This article analyzes the Medical Savings Account (MSA) program, and critiques its impact on the retirement and health care systems. The MSA program is an experimental health care program created by The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. The program allows a limited number of small employers and self-employed individuals to establish MSAs during an experimental period. MSA funds may be used for medical expenses, or carried forward and accumulated tax-free as retirement savings. The underlying purpose of the MSA program is to reduce the cost of medical care by providing consumers greater incentives to be sensitive to health care costs than traditional insurance provides. Based upon the outcome of the MSA experiment, in 2000 Congress will decide whether to abolish or expand the program. On its face the MSA program appears to be an efficacious method of tackling both the overwhelming problem of health care financing, and the increasing need for retirement income security. However, this article demonstrates that the MSA program is a questionable response to these concerns because its underlying policy runs counter to existing retirement income and health care goals. Furthermore, the article shows that the MSA program raises serious issues of fairness as it benefits only relatively few, namely, the healthiest, wealthiest, and most informed members in society. The article acknowledges that the program's failure to deliver health benefits and savings opportunities to all Americans would not render it void of value, or its cost unjustifiable, if it were successful in curbing rising health care costs. However, using health care consumption trends, a comparative analysis, and MSA participation rates the article determines that the MSA program is unlikely to significantly impact medical care costs.


The new Common Core Standards for New York State and the Framework for K-12 Science Education Standards have a main focus on implementing argumentative writing into each content area. Some form of argumentative writing has always been used in the science curriculum through the creation of a lab report. However, an argumentative lab report must contain a counterclaim and specific sources of evidence to be considered a real argument. An argument does not have to be as formal as a lab report. Arguments can be as informal as a journal article or a narrative story. As long as the main parts of the argument are present, which include the claim, warrant, evidence and counterclaim, any sample of writing can be turned into an argument. In science, the three most important types of writing to enhance scientific literacy are lab reports, journaling and narratives. All three of these examples can be turned into argumentative writing to enhance a students' understanding of the content and the writing process.


PREVENTING GUILT BY ASSOCIATION: MINDFULNESS AND SUSCEPTIBILITY TO EVALUATIVE CONDITIONING By: LAURA KIKEN, M.S., M.P.H. A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2012. Director: Natalie Shook, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Psychology West Virginia University Evaluative conditioning (EC) is a type of attitude formation in which a stimulus is evaluated as positive or negative based on repeated pairings with valenced stimuli. Emerging evidence suggests that individuals differ in susceptibility to EC and these differences may be related to various social and psychological biases. One variable that has been linked with less negative attitude formation, although not using an EC paradigm, is mindfulness. Further, mindfulness is proposed to alter dimensions of elaboration that may underlie EC, particularly conditioning of negative attitudes. Therefore, three studies were conducted to examine whether mindfulness is linked to differential susceptibility to EC, particularly less conditioning of negative attitudes, and whether aspects of elaboration mediate this proposed relation. In all three studies, participants were exposed to an EC paradigm in which positive and negative pictures were paired with neutral Chinese ideographs. Then, they completed ideograph likability ratings. In Study 1, a measure of trait mindfulness was inversely associated with conditioning of negative attitudes, but not after accounting for negative state affect. In Study 2, there was no relation between either of two measures of trait mindfulness and susceptibility to EC. In Study 3, mindfulness was experimentally manipulated by randomly assigning participants to a mindful breathing induction or a mind-wandering control condition before they completed measures of elaboration and the EC paradigm. As compared to the control condition, the mindfulness condition showed greater susceptibility to conditioning of negative attitudes, after controlling for awareness of the picture-ideograph pairings. There was no support for the proposed mediation models through elaboration in either Studies 2 or 3. However, both studies provided evidence that more mindful individuals demonstrated less cognitive elaboration on negative stimuli. Further, both studies suggested that greater cognitive elaboration in response to pictures predicted less susceptibility to conditioning of positive attitudes and possibly greater susceptibility to conditioning of negative attitudes. Altogether, the three studies provided mixed and inconclusive evidence as to the relation between mindfulness and susceptibility to EC. However, the findings regarding cognitive elaboration may help to advance both the mindfulness and EC literatures.


This paper develops the concept of network sustainability. To become and stay sustainable, distributed research infrastructures must satisfy present needs while at the same time be flexible and resilient to meet future requirements. For this it is not enough to merely build a resilient economic model and be technically viable. Research infrastructures that can understand, address and shape future needs have a sustainable community network. Clear characteristics of a research infrastructure with a sustainable network are that partners gain access to other networks and interest groups, that knowledge, information and expertise is shared freely among partners, that the infrastructure increases partners' visibilities and vice versa, and that partners are enabled to stay current and state-of-the-art. This is shown on OPERAS (open access in the european research area through scholarly communication), a research infrastructure for open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities, and its partner the Max Weber Foundation, a German research institution.


The article studies the 1978 macroeconomics conference titled "After the Phillips Curve", where Lucas and Sargent presented their fierce attack against structural macroeconometric models, "After Keynesian Macroeconomics". The article aims at enlarging the comprehension of changes in macroeconomics in the 1970s. It shows: 1) that Lucas and Sargent dit not tackle directly the issue of the explanation of stagflation; 2) but that the struggle between different methodological stances in the conference cannot be separated from the way macroeconomists interpreted stagflation; 3) that it was not an opposition between being in favor or against microfounded models, but rather on the way we build microfoundations; 4) finally that the study of the 1978 conference opens the doors for scrutinizing the evolution of institution macroeconometric models of the 1970s which were not totally overthrown by Lucas and Sargent's arguments.


Many countries in Central and Eastern Europe will be formulating new environmental regulations within the next few years. Among the many topics which these are likely to address is the development of control policies for waste-water dischargers, including municipal sewage treatment plants. In Western Europe and North America, standards have relied heavily upon so-called "best available technology" control policies, which require dischargers to use treatment processes that reduce emissions of BOD, phosphorus, and nitrogen as much as is technically feasible. However, these technologies are often very expensive. Given the state of Central and Eastern European economies, less expensive methods to improve water quality should be seriously considered.

In this paper, we investigate control policies, alternative sewage treatment possibilities, water quality models, and optimization methods required to identify least-cost strategies to improve the region's ambient water quality. We survey the costs and technical capacities of a variety of treatment techniques, ranging from simple primary or mechanical treatment to advanced technology to remove nutrients. We also survey existing water quality models and show how they can be adapted to the policy analysis problem. Finally, we characterize a number of potential policies in terms that are amenable to analysis of their costs and ambient quality impacts. Focussing on municipal waste-water treatment plants and water quality in rivers and streams, we show how these techniques can be integrated and applied. We conclude with an empirical example based on the Nitra, a small, heavily contaminated river in Slovakia.


This paper evaluates the role of the construction sector in accounting for the performance of the U.S. economy before, during and after the Great Recession. We use input-output analysis to evaluate its linkages with the rest of the economy and measure the transmission of its demand shocks to the overall economy. Such effects are quantified by means of a dynamic multi-sector model parameterized to reproduce the boom-bust dynamics of employment in construction during 2000-13. The model suggests that the interlinkages account for a large share of the actual changes in aggregate employment and gross domestic product during the previous expansion, the recession and the subsequent recovery.


Waqf is one of the Islamic financial instruments that has been proven historically in empowering Muslim society. In Malaysia, waqf is managed by the State Religious Islamic Council (SIRC) of each state as the sole trustee of waqf. Hence, this situation has resulted in different management and organization structures. This study was conducted to explore the differences in organization structure and its waqf management. In depth interviews were conducted involving 12 informants from seven waqf institutions. The findings revealed that appropriate arrangement within the organization structure can help the institution to focus on their waqf management; hence the desired performance can be achieved. Two options in changing the structure were revealed, namely internal and external re-organization. Three factors of organization structure need to be carefully examined and considered, which are organization size, professionalism and authority to execute the re-organization, both internally and externally. SIRCs have to carefully examine the number of staff needed including staff with professional background to make sure the workload can be reduced and the management can be improved. Most of the SIRCs do not have the authority to hire more staff and change their structure. External re-organization of waqf management is one of the suggestions to gain the authority.


In this Article, I observe that "mothering" and "fathering" have been inappropriately tethered to biosex. "Mothering" should be unsexed as the primary parental relationship. "Fathering," correspondingly, should be unsexed from its breadwinner status. In an ideal world, people now considered "mothers" and "fathers" would be "parents" first, a category that includes all forms of caretaking. One could even imagine an androgynous world in which parenting has no sexed subcategories, whether attached to biosex or not. I doubt our world is anywhere near that; I also wonder whether universal androgyny is a utopian ideal worth pursuing. I instead focus in this Article on unsexing the roles of "mother" and "father," elevating them from biodeterminist brandings to chosen classifications or roles. Removing biosex from "mothering" and "fathering" may ultimately eliminate some of the meaning of these terms, but its elimination is less important than undoing the biosex link. Liberated from biosex roles, a parent could define herself as "parent," "mother," or "father" with some fluidity.In Pregnant Man?: A Conversation, I described my own experience as a differently sexed mother/parent and the impact of my gender on parenting. Here, I promote a conception of parenting that embraces the fluidity of contemporary understandings of gender and the need for balancing roles within the family. Part I elaborates the ways in which legal and social norms configure parenting as a sexed endeavor. Part II argues that the solution to this problem is to unsex mothering, fathering, and parenting. Unwinding parenting from biosex roles creates a construction of family that is liberating for traditionally sexed women and men and holds potential for the equality of LGBT parents. Women's economic equality efforts have tended to fail in part because of childcare; accordingly, their economic success largely depends on shifting men into family responsibilities. Part III shifts the frame to international and comparative law. International law fosters a sexed vision of parenting but also suggests ways to shift toward an unsexed future. After examining the international framework for parenting roles, Part III examines one public policy example of unsexed parenting, parental leave, using a comparative law analysis contrasting the U.S. Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) with Sweden's Parental Leave Act. Parental leave is the perfect position from which to examine unsexing because it sits in the middle of the triad of corporate law, family law, and public law. In that sense, it evokes the challenges of intermediating among the normative and regulatory forces of these three legal frames. The Conclusion asserts that parenting is becoming more unsexed and that legal regimes governing parenting should encourage this development to promote fluidity in parenting roles.


The concentration index and decomposition analysis are commonly used in economics to measure and explain socioeconomic inequalities in health. Such analysis builds on the strong assumption that a health production function can be estimated without substantial bias implying that health is caused by socioeconomic outcomes, which is hard to prove. This article contributes to the decomposition literature by applying a twin design to standard decomposition analysis of socioeconomic health inequalities in Sweden. The twin-based decomposition estimates, which control for unobserved endowments at the twin-pair level, are much lower in magnitude than estimates obtained via typical OLS on the same sample. This demonstrates that OLS-based decompositions are severely upward biased due to underlying confounders, exaggerating the contribution of income and education to health inequality, which in turn limits the usefulness of such decompositions for policy purposes.


Large Eddy Simulations (LES) are carried out for a Francis turbine operating at an ultra-low load with and without injection. The flow rate of the turbine is 40% of the design value. The injection aims to improve turbine operation for the already unstable base case away from the design flow rate. Tangential water injection was introduced through the draft tube wall in the same and opposite runner rotation direction. The injection angle was varied (15°, 30°, 45° and 60°). Two water injection rates were applied at 4% and 8 % of the optimal design flowrate. While injection with the 4% rate and 30° in the opposite runner rotation direction helped reduce pressure fluctuations downstream of the injection inlets; no injection configuration could completely mitigate the power and pressure fluctuations. The injection was found to increase the amplitude of pressure fluctuations close to the injection inlets by 2 to 20 times the magnitude of fluctuations without injection. There was a slight reduction in mean power production (4–10% loss) by injection. The high amplitude fluctuations were observed in power signals with and without the injection.


For preterm infants, it is common practice to add human milk fortifiers to native breast milk to enhance protein and calorie supply because the growth rates and nutritional requirements of preterm infants are considerably higher than those of term infants. However, macronutrient intake may still be inadequate because the composition of native breast milk has individual inter- and intra-sample variation. Target fortification (TFO) of breast milk is a new nutritional regime aiming to reduce such variations by individually measuring and adding deficient macronutrients. Added TFO components contribute to the final osmolality of milk feeds. It is important to predict the final osmolality of TFO breast milk to ensure current osmolality recommendations are followed to minimize feeding intolerance and necrotizing enterocolitis. This study aims to develop and validate equations to predict the osmolality of TFO milk batches. To establish prediction models, the osmolalities of either native or supplemented breast milk with known amounts of fat, protein, and carbohydrates were analyzed. To validate prediction models, the osmolalities of each macronutrient and combinations of macronutrients were measured in an independent sample set. Additionally, osmolality was measured in TFO milk samples obtained from a previous clinical study and compared with predicted osmolality using the prediction equations. Following the addition of 1 g of carbohydrates (glucose polymer), 1 g of hydrolyzed protein, or 1 g of whey protein per 100 mL breast milk, the average increase in osmolality was 20, 38, and 4 mOsm/kg respectively. Adding fat decreased osmolality only marginally due to dilution effect. Measured and predicted osmolality of combinations of macronutrients as well as single macronutrient (R2 = 0.93) were highly correlated. Using clinical data (n = 696), the average difference between the measured and predicted osmolality was 3 ± 11 mOsm/kg and was not statistically significant. In conclusion, the prediction model can be utilized to estimate osmolality values after fortification.


Symptomatic aortic stenosis (AS) is an increasing phenomenon as more adults live longer. The gold standard for treating AS is surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR). Frequently, as older individuals with AS often have multiple comorbidities, a SAVR is determined to be too high risk. Therefore, a less invasive treatment option is available, namely a transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) or transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR). Such biomedical procedures have encouraged life extension and the decision to intervene commonplace with the aging population. Without an intervention, significant debilitating symptoms affect a person's quality of life (QoL). Multiple quantitative studies evaluating QoL before and after a TAVI have been performed. However QoL has multiple attributes and is not a single construct. By limiting practice to these defined QoL measures, we exclude the human experience and what values individuals describe as important to them. The dilemma in the present medical model is influenced by two paradigms, evidence based medicine and patient centered medicine. Some people opt not to have a TAVI. This study aims to understand what it is like living with aortic stenosis as perceived by the participant and to gain a more meaningful understanding of why some individuals with AS choose not to have this procedure performed. Using a convenience sample of patients who declined a TAVI, a telephone interview with the person focused on their perceived QoL and the implications determining not to pursue a TAVI. In this qualitative phenomenological design, openended questions included: 1) What is it like to live with Aortic Stenosis. 2) Why did you choose not to have the TAVI? Interviews will explore emerging themes. Advanced practice nurses are in ideal positions for performing research to gain greater insight on the complexity of people's health choices. As the incidence of AS occurs more frequently in the increasing aged population, TAVI offers a treatment option for those patients who are symptomatic with AS and are not surgical candidates. However, health care providers should focus on the illness, not the disease, and explore the patients' biopsychosocial values with their medical needs. The information gathered in this study will help guide heath care providers with offering holistic health care incorporating both paradigms of evidence based practice and patient centered medicine options on treatment for people with symptomatic AS.


Designing policies for long-term forest management is difficult, in part because ecological processes that drive forest structure and composition interact strongly, both spatially and temporally, with the many values we want to obtain from the forest. Using the Robson Valley in east-central British Columbia as a study area, we developed a spatio-temporal landscape model to assess the effects of uncertainties about stand-replacing natural disturbance regimes on indicators related to the sustainability of forest harvesting and biodiversity. Results show that key timber policy indicators were relatively less sensitive to natural disturbance regime parameters than were the biodiversity indicators of seral stage distribution and tree species composition. The other biodiversity indicator we examined, structural connectivity among old-forest patches, was among those indicators least sensitive to any of the parameters we varied. Other timber supply indicators— including non-recoverable losses, and volumes and areas disturbed—were the most sensitive to both the particular natural disturbance agent chosen and to the parameters describing its behaviour. Projections of a range of scenarios for present and alternative natural disturbance and management regimes for the study area show that most indicators varied from less than 1% up to 93% from the value of the present management/disturbance regime. Generally, three alternative management policies had weak-to-moderate capabilities of reducing effects of natural disturbances. Despite the range of uncertainties explored, the results provided little indication that, at the scale of the whole study area, current timber-harvesting targets are not sustainable over the long term. However, our findings highlight the lack of knowledge about the future, particularly about changes in climate, resulting in significant uncertainty about the future condition of the forest and about future forest-management opportunities.


Nimat Hafez Barazangi, Ph.D. '88, a research fellow in the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies program at Cornell, suggests it's time for Muslim women to have a peaceful, silent revolution firmly grounded in the Qur'an. Barazangi works to improve attitudes and conditions for women in Islam. She is the author of "Woman's Identity and the Qur'an." The lecture, moderated by National Public Radio correspondent Laura Sydell, was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on July 19, 2010.


This paper examines the discourses relating to antisemitism in the three leading UK national "quality" newspapers from 1993 to 2009. To this end, three corpora were compiled, each consisting of the complete set of instances in context in these papers where antisemitism is mentioned, the first from 1993 the others from 2005 and 2009. Considerable changes were noted between the discourses in the earlier corpus compared to the later ones. In the first, the majority of discourses were either historical and/or literary-artistic (typically discussing whether a particular writer or artist had been antisemitic) or, if they were related to contemporary society, they were discussions of potential or reported antisemitism outside the UK, especially in Eastern Europe. In the later corpora, however, there is much more discussion about a perceived resurgence of antisemitism in the UK and Western Europe. After an overview of these changing patterns, particularly controversial recent cases of alleged antisemitism in British politics are discussed. The methodology of this research combines corpus-analysis techniques with more traditional close textual analysis, characteristic of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS: Stubbs 1996, Partington 2008).


Four species of the genus Neocyprideis described in this paper are an addition to the ostracod fauna from the early Tertiary of Pakistan. N. sp. A occurs in the Upper Palaeocene of the Sor Range, and three new species are found in the Eocene of the Sulaiman Range. The new species are Neocyprideis simplex and N. regularis from the upper Lower Eocene, and N. formosa from the uppermost Eocene. The first two species, the associated ostracod fauna and the lithology suggest a shallow marine shelf environment with evaporitic conditions, while N. formosa lived in an open marine shelf environment. The short vertical ranges of these three new species makes them useful stratigraphic markers in this area.


In Kenya teaching is regarded as a profession characterized by high professional preparation, turnover and attrition. It is also an academic discipline as the individuals involved are required to receive in academic subjects. The purpose of this study was to determine the motives for choosing teaching as a career among pre-service Physical Education (PE) teachers in two Kenyan universities. Data were collected through self-administered questionnaires from 85 teacher trainees. The data were analysed through t-test and one-way ANOVA to determine the effects of selected demographic factors (age, gender, year level and parental social economic status: SES) on motives for selecting PE. Findings showed that the teacher trainees chose PE due to various reasons such as fun and enjoyment (95.3%), PE is interesting (94.1%) and offers diverse opportunities (89.4%) and the motives with the least influence were encouragement to pursue PE by significant others such as friends, parents and secondary school teachers. The motives for choosing teaching PE did not differ significantly across on age, gender, year level and parental SES. It is concluded that the pre-service teachers are likely to continue teaching PE in the light of their strong convictions that they made a wise career choice. Educational planners and administrators should incorporate the trainee teachers' motives in future marketing and student recruitment campaigns.


Stimuli-responsive hydrogels, known as smart hydrogels, are three-dimensional amphiphilic or hydrophilic polymer networks that are able to change their volume or phase, and other properties, including viscosity, structure, and dimension, in response to changes in pH, temperature, and magnetic or electric field. Highly swellable, dual-responsive bovine serum albumin (BSA)-based injectable hydrogels are prepared here by the chemical conjugation of pH- and temperature-responsive oligo(sulfamethazine acrylate-co-N-isopropylacrylamide) (oligo(SMA-co-NIPAM)) copolymers on the surface of BSA through carbodiimide-mediated chemistry. The pH- and temperature-responsive oligomer-bearing BSA conjugates show rapid sol-to-gel phase transition properties. Specifically, the free-flowing conjugates at high pH (pH 8.4, 23 °C) are transformed to a viscoelastic gel under physiological conditions (pH 7.4, 37 °C). The swelling ratio, gel strength, and pore size of the BSA hydrogel were tuned by altering the conjugation ratio of the oligo(SMA-co-NIPAM) copolymers of various lengths and compositions to BSA. Subcutaneously administered BSA conjugate sols into the dorsal region of Sprague-Dawley rats formed an in situ gel. When the oligo(NIPAM) content in the hydrogel was high, the degradation rate of BSA hydrogels was remarkably slow, and two weeks after in vivo administration, the hydrogels with high oligo(NIPAM) had swollen more than 4-fold. An in vivo biodegradation study demonstrated that no necrosis or hemorrhage was observed in the tissues with the hydrogels. The concurrent stimuli-responsivity under physiological conditions and high elasticity suggest that these smart hydrogels may open a new avenue for hydrogel applications.


Carbonation has been a concern of constructors and researchers because, by lowering the pH of the interstitial solution of the concrete, it can favor the post-deposition and subsequent corrosion of reinforced concrete reinforcement. Among the factors that influence carbonation is the use of pozzolanic materials, such as metakaolin. However, there is no consensus as to the positive or negative contribution of these additions. This work evaluated the influence of metakaolin on the mechanical properties, porosity and in particular on the carbonation of concrete, from the addition of 0%, 5%, 10% and 15% of metakaolin, in relation to the cement mass. From the results, it was observed that the addition of metakaolin, while not significantly influencing the porosity, gave the concrete a greater resistance to axial compression, a decrease in the capillary absorption and delayed the advance of the carbonation front in the concrete.


Team cohesion represents arguably the most studied team construct as it has been consistently shown to be associated with improved performance. However, although cohesion is now understood to be an emergent state—as it develops over a team's life cycle—research has yet to uncover the dynamic nature of cohesion. The current study was designed to particularly test the impact of team personality composition both on the initial status of cohesion, and on changes in cohesion over time. 80 Newly formed teams performed a highly interdependent team task, and team cohesion was measured over six time points. Personality was measured prior to the task and calculated at the team level, as both an average and a variability score. After performing longitudinal hierarchical linear modeling, results indicated that team personality impacts cohesion differently at initial status and over time. In particular, higher team agreeableness predicted greater slopes of cohesion, but not initial cohesion levels. Also, higher extraversion predicted greater initial status of cohesion, but not greater slopes. These results present important boundary conditions for understanding the role of team personality composition on team cohesion.


This short tutorial explains how to do Prolog-style logic programming in Oz. We give programming examples that can be run interactively on the Mozart system, which implements Oz. The Oz language is the result of a decade of research into programming based on logic. The Oz computation model subsumes both search-based logic programming and committed-choice (concurrent) logic programming with deep guards. Furthermore, Oz provides new abilities, such as rst-class top levels and constant-time merge, that exist in neither of its ancestors. We show two of the Oz interactive graphic tools, namely the Browser and the Explorer, which are useful for developing and running logic programs. We conclude by explaining why logic programming is just a prelude to the real strengths of Oz, namely constraint programming and distributed programming. In these two areas, Oz is equal to or better than any other system existing in the world today. For example, for compute-intensive constraint problems Oz provides parallel search engines that can be used transparently, i.e., without changing the problem speciication.


Securitization involves the transformation of illiquid assets into liquid and easy to sell ones. The paper focuses on the effect of unexpected negative shocks on low quality (LQ)-asset price and input, collateralized debt obligation price and output as well as profit through the use of numerical analysis. In this regard, two kinds of multiplier processes are considered with the first being the within-period or static multiplier process where the shock such as a ratings downgrade was found to cause a fall in net value of the LQ-entity and compels it to reduce its asset demand. In this case, by keeping the future constant, the transaction fees decrease to clear the market and the asset price falls by the same amount. In turn, this lowers the value of the LQ-entity's existing assets and reduces their net value even more. Since the future is not constant, this multiplier misses the intuition which was given by the more realistic inter-temporal dynamic multiplier. In this case, the decrease in asset prices results from the cumulative decrease in present and future opportunity costs, stemming from the persistent reductions in the constrained LQ-entity's net value and asset demand, which are in turn propelled by a decrease in asset price. The article in addition gives a simulation results for the full nonlinear model taking into consideration the role of uncollateralized asset backed securities. It's clear in the paper that most banks securitize assets without having sufficient capital and liquidity.


Integrin receptors for extracellular matrix transmit mechanical and biochemical information through molecular connections to the actin cytoskeleton and to several intracellular signaling pathways. In Caenorhabditis elegans, integrins are essential for embryonic development, muscle cell adhesion and contraction, and migration of nerve cell axons and gonadal distal tip cells. To identify key components involved in distal tip cell migration, we are using an RNA interference (RNAi)-based genetic screen for deformities in gonad morphogenesis. We have found that talin, a cytoskeletal-associated protein and focal adhesion component, is expressed in the distal tip cell and plays a central role in regulating its migration. Reduction of talin expression caused severe defects in gonad formation because of aberrant distal tip cell migration and also disrupted oocyte maturation and gonad sheath cell structure. Contractile muscle cells showed disorganization of the actin cytoskeleton leading to complete paralysis, a phenotype that was also observed with depletion of pat-2 and pat-3 integrins. These in vivo analyses show that talin is required not only for strong adhesion and cytoskeletal organization by contractile cells, but also for dynamic regulation of integrin signals during cell migration. In addition, induction of distal tip cell migration defects by bacterial RNAi in C. elegans provides an effective screen to identify genes involved in integrin signaling and function.


Popular analyses of political discontent among young people converged on a global level after the advent of the economic crisis in 2007-08. They have referred to pervasive alienation, frustration, disappointment, and fear, depicting a generation exploited by ruthless business owners, neglected by policy elites, and abandoned by older generations. The analyses likewise share an understanding of the meaning of 'youth', namely a population defined by narrowing economic opportunities under global market capitalism and subsequent protest. This paper attempts to go beyond this conception to explore the emergence of a new framework for agency. More specifically, the paper aims to go beyond interpreting the behavior of 'youth' in the Arab World, especially among educated young men and women, as simply about protest. Instead, the paper posits that concurrent trends in privatization of public services, increasing individual and local responsibility for social problems and job creation, job insecurity, and greater exposure to rights and government accountability are influencing capacity to influence local change and likewise, challenging boundaries between social, political, and economic agency. Drawing on longstanding research on social activism in Morocco, the paper adapts the language of theorists of generational formation and consciousness (see Edmunds and Turner 2002, 2005) to argue that the initial consequence of market reform in the eighties and nineties was the formation of an 'interval generation', disenfranchised economically and unrepresented politically. Over the past 5-10 years, though, the entrenchment of globalization and neoliberal ideology have led to the emergence of an 'active generation' maneuvering to influence policy and liberal market capitalism through altering local economic and social opportunities. This maneuvering is particularly apparent in the rise of social entrepreneurship, not just as an employment policy, but also as an indicator of how the boundaries between economic, political, and social agency at a local level have blurred.


A compositional time series is obtained when a compositional data vector is observed at
different points in time. Inherently, then, a compositional time series is a multivariate
time series with important constraints on the variables observed at any instance in time.
Although this type of data frequently occurs in situations of real practical interest, a
trawl through the statistical literature reveals that research in the field is very much in its
infancy and that many theoretical and empirical issues still remain to be addressed. Any
appropriate statistical methodology for the analysis of compositional time series must
take into account the constraints which are not allowed for by the usual statistical
techniques available for analysing multivariate time series. One general approach to
analyzing compositional time series consists in the application of an initial transform to
break the positive and unit sum constraints, followed by the analysis of the transformed
time series using multivariate ARIMA models. In this paper we discuss the use of the
additive log-ratio, centred log-ratio and isometric log-ratio transforms. We also present
results from an empirical study designed to explore how the selection of the initial
transform affects subsequent multivariate ARIMA modelling as well as the quality of
the forecasts


This paper provides a case study of the evolution of social closure as experienced within the teaching profession in public school education in New South Wales, Australia. It charts the changing development of social closure mechanisms, from state-sanctioned, formalized, collectivist mechanisms, to organization-based formal and informal mechanisms derived from individualist criteria. Drawing on an empirical research project that examined the individual experiences of social closure amongst a group of school teachers, this paper finds that there is potential for both collective and individual resistance, or the development of 'usurpationary' strategies, at both the formal and the informal level. Detailed study of changing social closure strategies, and the strategies employed to resist social closure, can provide a more in-depth and nuanced understanding of how discrimination continues to operate in workplaces despite the existence of anti-discrimination and equal opportunity legislation in Australia


Despite its high prevalence and implications for health care resources, health anxiety is still a relatively neglected area of research. This paper describes the development of the Health Anxiety Questionnaire (HAQ), a measure based on a cognitive-behavioural analysis of health anxiety. The measure was developed to identify individuals with high levels of concern about their health. Psychiatric and medical samples were used in the reported studies. The HAQ was found to have a good internal consistency (coefficient alpha and split-half reliability) and short-term temporal stability (test-retest reliability). Long term stability (one year) was modest but predictably responsive to external events. Analysis of the structure of the HAQ (cluster and factor analyses) revealed four factors: worry and health preoccupation, fear of illness and death, reassurance-seeking behaviour and the extent to which symptoms interfere with a person's life. Studies of the HAQ's validity indicate that it has appropriate discriminate validity. It is concluded that the HAQ appears to reflect relatively enduring features consistent with the cognitive-behavioural model of health anxiety. It is anticipated that the HAQ should be able to predict response to reassurance following medical examination.


The article addresses the use of notions of gender equality and non-discrimination in the discussions concerning the practice of Islamic veiling by the European Court of Human Rights as well as by French authorities in relation to the recent adoption of the law banning full face veils in public spaces in France. The author argues that the use of the rhetoric of gender equality without the required knowledge and understanding of the justifications for and discussions about this practice existing within Islam is in both cases very inadequate and leads to results opposite to those they intended to promote. Based on insights into the discussions of Muslims about the practice of veiling the author makes some proposals for a more adequate approach to this practice both from the point of view of women's status as well as from the point of view of relationship between Islam and the West.


Background: Increased access to affordable produce may increase fruit and vegetable serving intake. The objective of this study was to characterize the individuals utilizing the Veggie Van in low-income areas of Grand Rapids and Muskegon, MI including food security status and fruit and vegetable servings. Methods: The participants were residents in Muskegon and Grand Rapids, MI purchasing food from the low-income sites of the YMCA Veggie Van. Demographics, food security, participation in food assistance programs, and income of the participants was collected. Fruit and vegetable servings were measured with three 24-hour recalls. Anthropometric measures (height, weight, and waist circumference) were collected for all eight participants. Three participants completed both the survey and recalls, three completed only the recalls, and two completed only the survey. Results: The majority of participants who completed the survey were of low food security (60%). Some of the respondents participated in food assistance programs such as SNAP (80%), WIC (40%) and Double-Up Food Bucks (40%). The median fruit and vegetable (excluding potatoes) servings of participants that completed the 24-hour recalls was1.44 (IQR 0.56, 1.46) and 1.46 (IQR .93, 2.83). Conclusion: At low-income sites, the YMCA Veggie Van is reaching primarily low-income individuals with potentially low food security. The fruit and vegetable servings of Veggie Van participants is much lower than the recommendation of 7-9 servings per day, which may suggest that fruit and vegetable intake is influenced by more than increasing access.


The purpose of this qualitative, multiple-case study was two-fold: 1) to describe, analyze, and interpret the experiences of school principals and superintendents who use multiple social media tools such as blogs, microblogs, social networking sites, podcasts, and online videos with stakeholders as part of their comprehensive communications practices, and 2) to examine why the principals and superintendents have chosen to communicate with their stakeholders through social media. Qualitative, semi-structured interviews with 12 principals and 12 superintendents purposefully selected from four regions of the United States and Canada were conducted. Social CRM served as the framework for the study. Findings revealed four themes that applied to both groups: 1) Social media tools allow for greater interactions between school administrators and their stakeholders; 2) Social media tools provide stronger connections to local stakeholders, to fellow educators, and to the world; 3) Social media use can have a significant impact on a school administrator"s personal and professional growth; and 4) Social media use is an expectation; it"s no longer optional. Implications for practice, for boards of education, for educational leadership programs, and for expanding the definition of Social CRM are included.


Genetic surveillance of malaria parasites supports malaria control programmes, treatment guidelines and elimination strategies. Surveillance studies often pose questions about malaria parasite ancestry (e.g. how antimalarial resistance has spread) and employ statistical methods that characterise parasite population structure. Many of the methods used to characterise structure are unsupervised machine learning algorithms which depend on a genetic distance matrix, notably principal coordinates analysis (PCoA) and hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC). PCoA and HAC are sensitive to both the definition of genetic distance and algorithmic specification. Importantly, neither algorithm infers malaria parasite ancestry. As such, PCoA and HAC can inform (e.g. via exploratory data visualisation and hypothesis generation), but not answer comprehensively, key questions about malaria parasite ancestry. We illustrate the sensitivity of PCoA and HAC using 393 Plasmodium falciparum whole genome sequences collected from Cambodia and neighbouring regions (where antimalarial resistance has emerged and spread recently) and we provide tentative guidance for the use and interpretation of PCoA and HAC in malaria parasite genetic epidemiology. This guidance includes a call for fully transparent and reproducible analysis pipelines that feature (i) a clearly outlined scientific question; (ii) a clear justification of analytical methods used to answer the scientific question along with discussion of any inferential limitations; (iii) publicly available genetic distance matrices when downstream analyses depend on them; and (iv) sensitivity analyses. To bridge the inferential disconnect between the output of non-inferential unsupervised learning algorithms and the scientific questions of interest, tailor-made statistical models are needed to infer malaria parasite ancestry. In the absence of such models speculative reasoning should feature only as discussion but not as results. Author summary Genetic epidemiology studies of malaria attempt to characterise what is happening in malaria parasite populations. In particular, they are an important tool to track the spread of drug resistance and to validate genetic makers of drug resistance. To make sense of parasite genetic data, researchers usually characterise the population structure using statistical methods. This is most often done as a two step process. The first is a data reduction step, whereby the data are summarised into a distance matrix (each entry represents the genetic distance between two isolates) and then the distance matrix is input into an unsupervised machine learning algorithm. Principal coordinates analysis and hierarchical agglomerative clustering are the two most popular unsupervised machine learning algorithms used for this purpose in malaria genetic epidemiology. We illustrate that this procedure is sensitive to the choice of genetic distance and to the specification of the algorithms. These unsupervised methods are useful for exploratory data analysis but cannot be used to infer historical events. We provide some guidance on how to make genetic epidemiology analyses more transparent and reproducible.


Component-oriented development of software supports the adaptability and maintainability of large systems, in particular if requirements change over time and parts of a system have to be modified or replaced. The software architecture in such systems can be described by components and their composition. In order to describe larger architectures, the composition concept becomes crucial.

We will present a formal framework for component composition for object-based software development. The deployment of modal logics for defining components and component composition will allow us to reason about and prove properties of components and compositions.


This paper reports on the final phase of a multi-year project to identify whether a credit counseling experience leads to longer-term improvements in consumer credit profiles and credit usage behavior. The paper analyzes the experience of 29,000 clients who were counseled by five non-profit, 501(c)3 counseling agencies in 2007. Among the 45% of clients who were recommended for an agencyadministered Debt Management Plan (DMP), it is clear that the decision to start a DMP is linked to significant credit score improvement and reduced likelihood of bankruptcy. That is, between two clients for whom the counselor has judged that a DMP is both a workable option and the best option, the client who actually starts payments in a DMP fares significantly better over a three year period in terms of credit score and reduced incidence of bankruptcy. A statistical procedure to control for client selfselection reinforces the finding that it is the DMP experience and not selection that drives the result. It also appears that agencies can, and do, influence individuals' decisions with respect to DMP participation and those efforts can improve clients' outcomes. Moreover, the longer the client sticks with the DMP payment program, the greater is the pay-down of debt and the greater the corresponding improvement in credit score. Larger reductions in the interest rate (relative to the original loan agreement) offered to clients who agree to a DMP also increase time on plan and the amount of debt repaid. The rationale is straightforward. The interest rate reduction associated with the DMP program is the incentive for clients to start and stick with a monthly repayment plan. The larger the reduction, the greater is the incentive.


Interleukin (IL)-17–producing T helper (Th17) cells play a critical role in the pathophysiology of several autoimmune disorders. The differentiation of Th17 cells requires the simultaneous presence of an unusual combination of cytokines: IL-6, a proinflammatory cytokine, and transforming growth factor (TGF) β, an antiinflammatory cytokine. However, the molecular mechanisms by which TGF-β exerts its effects on Th17 cell differentiation remain elusive. We report that TGF-β does not directly promote Th17 cell differentiation but instead acts indirectly by blocking expression of the transcription factors signal transducer and activator of transcription (STAT) 4 and GATA-3, thus preventing Th1 and Th2 cell differentiation. In contrast, TGF-β had no effect on the expression of retinoic acid receptor–related orphan nuclear receptor γt, a Th17-specific transcription factor. Interestingly, in Stat-6−/−T-bet−/− mice, which are unable to generate Th1 and Th2 cells, IL-6 alone was sufficient to induce robust differentiation of Th17 cells, whereas TGF-β had no effect, suggesting that TGF-β is dispensable for Th17 cell development. Consequently, BALB/c Stat-6−/−T-bet−/− mice, but not wild-type BALB/c mice, were highly susceptible to the development of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, which could be blocked by anti–IL-17 antibodies but not by anti–TGF-β antibodies. Collectively, these data provide evidence that TGF-β is not directly required for the molecular orchestration of Th17 cell differentiation.


This is the ultimate beachcomber's book. A series of meditations prompted by walking on the wild estuarial beaches of Ainsdale Sands between Blackpool and Liverpool, "Strands" is about what is lost and buried then discovered, about all the things you find on a beach, dead or alive, about flotsam and jetsam, about mutability and transformation - about sea-change. Every so often the sands shift enough to reveal great mysteries: the Star of Hope, wrecked on Mad Wharf in 1883 and usually just visible as a few wooden stumps, is suddenly raised one day, up from the depths - an entire wreck, black and barnacled, and on either side two more ruined ships, taking the air for a while before sinking back under the sand. And stranger still, perhaps, are the prehistoric footprints of humans, animals and birds on the beach: prints from the Late Mesolithic to mid-Neolithic period which are described as 'ephemeral archaeology' because they are preserved in the Holocene sediment, revealed briefly and then destroyed by the next tide. "Strands" describes a year's worth of walking on the ultimate beach: inter-tidal and constantly turning up revelations: mermaid's purses, lugworms, sea potatoes, messages in bottles, buried cars, beached whales and a perfect cup from a Cunard liner. Jean Sprackland, a prize-winning poet and natural storyteller, is the perfect guide to these shifting sands - this place of transformation.


Legal protection of personal data that are transferred or processed outside the EU's territorial boundaries has been strengthened in recent years, both in the GDPR and by the Court of Justice. The main mechanisms for guarding against data protection threats originating from outside the EU's borders are rules on the territorial scope of EU data protection law (Article 3 GDPR), which allow its application to data processing by non-EU parties, and data transfer restrictions (Chapter V GDPR), which protect personal data that are transferred to third countries. The GDPR does not indicate how these two mechanisms interact, which has led to initiatives to disapply data transfer rules when data processed outside the EU are already subject to it. However, there has been little transparency about these initiatives or explanation of their rationale, despite their significance for the protection of EU data and their impact on the GDPR's global reach. For the protection of EU data against external threats to be both legally sound and effective in practice, it is necessary to examine the nature and interaction of rules on territorial scope and data transfers, in order to determine how the EU's vision of cross-border data protection can be realised.


The objectives of this study were to monitor vegetation change patterns and to determine how land management practices have contributed to vegetation change in the Densu Basin. The procedures employed involve independently classifying multi-temporal images using a hybridized classification method after geo-referencing and coregistering images. A land cover map of the basin was pre-loaded onto a Juno SB hand-held GPS receiver and geo-referenced for ground-truth delineation of vegetation classes. Readings were taken for thirty-three (33) geographical positions and corresponding classes of vegetation to enhance classification accuracy. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Indices (NDVI) of Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) images were monitored for variations in the NDVI values due to seasonal changes. The effects due to phenology were then minimized using the Normalized Difference Senescence Vegetation Index (NDSVI) method. The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) technique was used to identify possible areas of vegetation depletion in the basin. The trend of change was further determined by a NDVI image differencing method by setting threshold values that best discriminate per pixel change. The result of this study revealed significant loss of vegetation cover in the basin. For example whereas open forest was dominant in the northern sector with a total coverage area of 490 km 2 in the 1985 classification, the same vegetation type disappeared by 1991 and was replaced by scattered trees with dense herbs. There was a further decrease of forest cover between 1991 and 2000 from 332


For the very first time, "The War That Never Was" tells the fascinating story of a secret war fought by British mercenaries in the Yemen in the early 1960s. In a covert operation organised over whisky and sodas in the clubs of Chelsea and Mayfair, a group of former SAS officers - led by the irrepressible Colonel Jim Johnson - arranged for a squadron of British mercenaries to travel to the remote mountain regions of the Yemen, to arm, train and lead Yemeni tribesmen in their fight against a 60,000-strong contingent of Egyptian soldiers. It was one of the most uneven running battles ever waged; the Egyptians fielded a huge, professionally-trained army. The British fought back at the head of a ragtag force of tribal warriors and, ultimately, won. Egypt's President Nasser described the battle in the Yemen as 'my Vietnam'. It's a fascinating, forgotten, and rip-roaringly entertaining pocket of British military history, much in the spirit of Ben MvIntyre's bestselling "Agent Zigzag" and "Operation Mincemeat".


Frequency- and temperature-dependent complex permittivity or conductivity of a silty clay loam were examined in a broad saturation and porosity range with network analyzer technique (1 MHz-10 GHz, 5 °C-40 °C, coaxial transmission line and open ended coaxial cells). An advanced mixture model based on the well-known Lichtenecker-Rother model (ALRM) was developed and used to parameterize complex permittivity or conductivity at a measurement frequency of 1 GHz under consideration of a dependence of the so-called structure parameter as well as the apparent pore water conductivity on saturation and porosity. The ALRM is compared with frequently applied mixture models: complex refractive index model, Looyenga-Landau-Lifschitz model, Bruggeman-Hanai-Sen model, and Maxwell-Garnet model as well as empirical calibration functions. Comparison of ALRM applied to the investigated frequency and temperature range with sophisticated broadband relaxation models indicates the potential and the limitation to predict the high-frequency electromagnetic material properties.


In September 2009, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared to the global media that Canada had 'no history of colonialism'. Such expressions of the post-colonial Canadian imaginary are common, despite Canada's dubious legacy of settler colonialism. This article uses Canada's Access to Information Act to examine how mechanisms of security are mobilized against members of the Algonquins of Barriere Lake (ABL), whose persistent calls for sovereign control of their land and customary governance system have been translated by Canadian authorities into a security threat to settler society. Contributing to the literature on postcolonialism, as well as works on critical security studies and colonial governmentality, this article suggests that distinct rationalities underline colonial activities in settler states. The authors contend that the term 'settler governmentality' is more appropriate for settler states such as Canada, and they present the case study of the ABL to argue that (in)security governance of indigenous groups in Canada incorporates techniques that are necessarily grounded in a logic of elimination. The authors detail how an analysis of the interventions in the traditional governance of the ABL contributes to understanding recent security trends regarding 'Aboriginal extremism' and indigenous 'hot spot' areas in Canada, which are often framed as matters of 'national security'.


The synthesis of three new isomerically pure (E,E,E)-form thiophene-S,S-dioxidized indophenine (IDTO) compounds, (3Z,3′Z)-3,3′-((E)-1,1,1′,1′-tetraoxido-5H,5′H-[2,2′-bithiophenylidene]-5,5′-diylidene)bis(1-dodecyl-indolin-2-one) (4a-S1), (3Z,3′Z)-3,3′-((E)-1,1,1′,1′-tetraoxido-5H,5′H-[2,2′-bithiophenylidene]-5,5′-diylidene)bis(5-bromo-1-dodecyl-indolin-2-one) (4b-S1) and (3Z,3′Z)-3,3′-((E)-1,1,1′,1′-tetraoxido-5H,5′H-[2,2′-bithiophenyldene]-5,5′-diylidene)bis(6-bromo-1-dodecyl-indolin-2-one) (4c-S1), and their use as n-channel semiconductors for organic thin film transistors (OTFTs) are reported. Compared to the non-oxidized parent indophenine compound 3,3′-(5H,5′H-[2,2′-bithiophenylidene]-5,5′-diylidene)bis(1-dodecylindolin-2-one) (3a), 4a-S1 exhibited significantly lower HOMO and LUMO energy levels. Having bromine atoms at the 5,5′- (4b-S1) or 6,6′-positions (4c-S1), the HOMO and LUMO energy levels further decreased. In OTFT devices, these IDTO compounds exhibit unipolar n-type semiconductor behavior due to their significantly deeper LUMO and HOMO energy levels than those of 3a that shows ambipolar charge transport performance. The maximum electron mobilities of 4a-S1, 4b-S1 and 4c-S1 are in the order of 10−2 to 10−1 cm2 V−1 s−1, which are much higher than that of 3a (∼10−3 cm2 V−1 s−1), originating from the lower LUMO energy levels and the high isomeric purities of the former compounds. Among the three IDTO compounds, 4c-S1 shows the highest electron mobility of up to 0.11 cm2 V−1 s−1, which is likely due to its most extended π-electron delocalization on the LUMO wavefunction.


Abstract The Şahin-village clay deposit, situated in the vicinity of Kütahya, western Turkey, has a promising reserve suitable for tile production. In order to evaluate its potential use, 27 clay samples were collected and their mineralogical, chemical, firing and technological properties were evaluated. The reaction of samples with dilute HCl, dispersion in water and their swelling properties were determined. Mineral identification studies were conducted using X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), differential thermal analyses (DTA) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) techniques. Analysis showed that clay minerals are illite, kaolinite and montmorillonite. Non-clay minerals are quartz, muscovite, microcline and goethite. The clay samples consisted mainly of SiO2 and Al2O3 corresponding to about 81–83% (average) because of the presence of clay minerals and quartz, accompanied by a significant amount of iron oxide. Mineralogical, chemical, thermal analysis and technological tests showed that the clays from Şahin village could be used for stoneware tiles, tile and brick-making.


Government lawyers and other public officials sometimes face an excruciating moral dilemma: to stay on the job or to quit, when the government is one they find morally abhorrent. Staying may make them complicit in evil policies; it also runs the danger of inuring them to wrongdoing, just as their presence on the job helps inure others. At the same time, staying may be their only opportunity to mitigate those policies – to make evils into lesser evils – and to uphold the rule of law when it is under assault. This Article explores that dilemma in a stark form: through the moral biographies of two lawyers in the Third Reich, both of whom stayed on the job, and both of whom can lay claim to mitigating evil. One, Helmuth James von Moltke, was an anti-Nazi, and a martyr of the resistance; the other, Bernhard Losener, was a Nazi by conviction who nevertheless claimed to have secretly fought against the persecution of Jews from the improbable post of legal adviser on Jewish matters. The Article critically examines their careers and self-justifications. It frames its analysis through two philosophical arguments: Hannah Arendt's stern injunction that staying on the job is self-deception or worse, because like it or not, obedience is support; and a contemporary analysis of moral complicity by Chiara Lepora and Robert Goodin. The chief question, with resonance today as well as historically, is whether Arendt is right – and, if not, under what conditions lesser-evilism can succeed.

This article will appear in a symposium with comments by Leora Bilsky and Natalie Davidson, Kathleen Clark, Erica Newland, and Shannon Prince.


"There is another Iugler, that beeing well skild in the Iewes Trumpe, takes vpon him to bee a dealer in Musicke: especiall good at mending Instruments: he iugled away more instrumentes of late, than his bodie (being taken) will euer be able to make good." - Henry Chettle, Kind-Hartes Dreame, (1592).
Over the last few years, documentary evidence from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has provided increasing amounts of information about instrument-making in English cities other than London and has assisted those who seek a more accurate understanding of provincial music. Building on previous work about inhabitants of Oxford and York, new research into the people involved in musical activities in Oxford will now be presented and discussed. This will focus on people who made musical instruments, but will also include information about professional and amateur instrumentalists, and about some of the relationships between all these and other musicians and woodworkers. Some common sources of confusion in research about instrument-makers will be described and exemplified.

The information to be presented will support earlier findings about the nature of instrument-makers, particularly that for many, instrument making was only part of their work, so instruments were often made not by specialist instrument-makers but by people who may be better known for other activities. This raises important questions, such as how did English instruments attain their high international reputation ? The work also casts new light on some important names in the string instrument making world. There are indications that relatively obscure Oxford instrument-makers are connected with some better-known makers in London. It is possible that far from being backward, derivative or even parasitic in relation to London, centres such as Oxford provided not only the manpower but possibly also the foundation or driving force for significant developments in other parts of the country, including the capital


Shear stress is known to dilate blood vessels and exert antiproliferative effects on vascular walls: these effects have been ascribed to shear stress-induced upregulation of endothelium-derived vasoactive substances, mainly nitric oxide and prostacyclin. We have demonstrated the significance of C-type natriuretic peptide (CNP) as a novel endothelium-derived relaxing peptide (EDRP) that shares a cGMP pathway with nitric oxide. Adrenomedullin is a recently isolated EDRP that elevates intracellular cAMP as prostacyclin does. To elucidate the possible role of these EDRPs under shear stress, we examined the effect of physiological shear stress on CNP mRNA expression in endothelial cells derived from the human umbilical vein (HUVECs), bovine aorta (BAECs), and murine lymph nodes (MLECs) as well as adrenomedullin mRNA expression in HUVECs. CNP mRNA was stimulated prominently in HUVECs under shear stress of 15 dyne/cm2 in a time-dependent manner (4 hours, sixfold increase compared with that in the static condition; 24 hours, 30-fold increase). Similar results were obtained in BAECs (4 hours, twofold increase; 24 hours, threefold increase) and MLECs (4 hours, threefold increase; 24 hours, 10-fold increase). Augmentation of CNP mRNA expression that was dependent on shear stress intensity was also observed (5 dyne/cm2, 2.5-fold increase of static; 15 dyne/cm2, 4.5-fold increase). Increased CNP secretion was also confirmed by the specific radioimmunoassay for CNP. Adrenomedullin mRNA expression in HUVECs increased under shear stress of 15 dyne/cm2 in a time-dependent manner (4 hours, 1.2-fold increase of static: 24 hours, threefold increase) and shear stress intensity-dependent manner (15 dyne/cm2, threefold increase compared with that at 5 dyne/cm2). These results suggest that the coordinated augmentation of mRNA expression of these novel EDRPs may constitute shear stress-dependent vasodilator and antiproliferative effects.


Although the intra-sentential functions of the Mandarin bei passive construction have been well studied, its inter-sentential function has not been well understood yet. In this paper, from a Centering Theory perspective, we demonstrate that the bei passive also bears inter-sentential weights. Specifically, the function of the pre-bei semantic entity is to preserve the Cb from its preceding utterance; whereas that of the bei-object is either to introduce a new Cb or to retain the original Cb so as to step aside for a new one at the pre-bei position. This study also compares the Centering Theory approach with the Givon tradition in discourse analysis and claims that Centering Theory is a more suitable analytical tool of calculating the degree of discourse coherence and portraying the fluency of information flow, whereas the Givon tradition is better treated as a measurement for discourse relatedness.


Study Design. A retrospective study. Objective. To evaluate the safety of free-hand pedicle screw placement during revision surgery at levels with a solid posterior fusion mass and/or identified pseudarthroses of the thoracic and lumbosacral spine. Summary of Background Data. Placement of pedicle screws into previous fusion masses or pseudarthrosis levels of the spine is challenging because of the loss of anatomic landmarks. We are aware of no study focusing on screw placement without any type of radiographic or navigational assistance. Methods. Thirty-seven patients underwent revision spinal surgery with posterior spinal instrumentation and fusion using 552 transpedicular screws by a single surgeon from 1994 to 2003. Among 552 screws, 184 were inserted into virgin levels, 60 were inserted into the vertebral body through previous screw holes, 208 were inserted into fusion masses, and 100 were inserted into pseudarthrosis levels. We used the quadrangulation method to gain pedicle access in a prior fusion mass after diligent exposure of any and all visible anatomic landmarks. All screws were analyzed using radiographs, intraoperative monitoring data, and clinical outcomes. Results. There were 29 women and 8 men. The mean age of patients at the time of surgery was 38 + 6 years (range, 8–75 years). Six screws were removed intraoperatively according to the triggered electromyography criteria and 4 of them were repositioned after checking the integrity of the pedicle by a careful probing technique (1.09%). Six screws were removed after checking the intraoperative radiographs and 5 screws were misplaced, as noted, in postoperative radiographs (1.99%). Two patients underwent revision surgery at 3 days and 6 weeks after initial surgery, respectively, for root decompression at the osteotomy site although screw positions were correct. Conclusion. The free-hand technique of thoracic and lumbosacral pedicle screw placement in revision spinalsurgery is reliable and safe when using the quadrangulation method of gaining pedicle access in a prior fusion mass or at pseudarthrosis levels.


Abstract.
 Rare specimens of eldonioids recovered from the lower Cambrian (Series 2, Stage 4) Emu Bay Shale (EBS) Konservat-Lagerstätte represent the first record of the group for the Cambrian of East Gondwana. The disc-shaped body of the EBS taxon bears fine concentric corrugations on the dorsal surface and, ventrally, a series of internal lobes that have primary and secondary bifurcations, as well as a coiled sac. It appears to be most similar to Rotadiscus and Pararotadiscus of the Cambrian Chengjiang and Kaili biotas of South China, respectively. While the structure of the internal lobes would indicate that this occurrence in the EBS represents a new taxon within the Rotadiscidae, lack of detail regarding the precise number of internal lobes and the condition of the circumoral tentacles warrants a more conservative approach in leaving the genus and species under open nomenclature. The EBS specimens also host trace fossils, including the remains of a burrow, which are generally lacking in the body-fossilbearing layers of the Konservat-Lagerstätte interval. These traces appear to have been made by small organisms and are similar to traces associated with the discs of Pararotadiscus guizhouensis (Zhao and Zhu, 1994) from the Kaili Biota. The available taphonomic, paleoenvironmental, and ichnological evidence indicates that the EBS eldonioids are most likely vagrants that were transported or settled into the 'preservational trap' and subsequently exposed on the substrate for a brief period before burial, thereby allowing organisms to exploit their carcasses for nutrients or other purposes.


This article provides a retrospective account and analysis of communitarianism. Drawing upon the author's involvement with the political branch of communitarianism, it attempts to summarize both the history of the school of thought as well as its most prominent ideas. These include the communitarian emphasis on the common good; the effort to find an acceptable balance between individual rights and social responsibilities; the basis of social order; and the need to engage in substantive moral dialogues. The article closes with a discussion of cultural relativism according to which communities ought to be the ultimate arbitrators of the good and a universalistic position.


This books explains why the British Army fought the way it did in the First World War. It integrates social and military history and the impact of ideas to tell the story of how the army, especially the senior officers, adapted to the new technological warfare and asks: Was the style of warfare on the Western Front inevitable? Using an extensive range of unpublished diaries, letters, memoirs and Cabinet and War Office files, Professor Travers explains how and why the ideas, tactics and strategies emerged. He emphasises the influence of pre-war social and military attitudes, and examines the early life and career of Sir Douglas Haig. The author's analysis of the preparations for the Battles of the Somme and Passchendaele provide new interpretations of the role of Haig and his GHQ, and he explains the reasons for the unexpected British withdrawal in March 1918. An appendix supplies short biographies of senior British officers. In general, historians of the First World War are in two hostile camps: those who see the futility of lions led by donkeys on the one hand and on the other the apologists for Haig and the conduct of the war. Professor Travers' immensely readable book provides a bridge between the two.


Competition law, at both the EC and UK levels, plays an important and ever-increasing role in regulating the conduct of businesses. Based on the premise that open and fair competition is good for both consumers and businesses, competition law prevents businesses from entering into anti-competitive agreements and from abusing their dominant market position. Competition Law and Policy in the EC and UK looks at how competition law affects business, including: co-ordinated actions; pricing behaviour; take-overs and mergers; and state subsidies. It provides a clear guide to and outline of the general policies behind, and the main provisions of EC and UK competition law. Information is presented within a structured framework, complete with a glossary of useful terminology. This fourth edition has been revised and updated to take into account developments since publication of the previous edition, including expanded coverage of the regulation of cartels, the development of private enforcement, the consideration of IP issues in Microsoft, and extended discussion of UK competition Law.


Theories of dignity have to navigate between two conceptions: the egalitarian idea of human dignity and the old idea of dignitas, connected with hierarchy, rank, and office. One possible way of bridging the gap between the two is to talk of the dignity of the citizen. In modern republics and democracies, the dignity of the citizen extends to a large sector of the population and connotes something about the general quality of the relation between the government and the governed. This chapter first explores Immanuel Kant's account of the dignity of the citizen, and then it pursues the implications of the dignity of the citizen for modern society and modern theories of human dignity. Though the dignity of the citizen and human dignity are not the same concept, they are congruent in many respects and the former casts considerable light on the latter — in particular on the connection between dignity and responsibility and dignity and transparency in social and political relations.


In this smart and timely book, the distinguished moral philosopher Sissela Bok ponders the nature of happiness and its place in philosophical thinking and writing throughout the ages. With nuance and elegance, Bok explores notions of happiness - from Greek philosophers to Desmond Tutu, Charles Darwin, Iris Murdoch, and the Dalai Lama - as well as the latest theories advanced by psychologists, economists, geneticists, and neuroscientists. Eschewing abstract theorizing, Bok weaves in a wealth of firsthand observations about happiness from ordinary people as well as renowned figures. This may well be the most complete picture of happiness yet. This book is also a clarion call to think clearly and sensitively about happiness. Bringing together very different disciplines provides Bok with a unique opportunity to consider the role of happiness in wider questions of how we should lead our lives and treat one another - concerns that don't often figure in today's happiness equation. How should we pursue, weigh, value, or limit our own happiness, or that of others, now and in the future? Compelling and perceptive, "Exploring Happiness" shines a welcome new light on the heart of the human condition.


Ethernet AVB is being actively considered by the automotive industry as a candidate for in-vehicle communication backbone. However, several questions pertaining to schedulability of hard real-time messages transmitted via such a switch remain unanswered. In this paper, we attempt to fill this void. We derive equations to perform worst-case response time analysis on Ethernet AVB switches by considering its credit-based shaping algorithm. Also, we propose several approaches to reduce the pessimism in the analysis to provide tighter bounds.


This paper proposes a scheme of optimal resource management for reverse-link transmissions in multimedia wideband code-division multiple-access (WCDMA) communications. It is to guarantee quality-of-service (QoS) by resource (transmit power and rate) allocation and to achieve high spectral efficiency by base-station assignment. This approach takes the form of a nonlinear-programming large-scale optimization problem: maximizing an abstraction for the profit of a service provider subject to QoS satisfaction. Solutions for both single-cell and multicell systems are investigated. The single-cell solution has the advantage of low complexity and global convergence in comparison with the previous work. Maximum achievable throughput (capacity) of a single cell is mathematically evaluated and used as the benchmark for performance measure of multicell systems. For multicell systems, due to its max-max structure, solving the optimization problem directly entails a high-computational complexity. Instead, the problem is reformulated to a mixed integer nonlinear-programming (MINLP) problem. Then, binary variables indicating base-station assignments are relaxed to their continuous analogs to make a computer solution feasible. Furthermore, approximations can be made to make the resource-management scheme less computationally complex and allow its partial decentralization. The sensitivity of the proposed scheme to path-gain estimation error is studied. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme and the throughput improvement achieved by combining resource allocation with base station assignment.


We report a new design of single-shot cross-correlation frequency-resolved optical gating (XFROG) with sub femto-joule sensitivity for complete field characterization of ultrashort optical pulse using a 400- nm-pumped type-I noncollinear optical parametric amplifier. Optical parametric gain as high as 10(8) with 0.8-0.9 femto-joules sensitivity had been demonstrated with an un-cooled CCD in this study. The experimental FROG traces have been successfully retrieved with an error no worse than 0.0014. The device had been to be useful for studying the generation mechanism of white-light supercontinuum (WLS).


The output of a continuous-wave carbon dioxide laser was used successfully for the dissociation of methylphosphonic difluoride. End product analysis using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy revealed that the phosphorus-to-carbon bond was cleaved, yielding the products methane, ethene, ethyne, hydrophosphoryl difluoride, and a mixture of phosphorus compounds. These results are presented and discussed. The dissociation was optimized. A reaction mechanism of the dissociation is suggested.


We study the evolution of three-dimensional (3-D), small-scale, small-amplitude perturbations on a plane internal gravity wave using the local stability approach. The plane internal wave is characterised by its non-dimensional amplitude, $A$ , and the angle the group velocity vector makes with gravity, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F7}$ . For a given $(A,\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F7})$ , the local stability equations are solved on the periodic fluid particle trajectories to obtain growth rates for all two-dimensional (2-D) and 3-D perturbation wave vectors. For small $A$ , the local stability approach recovers previous results of 2-D parametric subharmonic instability (PSI) while offering new insights into 3-D PSI. Higher-order triadic resonances, and associated deviations from them, are also observed at small $A$ . Moreover, for small $A$ , purely transverse instabilities resulting from parametric resonance are shown to occur at select values of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F7}$ . The possibility of a non-resonant instability mechanism for transverse perturbations at finite $A$ allows us to derive a heuristic, modified gravitational instability criterion. We then study the extension of small $A$ to finite $A$ internal wave instabilities, where we recover and build upon existing knowledge of small-scale, small-amplitude internal wave instabilities. Four distinct regions of the $(A,\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F7})$ -plane based on the dominant instability modes are identified: 2-D PSI, 3-D oblique, quasi-2-D shear-aligned, and 3-D transverse. Our study demonstrates the local stability approach as a physically insightful and computationally efficient tool, with potentially broad utility for studies that are based on other theoretical approaches and numerical simulations of small-scale instabilities of internal waves in various settings.


Objectives: The aim of the present study was to assess the auditory lateralization ability in children with (central) auditory processing disorder. Methods: Participants were divided in two groups: 15 children with Central Auditory Processing Disorder (8-10 years) and 80 normal children (8-11 years) from both genders with pure-tone air-conduction thresholds better than 20 dB HL bilaterally and interaural pure tone threshold difference better than 5 dB . All subjects had normal IQ and normal otoscopy: In the present study 9 imaginary positions were simulated in horizontal plane by Interaural Time Difference (ITD) and Interaural Intensity Difference (IID) to evaluate the auditory lateralization performance in normal and children with (central) Auditory Processing Disorder (C)APD. Lateralization performance were determined by ITD ranging from -880 to +880 microsecond and IID ranging from -10 to +10 dB for high pass and low pass noise(2 kHz cut off point). Boltzmann function was used to describe the auditory lateralization performance and Independent Samples T-test was used to compare the two groups. Results: according to Boltzmann function two major types of abnormalities were revealed in the lateralization performances: 1- completely disoriented, 2- side-oriented. 86.6% of (C)APD children showed significant increase in mean of test errors compared with normal ones (p<0.001.( Discussion: The study supports the hypothesis that most children with (C)APD have poor auditory lateralization and abnormal processing of binaural cues.


An H1N1 subtype influenza A virus with all eight gene segments derived from wild birds (including mallards), ducks and chickens, caused severe disease outbreaks in swine populations in Europe beginning in 1979 and successfully adapted to form the European avian‐like swine (EA‐swine) influenza lineage. Genes of the EA‐swine lineage that are clearly segregated from its closest avian relatives continue to circulate in swine populations globally and represent a unique opportunity to study the adaptive process of an avian‐to‐mammalian cross‐species transmission. Here, we used a relaxed molecular clock model to test whether the EA‐swine virus originated through the introduction of a single avian ancestor as an entire genome, followed by an analysis of host‐specific selection pressures among different gene segments. Our data indicated independent introduction of gene segments via transmission of avian viruses into swine followed by reassortment events that occurred at least 1–4 years prior to the EA‐swine outbreak. All EA‐swine gene segments exhibit greater selection pressure than avian viruses, reflecting both adaptive pressures and relaxed selective constraints that are associated with host switching. Notably, we identified key amino acid mutations in the viral surface proteins (H1 and N1) that play a role in adaptation to new hosts. Following the establishment of EA‐swine lineage, we observed an increased frequency of intrasubtype reassortment of segments compared to the earlier strains that has been associated with adaptive amino acid replacements, disease severity and vaccine escape. Taken together, our study provides key insights into the adaptive changes in viral genomes following the transmission of avian influenza viruses to swine and the early establishment of the EA‐swine lineage.


A method to manufacture 3D microcoils based on locally controlled bimorph actuation is reported. A simple and batch-compatible method for producing out-of-plane spiral structures is developed to create inductors whose inductances are tuned independently of their base dimensions. A 500-nm-thick Cr layer used as the stress layer is patterned on a planar Cu coil to induce plastic deformation of the coil in the vertical direction uniformly, defining the final 3D coil shape. The Cr pattern, as well as the temperature of post-fabrication annealing, is varied to achieve different levels of vertical deformation and inductance of the coils. A maximum vertical expansion of 721 μm is demonstrated to yield a 12 inductance change. The Q factor of 17 and the self-resonance at ~1.2~GHz are obtained.


Exchanging mutable data objects with untrusted code is a delicate matter because of the risk of creating a data space that is accessible by an attacker. Consequently, secure programming guidelines for Java stress the importance of using defensive copying before accepting or handing out references to an internal mutable object. However, implementation of a copy method (like clone()) is entirely left to the programmer. It may not provide a sufficiently deep copy of an object and is subject to overriding by a malicious sub-class. Currently no language-based mechanism supports secure object cloning. This paper proposes a type-based annotation system for defining modular copy policies for class-based object-oriented programs. A copy policy specifies the maximally allowed sharing between an object and its clone. We present a static enforcement mechanism that will guarantee that all classes fulfill their copy policy, even in the presence of overriding of copy methods, and establish the semantic correctness of the overall approach in Coq. The mechanism has been implemented and experimentally evaluated on clone methods from several Java libraries.


A legend in EMS education just got better! In 1971, the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) published the first edition of Emergency Care and Transportation of the Sick and Injured and created the backbone of EMS education. Now, the Tenth Edition of this gold standard training program raises the bar even higher with its world-class content and instructional resources that meet the diverse needs of today's educators and students. Based on the new National EMS Education Standards, the Tenth Edition offers complete coverage of every competency statement with clarity and precision in a concise format that ensures student comprehension and encourages critical thinking. The experienced author team and AAOS medical editors have transformed the Education Standards into a training program that reflects current trends in prehospital medicine and best practices. New cognitive and didactic material is presented, along with new skills and features, to create a robust and innovative training solution for your course that will engage students' minds. Interactive resources, including online testing and assessment materials, learning management system, and eLearning student resources, allow you the flexibility to build the course that works best for you and your students. The Tenth Edition is the only way to prepare EMT students for the challenges they will face in the field.


governance is a way implemented by the government using political, economic and administrative authority in managing economic and social resources for community development. The term governance is more directed to technical matters of governance in a country. By that, the term governance in relation to good governance is directed more towards legal aspects, especially administrative law which in essence more emphasized public service aspect which is addressed to society. Good governance characteristics include Participation, Rule of law, Transparency, Responsiveness, Consensus orientation, Equity, Effectiveness and efficiency, Accountability, and Strategic vision. These characteristics are legally sourced on two main grounds, namely the principle of the rule of law and the principle of democracy. The principle of the rule of law becomes the foundation of good governance where every act of government should have a legal basis, in the form of authority, procedure and substance and protection of human rights. The principle of a legal state provides the basis of legality in the administration of government, while the principle of democracy as the basis of government openness and community participation. Power or power essentially contains the rights and obligations of the apparatus of government to take certain legal actions, derived from attribution, delegation and mandate. Abuse of power is an act of government that is inconsistent with the purpose of authorization. the form of abuse of power consists of illegal state administration (onrechtmatige overheidsdaad), the misuse of the state administration (detournement de pouvoir or ultra vires) and the arbitrary acts of state administration (abus de droit). Abuse of power may occur against bound and free power. Parameters testing abuse of power from power are tied to the legality of government action, while the abuse of power from free power using the Good Governance Principles (GGP). GGP is the principle of proper administration


Purpose

The production of glycerol derivatives by the esterification process is subject to many constraints related to the yield of the production target and the lack of process efficiency. An accurate monitoring and controlling of the process can improve production yield and efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to propose a real-time optimization (RTO) using gradient adaptive selection and classification from infrared sensor measurement to cover various disturbances and uncertainties in the reactor.

Design/methodology/approach

The integration of the esterification process optimization using self-optimization (SO) was developed with classification process was combined with necessary condition optimum (NCO) as gradient adaptive selection, supported with laboratory scaled medium wavelength infrared (mid-IR) sensors, and measured the proposed optimization system indicator in the batch process. Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN 2.0) was built to describe the tasks of SO workflow in collaboration with NCO as an abstraction for the conceptual phase. Next, Stateflow modeling was deployed to simulate the three states of gradient-based adaptive control combined with support vector machine (SVM) classification and Arduino microcontroller for implementation.

Findings

This new method shows that the real-time optimization responsiveness of control increased product yield up to 13 percent, lower error measurement with percentage error 1.11 percent, reduced the process duration up to 22 minutes, with an effective range of stirrer rotation set between 300 and 400 rpm and final temperature between 200 and 210°C which was more efficient, as it consumed less energy.

Research limitations/implications

In this research the authors just have an experiment for the esterification process using glycerol, but as a development concept of RTO, it would be possible to apply for another chemical reaction or system.

Practical implications

This research introduces new development of an RTO approach to optimal control and as such marks the starting point for more research of its properties. As the methodology is generic, it can be applied to different optimization problems for a batch system in chemical industries.

Originality/value

The paper presented is original as it presents the first application of adaptive selection based on the gradient value of mid-IR sensor data, applied to the real-time determining control state by classification with the SVM algorithm for esterification process control to increase the efficiency.


The purpose of this study was to review the results of the Republic of Korea's agricultural development programs and the food situation in relation to the present government's efforts (1959-1967) to modernize agriculture by the use of analyzing statistics data. The FAD data is cited for better comprehension of the situations reviewed. The general background of the rural community is presented in Chapter II. One of the factors of production endangering productivity is the tenancy system. This system has been illegal since 1948 and is non-existent in the Republic of Korea. Labor is the only factor at the farmers' disposal, Chapter III is concerned with the government's measures to supply scarce resources for labor-intensive farming methods, the promulgation and enactment for the correction and innovation of institutional defects, and organizational malfunctions. Chapter IV is concerned with growing domestic market demand and production capacity of foodstuffs. Price policy and distribution channels of rice and barley are discussed in relation to the farmer's income. A sample survey of farm income is analyzed for the measurement of unjustly depressed facts. Chapter V is the summary and conclusions concerning the development of the Republic of Korea's agricultural development. Questions pertaining to how to achieve goals of self-supporting food production are presented in this chapter.


A theoretical and experimental study of the optical gain and the linewidth enhancement factor (LEF) of a type-I quantum-cascade (QC) laser is reported. QC lasers have a symmetrical gain spectrum because the optical transition occurs between conduction subbands. According to the Kramers-Kronig relation, a zero LEF is predicted at the gain peak, but there has been no experimental observation of a zero LEF. There are other mechanisms that affect the LEF such as device self-heating, and the refractive index change due to other transition states not involved in lasing action. In this paper, the effects of these mechanisms on the LEF of a type-I QC laser are investigated theoretically and experimentally. The optical gain spectrum and the LEF are measured using the Hakki-Paoli method. Device self-heating on the wavelength shift in the Fabry-Perot modes is isolated by measuring the shift of the lasing wavelength above the threshold current. The band structure of a QC laser is calculated by solving the Schro/spl uml/dinger-Poisson equation self-consistently. We use the Gaussian lineshape function for gain change and the confluent hypergeometric function of the first kind for refractive index change, which satisfies the Kramers-Kronig relation. The refractive index change caused by various transition states is calculated by the theoretical model of a type-I QC laser. The calculated LEF shows good agreement with the experimental measurement.


The exhibition and symposium mark the launch of the RE:Print International Research Project with the aim of promoting international networks in discussion, exhibition and exchange.

The project was initiated following discussions with academics and artists whose concerns centre on inter-medial approaches to printed media and the nature of reproduction and reproducibility within current art practice.

A key aim of the exhibition and symposium is to examine, through practice and dialogue, the impact of continuing technological developments in reproductive media on trans-medial art practice and to RE-Present, challenge, question and connect to previously established relationships between media in unexpected, provocative and radical ways.

Key Research Questions

Technological developments in print media, moving image, sound and performance, have often led to cross-platform dialogue but how are these relationships RE-Presented when immersed in today's hyper-mediated status of image, sound, and file reproduction?

When almost anyone is capable of uploading, downloading, creating, modifying, copying, sharing and deleting files of every and any digitally convertible medium, how does the current frenzy of data use and re-use, challenge our understanding and expectations of image and media reproduction?

What kind of spaces or places are constructed, performed or revealed in the process?

What is the impact on the shared vocabulary across these media: between the notion of a print; of screen interaction; of the nature of collage; of sequence and seriality; of the conception of the unique; of the multiple and the edition or indeed of art and artefact?


Because of the psychical reorganization implied by puberty, reflectiveness is a major component of adolescence that can also shed light on the issue of subjectivation. In this context, imagining one's own death paradoxically helps re-establish a form of subjectivizing reflectiveness while restarting the self-appropriating process. This work relies on the investment of an object-double which can shore up the suffering reflectiveness.