We consider discrete infinite-state Markov chains which contain an eager finite attractor. A finite attractor is a finite subset of states that is eventually reached with probability 1 from every other state, and the eagerness condition requires that the probability of avoiding the attractor in n or more steps after leaving it is exponentially bounded in n. Examples of such Markov chains are those induced by probabilistic lossy channel systems and similar systems. We show that the expected residence time (a generalization of the steady state distribution) exists for Markov chains with eager attractors and that it can be effectively approximated to arbitrary precision. Furthermore, arbitrarily close approximations of the limiting average expected reward, with respect to state-based bounded reward functions, are also computable


Spent mushroom substrate (SMS) is an organic manure that can be used with advantage
 in agriculture. Under European Union (EU) (Good Agricultural Practice for Protection
 of Waters) Regulations, SMS cannot be applied to land over the winter months and must
 be stored on concrete surfaces, either covered or uncovered, to prevent nutrient-rich
 runoff seeping into groundwater. Spent mushroom substrate at four storage facilities,
 two covered and two uncovered, was analysed for physical and chemical characteristics
 after storage for up to 12 mo. Significant differences (P<0.05) were identified for
 all parameters across the four sites, except for pH, but there were no consistent
 differences that correlated with uncovered or covered storage conditions. The content
 of nitrogen (N) and manganese (Mn) was significantly lower in uncovered SMS, while
 the content of iron (Fe) and copper (Cu) was significantly higher. The chemical nitrogen-phospous-potassium
 (NPK) fertiliser equivalent value of SMS, when applied at a rate of 10 t/ha, was between
 €105 and €191 per hectare. Nitrogen-phospous-potassium concentrations per kg wet weight
 were all higher in SMS that was stored under cover, meaning higher chemical fertiliser
 savings are possible. The high pH of stored SMS (7.8–8.1) means it could be used with
 good effect on acid soils instead of ground limestone. The low bulk density of SMS
 (0.545–0.593 g/cm
 3) makes it an ideal amendment to soils to improve soil structure and quality. There
 is some variability in the nutrient content of SMS from different sources, so it is
 advisable to get the material analysed when including in nutrient management plans.


One of the acknowledged giants of twentieth-century American literature, Robert Frost was a public figure much celebrated in his day. Although his poetry reached a wide audience, the private Frost pensive, mercurial, and often very funny remains less appreciated. Following upon the publication of Frost s notebooks and collected prose, "The Letters of Robert Frost" is the first major edition of the poet s written correspondence. The hundreds of previously unpublished letters in these annotated volumes deepen our understanding and appreciation of this most complex and subtle of verbal artists.Volume One traverses the years of Frost s earliest poems to the acclaimed collections "North of Boston" and "Mountain Interval" that cemented his reputation as one of the leading lights of his era. The drama of his personal life as well as the growth of the audacious mind that produced his poetry unfolds before us in Frost s day-to-day missives. These rhetorical performances are at once revealing and tantalizingly evasive about relationships with family and close friends, including the poet Edward Thomas. We listen in as Frost defines himself against contemporaries Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats, and we witness the evolution of his thoughts about prosody, sound, style, and other aspects of poetic craft.In its literary interest and sheer display of personality, Frost s correspondence is on a par with the letters of Emily Dickinson, Robert Lowell, and Samuel Beckett. "The Letters of Robert Frost" holds hours of pleasurable reading for lovers of Frost and modern American poetry."


Phytoplankton community analysis is important with respect to natural or humaninduced
changes in the marine environment. Because of the efforts involved and the
limitations of traditional methods, molecular sensing approaches are becoming more
popular. Among others, microarray techniques targeting ribosomal 18S sequences
have been successfully applied for phytoplankton investigation. In this contribution,
we compared the results of two microarray methods targeting 18S rDNA and 18S
rRNA with the results obtained from microscopy, HPLC and flow cytometry. On a
qualitative basis, the microarrays showed similar or potentially better performance
than the non-molecular methods. Quantitatively, our data suggest that microarray
signals obtained from 18S rDNA provide relatively rough estimates of phytoplankton
abundance. In contrast, when targeting 18S rRNA instead, a robust linear relationship
(r2 ¼ 0.68) between molecular sensing signal and microscopic cell counts could be
demonstrated using a probe specific to the genus Pseudo-nitzschia as an example. Thus,
for both qualitative and quantitative purposes, microarray techniques can be valuable
additions to traditional methods for phytoplankton analysis. Routine monitoring
approaches in particular could benefit from advantages like reduced effort, higher
taxonomic resolution and a potential for automation.


The senses of our life resemble pictures in rough mosaic; they are ineffective from close up, and have to be viewed from a distance if they are to seem beautiful. That is why to attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and why, though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving only as the road to our goal. That is why most men [and women] discover when they look back on their life that they have the whole time been living ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely that in expectation of which they lived. (p. 53)


Abstract:This article takes a comparative, empirical look at the practice of Irish neutrality during World War II. It critiques a model of neutrality presented in a thesis on Irish neutrality called Unneutral Ireland, consisting of factors derived from an analysis of three states regarded as well-established European neutrals-Austria, Sweden and Switzerland-that reflect the practice of neutrality. That model focused on the rights and duties of neutrality; the recognition of Ireland's status by belligerents and others; the disavowal of external help; and freedom of decision and action. This present article focuses on the factors flowing from these latter obligations that are cited in an analysis of the practice of Irish neutrality in the Unneutral thesis as proof of Ireland's 'unneutral' status, i.e. ideology; involvement in economic sanctions; partiality; the practice of Irish citizens joining the British army; and post-World War II factors such as Ireland's EEC membership. In this article, Ireland's practice of neutrality is evaluated against the practice of other European neutral states-Sweden, Switzerland, Austria and Finland (and also Norway's truncated practice of neutrality)-vis-à-vis the above variables. The article also deals with the perennial myths that crop up in 'unneutral' discourses on Irish neutrality, for example, the oftcited incidence of de Valera's alleged visit to the German legation in Ireland to sign a book of condolences on Hitler's death; and the suggestions of a British government offer of a deal on Northern Ireland in exchange for Ireland dropping its neutral stance and supporting the Allies in World War II. The article concludes that the practice of Irish neutrality is equivalent to or superior to the practice of other European neutral states, thus undermining the dominant discourse that Ireland's neutrality is a myth and that Ireland is 'unneutral'.


In near-infrared reflectance analysis (NIRA), a computer is trained to recognize and quantitate the relationship between the near-infrared spectrum of a sample and the concentrations of one or more of the sample constituents. During this training process the computer implicitly generates the spectrum of the constituents in question, although this spectrum is ordinarily not available for operator inspection. In the present study, a method for displaying this implicit information is developed and evaluated. The resulting "reconstructed spectrum" can be of a specific chemical constituent in a sample or can be a composite spectrum of those components that collectively contribute to specific sample properties such as material strength or processing temperature, or to sensory characteristics such as the "hotness" of peppers. A comparison is made of this new spectral reconstruction technique to established methods such as spectral stripping and factor analysis.


This article analyzes copyright law as a growing burden on free speech institutions such as newspapers, television stations, Web sites, and software platforms. Free speech institutions help us read, watch, access, write, perform, display, transform what has been written, and publish what is newly or previously written or transformed. Yet copyright law potentially outlaws the unauthorized reading, watching, performing, transforming, or publishing of existing work. Fair use shields free speech institutions from some claims of infringement based on their mediating role. Emerging copyright norms could harm the freedom and diversity of the Internet, however. Associations of media and Internet corporations have become prolific sources of proposed norms governing Internet speech and communication. They asked the Obama administration to pressure Web sites such as YouTube to agree to a series of Principles for User-Generated Content Services, which would delete (or filter) quotations of media content in audio or audiovisual form, often without regard to fair use. An Open Book Alliance filed briefs in federal court arguing that Google should be restricted from contracting with publishers to create digital libraries of books. The Associated Press and Media Bloggers Association proposed that fair use be restricted online in ways that are contrary to established custom in print and on television, as well as online. Media corporations requested a National Broadband Plan that endorsed filtering out copyrighted material.This article explores how negotiations between copyright industry trade associations and online services present a risk to free speech institutions. Specifically, the norms advanced by the associations are often framed so as to preserve revenue streams at expense of Internet users' freedom of expression. Industry groups frequently characterize as "piracy" or a "threat" what courts or legislators would regard as First-Amendment protected, transformative fair use, outside the scope of copyright or trademark rights, or free competition under antitrust law. Moreover, such negotiations may increase the price of information works while reducing the quality of Internet services, including their interactivity and accessibility to the poor and those on fixed incomes. This article therefore describes the problem of non-price-related restraints on upstart Internet and social media companies, such as a requirement to filter out quotations. Such restraints do not burden incumbents, which typically do not confront prepublication filtering of their content.Antitrust cases and constitutional doctrine are slow to evolve, however. For this reason, the article calls for reform of the fair use privilege of free speech institutions in three key areas: burden of proof, due process, and liability standards. The reforms are intended to serve core constitutional values: liberty of expression, communicative privacy, separation of powers, and the rule of law. Other scholars have proposed reforms to the fair use doctrine that alter procedures, focus on quantitative thresholds of use, or protect a subset of free speech institutions' activity. This article proposes reforming the statute to shield fair users from liability if they do not harm the copyright holder, and to fix evidentiary problems which they face in proving a lack of harm. The proposed reforms will amend the fair use statute to prevent free speech institutions from confronting an impossible standard, i.e. a burden of disproving potential harm in aggregate.


In The Home Life of Swinburne (1922), Clara Watts-Dunton, widow of Swinburne's close friend and latter-day guardian Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton, details the domestic habits and routine of the poet as she observed them at The Pines, Putney, after her marriage in November 1905. Clara Watts-Dunton's biography is sometimes mocked for its banality, but nonetheless remains a valuable record of Swinburne's last years, providing useful information about his writing habits, friendships, literary and other tastes. Moreover, Clara's seemingly artless chatty style belies the fact that she was almost aware of certain chapters in the poet's private history--something she hints at obliquely in the following comment: He was, I remember, extremely fond of Thackeray. "The Newcomes" was one of his favourite novels, and Ethel Newcome was his favourite heroine in fiction. Ethel, I have always thought, must have appealed to him as resembling some member of his own family, perhaps one of his sisters. (1) When Swinburne first read Thackeray's The Newcomes is not clear. He was sixteen when the first monthly number of the novel came out in serial form in October 1853, with the last number appearing in August 1855. He was from a child a voracious reader and had already formed an enduring passion for Dickens whose novels were being published in serial form during his schooldays. (2) Swinburne's future friend, Edward Burne-Jones wrote an earnest essay on the The Newcomes in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, the journal he founded with William Morris, which was published in January 1856, the month Swinburne entered Balliol College. Swinburne had certainly read the novel by February 25, 1860, because we find him alluding to one of its characters, Sir Barnes Newcome, in a letter to William Bell Scott (Letters, 1:32). Three years later he would meet Thackeray himself along with his two daughters during Easter (April) 1863, at Fryston, the home of Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton. Thackeray's daughter, the author Annie Thackeray Ritchie, who would remain a lifelong friend of Swinburne's, famously described her first impressions of the poet for his biographer Edmund Gosse, noting her father's sympathetic liking for the young man. (3) Unfortunately there was no chance for a deeper relationship to develop as Thackeray died on December 24 that same year. The Newcomes, which for Henry James ranked among the novels he described as "large loose baggy monsters," does not appeal as much to modern tastes as Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847-8), but was, with Henry Esmond (1852), considered by the Victorians to be one of his two most important books. (4) Burne-Jones wrote that "this last and greatest work of Mr Thackeray" had "done a good work for society in giving us this story of our manner of life so faithfully and tenderly," and offering "a wonderfully faithful picture of the great world as it passes daily before us, many-sided, deeply intricate." (5) Set in the 1830s and 1840s, The Newcomes, is nonetheless for modern readers an illuminating, often satirical guide to the period, documenting the manners and morals, the triumphs and crises that constitute what the subtitle of the novel somewhat sardonically refers to as The History of a Most Respectable Family. Of that family the figure who most won favor with Victorian readers was Colonel Thomas Newcome, simple, sincere, an exemplum of the benevolent gentleman. His fortunes and disappointments are contrasted with those of his more worldly-wise and aspirant twin half-brothers Hobson and Brian (later Sir Brian) Newcome. Though not without flaw and capable of woeful misjudgement, Colonel Newcome emerges as the epitome of noble, upright behavior in adversity, his eventual demise entailing one of Victorian literature's most celebrated and edifying deathbed scenes. Swinburne, although he liked the character of the Colonel--and cherished an engraving of him--was not an uncritical admirer, commenting judiciously in his short monograph A Note on Charlotte Bronte (1877) that "our sense of his intellectual infirmity and imperfection is never quite overcome or transfigured by our sense of his moral and chivalrous excellence. …


Acoustic feedback offers promising opportunities to enhance the perception of athletes in regards of the modification of movement patterns and control in technique training. Sound conveys time-critical structures that are perceived subliminally, which is of crucial importance for the precision when modifying movements to improve their execution. Technological advances allow the design of innovative feedback systems to communicate information audibly to athletes. This paper describes a concept for providing acoustic feedback online during on-water training sessions to elite rowers with the final aim to improve the mean boat velocity by a reduction of intracyclic interruptions in the boat acceleration. Following the initial analysis of technical and biomechanical requirements, the acoustic feedback system Sofirow was designed and field-tested with elite athletes. This rowing specific training system presents the boat acceleration-time trace audibly and online to athletes and coaches. The results showed a significant increase in the mean boat velocity when the acoustic feedback was used compared to sections without. It thus seems promising to implement acoustic feedback regularly into training processes for elite athletes. A behavioural dynamics approach was recommended to provide a theoretical basis for this concept.


Sybil Exposed makes the case that the 1973 book Sybil misrepresents the facts of Shirley Mason's life, diagnosis, and treatment. It also points to concerns that extend beyond a single case, to the diagnostic concept of multiple personalities. Still, perhaps the books suggests the need for a more systematic look at not just the case of Sybil, but also the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID).


Violence committed by and against juveniles was the focus of this study. Two groups were examined: incarcerated (criminally active) juveniles and students in inner-city high schools, since these youths are popularly considered to engage in and experience violence (especially gun-related violence), to belong to urban street gangs, and to participate in the drug trafficking thought to lead to excessive gun violence. Self-administered questionnaires were completed by 835 male inmates in six correctional facilities and 1,663 male and female students from ten inner-city high schools in California, Illinois, Louisiana, and New Jersey. Data collection took place during January through April of 1991. To maximize response rates, inducements of five dollars were offered to the inmates, Spanish-language versions of the questionnaire were provided to inmates who preferred them, and personal interviews were conducted with inmates whose reading skills were less than sufficient to complete the questionnaire on their own. In four schools, principals permitted the inducements to be offered to students to participate in the study. As with the inmate survey, a Spanish-language version of the questionnaire was provided to students who preferred it. The questionnaires covered roughly the same core topics for both inmates and students. Items included questions on sociodemographic characteristics, school experiences, gun ownership, gun use for several types of firearms, gun acquisition patterns, gun-carrying habits, use of other weapons, gang membership and gang activities, self-reported criminal histories, victimization patterns, drug use, alcohol use, and attitudes concerning guns, crime, and violence. In both questionnaires, the majority of the items covered firearms knowledge, acquisition, and use. The remaining items in the inmate survey primarily covered criminal behavior and, secondarily, victimization histories. In the student survey, these priorities were reversed.


Three levels (1, 5 and 10%) of fishbone powder and (25, 37.5 and 50%) squash paste were used in the production of vege-fish noodle. Expansion ratio, bulk density, oil absorption, and percent yield were determined. Sensory attributes were evaluated employing Quality Scoring in combination with the 9-Point Hedonic scale. Proximate composition of the most acceptable formulation was analyzed. Consumer evaluation of the recommended formulation was assessed and the cost of production was determined. Levels of fish-bone powder and squash paste have no significant effect on the physical qualities of noodles except percent yield. Sensory attributes of vege-fish noodles were significantly influenced by the incorporation of fish bone powder and squash paste except taste of the product. General acceptability is significantly higher in treatment with highest level of both fish bone powder and squash paste. The proximate composition of vege-fish noodle is higher than its commercial counterpart except ash. The calcium content of the product is 1,918.08 mg/kg. The vege-fish noodle is acceptable among 70.80% of the consumers. The cost of production is lower with the break-even price of P28.70/350 grams.


The origins of money and banking are explained in nearly every introduction money and banking course, but Wray proposes an alternative approach that emerges from a comparative analysis of economic institutions. Orthodox theory suggests that barter replaced self-sufficiency and increased efficiency by fostering specialization- subsequently, establishing some object as a medium of exchange permits greater efficiency. In essence, the orthodox economist espouses the view that we operate in a free market economy in which "neutral money is used primarily to facilitate exchange of real goods, undertaken by self-interested maximizers for personal gain." Institutionalists reject this argument because it emerges from the perspective of a rational economic agent facing scarce resources and unlimited wants-thus, the focus is on choice. Wray states that economic analyses must incorporate interactions between humans and nature, and that the economy is a "component of the material life process of society." Hence, the conventionalists' focus on choice should instead be directed at production and distribution. The Wray thesis suggests that money is necessarily endogenously determined: Monetary economies have not, and cannot, operate with exogenous money supply can function with a commodity reserve system, such a system is subject to periodic debt deflations. In sum, the monetarist policy prescription would be counterproductive to systemic stability and would not yield greater control of the money supply.


Ground-holding as one of the common strategies for the current air traffic flow management, can alleviate congestion effectively and save the cost of flights waiting. Flights ground-holding strategy has a direct relationship with the landing capacity of destination airport, but the capacity of destination airport changes randomly with the affection of many factors, and moreover delay cost of different models has an important influence on the ground-holding strategy, therefore this paper considers the random changes of destination airport's capacity and delay cost of different models and establishes single airport ground random holding strategy model, and then uses genetic algorithm to simulate and verify the model. The simulation result shows that the model established is effective.


Researcher: Matthew John Lehman Title: Study of Surface Tension, Natural Evaporation, and Subcooled Boiling Evaporation of Aqueous Surfactant Solutions Institution: Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Degree: Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering Year: 2016 The relation between surface tension and surfactant concentration and its effect on solution evaporation under natural convection and subcooled pool boiling is examined through experimental methods. Aqueous solutions of sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), ECOSURF EH-14, and ECOSURF SA-9 are used in this study. SLS is an anionic surfactant while EH-14 and SA-9 are environmentally-friendly nonionic surfactants. Surfactants, surface active agents, are known to affect evaporation performance of solutions and are studied in relation to water loss prevention and heat dissipation. Surfactants could be useful under drought conditions which present challenges to water management on a yearly basis in arid areas of the world. Recent water scarcity in the greater Los Angeles area, south eastern Africa nations, eastern Australia and eastern Mediterranean countries has highlighted the cost of water loss by evaporation. Surfactants are studied as a potential effective method of suppressing evaporation in water reservoirs and lowering associated human suffering and costs. Surfactants are also studied as performance enhancers for the working fluid of heat dissipation devices, such as pulsating heat pipes used for electronics cooling. Some surfactants have been shown to lower thermal resistances and friction pressure in such devices and thereby increase their efficiency.


The force that is produced from the momentum change of a stream of photons incident upon micrometer-sized spheres is developed from a ray-optic model. The resulting force component expressions, axial and radial with respect to the photon stream center and incident direction, are in a form that makes them suitable for computer modeling of the levitation phenomena. Simulated results presented are in excellent agreement with published experimental observations.


Theorists have long noted that people's moral circles have expanded over the course of history, with modern people extending moral concern to entities—both human and nonhuman—that our ancestors would never have considered including within their moral boundaries. In recent decades, researchers have sought a comprehensive understanding of the psychology of moral expansiveness. We first review the history of conceptual and methodological approaches in understanding our moral boundaries, with a particular focus on the recently developed Moral Expansiveness Scale. We then explore individual differences in moral expansiveness, attributes of entities that predict their inclusion in moral circles, and cognitive and motivational factors that help explain what we include within our moral boundaries and why they may shrink or expand. Throughout, we highlight the consequences of these psychological effects for real-world ethical decision making.


In recent years, small municipalities have been gaining an increasing research interest, most notably in the areas of sociology and geography, yet the economic standpoint has not been sufficiently examined. Presented is an introductory case study on selected types of small municipalities of the South Bohemian Region (the Czech Republic) discussing their financial self-sufficiency and dependence on grants in a certain period under review (2013 2016). As regards the Czech Republic ́s settlement structure, a specific category, considering small municipality as a unit with 500 9999 inhabitants, was established for the research purposes. The main part of the study encompasses a financial analysis of the corresponding municipalities, included in the category. Financial self-sufficiency and dependence on grants were assessed based on particular ratio indicators, i.e. own revenues and selected own revenues in relation to total revenues, and covering capital expenditures by investment transfers. It was found that the majority of municipalities have sufficient revenues to cover their expenditures. For the small municipalities concerned, however, this is at the expense of capital expenditure limitations, and in order to cover their investment projects, it is necessary to increase own revenues by grants.


We prove NP-hardness results for five of Nintendo's largest video game franchises: Mario, Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Pokémon. Our results apply to Super Mario Bros. 1, 3, Lost Levels, and Super Mario World; Donkey Kong Country 1–3; all Legend of Zelda games except Zelda II: The Adventure of Link; all Metroid games; and all Pokémon role-playing games. For Mario and Donkey Kong, we show NP-completeness. In addition, we observe that several games in the Zelda series are PSPACE-complete.


Objective Knee abduction moment (KAM) during landing predicts non-contact anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury risk with high sensitivity and specificity in female athletes. The purpose of this study was to employ sensitive laboratory (lab-based) tools to determine predictive mechanisms that underlie increased KAM during landing. Methods Female basketball and soccer players (N=744) from a single county public school district were recruited to participate in testing of anthropometrics, maturation, laxity/flexibility, strength and landing biomechanics. Linear regression was used to model KAM, and logistic regression was used to examine high (>25.25 Nm of KAM) versus low KAM as surrogate for ACL injury risk. Results The most parsimonious model included independent predictors (β±1 SE) (1) peak knee abduction angle (1.78±0.05; p<0.001), (2) peak knee extensor moment (0.17±0.01; p<0.001), (3) knee flexion range of motion (0.15±0.03; p<0.01), (4) body mass index (BMI) Z-score (−1.67±0.36; p<0.001) and (5) tibia length (−0.50±0.14; p<0.001) and accounted for 78% of the variance in KAM during landing. The logistic regression model that employed these same variables predicted high KAM status with 85% sensitivity and 93% specificity and a C-statistic of 0.96. Conclusions Increased knee abduction angle, quadriceps recruitment, tibia length and BMI with decreased knee flexion account for 80% of the measured variance in KAM during a drop vertical jump. Clinical relevance Females who demonstrate increased KAM are more responsive and more likely to benefit from neuromuscular training. These findings should significantly enhance the identification of those at increased risk and facilitate neuromuscular training targeted to this important risk factor (high KAM) for ACL injury.


This thesis is an historical commentary on Lykourgos' prosecution speech Against
Leokrates. The introduction comprises various sections. The first is a brief
consideration of the specific historical background to the oration in Athens and
the wider Greek world. The second looks at the orator Lykourgos himself, one of
the most significant figures of Classical Athenian history who could be described
as a fourth-century equivalent of Perikles. Lykourgos was 'Controller of Athenian
finances' for more than a decade following the Athenians' defeat by Philip at
Khaironeia in 338 B.C. During this period, Lykourgos used his dominant position
effectively to rebuild Athens structurally, aesthetically and culturally. He could
thus be considered to be of far greater significance than his much better-known
contemporary Demosthenes, even if it is accepted that he was a less effective
orator. There are, however, reasons to believe that he was in fact not less
effective, for the ancient view of Lykourgos as a prosecutor was that his 'pen was
dipped in blood'. This has, indeed, proved a puzzle in tenns of this one surviving
speech, which Lykourgos has unanimously been deemed to have lost. The
remainder of the introduction looks in detail at eisangelia, the procedure under
which Lykourgos prosecuted Leokrates, and the sole reference to the outcome of
the case (Aiskhin. 3.252), and re-evaluates this assessment. It concludes that there
are juridical and rhetorical reasons to suggest that Aiskhines has been
misinterpreted and that Lykourgos in fact won this case, failing by one vote on a
second ballot to secure a majority for a punishment of execution. The introduction
concludes by re-evaluating the structure of the speech which has been
overwhelmingly seen as a mass digression into poetic quotations. It suggests that
previous assessments of the speech as a failure have worked against an objective
consideration of Lykourgos' tactics, and have therefore masked the structure
inherent to the speech as a whole. The commentary itself has an historical, rather
than rhetorical or linguistic, focus, and is subdivided into sections which reflect
the structure outlined in the introduction.


Carbon dioxide is understood as a major contributor to the greenhouse effect. The search for an effective and efficient method for CO2 capture and utilization has become a priority task on a global scale. For Mars exploration missions, the ability to use the CO2 in the atmosphere (96%) could offer great benefits in terms of energy storage. The Li–CO2 battery is considered a promising platform for CO2 capture, with its ability to utilize the captured CO2 for energy storage. However, the Li–CO2 battery still suffers various inadequacies, including the slow kinetics of CO2 reduction, the high charge/discharge hysteresis, the ultra-stable discharge product, and the slow transport of CO2 gas and electrolyte. In this work, we introduce a high-capacity, long-life Li–CO2 battery based on a flexible wood cathode architecture. Mother nature has produced the most efficient ion and gas transport architectural system in the form of wood. The unique channel structure of the wood-based cathode separates the transport of CO2 and the electrolyte into specific pathways, leading to facilitated transport. The improvements in mass transport, combined with faster kinetics as a result of the use of Ru nanocatalyst supported on carbon nanotubes that reside in the microchannels, contribute to substantially improved electrochemical performance. Stable cycling for over 200 cycles with both a low overpotential and an ultrahigh discharge capacity of 11 mA h cm−2 is achieved with the flexible wood-based Li–CO2 battery. Such a long cycle life and high capacity is unprecedented for a Li–CO2 battery. Additionally, the cathode exhibits excellent mechanical flexibility imparted by the flexible wood scaffold, holding great promise for wearable device applications. The high capacity and the long cycle life make the flexible wood cathode Li–CO2 battery a promising candidate for combining CO2 capture and utilization.


Fast information retrieval is pivot of medical breakthrough to provide quality medical services. There were a number of attempts to develop clinical information system (CIS) which is reliable, affordable and accessible over the entire hospital and beyond. Today's home healthcare progression is becoming a predominant form of healthcare delivery. Although there have been many recent advances in biomedical sensors, low-power radio communication and embedded computation, there does not yet exist a flexible, robust communication infrastructure to integrate these devices into an emergency care setting. An efficient wireless communication substrate for medical devices that addresses ad hoc or fixed network formation, naming and discovery, security and authentication, as well as filtration and aggregation of vital sign data need to be studied. The potential applications will save lives, create valuable data for medical research, and cut the cost of medical services. In this paper, we focus on home healthcare via wireless sensor network (WSN) platform. WSN composed of a large number of sensor nodes and multi-hop networking capability that are densely deployed for a wide variety of applicants such as smart buildings, interactive user interfaces, environment control and highly suitable for monitoring in military and biomedical applications. We describe our experiences in developing and implement both hardware and software platform for medical sensor network, provides protocol for device discovery and multi-hop routing, as well as a simple query interface that is tailored for medical monitoring.


From the Publisher:
Engineers can profit from the revolution in AI research that is changing the ground rules of the profession. AI expert and consultant William Taylor provides a practical explanation of the parts of AI research that are ready for use by anyone with an engineering degree and that can help engineers do their jobs better.
Taylor tours the field of artificial intelligence in a highly readable and engaging manner, outlining in detail how engineers can work with AI. In separate chapters he discusses the three basic programming styles - function-based programming, object-oriented programming, and rulebased programming - as well as the use of Lisp and Prolog. He concludes by offering several suggestions for getting started in the field.
As Taylor defines it, AI is a programming style that has much in common with engineering practice: programs operate on data according to rules in order to accomplish goals. While the term "artificial intelligence" is generally defined as meaning the design of computers to think the way people do, Taylor points out that for engineering purposes it is more accurately defined as a few software ideas that work well enough to be used. And as AI technology matures, computers will be able to provide actual design help. They will, in effect, serve as design apprentices, offering suggestions and handling actual parts of the design.
William A. Taylor is an international consultant on the practical applications of artificial intelligence and has spent several years giving seminars on AI to senior engineers and engineering management.


This paper focuses on the competitively optimal power control and signal shaping for "ad hoc" networks composed by multiple-antenna noncooperative transmit/receive terminals affected by spatially colored multiple-access interference (MAI). The target is the competitive maximization of the information throughput sustained by each link that is active over the network. For this purpose, the MAI-impaired network is modeled as a noncooperative strategic game, and sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium (NE) are provided. Furthermore, iterative power-control and signal-shaping algorithms are presented to efficiently achieve the NE under both best-effort and "contracted QoS" policies. The presented algorithms also account for the effect of (possibly) imperfect channel estimates available at the transmit/receive units active over the network, they are fully scalable, and they may be implemented in a fully distributed and asynchronous way. The presented numerical results support the conclusion that the proposed distributed algorithms may be able to outperform the conventional centralized orthogonal MAC strategies (as time division multiple access, frequency division multiple access, and code division multiple access) in terms of a sustained network throughput, especially in operating scenarios affected by a strong MAI


The development of resistance towards chemotherapeutic drugs has become an obstacle in treatment of cancer. Ankaferd Hemostat [ABS] has shown to suppress the proliferation of melanoma cells, but little is known about its' mechanism. In this study, we demonstrate that ABS can make some melanoma cell lines such as A2058 more sensitive towards etoposide by altering the genes involved in oxidative phosphorylation [OXPHOS] pathway. ABS treatment has shown to increase the sensitivity of A2058 towards etoposide and showed no effect for SK-MEL-5. Previously known to be more resistant to etoposide, SK-MEL-30 showed least amount of sensitivity to ABS. We found mitochondrion cluster to be the most relevant to genes altered by ABS. To validate our claim, we compared two sets of melanoma cell lines; A375 with A2058 and A375 with SK-MEL-2. The clusters that we obtained from A375 and A2058 comparison did contain mitochondrial related clusters, their corresponding p value was not significant. Whereas, the clusters from A375 and SK-MEL-2 comparison contain 72 genes in 'oxidoreductase' cluster with enrichment score of 2.52. To get insight of the oxidoreductase cluster, we put the genes in that cluster to Enrichr. We found that majority of the genes among oxidoreductase cluster participate in oxidative phosphorylation and electron transport chain. Our study suggests that the use of ABS prior to etoposide treatment can increase the response of melanoma cell lines because of the alteration of OXPHOS genes.


In the wake of closely contested elections, calls for laws that require voters to present photo identification as a condition to cast a ballot have become pervasive. Advocates tend to rely on two rhetorical devices: (1) anecdotes about a couple of elections tainted by voter fraud; and (2) common sense arguments that voters should produce photo identification because the cards are required to board airplanes, buy alcohol, and engage in other activities. This Article explains the analytical shortcomings of anecdote, analogy, and intuition, and applies a cost-benefit approach generally overlooked in election law scholarship. Rather than rushing to impose a photo identification requirement for voting, policymakers should instead examine empirical data to weigh the costs and benefits of such a requirement. Existing data suggests that the number of legitimate voters who would fail to bring photo identification to the polls is several times higher than the number of fraudulent voters, and that a photo identification requirement would produce political outcomes that are less reflective of the electorate as a whole. Policymakers should await better empirical studies before imposing potentially antidemocratic measures. Judges, in turn, should demand statistical data to ensure that voter identification procedures are appropriately tailored to deter fraudulent voters rather than legitimate ones and do not disproportionately exclude protected classes of voters.


Machine learning has emerged as an attractive alternative to experiments and simulations for predicting material properties. Usually, such an approach relies on specific domain knowledge for feature design: each learning target requires careful selection of features that an expert recognizes as important for the specific task. The major drawback of this approach is that computation of only a few structural features has been implemented so far, and it is difficult to tell a priori which features are important for a particular application. The latter problem has been empirically observed for predictors of guest uptake in nanoporous materials: local and global porosity features become dominant descriptors at low and high pressures, respectively. We investigate a feature representation of materials using tools from topological data analysis. Specifically, we use persistent homology to describe the geometry of nanoporous materials at various scales. We combine our topological descriptor with traditional structural features and investigate the relative importance of each to the prediction tasks. We demonstrate an application of this feature representation by predicting methane adsorption in zeolites, for pressures in the range of 1-200 bar. Our results not only show a considerable improvement compared to the baseline, but they also highlight that topological features capture information complementary to the structural features: this is especially important for the adsorption at low pressure, a task particularly difficult for the traditional features. Furthermore, by investigation of the importance of individual topological features in the adsorption model, we are able to pinpoint the location of the pores that correlate best to adsorption at different pressure, contributing to our atom-level understanding of structure-property relationships.


Our intention is generating the right mixture of audio, speech and language technologies with big data ones. Some audio, speech and language automatic technologies are available or gaining enough degree of maturity as to be able to help to this objective: automatic speech transcription, query by spoken example, spoken information retrieval, natural language processing, unstructured multimedia contents transcription and description, multimedia files summarization, spoken emotion detection and sentiment analysis, speech and text understanding, etc. They seem to be worthwhile to be joined and put at work on automatically captured data streams coming from several sources of information like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, online newspapers, web search engines, etc. to automatically generate reports that include both scientific based scores and subjective but relevant summarized statements on the tendency analysis and the perceived satisfaction of a product, a company or another entity by the general population.


In this paper, a transmit antenna selection scheme, which is based on shadowing side information, is investigated. In this scheme, the selected single transmit antenna provides the highest shadowing coefficient between a transmitter and a receiver. By the proposed technique, the frequency of the usage of the feedback channel from the receiver to the transmitter and channel estimation complexity at the receiver can be reduced. We study the performance of our proposed technique, and in the analysis, we consider an independent but not identically distributed generalized-K composite fading model. More specifically, exact and closed-form expressions for the outage probability, the moment-generating function, the moments of signal-to-noise ratio, and the average symbol error probability (SEP) are derived. In addition, asymptotic outage probability and SP expressions are also presented to investigate the diversity order and the array gain. Finally, our theoretical performance results are validated by Monte Carlo simulations.


We explore the idea that judgment by representativeness reflects the workings of episodic memory, especially interference. In a new laboratory experiment on cued recall, participants are shown two groups of images with different distributions of colors. We find that i) decreasing the frequency of a given color in one group significantly increases the recalled frequency of that color in the other group, ii) for a fixed set of images, different cues for the same objective distribution entail different interference patterns and different probabilistic assessments. Selective retrieval and interference may offer a foundation for the representativeness heuristic, but more generally for understanding the formation of probability judgments from experienced statistical associations.


In this lively historical examination of American federalism, a leading scholar in the field refutes the widely accepted notion that the founding fathers carefully crafted a constitutional balance of power between the states and the federal government. Edward Purcell bases his argument on close analysis of the Constitution's original structure and the ways that structure both induced and accommodated changes over the centuries. There was no clear agreement among the founding fathers regarding the 'true' nature of American federalism, Purcell contends, nor was there a consensus on 'correct' lines dividing state and national authority. Furthermore, even had there been some true 'original' understanding, the elastic and dynamic nature of the constitutional structure would have made it impossible for subsequent generations to maintain any original or permanent balance. The author traces the evolution of federalism through the centuries, focusing particularly on shifting interpretations founded on political interests. He concludes with insights into current issues of federal power and a discussion of the grounds on which legitimate decisions about federal and state power should rest.


Web usage mining attempts to discover useful knowledge from the secondary data obtained from the interactions of the users with the Web. Web usage mining has become very critical for effective Web site management, creating adaptive Web sites, business and support services, personalization, network traffic flow analysis etc., Web site under study is part of a nonprofit organization that does not sell any products. It was crucial to understand who the users were, what they looked at, and how their interests changed with time. To achieve this, one of the promising approaches is web usage mining, which mines web logs for user models and recommendations. Web usage mining algorithms have been widely utilized for modeling user web navigation behavior. In this study we advance a model for mining of user's navigation pattern. The proposal of our work proceeds in the direction of building a robust web usage knowledge discovery system, which extracts the web user profiles at the web server, application server and core application level. The proposal optimizes the usage mining framework with fuzzy C means clustering algorithm (to discover web data clusters) and compare with expected maximization cluster system to analyze the Web site visitor trends. The evolutionary clustering algorithm is proposed to optimally segregate similar user interests. The clustered data is then used to analyze the trends using inference system. By linking the Web logs with cookies and forms, it is further possible to analyze the visitor behavior and profiles which could help an e-commerce site to address several business questions. Experimentation conducted with CFuzzy means and Expected Maximization clusters in Syskill Webert data set from UCI, shows that EM shows 5% to 8% better performance than CFuzzy means in terms of cluster number.


A Thesis Submitted In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Award of the Degree of Master of Science (Medical Biochemistry) in the School of Pure and Applied Sciences of Kenyatta University


Abstract The European Activation System, EASY, includes as the source of nuclear data the European Activation File (EAF). A new version of EAF, EAF-2007, has been developed that contains cross-section data for deuteron- and proton-induced reactions in addition to the traditional neutron-induced data. The main reason for the addition of these data to EAF is to enable activation calculations to be performed for the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility, which is a planned materials test facility, and for other accelerator-driven devices with an incident upper energy limit of 60 MeV. EAF-2007 has benefited from the generation and maintenance of comprehensive activation files and the development of the processing code SAFEPAQ-II. Cross-section validation exercises against both experimental data and systematics, which were started on the EAF-4 file (1995), enable a comprehensive assessment of the data. Although EAF-2007 is the best-validated activation neutron cross-section library in the world, currently <3% of all the reactions can be compared with experimental information and sometimes then only for a very limited, and not always relevant, energy range. As with EAF-2001, EAF-2003, and EAF-2005, results of integral experiments have been used to correct, adjust, and validate data. This can be done using SAFEPAQ-II by inputting the measured effective cross sections. Validation using integral data has been performed by means of direct comparison with measurements of various materials under relevant neutron spectra. A tool has been recently developed that is of importance now that libraries contain so much calculated data. Statistical Analysis of Cross Sections is used to look for trends in the library data for a particular reaction type, and this has proved efficient in identifying reactions with data that need correction or improvement. This method has been used with EAF-2005 and EAF-2007 and is a valuable additional validation method.


Whilst critical ethnography is an appropriate and beneficial research approach for troubling school policy such as behaviour management in large institutions like public high schools it does present some challenges and difficulties for the lone ethnographer. This paper traces an 'insider' experience as researcher and secondary school teacher as I investigate the Behaviour Management in Schools Policy (2001, 2008) in Western Australia through the understandings and experiences of 27 sixteen year old school students. As I unpacked many of the struggles and contradictions between what policy was claiming to do and what was really happening on the ground in student's lives, I also found spaces and possibilities to continue my research. It is the strategies for discovering meaning from social action and analysis of data as well as experience with the ethical dilemmas of engaging in critical ethnography that I share throughout this paper.


Abstract : In important ways, the world is at a nuclear crossroads. The complex and dynamic nuclear landscape presents us with challenges along at least four axes: regional nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism, great power nuclear relations, and the security implications of increased interest in nuclear energy. These problems are interrelated in ways that the national security community does not fully understand. Strategy and policy frameworks do not address them in sufficiently integrated fashion. New conceptual thinking is required to develop a more unified understanding of and approach to managing the risks and opportunities posed by these 21st-century nuclear challenges. Today, more than at any other time in the nuclear era, nuclear capacity and potential (knowledge, technology, and materials) are accessible to a growing number of actors with more ambitious goals. The result is a high degree of nuclear latency that challenges traditional thinking about nuclear threats. Whereas 30 or 40 years ago, only a handful of countries were assumed to know how to acquire nuclear weapons, as many as 35 or 40 nations currently are believed to be in the know, and many more could become so based on their participation in civilian nuclear energy programs.


Generally the artificial neural networks (ANN) are regarded as highly computational demanding method. The usage of ANN in model predictive control as an adaptive predictor is mostly impossible. The aim of this paper is to present and compare one possible way how to reduce computational costs of adaptive predictors based on artificial neural networks. This paper presents real-time system control by two adaptive control methods. The first method is based on the model predictive method with adaptive artificial neural network as a predictor. This artificial neural network offers interesting solution of the computation time problem while using artificial neural network as an adaptive (online) predictor. The second method is established on self-tuning approach. Both these methods are applied to a problem of control liquid level in interconnected tanks. Real-time experiments are performed using Amira DTS200 - three tank system. This system is characterized by non-linear behavior.


Background Personalizing education by adapting learning opportunities and instructional practices to individual abilities and dispositions has been a long-standing objective among educators and indeed, among all who seek more powerful learning experiences. Interest in adapting learning opportunities to meet the needs of learners has continued throughout history up to the present time. Purpose This article considers both historical and contemporary work to create adaptive learning opportunities to illustrate the various strands of thought about the personalization of learning experiences and to identify active lines of relevant research and development activities. Research Design A wide range of work to create adaptive learning applications both within the education sector and the research community and beyond is reviewed. The review is organized according to a model of the processes leading to adaptive learning opportunities that calls attention to seven categories of work encompassing everyday tasks, learning tasks, learning theory, assessment, curriculum, teaching, and networking activities. Conclusions After noting some promising directions for additional work, the paper concludes by identifying issues that should be considered in the further development of adaptive learning applications to avoid potential negative effects.


While carbon tax measures have not yet met with success at the federal level in the United States, proposals for carbon taxes emerged in a handful of states in 2015 and 2016. The proposals address the shared challenge of climate change, but each has its own unique features and setting. Drawing on proposals in Oregon, Massachusetts, Vermont and Washington as case studies, this chapter explores how state constitutions can affect the design of state-level carbon taxes and their legislative route toward enactment. For example, the Oregon constitution imposes limits on tax rates and use of the revenue when taxing certain fossil fuels. The constitutions in three of the four states require that some types of revenue measures must originate in the legislative House of Representatives, not the Senate, raising the question whether carbon taxes can be designed in a manner that will avoid this procedural constraint. In Washington, the carbon tax proposal came forward as a ballot initiative that went to voters in the general election, following a procedure permitted under the state constitution. These case studies serve as an important reminder of how constitutional provisions that were not created with climate change in mind can influence the design features of subnational carbon taxes and political strategies.


Purpose: The main aim of this article is to show the positive impacts of the tourism industry on economic development. It is based on mathematicalstatistical analysis demonstrating positive trends for the development of the field. Design/Methodology/Approach: Using 6 years of data, from 2010-2016 regarding the tourism development of the state of Georgia, it is possible to identify a forecast for the future tourism development and its impact on national economy. Findings: The direct share of the tourism industry in employment would increase from 6 to 9% and revenues could reach up to 3 billion Gel. Moreover, the econometric results shows the tourism industry's influence on main indicators such as tourist flows and direct share in total GDP. Practical Implications: Some findings can be implied as a base for the future development of the field. Originality/Value: The state of Georgia is trying to develop the tourism industry by using many resources to achieve this goal. However there is a lack of statistical information for the future development needs or expectations. Statistical forecast could be a good precondition to pursue the goals established by the government.


Airborne Laser Scanning systems with light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology is one of the fast and accurate 3D point data acquisition techniques. Generating accurate digital terrain and/or surface models (DTM/DSM) is the main application of collecting LiDAR range data. Recently, LiDAR range and intensity data have been used for land cover classification applications. Data range and Intensity, (strength of the backscattered signals measured by the LiDAR systems), are affected by the flying height, the ground elevation, scanning angle and the physical characteristics of the objects surface. These effects may lead to uneven distribution of point cloud or some gaps that may affect the classification process. Researchers have investigated the conversion of LiDAR range point data to raster image for terrain modelling. Interpolation techniques have been used to achieve the best representation of surfaces, and to fill the gaps between the LiDAR footprints. Interpolation methods are also investigated to generate LiDAR range and intensity image data for land cover classification applications. In this paper, different approach has been followed to classifying the LiDAR data (range and intensity) for land cover mapping. The methodology relies on the classification of the point cloud data based on their range and intensity and then converted the classified points into raster image. The gaps in the data are filled based on the classes of the nearest neighbour. Land cover maps are produced using two approaches using: (a) the conventional raster image data based on point interpolation; and (b) the proposed point data classification. A study area covering an urban district in Burnaby, British Colombia, Canada, is selected to compare the results of the two approaches. Five different land cover classes can be distinguished in that area: buildings, roads and parking areas, trees, low vegetation (grass), and bare soil. The results show that an improvement of around 10 % in the classification results can be achieved by using the proposed approach.


ECONOMIC CONDITIONS The Politics of Islamic Finance, ed. by Clement M. Henry and Rodney Wilson. New York and Edinburgh: Columbia University Press and Edinburgh University, 2004. 295 pages. Contribs. Index to p. 307. $30. This collection of articles addresses a number of political aspects surrounding Islamic finance, and whets the reader's appetite for more in-depth treatment of the politics shaping the industry. A common shortcoming of essays collected in a single volume is that some points are treated repeatedly by various authors (albeit from slightly different vantage points and in different contexts), while other important points are not sufficiently addressed. Most political questions that come to mind today are framed by the post September 11"1 world order. Excluding the editors' introduction and conclusion of the volume, Ibrahim Warde's article is the only one that discusses this issue in some detail, paralleling and updating the analysis in his recent book, also published by Edinburgh University Press, in 2003. This analysis highlights US policy-circles' prior ignorance of the nature of Islamic finance (to the point of confusing two very different institutions: Al-Baraka and Al-Barakaat), but Western governments more generally have since increased their understanding of (and sympathy towards) Islamic finance. Indeed, after the publication of this volume, Britain's Financial Services Authority (FSA) licensed the first Islamic bank in Europe: Islamic Bank of Britain, PIc., and the first Western "Islamic" bonds were issued by the German state of Saxony Anhalt. The US Treasury also created a position of "scholar-in-residence in Islamic finance" to enhance Washington's understanding of the industry. Most articles in the volume concentrated on domestic and intra-Islamic-regional politics surrounding Islamic finance. In particular, the historical roots of Islamic finance, and the relationship of its financiers, pioneers and clients to Islamist movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, are featured in multiple articles. The primary collective contribution of this volume, as summarized clearly in the editors' conclusions, is to highlight which political environments tend to be hospitable or hostile to Islamic financial growth, including relationships between various governments and their Islamist constituencies, be they actively political or otherwise. Particularly interesting are the nuanced analyses of government religious competition with private groups: For instance, the governmental posture in Egypt simultaneously exhibits hostility to Islamic banks through pronouncements and proposed legislation as well as offering Islamic financial services through state-owned banks. This phenomenon is part of larger competitions in most Islamic countries between state and private (grassroots or business-community-financed) domination of the religious scene. The first article of the volume, by Monzer Kahf, offers a most intriguing history of Islamic finance, from it, germination in the theoretical Islamic economics literature of the 1950s and 1960s, up to its current state. Kahf focuses his article on the alliance between wealthy Arab Muslims, who gave rise to the industry and continued to support it financially through its formative years, and jurist-consults (fuqaha) or scholars ('ulama '), who helped establish the industry's credibility. …


While multimedia and social computing research have used crowdsourcing techniques to annotate objects, actions, and scenes in social video sites like YouTube, little work has addressed the crowdsourcing of personal and social traits in online social video or social media content in general. In this paper, we address the problems of (1) crowdsourcing the annotation of first impressions of video bloggers (vloggers) personal and social traits in conversational YouTube videos, and (2) mining the impressions with the goal of modeling the interplay of different vlogger facets. First, we design a human annotation task to crowdsource impressions of vloggers that extends a tradition of studies of personality impressions with the addition of attractiveness and mood impressions. Second, we propose a probabilistic framework using Topic Models to discover prototypical impressions that are data driven, and that combine multiple facets of vloggers. Finally, we address the task of automatically predicting topic impressions using nonverbal and verbal content extracted from videos and comments. Our study of 442 YouTube vlogs and 2,210 annotations collected in Mechanical Turk supports recent literature showing the feasibility to crowdsource interpersonal human impression with comparable quality to what is reported in social psychology research, and provides insights on the interplay among human first impressions. We also show that topic models are useful to discover meaningful prototypical impressions that can be validated by humans, and that different topics can be predicted using different sources of information from vloggers' nonverbal and verbal content, as well as comments from the audience.


Cognitive science is a form of "reverse engineering" (as Dennett has dubbed it). We are trying to explain the mind by building (or explaining the functional principles of) systems that have minds. A "Turing" hierarchy of empirical constraints can be applied to this task, from t1, toy models that capture only an arbitrary fragment of our performance capacity, to T2, the standard "pen-pal" Turing Test (total symbolic capacity), to T3, the Total Turing Test (total symbolic plus robotic capacity), to T4 (T3 plus internal [neuromolecular] indistinguishability). All scientific theories are underdetermined by data. What is the right level of empirical constraint for cognitive theory? I will argue that T2 is underconstrained (because of the Symbol Grounding Problem and Searle's Chinese Room Argument) and that T4 is overconstrained (because we don't know what neural data, if any, are relevant). T3 is the level at which we solve the "other minds" problem in everyday life, the one at which evolution operates (the Blind Watchmaker is no mind-reader either) and the one at which symbol systems can be grounded in the robotic capacity to name and manipulate the objects their symbols are about. I will illustrate this with a toy model for an important component of T3 -- categorization -- using neural nets that learn category invariance by "warping" similarity space the way it is warped in human categorical perception: within-category similarities are amplified and between-category similarities are attenuated. This analog "shape" constraint is the grounding inherited by the arbitrarily shaped symbol that names the category and by all the symbol combinations it enters into. No matter how tightly one constrains any such model, however, it will always be more underdetermined than normal scientific and engineering theory. This will remain the ineliminable legacy of the mind/body problem.


The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a visual diary chronicling the struggle for intimacy and understanding between friends, family, and lovers collectively described by Goldin as her tribe. Her work describes a world that is visceral, charged, and seething with life. First published in 1986, this reissue recognizes the persistent relevance and freshness of Nan Goldins cutting-edge photography. Her lush color photography and candid style demand that the viewer go beyond the surface to encounter a profound intensity. As Goldin writes: Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavor of life. Through an accurate and detailed record of her life, Ballad reveals Goldins personal odyssey as well as a more universal understanding of the different languages men and women speak, and the struggle between autonomy and dependency. Over the past twenty-five years, the influence of Ballad on photography and other aesthetic realms has continually grown, making the work a contemporary classic. Nan Goldins story of urban life on the fringe was the swan song of an era that reached its peak in the early eighties. Yet it has captured an important element of humanity that is transcendent: a need to connect. This new paperback edition of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency has been printed using new scans and separations created by master-separator Robert Hennessey from Goldins original transparencies, rendering them with unparalleled sumptuousness and impact.


The need to distribute large files across multiple wide-area sites is becoming increasingly common, for instance, in support of scientific computing, configuring distributed systems, distributing software updates such as open source ISOs or Windows patches, or disseminating multimedia content. Recently a number of techniques have been proposed for simultaneously retrieving portions of a file from multiple remote sites with the twin goals of filling the client's pipe and overcoming any performance bottlenecks between the client and any individual server. While there are a number of interesting tradeoffs in locating appropriate download sites in the face of dynamically changing network conditions, to date there has been no systematic evaluation of the merits of different protocols. This paper explores the design space of file distribution protocols and conducts a detailed performance evaluation of a number of competing systems running in both controlled emulation environments and live across the Internet. Based on our experience with these systems under a variety of conditions, we propose, implement and evaluate Bullet' (Bullet prime), a mesh based high bandwidth data dissemination system that outperforms previous techniques under both static and dynamic conditions.


Scholars from across the political spectrum have in recent years attacked the Supreme Court's claim to supreme power to interpret the Constitution. This Article adds to this movement of "popular constitutionalism" by deploying the Supreme Court's own doctrine against it. Recent developments in the Chevron doctrine have culminated in what might be called, after the case that gave it form, the Brand X model of statutory interpretation. Broadly speaking, this model requires courts to uphold an agency's reasonable interpretation of a statute it administers - even in the teeth of contrary precedent - so long as the agency used transparent, deliberative means to adopt it. Translating this Brand X model into a constitutional setting, this Article claims that courts should uphold reasonable legislative constitutional constructions that are expressly stated in focused federal legislation even if they contradict contrary Supreme Court precedent. This proposal would thus require the Supreme Court to extend about as much deference to select legislative precedents as it now indulges its own judicial precedents. Adopting this approach would expand in an incremental and controlled way the voice of the public, Congress, and the President in constitutional construction. The most fundamental reason to pursue this change is that choosing among reasonable constitutional constructions is a political task that depends on value judgments and related assessments of legislative fact. In a representative democracy, the problem of making such policy choices should be committed ultimately to public judgment rather than nine life-tenured judges.


Observations of cosmic ray arrival directions made with the Pierre Auger Observatory have previously provided evidence of anisotropy at the 99% CL using the correlation of ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) with objects drawn from the Véron-Cetty Véron catalog. In this paper we report on the use of three catalog independent methods to search for anisotropy. The 2pt–L, 2pt+ and 3pt methods, each giving a different measure of selfclustering in arrival directions, were tested on mock cosmic ray data sets to study the impacts of sample size and magnetic smearing on their results, accounting for both angular and energy resolutions. If the sources of UHECRs follow the same large scale structure as ordinary galaxies in the local Universe and if UHECRs are deflected no more than a few degrees, a study of mock maps suggests that these three methods can efficiently respond to the resulting anisotropy with a P -value = 1.0% or smaller with data sets as few as 100 events. Using data taken from January 1, 2004 to July 31, 2010 we examined the 20, 30, ..., 110 highest energy events with a corresponding minimum energy threshold of about 49.3 EeV. The minimum P -values found were 13.5% using the 2pt-L method, 1.0% using the 2pt+ method and 1.1% using the 3pt method for the highest 100 energy events. In view of the multiple (correlated) scans performed on the data set, these catalog-independent methods do not yield strong evidence of anisotropy in the highest energy cosmic rays.


The importance of conflict and its resolution for children's short- and long-term adjustment has been well established within the research literature. Conflict and conflict resolution differs according to a number of constructs, including age, gender and relationship status. The purpose of this study was to explore conflict origins, resolution strategies and outcomes in two pairs of toddler friends and two pairs of toddler acquaintances aged between two years and two months and two years and ten months. The dyads were composed of either two boys or two girls. Conflict events were of a reduced number between friends than acquaintances, with time spent in conflict lower for friend pairs. Standing firm and yielding were the preferred resolution strategies of both groups, with outcomes for both acquaintances and friends predominantly win/lose. Gender differences were also evident. Girl dyads engaged in more conflict events and spent an increased amount of time in conflict than boy dyads. Yielding was the dominant resolution strategy employed by boy pairs, whilst girl pairs favoured standing firm. Win/lose outcomes were the dominant conflict resolution outcome for both boy and girl dyads. Taken together, these findings provide further evidence for the relational nature of conflict, and highlight the need for further research examining conflict and conflict resolution in toddler relationships.


This document registers the message/sipfrag Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) media type. This type is similar to message/sip, but allows certain subsets of well formed Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) messages to be represented instead of requiring a complete SIP message. In addition to end-to-end security uses, message/sipfrag is used with the REFER method to convey information about the status of a referenced request.


Sequencing by translocating DNA fragments through an array of nanopores is a rapidly maturing technology which offers faster and cheaper sequencing than other approaches. However, accurately deciphering the DNA sequence from the noisy and complex electrical signal is challenging. Here, we report the first deep learning model, named Chiron, that can directly translate the raw signal to DNA sequence without the error-prone segmentation step. We show that our model provides state-of-the-art basecalling accuracy when trained with only a small set of 4000 reads. Chiron achieves basecalling speeds of over 2000 bases per second using desktop computer graphics processing units, making it competitive with other deep-learning basecalling algorithms.


This article analyzes the construction and experience of masculinity in the correspondence of early national congressmen. Focusing on the years after the removal of the national capital to Washington, the article examines a number of married congressmen who usually served their terms separate from their wives and families. These men wrote home obsessively, in letters filled with pathos, vulnerability, and loneliness. Contrasting the bliss of life at home with the privations of political life, such correspondence anticipated antebellum distinctions between public and private and the middle-class cult of domesticity. These sentiments of male longing stood in marked contrast to Washington political society, in which women, as Catherine Allgor and others have argued, played a decisive public role. Lonely congressmen often criticized women in Washington society, while emphasizing the importance of the private realm and the love and affection men found at home. The tensions between these different models of gender relations point to the significance of marriage and romantic longing in the construction of early national manhood. By privileging marriage and the home over political life, congressmen defined male political power as a burden and elevated private domesticity over a civil society in which men and women mixed freely. They did all this, finally, in the language of vulnerability and need, rendering male power opaque, both in national politics and in the institution of marriage. In emphasizing their emotional dependence on their wives, congressmen sustained romantic and institutional relationships that perpetuated the political dependence of women.


This paper presents estimates of the key impacts of Federal energy and water conservation standards adopted from 1987 through 2014. The standards for consumer products and commercial and industrial equipment include those set by legislation as well as standards adopted by DOE through rulemaking. In 2014, the standards saved an estimated 4.29 quads of primary energy, which is equivalent to 4% of total U.S. energy consumption. The savings in operating costs for households and businesses totaled $60 billion. The average household saved $377 in operating costs as a result of residential and plumbing product standards. The estimated reduction in CO 2 emissions associated with the standards in 2014 was 232 million metric tons , which is equivalent to 4% of total U.S. CO 2 emissions. The estimated cumulative energy savings over the period 1990-2090 amount to 202 quads. Accounting for the increased upfront costs of more-efficient products and the operating cost (energy and water) savings over the products' lifetime, the standards have a cumulative net present value (NPV) of consumer benefit of between $1,327 billion and $1,604 billion, using 7 percent and 3 percent discount rates, respectively. The water conservation standards, together with energy conservation standards that also save water, reduced water use by 1.9 trillion gallons in 2014, and estimated cumulative water savings by 2090 amount to 55 trillion gallons. The estimated consumer savings in 2014 from reduced water use amounted to $12 billon.


Field effect transistors (FETs) are indispensable for our modern digital society, needed as basic building blocks for logical gates in all digital circuits. FETs are found in sample and hold circuits with high storage capacities and high write and read speeds and in driver circuits for active matrix displays such as large area TVs. An entire new application perspective is currently emerging in the area of printed electronics, where flexible plastic foils, papers and textiles become inexpensive substrates for novel devices. To realize circuits on such substrates, dielectrics, semiconductors and conductors with suitable morphologies as well as innovative device architectures have to be developed. Prominent among others, printed liquid electrolytes with high gate capacities in combination with printed oxide semiconductors have yielded good device performance and remarkable drain currents at low gate voltages. To be usable in everyday applications basic requirements have to be fulfilled, such as functional stability during environmental temperature changes, sufficient current output to drive more advanced electronic circuits, high switching speed and miniaturized size to allow for large packing densities. Miniaturized high current transistors with good temperature stability can open the path to many new applications for printed electronics, e.g., wearable electronics or lighting solutions, where higher currents are necessary.
In this thesis in-plane indium oxide based FETs have been fabricated utilizing composite solid polymer electrolytes (CSPEs) for gating. Different CSPEs have been investigated to determine the most suitable candidate for high performance FETs concerning chemical, physical and electrical behavior. The CSPE, containing LiClO4, PVA, PC and DMSO, has been selected and printed onto an in-plane electrolyte-gated FET (EG-FET). Special attention has been drawn to the key parameters of the EG-FET like mobility, on-current, on/off-current ratio and threshold voltage tested over a wide temperature range. Especially the temperature independence of the on-current and the threshold voltage as well as the absence of hysteresis turn out to be beneficial with respect to future applicability of printed EG-FETs in electrical circuits.
In order to downsize the in-plane EG-FETs and to obtain large drain currents at the same time, a vertical arrangement of the FET (v-FET) has been realized. In order to achieve this goal, SnO2 has been stacked in between two platinum electrodes to achieve the vertical source/semiconductor/drain structure, in plane with the platinum gate. The gating is realized by ink-jet printing a CSPE film covering the semiconductor channel and the gate. The CSPE, infiltrated into the porous semiconductor network, addresses the entire inner surface of the semiconductor. A channel of 45 nm is achieved by utilizing the thickness of the printed semiconductor film. A device using such geometry yields nearly ideal transistor characteristics with a clear current saturation with increasing drain voltage and a quadratic increase of the output curves with increasing gate voltage. The large drain current densities exceeding 0.1 MA/cm2 can be explained by the large channel area or channel width, which can be modeled by a large number of independent pillars forming conducting pathways between source to drain electrode.
Finally, the problem of limited switching speeds of an in-plane EG-FET has been addressed. The limiting factor for such devices is clearly the large gate-to-channel distance, which limits the time to form the FET conducting channel. The characteristic time constant is determined by the ionic conductivity of the CSPE and double layer capacitance of the CSPE/semiconductor interface. In order to reduce the gate-to-channel distance, i. e., the total resistance, a back-gated EG-FET has been designed using a porous AlOx spacer with a thickness of about 300 nm and a SnO2 layer as the channel material. Due to the reduction of the gate-to-channel distance by more than two orders of magnitude a potential reduction of the the switching frequency can be shown.


Written for the undergraduate Cell Biology course, Principles of Cell Biology provides students with an accessible approach to the fundamental concepts of cell biology. The text focuses on the underlying principles that illustrate both how cells function as well as how we study them. It identifies 10 specific principles of Cell Biology, and devotes a separate chapter to illustrate each. The result is a shift away from the traditional focus on technical details and towards a more integrative view of cellular activity that is flexible and can be tailored to suit students with a broad range of backgrounds. An informal, narrative writing style makes even the most complex concepts accessible to students new to the scientific field, including eliminating much of the technical complexity that many students find intimidating. With a wealth of student and instructor ancillary items to round out the course Principles of Cell Biology is the clear choice for your students. Key Features include: -Ten Principle-based chapters build on the foundation laid out in the first four chapters of the text, with heavy emphasis on linking concepts across multiple chapters. -New vocabulary terms are introduced gradually, after the concepts have been established, thereby de-emphasizing memorization of names. -Marginal boxes throughout each chapter include studying tips, clarifications of apparent contradictions, explanations of naming schemes, FAQ, and more. -Analogies are used throughout to clarify concepts and help students retain the material at hand. -Cellular metabolism, a topic that many student struggle with, is introduced and expanded upon in a very accessible way, providing a "big picture" approach to the material. -Provides extensive cross referencing between specific figures and sections of text in different chapters to emphasize that multiple topics are functionally, spatially, and temporally linked. -Concept Check questions, at the end of each section, test comprehension of the section, with answers provided at the end of the chapter. -End-of-chapter questions ask students to integrate material across chapter sections and across different chapters.


Drawing upon criminological studies in the field of prisoner rehabilitation, this essay explores the relevance of the Demobilisation, Disarmament and Reintegration (DDR) framework to the process of conflict transformation in Northern Ireland. In a similar fashion to the critique of 'passivity' offered by, for example, the 'strengths based' or 'good lives' approach to prisoner resettlement and reintegration more generally, the authors contend that the Northern Ireland peace process offers conspicuous examples of former prisoners and combatants as agentsand indeed leadersin the process of conflict transformation. They draw out three broad styles of leadership which have emerged amongst ex-combatants over the course of the Northern Ireland transition from conflict—political, military and communal.They suggest that cumulatively such leadership speaks to the potential of ex-prisoners and ex-combatants as moral agentsin conflict transformation around which peacemaking can be constructed rather than as obstacles which must be 'managed' out of existence.


The International Commercial Terms (Incoterms), introduced and governed by International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) are standard trade terms used in international and domestic sales contract. The latest version, INCOTERMS 2010 states the obligations and responsibilities of importers and exporters regarding transport costs and risks as well as the responsibilities for insurance and customs formalities. This paper seeks to examine the factors that influences the choice of Incoterms among Malaysian manufacturers and its effect on export performance. Data was collected using survey methods and then analysed using two main types of analyses: univariate (descriptive) and inferential (bivariate and multivariate). A total of 335 questionnaires were distributed to manufacturers in Malaysia using a sampling framework from the Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers (FMM). Of the 335 questionnaires distributed, 60 were returned yielding a response rate of 17.9%. Findings indicate that indicate that there is a significant relationship between selection factors and export performance. The main contribution of this study is towards narrowing the gap in knowledge regarding Incoterms as past research indicated that it is still relatively unknown and should highlight Incoterms selection and its effect on export performance, among others © 2018. Hosting by Aibma Management. All rights reserved.


We present methods for calculating a measure of phonotactic complexity—bits per phoneme— that permits a straightforward cross-linguistic comparison. When given a word, represented as a sequence of phonemic segments such as symbols in the international phonetic alphabet, and a statistical model trained on a sample of word types from the language, we can approximately measure bits per phoneme using the negative log-probability of that word under the model. This simple measure allows us to compare the entropy across languages, giving insight into how complex a language's phonotactics is. Using a collection of 1016 basic concept words across 106 languages, we demonstrate a very strong negative correlation of − 0.74 between bits per phoneme and the average length of words.


Natural language understanding (NLU) focusing on machine reading comprehension is a branch of natural language processing (NLP). The domain of the developing NLU system covers from sentence decoding to text understanding and the automatic decoding of GP sentence belongs to the domain of NLU system. GP sentence is a special linguistic phenomenon in which processing breakdown and backtracking are two key features. If the syntax-based system can present the special features of GP sentence and decode GP sentence completely and perfectly, NLU system can improve the effectiveness and develop the understanding skill greatly. On the one hand, by means of showing Octav Popescu's model of NLU system, we argue that the emphasis on the integration of syntactic, semantic and cognitive backgrounds in system is necessary. On the other hand, we focus on the programming skill of IF-THEN-ELSE statement used in N-S flowchart and highlight the function of context free grammar (CFG) created to decode GP sentence. On the basis of example-based analysis, we reach the conclusion that syntax- based machine comprehension is technically feasible and semantically acceptable, and that N-S flowchart and CFG can help NLU system present the decoding procedure of GP sentence successfully. In short, syntax-based NLU system can bring a deeper understanding of GP sentence and thus paves the way for further development of syntax-based natural language processing and artificial intelligence.


Matrix factorization is a fundamental technique in machine learning that is applicable to collaborative filtering, information retrieval and many other areas. In collaborative filtering and many other tasks, the objective is to fill in missing elements of a sparse data matrix. One of the biggest challenges in this case is filling in a column or row of the matrix with very few observations. In this paper we introduce a Bayesian matrix factorization model that performs regression against side information known about the data in addition to the observations. The side information helps by adding observed entries to the factored matrices. We also introduce a nonparametric mixture model for the prior of the rows and columns of the factored matrices that gives a different regularization for each latent class. Besides providing a richer prior, the posterior distribution of mixture assignments reveals the latent classes. Using Gibbs sampling for inference, we apply our model to the Netflix Prize problem of predicting movie ratings given an incomplete user-movie ratings matrix. Incorporating rating information with gathered metadata information, our Bayesian approach outperforms other matrix factorization techniques even when using fewer dimensions.


Fatigue is a common complaint amongst patients who come to the clinic seeking help and advice. Fatigue, which is also commonly referred to as tiredness (although these terms do not actually have identical meanings), refers to the sensation of exhaustion during or after usual activities, or even inadequate energy to begin these activities in the first place. In its most severe form, ongoing fatigue can heavily impact the daily activities of a patient and significantly reduce their quality of life.


Induction of unscheduled DNA synthesis (UDS) in hairless mouse epidermis by six chemicals was determined in an in vivo-in vitro assay by using a liquid scintillation counting method. Test chemicals were applied once onto two areas of the back of female hairless mice after stripping of the stratum corneum with adhesive tape to enhance skin penetration. After exposure, the skin samples were taken and cultured in a medium containing [3H]thymidine with or without hydroxyurea (HU, an inhibitor of replicative DNA synthesis). DNA of the epidermis was extracted, and incorporation of [3H]thymidine into DNA and the DNA content was determined with a liquid scintillation counter and a fluorescence spectrophotometer, respectively. Induction of UDS by chemicals was judged by calculation of the UDS index [(the ratio of DNA synthesis in the presence of HU to that in its absence) x 100]. A good correlation between UDS induction and organ specificity of carcinogens was observed. 4-Nitroquinoline 1-oxide, a skin carcinogen used as a positive control, induced a dose-dependent increase in the UDS index of approximately 12-fold at 2 hr after exposure, while 1,2-epoxydodecane, a non-skin carcinogen applied as a negative control, did not increase the UDS index. Four other skin carcinogens induced dose-dependent increases in the UDS index; N-methyl-N'-nitro-N-nitrosoguanidine and diepoxybutane at 2 hr after exposure, and 7,12-dimethylbenz[a]anthracene and benzo[a]pyrene at 24 hr after exposure. The results suggest that UDS is a good marker of the genotoxicity of skin carcinogens.


Lignin is a naturally occurring polymer that is present in all vascular plants. It binds together the cell walls, thus being one of the main structural components of vegetable tissue. In this project, alkali and dealkali lignins have been chemically modified in order to incorporate reactive fragments for subsequent free radical co-polymerisation with n-butyl methacrylate, styrene, or divinylbenzene (DVB). The thermal properties of regular and modified lignins were assessed and compared. The cross-linking of modified lignins with DVB yields materials with properties suitable for applications as a pellet binder, as well as a bio-based resin for the preparation of biocomposites. The chemical modification of alkali and dealkali lignin has been verified by Raman and infrared spectroscopies. The thermo-mechanical properties of the final materials prepared have been assessed by means of thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), and dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA), and are reported and discussed in this work.


INTRODUCTION
In Italy, regional governments are in charge of implementing cervical, breast and colorectal cancer screening programmes. The 2020 Coronavirus pandemic led to a national lockdown and the temporary suspension of several non-urgent healthcare activities, including cancer screening. This paper aims to describe the results of a national survey carried out by the National Centre for Screening Monitoring (ONS) on cervical, breast and colorectal cancer screening activities in 2020.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
A national survey was conducted by ONS in 2020 to assess: the number of screening invitations by Region; the volumes of screening tests and the attitude to attend the screening programme compared to 2019; the number of delayed diagnoses of malignant or pre-malignant lesions caused by the slowing down of screening programmes, based on the average Region-specific screening detection rate for cervical, breast and colorectal cancers.

RESULTS
Screening tests for breast, colorectal and cervical cancer decreased by 37.6%, 45.5% and 43.4% in 2020 compared with 2019. In 2020 the estimated numbers of undiagnosed lesions are: 3,324 breast cancers, 1,299 colorectal cancers, 7,474 colorectal advanced adenomas and 2,782 CIN2 or more severe cervical lesions. Participation in cancer screening programmes decreased by 15%, 15% and 20%, for cervical, breast and CRC screening, respectively.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
An urgent call to action is needed to prevent further delays and to limit the impact of the pandemic on cancer diagnosis and prevention.


INTRODUCTION
In order to commit to their mission and placement requirements, medical education policy-makers are required to understand the background and character of students in order to admit, cultivate and support them efficiently and effectively.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
This study sample consisted of 408 homogeneous medical students with the same level of education, occupation, school and societal environment. They differed mainly in their family background. Therefore, this study used part of a multidimensional "student portfolio system" database to assess the correlation between family status (indexed by parental education and occupation) and medical students' mental health status and characters. The controls were a group of 181 non-medical students in another university.

RESULTS
The parents of the medical students were from a higher socioeconomic status (SES) than the parents of those in the control group. This showed the heritability of genetic and environment conditions as well as the socioeconomic forces at play in medical education. Students' personal and professional development were associated with their parents' SES. The mother's SES was associated with the student's selfreported stress, mental disturbances, attitude towards life, personality, health, discipline, internationalisation and professionalism. The fathers' SES did not show a statistically significant association with the above stress, physical and mental health factors, but showed an association with some of the personality factors. The greater the educational difference between both parents, the more stress, hopelessness and pessimism the student manifested.

CONCLUSIONS
Medical educators need to be aware that socioeconomic factors have meaningful patterns of association with students' mental and physical health, and their characters relating to personal and professional development. Low maternal SES negatively influences medical students' personal and professional development, suggesting that medical education policy-makers need to initiate support mechanisms for those with latent vulnerability.