In this paper, we consider the potential of gamified platforms to teach young people entrepreneurial values. We start from exploring a specific learning environment, #ritmdebusiness (Eng. #businessrhythm), designed to increase visibility of self-driven careers, while promoting the diversity of trajectories, motivations and models in successful Romanian businesses. The environment is supported by a digital platform used to assemble stories of leading entrepreneurs whose experience and products are made to account as subject of discussion. The gamified component of the platform consists in a competition organized to award users who propose valuable improvements and extensions of the presented products. Therefore, #ritmdebusiness also functions as a campaign developed both to enrich public discourse around the values of business creation and to increase awareness on the role of IT instruments in developing successful entrepreneurial projects.
The digital platform unfolds a jointly constructed culture in which different actors collaboratively establish entrepreneurship as the referential system of ongoing interactions. The platform facilitates actions in which the meaning of entrepreneurship is socially defined and negotiated through locally orchestrated modes of engagement. In this sense, #ritmdebusiness becomes a medium to invite questioning on how entrepreneurship might be known, approached and learned, and on what type of resources might be integrated in the process. We consider that analytically employing the concept of voices, understood as an accountable embodiment of "perspective, conceptual horizon, intention and worldview" (Engestrom, 1995, p. 199) represents an effective practice in the design and implementation of powerful learning environments.
By exploring different interactional patterns and discursive episodes in the production, use and evaluation of #ritmdebusiness digital environment, we propose a framework to analyse multivoicedness (Wertsch, 1991) in gamified learning platforms. We claim that voices are embedded in the design and rhetoric of the digital medium, becoming a function of framing discourse, positioning actors, mediating actions, and building technological infrastructure. Accordingly, we develop a typology that differentiate between (1) discursively-framed voices (voices that are intentionally introduced to stage subjective positions of various actors), (2) relationally-emergent voices (voices that arise in sequences of interactions and relations between various actors), (3) action-based voices (voices that develop in processes of acting upon the platform and engaging with it), (4) objectified-constructed voices (voices of objects, digital artefacts and technological infrastructure integrated within the platform), and (5) performative meta-voices (voices resulting in how the platform acts in the world as an independent reality). We illustrate how these types of voices operate in achieving the meaning of entrepreneurship within #ritmdebusiness media platform, thus theorizing on how learning process is being constituted by a multiplicity of dynamic and interacting cultural, institutional and socio-economic settings.


Hierarchical latent class (HLC) models are tree-structured Bayesian networks where leaf nodes are observed while internal nodes are latent. There are no theoretically well justified model selection criteria for HLC models in particular and Bayesian networks with latent nodes in general. Nonetheless, empirical studies suggest that the BIC score is a reasonable criterion to use in practice for learning HLC models. Empirical studies also suggest that sometimes model selection can be improved if standard model dimension is replaced with effective model dimension in the penalty term of the BIC score.

Effective dimensions are difficult to compute. In this paper, we prove a theorem that relates the effective dimension of an HLC model to the effective dimensions of a number of latent class models. The theorem makes it computationally feasible to compute the effective dimensions of large HLC models. The theorem can also be used to compute the effective dimensions of general tree models.


China's relentless economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s heralded its emergence as a great power in world politics. As its economy expanded, China seemed poised to become the second-largest economy in the world. At the same time, it modernized its military and adopted a more assertive diplomatic posture. Many observers have begun to debate the international implications of China's rise. Some analysts argue that China will inevitably pose a threat to peace and security in East Asia. A few even predict a new cold war between Beijing and Washington. Others claim that a powerful China can remain benign. None believes that China can be ignored. The essays in this volume assess China's emerging capabilities and intentions, debate the impact that China will have on security in the Asia-Pacific region, and propose polices for the United States to adopt in its relations with China.


We have explored the kinetic effect of increasing electron transfer distance in a biomimetic, proton coupled electron transfer system (PCET). Biological electron transfer is often simultaneous with proton transfer in order to avoid the high-energy, charged intermediates resulting from the stepwise transfer of protons and electrons. These concerted proton electron transfer (CPET) reactions are implicated in numerous biological electron transfer pathways. In many cases, proton transfer is coupled to long-range electron transfer. While many studies have shown that the rate of electron transfer is sensitive to the distance between the electron donor and acceptor, extensions to biological CPET reactions are sparse. The possibility of a unique electron transfer distance dependence for CPET reactions deserves further exploration, as this could have implications for how we understand biological electron transfer. We therefore explored the electron transfer distance dependence for the CPET oxidation of tyrosine in a model system. We prepared a series of metallopeptides with a tyrosine separated from a [Ru(bpy)3]2+ complex by an oligoproline bridge of increasing length. Rate constants for intra-molecular tyrosine oxidation were measured using the flash-quench transient absorption technique in aqueous solutions. The rate constants for tyrosine oxidation decreased by 125-fold with three added prolines residues between tyrosine and the oxidant. By comparison, related intramolecular ET rate constants in very similar constructs were reported to decrease by 4-5 orders of magnitude over the same number of prolines. The observed shallow distance dependence for tyrosine oxidation is proposed to be due to a number of factors, including the requirement for stronger oxidants, leading to a smaller hole transfer effective tunneling barrier height. The shallow distance dependence observed here and extensions to distance dependent CPET reactions have significant implications for long-range charge transfers.


Sweden has a strong demand on the construction of student accommodations and consequently significant efforts have been taken to increase and streamline construction methods. In addition, the fluctuation on the number of students admitted at each year, in each university, lead to periods of house shortage or, in opposition to that, to eventual surplus on the housing market. For these reasons urges finding a fast execution process in construction to fulfil the market needs, together with a housing mechanism of control which balances the students' needs with the housing availability. FRAMEUP system arises thus to solve both problems by combining a modular construction with an innovative execution process. The FRAMEUP buildings uses a steel frame in combination with prefabricated 3D modules (fully equipped and suitable for student accommodations) which are assembled by starting from the roof to the 1st floor. The existence of a lifting system permits the erection of the building, promoting each time the building is lifted, a clearance of one floor height, at ground level, for the assembly of a new floor. The procedure is repeated several times, according to the number of floors, until the 1st floor of the building, the last floor of the execution sequence, is assembled. Alongside with its advantage on the fast execution, the FRAMEUP system allows to efficiently increase or decrease the number of the floors and consequently its permutability with other buildings of the same nature. Thus, assuming a net of FRAMEUP buildings at each university, its permutability system would create the necessary conditions so that the number of floors at each campus would follow the fluctuations of the students' population among the different universities on different periods of time, so to suppress the needs for housing or to avoid the surplus on construction.


Software functional size measurement is highly demanded and has gained wide adoption and acceptance in software organizations due to its benefits and wide applications in software project management. Function point analysis is the first method proposed by Albrecht, and has been maintained by the international function point user group. Function point analysis method is the most used measurement
method globally. COSMIC method has been known as a second generation functional size measurement due to it is novel design. The method was designed to size a wider scope of functional domains, in particular, to measure real time systems and to alleviate the existing limitations of previous proposed methods.
The need for conversion is driven by a method's unsuitability for the task at hand, or its limitations, or it might be necessary because of the need to use the benchmark set of a particular domain. This is mainly, because function point analysis cannot size as many software functional domains as COSMIC, and because of some limitations surrounding function point analysis. The main problem with this change is to maintain the software organization's ability to accurately convert their historical data measured by function point analysis to the corresponding value in COSMIC method.
This thesis proposes a new theoretical model that converts the functional size measured by function point analysis to its corresponding COSMIC measures, at the level of base functional components of both methods, using the principles of probability based on in depth analysis of the type of transaction functions and its primary intent, processing logic forms and COSMIC method rules. The model was
found to adequately convert all the tested applications precisely, in which it converts 97.7% of the whole dataset elementary processes into the estimated interval
accurately.
Most convertibility studies between the two methods undertook to convert the unadjusted function point to COSMIC size statistically. Two studies used the
transaction functions size to obtain the corresponding COSMIC size, and found it more accurate than the type that uses the unadjusted size to obtain COSMIC measures. Accordingly, this thesis examines the accuracy of the two common statistical conversion types as well as the effect of function point analysis weighting tables and structural problems on its accuracy. Moreover, it proposes a new statistical conversion type that uses the number of files referenced by the whole elementary processes in a single application as a unit for prediction to estimate the corresponding COSMIC measures.
Basically, two regression models have been used to compare the accuracy of the two statistical conversion types with the proposed type, based on the accuracy of fitting measures that uses the leave one out cross validation technique applied on one dataset. Also, four datasets from previous studies were used to further emphasize the
obtained results. The two conversion types most often used were found to generate non-linear, inaccurate and violate the principle of measurement theory as scales transformation. The proposed statistical conversion type avoids the problems inherent in the other two types but not the non-linearity problem, and produced valid and highly accurate results over the tested datasets.


The open access movement has highlighted the barriers that exist for users to gain access to significant portions of the research literature. The open data approach seeks to extend the principles of open access to the data and code that supports the published scholarly record. Current metadata is inadequate to allow information researchers to evaluate claims made about data archiving practices. Assessing current archiving practice and understanding the impact of archiving policies requires improved metadata. We propose that information researchers create an infrastructure for the collection of metadata about data use in the research literature, and that infrastructure should itself be open. The availability of metadata on data use would enable the calculation of archiving indices, just as citation data enables the calculation of the h-index.


Motion Capture and whole-body interaction technologies have been experimentally proven to contribute to the enhancement of dance learning and to the investigation of bodily knowledge, innovating at the same time the practice of dance. Designing and implementing a dance interactive learning system with the aim to achieve effective, enjoyable, and meaningful educational experiences is, however, a highly demanding interdisciplinary and complex problem. In this work, we examine the interactive dance training systems that are described in the recent bibliography, proposing a framework of the most important design parameters, which we present along with particular examples of implementations. We discuss the way that the different phases of a common workflow are designed and implemented in these systems, examining aspects such as the visualization of feedback to the learner, the movement qualities involved, the technological approaches used, as well as the general context of use and learning approaches. Our aim is to identify common patterns and areas that require further research and development toward creating more effective and meaningful digital dance learning tools.


Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), caused by infection with H5N1 virus, is a transboundary disease which has had a significant socio-economic impact on the poultry production systems of Eurasia, and spillover events with mortality in humans and wild birds. In northern Australia, prior to the current study there was poor understanding of the ecology of avian influenza viruses (AIV) and the risks of H5N1 transmission by wild birds. In this study, the biological pathways of risk for HPAI H5N1 by migratory birds were estimated as a negligible to very low risk to the wild birds of northern Australia. Following stochastic modelling the highest mean frequency of outbreaks was 1 year in 36 years (range 1 in 25-53 years; annual incidence of 0.028) for the Little Curlew (Numenius minutus), followed by the Sharp-tailed Sandpiper (Calidris acuminata) (1 in 56 years, range 36 to 91 years).

Three species of wild birds were challenged with a H6N2 low pathogenicity AIV (LPAIV). There was poor viral replication in the Ruddy Turnstones (Arenaria interpres) and Silver Gulls (Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae) with mostly low titre oropharyngeal (OP) excretion [median titre at 4 days post inoculation (DPI) of 101.43 and 102.09 50% embryo infectious dose (EID50)/0.1 mL respectively], with the exception of an OP sample from one Silver Gull (104.26 EID50/0.1 mL at 2 DPI), and one cloacal sample from a Ruddy Turnstone (103.14 EID50/0.1 mL at 10 DPI). In the Wandering Whistling Ducks (Dendrocygna arcuata), there was gastro-intestinal tropism with moderately high titre viral excretion to 6 DPI (highest median titre of 104.58 EID50/0.1 mL in cloacal swabs at 4 DPI). The anti-haemagglutinin (HA) antibody response was poor in the ducks and declined from 19-56 DPI [highest haemagglutination inhibition (HI) test reciprocal geometric mean titre (GMT) of 16.1 at 19 DPI to a GMT of 3.7 at 56 DPI]. In the ducks after 42 DPI, nucleoprotein (NP) c-ELISA antibodies waned slowly from a median of 81% inhibition, and were long-lived to at least 8 months with a 57% median inhibition value.

The evaluation of a commercial NP c-ELISA, HI test, Taqman Type A RRT-PCR and embryonating chicken egg (ECE) virus isolation methods suggests high validity of these tests in wild birds, comparable to that reported in poultry. The NP c-ELISA in high AIV prevalence situations had a 100% diagnostic sensitivity (95% CI 81.5, 100) and in controls had 91% diagnostic specificity (95% CI 70.8, 98.9). In low AIV prevalence situations using a ≥60% inhibition threshold for positivity relative to the HI test, c-ELISA performed with 90.5% diagnostic sensitivity (95% CI 86.2, 93.8) and 41.2% diagnostic specificity (95% CI 38.1, 44.5). Assessment of the HI test suggests that a titre of ≥8 is a significant result in wild birds, and using this titre the HI test had 83.3% diagnostic sensitivity (95% CI 58.6, 96.4) in the challenged birds. The Type A RRT-PCR test performance for cloacal swabs had high diagnostic sensitivity that varied between 83.3-100% and diagnostic specificity that varied between 94.1-100% over 2-6 DPI when evaluated against ECE virus isolation, with substantial to outstanding agreement (Kappa statistic=0.8) and significant positive correlation (rs=0.82). The recommended thresholds for the Type A RRT-PCR at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory (AAHL) in poultry of CT <37 for positivity with an intermediate threshold (CT 37-40) were found to be valid in wild birds. The ECE virus isolation method performed well with 89% of virus positive birds positive on the first passage.


This paper quantifies factors affecting energy‐related financial stress in Australia, a key economic challenge facing a minority of households. We find that low net wealth is a particularly important factor affecting difficulty in paying energy bills. Having insulation reduces reported difficulties in being able to heat and cool homes. The odds of not paying energy bills on time are doubled by households not having solar panels. Other important factors contributing to energy‐related financial stress include being a renter, being a mortgage holder, having a large number of occupants in a household, and having a resident who requires energy‐consuming medical equipment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]


Access to credit has been considered as one of the main problems that SMEs have to deal with in order to survive and keep growing. This document describes a system dynamics model based on the case of a mediumsized manufacturing firm located in Colombia. The model integrates operational and financial aspects of the firm, including variables associated with trade credit and bank's credit. A sensitivity analysis is made in order to find high leverage variables. The results obtained indicate that operational and financial policies, when applied alone, are not sufficie nt to solve the firm's stagnation problem. An appropriate combination of ac cess to credit, credit conditions, and adequate operational and financial policies, might be the best way to deal with the complex problem of SMEs survival and growing.


We are investigating characteristics associated with oil degradation amongst bacteria isolated from clean and hydrocarbon contaminated soils from Nigeria and the UK.Our focus has been to identify bacteria expressing surfactants following isolation on Pseudomonas selective (PSA-CFC) and non-selective nutrient media and investigate the nature of surfactants, heavy metal resistance and hydrocarbon-degrading enzymes expressed by the bacteria. Of five sites sampled, a total of 1460 colonies were tested using the drop collapse assay, and 110 were found to express surfactants reducing liquid surface tensions as assessed by quantitative tensiometry to between 24.7 and 26.7 mN.m-1 (Tukey-Kramer HSD, α=0.05). We undertook a range of growth and behaviour-based assays on 60 selected strain which, when investigated by Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) demonstrated that this collection showed considerable phenotypic diversity. Eight out of the 60 strains could grow at a high temperature (50 °C), 35 of the 60 strains utilized diesel as a sole carbon source, and most of the strains could tolerate high concentrations (up to 20 mM) of heavy metals. Identification by 16S rDNA sequencing revealed that some of the strains belong to Pseudomonas, Bacillus, and Stenotrophomonas genera. We found using bioinformatics analysis of eight-selected draft genome sequences (AntiSMASH and RAST) NRPS-like (probable surfactants), cytochrome P450, catechol-1,2/2,3-dioxygenase, lipase, and heavy metal resistance gene sequences. We intend to use the information provided in this research to select strains for potential applications in in-situor ex-situ bioremediation of hydrocarbon-contaminated soils.


Background/Context It is well documented that Black doctoral students in engineering and computing fields experience more stress and strain during doctoral training than their White and Asian peers. However, few studies have examined how Black engineering and computing doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers experience these challenges and stressors or focused on the psychological effects, behavioral responses, or health costs for these students. We interviewed 48 Black PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in engineering and computing departments to find out how they describe, make sense of, and cope with stressors and strains in their training programs. Study participants (29 men and 19 women) ranged from first-year doctoral students to recent PhDs. Students attended various institutions and institution types, primarily in eastern and central time zones. Nine participants attended historically Black colleges and universities, and though we anticipated that their experiences would be vastly different, their experiences closely resembled those of students in other institutions. Research Design Each person participated in either an individual interview or focus group. Data were collected via video- and audio-recording. All focus groups took place at either a national engineering-/computing-related conference or at the students' home institutions. Twenty-three participants were interviewed, while the remainder participated in focus groups of three to five students (maximum of ten). Interviews and focus groups were semistructured, using open-ended questions but allowing some flexibility to develop new ideas and order topics differently. Data Collection and Analysis This study employed transcendental phenomenology, using three steps to investigate and make meaning of participants' experiences: examining the phenomenon with intentionality, eidetic reduction, and constitution of meaning. Transcendental reduction allowed for examining the experience of Black doctoral students in engineering and computing in general and separating what the research perspectives supplied from what our intuitions offered, guided by our theoretical frameworks of role strain and racial battle fatigue. Transcendental phenomenology also gave the authors a context to examine and disclose our own experiences and feelings. Findings Consistent with prior research on role strain and John Henryism (i.e., trying to overcome a chronic stressor by working harder), we found that seeking success in training, employment, work, or career was more important to these Black graduate students and postdocs than safeguarding their mental or physical health. Meeting the demands of a PhD program or postdoctoral fellowship were critical priorities congruent with their phase of life. Their focus and sacrifice may have helped them complete their degrees, but our findings suggest that these strategies exacted psychological, emotional, and physical costs. The study deepened our understanding of significant interrelated dynamics for this population in four key ways. We found that (a) the stresses and strains made students question their qualifications; (b) racialized experiences were often the source of stress, strain, and academic performance anxiety; (c) discordance between the racial make-up of their academic environments and their racialized engineering and computing identities appeared to exacerbate impostor phenomenon; and (d) the students' proactive coping mechanisms took an emotional toll. Participants discussed the nature and sources of their feelings of self-doubt. The implications extend beyond the dwindling numbers of Black students earning STEM doctorates; this racial climate also affects the academic workforce and the professional landscape. Although Black researchers who leave academia after completing doctoral training can influence scientific innovation through other positions, it is alarming and problematic that potentially qualified future professors are dissuaded from pursuing academic careers because of their training experiences. Their absence from faculty can hinder critical innovation, breakthroughs, and the training of succeeding generations of scholars who might have learned from and collaborated with them. Conclusions and Recommendations The added stress, strain, and toll on Black students' well-being is an underappreciated reason for their relinquishing of academic careers. Our findings illustrate the students' resilience and strength. Continued research on added stressors (e.g., impostor syndrome, racialized stress) and strengths could add much-needed consideration of cultural, structural, and interpersonal racism and the ways that Black students earning doctoral degrees in STEM fields manage to succeed despite cultural and institutional barriers. Future research should explore how to modify the microculture of STEM programs and departments to allow Black students to feel that these are healthy, safe, and fair spaces in which they can make contributions. Otherwise, an invaluable diversity of perspectives may disappear altogether from academic environments. In addition, diversifying the faculty and students in doctoral engineering and computing programs could help to reduce impostor syndrome, isolation, and other damaging psychological stress. Forthcoming research, programs, and policies should consider what Black students in STEM endure, because simply surviving racially toxic environments should not be the end goal.


ABSTRACT The governance of marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) lacks a legal framework that would ensure the conservation and sustainable use of the oceans. In order to fill this gap, governments have been negotiating a new treaty under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Negotiations have been afflicted by polarisation between two principles: The 'Freedom of the High Seas' (FOS) and the 'Common Heritage of Humankind' (CHP). Instead of discussing the CHP from a purely legal perspective, we examined, through an ethnographic lens, how it has become a practice of contestation: it is used as a tool and negotiation technique to challenge deeply rooted inequalities in the current world order. The CHP could make a difference if it was integrated into the text as a general principle committing all states to protect and preserve BBNJ for future generations – regardless of their imminent economic value as commercial assets.


Packaging has a fundamental role in ensuring safe delivery of goods throughout supply chains to the end consumer in good condition. It also has great potential to contribute to sustainable development. This paper explores and provides insights on Swedish consumer perceptions and knowledge of environmental aspects of food packaging and elaborates on how these can contribute to or counteract environmentally sustainable development. A study based on a consumer survey carried out in Sweden is presented. A review of recent packaging research emphasizes the protective function of packaging as its most important contribution to the environmental dimension of sustainable development. Contrary to this, consumers almost exclusively refer to the packaging material when it comes to their perceptions of the environmental impact of packaging. Paper‐based packaging is strongly understood by the surveyed consumers to be environmentally advantageous, whereas plastic and metal are not. This study further indicates that a majority of the Swedish consumers surveyed are aware of their shortcomings in judging the environmental status of food packaging, indicating a need for guidance; otherwise, consumer choices can unintendedly counteract environmentally sustainable intentions. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


This research aims to analyse the contribution of construction-related
commodities to the trade balance of Sri Lanka.
The study has been carried out on selected 310 construction materials and equipments
according to Harmonized System (HS) Codes. Further a survey had been done on 215
importers of steel to determine the percentage of imported construction-related steel on the
total imported steel. Trend analysis is done over the last decade, with the supported
information from price indices, general duties, tariff reforms, economic status of the country
and past performance of the construction industry itself.
It is found that the contribution of imported steel, cement, electrical items and machineries is
more than 80% on total imported construction-related commodities. Steel ranks first among
the construction related commodities followed by cement, electrical items and machineries.
With an annual average contribution of 24.34% to trade balance, the construction-related
imports stand as a main area to be reviewed & reconsidered for the related policy changes.


How strong are the connections between individuals? This is a fundamental question in the study of social networks. In this work, we take a topological view rooted in the idea of local sparsity to answer this question on large social networks to which we have only incomplete access. Prior approaches to measuring network structure are not applicable to this setting due to the strict limits on data availability. Therefore, we propose a new metric, the Edgecut Weight, for this task. This metric can be calculated efficiently in an online fashion, and we empirically show that it captures important elements of communities. Further, we demonstrate that the distribution of these weights characterizes connectivity on a network. Subsequently, we estimate the distribution of weights on Twitter and show both a lack of strong connections and a corresponding lack of community structure.


This piece of research completes the line of work on the thermal evolution of the Mediterranean region initiated in the National Plan on Climate Change. The study was undertaken to analyse the active regional thermal series over the 1950–1996 period, rigorously treated by the SNHT (Standard Normal Homogeneity Test) method. This research concluded that the evolution of the mean annual temperatures recorded in the major historical network of Spanish Mediterranean observatories exhibits a significant warming trend. However, analysis of the non-climatic processes, such as the urban effect and weather station relocations, allowed us to conclude (in a study published in 2004) that the assumption of temperature stability in the Spanish Mediterranean should therefore not be rejected. Conclusions that were partially verified in 2016, in particular of the true the urban effect, about the period (1950-2013). The results obtained showed that this magnitude could account for between 70 and 80% of the recorded warming trend in Western Mediterranean cities. In this context, twenty years after the end of the Plan Nacional del Clima, it would be wise to revisit, in 2019, the validity of the conclusions that the regional climate offered. This piece of research aims to assess the true magnitude of the climate warming recorded in the Spanish Mediterranean region. The evaluation is based on the records of 23 observatories belonging to the Spanish regional network of the State Meteorological Agency (AEMET), with complete series covering the 1950–2018 period, processed by the SNHT. The verification is further based on three new analyses. The first involves the analysis of the thermal evolution (1906-1925 and 1991-2018) at the observatory on the Columbretes Islands (28 miles off the coast of Castellón). The island climate series entails in-depth revision of the conclusions and trends set out in our previous studies. The second piece of research involves the magnitude of the Urban Heat Island (UHI, 2001–2018) using temperature records from seven weather stations located in the CastellónAlmassora urban area. The third piece of research was based on the analysis of a trend value that has stabilized since 2010, simultaneously to the decline of the population and the descent of total energy consumption. Therefore, this piece of work verifies the importance of the UHI and establishes the magnitude of the real t regional warming. The study suggests that the real value of climate warming in the Spanish Mediterranean region may be estimated at between 1oC and 1.1oC in the period from 1950 to 2018.


We investigate the transient dynamics of a lumped-element oscillator based on a dc superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID). The SQUID is shunted with a capacitor, forming a nonlinear oscillator with a resonance frequency in the range of several gigahertz. The resonance frequency is varied by tuning the Josephson inductance of the SQUID with on-chip flux lines. We report measurements of decaying oscillations in the time domain following a brief excitation with a microwave pulse. The nonlinearity of the SQUID oscillator is probed by observing the ringdown response for different excitation amplitudes while the SQUID potential is varied by adjusting the flux bias. Simulations are performed on a model circuit by numerically solving the corresponding Langevin equations incorporating the SQUID potential at the experimental temperature and using parameters obtained from separate measurements characterizing the SQUID oscillator. Simulations are in good agreement with the experimental observations of the ringdowns as a function of applied magnetic flux and pulse amplitude. We observe a crossover between the occurrence of ringdowns close to resonance and adiabatic following at a larger detuning from the resonance. We also discuss the occurrence of phase jumps at a large amplitude drive. Finally, we briefly outline prospects for a readout scheme for superconducting flux qubits based on the discrimination between ringdown signals for different levels of magnetic flux coupled to the SQUID.


Environmental agencies have several options for dealing with alleged noncompliance with environmental regulations. These options include pursuit of administrative or judicial civil penalties and injunctions to prevent future violations. Scholars have begun exploring whether these options induce better performance by regulated entities. This Article addresses a largely neglected question: whether a regulated facility's characteristics affect the efficacy of the different enforcement options. The Article stems from a study of compliance by the chemical industry with federal Clean Water Act permits. It assesses whether facility characteristics, including effluent limit level and type, permit modifications, facility size, capacity utilization, discharge volatility, and ownership structure, theoretically should make a difference and actually appeared to do so at the facilities covered by the study. The findings should be of interest to both facilities regulated under the Clean Water Act and federal and state regulators seeking to maximize the impact of their enforcement actions.


There has been a concerted effort in recent years to undertake more strategic, long-term, and cross-sector assessment of national infrastructure. This paper reflects on the assessment of fixed broadband within the recent National Needs Assessment, which aims to identify options for meeting the UK's infrastructure 'needs' up to 2050. It establishes the future 'need' for different levels of fixed broadband connectivity and how much investment is required to rollout infrastructure to meet different regional coverage and capacity levels. Two key technologies are initially assessed here using a cost modelling approach, including Fibre-To-The-Premises (FTTP) utilising a Gigabit Passive Optical Network and FTTP utilising a Point-To-Point fibre connection. The results show the aggregate investment required to deliver different levels of fixed broadband access to different proportions of the population. The costs raise linearly for delivery to premises in urban areas, with total urban coverage by FTTP using a Gigabit Passive Optical Network costing £14.1 billion and FTTP using a Point-To-Point network costing £17 billion. The costs for rural and remote areas begin to rise sharply, to the extent that deployment of these technologies to the final third of premises could cost almost the same amount as deployment to the first two thirds of premises in urban areas. Deployment to rural and remote areas was estimated to cost £13.7 billion for FTTP using a Gigabit Passive Optical Network and £15.8 billion for FTTP using a Point-To-Point network. Total FTTP coverage using a Gigabit Passive Optical Network costs £27.7 billion, whereas FTTP coverage using a Point-To-Point network costs £32.8 billion. The largest aggregate investment is required in the South East, North West and East of England, due to their large population sizes. Across these technologies the lowest average marginal cost per premises was in London for urban areas, Scotland for rural areas, and Wales for remote areas.


Silicon Valley law firms were among the first to experiment in taking stock in their technology start-up clients. Law firms in other financial centers in the United States have also begun to accept equity in their high-tech clients, as have several Canadian law firms. Even the most conservative law firms in England have accepted accepting small equity stakes in their clients, and the trend is spreading throughout Europe. This article critically analyzes the practice of lawyers taking equity in their clients as compensation for rendering legal services. The article concludes that equity billing can provide significant private benefits to law firms and clients, as well as indirect public benefits. The article also concludes that equity billing can be usefully analogized to contingency fee arrangements: equity billing is to start-up clients and corporate legal work what contingency fee arrangements are to impecunious litigants and access to the courts. The article then addresses ethical issues raised by equity billing. Can equity billing be reconciled with ethical rules that lawyers? fees be reasonable? Can equity billing be reconciled with concerns about conflicts between a client?s best interests and the lawyer?s self-interest? Equity billing also raises a concern that the lawyer?s role as guardian of the public interest, particularly in the context of public securities markets, will be undermined. This article applies the economic theory of gatekeeping and concludes that equity billing may impose externalities on third parties such as retail investors who rely on issuers? lawyers to ensure compliance with securities laws. The article concludes that a case cannot be made for prohibiting equity billing or capping the amount of equity that a lawyer can take in a client, and that the most appropriate form of regulation is heightened disclosure of equity billing arrangements, coupled with letting existing ethical rules, fiduciary principles and market forces regulate.


The Australian Parliament enacted the Disability Discrimination Act ("DDA") in 1992. This article explores how effectively the DDA eliminates discrimination against people with disabilities in the employment context. It addresses some key problems with the DDA by considering the need for reform of the purposes, definitions, prohibitions, exemptions, and remedies of disability discrimination provided for in the Act. One of the aims of the article is to assess some key findings and recommendations of a Productivity Commission's report, entitled, "Review of the Disability Discrimination Act 1992," taking legislative developments and judicial interpretation of the Act into account. The paper concludes that there is a compelling case for reform of the key provisions of the DDA to better promote the protections against employment discrimination and enhance the equality of people with disabilities in the employment context.


A proper understanding of the Milky Way (MW) dwarf galaxies in a cosmological context requires knowledge of their 3D velocities and orbits. However, proper motion (PM) measurements have generally been of limited accuracy and are available only for more massive dwarfs. We therefore present a new study of the kinematics of the MW dwarf galaxies. We use the Gaia DR2 for those dwarfs that have been spectroscopically observed in the literature. We derive systemic PMs for 39 galaxies and galaxy candidates out to 420 kpc, and generally find good consistency for the subset with measurements available from other studies. We derive the implied Galactocentric velocities, and calculate orbits in canonical MW halo potentials of low (0.8 × 1012 M⊙) and high mass (1.6 × 1012 M⊙). Comparison of the distributions of orbital apocenters and 3D velocities to the halo virial radius and escape velocity, respectively, suggests that the satellite kinematics are best explained in the high-mass halo. Tuc III, Crater II, and additional candidates have orbital pericenters small enough to imply significant tidal influences. Relevant to the missing satellite problem, the fact that fewer galaxies are observed to be near apocenter than near pericenter implies that there must be a population of distant dwarf galaxies yet to be discovered. Of the 39 dwarfs: 12 have orbital poles that do not align with the MW plane of satellites (given reasonable assumptions about its intrinsic thickness); 10 have insufficient PM accuracy to establish whether they align; and 17 satellites align, of which 11 are co-orbiting and (somewhat surprisingly, in view of prior knowledge) 6 are counter-orbiting. Group infall might have contributed to this, but no definitive association is found for the members of the Crater-Leo group.


It is clinically vital to devise a technique to evaluate regional functionality of the myocardium in order to determine the extent and intensity of local damage to the cardiac tissue caused by ischemic injuries. Such a technique can potentially enable cardiologists to discriminate between reversible and irreversible ischemic injuries and to devise appropriate revascularization therapy in case of reversible lesions. The technique is founded on the premise that sufficient contraction force generated by the cardiac tissue can be regarded as a direct and reliable criterion for regional analysis of tissue healthy functionality. To this end, a number of imaging techniques have been developed and, to our knowledge, none of them assess regional cardiac functionality based on a straightforward mechanical measure such as local cardiac contraction forces. . As such, a novel imaging technique is being developed on the basis of quantification and visualisation of local myocardial contraction forces. In this technique, cardiac contraction force distribution is attained through solving an inverse problem within an optimization framework which uses iterative forward mechanical modelling of the myocardium. Hence, a forward mechanical model of the myocardium which is computationally efficient, robust, and adaptable to diverse pathophysiological conditions is necessary for this development. As such, this paper is geared towards developing a novel mechanical model of the healthy and pathological myocardium which considers all aspects of the myocardial mechanics including hyperelasticity, anisotropy, and active contraction force. In this investigation, two major parts, including background tissue and reinforcement bars (fibers) have been considered for modelling the myocardium. The model was implemented using finite element (FE) approach and demonstrated very good performance in simulating normal and infarcted left ventricle (LV) contractile function.


Clinical neurology has been traditionally considered as an academic speciality in which the specialist regurgitates his/her knowledge of neurology without being able to do much for the patient. This attitude is no longer acceptable. Surge of information and discoveries in neurosciences within the last two decades translated into therapeutic interventions which is literally life saving in some occasions. Neuroimmunology, without a doubt, has been in the forefront of such discoveries. Just a few decades ago immunology of the nervous system was of little interest because brain was thought to be an immunologically "privileged" organ i.e. inaccessible to cellular and humeral immunity. Today, however, clinical neurologists deal with neurological problem with immunological basis on a daily basis. This article tries to review such diseases and their current therapeutic strategy proceeded by an introduction to CNS immunity. Multiple sclerosis, as one of the most common CNS disease with immunological basis, has been given more attention because of the growing number of affected people in Iran.


Emphasizing words in presentation slides allows viewers to direct their gaze to focal points without reading the entire slide, retaining their attention on the speaker. Despite many studies on automatic slide generation, few have addressed helping authors choose which words to emphasize. Motivated by this, we study the problem of choosing candidates for emphasis by introducing a new dataset containing presentation slides with a wide variety of topics. We evaluated a range of state-of-the-art models on this novel dataset by organizing a shared task and inviting multiple researchers to model emphasis in slides.


The contributions of Portuguese and Spanish sixteenth century science and technology in fields such as metallurgy, medicine, agriculture, surgery, meteorology, cosmography, cartography, navigation, military technology, and urban engineering, by and large, have been excluded in most accounts of the Scientific Revolution. I review several recent studies in English on sixteenth and seventeenth century natural history and natural philosophy to demonstrate how difficult it has become for Anglo-American scholarship to bring Iberia back into narratives on the origins of modernity. The roots of this exclusion, to be sure, hark back to the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. The oversight is unfortunate for it has blinded scholars to the fact that the Iberians first created a culture of empirical, experimental, and utilitarian knowledge-gathering of massive proportions that did not get its cues from the classics or the learned, but from merchants, enterprising settlers, and bureaucrats. The Portuguese and the Spanish confidently saw themselves as the first moderns, superseding the ancients. The English were the first to recognize this fact and they sought to imitate the new institutions of knowledge-gathering created by the Iberians. I demonstrate, for example, the Iberian origins of many of Francis Bacon's epistemological insights and metaphors. Spanish and Portuguese scholars have long been making this point. I therefore introduce English-speaking audiences to some of the most recent scholarship by Spanish scholars on sixteenth century Iberian science and technology.


The aim of this retrospective study was to identify and evaluate complications after hip spacer implantation other than reinfection and/or infection persistence. Between 1999 and 2008, 88 hip spacer implantations in 82 patients have been performed. There were 43 male and 39 female patients at a mean age of 70 [43 - 89] years. The mean spacer implantation time was 90 [14-1460] days. The mean follow-up was 54 [7-96] months. The most common identified organisms were S. aureus and S. epidermidis. In most cases, the spacers were impregnated with 1 g gentamicin and 4 g vancomycin / 80 g bone cement. The overall complication rate was 58.5 % (48/82 cases). A spacer dislocation occurred in 15 cases (17 %). Spacer fractures could be noticed in 9 cases (10.2 %). Femoral fractures occurred in 12 cases (13.6 %). After prosthesis reimplantation, 16 patients suffered from a prosthesis dislocation (23 %). 2 patients (2.4 %) showed allergic reactions against the intravenous antibiotic therapy. An acute renal failure occurred in 5 cases (6 %). No cases of hepatic failure or ototoxicity could be observed in our collective. General complications (consisting mostly of draining sinus, pneumonia, cardiopulmonary decompensation, lower urinary tract infections) occurred in 38 patients (46.3 %). Despite the retrospective study design and the limited possibility of interpreting these findings and their causes, this rate indicates that patients suffering from late hip joint infections and being treated with a two-stage protocol are prone to having complications. Orthopaedic surgeons should be aware of these complications and their treatment options and focus on the early diagnosis for prevention of further complications. Between stages, an interdisciplinary cooperation with other facilities (internal medicine, microbiologists) should be aimed for patients with several comorbidities for optimizing their general medical condition.


Background—A dry epicardial access (EA) is increasingly used for advanced cardiovascular procedures. Conventionally used large bore needles (Tuohy or Pajunk needle; LBN) have been associated with low but definite incidence of major complications with EA. Use of micropuncture needle (MPN) may decrease the risk of complications. We intended to compare the outcomes of LBN with MPN for EA. Methods and Results—We report a multicenter observational study of consecutive patients who underwent EA for ventricular tachycardia ablation or Lariat procedure using the LBN or MPN. Oral anticoagulation was stopped before the procedure. Baseline characteristics and procedure-related complications were collected and compared. Of the 404 patients, LBN and MPN were used in 46% and 54% of patients, respectively. There was no significant difference in the incidence of inadvertent puncture of myocardium between LBN and MPN (7.6% versus 6.8%, P=0.76). However, there was a significantly higher rate of large pericardial effusions with LBN compared with MPN (8.1% versus 0.9%; P<0.001). The incidence of pleural effusions were not significantly different between both (1.6% versus 2.3%; P=0.64). LBN group had an increase in other complications compared with MPN (open heart surgery to repair cardiac laceration [6 versus 0], injury to liver [1 versus 0], coronaries [1 versus 0], and superior epigastric artery requiring surgical exploration [0 versus 1]). Conclusions—The use of MPN is associated with decreased incidence of major complications, and the need for surgical repair and routine use should be considered for EA.


Floor speeches by legislators constitute an important body of legal rhetoric. This article studies the Megan's Law legislative floor debates in both the United States Congress and the New York state legislature. The article begins by setting out three practical purposes of legislative debate. First, it can influence voting decisions. Second, it educates and influences both the media and the voting public. Finally it provides a rich source of interpretive material for the judiciary. The article then sets out a naturalistic description of these speeches, comparing the two jurisdictions. Legislators in both Washington, DC and Albany argued for the new laws primarily by painting a grim picture of the status quo. They offered horrific accounts of individual child victimization, questionable statistical claims about the extent of the molestation and abduction crisis, and dehumanizing descriptions of child sexual offenders. Particularly within the U.S. Congress, legislators spent little time touting bills' virtues or rebutting the many possible criticisms of these controversial provisions. New York legislators, perhaps because of their greater political diversity, offered more nuanced critiques of the bills. The article then assesses legislators' rhetorical tropes and claims. Storytelling, for instance, presented both problems and benefits as a primary rhetorical tool for promoting the new social policy. And despite the apparent value of statistical proof, such empirical data was easily manipulated by savvy legislators. Many issues were underdeveloped during the Megan's Law debates. For example, while virtually all legislators spoke exclusively of white offenders and victims, legislators' rhetoric entirely excluded a discussion of the laws' likely disparate impact on African-Americans. Similarly, few legislators acknowledged that benefits of the law - if any were to be had - would flow almost entirely to suburban, and other low density, communities. Finally, the article considers how the Megan's Law debates educated the public, affected legislative voting, or shaped judicial interpretation of the bills. Because it concludes that the Megan's Law legislative debates did not optimally serve these three practical aims, the article evaluates new approaches to enriching the content of legislative debate. It argues that legislatures could appoint a public legislative advocate - the equivalent of a public defender, within the legislative context - or adopt new codes of debate. In any case, legislators should look for ways to improve and enhance the rhetoric of legislative debate.


The aim of this book is to offer a fresh approach to the history and archaeology of the Cyclades in Late Antiquity and the Byzantine Early Middle Ages in light of current archaeological investigations. It is an attempt to interpret human-environmental interaction in order to "read" the relationship between islands, settlements, landscapes and seascapes in the context of the diverse and highly interactive Mediterranean world.It offers an interdisciplinary approach, which combines archaeological evidence, literary sources, and observations of the sites and microlandscapes as a whole, using the advantages offered by the application of new technologies in archaeological research (Geographic Information Systems). The islands of Paros and Naxos are used as case-studies. The author traces how these neighbouring insular communities reacted under the same general circumstances pertaining in the Aegean and to what extent the landscape played a role in this process.


The author has undertaken a technological and typological analysis of lithic assemblages from southern Oman dating between 10,000 to 7,000 years before present (BP). These assemblages are characterized by the production of blades (leptoliths) using varied core reduction modalities exemplified throughout the book. These blade technologies are accompanied by formal tools such as tanged projectiles, burins, endscrapers and pseude-backed knifes. The chronological and techno-typological characterization of these blade assemblages warrants its individual status as a lithic industry of the Late Palaeolithic in its own right. The name 'Khashabian' is given by the author to this industry, which has little resemblance to those found outside of Arabia, enforcing the local origin of the Early Holocene Populations of the South Arabian Highlands.


An in situ infrared cell capable of studying reactions over heterogeneous catalysts in the temperature range 77 to 773 K has been designed. In particular, the adsorption of formic acid on a model Cu/SiO2 methanol synthesis catalyst was investigated. Exposure of a reduced copper surface to formic acid at 300 K resulted in the formation of both formic acid molecules, which were ligated to the copper catalyst, and chemisorbed bidentate copper formate species. Under temperature-programming conditions, the bidentate species displayed a maximum rate of desorption at 433 K, which correlates to a desorption activation energy of 120 kJ mol−1. In contrast, on the reoxidized catalyst, unidentate formate species were preferentially formed. These exhibited a maximum rate of desorption at a temperature of 408 K, and a desorption activation energy of 113 kJ mol−1. A mechanism was postulated to explain this behavior, and evidence was presented to show that useful kinetic data can be obtained for desorption from a catalyst in the form of a pressed disk.


Electrochemically activated (ECA) water is being extensively studied and considered as an alternative to chlorine for disinfection. Some researchers claim that ECA is by and large a chlorine solution, while others claim the presence of reactive oxygen species such as ozone and hydroxyl radicals in addition to chlorine. This study compares sodium hypochlorite (NaOCl) and ECA in terms of disinfection efficacy, trihalomethanes (THMs) formation, stability and composition. The studies were carried out under different process conditions (pH 5, 7 and 9, disinfectant concentrations of 2―5 mg/L and dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration of 2-4 mg/L). The results indicated that in the presence of low DOC (<2 mg/L) ECA showed better disinfection efficacy for E scherichia coli inactivation, formed lower THM and had better stability compared with NaOCl at both pH 5 and 7. Stability studies of stock solutions showed that over a period of 30 days, ECA decayed by only 5% while NaOCl decayed by 37.5% at temperatures of 4 °C. In a fresh ECA of 200 mg/L chlorine, about 5.3 mg/L ozone and 36.9 mg/L ClO 2 were detected. The study demonstrates that ECA could be a suitable alternative to NaOCl where decentralized production and use are required.


Portable and precise, this pocket-sized guide delivers ready answers for managing databases and services in Exchange Server 2013. Zero in on core tasks through quick-reference tables, instructions, and lists. You'll get the focused information you need to save time and get the job done-whether at your desk or in the field. Coverage includes: Managing databases and availability groups Core database administration Compliance and role-based access controls Managing mail flow Working with client access servers Managing mobile users Maintenance, monitoring, and queuing Backups and restorations


In this paper, we propose predictive temperature-aware dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) using the performance counters that are already embedded in commercial microprocessors. By using the performance counters and simple regression analysis, we can predict the localized temperature and efficiently scale the voltage/frequency. When localized thermal problems that were not detected by thermal sensors are found after layout (or fabrication), the thermal problems can be avoided by the proposed software solution without delaying time-to-market. The evaluation results show that in a Linux-based laptop with the Intel Core2 Duo processor, DVFS using the performance counters performs comparable to DVFS using the thermal sensor.


In the traditional deductive approach in teaching any engineering topic, teachers would first expose students to the derivation of the equations that govern the behavior of a physical system and then demonstrate the use of equations through a limited number of textbook examples. This methodology, however, is rarely adequate to unmask the cause-effect and quantitative relationships between the system variables that the equations embody. Web-based simulation, which is the integration of simulation and internet technologies, has the potential to enhance the learning experience by offering an interactive and easily accessible platform for quick and effortless experimentation with physical phenomena. This paper presents the design and development of a web-based platform for teaching basic food engineering phenomena to food technology students. The platform contains a variety of modules ("virtual experiments") covering the topics of mass and energy balances, fluid mechanics and heat transfer. In this paper, the design and development of three modules for mass balances and heat transfer is presented. Each webpage representing an educational module has the following features: visualization of the studied phenomenon through graphs, charts or videos, computation through a mathematical model and experimentation. The student is allowed to edit key parameters of the phenomenon and observe the effect of these changes on the outputs. Experimentation can be done in a free or guided fashion with a set of prefabricated examples that students can run and self-test their knowledge by answering multiple-choice questions.


This article examines a variety of sardonic interventions into the global flow of mainstream Bollywood's overbearing and complacent self-image. A resurgence of the familiar coinage "new wave" often attends to the urbane crop of film industry mavericks like Anurag Kashyap, Sriram Raghavan, or Dibakar Banerjee, extending to innovative independent ventures associated with figures like Ashim Ahluwalia, Pawan Kumar, or Q. On the one hand, such endeavors often flaunt the influence of contemporary world cinema accessed through new cinephilic networks. On the other hand, they claim to undertake authentic forays into indigenous sociocultural experience through the provocative undermining of established commercial as well as art/parallel film conventions in India. The article traces certain ambiguous stylistic propensities underneath such subversive cinematic aspirations as probable symptoms of a crucial predicament in Indian cinema's bid for alternative expressions in the realm of popular culture and spectatorial customs. Analyses of select films such as Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008), Pankh and Gandu (both 2010) draw attention to a certain tendency in contemporary narrative drama that renders cityscapes as symbolic witness to cultural ruin while dispensing with the technique of melodramatic italicization as expressive device. The author's discussion mobilizes an analytical category called "new junk aesthetics" to characterize these disparate urban fables whose narratorial logic seeks to eschew the circulation of value in the domain of mainstream cultural production as well as an alternative imagination.


Adrian Lockheart is a psychologist escaping his life in England. Arriving in Freetown in the wake of civil war, he struggles with the intensity of the heat, dirt and dust, and with the secrets this country hides. Despite the gulf of experience and understanding between them, Adrian finds unexpected friendship in a young surgeon at the hospital, the charismatic Kai Mansaray, and begins to build a new life just as Kai makes plans to leave. In the hospital Adrian encounters an elderly and unwell man, Elias Cole, who is reflecting on his past, not all of it noble. Recorded in a series of notebooks are memories of his youth, the optimism of the first moon landings, and the details of an obsession: Saffia, a woman he loved, and Julius, her fiery, rebellious husband. As their individual stories entwine across two generations in a country torn apart by repression and war, some distances cannot be bridged. "The Memory of Love" is a towering tale of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, superbly realised and beautifully written, horrifying and exhilarating, unflinching and tender, moving and uplifting. It is the story of four lives colliding; a story about friendship, about understanding, absolution and the indelible effects of the past; about journeys and dreams and loss, and about the very nature of love.


In order to survive in the highly competitive internet business, companies have to provide differentiated services that can satisfy the rapidly changing users' tastes and needs. Designers have been increasingly committed to achieving user satisfaction by generating and visualizing innovative solutions in new internet service development. The roles of internet service design have expanded from a narrow focus on aesthetics into a more strategic aspect. This paper investigates the methods of managing design in order to enhance companies' competitiveness in internet business. The main research processes are to: (1) explore the current state of internet service design in Korea through in-depth interviews with professional designers and survey questionnaires to 30 digital design agencies and 60 clients; (2) compare how design is managed between in-house design groups and digital design agencies though the case studies of five Korean companies; and (3) develop a taxonomy characterizing four roles of designers in conjunction with the levels of their strategic contributions to internet service innovation: visualist, solution provider, concept generator, and service initiator. In addition, we demonstrate the growing contributions of the strategic use of design for innovating internet services, building robust brand equity, and increasing business performance.
 Keywords:

Design Management; Internet Business; Internet Service Design; Digital Design; Digital Design Agency; In-House Design Group, Case Study


Abstract The standard model of intertemporal choice assumes risk neutrality towards the length of life: under additivity of lifetime utility and expected utility assumptions, agents are not sensitive to a mean preserving spread in the length of life. Using a survey fielded in the RAND American Life Panel, this paper provides empirical evidence on possible deviation from risk neutrality with respect to longevity in the US population. The questions we ask allow to find the distribution as well as to quantify the degree of risk aversion with respect to the length of life in the population. We find evidence that roughly 75% of respondents were not neutral with respect to longevity risk. Hence, there is a little empirical support for the joint use of the expected utility and additive lifetime utility assumptions in life-cycle models. Higher income households are more likely to be risk averse towards the length of life. We do not find evidence that the degree of risk aversion varies with age or education.


One of the main notational contexts in which model-driven software development has been studied is the Unified Modeling Language (UML), the de facto standard in software modelling. The current trend in software development is not just towards the use of models, but the use of executable models. In 2006, the Object Management Group issued a Request for Proposal (RFP), soliciting the definition of an Executable UML Foundation, with a fully specified executable semantics. The purpose of such a version of UML is to make the advantages of executable models available to UML users by enabling "a chain of tools that support the construction, verification, translation, and execution" of models.
An oft-voiced criticism of UML is its lack of a formal, unambiguous description of its semantics. In an effort to improve the support for model-driven development, especially with respect to executable modelling, the UML 2 specification introduced a novel three-layer semantics architecture. This architecture provides a stratification of the description of UML models that clearly separates 'low-level' behavioural specification mechanisms, such as actions, from 'high-level' behavioural formalisms, such as activities, state machines and interactions. Although UML describes the effect of actions, it does not provide either the concrete syntax or the formal semantics of an action language.
Our research focuses on a top-to-bottom slice of the three-layer architecture. We formally define the execution semantics of two-thirds of UML actions, including the most complicated actions—invocation actions. Our formal definition is expressed in terms of state changes to a global state machine representing an executing UML model. Our work provides an alternate formalization to that of the current submission to the RFP and could be used to enhance that submission.
To validate our formal semantics and to determine the usefulness of the three-layer architecture, we have created an interpreter for UML actions and activities. This interpreter was designed in accordance with the complex token passing semantics of UML and provides analysis capabilities that have been successfully used to identify problems even in published activity diagrams. In effect, we have created a tool that supports the construction, verification and execution of a subset of UML models, namely activities. Our handling of this slice of the three-layer architecture is a preliminary step to realizing the grander vision of general executable (and analyzable) models.


Coupling the atmosphere with the underlying surface presents numerical stability challenges in costeffective model integrations used for operational weather prediction or climate simulations. These are due to the choice of large integration time-step, aiming at reducing computational burden, and to an explicit flux coupling formulation, often preferred for its simplicity and modularity. The atmospheric models therefore use the surface-layer temperatures (representative of the uppermost soil, snow, ice, water, etc.,) at previous integration time-step in all surface-atmosphere heat-flux calculations and prescribe fluxes to be used in the surface models' integrations. Although both models may use implicit formulations for the time stepping, the explicit flux coupling can still lead to instabilities. In this study, idealized simulations with a fully coupled implicit system are performed to derive an empirical relation between surface heat flux and surface temperature at the new time level. Such a relation mimics the fully implicit formulation by allowing to estimate the surface temperature at the new time level without solving the surface heat diffusion problem. It is based on similarity reasoning and applies to any medium with constant heat diffusion and heat capacity parameters. The advantage is that modularity of the code is maintained and that the heat flux can be computed in the atmospheric model in such a way that instabilities in the snow or ice code are avoided. Applicability to snow/ice/soil models with variable density is discussed, and the loss of accuracy turns out to be small.


Natural soils and rocks are usually structured at various levels starting from the scale of the particles, pores and their networks up to the field scale. The particular structure in these materials, as often represented by the combination of fabric and bonding, may exist due to the occurrence of natural or induced external factors. The former are mostly related to sedimentation and diagenesis, while the latter mostly include anthropogenic processes. It is now well recognized that the effects of structure in geomaterials are of paramount significance when assessing their engineering properties. From the rheological point of view, these effects are similar for a great variety of geomaterials, including granular soils, clays and porous weak rocks. With the purpose of understanding and describing these effects, outstanding contributions have been made in the last two decades to both the experimental investigations and the constitutive modelling of structured geomaterials. These research efforts have helped in proposing a comprehensive and general behavioural framework for structured geomaterials. The "Geomechanics of structured materials" was the topic treated during a specific session of the annual ALERT Geomaterials Workshop held in Aussois (France) from the 8th to the 10th October 2007. A general overview of the behaviour of structured geomaterials and a timely state of the acquired knowledge in this field of geomechanics, as close as possible to the current state of practice, was offered. We are especially pleased to include in this Special Issue, hosted by Soils and Foundations International Journal, most of the contributions presented during the aforementioned ALERT Geomaterials workshop session. We are grateful to all the authors for having contributed with their works to the realisation of this Special Issue that we hope will constitute a useful source of information and inspiration.


ABSTRACT Genetic drift of influenza virus genomic sequences occurs through the combined effects of sequence alterations introduced by a low-fidelity polymerase and the varying selective pressures experienced as the virus migrates through different host environments. While traditional phylogenetic analysis is useful in tracking the evolutionary heritage of these viruses, the specific genetic determinants that dictate important phenotypic characteristics are often difficult to discern within the complex genetic background arising through evolution. Here we describe a novel influenza virus sequence feature variant type (Flu-SFVT) approach, made available through the public Influenza Research Database resource (www.fludb.org), in which variant types (VTs) identified in defined influenza virus protein sequence features (SFs) are used for genotype-phenotype association studies. Since SFs have been defined for all influenza virus proteins based on known structural, functional, and immune epitope recognition properties, the Flu-SFVT approach allows the rapid identification of the molecular genetic determinants of important influenza virus characteristics and their connection to underlying biological functions. We demonstrate the use of the SFVT approach to obtain statistical evidence for effects of NS1 protein sequence variations in dictating influenza virus host range restriction.


In order to address how new knowledge influences design expressions, design codes have in most cases become significantly more complex over the last decades. However, this tendency is leading to codes that are too complicated for preliminary design but still not sufficiently accurate for assessing existing structures (where even more realistic models of behaviour are sometimes required). An alternative code strategy is that proposed by codes based on a levels‐of‐approximation (LoA) approach. This approach is based on the use of theories based on physical parameters where the hypotheses for their application can be refined as the accuracy required increases. The approach proposes adopting safe hypotheses during the first stages of design, leading to relatively quick and simple analyses. In cases where such a degree of accuracy is not sufficient (e.g. design of complex structures, assessment of existing structures, significant potential economic savings), the hypotheses can be refined in a number of steps, leading to better estimates of the behaviour and strength of members. This approach, recently adopted in the first complete draft of Model Code 2010 for a number of design issues, is discussed within this paper with reference to punching shear provisions.


We examined the sensitivity of newly settled Mytilus trossulus to heat and desiccation, as well as the ontogeny of sensitivity through the early benthic phase. Laboratory experiments were conducted to determine the sensitivity of mussels to the full range of temperatures and desiccation levels experienced in the field. Mussels of 1 to 2 mm shell length (SL) experienced a threshold of heat tolerance at 34°C and a threshold of desiccation tolerance at vapour pressure deficit levels of 1.01 kPa. Extended periods of temperatures reaching or exceeding lethal levels for newly settled M. trossulus occurred relatively rarely in Barkley Sound, British Columbia, Canada, whereas lethal levels of desiccation occurred often during the recruitment season and were usually sustained for several hours. Desiccation, therefore, appears to be a substantially greater threat to recently settled M. trossulus than heat. A final laboratory experiment characterized the changes in sensitivity to desiccation that occur as mussels increase in size. Mussels became highly tolerant to desiccation when they reached a size of 2 to 3 mm SL. This size closely corresponds to the size at which juvenile M. trossulus relocate from protective filamentous algal habitat to adult habitat, suggesting ontogenetic shifts in habitat use by juvenile M. trossulus are a response to changing sensitivity to desiccation. If so, the future survival of newly settled mussels, and thus possibly the local persistence of mussel populations, may depend upon the persistence of protective algal microhabitats under changing climate conditions.


The interaction between gastric carcinoma cells and the peritoneal lining is a key step in peritoneal dissemination. In this study, we examined the roles of the β1 family of integrin receptors in the adhesion of such cells to the peritoneum. The adhesion of several gastric carcinoma cell lines to peritonea excised from mice was inhibited most by an anti-α3 integrin antibody and to a lesser extent by an anti-α2 integrin antibody. In the peritoneal implantation of NUGC-4 human gastric carcinoma cells in athymic mice, treatment of the cells with anti-α2 or anti-α3 integrin antibody reduced the number of disseminated nodules; suppression by the anti-α3 integrin antibody was stronger than that by the anti-α2 integrin antibody. The cDNAs to human α2 and α3 integrins were introduced into K562 leukemic cells, which were positive for the integrin β1 subunit but negative for the α2 or α3 subunit. The α3 integrin-transfected cells adhered to excised peritoneum and to a monolayer of peritoneal mesothelial cells more firmly than did the α2 integrin-transfected cells or the mock transfectant. Reverse transcription-PCR was used to analyze the expression of laminin-5 and laminin-10/11, which have been reported to serve as high-affinity ligands for α3β1 integrin. mRNA for these laminin isoforms was found in mesothelial cells from the diaphragm and parietal peritoneum. These results strongly suggest that α3β1 integrin plays an essential role in mediating the initial attachment of cancer cells to the peritoneum, leading to the formation of peritoneal metastasis.


This article explores the question of what character relations must have before the orthodox law of obligations will describe them as 'causal' relations. The article does not purport to identify the metaphysical nature of 'causation'. Instead it provides a non-reductive account of what is essential before the law has described the relation between a specific factor and the existence of a particular indivisible phenomenon as 'causal'. Section 1 presents a simple test for this relation — an 'extended but-for test' — that can be deployed in a straightforward way without engaging with theoretically complex and often problematic accounts of causation based on the notion of sufficient sets, such as Wright's NESS account. Section 2 demonstrates how important principles relating to the separateness of a legal entity and to legal responsibility can resolve theoretical puzzles and in turn illuminate why the orthodox law of obligations does not choose to describe as 'causal' a relation wider than the one identified in this article.


Hydrogels are cross-linked, water-swollen polymer networks that are widely used as a biomaterial. The suitability of hydrogels as biomedical materials, especially as drug delivery systems depend on their bulk structure. The most important parameters used to characterize the network structure of hydrogels are the polymer volume fraction in the swollen state, the molecular weight of the polymer chain between two neighboring crosslinking points, and the corresponding mesh size. Among hydrogel matrixes HEMA (hydroxyl ethyl methacrylate) base hydrogels are of great interest and they have many applications in biomedical fields like artificial organs and drug delivery system. The stiffness of this family of hydrogels is tunable by changing water ratio during polymerization. The goal of this project is to calculate the mesh size of new HEMA-MDHA hydrogel through rubber elasticity theory formulation, which involved interesting experimental works to measure required parameters for this calculation. Experiments consist of hydrogel synthesize via UV polymerization, measuring swelling ratio, polymer volume fraction, polymer density measurement through bouncy technique and measuring elastic modulus of hydrogels in tension. Each experiment provides the operator with fundamental skills in hydrogels characterization for who are interested to work with hydrogels in any biomedical application.


RATIONALE
New treatment strategies are needed to improve airway clearance and reduce the morbidity and the time burden associated with cystic fibrosis (CF).

OBJECTIVES
To determine whether long-term treatment with inhaled mannitol, an osmotic agent, improves lung function and morbidity.

METHODS
Double-blind, randomized, controlled trial of inhaled mannitol, 400 mg twice a day (n = 192, "treated" group) or 50 mg twice a day (n = 126, "control" group) for 26 weeks, followed by 26 weeks of open-label treatment.

MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS
The primary endpoint was absolute change in FEV(1) from baseline in treated versus control groups, averaged over the study period. Secondary endpoints included other spirometric measurements, pulmonary exacerbations, and hospitalization. Clinical, microbiologic, and laboratory safety were assessed. The treated group had a mean improvement in FEV(1) of 105 ml (8.2% above baseline). The treated group had a relative improvement in FEV(1) of 3.75% (P = 0.029) versus the control group. Adverse events and sputum microbiology were similar in both treatment groups. Exacerbation rates were low, but there were fewer in the treated group (hazard ratio, 0.74; 95% confidence interval, 0.42-1.32; P = 0.31), although this was not statistically significant. In the 26-week open-label extension study, FEV(1) was maintained in the original treated group, and improved in the original control group to the same degree.

CONCLUSIONS
Inhaled mannitol, 400 mg twice a day, resulted in improved lung function over 26 weeks, which was sustained after an additional 26 weeks of treatment. The safety profile was also acceptable, demonstrating the potential role for this chronic therapy for CF. Clinical trial registered with www.clinicaltrials.gov (NCT 00630812).


Measurements of secondary production of meiofaunal assemblages are limited, and for most seagrass systems no information is available yet. In the present study meiofaunal production was estimated in a Posidonia oceanica bed in the NW Mediterranean Sea using the summation of biomass increments and different equations based on the production:biomass ratio (i.e. biomass turnover). To- tal meiofaunal production ranged from 7.5 to 13.2 gC m -2 yr -1 , according to the approach utilised (mean value 10.0 ± 1.9 gC m -2 yr -1 , median value 9.6 gC m -2 yr -1 ). These values are among the high- est reported worldwide, indicating that seagrass systems are hot spots of meiofaunal production. De- spite the numerical dominance of nematodes, harpacticoid copepods were responsible for about 50% of total meiofaunal production, followed by polychaetes and nematodes (34 and 12%, respectively). Daily meiofaunal production rates were highest in February-March (21.3 mgC m -2 d -1 ), late May-June (31.4 mgC m -2 d -1 ) and October-December (44.6 to 52.0 mgC m -2 d -1 ). Analysis of daily secondary production of the dominant taxa suggested that different meiofaunal components dominated in differ- ent periods. During February-March, May-June and September-October harpacticoid copepods dis- played highest production rates, but in November and December daily meiofaunal production was largely accounted for by polychaetes and nematodes. Temporal analysis of total meiofaunal produc- tion also revealed that, conversely to what is expected for temperate environments, only ca. 15% of the meiofaunal carbon was produced in summer, whereas 23% was observed in spring and 45% in au- tumn. Temporal changes in total meiofaunal daily production were apparently not dependent upon temperature, but rather reflected changes in the content and bio-availability of sediment organic mat- ter in the seagrass bed. The seagrass P. oceanica was responsible, together with microphytobenthos, for high primary production values (169 to 300 gC m -2 yr -1 ). The fraction of total benthic primary pro- duction potentially consumed by meiofauna (as a measure of seagrass trophic efficiency) ranged from 10 to >50%. These estimates provide evidence of the relevance of meiofauna in benthic energy flows. At the same time, the production efficiency in the Posidonia bed (calculated by the ratio of total meio- faunal production to total primary production) was only 3.0 to 5.3%. These values, comparable to those observed in estuarine/organic-rich systems, are 2 to 10 times lower than those estimated in Cymod- ocea nodosa or Zostera noltii seagrass meadows, indicating that the Posidonia system is less efficient than other seagrass systems in channelling primary production to higher trophic levels.


The traditional way of understanding life, as a self-appropriating and self-organizing process of not ceasing to exist, of taking care of one's own hunger, is challenged by today's unprecedented proliferation of discourses and techniques concerning the living being. This challenge entails questioning the fundamental concepts of metaphysical thinking, namely, time, finality, and, above all, being. Garrido argues that today we are in a position to repeat Nietzsche's assertion that there is no other representation of "being" than that of "living." But in order to carry out this deconstruction of ontology, we need to find new ways of asking "What is life?" In this study, Garrido establishes the basic elements of the question concerning life through readings of Aristotle, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida; through the discussion of scientific breakthroughs in thermodynamics and evolutionary and developmental biology; and through the reexamination of the notion of hunger in both its metaphysical and its political implications.


Individual performance of photovoltaic (PV) modules is contravened by mismatch losses which result in blockage in most of the solar power generated by the PV array (PVA). Partial shading conditions (PSCs) are the main causes of these losses. Several techniques have been discussed to reduce the issues caused by PSCs. Reconfiguration techniques have been proven to be one of the most successful methods that help toward this cause. In this method, the location of PV module (PVM) in the PVA is reconfigured so that the shading effects get distributed throughout the entire array and, hence, maximizing the power output. Two novel reconfiguration patterns such as canonical SuDoKu (CS) and multi diagonal SuDoKu (MDS) for total cross tied (TCT) configuration have been put forth in this paper. This approach aims to rearrange the PVMs in the TCT array as per the fed-in patterns without causing a change in the internal electrical connections. Further parts of the paper focus on the comparison of the proposed pattern's performance with other pre-existing PVA arrangements such as, TCT, SuDoKu, optimal SuDoKu (OS), and modified SuDoku (MS) by taking into account the effects of global maximum power (GMP) point, mismatch power loss, fill factor, and performance ratio. The results obtained from the detailed analysis presented in this paper give proper evidence that, in many cases, the GMP is amplified in the CS and, in all cases, GMP is amplified in the proposed MDS PVA under different shading conditions.


To determine the lesion development of retrovirus-induced ovine pulmonary carcinoma (OPC), ten neonatal lambs were inoculated intratracheally with either 1) lung fluid preparations derived from a sheep with Type D retrovirus-associated OPC and concurrent ovine lentivirus (OvLV)-associated lymphoid interstitial pneumonia (LIP) (n = 8); or 2) lung fluid from a sheep with only OvLV-LIP (n = 2). Seven of eight neonates that received Type D retrovirus-associated OPC/OvLV-LIP lung fluid developed both OPC and LIP lesions between 9 and 32 weeks after inoculation. Mild OPC lesions consisted of foci of type II alveolar epithelial cells lining alveoli surrounded by minimal alveolar macrophage infiltrates. More severe OPC lesions consisted of multifocal aggregates of cuboidal to columnar neoplastic cells forming acini or masses associated with abundant alveolar macrophage infiltrates. Lesions of LIP consisted of peribronchiolar and perivascular lymphoid hyperplasia and heterogeneous interstitial leukocytic infiltrates. The two neonates that received OvLV-LIP lung fluid developed rapid and severe LIP, but not OPC lesions. Two lambs (inoculated as neonates with virus-free lung fluid) and three lambs (uninoculated contacts) served as controls and did not develop OPC. To investigate age susceptibility for development of OPC, 20 additional lambs within defined age groups (neonates, 2 weeks old, 5 weeks old, and 10 weeks old) received ultracentrifuged tumor homogenate. Neonatal to 5-week-old lambs inoculated with Type D retrovirus-associated OPC/OvLV-LIP tumor homogenate were equally likely to develop OPC, but lambs inoculated at 10 weeks of age were more refractory to tumor development. These results suggest that infection of sheep by the OPC retrovirus early in life enhances susceptibility to pulmonary neoplasia and defines methods to optimize experimental reproduction of this retrovirus-induced carcinoma.


A new, data-driven approach to deriving overlapping articulatory-feature based HMMs for speech recognition is presented in this paper. This approach uses speech data from University of Wisconsin's Microbeam X-ray Speech Production Database. Regression tree models were created for constructing HMMs. Use of actual articulatory data improves upon our previous rule-based feature overlapping system. The regression trees allow construction of the HMM topology for an arbitrary utterance given its phonetic transcription and some prosodic information. Experimental results in ASR show preliminary success of this approach.


The intracellular pattern recognition receptor Ipaf, which is a member of the NLR (for nucleotide-binding oligomerization domain-leucine-rich repeat or NACHT-leucine-rich repeat receptor) family, is involved in caspase-1 activation, which can stimulate interleukin-1β (IL-1β) secretion or lead to apoptosis, in response to bacterial infection of macrophages. Miao et al. and Franchi et al. both show that caspase-1 activation and IL-1β secretion by macrophages infected with Salmonella typhimurium required the bacterial type III secretion system (TTSS) and the flagellar protein flagellin, of which there are two variants, FliC and FliB. Bacteria lacking FliC and FliB or a functional TTSS did not stimulate caspase-1 activation or IL-1β secretion. Application of flagellin extracellularly did not trigger a macrophage response (because mouse macrophages lack the Toll-like receptor TLR5 that allows recognition of extracellular flagellin). But introduction of flagellin into the cytoplasm of macrophages using agents that mildly disrupt the membrane triggered IL-1β secretion; however, this was not observed in macrophages lacking Ipaf. Thus, the bacteria appear to release flagellin through the TTSS into the host cytoplasm, where it is recognized by Ipaf, which stimulates the inflammatory response. Subramanian and Qadri showed that exposure of Salmonella to intestinal epithelial cells (IECs) stimulated the secretion of monomeric flagellin into the culture medium, which was then able to stimulate IL-8 production in uninfected IECs when the flagellin-containing culture medium was applied to IECs (which have TLR5 and can respond to extracellular flagellin). CaCo-2 cells, an IEC cell line, exposed to various treatments to denature or inactivate proteins, were still capable of stimulating flagellin secretion by Salmonella; thus, lipid mediators were tested. Exposure of Salmonella to lysophosphatidic acid (LPA) or lysophosphatidylcholine (LPC) stimulated flagellin secretion. Lysophospholipids are released by cells through the activity of phospholipase A2 (PLA2), and inhibition of two types of PLA2 suppressed the stimulation of flagellin secretion from the bacteria in response to exposure to IECs or culture medium from IECs. In vivo, inhibition of calcium-independent cell-associated PLA2 inhibited flagellin release by Salmonella in infected mice. Secretion of flagellin in response to lysophospholipids involved de novo protein synthesis, and LPC and LPA both stimulated a reporter gene driven by the fliC promoter, suggesting that lysophospholipids may trigger the adenosine 3′,5′-monophosphate (cAMP) signaling pathway that activates flagellar biosynthesis. Exposure of Salmonella to glucose, which decreases cAMP concentrations, reduced flagellin secretion in response to LPC. Roy and Zamboni discuss the implications of these three articles and propose that host cells trigger flagellin production and secretion by the bacteria, effectively "'tricking' the bacteria into revealing themselves to host flagellin sensors." E. A. Miao, C. M. Alpuche-Aranda, M. Dors, A. E. Clark, M. W. Bader, S. I. Miller, A. Aderem, Cytoplasmic flagellin activates caspase-1 and secretion of interleukin 1β via Ipaf. Nat. Immunol. 7, 569-575 (2006). [PubMed] L. Franchi, A. Amer, M. Body-Malapel, T.-D. Kanneganti, N. Özören, R. Jagirdar, N. Inohara, P. Vandenabeele, J. Bertin, A. Coyle, E. P. Grant, G. Núñez, Cytosolic flagellin requires Ipaf for activation of caspase-1 and interleukin 1β in salmonella-infected macrophages. Nat. Immunol. 7, 576-582 (2006). [PubMed] N. Subramanian, A. Qadri, Lysophospholipid sensing triggers secretion of flagellin from pathogenic salmonella. Nat. Immunol. 7, 583-589 (2006). [PubMed] C. R. Roy, D. S. Zamboni, Cytosolic detection of flagellin: A deadly twist. Nat. Immunol. 7, 549-551 (2006). [PubMed]


Some authors have speculated that the cognitive component (P3) of the Event-Related Potential (ERP) can function as a psychophysiological measure of sexual interest. The aim of this study was to determine if the P3 ERP component in a workload task can be used as a specific and objective measure of sexual motivation by comparing the neurophysiologic response to stimuli of motivational relevance with different levels of valence and arousal. A total of 30 healthy volunteers watched different films clips with erotic, horror, social-positive and social-negative content, while answering an auditory oddball paradigm. Erotic film clips resulted in larger interference when compared to both the social-positive and auditory alone conditions. Horror film clips resulted in the highest levels of interference with smaller P3 amplitudes than erotic and also than social-positive, social-negative and auditory alone condition. No gender differences were found. Both horror and erotic film clips significantly decreased heart rate (HR) when compared to both social-positive and social-negative films. The erotic film clips significantly increased the skin conductance level (SCL) compared to the social-negative films. The horror film clips significantly increased the SCL compared to both social-positive and social-negative films. Both the highly arousing erotic and non-erotic (horror) movies produced the largest decrease in the P3 amplitude, a decrease in the HR and an increase in the SCL. These data support the notion that this workload task is very sensitive to the attentional resources allocated to the film clip, although they do not act as a specific index of sexual interest. Therefore, the use of this methodology seems to be of questionable utility as a specific measure of sexual interest or as an objective measure of the severity of Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder.


Imaging nanoparticles under relevant reaction conditions of high temperature and gas pressure is difficult because conventional imaging techniques, like transmission electron microscopy, cannot be used. Here we demonstrate that the coherent diffractive imaging technique of X-ray ptychography can be used for in situ phase contrast imaging in structure studies at atmospheric pressure and elevated temperatures. Lithium zirconate, a candidate CO2 capture material, was studied at a pressure of one atmosphere in air and in CO2, at temperatures exceeding 600 °C. Images with a spatial resolution better than 200 nm were retrieved, and possibilities for improving the experiment are described.


Community based probation practice and development is concerned with specific forms of Probation Service supervision described here as community probation work, and other, non-supervisory, practices described as community work and crime prevention work. For both sets of practices the probation fieldwork team acts as the frame of reference where primacy is given to enhanced service delivery systems, and where the locality is a referral source and a resource, not simply a remote situational context. The study begins by describing the Probation Service's philanthropic origins, the merger of criminal justice and social work, and the legislative base for, and function of, subsequent supervisory developments. It then explores the variety of ways in which the "community" has recently emerged as an additional focus for Probation intervention. The empirical study into the work of a new community Probation Team reveals the complexities of translating policy intentions into working community based probation practices. The bulk of the empirical work is concerned with exploring the ways in which this inner city team defined, implemented and sustained its practices. Evidence is provided for claiming that the implementation of community based probation practice requires an explicit acknowledgement not only of organisational imperatives, but of other more significant and interdependent factors. External legislative requirements, internal administrative factors and interactional forces (symbolised by client/worker exchanges), the local setting and the national social context, are regarded as particularly significant. At a theoretical level, and drawing on some of the insights offered by interactionism and functionalism, the study examines the creation of a new community Probation Team, as one societal reaction, amidst others, to a social problem, namely the 1981 urban disturbances in Brixton. The empirical work suggests that a three-fold conceptual model based on social control, social welfare, and social justice considerations provides a valuable theo;retical instrument for analysing community based probation practice and development. The study ends by drawing together these theoretical features, as well as examining some policy and organisational implications for the Probation Service arising from such work.