This Article was written for the 2008 Minnesota Law Review Symposium, Law & Politics in the 21st Century. The Article examines the core functionalist argument typically made to support unitary executive theory: that the theory advances the constitutional principle of accountability by demanding that all executive branch decisions be placed in the hands of a single, nationally elected official. This Article argues that a unitary executive undermines, rather than bolsters, government accountability. The Article also explains that one need not agree with that proposition to conclude that the accountability justification for unitary executive theory is flawed. Rather, one need only deem the point reasonably arguable - and hence within Congress' discretion to judge, subject to functional boundaries - to determine that accountability principles do not demand a unitary executive. The argument that unity reasonably can be deemed to undermine accountability rests on two prongs! First, it turns on the meaning of constitutional accountability. The Constitution reflects different forms of accountability that correspond to different constitutional actors who check and balance one another. Underlying all forms of accountability is the need for transparency and procedural regularity sufficient to enable public and inter-branch assessment of - and responses to - government actions. Second, unity helps the White House both to secretly intervene in administrative state decisions and to manipulate the very "facts" upon which such decisions purport to rest. The problem is compounded by the capacity of the White House politically to distance itself - and thus to create public confusion over who to blame - regarding decisions over which it legally has full authority (and in which conditions of unity thus exist). The Article is intended as a companion piece to another article to be published roughly contemporaneously with it in a symposium issue of the Willamette Law Review: Accountability and Administrative Structure.


Nowadays integration and interoperability can make or break an enterprise's business success. In the huge space that is software engi- neering a lot of ESBs have emerged but with vast di erences in imple- mentation, patterns and architectures. To create order in this disarray studies have been made, features eval- uated and performance measured. This is a good thing but it does not clear up all the confusion and adds another layer of confusion regarding the studies and tests themselves. The aim of this thesis is to make an attempt of rectifying some of the disorder by rst evaluating the current body of knowledge and to provide a humble attempt of making a transparent test framework which could be used for a more coherent ESB evaluation.


The Nunavut Court of Justice, a superior court and the only unified criminal court in Canada, was established in 1999, coincident with the creation of Nunavut. One of the court's three main objectives has been to provide an efficient and accessible court structure capable of responding to the unique needs of Nunavut. The achievement of that goal is an ongoing process in light of challenges inherent in providing justice in Nunavut. The article considers delays and lengthy case processing times as one example reflecting the difficulties facing the court. The author argues that improvements have been made since 1999 but that ongoing problems with the implementation of organizational improvements in the areas of legal aid services, the Inuit court worker program, and the justice of the peace program mean that the court's original objectives are not being completely met. Reasons for the gaps are examined, including perennial funding shortages for Nunavut's justice programs. The Nunavut Court is also seen as representative of broader challenges for the mainstream justice system in engaging with Inuit communities and culture. Fundamental problems resulting from the historical and ongoing marginalization of Inuit in Nunavut contribute to problems with the administration of justice. The author argues for increased movement toward true community-based justice alternatives, not to the exclusion of the mainstream system but in an effective intersection with it.


A meshless Lagrangian (particle) method based on the weakly compressible moving particle semi-implicit formulation (WC-MPS) is developed and analysed for simulation of flow over spillways. To improve the accuracy of the model for pressure and velocity calculation, some modifications are proposed and evaluated for the inflow and wall boundary conditions implementation methods. The final model is applied for simulation of flow over the 45° and 60° ogee spillways (with different inflow rates) and also shallow flow over a spillway-like curved bed channel. To evaluate the model, the numerical results of free surface profile and velocity and pressure field are compared with the available experimental measurements. Comparisons show the results' accuracy of the developed model and proposed improvements. The results of this study will not only provide a reliable numerical tool for modelling of flow over spillways, but also provide an insight for better understating flow pattern over these hydraulic structures.


We address the statistical and optimization impacts of the classical sketch and Hessian sketch used to approximately solve the Matrix Ridge Regression (MRR) problem. Prior research has quantified the effects of classical sketch on the strictly simpler least squares regression (LSR) problem. We establish that classical sketch has a similar effect upon the optimization properties of MRR as it does on those of LSR: namely, it recovers nearly optimal solutions. By contrast, Hessian sketch does not have this guarantee; instead, the approximation error is governed by a subtle interplay between the "mass" in the responses and the optimal objective value.

For both types of approximation, the regularization in the sketched MRR problem results in significantly different statistical properties from those of the sketched LSR problem. In particular, there is a bias-variance trade-off in sketched MRR that is not present in sketched LSR. We provide upper and lower bounds on the bias and variance of sketched MRR; these bounds show that classical sketch significantly increases the variance, while Hessian sketch significantly increases the bias. Empirically, sketched MRR solutions can have risks that are higher by an order-of-magnitude than those of the optimal MRR solutions.

We establish theoretically and empirically that model averaging greatly decreases the gap between the risks of the true and sketched solutions to the MRR problem. Thus, in parallel or distributed settings, sketching combined with model averaging is a powerful technique that quickly obtains near-optimal solutions to the MRR problem while greatly mitigating the increased statistical risk incurred by sketching.


Motivated by the analogy between successive interference cancellation and iterative belief-propagation on erasure channels, irregular repetition slotted ALOHA (IRSA) strategies have received a lot of attention in the design of medium access control protocols. In this work, we consider generic systems where sources in different importance classes compete for a common channel. We propose a new prioritized IRSA algorithm and derive the probability to correctly resolve collisions for data from each source class. We then make use of our theoretical analysis to formulate a new optimization problem for selecting the transmission strategies of heterogenous sources. We optimize both the replication probability per class and the source rate per class, in such a way that the overall system utility is maximized. We then propose a heuristic-based algorithm for the selection of the transmission strategy, which is built on intrinsic characteristics of the iterative decoding methods adopted for recovering from collisions. Experimental results validate the accuracy of the theoretical study and show the gain of well-chosen prioritized transmission strategies for transmission of data from heterogenous classes over shared wireless channels.


In high‐throughput studies, an important objective is to identify gene–environment interactions associated with disease outcomes and phenotypes. Many commonly adopted methods assume specific parametric or semiparametric models, which may be subject to model misspecification. In addition, they usually use significance level as the criterion for selecting important interactions. In this study, we adopt the rank‐based estimation, which is much less sensitive to model specification than some of the existing methods and includes several commonly encountered data and models as special cases. Penalization is adopted for the identification of gene–environment interactions. It achieves simultaneous estimation and identification and does not rely on significance level. For computation feasibility, a smoothed rank estimation is further proposed. Simulation shows that under certain scenarios, for example, with contaminated or heavy‐tailed data, the proposed method can significantly outperform the existing alternatives with more accurate identification. We analyze a lung cancer prognosis study with gene expression measurements under the AFT (accelerated failure time) model. The proposed method identifies interactions different from those using the alternatives. Some of the identified genes have important implications.


White women who inhabited the West Indies in the eighteenth century fascinated the metropole. In popular prints, novels, and serial publications, these women appeared to stray from "proper" British societal norms. Inhabiting a space dominated by a tropical climate and the presence of a large enslaved African population opened white women to censure. Almost from the moment of colonial encounter, they were perceived not as proper British women but as an imperial "other," inhabiting a middle space between the ideal woman and the supposed indigenous "savage." Furthermore, white women seemed to be lacking the sensibility prized in eighteenth-century England. However, the correspondence that survives from white women in Jamaica reveals the language of sensibility. "Creolized" in this imperial landscape, sensibility extended beyond written words to the material objects exchanged during their tenure on these sugar plantations. Although many women who lived in the Caribbean island of Jamaica might have fit the model, extant writings from Ann Brodbelt, Sarah Dwarris, Margaret and Mary Cowper, Lady Maria Nugent, and Ann Appleton Storrow, show a longing to remain connected with metropolitan society and their loved ones separated by the Atlantic. This sensibility and awareness of metropolitan material culture masked a lack of empathy towards subordinates, and opened the white women these islands to censure, particularly during the era of the British abolitionist movement. Novels and popular publications portrayed white women in the Caribbean as prone to overconsumption, but these women seem to prize items not for their inherent value. They treasured items most when they came from beloved connections. This colonial interchange forged and preserved bonds with loved ones and comforted the women in the West Indies during their residence in these sugar plantation islands. This dissertation seeks to complicate the stereotype of insensibility and overconsumption that characterized the perception of white women who inhabited the British West Indies in the long eighteenth century.


Objectives Interest in linking patients with unmet social needs to area-level resources, such as food pantries and employment centres in one's ZIP code, is growing. However, whether the presence of these resources is associated with better health outcomes is unclear. We sought to determine if area-level resources, defined as organisations that assist individuals with meeting health-related social needs, are associated with lower levels of cardiometabolic risk factors. Design Cross-sectional. Setting Data were collected in a primary care network in eastern Massachusetts in 2015. Participants and primary and secondary outcome measures 123 355 participants were included. The primary outcome was body mass index (BMI). The secondary outcomes were systolic blood pressure (SBP), low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol and haemoglobin A1c (HbA1c). All participants were included in BMI analyses. Participants with hypertension were included in SBP analyses. Participants with an indication for cholesterol lowering were included in LDL analyses and participants with diabetes mellitus were included in HbA1c analyses. We used a random forest-based machine-learning algorithm to identify types of resources associated with study outcomes. We then tested the association of ZIP-level selected resource types (three for BMI, two each for SBP and HbA1c analyses and one for LDL analyses) with these outcomes, using multilevel models to account for individual-level, clinic-level and other area-level factors. Results Resources associated with lower BMI included more food resources (−0.08 kg/m2 per additional resource, 95% CI −0.13 to −0.03 kg/m2), employment resources (−0.05 kg/m2, 95% CI −0.11 to −0.002 kg/m2) and nutrition resources (−0.07 kg/m2, 95% CI −0.13 to −0.01 kg/m2). No area resources were associated with differences in SBP, LDL or HbA1c. Conclusions Access to specific local resources is associated with better BMI. Efforts to link patients to area resources, and to improve the resources landscape within communities, may help reduce BMI and improve population health.


BACKGROUND: Cost-efficient and brief interventions to address BACKGROUND: Cost-efficient and brief interventions to address behavioral concerns are needed in the primary care setting. This pilot study looked at pediatric providers' interest and willingness in using the evidence-based, multimedia parenting program, Parenting Wisely-Young Children© (PWYC).
METHODS: Between June to October 2010, 32 pediatric providers from 13 community and academic pediatric practices completed a short demonstration of PWYC and provided opinions on its use in primary care practice by survey and verbal feedback. Bivariate analyses was performed using the Fisher's exact test to determine predictors of providers' willingness to use PWYC. Summary of themes from provider feedback were reviewed.
RESULTS: All providers reported a general need for brief parenting interventions for primary care and were interested in PWYC. No provider characteristic was significantly associated with reported willingness to use PWYC. There was a negative trend between years of training and willingness to use the program (p=0.06). Concerns were raised about using PWYC during clinic visits; however, almost all would recommend the online PWYC format to supplement recommendations made at the visit.
CONCLUSIONS: While providers are in need of brief parenting interventions to handle behavioral and mental health issues in primary care practice, there were potential concerns raised as to how PWYC would affect workflow and its cultural relevance to families they serve.


What is political philosophy? What are its fundamental problems? And how should it be distinguished from moral philosophy? This book redefines the distinctive aims of political philosophy, reformulating in this light the basis of a liberal understanding of politics. Because political life is characterized by deep and enduring conflict between rival interests and differing moral ideals, the core problems of political philosophy are the regulation of conflict and the conditions under which the members of society may thus be made subject to political authority. We cannot assume that reason will lead to unanimity about these matters because individuals hold different moral convictions. The book therefore analyzes the concept of reasonable disagreement and investigates the ways we can adjudicate conflicts among people who reasonably disagree about the nature of the human good and the proper basis of political society. Challenging both the classical liberalism of Locke, Kant, and Mill, and more recent theories of political realism proposed by Bernard Williams and others, the book argues for a version of political liberalism that is centered on political legitimacy rather than on social justice, and that aims to be well suited to our times rather than universally valid. It proposes a new definition of political philosophy and demonstrates the profound implications of that definition. The result is a compelling and distinctive intervention from a major political philosopher.


In this paper, we propose a tractable variant of the open economy neoclassical growth model that emphasizes political economy and contracting frictions. The political economy frictions involve disagreement and political turnover, while the contracting friction is a lack of commitment regarding foreign debt and expropriation. We show that the political economy frictions induce growth dynamics in a limited-commitment environment that would otherwise move immediately to the steady state. In particular, greater political disagreement corresponds to a high tax rate on investment, which declines slowly over time, generating slow convergence to the steady state. While in the standard neoclassical growth model capital's share in production plays an important role in determining the speed of convergence, this parameter is replaced by political disagreement in our open economy reformulation. Moreover, while political frictions shorten the horizon of the government, the government may still pursue a path of tax rates in which the first best investment is achieved in the long run, although the transition may be slow. The model rationalizes why openness has different implications for growth depending on the political environment, why institutions such as respect for property rights evolve over time, why governments in open countries that grow rapidly tend to accumulate net foreign assets rather than liabilities, and why foreign aid may not affect growth.


Introducing a complete guide to deploying and managing Windows 7 that is suitable for IT professionals and students alike! This instructional text provides the information users need to successfully migrate to Windows 7 and immediately derive benefits from it. Readers will learn about the new features in Windows 7, such as advanced security, and how those features compare to Windows Vista and Windows XP. Valuable for professionals, but written in a way that is understandable to the novice networking student, this informative guide examines Windows 7 in a thorough and logical manner making the information easy to understand and preparing readers for Microsoft's MCTS Exam #70-680. The hands-on activities and case projects help learners practice new skills, and review questions and key terms reinforce important information. The accompanying CD provides valuable certification preparation material, including test preparation software. With a section devoted to troubleshooting, this text also doubles as a manual that professionals can take on the job with them.


Thirty years after the publication of Martin Kay's classic paper about the proper place of men and machines in language translation, the relationship between translators and technology is changing dramatically. In this paper we explore the changes that have occurred during the past thirty years as well as the evolution of translation studies towards the inclusion of technology. Moreover, we analyse the new technologies that are changing the way translators work and we discuss the implications for training future translators. We finally propose a new learning model that aims at integrating these new technologies in a collaborative way to develop not only concrete skills, but rather a general computer savviness that helps students be ready for any future situation they might face.


Every country has experienced profound attack from the Coronavirus. Every state will now face deep economic damage, possibly for a prolonged period. The next stage of economic disruption produces some winners and many losers. It inherently carries risks of widespread unemployment, collapse of companies, services, taxation revenues, and consequential risks of social unrest, criminal exploitation, revolution, cyber exploitation and warfare, and possibly the collapse of states and societies, and invasion by foreign powers. Much depends on how things are handled by a small number of political leaders around the world, the decisions that they take, and the actions that they are able to implement. These challenges arise on top of the other existential risk of climate change and the extinction of species, which may now risk being overlooked. The risks to civilisation could not be more serious.

How should we respond? Many wise suggestions will be made by experts on the economic, employment and administrative aspects. This analysis contributes a different perspective based on what seem to be people's basic views of what they value. Certain values are being re-emphasised as fundamentally important, and we should consider the implications. The prevailing values of a society should be the foundation of the political decisions that are taken in the coming period of economic disruption and increased poverty, and of the evaluation of those decisions. We should also use the values to consider what changes may be necessary in structures, systems, processes actions and behaviours, so as to minimise harm and maximise the achievement of the intended goals.

The argument is that a change is occurring in which pursuit of personal wealth and success at the expense of others is being replaced by recognition of the need to found society and commerce on interconnectedness. Further, this change can only be effective if it is based on the human values of other-regarding and mutual support and solidarity based on a demonstrable commitment to ethical values in conduct. That understanding of the basis of value-based relationships provides the foundation for rethinking the structures and institutions that will be needed.


Objectives: Many Asian Americans tend to report receiving lower quality services from direct service providers. Improving the cultural competence of social workers and other professionals who work with Asian Americans may address this dissatisfaction. To date, there are few tools to help educators and supervisors evaluate the level of cultural competence of social workers and other health professionals. This study reports on the development and testing of a cultural competence measure to evaluate social workers' preparedness for working with Asian American clients. Method: Based on a sample of 294 student social workers, the final 29-item instrument is a reliable and valid tool. Results: The instrument shows strong content validity according to expert panelists, robust reliability, excellent model fit, and preliminary evidence of construct validity. Conclusion: The validated Cultural Competency with Asian American Clients Scale could be used by social work educators in planning courses and assessing student readiness for work with Asian Americans.


and Implications Use of bedded hoop barns for feeding cattle has grown in part due to increased regulations regarding open feedlot runoff. In 2010, ISU estimated almost 700 hoop barns in Iowa used for beef cattle and more than 80% were used for cattle feeding. Work in Iowa also has documented that cattle confined in a bedded hoop barn perform similarly to cattle fed in an open feedlot with shelter. The work was done with a stocking density of 50 sq ft per steer in the bedded hoop barn. A hoop barn is a more expensive facility system compared with open lot configurations. Fixed costs per steer (facilities) are partially determined by stocking density. The objective of this study was to determine the effects of increased stocking density on performance and carcass characteristics of steers fed in bedded hoop and bedded open front facilities. The trials were conducted in 2008 to 2011 at the ISU Armstrong Research Farm, Lewis, IA. The hoop barn was stocked with 40, 45 and 50 head per pen resulting in 50, 45 and 40 sq ft per steer, respectively. There was one stocking density per housing type per trial. The diet fed was 45.0% dry corn, 14.8% ground hay, 36.8% modified distillers grains and 3.4% supplement on an as-fed basis. The total diet was approximately 69% dry matter. Cattle growth rate (ADG), feed intake (DMI), feed efficiency (F/G) and mean mud score did not differ based on stocking density (P>0.05). However, the cattle given more square feet numerically had greater feed intake and were more efficient (about 4-5%) than the more densely stocked cattle. This study may not have had enough replications to detect statistically significant differences. Also the mean carcass characteristics (fat cover, rib eye area, marbling score, quality grade and yield grade) did not differ by stocking density (P>0.05). When comparing seasons only, steers fed in summer tended to have heavier market liveweight, heavier carcass weight, required less feed per liveweight and less marbling compared with steers fed in winter (P≤0.10). Also, the summer-fed steers grew faster and gained more liveweight than the winter-fed steers (P<0.005). These results suggest that this study may not have reached the maximum stocking density for feeding beef cattle in a bedded hoop barn. In other words, market cattle can probably be stocked at less square footage per steer than the 40 sq ft per steer used in this study. Observations of farmers with hoop barns suggest that 37 or 35 sq ft per steer may be feasible. Several factors may affect stocking density including genetics or frame size of the cattle and may interact with season. Also, it should be noted that as the density of cattle increases, more management is required, i.e., more bedding, more bunk space, more waterer space and observing individual cattle for health issues becomes more difficult.


Television news broadcasts have been airing since the mid-1930s, and has since then, implemented itself into viewer's everyday lives. In the 1980s, Cable News Network, or CNN, introduced the 24-hour news cycle. Because of this, there was a sharp increase of violent news being reported. In this study, the researchers chose to study both the emotional and physical reactions to the violent news media. Specifically, the researchers explored the possibility that too much violence could affect their mental and physical health. Participants from this study hailed from a faith-based institution of higher learning in an urban area of the Midwestern United States. The study found that there is a relationship between the violence in news media and mental and physical effects of the body.


Synthetic
biology reprograms organisms to perform non-native functions for beneficial
reasons. An important practice in
synthetic biology is the ability to edit DNA to change a base pair, disrupt a
gene, or insert a new DNA sequence. DNA
edits are commonly made with the help of homologous recombination, which
inserts new DNA flanked by sequences homologous to the target region. To
increase homologous recombination efficiency, a double stranded break is needed
in the middle of the target sequence.
Common methods to induce double stranded breaks use nucleases, enzymes
that cleave ribonucleotides (DNA and RNA).
The most common nucleases are restriction enzymes, which recognize a
short, fixed, palindromic DNA sequence (4-8 base pairs). Because of the short and fixed nature of the
recognition sites, restriction enzymes do not make good candidates to edit
large chromosomal DNA. Alternatively,
scientists have turned to programmable endonucleases which recognize user-defined
DNA sequences, often times much larger than the recognition sites of
restriction enzymes (15-25 base pairs).
Programmable endonucleases such as CRISPR-based systems and prokaryotic
Argonautes are found throughout the prokaryotic kingdom and may differ
significantly in activity and specificity. To compare activity levels among
endonuclease enzymes, activity assays are needed. These assays must clearly delineate dynamic
activity levels of different endonucleases and work with a wide variety of
enzymes. Ideally, the activity assay
will also function as a positive selection screen, allowing modifications to
the enzymes via directed evolution. Here, we develop an in vivo assay for programmable endonuclease activity that can also serve
as a positive selection screen using two plasmids, a lethal plasmid to cause
cell death and a rescue plasmid to rescue cell growth. The lethal plasmid houses the homing
endonuclease, I-SceI, which causes a deadly double-stranded break at an 18 base
pair sequence inserted into an engineered E.
coli genome. The rescue plasmid
encodes for a chosen endonuclease designed to target and cleave the lethal
plasmid, thereby preventing cell death.
With this, cell growth is directly linked to programmable endonuclease
activity. Three endonucleases were
tested, SpCas9, eSpCas9, and xCas9, displaying recovered growth of 49.3%,
26.1%, and 16.4% respectively. These
values translate to kinetic enzymatic activity and are congruent with current
literature findings as reported values find WT-SpCas9 to have the fastest
kinetics cleaving around 95% of substrate within 15 seconds, followed closely
by eSpCas9 cleaving 75% of substrate within 15 seconds and finally trailed by
xCas9 cleaving 20% of substrate in about 30 seconds. The differences between
each endonuclease's activity is exacerbated in our in vivo system when compared to similar in vitro methods with much lower resolution. Therefore, slight differences in activity
between endonucleases within the first few minutes in an in vitro assay may be a few percentages different whereas in our in vivo assay, these differences in
activity result in a more amplified signal. With the ability to display the dynamic
response of enzymes, this assay can be used to compare activity levels between
endonucleases, give insight into their kinetics, and serve as a positive
selection screen for use in directed evolution applications.


This paper describes a new lexical resource: Ancora-Nom, a Spanish lexicon of deverbal nominalizations. At present, it contains 1,655 lexical entries and 3,094 senses. Each sense has a denotation type associated, and the mapping of nominal complements with arguments and the corresponding theta roles is also annotated. A particular interest of this lexicon is that it has been automatically extracted from the annotated AnCora-Es corpus. AnCora-Nom was derived taking into account the information directly related to nominalizations, but also the morphological and syntactic-semantic information annotated in the corpus, such as WordNet synsets, the specifier type of the nominalization, and its morphological number (singular or plural).


In this work, we introduce a new video representation for action classification that aggregates local convolutional features across the entire spatio-temporal extent of the video. We do so by integrating state-of-the-art two-stream networks [42] with learnable spatio-temporal feature aggregation [6]. The resulting architecture is end-to-end trainable for whole-video classification. We investigate different strategies for pooling across space and time and combining signals from the different streams. We find that: (i) it is important to pool jointly across space and time, but (ii) appearance and motion streams are best aggregated into their own separate representations. Finally, we show that our representation outperforms the two-stream base architecture by a large margin (13% relative) as well as outperforms other baselines with comparable base architectures on HMDB51, UCF101, and Charades video classification benchmarks.


Mobile dating applications have become self-presentation spaces and stages among the youth. In the search for romance and sexual relationships, young Filipinos create and act out pre and co-constructed selves that enable them to find dating partners. Using the musings and experiences of 50 Filipino young adults who have been using dating apps to search for love or lust, the study found that created mobile/ online selves or faces reflect presentation strategies that include the show of sincerity, dramatic execution of the role, use of personal front, maintenance of control over the information, mystification, idealization, and misrepresentation. The study concludes that self-presentations range from the authentic to the inauthentic portrayal of the self to advance motives and intents in the use of dating apps.


Background: Acute myocardial infarction has become a serious financial burden for patients, healthcare system, and society. It is therefore necessary to assess treatment cost of myocardial infarction that had been conducted in many countries in the world and still not fully analysed in Vietnam. Thus, we sought to describe acute ST-elevation myocardial infarction treatment cost and analyse related factors to acute ST-elevation myocardial infarction treatment cost.

Methods and Materials: A retrospective cross-sectional study. Patients who was diagnosed by ST-elevation myocardial infarction at Cho Ray Hospital from June 2018 to February 2019, satisfied inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Results: We collected 130 patients with acute ST-elevation myocardial infarction with male: female ratio of 3:1, at average age of mean ± Standard deviation (SD) = 62.9 ± 12.6. The length of stay in hospital was mean ± SD = 7.1 ± 3.3 days and the median direct cost of MI was 68,902,500 VND (interquartile range (IQR): 5,737,200 – 104,266,000 VND). The average total cost of acute ST-elevation myocardial infarction in the percutaneous coronary intervention group was more than 16 times as the conservative group. The treatment strategies and hospital complications were major factors that affected treatment cost.

Conclusion: The median direct cost of acute ST-elevation myocardial infarction was accounted for 68,902,500 VND. Complications directly affected costs.


In this paper we explore the determinants of profitability for coalition loyalty programs. We consider a setting in which each of two firms competing in one market may form a coalition loyalty program with one of two firms in a different market. Firms in the same program jointly set the reward to consumers who buy from both coalition partners, but they set their own prices independently. We find that these programs are profitable for all firms, even when no value is created by the mere existence of rewards (i.e., when firms and consumers value $1 worth of rewards equally). The intuition is that joint loyalty programs allow each participating firm to leverage its partner's market power and charge higher prices. This result, however, depends crucially on several design elements of the program. First, rewards must be structured so that consumers earn more when they shop broadly across firms in the coalition than when they shop at only a single firm. Second, the reward program manager must be able to take into account the prices of individual firms when setting the value of rewards. Third, firms joining a coalition must be able to negotiate the share of program costs they will carry; firms must be charged according to their value added to the coalition (e.g., firms with greater market power will bear a lower share of program costs) and not taxed as a proportion of their revenues. Our theoretical findings provide insight into the forces underlying coalition loyalty programs in competitive settings and are suggestive of the impact of practical design decisions on program profitability.


Background and Purpose: Sleep breathing disorders have a negative impact on the illness outcome and quality of life in patients with heart failure. This study was conducted to investigate the probability of obstructive sleep apnea in men with heart failure and some related factors. Method: This was a cross-sectional study conducted on 100 male patients with systolic heart failure selected through convenience sampling. Demographic data, anthropometric indices, and information about the disease, treatment, and STOPBANG questionnaires were collected through interviewing subjects. Data was analyzed with SPSS 18 using descriptive statistics, t-test, Pearson correlation and linear regression. Results: 87% of heart failure patients were at a high risk of obstructive sleep apnea. The probability of obstructive sleep apnea had significant relationship with age and neck circumference (p<0.001). A significant difference was found in the mean score of obstructive sleep apnea compared with renal disease (p=0.020), use of angiotensin receptor blockers (p=0. 013) and diuretics (p=0. 019). Conclusion: Due to their longer and more direct contact with patients, nurses have more opportunity for evaluating obstructive sleep apnea in patients. Obstructive screening questionnaires of sleep breathing disorders is a simple and economical way for identifying the patients with a high risk of this problem and referring them for more accurate diagnosis and treatment, which can play an important role in reducing the negative outcomes of the disease and improving patients'


Globally, Atlantic salmon aquaculture is faced with a critical challenge: How best to deliver long-term sustainable growth, whilst optimising the opportunity for the expansion of the industry presented by an increasing global seafood demand?
This thesis presents a novel framework of complementary decision support approaches to enable decision-makers to better understand the factors influencing aquaculture development, and examine alternative production (growout) technologies that more effectively address the challenges associated with intensification and expansion. The framework was developed through a combination of fieldwork (international data-gathering), key stakeholder discussions, and the application of targeted qualitative and quantitative analytical approaches; using the Tasmanian industry as a Case Study. The initial research focused on shorter-term (tactical) decision support. A situational analysis defined the business environment, and appraised viable expansion options (offshore, closed-containment and extractive bio-remediation). An economic analysis of selected options then provided a comparison of financial performance and risk. The outputs of this initial component next informed strategic decision-making approaches; employing scenario analysis to explore plausible strategies for the adoption of land-based recirculating aquaculture systems; and qualitative modelling to understand the causal dynamics driving and regulating the industry, and their impact on technology selection.
Whilst it was clear that business economic viability is paramount, the results suggested that societal acceptance (the Social License to operate) is playing an increasingly important role in influencing business decisions. There is no single 'right' technological solution; social acceptance, in particular considerations regarding human wellbeing, trust, and animal welfare concers, will shape the business environment and therefore technology selection. The research emphasised the importance of employing a balance of tactical and strategic decision-making techniques, and of engaging with a broad range of industry stakeholders. It also highlighted the complexity and dynamic nature of the industry and that key variances (economic, regional, strategic, technological, and temporal) must be included in decision-making.


Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic, systemic inflammatory disease that commonly manifests in the feet as pain, swelling and deformity. These symptoms often have extensive and severe mutlidimensional consequences for people's lives and can be evaluated using a class of subjective outcome measures known as patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs). PROMs have been advocated by the Darzi report and are central to reforms in the NHS.
Therefore, the aim of this thesis was to develop a new and novel PROM, the Salford Rheumatoid Arthritis Foot Evaluation Instrument (SAFE), using a clinimetric approach and featuring an adequately pre-tested nomothetic (fixed scale) and idiographic (patient-specific scale) assessment
strategy. A mixed methods approach was employed to develop the SAFE, with the formulation and implementation of a four phase sequential exploratory fully mixed methods design (SEMMD) that featured equal priority between the qualitative and quantitative components.
The four phase SEMMD enabled the strategic and effective combination of methods to produce a PROM that is firmly rooted in the views and experiences of people with feet affected by RA. The nomothetic scale of the SAFE has evidence for face, content and convergent validity (Spearman-Rank co-efficients: 0.62 - 0.80) and excellent one week test-retest reliability (intra-class correlation coefficients: 0.86 - 1.00 ). The idiographic scale has evidence for face and content validity.
The SAFE is a tool for both clinical practice and clinical research. In order to realise the full potential of the SAFE, further research will be undertaken to refine, develop the PROM and integrate it into clinical practice. Initially, it will be necessary to demonstrate additional measurement properties for the nomothetic scale, including clinical interpretability and responsiveness and also
necessary to demonstrate quantitative measurement properties for the idiographic scale. Long term, the SAFE will be redeveloped using item response theory and implemented as a computerised adaptive test.


Detailed heat transfer coefficient and film effectiveness distributions are presented on a cylindrical leading edge model using a transient liquid crystal technique. Tests were done in a low-speed wind tunnel on a cylindrical model in a crossflow with two rows of injection holes. Mainstream Reynolds number based on the cylinder diameter was 100,900. The two rows of injection holes were located at ±15 deg from stagnation. The film holes were spaced four hole diameters apart and were angled 30 and 90 deg to the surface in the spanwise and streamwise directions, respectively. Heat transfer coefficient and film effectiveness distributions are presented on only one side of the front half of the cylinder. The cylinder surface is coated with a thin layer of thermochromic liquid crystals and a transient test is run to obtain the heat transfer coefficients and film effectiveness. Air and CO 2 were used as coolant to simulate coolant-to-mainstream density ratio effect. The effect of coolant blowing ratio was studied for blowing ratios of 0.4, 0.8, and 1.2. Results show that Nusselt numbers downstream of injection increase with an increase in blowing ratio for both coolants. Air provides highest effectiveness at blowing ratio of 0.4 and CO 2 provides highest effectiveness at a blowing ratio of 0.8. Higher density coolant (CO 2 ) provides lower Nusselt numbers at all blowing ratios compared to lower density coolant (air). An increase in free-stream turbulence has very small effect on Nusselt numbers for both coolants. However, an increase in free-stream turbulence reduces film effectiveness significantly at low blowing ratios for both coolants.


"Employment law has undergone a great deal of change over the past few years; most significantly the enactment of the Equality Act 2010 and the case law that has emerged as a result have irrevocably altered the legal landscape in relation to discrimination in the workplace. These developments have been fully explored in this new edition of A Practical Approach to Employment Law. Now in its ninth edition, this book provides a comprehensive and systematic exploration of the principles and practice of employment law. It is structured to meet the requirements of the lawyer who needs to find practical solutions to practical problems. It provides a clear guide to all aspects of individual and collective employment law as it actually works today. Key developments in this new edition include: extensive coverage of new rules and legislation such as the Equality Act 2010, the Enterprise & Regulatory Reform Act 2013, the Growth & Infrastructure Act 2013, the Trade Union Act 2016, and the new Employment Tribunal rules; as well as full consideration of relevant case law. The A Practical Approach series is the perfect partner for practice work. Each title focuses on one field of the law, providing a comprehensive overview of the subject together with clear, practical advice and tips on issues likely to arise in practice. The books are also an excellent resource for those new to the law, where the expert overview and clear layout promote clarity and ease of understanding."


This volume is the second of three that provide a complete review and inventory of New Zealand's entire living and fossil biodiversity an international effort involving more than 220 New Zealand and overseas specialists and the most comprehensive of its kind in the world. Together, the three volumes will list every one of the almost 55,000 known species of New Zealand's animals, plants, fungi and micro-organisms. Volume 2 mostly deals with the major branch of the animal kingdom known as Ecdysozoa (moulting animals), which includes arachnids, centipedes and millipedes, crustaceans and insects. It also includes the enigmatic phylum Chaetognatha (arrow worms) and concludes with a chapter on the fossil traces ichnofossils of ancient animal activities. All three volumes are affiliated with Species 2000, an international scientific project with the long-term goal of enumerating all known species on Earth into one seamless list the Catalogue of Life, a kind of online biological telephone directory.To date, only New Zealand has compiled a checklist of its entire biota. Approximately 52% of this country's species are endemic found only in New Zealand's freshwater, marine, and land environments. We have a responsibility to the global community to preserve this unique heritage or taonga. But further than that, all of our species including many of the naturalised aliens included in the survey are important to New Zealand's economy, ecology and well-being. Written for the advanced highschool and tertiary-level reader, these volumes are intended to be a kind of 'Cooks Tour' of the kingdoms and phyla of life that will, it is hoped, provide an appreciation of the wondrous diversity of nature.


Abstract With the devastation of the First World War, Germany experienced a traumatic loss of identification with values that had been central to its prewar culture, and these emphatically included musical values. In postwar German art music, this resulted in heavy irony toward the lofty philosophical claims and musical expressiveness that the later nineteenth century had bequeathed to prewar modernism. But it also occasioned bitter attempts to reassert those values, as exemplified by the polemics of Hans Pfitzner. Prominent on both sides of this debate, which found a medium in musical composition as well as musical discourse, were issues of national identity, nationalism, and the legacy of Richard Wagner. One musical statement that attracted much notice early on was Paul Hindemith9s burlesque opera Das Nusch-Nuschi , which premiered in Stuttgart in 1921. Hindemith, then beginning his rapid ascent in the postwar music scene, had based his opera on a Burmese marionette play that scandalously satirized Tristan und Isolde . There is considerable evidence of Hindemith9s ironic engagement with Wagner throughout the war, and his opera——the postwar culmination of this trend——abounds with ironic evocations of Tristan . Training a critical lens on Wagner9s legacy, Das Nusch-Nuschi also resonates strongly with a position then being voiced by Paul Bekker, who spoke out against Pfitzner9s Wagnerian hypernationalism and called for a decisive internationalist turn in postwar German composition. Specifically, Hindemith9s opera sharpens its ironic, anti-Wagnerian tone by reaching beyond German modernism to embrace the Russian ""neonationalism"" of Igor Stravinsky.


Contrary to standard search model predictions, prior studies failed to estimate a positive effect of unemployment insurance (UI) on reemployment wages. This paper estimates a positive UI wage effect exploiting an age-based regression discontinuity in Austrian administrative data. A search model incorporating duration dependence determines the UI wage effect as the balance between two offsetting forces: UI causes agents to seek higher-wage jobs, but also reduces wages by lengthening unemployment. This implies a negative relationship between the UI unemployment duration and wage effects, which holds empirically both in our sample and across studies, reconciling disparate wage-effect estimates. Empirically, UI raises wages by improving reemployment firms' quality and attenuating wage drops.


Thermal process has become one of the major technologies for the treatment of sewage sludge to secure final products. The incinerated ash and molten slag as products of thermal treatment contain various types of heavy metals at high concentrations. Incineration and melting processes can reduce the sludge volume and stabilize the chemical compounds in the final product, which can be utilized
beneficially as construction materials. In this study, dewatered sewage sludge was examined to investigate its
properties when subjected to different heat treatment processes, up to the temperature of 1550 8C, in terms of chemical, physical, and micro-structure properties, degree of stabilization and the possibility of utilizing the final products in different applications. The study shows that the volume of dewatered sewage sludge reduces up to five times by the drying process, twenty times by the incineration process and fifty five times by the melting process. It was shown that heavy metals can be stabilized
during the incineration process by conditioning the dried sludge with CaCO3. Heating temperature, holding time and cooling rate are the controlling parameters for the melting process, to produce different needed materials, in terms of
chemical, physical, micro-structure and stability of the final products. Incinerated ash and molten slag show stable end products in terms of the leaching properties, and it is within the limit of Japanese regulation for soil environmental limit. Incinerated ash and molten slag are shown to be very good products that can be utilized as alternatives to cement and sand in concrete. By replacing 5 percent of cement with incinerated ash, the compressive strength can be improved by 50 percent compared to the standard product for the period of 3 days by getting a compressive strength of 30.80 N.mm-2. Similarly, by replacing a 50 percent of sand with molten slag, the compressive strength can be higher than the standard product for the period of 7 days with a compressive strength of26.36.


The formation of a new vascular network by angiogenesis is a key driver in tumor growth and metastasis, making this an attractive therapeutic target. Different strategies are being developed to either prevent tumor angiogenesis or disrupt the tumor vasculature already in place. In this in vitro study, we investigated the antivascular properties of ENMD-1198, a new anticancer drug currently in clinical trials. ENMD-1198 is a new analogue of 2-methoxyestradiol, a microtubule-targeting agent that has shown promising results in the treatment of multiple myeloma and hormone-refractory prostate cancer. Using both bone marrow–derived and dermal microvascular endothelial cell lines, we analyzed the effect of ENMD-1198 on the different functions of endothelial cells involved in angiogenesis. In both cell lines, ENMD-1198 was more potent than 2-methoxyestradiol at inhibiting endothelial cell proliferation, motility, migration, and morphogenesis. In addition, ENMD-1198 induced a significant decrease in vascular endothelial growth factor receptor-2 protein expression in endothelial cells. Furthermore, videomicroscopy experiments showed that ENMD-1198 was able to completely disrupt preformed vascular structures within 2 hours. This vascular-disrupting activity was associated with extensive depolymerization of the microtubule network and accumulation of actin stress fibers and large focal adhesions in vascular endothelial cells. Collectively, our results show that this new compound displays potent antivascular properties, and this study provides important insights into the mechanism of action of this promising new anticancer drug. Mol Cancer Ther; 9(5); 1408–18. ©2010 AACR.


Pipeline integrity management commonly leverages nondestructive inspection of pipeline defects via inline inspection (ILI) and assessment of the resultant data. Key parameters for dent analysis include the feature geometry measured by caliper tools and the presence/severity of any interacting features (such as cracks or areas of corrosion) which can be measured with a variety of technologies (such as magnetic flux leakage or ultrasonic tools). Dent profile measurements can be especially susceptible to noise due to the measurement techniques employed, signal quality, and overall tool performance. Analytical methods for strain assessment of dents can employ curve/surface fitting techniques to estimate the curvature and calculate the strain of the dent based on the fitted curve/surface. Noise in the measured profile can result in local areas of high perceived strain, which could lead to misinterpretation of a dent's true severity, especially when using automated or purely analytical assessment methods.
 A deterministic strain-based approach for evaluating the severity of dented pipelines has been presented previously which leverages multi-dimensional B-spline functions to more accurately apply the non-mandatory ASME B31.8 equations for dent assessment. The approach presented previously requires relatively smooth dent profile information to minimize the effects of signal noise. While low pass filters can effectively eliminate noise in the signal, they may also lead to loss of accuracy (e.g. excessive smoothing can reduce the depth and sharpness of a measured dent's profile). This paper discusses how low pass filters can be optimally used to smooth the raw ILI signals to allow for analytical representation of the dent shape without underestimating its severity.
 The conclusion of this venture is a detailed workflow for the analytical assessment of dented pipelines for the rapid characterization of the severity of deformation in pipelines with limited computational demand. This type of assessment allows for initial ranking and assessment of large and complex pipeline systems to select features requiring more detailed assessment or mitigation.


Prof. Simon C. Robson ( Figure 1 ) has taught, conducted research and practiced in Hepatology and Transplantation in three countries over three continents for more than three decades. He has served as the Division Chief of Gastroenterology and Hepatology as well as a founding member of the Transplant Institute at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He is currently the Charlotte F. & Irving W. Rabb Professor of Medicine at Harvard University. He has a Ph.D. in Immunology, Fellowships of the Royal College of Physicians of London (by examination) and Ireland (honorary) and was recently elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases. He is recognized internationally as a physician-scientist and clinician. He is also a well-regarded educator and has received several awards for his excellence in research, teaching and clinical practice.


The closure of small rural schools is the single most implemented educational change reform in rural areas of Canada (Wallin, 2007). Similarly, throughout the 20 century, rural school consolidation was the single, most frequently implemented educational policy in the United States (Herzog & Pittman, 1995). This study explores the why and how of this phenomenon. Rural education research has indicated that small rural schools across North America share common challenges unique to the rural situation (Bard, Gardener & Wieland, 2006; Blaine, Pace & Robinson, 2004; Mulcahy, 1993; Wallin, 2007). Many rural education researchers concur that some of these challenges arise from social, economic and political differences between urban and rural settings, but primarily, they stem from the consequence of globalization on trade, labour relations, regulatory control, or governmental rules and guidelines (Howley, 1997; Wallin, 2007). In response to these challenges, many policymakers and educational officials have initiated reform efforts in the form of small rural school closures and consolidations (Bard et.al, 2006; Corbett & Mulcahy, 2006; Hicks, 1999; Wallin, 2007). In this study, I carry out a qualitative analysis of the rationale behind these reforms, using one particular Eastern Ontario school board's proposal (Boundary 2020) and a number of other documents as an exemplification of these closure and consolidation movements, and the various rural stakeholder responses to this reform. In an exploration of rural perspectives and philosophies, I bring alternative rural perceptions to the forefront and advocate for rural stakeholders to have a voice in the future of their schools and communities. Moreover, by acknowledging not only the existence of small rural schools in Ontario, including the notion that their future is threatened by plans such as Boundary 2020, this project serves as a point of departure for future rural education research in a province that tends to favour a metropolitan-inspired school system. Furthermore, by emphasizing the need to cultivate rural meanings and identities, I hope to encourage rural communities to nurture the strengths of their local schools through the development of locally responsive curricula and community-centered activities and opportunities, which could contribute to the sustainability of their local rural schools.


In an increasingly knowledge-based economy, Canadian universities are important spaces for the development of research and innovation in many areas. This collection is the first systematic examination of the evolving relationship between the federal government and Canadian universities as revealed through changes in federal research and innovation policies. Focusing on the last two decades of federal policy under the Chretien and Martin Liberal governments and the Harper Conservative government, Research and Innovation Policy considers issues such as the transformation of federal research granting bodies, the creation of new research infrastructure funding organizations such as the Canada Foundation for Innovation, pressures and incentives to create intellectual property and to commercialize, and the regulation of research ethics. With timely essays ranging in scope from the regulation of research ethics to the pressures of commercialization, Research and Innovation Policy is essential reading for any student or scholar committed to the well-being of higher education in Canada.


The circadian clock is a self-sustained time-keeping system which controls behavioral, biochemical and physiological rhythmic processes. In mammals, the cogwheels of this clock are the so-called clock genes which control their own expression via several feedback loops. One of these genes is hPER1, a clock gene which disposes of a glucocorticoid-responsive element and might therefore be influenced by glucocorticoids. In humans, stress is associated with an increase in the glucocorticoid cortisol and is seen as a major factor in the etiology of numerous mental health problems. For this reason, our goal was to investigate the putative cortisol-mediated influence of acute and chronic psychosocial stress on the gene expression of hPER1 as well as hPER2, another related clock gene from the same family. We therefore applied laboratory psychosocial stress to thirty-one healthy men and measured cortisol as well as mRNA levels of hPER1 and hPER2. Our main findings suggest that acute psychosocial stress influences the expression of hPER1 and hPER2 dependent on the subjective experience of chronic stress. We therefore conclude that the reactivity to acute stress on the gene expression level of these two genes differs significantly between subjects with high chronic stress compared to subjects with low chronic stress.


Cause-Effect Graph Testing is a popular technique used for almost four decades. Based on Boolean algebra, this technique assists deriving test cases from a given specification informally written in a natural language. The present paper suggests Boolean differentiation for formalizing this technique. The new approach is applied to an example, borrowed from G. Myers, for demonstrating and analyzing its features. Evaluations show that the new approach outperforms Myers' approach in terms of the detected faults per test cases.


When my family discusses how we should spend a summer holiday, we start from certain common understandings about our preferences. We prefer self-catering accommodation to hotels, and hotels to campsites. We prefer walking and looking at scenery and wildlife to big-city sightseeing and shopping. When it comes to walks, we prefer walks of six miles or so to ones which are much shorter or much longer, and prefer well-marked but uncrowded paths to ones which are either more rugged or more popular. And so on. These common understandings greatly simplify the task of choosing between holiday destinations and activities, by allowing us quickly to eliminate many options. But what does it mean to say that we prefer one thing to another?


The term "Mediterranean diet," implying that all Mediterranean people have the same diet, is a misnomer. The countries around the Mediterranean basin have different diets, religions and cultures. Their diets differ in the amount of total fat, olive oil, type of meat and wine intake; milk vs. cheese; fruits and vegetables; and the rates of coronary heart disease and cancer, with the lower death rates and longer life expectancy occurring in Greece. Extensive studies on the traditional diet of Greece (the diet before 1960) indicate that the dietary pattern of Greeks consists of a high intake of fruits, vegetables (particularly wild plants), nuts and cereals mostly in the form of sourdough bread rather than pasta; more olive oil and olives; less milk but more cheese; more fish; less meat; and moderate amounts of wine, more so than other Mediterranean countries. Analyses of the dietary pattern of the diet of Crete shows a number of protective substances, such as selenium, glutathione, a balanced ratio of (n-6):(n-3) essential fatty acids (EFA), high amounts of fiber, antioxidants (especially resveratrol from wine and polyphenols from olive oil), vitamins E and C, some of which have been shown to be associated with lower risk of cancer, including cancer of the breast. These findings should serve as a strong incentive for the initiation of intervention trials that will test the effect of specific dietary patterns in the prevention and management of patients with cancer.


This Executive Summary of the Global Strategy for the Diagnosis, Management, and Prevention of COPD, Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) 2017 report focuses primarily on the revised and novel parts of the document. The most significant changes include: (1) the assessment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease has been refined to separate the spirometric assessment from symptom evaluation. ABCD groups are now proposed to be derived exclusively from patient symptoms and their history of exacerbations; (2) for each of the groups A to D, escalation strategies for pharmacologic treatments are proposed; (3) the concept of deescalation of therapy is introduced in the treatment assessment scheme; (4) nonpharmacologic therapies are comprehensively presented; and (5) the importance of comorbid conditions in managing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is reviewed.


AIM
To explore final-year nursing students' perceptions of general practice nursing.

BACKGROUND
The need for general practice nurses has increased due to growing demands for health care in the community. This demand is exacerbated by a shortage in the general practice nursing workforce. Understanding final-year nursing students' perceptions of general practice nursing is important as these may influence career choices.

DESIGN
Qualitative descriptive study within a mixed methods project.

METHODS
Telephone interviews were conducted with sixteen final-year nursing students. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analysed using thematic analysis. Reporting follows the COREQ checklist.

RESULTS
Perceptions of general practice nursing varied between participants and related to three main themes; ways of working; a broad role to meet diverse health needs; and relationships with patients. General practice nurses were seen to have stable and collaborative working relationships, with their role ranging from supporting general practitioners to being autonomous professionals. The nurse's broad role was associated with diverse presentations and was considered interesting and challenging. Participants perceived that general practice nurses had more time to spend with patients, and this helped establish trust, and facilitated patient-centred care.

CONCLUSION
Participants' perceptions of general practice nursing varied, with some students recognising the diversity of the role and others perceiving it as limited. These views were often impacted by others experiences rather than personal experience. These variations underscore the need for students to receive greater exposure to general practice nursing. Review of undergraduate curricula to increase focus on preparing nursing students to work in general practice may help shape students' interest to seek employment in this setting.

RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE
Students perceptions of a clinical setting can influence their career decisions. Understanding these perceptions can inform clinicians and managers and highlight areas that may need to be addressed to promote career opportunities.


Assessment is integral to teaching and learning and external assessment is a logical sequel to the interaction between teachers and their students because it represents an account of this interaction to the public. External assessments, especially those that have high stakes, such as the end-of-cycle examinations, are known to have an influence on teaching and learning in the years that precede them.

The effect of external assessments on teaching and learning has been extensively researched. The test items which transmit the influence have also been thoroughly analysed in terms of the kind of thinking that they demand from students. However, the aspect of external assessment that has not received much attention is the test developers who originate the test items and are therefore ultimately responsible for the type of effect the items have on teaching and learning.

External assessment in sub-Saharan African countries especially, demand mainly recall of facts with very little demand on the thinking and problem solving abilities of students. This type of question tends to induce teaching and learning mainly for recall. This research aims to throw light on the intentions of test developers for Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) in Ghana when they write items for this end-of-cycle examination.

A broadly qualitative approach was adopted for this research but quantitative data was used in addition. Seven test developers were interviewed extensively on how they perform their test development activities. In order to have a fuller understanding of the external examination, the teachers and students who experience its influence were included in the study. Forty teachers and 120 students completed questionnaires relating to their beliefs about the BECE and eight each of the participating teachers and students were subsequently interviewed.

The findings suggest that the test developers were aware that the level of thinking in their questions was low and would prefer questions that demand higher levels of thinking. They were also aware that past questions influence teaching and learning and were of the opinion that the standard of education is low. However, the test developers did not have the intention to change teaching and learning with their tests because they could not see a relation between their test items and the quality of teaching and learning. It was also found that their personal interpretations and concerns about the social impact of the examination are more influential in determining the type of items they write. This is significant because item writing is presumed to be a neutral and objective activity devoid of subjective considerations.

The findings further suggest that the examination influences what teachers teach and how they teach it and the teachers' self-worth, prestige and public esteem depend on the performance of their students in the examination. The students believed the BECE prevents them from learning other things and from developing their talents and they saw the examination as the fairest means of competing for selection to senior high school because it is less partial when compared with their teachers' continuous assessment marks. It was also found that past questions serve as an alternative curriculum because they determine the standard of the examination questions and also influence teaching and learning. Through the medium of past questions, the examination is able to influence policy by circumventing it or diverting attention away from it.

It was concluded that the influence of social considerations in item writing has created a vicious cycle of low level questions that induce teaching and learning aimed at recall which does not equip students to use knowledge acquired to solve the problems that attract the sympathy of the item writers. It will require awareness creation among stakeholders about the central role of the external assessment in determining the quality of teaching and learning to break the cycle by improving the quality of the test items.


This article is concerned with the problems connected with the development of the Franco-Swiss Jura Arc in its cross-border context. For this region, the border has always been an obstacle to development. Now owing to the further development of the EU, the impact of the border is likely to change, opening up rich prospects for opportunities although they will not be free from stumbling blocks. The empirically oriented approach we have adopted consists of three parts. The first characterizes the Franco-Swiss Jura Arc and stresses the similarities on either side of the border. The result is common development issues. The second part explains the border's influence on this region's ability to develop, particularly in view of the changes undergone by the Swiss and French watchmaking industries since the 1960s. The third part presents the major issues of a cross-border Jura policy aimed at diminishing the impact of the border. The object is to eliminate the cut-off effect caused by the border, to re-create bonds of solidarity and to re-organize energies in order to stimulate a dynamic common to the whole of this Franco-Swiss region.


We present the first shared task on semantic change discovery and detection in Spanish. We create the first dataset of Spanish words manually annotated by semantic change using the DURel framewok (Schlechtweg et al., 2018). The task is divided in two phases: 1) graded change discovery, and 2) binary change detection. In addition to introducing a new language for this task, the main novelty with respect to the previous tasks consists in predicting and evaluating changes for all vocabulary words in the corpus. Six teams participated in phase 1 and seven teams in phase 2 of the shared task, and the best system obtained a Spearman rank correlation of 0.735 for phase 1 and an F1 score of 0.735 for phase 2. We describe the systems developed by the competing teams, highlighting the techniques that were particularly useful.


Rupture resistance is a measure of the strength of a soil to withstand an applied stress or resist deformation. In soil survey, during routine soil descriptions, rupture resistance is described for each horizon or layer in the soil profile. The lower portion of the rupture resistance classes are assigned based on rupture between thumb and forefinger. The tactile sense of the pressure can vary considerably between individuals. A calibration tool was developed, to help the students and soil scientists calibrate their thumb and forefinger for the correct amount of pressure. Instructions on how to assemble four pressure calibration tool assemblies measuring 8, 20, 40, and 80 N of applied pressure are presented. The calibration tools are demonstrated on how the combinations of spring/knobs are put together to get different rupture pressures. Manufactured or substitute fragments for natural fragments can be used in the instruction of rupture resistance in the classroom. In soil survey, this tool has been effective in calibrating the finger-force range for rupture resistance class placement for the last two decades.


As the end of Dennard scaling looms, both the semiconductor industry and the research community are exploring for innovative solutions that allow energy efficiency and performance to continue to scale. Approximation computing has become one of the viable techniques to perpetuate the historical improvements in the computing landscape. As approximate computing attracts more attention in the community, having a general, diverse, and representative set of benchmarks to evaluate different approximation techniques becomes necessary. In this paper, we develop and introduce AxBench, a general, diverse and representative multi-framework set of benchmarks for CPUs, GPUs, and hardware design with the total number of 29 benchmarks. We judiciously select and develop each benchmark to cover a diverse set of domains such as machine learning, scientific computation, signal processing, image processing, robotics, and compression. AxBench comes with the necessary annotations to mark the approximable region of code and the application-specific quality metric to assess the output quality of each application. AxBench with these set of annotations facilitate the evaluation of different approximation techniques. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we evaluate three previously proposed approximation techniques using AxBench benchmarks: loop perforation [1] and neural processing units (NPUs) [2–4] on CPUs and GPUs, and Axilog [5] on dedicated hardware. We find that (1) NPUs offer higher performance and energy efficiency as compared to loop perforation on both CPUs and GPUs, (2) while NPUs provide considerable efficiency gains on CPUs, there still remains significant opportunity to be explored by other approximation techniques, (3) Unlike on CPUs, NPUs offer full benefits of approximate computations on GPUs, and (4) considerable opportunity remains to be explored by innovative approximate computation techniques at the hardware level after applying Axilog.


ABSTRACT A phylogenetic analysis of the two-clawed spiders grouped in Dionycha is presented, with 166 representative species of 49 araneomorph families, scored for 393 characters documented through standardized imaging protocols. The study includes 44 outgroup representatives of the main clades of Araneomorphae, and a revision of the main morphological character systems. Novel terminology is proposed for stereotyped structures on the chelicerae, and the main types of setae and silk spigots are reviewed, summarizing their characteristics. Clear homologs of posterior book lungs are described for early instars of Filistatidae, and a novel type of respiratory structure, the epigastric median tracheae, is described for some terminals probably related with Anyphaenidae or Eutichuridae. A new type of crypsis mechanism is described for a clade of thomisids, which in addition to retaining soil particles, grow fungi on their cuticle. Generalized patterns of cheliceral setae and macrosetae are proposed as synapomorphies of the Divided Cribellum and RTA clades. Dionycha is here proposed as a member of the Oval Calamistrum clade among the lycosoid lineages, and Liocranoides, with three claws and claw tufts, is obtained as a plausible sister group of the dionychan lineage. The morphology of the claw tuft and scopula is examined in detail and scored for 14 characters highly informative for relationships. A kind of seta intermediate between tenent and plumose setae (the pseudotenent type) is found in several spider families, more often reconstructed as a derivation from true tenent setae rather than as a phylogenetic intermediate. Corinnidae is retrieved in a restricted sense, including only the subfamilies Corinninae and Castianeirinae, while the "corinnid" genera retaining the median apophysis in the copulatory bulb are not clearly affiliated to any of the established families. Miturgidae is redefined, including Zoridae as a junior synonym. The Eutichuridae is raised to family status, as well as the Trachelidae and Phrurolithidae. New synapomorphies are provided for Sparassidae, Philodromidae, and Trachelidae. Philodromidae is presented as a plausible sister group of Salticidae, and these sister to Thomisidae; an alternative resolution placing thomisids in Lycosoidea is also examined. The Oblique Median Tapetum (OMT) clade is proposed for a large group of families including gnaphosoids, trachelids, liocranids, and phrurolithids, all having the posterior median eye tapeta forming a 90° angle, used for navigation by means of the polarized light in the sky as an optical compass; prodidomines seem to have further enhanced the mechanism by incorporating the posterior lateral eyes to the system. The Teutamus group is recognized for members of the OMT clade that are usually included in Liocranidae, but not closely related to Liocranum or phrurolithids. The Claw Tuft Clasper (CTC) clade is proposed for a group of families within the OMT clade, all having a peculiar mechanism grasping the folded base of the claw tuft setae with a hook on the superior claws. The CTC clade includes Trachelidae, Phrurolithidae, and several gnaphosoids such as Ammoxenidae, Cithaeronidae, Gnaphosidae, and Prodidomidae. A remarkable syndrome involving the expansion of the anterior lateral spinnerets, often sexually dimorphic, is here reported for some Miturgidae and several members of the CTC clade, in addition to the known cases in Clubionidae and "Liocranidae." The following genera are transferred from Miturgidae to Eutichuridae: Calamoneta, Calamopus, Cheiracanthium, Cheiramiona, Ericaella, Eutichurus, Macerio, Radulphius, Strotarchus, Summacanthium, and Tecution; Lessertina is transferred from Corinnidae to Eutichuridae. The following genera are transferred to Miturgidae: Argoctenus, Elassoctenus, Hestimodema, Hoedillus, Israzorides, Odomasta, Simonus, Thasyraea, Tuxoctenus, Voraptus, Xenoctenus, Zora, and Zoroides, from Zoridae; Odo and Paravulsor, from Ctenidae; Pseudoceto from Corinnidae. The following genera are transferred from Corinnidae to Trachelidae: Afroceto, Cetonana, Fuchiba, Fuchibotulus, Meriola, Metatrachelas, Paccius, Paratrachelas, Patelloceto, Planochelas, Poachelas, Spinotrachelas, Thysanina, Trachelas, Trachelopachys, and Utivarachna. The following genera are transferred from Corinnidae to Phrurolithidae: Abdosetae, Drassinella, Liophrurillus, Plynnon, Orthobula, Otacilia, Phonotimpus, Phrurolinillus, Phrurolithus, Phruronellus, Phrurotimpus, Piabuna, and Scotinella. Dorymetaecus is transferred from Clubionidae to Phrurolithidae. Oedignatha and Koppe are transferred from Corinnidae to Liocranidae. Ciniflella is transferred from Amaurobiidae to Tengellidae.


Abstract: Redesign of a beginning Spanish program allowed for an enrollment increase of 85%, lowered cost per student by 29%, and provided a 9% pay raise to the course instructors. Class sizes were reduced from 30 students per section to 25 per section and seat time was reduced from 200 minutes per week to 130 per week. In-class instruction was supplemented with automated, online homework exercises and computer-mediated communication (CMC). The online components were distributed through a WebCT course Web site. Implementation occurred over a period of 2 years. This study examines whether the redesigned program was able to maintain student learning outcomes. The resulting student retention rates, successful course completion rates, and scores on the Brigham Young University Web-based Computerized Adaptive Placement Exam (BYU WebCAPE) were comparable to those of prior instruction, but the redesign had questionable effects on proficiency. Key words: cost, enrollment, online, outcomes, redesign Language: Spanish Introduction This study describes the implementation and assessment of a technology-enhanced first-year Spanish program at Portland State University. The program included three courses (Spanish 101, 102, 103) taught in quarters. In the new program model, students met face to face 130 minutes each week, instead of the previous 200 minutes per week, and section sizes were limited to 25 students, rather than the previous limit of 30. Online homework assignments included reading, listening, vocabulary, and grammar activities. Class meetings were also supplemented with out-of-class computer-mediated communication (CMC). The redesign was implemented gradually over a period of 2 years. The goals of the program redesign were to improve instruction, maintain learning outcomes, serve more students, reduce costs, and reduce seat time. Demand for enrollment in beginning Spanish at the university was straining the personnel and financial resources available. Without the new program design, section sizes would have increased and many students would have been turned away. This study examined whether the combination of technologies employed and the course design were effective in maintaining student learning outcomes. Survey of Literature In contrast with previous generations' expectations that machines would replace instructors (see Salaberry, 2001), researchers today present a balanced assessment which underscores the essential skills of language teachers in technologically rich learning environments (see Garrett, 1989, 1991; Pusack & Otto, 1997; Salaberry, 2001; Warschauer, 1997). In the present study, technology was integrated based on the indications of existing research on computer-assisted language learning and instruction. The experimental treatment was also designed to generate cost and space savings as these were institutional imperatives. The survey of literature therefore includes considerations of cost effectiveness. Cost is not a conventional criterion in studies of language instruction and acquisition, but cost is a concern for many language programs and is often a barrier to pedagogical transformation. Two types of available online technology were identified as effective for improving learning outcomes and instructional efficiency. CMC was indicated by existing research to be effective for improving oral performance. Additionally, it could be used outside of class time. Online automated workbooks were highly efficient for grading and grade recording. They could also provide instant feedback. A WebCT course Web site was included in the curriculum because of its capacity to host mechanical and meaningful drills (a la Paulston, 1972) through its quiz programs, as well as communicative drills and communicative language practice (a la Lee & Van Patten, 1995) through its communication tools. The WebCT course Web site provided efficient ways to monitor student use of CMC and the WebCT quiz software allowed extensive customization of mechanical and meaningful drills. …


The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) have the potential to become a powerful political vision that can support the urgently needed global transition to a shared and lasting prosperity. In December 2014, the United Nations (UN) Secretary General published his report on the SDGs. However, the final goals and targets that will be adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015 risk falling short of expectations because of what we call "cockpit-ism": the illusion that top-down steering by governments and intergovernmental organizations alone can address global problems. In view of the limited effectiveness of intergovernmental efforts and questions about the capacity of national governments to affect change, the SDGs need to additionally mobilize new agents of change such as businesses, cities and civil society. To galvanize such a broad set of actors, multiple perspectives on sustainable development are needed that respond to the various motives and logics of change of these different actors. We propose four connected perspectives which can strengthen the universal relevance of the SDGs: "planetary boundaries" to stress the urgency of addressing environmental concerns and to target governments to take responsibility for (global) public goods; "the safe and just operating space" to highlight the interconnectedness of social and environmental concerns and its distributive consequences; "the energetic society" to benefit from the willingness of a broad group of actors worldwide to take action; and "green competition" to stimulate innovation and new business practices. To realize the transformative potential of the SDGs, these four perspectives should be reflected in the focus and content of the SDGs that will be negotiated in the run up to September 2015 and its further implementation.


ABSTRACT This article explores Europe's external migration mix, considering three policy instruments which form part of the EU's remote control of borders: (1) visa regulations managing entry and cross-border mobility, (2) readmission agreements facilitating assisted and forced return of migrants without legal right to remain, and (3) resettlement of refugees with refugee status via formalised programmes. The article explores the degree and nature of these policies co-evolution. Based on a collation of migration policy data for 31 European countries between 1990 and 2020, we disentangle spatial, temporal, and categorical policy patterns and interactions. We find strong evidence for spatial policy dependence across European countries for all three policy areas, but particularly visa policy; evidence for some categorical dependence between selected external policies within countries, but also between external policy instruments and other migration-relevant policies; and only weak or no evidence for temporal sequencing of external policy change. The external migration policy mix appears heterogenous across different European states, but also within single European states, and vis-a-vis third country states, with whom various migration-relevant and externally oriented policies are negotiated. As a result, and perhaps surprisingly, the role of specific migration-relevant policies seems to be underestimated in strategic and overarching migration policymaking.


ABSTRACT This paper presents a methodology to calculate the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of machinery equipment by utilising physics-based simulation models and Digital Twin concept, in order to enable predictive maintenance for manufacturing resources using Prognostics and health management (PHM) techniques. The resources and the properties of them are first modelled in a digital environment able to simulate the real machine's behaviour. Data are gathered by machines' controllers and external sensors to be used for the synchronous tuning of the digital models and their simulation. The outcome of the simulation is then used to assess the resource's condition and to calculate RUL. In this way, the condition and the status of the machines can be monitored and predicted as a result from the simulation of physics-based models, without invasive techniques of common predictive maintenance solutions. A case study is presented in this paper where the proposed methodology is validated by predicting the RUL of an industrial robot.


The World Health Organization should reconsider its approval of misoprostol to prevent postpartum haemorrhaging in poorer countries, says a review of the evidence.1

The review concluded that the evidence to support the use of misoprostol in low and middle income countries in home and community settings where parenteral uterotonics were not available was "at best weak and inconclusive."

Most maternal deaths relating to pregnancy and childbirth occur in lower income countries, and a quarter of deaths are associated with postpartum haemorrhage, defined as blood loss of more than 500 mL after a vaginal delivery.2

Anaemia is the main risk factor for postpartum haemorrhage and can be treated easily if diagnosed. But in lower income countries without antenatal screening for anaemia WHO guidelines recommend that skilled birth attendants perform active management of the third stage of labour. This consists of three interventions: prophylactic administration of a uterotonic drug, where oxytocin is the drug of choice followed by ergometrine/methylergometrine; early cord clamping and cutting; and controlled cord traction.3

Oxytocin and ergometrine preparations …


Using vessel-mounted acoustic Doppler current profiler data from four different routes between Scotland, Iceland and Greenland, we map out the mean flow of water in the top 400 m of the northeastern North Atlantic. The poleward transport east of the Reykjanes Ridge (RR) decreases from ~8.5 to 10 Sv (1 Sverdrup=106 m3 s−1) at 59.5°N to 61°N to 6 Sv crossing the Iceland–Faroes–Scotland Ridge. The two longest ~1200 km transport integrals have 1.4–0.94 Sv uncertainty, respectively. The overall decrease in transport can in large measure be accounted for by a ~1.5 Sv flow across the RR into the Irminger Sea north of 59.5°N and by a ~0.5 Sv overflow of dense water along the Iceland–Faroes Ridge. A remaining 0.5 Sv flux divergence is at the edge of detectability, but if real could be accounted for through wintertime convection to >400 m and densification of upper ocean water. The topography of the Iceland Basin and the banks west of Scotland play a fundamental role in controlling flow pathways towards and past Iceland, the Faroes and Scotland. Most water flows north unimpeded through the Iceland Basin, some in the centre of the basin along the Maury Channel, and some along Hatton Bank, turning east along the northern slopes of George Bligh Bank, Lousy Bank and Bill Bailey's Bank, whereupon the flow splits with ~3 Sv turning northwest towards the Iceland–Faroes Ridge and the remainder continuing east towards and north of the Wyville-Thomson Ridge (WTR) to the Scotland slope thereby increasing the Slope Current transport from ~1.5 Sv south of the WTR to 3.5 Sv in the Faroes–Shetland Channel.


The stratiform pyritic Zn-Pb-Cu and barite ore deposit at Rosebery is contained in a small shale lens within pyroclastic rocks (the Primrose Pyroclastics) which form part of the Mt. Read Volcanic Group -an extensive belt of silicic volcanic rocks of Cambrian age.
The Primrose Pyroclastics consist of vitric, crystal and lithic tuffs, pyroclastic breccias, shale·lenses and quartz-sericitechlorite schists derived from the pyroclastic rocks. The Primrose Pyroclastics contain probable ignimbrites and therefore may have been deposited on land. They are overlain to the east by massive lavas of the Mt, Black Volcanics. On the, west the Primrose
Pyroclastics are flanked by and appear to intertongue with the Rosebery Group consisting of shale, quartz-wacke, greywacke conglomerate and dolomitic siltstone. The Cambrian rocks, particularly the volcanic formations, in the Rosebery area,have undergone low-grade regional metamorphism that has·produced mineral assemblages of the lower greenschist facies together with schistose fabrics.
In the Rosebery Mine area the detailed stratigraphic sequence is: massive pyroclastics (vitric, crystal and lithic tuff), black slate, host rock ( siltstone with crystal tuff bands), Barite orebody, host rock, Z.n-Pb sulphide orebody with an Fe-Cu-rich basal zone, footwall
schists, and footwall pyroclastics (crystal tuff). The contact
between the massive pyroclastics and the underlying black slate or
host rock appears, -ion part, to be a disconformity. The footwall
schists below thei Zn-Pb orebody possibly represent a zone of wallrock
alteration.i A post-ore basaltic dike is corelated with the
Jurassic dole ritei and is of interest because it contains probable
rheomorphic galena-chalcopyrite veinlets.


Two classic "phase transitions" in discrete mathematics are the emergence of a giant component in a random graph as the density of edges increases, and the transition of a random 2-SAT formula from satisfiable to unsatisfiable as the density of clauses increases. The random-graph result has been extended to the case of prescribed degree sequences, where the almost-sure nonexistence or existence of a giant component is related to a simple property of the degree sequence. We similarly extend the satisfiability result, by relating the almost-sure satisfiability or unsatisfiability of a random 2-SAT formula to an analogous property of a prescribed literal sequence.


The evolution of antibiotic resistance presents a practical and theoretical challenge: the design of strategies that limit the risk of evolved resistance while effectively treating current patients. Sequentially cycling antibiotics has been proposed as a way to slow the evolution of resistance by reducing the extent of adaptation to a given drug, and clinical trials have demonstrated its effectiveness in some settings. Empirical fitness landscapes in theory allow the sequence of drugs to be refined to maximize tradeoffs between drugs and thereby slow adaptation even further. Using the measured growth rates of 16 genotypes of Escherichia coli in the presence of β-lactam antibiotics, we test an adaptive strategy, based on a Markov chain transition matrix, to select drug sequences that continuously minimize resistance. Cycling is never selected over the long term. Instead, monotherapy with the antibiotic that permits the least growth in its landscape's absorbing state is rapidly selected from different starting conditions. Analysis of a synthetic fitness landscape shows that cycling drugs that induce sensitivity to one other could, in theory, outperform monotherapy. These results underscore the importance of considering the specific topologies of fitness landscape in determining whether to cycle drugs and suggest a general computational approach to identify high performing, practical strategies to manage resistance.


Normal 0 false false false EN-CA JA AR-SA This paper explores the idea of facing oppression by exploring how two photographs, one of a Catholic schoolgirl and one of a wet nurse were received as they made their way through social media. In addition, the paper looks at a blog post that was made about photographs from a similar time period as the photos. By exploring how the photos were received through Fanon, visual studies, and psychoanalytic theory, the paper proposes a new way to view these photographs, outside of the narratives of Oppression and Trauma. Instead, by understanding the re-inscription of the dominant narratives as an ongoing crisis, we allow for a reparative reading of this type of imagery that complicates our relationship with the past .


We examine stock market reactions around the
Nasdaq-100 Index reconstitutions. We find a symmetric and
transitory price response accompanied by a significant increase in
trading volume on the effective date. Firms added to the Nasdaq-100
Index experience significant increases in institutional ownership,
the number of market makers, and the number of shareholders. In
contrast, firms removed from the index show significant decreases
in the number of institutional shareholders. Additions to the
Nasdaq-100 Index also show significant increases in four liquidity
measures, whereas deletions demonstrate significant decreases in
two liquidity measures. These changes in liquidity are related to
the abnormal return on the announcement day. Taken together, the
results suggest support for the price pressure, liquidity, and
investor awareness hypotheses.