face-to-face and self-completion questionnaires to people aged 16–44 years (N = 13,765 in 1990–1991; N = 12,110 in 2000–2001). The proportion that had never experienced sexual attraction was 0.4% (95% CI: 0.3–0.5%) in 2000–2001, with no significant variation by gender or age, versus 0.9% (95% CI: 0.7–1.1%) in 1990–1991; p < 0.0001. Among these 79 respondents in 2000–2001, 28 (40.3% men; 33.9% women) had had sex, 19 (33.5% men; 20.9% women) had child(ren), and 17 (30.1% men; 19.2% women) were married. Three-quarters of asexual men and two-thirds of asexual women considered their frequency of sex 'about right', while 24.7% and 19.4%, respectively, 'always enjoyed having sex'. As well as providing evidence on the distribution of asexuality in Britain, our data suggest that it cannot be assumed that those reporting no sexual attraction are sexually inexperienced or without intimate relationships. We recognise the possibility of social desirability bias given our reliance on self-reported data, but suggest that its effect is not easily predicted regarding absence of sexual attraction.


Abstract Habitat edges are well-studied components of fragmented landscapes, yet factors mediating edge effects remain unclear. We report how different types of edges surrounding patches may affect spatial distributions of Bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus), a declining, area-sensitive songbird that breeds in grasslands. We expected Bobolinks to be less abundant near edges, and we investigated a set of alternative hypotheses for explaining that spatial pattern: (1) passive displacement, in which individuals do not avoid edges but use edges as boundaries for territories; (2) habitat gradients, in which individuals respond to habitat structure gradients near edges; (3) territory size, in which size of territories increases near edges; and (4) active avoidance, in which individuals actively avoid edges by positioning territory boundaries away from edges. To examine those hypotheses, we surveyed Bobolinks in grassland habitats near 34 edges of three different edge types (agriculture, road, and woodland) in northern Iowa, 1999–2000. Bobolink density was lower near woodland edges than near other edge types, and density increased as a function of distance from edge for all edge types. There was no evidence for a habitat gradient close to edges, but there was some evidence for habitat structure differing among edge types. Territory size increased near roads, decreased near woodlands, but did not change near agricultural edges. Territory positioning was consistent with active avoidance near woodland edges, and to a lesser extent road edges, but positioning was only consistent with passive displacement near agriculture edges. We conclude that land use surrounding patches can have variable effects on territorial dynamics and habitat use of this area-sensitive species. Linking edge avoidance with fitness is needed to understand the demographic consequences of those responses for species in fragmented landscapes.


A B S T R A C T anomagnetic hydrogels, based on κ-carrageenan and acrylic acid, were prepared for removal of methyl violet from aqueous solutions. κ-Carrageenan/ acrylic acid-based hydrogels were prepared in aqueous solution in the presence of methylene bisacrylamide (MBA) and ammonium persulfate (APS), the former as a crosslinking agent and the latter as an initiator. The nanomagnetic hydrogels were obtained by co-precipitation of Fe (II) and Fe (III) ions in presence of ammonia solution. The effects of different variables such as contact time, temperature, amount of adsorbent, and pH were examined in relation to the sorption behavior of the methyl violet. The structure of the nanomagnetic hydrogels were studied by infrared spectroscopy (IR), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The results of scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy showed that the magnetic nanoparticles in the hydrogel matrix were dispersed satisfactorily with approximate size of 5-15 nm. The maximum amount of adsorption reached approximately 86% under optimum conditions of 60 min, pH 8 and initial dye concentration of 10 ppm. The adsorption capacity increased with temperature and pH. This study showed that the obtained nanomagnetic hydrogels with high removal efficiency and low reaction time could be used as effective adsorbents of methyl violet dyes from aqueous solution and for simple separation by a magnetic field. The equilibrium process of removing metal ions by nanomagnetic hydrogels could be evaluated efficiently using the Langmuir, Freundlich and Temkin models.


Institutional initiatives to foster networked learning practices, based on 'Western' models, are increasingly prominent in developing countries; yet, to date, very little research has explored campus-based students' conceptions or experiences of those initiatives. This study investigates students' conceptions of networked learning in a particular developing country setting: Can Tho University, Vietnam. The study started from the conviction that we should not assume that aspects of networked learning will be conceived by the students there in the same ways as in the countries where the models were developed. The study adopted a phenomenographic research approach to elicit and describe the qualitatively varied ways in which undergraduate students experienced and perceived four different (though related) phenomena that are associated with networked learning in the literature and promoted within institutional initiatives. Those four phenomena relate, in turn, to: a) learning in relation to others and resources; b) the roles of technology in mediating learning through connections; c) cooperation with others in learning; and d) working together towards a common goal. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and analysed according to Dahlgren and Fallsberg's (1991) seven-stage cycle of data analysis in phenomenography, so as to elaborate the range of ways in which the phenomena of study were perceived across the sample of participants. The findings of the study are presented as outcome spaces, representing the variation in conception of each phenomenon. With regard to learning in relation to others and resources, three categories of description were identified: resource access, knowledge transmission and knowledge construction. Regarding the roles of technology in mediating learning through connections, three categories emerged: flexibility, tool and medium. These categories are argued to demonstrate a conceptual variation in the perceived extent and sophistication of the technological mediation occurring. Concerning cooperation with others in learning, the analysis of the data led to the emergence of three categories. These categories identified that cooperation in learning was perceived as group work, exploratory learning and directing learning. vi In addition, qualitative differences in students' accounts on their conceptions of working together towards a common goal were constituted by three issues related to benefits of working together towards a common goal (diversity awareness, increased understanding and increased performance) and three issues related to challenges of working together towards a common goal (technological availability, interpersonal differences and unproductive learning). The significance of the study derives from how it provides insight into how undergraduate students experience and perceive 'networked learning' in developing country contexts where learners typically have rather different values and educational histories than in the 'West'. For example, the students in this study perceived networked learning as partially an act of knowledge transmission from teacher to students, contrary to the Western literature, where the dominant conception invokes an image of students' active involvement in knowledge construction. On the other hand, students also experienced networked learning as making-meaning-through-connections, which is reasonably consistent with findings from studies of Western settings. It is hoped that the findings will provide new insights of value to practitioners and educators seeking to design or integrate the networked learning concept into the curriculum in higher education in the developing world; and, at a higher level of granularity, empirical knowledge of use to educators and policy makers who wish to promote more student-centred learning approaches such as networked learning in the developing world.


Essays on Water Resource Economics Daniel A. Brent Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Assistant Professor Hendrik G. Wolff Department of Economics A canonical example in economics of the difference between marginal and total value is the diamond-water paradox. The high price of diamonds is derived from their rarity; whereas the price of water is low due to its abundance, even though it is essential to sustain human life. Scarcity, rather than abundance, better characterizes water availability for many people and this dissertation studies how applied economic principles can be utilized to manage water resources. The first chapter estimate the costs of water volatility in the agricultural sector through a hedonic analysis of heterogeneous water rights. Security for water rights is capitalized into the value of agricultural land, which informs the magnitude and distributional welfare effects of droughts. Tests for an endogenous changepoint fails find a time-varying price premium, indicating that the costs of increased water volatility due to climate change are not manifested in agricultural property markets. The second and third chapters focus on economic and behavioral incentives in urban municipal water demand. Chapter 2 presents a disaggregated model of water demand to separately estimate intensive and extensive margin demand elasticity. Identification is achieved through a novel method merging remotely sensed satellite data on vegetative cover with water metering records. The time series of vegetative cover captures changes in landscape over time and identifies the extensive margin elasticity a parameter that has only been estimated implicitly through the difference in short run and long run demand. Households that maintain green lawns are less responsive to prices than households either change landscapes or have a mixed landscape. Higher water rates increase the probability of converting to low water-intensive landscapes, which in turn is a major driver of long-run demand. The extensive margin with respect to changing landscapes comprises 7%-48% of total elasticity for households with significant outdoor water use. The final chapter examines the impact of non-pecuniary incentives stemming from the behavioral economics literature on water demand. In a randomized field experiment social comparisons are found to significantly decrease water demand with substantial heterogeneity both across and within utilities. The utility with the highest average treatment effect saved three times as much water in percentage terms as the utility with the lowest average treatment effect. Higher users are more responsive to the program and there are important interactions between social norms and existing utility conservation programs. Water resources face stress due to population growth, rising incomes, and climate change and these stressors will only increase in the future. This dissertation addresses several key issues in agricultural and residential that aim to increase knowledge and aid public policy of managing water resources in times of scarcity.


SINCE TAKING office four years ago, President George W. Bush has often spoken ofthe need for political reform in the Arab world. Ordinary Arabs, however, have had good reason to be skeptical of his much discussed "forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East." After all, their region has been mired in political stasis for years, thanks in part to U.S. support for many ofthe Middle East's dictators. For most of the last five decades, Washington has done little to promote Arab democratiza tion, relying instead on the autocratic leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other countries to help protect vital U.S. interests in the neighborhood. This skepticism, however, may no longer be warranted. On the morning of September 1i, 2001, U.S. priorities in the Middle East changed. Suddenly, the Bush administration came to see democrati zation, which it had previously ranked below security and stability in its list of concerns for the Arab world, as the critical means by which to achieve these other goals. Indeed, the toppling of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon fundamentally shifted the underlying assumption of U.S. Middle East policy. Arab authoritari anism could no longer be viewed as a source of stability; instead, it was the primary threat to it. To "drain the swamp" that had incubated Islamist radicals such as Osama bin Laden, it became critical to promote political liberalization, even democratization, in the Middle East, and this goal became a central feature of U.S. national security policy.


This thesis provides a solution for sustainable energy production. It applies the newest technologies of microwave plasma on a traditional method known as gasification. The simulation of this system has been achieved through a high frequency structure simulator to decide the best design of the structure. Microwave radiation at the frequency of 2.45 GHz has been applied to ionise argon gas and convert it into plasma. It has been proven that plasma can be self-initiated with an appropriate electric field applied. This microwave-induced plasma is the heart and soul of the Liverpool John Moores University's gasification system. It is coupled to a gasification chamber to gasify the feedstock placed inside and extract its energy as synthesis gas (i.e. hydrogen and carbon monoxide). Feedstock used in this study is carbon based material including pieces of wood and palm date seeds. This work is novel as no other work upto the date of this thesis completion has studied the different variables affecting plasma creation, plus the automation and the fully control of the microwave plama gasification system. Results reveal that after improvement of the microwave-induced plasma by automated control, it was possible to increase the synthesis gas production to 25.7% hydrogen and more than 57.6% carbon monoxide. This study has included the effects of some parameters on the plasma created, thus on its efficiency. These parameters are; the power of the microwave radiation, the reflected power from the system, the flow rate of argon and the pressure inside the gasification chamber. Other effects were taken into consideration throughout the project such as the study of the sample's moisture levels on the gas production and the use of helium gas instead of argon for plasma creation. The system has proved the benefits of applying microwave-induced plasma technology on the gasification technology. These benefits can be summarised as the reduction of the input power needed for the procedure from the range of megawatts to 1 kilowatt, and the flexibility achieved through controlling the plasma jet for an improved process.


Standards which prescribe more than efficient precaution against physical harm and health injury are commonplace in American environmental, health and safety regulation. The safe level standard, for example, requires the elimination of all significant risks. The feasibility standard requires the elimination of significant risks to the extent insofar as it is possible to do so without impairing the long run survival of the activities which give rise to the risks. These standards reach back more than a generation to the founding of the EPA and OSHA. You might think that they are too well-entrenched in American law to be subject to serious dispute. Yet these standards are now routinely decried as irrational or incoherent. Cost-benefit analysis, we are told, is the only game in town for determining appropriate standards of conduct for socially useful but risky acts. In a nutshell, the conventional wisdom is that cost-benefit analysis is rationality incarnate and the cost-justified level of precaution is the rational level of precaution. No matter how highly we value safety, the benefits of achieving a particular level of safety must be traded off against the costs of doing so. The rational way to trade costs off against benefits is to balance them so that we maximize net value and thereby make ourselves as well off as we can be. Taking more than efficient precaution yields less — not more — value. Preferring less value to more value is flatly irrational.This paper argues that the charge of irrationality is mistaken. The feasibility and safety norms are directed against very serious harms — the kind of health injuries that deal out death and disability. Costs and benefits may be symmetrically important but harms and benefits are not. By virtue of its intimate connection to autonomy, the avoidance of harm has a special priority. There is nothing special about harm from an efficiency perspective; harms are simply costs and all costs are comparable at some ratio of exchange. Harm's moral significance is connected to our separateness and independence as persons, and with our interest in securing the conditions necessary for us to be the authors of our own lives. Serious physical harms impair the pursuit of a wide range of human ends and aspirations, and deny normal human lives to those whose powers are impaired. Very few benefits, by contrast, are comparably essential conditions of effective agency. Benefit, like happiness, is mostly for each of us to pursue as best we can. In the domains to which they apply, the safety and feasibility standards are plausible expressions of the priority of avoiding harm.


This paper studies the nonparametric identification of a contract model with adverse selection and moral hazard. Specifically, we consider the false moral hazard model developed by Laffont and Tirole (1986). We first extend this model to allow for general random demand and cost functions. We establish the nonparametric identification of the demand, cost, deterministic transfer, and effort disutility functions as well as the joint distribution of the random elements of the model, which are the firm's type and the demand, cost, and transfer shocks. The cost of public funds is identified with the help of an instrument. Testable restrictions of the model are characterized.


No general rule of law renders trademark owners liable for products sold or business conducted under the trademark. This essay proposes the adoption of such a rule. The rationale for the change is that businesses are known by their trademarks, not their entity names, in the marketplace. The vast majority of customers - both businesses and consumers - select the persons with whom they will deal, and contract with those persons, on the basis of trademarks. The entity structures of businesses (corporate groups, franchises, joint ventures, etc.) are generally invisible to customers. Yet under current law the businesses' liabilities to customers are calculated from those entity structures. The result is a failure in the market for liability: Customers lack the information they need to contract for the level of supplier financial responsibility they prefer. The proposed rule would create no new liability, it would merely extend existing liability to trademark owners. The rule would extend liability to trademark owners for (1) defective products sold under the mark and (2) the wrongful acts of licensees that conduct businesses identified to customers by the mark. The initial assignment of liability to the trademark owner will prevent businesses from externalizing their liabilities. Trademark owners will remain free, however, to pass the liability on to their licensees by contracts requiring indemnification or insurance.


Art education an important part of aesthetic education. It is indispensable for the comprehensive and healthy development of human beings. The basic task is to cultivate creative ability, human aesthetics, and apprec iation. Art education is conducive to improving the humanistic cultivation of young students, enhancing the spiritual realm of human beings, and cultivating the creative ability of young people. It has irreplaceable social, cultural, and an-thropological significance for promoting the comprehensive and healthy de-velopment of people. The development of multimedia information technolo-gy provides a new teaching method for art education and teaching in a con-temporary setting. This teaching method can guide students to optimize or change the methods and concepts of traditional art creation and aesthetic value. However, traditional art education multimedia technology has poor teaching effects due to limited teaching conditions. This requires the use of multimedia technology and other technologies for interactive fusion. There-fore, this paper proposes an interactive fusion model of multimedia and vir-tual technology, which is verified by the model. It was found that this inte-grated education method could not only simulate the real environment and expand the cognitive scope of students, but also could promote students' learning motivation as well as situational and authentic learning experiences.


The complexity of processes occurring in the brain is an intriguing issue not just for scientists and medical doctors, but the humanity in general. The cortex ability to perceive and analyze an enormous amount of information in an instance of time, the parallelism and computational efficiency are among the questions that attract attention. Even a simple, everyday gesture, for example, reaching for a cup of coffee, evokes a flow of signals in the brain. It goes from the primary visual region, that locates the cup on the table, to the primary motor region that sends the precise coordinates to the hand, and the instruction what to do next. The sequence of signal transmission and transformation continues through several regions, sensory, associative and motor ones. In this study, we will focus on the posterior parietal cortex, the region involved in the transformation of visual inputs into the preliminary motor plans. The years of experimental work revealed mechanisms for integration of multimodal signals, coordinate transformations, information representation in multiple coordinate frames, and many other. Still, a single encompassing theory about movement generation in the parietal cortex does not exist, and is a matter of debate. This study contributes to the analysis of motor intention in the 7a parietal region. The motor intention, a high-level cognitive signal, is defined as the preliminary plan for making a movement. From the engineering point of view, encoding of motor parameters in the neural activity is extensively studied within the framework of brain-computer interfaces. The motivation behind these studies is the development of neural prosthesis for the paralyzed persons. The direct cortical prosthesis can significantly improve the lives of paralyzed people, who have lost every other contact with the outside world. Also, this framework opens the possibilities for monitoring the neural processes during the execution of natural movements, and studying the mechanisms behind it. In this work, a method for identification of motor intention from the standard recordings of neural activity, the spike trains, is developed. The data of interest was collected in a series of behavioral experiments involving reaching or saccadic eye movements. The presence and absence of motor intention was monitored in various phases of motion execution, and for different types of movements. All the recordings obtained simultaneously are combined in the same decoding session. Therefore, the analysis is done using the activity of small population of cells (typically 8 to 12 cells). We aim to study the motor intention in a general context which requires using activity of multiple cells. The population size is determined by the experimental procedure. Throughout this study we assume that the motor intention can be red from the spike rates, the assumption supported by the neurophysiological studies. Therefore, all the simultaneously collected spike trains are converted into vectors of spike rates. The results of this study show that motor intention can be decoded from the spike rates. A machine-learning based algorithm is developed to analyze the presence or absence of motor intention in the obtained spike rate vectors. This algorithm, based on standard support vector machines, can distinguish between the segments of recordings that encode motor intention, from those that do not encode it. The goal of the study was to examine the precision of motor intention identification, when the activity of a randomly selected set of cells is analyzed using on such algorithm. Additionally, several relevant parameters were tested. The algorithm precision during different phases of movement execution is tested. Also, the influence of the population size and of the procedure for spike rates computation is examined. The obtained results demonstrated that the motor intention can be extracted from the neural signals with the precision of around 70% for a randomly selected set of cells. For the best groups of cells, this precision was 82%. The motor intention identification was particularly precise during the intervals of preparation and realization of saccadic eye movements. This is in accordance with the known functions of the 7a region, where the majority of cells respond to the eye movements. The algorithm precision is determined by the considered population size. For the bigger population the precision increases. Still, this conclusion holds only on average, since adding one or a couple of randomly selected cells does not have to change the result. Randomly selected cells do not necessary carry the information of interest. The influence of each of the cells, present in one set, is tested in this context. The obtained results indicate redundant coding of motor intention in the parietal cortex. Many cells carry the same information, and some of them can be removed from the set without changing the algorithm precision. Still, removing all of them degrades the result. Finally, the influence of the window size, used to compute spike rates in some of the tests is studied. In general, the precision improves when using bigger windows, the result that is consistent with the literature. Introducing the window for computing spike rates enables automatic identification of motor intention, the method suitable for the brain-computer interface applications. Finally, the analysis of the experimental data is complemented with the study of an appropriately designed model. Modeling the biological processes, in order to reveal additional functionality and test some parameters not accessible through the data, is a widely accepted approach. Still, the development of a model, sufficiently simple for implementation on the standard hardware, sufficiently tractable in the simulations, yet informative enough to capture the main processes of interest, is not straightforward. Our motivation for accepting this approach was to test several parameters that imposed themselves as important in the data analysis step. Due to the nature of the problem itself, the test on an approximative model was the only feasible tactic. The influence of the population size and the window size was assessed in this study. This, additionally, demonstrated the algorithm precision scaling as a function of the number of cells.