Reinforced concrete bridge deck slabs without shear reinforcement can be subjected to concentrated or distributed loads of important magnitude. Under these loads their structural response is not always ductile. In particular under concentrated loads their deformation capacity can be limited by shear or punching shear failures, which prevent them from reaching the ultimate load predicted by pure flexural analysis. This problem has been studied in this research by means of an important experimental program and theoretical modeling. The limited ductility of bridge decks was investigated by means of full scale tests on bridge deck cantilevers under groups of concentrated loads. Six large scale laboratory tests were performed on two bridge deck cantilevers with a span of 2.8 m and a length of 10.0 m. All slabs failed in a brittle manner, in shear or punching shear. The theoretical flexural failure load estimated using the yield-line method was never attained. Despite the brittle failures, the results of tests on cantilevers have shown that some amount of yielding can occur before the shear failure and therefore reduce the shear strength. This effect was quantified on eleven full scale tests on slab strips without shear reinforcement with a length of 8.4 m. The results clearly show that the increase of plastic strains in the flexural reinforcement leads to a reduction of the shear strength. The measured rotation capacity of the plastic hinge was thus limited by a shear failure. A particular problem of bridge deck slabs is the introduction of concentrated loads applied by wheels with pneumatic pressure. Punching shear with these loads is usually treated in a manner similar to punching by a column. A punching shear test was performed with a concentrated load simulating a vehicle wheel with pneumatic pressure to investigate the differences. It appears that punching shear with a wheel with pneumatic pressure is less critical because curvatures tend to be distributed over the surface of the applied load rather than concentrated near the edges of the column. In order to investigate the experimental results on slab strips without shear reinforcement, a mechanical model is proposed to predict the shear strength and rotation capacity of plastic hinges. The shear strength is formulated as a function of the opening of the shear crack and of the strength of the concrete compression zone. The results of the mechanical model are in good agreement with the measured values, both for the shear strength and for the shear carried across the shear crack. Based on the mechanical model, a simplified equation is proposed. The model can also be used to predict the shear capacity of yield-lines. A non linear finite element model was implemented during this work and used to correctly predict the measured rotations and load-displacements curves of the tested cantilevers and other full scale tests performed by other researchers. The measured failure loads are accurately estimated by using the results of the non-linear model and the one-way shear and punching shear criteria proposed by Prof. A. Muttoni (Muttoni 2003).


ABSTRACT
 Chlorantraniliprole 200 mg ai L-1 (Rynaxypyr® 200 SC) is the first xylem systemic insecticide in the new chemistry class, anthranilic diamides. A laboratory systemic bioassay using cut stems of cotton seedlings was developed to quantify the baseline susceptibility of the sweetpotato whitefly, Bemisia tabaci (Gennadius) biotype B, to chlorantraniliprole. Bioassays were conducted for a susceptible laboratory colony and for 11 field populations collected in 2008 and 2009 in Southern Florida. Baseline data of the susceptible colony (targeting first instar nymphs with initial exposure at the egg stage) for chlorantraniliprole in 2008 and 2009, revealed a pooled LC50 and slope values of 0.033 mg ai L-1 and 1.186, correspondingly. With the implementation of the stabilization period in the bioassay method in 2009, the susceptible colony generated LC50 and slope values of 0.182 mg ai L-1 and 0.972, respectively. LC50 and slope values of field collected populations (targeting nymphs as above) ranged from 0.016 to 0.046 mg ai L-1 and 0.889 to 1.595, respectively, in 2008 and 2009. Resistance ratio values at 50% mortality (RR50) on nymphs of field colonies ranged from 0.496 to 1.377. LC50 and slope values of the last 3 field collected populations of 2009, using the stabilization period, ranged from 0.117 to 0.251 mg ai L-1 and 0.885 to 1.395, respectively, and RR50 values ranging from 0.645 to 1.381. The overlapping of the fiducial limits of the LC50 values, the low RR50 values, and no significant differences in the slopes of the probit lines between the laboratory and field colonies, indicate that B. tabaci populations collected in Florida in 2008 and 2009 were highly susceptible to chlorantraniliprole. This anthranilic diamide insecticide is a promising tool in integrated pest management programs for B. tabaci, particularly where field populations have developed resistance to other insecticide groups. The baseline information developed in the present study confirmed the susceptibility of field populations in Florida and represents the basis for future susceptibility monitoring programs to help ensure the continued viability of chlorantraniliprole for B. tabaci management.


In the last ten years there has been increasing concern about the drop in numbers of experienced British merchant ship officers. This short fall in manpower will have serious repercussions on the recruitment strategy of United Kingdom shore-based shipping support organisations. These employers have relied upon a supply of former ships' officers to recruit into various key jobs. Research has shown that demand is expected to exceed suppy, and there has been much debate concerning a solution to the problem.

This thesis is an analysis of the shore-side maritime industry's recruitment strategy in the light of this forecast shortage of experienced ships' officers. It aims to make a substantial conribution to the debate concerning recruitment pre-requisites into the industry and increase understanding of the reasons why employers prefer to recruit former ships' officers.

There are two 'strands' in this thesis. First of all this work provides a broad, qualitative analysis of the situation. It focuses upon the recruitment of seafarers into the shore-based maritime industry, the supply of and demand for seafarers and the reasons for their decline in numbers.

The work uses data that has been generated on the maritime labour market to argue that the industry needs to train non-seafarers for certain key jobs instead of recruiting former officers. Theories and concepts originating from experts on skill shortages are used to show that the industry is unlikely to react in time to the shortage to prevent wider damage to the UK's maritime sector. Therefore this work supports the idea that non-seafarer training schemes are feasible for some types of work, and also need to be supported by the State in order to preserve the pool of experienced officers.

Secondly, the arguments put forward by employers and employee bodies areanalysed to ascertain why they believe it is necessary that former seafarers have to be employed to carry out certain key jobs. This work also argues that there are other reasons besides those given as to why employers do not see the training of non-seafarers as a good alternative. The situation in the industry is tested against two models of 'professional power'. A new model of professionalism was created in order to develop understanding of how and why maritime occupational groups try to exclude non-seafarers from shore-based marine related work. It concluded that there is a mobilisation of bias within the sector against non-seafarers entering an industry that predominantly favours of those who have ships' officer experience


First Philosophy? Most of us will recall Quine's pronouncements on the subject: First Philosophy is the philosophical disease for which naturalism is the cure. Naturalism, the fifth and final milestone of empiricism, the cap crowning empiricism's triumphal arch, mandates the "abandonment of the goal of first philosophy," which is just to say that (Naturalism) sees natural science as an inquiry into reality, fallible and corrigible, but not answerable to any supra-scientific method, and not in need of any justification beyond observation and hypothetico-deductive method.1 By implication, First Philosophy subordinates natural science to "supra-scientific method" and to non-empirical constraints of justification. In the same passage, Quine notes that the sources of naturalism, thus understood, are two, and both negative: despair at the failure of attempts to define theoretical terms of science in terms of phenomena, with the resulting surrender to holism of empirical meaning, and secondly, an unregenerate realism, the robust state of mind of the natural scientist who has never felt any qualms beyond the negotiable uncertainties internal to science. According to Quinean naturalism, "the scientific epistemologist" has become a deckhand on Neurath's boat, adrift in a sea of incoming sensory stimulation, with only the planks provided by empirical psychology, the neurology of perception and of language learning, evolutionary theory, and so on, to refit the ever-evolving ark of contemporary scientific theory. Although few "scientific epistemologists"-if that term actually describes philosophers of science-have followed the letter of Quine's commandment to seek illumination of their perceived problems in the nitty-gritty details of cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology, the wider Quinean conception of naturalism has wide currency within philosophy of science. To be sure, from such passages as the one quoted some have puzzled that Quine would trouble to belabor what had been obvious since the time of Newton, that science was not to be yoked to a Cartesian (let alone Aristotelian) Prima Philosophia. But such objections miss the intended target of Quine's remarks. Penny Maddy, in a recent article enthusiastically endorsing Quinean naturalism, explicitly brings this out, quoting Quine himself: For the naturalist, there is no higher perspective, where transcendental or other extra-scientific considerations hold sway. The naturalist operates "from the point of view of our own science, which is the only point of view I can offer."2 We should not forget that the non-existent "higher perspective where transcendental or other extra-scientific considerations hold sway" includes the remnants of a constitutive but relativized a priori retained in the logical empiricists' recognition of conventionalist elements in scientific theories, in the analytic/synthetic distinction, and in particular in Carnap's conception of linguistic frameworks as a presupposition of inquiry. In any case, while naturalism would remain a subject of live debate within epistemological discussions per se, principally regarding the nature and sources of normativity, naturalism in Quine's broader sense, constraining philosophical reflections on science to lie within "the point of view of our own science," has long been the implicit ideology in the bulk of contemporary philosophy of science and in philosophy of physics. There are, of course, exceptions, of which the program formulated in Michael Friedman's Dynamics of Reason is by far the most articulated and influential.3 There, as against Quinean holism and Kuhnian relativism, it is shown how the cumulative and rational character of revolutionary change in mechanics and gravitational theory is accounted for by a continuous succession of meta-empirical a priori principles, "relativized" to particular theories. On the other hand, except by implication, within the frame of the Dynamics of Reason an explicit alternative is not posed to scientific realism, itself the inevitable outgrowth of the "unregenerate realism" of natural science that is, for Quine, one of two primary sources of naturalism. …


What does it take for organizations to support people working together effectively? What does it mean for an organization to be effective? Does successful collaboration lead to more effective organizations? This study explored these questions both theoretically and empirically in an effort to help organizations understand the most important aspects to consider when attempting to achieve collaboration for organization success. The purpose of this study was to fill some of the gaps in the research by taking a broad, holistic approach to exploring the context required to support collaboration at levels of organizations broader than the team and exploring the links between organization support of collaboration and organization effectiveness. In preparation for the current study, the Organization Support of Collaboration model was developed to identify the broad organization design elements that are required to support collaboration. The Organization Effectiveness model was created to provide a holistic view of what it takes for an organization to be considered effective. The present study empirically validated these models and explored the links between them. Data was collected via a web-based questionnaire administered to a broad sample of individuals who work in organizations. Results supported a model of Organization Support of Collaboration with six factors (Connect to the Environment, Craft a Culture of Collaboration, Understand Work Processes, Design Using an Array of Structures, Build Shared Leadership, and Align Support Systems) and a model of Organization Effectiveness with six factors (Performance, Employee Involvement, Flexibility, Customer Satisfaction, New Customer Development, and Treatment of People). Connect to the Environment predicted five of the six Organization Effectiveness factors, and Craft a Culture of Collaboration predicted four of the six, notably with a connection to Performance. For the predicted relationships between the models, nine hypotheses were supported, six were not supported, and three unexpected significant relationships were found. Implications for practice and future directions are recommended.


Four CO2 concentration inversions and the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED) versions 2.1 and 3 are used to provide benchmarks for climate‐driven modeling of the global land‐atmosphere CO2 flux and the contribution of wildfire to this flux. The Land surface Processes and exchanges (LPX) model is introduced. LPX is based on the Lund‐Potsdam‐Jena Spread and Intensity of FIRE (LPJ‐SPITFIRE) model with amended fire probability calculations. LPX omits human ignition sources yet simulates many aspects of global fire adequately. It captures the major features of observed geographic pattern in burnt area and its seasonal timing and the unimodal relationship of burnt area to precipitation. It simulates features of geographic variation in the sign of the interannual correlations of burnt area with antecedent dryness and precipitation. It simulates well the interannual variability of the global total land‐atmosphere CO2 flux. There are differences among the global burnt area time series from GFED2.1, GFED3 and LPX, but some features are common to all. GFED3 fire CO2 fluxes account for only about 1/3 of the variation in total CO2 flux during 1997–2005. This relationship appears to be dominated by the strong climatic dependence of deforestation fires. The relationship of LPX‐modeled fire CO2 fluxes to total CO2 fluxes is weak. Observed and modeled total CO2 fluxes track the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) closely; GFED3 burnt area and global fire CO2 flux track the ENSO much less so. The GFED3 fire CO2 flux‐ENSO connection is most prominent for the El Niño of 1997–1998, which produced exceptional burning conditions in several regions, especially equatorial Asia. The sign of the observed relationship between ENSO and fire varies regionally, and LPX captures the broad features of this variation. These complexities underscore the need for process‐based modeling to assess the consequences of global change for fire and its implications for the carbon cycle.


Over the last three decades sports coaching has evolved from a set of customary practices based largely on tradition and routine into a sophisticated, reflective and multi-disciplinary profession. In parallel with this, coach education and coaching studies within higher education have developed into a coherent and substantial field of scholarly enquiry with a rich and sophisticated research literature. The Routledge Handbook of Sports Coaching is the first book to survey the full depth and breadth of contemporary coaching studies, mapping the existing disciplinary territory and opening up important new areas of research. Bringing together many of the world's leading coaching scholars and practitioners working across the full range of psychological, social and pedagogical perspectives, the book helps to develop an understanding of sports coaching that reflects its complex, dynamic and messy reality. With more importance than ever before being attached to the role of the coach in developing and shaping the sporting experience for participants at all levels of sport, this book makes an important contribution to the professionalization of coaching and the development of coaching theory. It is important reading for all students, researchers and policy makers with an interest in this young and flourishing area. [Book Synopsis]


Reserved parking and specialized treatment are necessary to permit individuals with disabilities access to goods, services, and employment opportunities on an equal basis with the general public. Why are disabled drivers entitled to disabled parking spots? What is the procedure for an individual with a disability to receive special disability registration license plates? What is the role of the Medical Advisory Board in reviewing the ability of disabled drivers to get behind the wheel? What, if any, obligation or responsibility does a physician treating a disabled driver have to notify the Department of Motor Vehicles of the patient's condition or to third parties injured by a disabled driver?Does the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 ("ADA"), a landmark civil rights act protecting an individual with a physical or mental impairment, require the removal of architectural barriers to create designated accessible parking spaces at places of public accommodation? Does the ADA require that restaurants, grocery stores, law offices, and laundromats provide designated parking for individuals with disabilities?Empirical data provided in this article is submitted to serve as a backdrop for elaboration and comparison. Fifty places of public accommodation were surveyed to identify and determine compliance with the provision of accessible parking spaces for disabled drivers in a variety of locations in Maryland.A review of a variety of state motor vehicle statutes are compared and analyzed, ranging from the enumerated covered disabilities, the physician certification process, the provision of placards and disability plates, parking space requirements fees, parking privileges, and enforcement provisions.This article will discuss and analyze various court decisions concerning reasonable accommodations for drivers with disabilities. It will provide insight and understanding of the impact of the ADA and the direction courts are heading as they confront this challenging and important area of the law. Finally, this article will offer recommendations regarding accessible parking and Medical Advisory for the disabled driver.


Objective To describe the patient characteristics, diagnoses and clinical outcomes of patients presenting with acute upper gastrointestinal bleeding (AUGIB) in the 2007 UK Audit. Design Multi-centre survey. Setting All UK hospitals admitting patients with AUGIB. Participants All adults (>16 years) presenting in or to UK hospitals with AUGIB between 1 May and 30 June 2007. Results Data on 6750 patients (median age 68 years) was collected from 208 participating hospitals. New admissions (n=5550) were younger (median age 65 years) than inpatients (n=1107, median age 71 years), with less co-morbidity (any co-morbidity 46% vs 71%, respectively). At presentation 9% (599/6750) had known cirrhosis, 26% a history of alcohol excess, 11% were taking non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and 28% aspirin. Peptic ulcer disease accounted for 36% of AUGIB and bleeding varices 11%. In 13% there was evidence of further bleeding after the first endoscopy. 1.9% underwent surgery and 1.2% interventional radiology for AUGIB. Median length of stay was 5 days. Overall mortality in hospital was 10% (675/6750, 95% CI 9.3 to 10.7), 7% in new admissions and 26% among inpatients. Mortality was highest in those with variceal bleeding (15%) and with malignancy (17%). Conclusions AUGIB continues to result in substantial mortality although it appears to be lower than in 1993. Mortality is particularly high among inpatients and those bleeding from varices or upper gastrointestinal malignancy. Surgical or radiological interventions are little used currently.


DEM error propagation methodology is extended to the derivation of vector-based objects (stream networks) using geostatistical simulations. First, point sampled ele- vations are used to fit a variogram model. Next 100 DEM realizations are generated using conditional sequential Gaus- sian simulation; the stream network map is extracted for each of these realizations, and the collection of stream networks is analyzed to quantify the error propagation. At each grid cell, the probability of the occurrence of a stream and the propagated error are estimated. The method is illustrated us- ing two small data sets: Baranja hill (30 m grid cell size; 16 512 pixels; 6367 sampled elevations), and Zlatibor (30 m grid cell size; 15 000 pixels; 2051 sampled elevations). All computations are run in the open source software for statis- tical computing R: package geoR is used to fit variogram; package gstat is used to run sequential Gaussian simula- tion; streams are extracted using the open source GIS SAGA via the RSAGA library. The resulting stream error map (In- formation entropy of a Bernoulli trial) clearly depicts areas where the extracted stream network is least precise - usually areas of low local relief and slightly convex (0-10 difference from the mean value). In both cases, significant parts of the study area (17.3% for Baranja Hill; 6.2% for Zlatibor) show high error (H > 0.5) of locating streams. By correlating the propagated uncertainty of the derived stream network with various land surface parameters sampling of height measure- ments can be optimized so that delineated streams satisfy the required accuracy level. Such error propagation tool should become a standard functionality in any modern GIS. Re- maining issue to be tackled is the computational burden of geostatistical simulations: this framework is at the moment limited to small data sets with several hundreds of points. Scripts and data sets used in this article are available on-line via the www.geomorphometry.org website and can be easily adopted/adjusted to any similar case study.


To determine whether compositional abnormalities are present in high-density lipoprotein (HDL) in patients with insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDOM) that might negate its putatively protective cardiovascular effects, we studied the plasma lipoproteins of 12 men with varying degrees of clinical control (mean fasting glucose 193 ± 10 mg/dl, mean glycoalbumin > 73% above control mean). The diabetic patients' basal plasma triglyceride, total- and free- (unesterified) cholesterol, HDL cholesterol (HDL-chol), and apolipoprotein Al, All, and B concentrations were similar to those of control subjects, but the freecholesterol- to-lecithin ratio, a new index of cardiovascular disease risk, was significantly increased in their plasma (0.97 ± 0.14 vs. 0.88 ± 0.07, P < .02) and their very-low-density lipoprotein (VLDL)-low-density lipoprotein (LDL) subfraction (1.50 ± 0.51 vs. 1.08 ± 0.15, P < .005). Although HDL2-chol was similar in diabetic and control groups, the HDL2-chol-to-free-cholesterol ratio (diabetic vs. control, 4.64 ± 1.7 vs. 1.96 ± 1.0 μmol/ml, P < .025) and the sphingomyelin-to-lecithin ratio (0.23 ± 0.08 vs. 0.20 ± 0.09, P < .025) were both significantly increased in the IDDM group. HDL3-chol was higher in the IDDM than in the control subjects (diabetic vs. control, 38.6 ± 5.2 vs. 32.7 ± 2.7 mg/dl, P < .005). In contrast to whole plasma and the VLDL + LDL subfraction, the freecholesterol- to-lecithin ratio of IDDM and control HDL subfractions were similar. These results demonstrate that men with IDDM have both qualitative and quantitative changes in lipoprotein surface lipid composition involving VLDL + LDL and HDL2 plasma subfractions. Because changes in the amounts of free cholesterol and phospholipid in lipoproteins have been shown to influence the directional fluxes of cholesterol, these compositional alterations suggest that IDDM may adversely affect both lipoproteinlipoprotein and lipoprotein-cell interactions.


The purpose of this study was to establish views and investigate challenges faced by teachers and learners in the use of Icibemba in teaching initial literacy in primary schools in Serenje district. A descriptive research design supported by qualitative data collection techniques was employed. A purposive sampling procedure was used to select all the participants giving the study a sample size of 56 comprising of 40 grade four learners and 16 of their teachers sampled from 10 primary schools. Researchers decided to have more learners in this study since they were the direct beneficiaries of the curriculum. And thus the need to have a wider view from them. This was also done so as to have enough participants from each school. Data was collected through interviews, focus group discussions and classroom observations of literacy lessons. Lesson observation was used to get first hand information on the learning experiences and helped the researchers to triangulate with what participants expressed during interviews and focus group discussions. Focus group discussions and interviews enabled participants to provide their detailed views of the exact situation learners and teachers encountered. Thematic analysis was used to analyze all the data. It involved organizing data through use of open, axial and selective coding before presenting the emerging themes. The findings revealed that although the Ministry of General Education zoned Serenje district under Icibemba instead of Icilala in teaching initial literacy, learners' performance was low because the language used in school was unfamiliar to learners. Additionally, findings also showed that there was a lack of teacher's guide books and learners' text books to use in teaching initial literacy hence teacher's delivery of lessons was negatively affected. Researchers concluded that learners performed poorly in literacy due to the fact that the zoned language was unfamiliar to learners in that area where it was used as a medium of teaching literacy. It is therefore recommended that the Ministry of General Education through the Curriclum Development Center should develop and produce and distribute learning materials for the teaching of literacy in grades one to four. Furthermore, lessons for literacy should be taught using concrete and real teaching and learning resources that can enhance learning. Additionally, there is a need to start thinking about the possibility of rezoning the whole country.


On September 17, 1996, Allan Rock, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, and Herb Grey, Solicitor General of Canada, announced "tough new measures" to deal with dangerous offenders. These measures were introduced in Bill C-55, which received Royal Assent on April 15, 1997. The following comment focuses on only one significant change to the dangerous offender legislation. As part of these measures, the new section 753(4) of the Criminal Code removes a judge's discretion to award a determinate sentence once an accused is found to be a dangerous offender. This discretionary power is which existed in the former legislation replaced with a mandatory indeterminate sentence imposed once an offender is labeled a dangerous offender. First, this comment briefly examines the application process and the procedure formerly involved with the dangerous offender provisions of the Criminal Code prior to the Amendment. This will serve to demonstrate the procedures and safeguards the courts must follow when labeling an accused a dangerous offender. This comment will then use the two cases of R. v. Neve (1995), 160 AR 255 (QB) and R. v. Gaudry (1996), 186 AR 91 (Prov Ct)  to illustrate the expansive use the courts are making of the dangerous offender legislation. After a discussion of the purpose of the amendment, this comment turns to an examination of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the potential for new Charter challenges arising from the amendment. An expansive use of Part XXIV coupled with the mandatory indefinite sentence could result in the violation of an accused's Charter rights. It is likely that the courts will find a violation of section 7 of the Charter based on the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in R. v. Heywood. Subsequently, this comment analyzes the Supreme Court's past reasoning on certain issues with respect to section 7 and section 12 Charter challenges. The issues considered include the reliance of the courts on unreliable psychiatric evidence and faulty procedural safeguards. The discussion involves looking at how the Court has justified Part XXIV of the Criminal Code in the past and how some of these justifications may no longer be available since the passage of the amendment. The final section provides recommendations to address the real dangers of a mandatory indeterminate sentence and possible opportunities for new Charter challenges.


The rise of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in industrial applications imposes novel demands on existing wireless protocols. The deterministic and synchronous multi-channel extension (DSME) is a recent amendment to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, which aims for highly reliable, deterministic traffic in these industrial environments. It offers TDMA-based channel access, where slots are allocated in a distributed manner. In this work, we propose a novel scheduling algorithm for DSME which minimizes the delay in time-critical applications by employing reinforcement learning (RL) on deep neural networks (DNN).


Observational and theoretical arguments suggest that the momentum carried in mass outflows from AGN can reach several times L/c, corresponding to outflow rates of hundreds of solar masses per year. Radiation pressure on resonant absorption lines alone may not be sufficient to provide this momentum deposition, and the transfer of reprocessed IR radiation in dusty nuclear gas has been postulated to provide the extra enhancement. The efficacy of this mechanism, however, will be sensitive to multidimensional effects such as the tendency for the reprocessed radiation to preferentially escape along sightlines of lower column density. We use Monte Carlo radiative transfer calculations to determine the radiation force on dusty gas residing within approximately 30 parsecs from an accreting supermassive black hole. We calculate the net rate of momentum deposition in the surrounding gas and estimate the mass-loss rate in the resulting outflow as a function of solid angle for different black hole luminosities, sightline-averaged column densities, clumping parameters, and opening angles of the dusty gas. We find that these dust-driven winds carry momentum fluxes of 1-5 times L/c and correspond to mass-loss rates of 10-100 M per year for a 10 8 M black hole radiating at or near its Eddington limit. These results help to explain the origin of high velocity molecular and atomic outflows in local ULIRGs, and can inform numerical simulations of galaxy evolution including AGN feedback. Subject headings: black hole physics – galaxies: active – galaxies: kinematics and dynamics – galaxies: nuclei – radiative transfer – quasars: general


Mid-infrared spectroscopic techniques rely on the specific "fingerprint" absorption lines of molecules in the mid-infrared band to detect the presence and concentration of these molecules. Despite being very sensitive and selective, bulky and expensive equipment such as cooled mid-infrared detectors is required for conventional systems. In this paper, we demonstrate a miniature CMOS-compatible Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) photothermal transducer for mid-infrared spectroscopy which can potentially be made in high volumes and at a low cost. The optical absorption of an analyte in the mid-infrared wavelength range (3.25–3.6 μm) is thermally transduced to an optical transmission change of a microring resonator through the thermo-optic effect in silicon. The photothermal signal is further enhanced by locally removing the silicon substrate beneath the transducer, hereby increasing the effective thermal isolation by a factor of 40. As a proof-of-concept, the absorption spectrum of a polymer that has been locally p...


The objective of this study was to measure angler participation and success of a "put and take" trout fishery established in the Blue River in south central Oklahoma. The 374-ha Blue River Public Fishing and Hunting Area is located 4.8 km east and 9.7 km north of Tishomingo in Johnston County. This area was purchased from private ownership by the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation through Aid to Fish and Wildlife Restoration Funds (Project FW-24-L) during 1967. The main attraction of this area is the 2.8-km part of Blue River that flows from north to south across the east portion of the area. This scenic stream maintains 30 to 60 c.f.s. flows minus flood water. The upper Blue River is fed by springs and flows over numerous granite boulders forming waterfalls and pools that further enhance fishing and aesthetic values. Because of the numerous springs, water temperatures generally remain below 21 C except in July, August, and September, when temperatures are near 27 C. The main objective in the management area is to provide anglers access to quality stream fishing. The Blue River Area operates a "put and take" trout fishery from the last Saturday in October to March 31 of the following year. Anglers continue harvesting trout throughout April. Trout are obtained from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Trout Hatchery at Mountain Home, Arkansas. The trout average 228-254 mm in length and 130 g in weight. Creel surveys were conducted annually from 1970 through 1976 as described by Bennett (1) and Mauck (2). Results of these creel surveys are summarized in Table 1. An estimated 12,560 anglers spent 53,082 hours to creel 34,424 trout. The average angler fished approximately four hours to catch three fish. Three-fourths (74.5%) of the anglers visiting the area caught trout. Resident anglers comprised 77.8% of the people utilizing the area. A total of 63.6% of the trout stocked during the study period were harvested. Six consecutive years of creel data indicate an upward trend in the number of trout anglers using the area (11,695 in 1970 to 16,656 in 1976) and the total hours that anglers fished (44,336 to 65,641). The overall harvest rate fluctuated from a low of 55.5% in 1972-1973 to a high of 82.1% in the 1975-1976 season. Angler success and harvest rates are adversely affected by turbid water. Trout seasons during extremely wet years and fluctuating river conditions generally resulted in poorer angler success and harvest rates. The harvest rate of 82.1% during the 1975-1976 trout season was very good because the river remained clear and stable during most of the season. ACKNOWLEDGMENT


Can we leverage the community-contributed collections of rich media on the web to automatically generate representative and diverse views of the world's landmarks? We use a combination of context- and content-based tools to generate representative sets of images for location-driven features and landmarks, a common search task. To do that, we using location and other metadata, as well as tags associated with images, and the images' visual features. We present an approach to extracting tags that represent landmarks. We show how to use unsupervised methods to extract representative views and images for each landmark. This approach can potentially scale to provide better search and representation for landmarks, worldwide. We evaluate the system in the context of image search using a real-life dataset of 110,000 images from the San Francisco area.


In this paper, starting from the two-sector Uzawa-Lucas model, we study a three-sector endogenous growth model with leisure services. By extending the endogenous growth model with leisure developed by Ladron-de Guevara et al. [1999], our model generalizes the standard time allocation problem, in that it explicitly accounts for the way total time is allocated between work, education, purely free time and time spent on leisure services, where the latter represents therefore an additional time-consuming activity. Accordingly, service consumption is tied to a production sector for leisure services in our model. We fully characterize Balanced Growth Path (BGP) equilibria in terms of time allocation and growth, and show that multiple BGPs are possible. Since service production plays an important role in economic development, we carry out a comparative analysis of the dynamic performance of different economic systems - Post-Industrial Economy vs. Service Economy - along a BGP.


What does European modernity look like from the extremely peripheral perspective of Svalbard, a Norwegian High-Arctic archipelago located approximately midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole? This is a questions that informs my reading of two personal narratives describing twentieth-century Svalbard as an emergent form of place, in Eric Prieto's term an entre-deux , that is no longer "outside time" as an uncharted Arctic wilderness, yet still not a location that has become thoroughly subsumed into European modernity. Both are memoirs published in 1955, Svalbard var min verden by the former trapper and hunter Arthur Oxaas (1888-1972), Nord for det ode hav by Liv Balstad (1915-1966), wife of the first post-war Norwegian governor of Svalbard. While Svalbard var min verden is a predominantly nostalgic retrospective of a historical era of hunting and trapping that had come to an with the Second World War, Nord for det ode hav looks forward to a future in which Svalbard has become fully integrated in the modern Norwegian welfare society. However, both narratives share an emphasis on the Heideggerian topic of place-making through building and dwelling, as well as a gendered vision of an Arctic modernity based on the feminine-coded values of family, homemaking and everyday life.


Haunted Data explores the challenges of 21st century media and computational cultures to our understandings of the media, mediation, representation, affect, power and subjectivity. The book specifically looks at how software-driven transactions are changing scientific innovation, progress, discussion, review, debate and the nature of consensus and controversy. Focusing specifically on two controversies in the area of "weird science", including interspecies communication and extra-sensory perception, it argues that focusing on the odd, strange, anomalous, aberrant, freakish, bizarre, peculiar and unusual provides a route into developing the possibilities for more creative, speculative, open and adventurous science. The book suggests that both science and computational culture are haunted by both the histories and excesses of their own storytelling and that these excesses surface in "queer aggregations" or haunted data to be mined, poached and put to work in newly emergent contexts and settings. Haunted Data develops a form of transmedial storytelling drawn from postcolonial and critical race studies in order to re-move "ghost data" as they appear in dead-ends, deferrals, redactions, re-codings and gaps. These often lead to submerged and displaced narratives and disavowed and disqualified actors and agents. Drawing from radical philosophies of science, feminist science studies, queer theory, cultural studies, and the field of affect studies, the book develops a manifesto for how artists, philosophers and humanities scholars might engage creatively and critically with science within the context of digital communication.


This is about the pedagogical experience ahead of or beyond any pedagogical activity or action. It is therefore about perfectibility and/or dealing with something both theoretically and existentially. It is about inclusion and dialogue, but in an indirect manner, and school as a low threshold institution: heterogeneity, pluralism and multiculturalism as the primary characteristics of a modern school in a modern society. This makes school an institution important to life and knowledge. The need for a pedagogy created through a strong scientific orientation through practice or as I prefer; realism, urgent: Pedagogy framed by a good, relevant and strong understanding of context. This makes demands on teachers' competence. It demands more than possessing pedagogical scientific competence. A certain extent of double(d) competence and more is demanded both about what happens in science and about what happens in society and openness always through language and critical thinking or philosophy. This is about becoming teacher in/and for the fractured future and about what we might "give" (student) teachers in addition.


Use of neutron noise analysis in pressurized water reactors to detect and diagnose degradation represents the practice of proactive structural health monitoring for reactor vessel internals. Recent enhancements to this remote condition monitoring and diagnostic computational framework quantify the sensitivity of the structural dynamics to different degradation scenarios. This methodology leverages benchmarked computational structural mechanics models and machine learning methods to enhance interpretability of neutron noise measurement results. The novelty of the methodology lies not in the particular technologies and algorithms but in our amalgamation into a holistic computational framework for structural health monitoring. Recent experience revealed successful deployment of this methodology to proactively diagnose different degradation scenarios, thus enabling prognostic asset management for reactor structures.


Automatic symbolic tra c scene analysis is essential to many areas of IVHS (Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems). Tra c scene information can be used to optimize tra c ow during busy periods, identify stalled vehicles and accidents, and aid the decision-making of an autonomous vehicle controller. Improvements in technologies for machine vision-based surveillance and high-level symbolic reasoning have enabled us to develop a system for detailed, reliable tra c scene analysis. The machine vision component of our system employs a correlation-based tracker and a physical motion model using a Kalman lter to extract vehicle trajectories over a sequence of tra c scene images. The symbolic reasoning component uses a dynamic belief network to make inferences about tra c events such as vehicle lane changes and stalls. In this paper, we discuss the key tasks of the vision and reasoning components as well as their integration into a working prototype. Preliminary results of an implementation on special purpose hardware using C-40 Digital Signal Processors show that near real-time performance can be achieved without further improvements. keywords: Video Image Processing, Tra c Surveillance, PATH, Incident Detection, Computer Vision, Automatic Vehicle Classi cation, Arti cial Intelligence, Advanced Tra c Management Systems.


The Flash of Capital analyzes the links between Japan's capitalist history and its film history, illuminating what these connections reveal about film culture and everyday life in Japan. Looking at a hundred-year history of film and capitalism, Eric Cazdyn theorizes a cultural history that highlights the spaces where film and the nation transcend their customary borders—where culture and capital crisscross—and, in doing so, develops a new way of understanding historical change and transformation in modern Japan and beyond.

Cazdyn focuses on three key moments of historical contradiction: colonialism, post-war reconstruction, and globalization. Considering great classics of Japanese film, documentaries, works of science fiction, animation, and pornography, he brings to light cinematic attempts to come to terms with the tensions inherent in each historical moment—tensions between the colonizer and the colonized, between the individual and the collective, and between the national and the transnational. Paying close attention to political context, Cazdyn shows how formal inventions in the realms of acting, film history and theory, thematics, documentary filmmaking, and adaptation articulate a struggle to solve implacable historical problems. This innovative work of cultural history and criticism offers explanations of historical change that challenge conventional distinctions between the aesthetic and the geopolitical.


We have developed a continuous-wave, lamp-pumped, intracavity frequency-doubled laser that provides as much as 13.5 W of power in the green, linearly polarized TEM00 output, and very low misalignment sensitivity. These results have been obtained with a Nd:YLF rod of large cross section, a lithium triborate frequency-doubling crystal, and a novel resonator design. We demonstrate that the problem of power fluctuations and chaos in this class of lasers (the green problem) can effectively be overcome and that fluctuations of less than ±1% on a millisecond time scale can be obtained.


A growing trend is connection of new renewable energy resources to the power system. Small and medium-scale hydroelectric and wind power plants are examples of such new production with economic incentives being connected to the power system. The energy resources are often found in rural areas, and distribution networks are a feasible choice for connection. When connected, in general they are denoted distributed generation (DG). Connecting DG to distribution networks may imply challenges related to voltage rise, due to inherent network properties and the resulting power flow. Voltage control is necessary to obtain satisfactory voltage level at all operational situations. An effective voltage regulation may be achieved by use of an on-load-tap-changer (OLTC). The main contribution of the thesis is moving away from a conventional transformer voltage control in which voltage are kept constant at the transformer secondary side to an approach in which power flow decides tap-changer position. Voltage level is a function of power flow through the transformer. Measured voltage and line current are used to determine tap-changer setting on an OLTC equipped transformer. Power loss and coordination with other voltage regulation mechanisms are focused. The input signal to the tap-changer control are manipulated by use of parameters multiplied with the measured line current and added together with the measured voltage. The principle is the same as used in the traditional transformer model with line drop compensation. It requires no communication. Compensation parameters are determined by a desired contribution at a given operational situation. A droop relation between active power flow and transformer secondary side voltage is obtained by use of these parameters. Assessment and analysis of voltage control are carried out through power flow calculations and dynamic simulations. From simulations and calculations performed on simplified radial networks, the transformer voltage droop control is seen to be beneficial with respect to reducing network losses. In addition, it can be used to ease coordination with other voltage regulation mechanisms. Other voltage regulation mechanisms could be voltage regulators on synchronous generators. Results from a given network presented indicates that a loss reduction by some 15 \% can be obtained when adapting tap-changer position to network operational situation. Furthermore, results indicates that traditional tap-changer control methods may cause erroneous tap-changer operation in networks with high share of DG production. A challenge in networks with low reactance/resistance relation with high share of DG production at low load, may be export of active power and import of reactive power. The mentioned operational situation may be related to challenges with OLTC operation. Reactive power is seen to have a greater impact on tap-changer operation than active power. Export of active power may cause voltage rise along the network feeder, while import of reactive power may imply undesired tap-changer operation and increased losses. By use of the proposed transformer voltage droop control scheme, challenges related to opposite direction of active and reactive power causing challenges with OLTC operation are seen to be reduced.


We discuss the trapping features of cholesteric liquid crystal as a self-organized photonic crystal and suggest it for absorption improvement. The imperfection of the absorbing surface is manifested by the reflection originating from the indispensable impedance mismatch. The reflection can be suppressed by an additional surface coating to reflect the light back to the absorber once again. In the simple consideration this reflection loop is possible only twice. For a right-handed CLC coating, the boundary reflection switches the light polarization from left to right circular in the first loop and it switches in the second loop back to the left circular polarization before the emerging light finally escapes from the absorbing process. The enhancement of light absorption is possible in the frequency range as large as the photonic bang gap of the cholesteric layer, which can be adjusted as desired.


The prevalence rates of allergic diseases such as
allergic rhinitis and asthma appear to be increasing in
many countries. Although several mediators are
involved in the pathophysiology of allergic
diseases, histamine plays a fundamental role,
particularly in allergic rhinitis and urticaria.
Produced and stored within the cyto-plasmic
granules of mast cells and basophils, histamine is
released in large quantities during the immediate phase of allergic reactions.1


A new mental health bill has been tabled in the Indian parliament by the health minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad, and it is expected to be passed during the current session.

The Mental Health Care Bill 2013 seeks to protect, promote, and fulfil the rights of people with mental illness and ensure the availability of high quality services, but some initial hurdles delayed the process.

For instance, the original draft of the bill did not decriminalise suicide. It said that people who attempted suicide should be treated as mentally ill, but it nevertheless allowed suicide to remain a criminal offence. However, the parliamentary standing committee raised objections, stating that this would stigmatise such people.

The committee advised the health ministry to define people who attempted suicide as …


The influence of an external strain (or shear) field on the evolution of two identical vortices is investigated in a twodimensional incompressible fluid. Using point vortex modeling, two regimes of the vortex doublet (co-rotation and irreversible separation) are determined; the critical intensity of the large scale flow separating these two regimes for a given initial separation of vortices, is calculated. Finite-area effects are then considered for the vortices. The steady states of piecewise constant vortices are computed algebraically and numerically; positive strain (or shear) favors vortex deformation. This deformation has a dominant elliptical component. An elliptical model of two vortices confirms the point vortex model results for centroid trajectories, and the steady state model results concerning the influence of positive strain on vortex deformation. It also provides an estimate of critical merger distance in the presence of large scale flow. Finally, the finite-time, nonlinear evolution of the vortex doublet is simulated with a numerical code of the 2D vorticity equation. The various regimes (stationarity, merger, co-rotation, ejection) are classified in the plane of initial vortex separation and of external deformation. These regimes are analyzed, and the critical merger distance is evaluated for negative and positive external strain; the results are in agreement with the elliptical model prediction. Merger efficiency, defined as the ratio of final to initial vortex circulation, is computed; for the same initial distance, it is smaller for negative strain. It also depends in a more complex way of the initial vortex distance.


Purpose The overuse of laboratory tests contributes to impair health systems effectiveness, tumor markers (TMs) being a paradigmatic example. In the present study we applied indicators of TMs appropriateness developed from administrative datasets to appraise regionwide overordering in the clinical practice. Patients and methods TMs ordered to outpatients in the Veneto Region over 6 years were obtained from the eletronic Outpatients' Records of Diagnostic and Therapeutic Procedures. TMs orders were examined as aggregated data or stratified according to disease codes, gender, age, and requests per patient. TMs recommended only for specific malignancies were examined using epidemiological data obtained from Veneto Tumor Registry. Results A total of 5,821,251 TMs were ordered in 4,382,159 patients over 6 years. Overall, 3,252,389 (55.9%) TMs were ordered without appropriate disease codes (ranging from 77.0% for PSA to 17.5% for CA15.3). TM orders declined over 6 years (−13.4%), with a noticeable reduction of orders without appropriate disease codes (−21.3%). Orders decreased sharply from 2015 to 2016, after the enactment of a national Decree-Law aimed at improving appropriateness, and remained stable thereafter. However, the rate of inappropriate TMs requests still remained elevated (44.4%) in the last year of observation, with orders of TMs being much higher than expected on the basis of prevalence and incidence figures of specific malignancies. Conclusions Indicators developed from administrative datasets were effective in assessing the overordering of TMs and the impact of interventions to improve appropriateness. The developed indicators could be considered for other diagnostic tests.


Propolis (bee glue) is a resinous secretory product obtained from honeybees (Apis mellifera carnica). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of ethanol extract of propolis (EEP) collected from West Azarbaijan apiaries against dermatophytes and non dermatophitic fungi.

 Material & Methods: In this study antifungal activity of propolis on Microsporum canis, Microsporum gypseum, Microsporum nanum, Trichophyton rubrum, Trichophyton mentagrophytes, Epidermophyton floccosum, Candida albicans, Aspergillus nijer, and saccaromyces serevisiae were compared with that of nystatin as standard antifungal drug. Two susceptibility testing techniques (Micro-broth dilution method and Agar-well diffusion method) were used to evaluate antifungal activity of EEP against these micro-organisms. Moreover, the chemical composition of propolis was determined by the method of Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS).

 Results: The ethanol extract of propolis has an inhibitory effect on all tested fungi and the MIC of propolis was 62.5-500 µg/ml and 62.5-125 µg/ml for dermatophytes and non-dermatophytes, respectively. Twenty-six compounds were identified by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry analysis. The Chemical composition of EEP included considerable amount of flavonoids.

 Conclusion: According to the results obtained from the present work, it was concluded that EEP has a suitable application in pharmacy, cosmetics, health and food industry. These antifungal properties would warrant further studies on the clinical applications of propolis.


Structured matrices, such as those derived from Kronecker products (KP), are effective at compressing neural networks, but can lead to unacceptable accuracy loss when applied to large models. In this paper, we propose the notion of doping -- addition of an extremely sparse matrix to a structured matrix. Doping facilitates additional degrees of freedom for a small number of parameters, allowing them to independently diverge from the fixed structure. To train LSTMs with doped structured matrices, we introduce the additional parameter matrix while slowly annealing its sparsity level. However, we find that performance degrades as we slowly sparsify the doping matrix, due to co-matrix adaptation (CMA) between the structured and the sparse matrices. We address this over dependence on the sparse matrix using a co-matrix dropout regularization (CMR) scheme. We provide empirical evidence to show that doping, CMA and CMR are concepts generally applicable to multiple structured matrices (Kronecker Product, LMF, Hybrid Matrix Decomposition). Additionally, results with doped kronecker product matrices demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy at large compression factors (10 - 25x) across 4 natural language processing applications with minor loss in accuracy. Doped KP compression technique outperforms previous state-of-the art compression results by achieving 1.3 - 2.4x higher compression factor at a similar accuracy, while also beating strong alternatives like pruning and low-rank methods by a large margin (8% or more). Additionally, we show that doped KP can be deployed on commodity hardware using the current software stack and achieve 2.5 - 5.5x inference run-time speed-up over baseline.


Food is a primary provisioning ecosystem service. The concept of ecosystem services only focuses on the flow of services from nature to humans and doesn't consider human flows, which include both the flows from human to nature (i.e. the co-production of ecosystem services or environmental pressures caused by humans) and human to human flows (i.e. social flows). Neglecting human flows is a main issue for modelling food provision within the ecosystem services framework, especially so under a food security perspective, where food access greatly depend on economic entitlements and social networks. We use the example of food security to provide a blueprint for modelling the sustainability of provisioning ecosystem services by incorporating human flows. We adopt an agent-based perspective that allows not only to capture critical flows between agents, but also to tag social agents with heterogeneous roles and behaviors. In complex coupled human-natural systems individual human behavior affects the emergence of collective outcomes of natural resource management. We conceptually model household behavior in the context of food provision within a rural village by framing it into a social-ecological governance compass based on four cardinal directions: differentiation, conformation, cooperation and competition. We argue that by acting together towards diet diversity, differentiation and cooperation may stimulate the rise of human flows that make a rural community more food secure. When generalized to the ecosystem services paradigm, the consequences of this study stand out. From a descriptive point of view scientists could draw more informed conclusions on both the environmental and social sustainability of the ecosystem services dynamics. From a normative point of view science could inform policy-making on how to stimulate the human flows that better optimize the flow of benefits from nature to humans.


This Article has three parts. Part I begins by delineating the protocol one should use to determine whether a society is an immoral society, an amoral society, a goal-based society of moral integrity, or a rights-based society of moral integrity (i.e., a society that engages in a bifurcated prescriptive-moral practice that strongly distinguishes moral-rights claims (about the just) from moral-ought claims (about the good), that is committed to the lexical priority of the just over the good, and that fulfills its commitments to some hard-to-specify, requisite extent). Part I then proceeds to outline the protocol one should use to determine the moral norm that any particular rights-based society is committed to using to derive moral-rights conclusions. It next provides an account of the liberal moral norm that I think our rights-based society is committed to instantiating. It argues that this norm commits us to treating all creatures that have the neurological prerequisites to lead a life of moral integrity (to take their moral obligations seriously and to take seriously as well the dialectical task of choosing a conception of the good and leading a life that is consonant with that conception) with appropriate, equal respect and to showing appropriate, equal concern for such creatures, in part for their welfare as economists understand that concept but primarily for their having a meaningful opportunity to lead a life of moral integrity. Part I concludes by examining the implications of our society's liberal commitments for (1) the tort-related moral duties and rights of its members and participants and (2) the general tort-related duties of its governments and the more specific duties of our society's courts when adjudicating common-law tort cases. This account proceeds from a premise uncongenial to economics that, from the perspective of liberalism, not all effects are commensurable - viz., that any tendency of a choice to deprive moral-rights holders on balance of a meaningful opportunity to lead a life of moral integrity by killing them, depriving them of the neurological prerequisites for leading a life of moral integrity, subjecting them to life-dominating pain, or (perhaps) treating them in ways that substantially undercut their perception that they are the authors of their own lives cannot be offset by any tendency the choice has to increase "mere utility" or "welfare" as economists understand that term. Part I argues inter alia that (1) its claim that ours is a liberal, rights-based society and (2) its account of the implications of that fact for the obligations of our society's members, participants, and common-law judges provide a normative grounding both for something like the Hand formula for negligence and for the common law's treatment of ultrahazardous activities. More specifically, Part 1 argues that liberalism implies that (1) something like the Hand formula for negligence is the appropriate standard for determining tort liability for possibly-tortious choices made by individuals who knew or should have known that their choices should be expected to impose net equivalent-dollar losses on others that reflect "mere-utility losses" the relevant victims sustained, and (2) individuals who made possibly-tortious choices they knew or should have known should be expected to disserve the interests of some others in having a meaningful opportunity to lead a life of moral integrity are liable in tort unless their choices served the on-balance interests of the society's members and participants in having an opportunity to lead such a life. Part 2 then examines whether a common law of torts that seeks solely to secure liberal corrective-justice rights will be economically efficient. More specifically, Part 2 delineates and explores twelve reasons why the correct resolution of a liberal corrective-justice claim may not be economically efficient. Finally, Part 3 identifies and analyzes the moral status (inter alia, the moral legitimacy) and likely generic desirability (moral-rights considerations aside) of the various possible non-common-law components of the positive tort law of a liberal, rights-based State - i.e., of its relevant constitutional law, statutory law, administrative regulations, and truly-judge-made law.


Death had an important and pervasive presence in the middle ages. It was a theme in medieval public life, finding expression both in literature and art. The beliefs and procedures accompanying death were both complex and fascinating. Christopher Daniell's appproach to this subject is unusual 1n bringing together knowledge accumulated from historical, archaeological and literary sources. The book includes the very latest research, both of the author and of others working in this area. The result is a comprehensive and vivid picture of the entire phenomenon of medieval death and burial.


The thesis presents the findings of practice-led research arising from the development of a self-help toolkit. The toolkit comprises a hybrid of person-centred therapy (PCT) and visual journaling, and is aimed at individuals suffering from prolonged grief disorder (PGD) resulting from the loss of the loved one (WHO, 2015; APA, 2013). PCT is renowned for providing an affectionate facilitation to develop a therapeutic relationship between counsellors/therapists and clients/patients (Rogers, 1957; 1965; BAPCA, 2018), while visual journaling is a current self-help approach that uses images and, occasionally, words to record an individual's emotions and daily life experiences for self-expression, self-discovery and self-reflection (Capacchione, 1977, 2015; Ganim & Fox, 1999; Hieb, 2005). The central research question driving this project concerned bringing together those two different methods: How is it possible to bridge the core concerns of PCT and visual journaling to develop a productive hybrid of both in the form of a self-help toolkit that provides a therapeutic environment for its users? This thesis charts the development process of this hybrid toolkit. Through practice-led research, autoethnography, user-centred design and qualitative analysis, two prototypes were initiated and tested (non-clinically) with volunteers from the general public who had experienced loss. The research design and methods used are presented within the thesis in five progressive phases. Phase 1 is the process of developing and formulating the hybrid approach by testing it on myself: practices included deploying PCT's conditions of 'being honest and positive' and having a 'compassionate conversation' while exploring current feelings through visual journaling (STAGE 1 trial). Phase 2 involved conducting an autoethnographic study to design the toolkit's first prototype. Phase 3 involved testing the toolkit on a group of nine volunteers recruited from the university network (STAGE 2 trial). Phase 4 refined the toolkit using a user-centred approach to evaluate participants' feedback and develop the second prototype to be more interactive and 'user-friendly': including a step-by-step approach for instructions and one-by-one demonstrations, especially how to draw while engaging in a 'compassionate conversation'. Phase 5 examined the refined toolkit by conducting two further trials: the first of these was with a group of five volunteers from the previous (STAGE 3 trial), while the final trial involved a group of seven volunteers in collaboration with the local community arts organisation, Charnwood Arts, in Loughborough, Leicestershire (STAGE 4 trial). The results of each of these stages of development, testing and refinement have demonstrated that the toolkit answers the project's central question and provides an effective hybrid of PCT and visual journaling for potential therapeutic purposes. Significantly, the practical outcome of this thesis has been to design a toolkit that is the first visual journaling workbook to take a PCT approach designed specifically for PGD. The toolkit has the potential to enrich a person's empathy and to become self-compassionate: thereby enhancing their quality of life. The methodology used in the project, as well as the non-clinical results of the trials, demonstrate that the toolkit is beneficial for health and well-being. This is an important area in current research at the nexus of the creative arts and sciences and that is a further key context for this project. Future research is recommended by collaborating with clinicians or counsellors/therapists to conduct a clinical trial to test the toolkit on those with a clinical diagnosis of PGD.


The twentieth-century art of Latin America is art in the western tradition, and its leading figures - Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Diego Rivera, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, to name only a few - have achieved international stature. Yet much of the writing about this art has offered either a victimized view of an art tradition dominated by foreign models or a romanticized view of what Latin American art should be. This pathfinding book, by contrast, seeks not to "invent" Latin American art but to look at it from the points of view of its own artists and critics. Drawing on some forty years of studying and teaching Latin American art, Jacqueline Barnitz surveys the major currents and artists of the twentieth century in Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America (including Brazil). She progresses chronologically from modernismo and the break with nineteenth-century academic art to some of the trends of the 1980s, setting each movement within its historical and cultural contexts. This grand survey of modern Latin American art will thus be the essential guide to a vibrant art tradition, as well as a vital teaching tool. Lavishly illustrated with color and black-and-white reproductions of major works, it will be useful to artists, collectors, historians, writers, and social scientists, as well as art historians. Jacqueline Barnitz is Professor of Modern Latin American Art at the University of Texas at Austin.


Imprint lithography has been used since the application of the Chinese wax seal to authenticate official documents. In the past century the resolution of the technology has been driven through commercial applications such as vinyl records, CDs and more recently by high definition DVDs. In the past decade, high resolution imprinting has extended the resolution down to sub 10nm features and this fact, coupled with the low cost of the tool, make it attractive as an alternative to other lithographic technologies. More recently the evolution of imprint lithography from thermal imprinting to UV cured materials, has allowed the technology to operate at room temperature (allowing tight overlay) and low material viscosities (important for high throughput), opening up the potential for CMOS applications. This paper will discuss recent progress in align/overlay, throughput, defect density, materials and the availability of sub 20nm templates, along with tool developments, that make the technology a viable option for advanced CMOS beyond 32nm HP design nodes. In addition, imprint lithography is being developed for other large electronic markets such as bit patterned media (BPM) for disk drives, and photonic crystals to increase the brightness and efficiency of LEDs used for solid sate lighting, both of which applications are likely to go into production ahead of sub 32nm CMOS. Since overlay requirements are significantly less, whole wafer (as opposed to step and repeat) imprinting is used for these applications, and the presentation will discuss the synergies with CMOS imprint technology.


The wireless sensor node can only be equipped with a limited power source. In some application scenarios, replenishment of power resources might be impossible. Sensor node lifetime, therefore, shows a strong dependence on battery lifetime. Hence, power conservation and power management take on additional importance. The main task of a sensor node in a sensor field is to detect events, perform quick local data processing, and then transmit the data. Power consumption can hence be divided into three domains: sensing, communication, and data processing. One of the most commonly used Power management techniques is to allow a node to follow sleep-wake up-sample-compute-communicate cycle. Based on the amount of the battery availability, by adopting the proper information dissemenitation schemes, the network life time can be extended. This process relies on hardware support for implementing sleep states, permits the power consumption of a node to be reduced by many orders of magnitude. Keywords—WSN, Energy Consumption, Information Dissemination Schemes, Mobile Sensor Node.


This article analyzes how diplomats from the United States, European Union, and allied organizations marshaled public communication as a political tool in the Republic of Macedonia following the country's 2001 armed conflict. During this period, American and European officials used press conferences, media interviews, public addresses, press releases, and official reports to evaluate and comment on political decisions facing the country. Through an ethnographic elaboration of foreign representatives' participation in the Macedonian public sphere on politics, the article develops how foreign officials' commentary was performative in that its pragmatic effect—of expressing approval or disapproval—produced new and consequential contexts that would affect how others (e.g., Macedonian politicians) participated in the public. In tracing the powerful but fragile ways in which such public interdiscursivity functioned to modulate political decision-making in Macedonia, the article links scholarship on governmentality with that on the public sphere to advance a deeper reading of communicative dimensions of governmentality as well as the governmental politics of publicity.


Excerpt] The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has for many years published various measures of unemployment and other labor market difficulties. There are six "alternative measures of labor underutilization" published each month in the Employment Situation news release. These measures provide insights into a broad range of problems encountered by workers in today's labor market. The official unemployment rate, also referred to in the list of alternative measures as U-3, is defined as the total number of unemployed persons as a percentage of the labor force, while U-1 and U-2 are more narrowly defined and U-4 through U-6 are broader in scope. The original set of alternative measures was first introduced by the BLS in 1976.5 These measures were later revised following the 1994 redesign of the Current Population Survey (CPS) to account for changes in the definitions of certain labor force measures as well as the collection of new data. Since the redesign of the CPS in 1994, the economy has experienced two recessions—in 2001 and in 2007-2009—during which the entire range of alternative measures (U-1 through U-6) increased. This issue of Beyond the Numbers examines trends in the BLS alternative measures of labor underutilization over the period from 1994 to 2014.


Recent studies have shown that nanoparticles, which are approximately 1 to 100 billionths of a meter in size, present unique health and environmental risks. Nevertheless, products enhanced by nanoparticles, such as sunscreen, golf balls, and hard drives, are shipped daily in international trade. With these unique risks in mind, would measures regulating the trade in nanotechnology be subject to the WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures? If they were, would the Agreement objectively balance the unique risks and benefits of trading in nanotechnology? Whether measures regulating the trade in nanotechnology are subject to the SPS Agreement depends on the purpose of such measures. This iBrief argues that because of recent scientific evidence, many such measures are likely to be subject to the SPS Agreement. In addition, since sanitary and phytosanitary measures must be based on scientific evidence, if Members apply the Agreement appropriately, the Agreement would objectively balance the benefits and risks of trading in nanotechnology.


Trails are a primary recreation resource facility on which recreation activities are performed. They provide safe access to non-roaded areas, support recreational opportunities such as hiking, biking, and wildlife observation, and protect natural resources by concentrating visitor traffic on resistant treads. However, increasing recreational use, coupled with poorly designed and/or maintained trails, has led to a variety of resource impacts. Trail managers require objective information on trails and their conditions to monitor trends, direct trail maintenance efforts, and evaluate the need for visitor management and resource protection actions. This paper reviews trail impacts and different types of trail assessments, including inventory, maintenance, and condition assessment approaches. Two assessment methods, point sampling and problem assessment, are compared empirically from separate assessments of a 15-mile segment of the Appalachian Trail in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Results indicate that point sampling and problem assessment methods yield distinctly different types of quantitative information. The point sampling method provides more accurate and precise measures of trail characteristics that are continuous or frequent (e.g., tread width or exposed soil). The problem assessment method is a preferred approach for monitoring trail characteristics that can be easily predefined or are infrequent (e.g., exces- sive width or secondary treads), particularly when information on the location of specific trail impact problems is needed. The advantages and limitations of these two assessment methods are examined in relation to various management and research information needs. The choice and utility of these assessment methods are also discussed.


For two centuries, the private violence of American history has paraded into courts for public trial. Often dramatized by the spectacle of rape and murder, the public trials of private violence increasingly are seen to decide the fates of both the accused and the victim of crime. The fate of community, whether the community of the victim, the accused, or the public, seems at first blush untouched by such trials. Like victims and their families, however, communities struck by violence suffer profound loss. That loss is expressed in the destruction of public discourse, reason, and citizenship. This public ruin is not simply the result of interpretive and material violence; rather it is a consequence as well of the force of law and legal agents. The forum of law's violence is the criminal justice system. The agents of its advocacy are prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers. Their acts and ethics work to shape the prosecution of violence. When that prosecution confronts race, law and community each faces trial and, inevitably, the despoiling of public interracial dialogue. Indeed, the prosecution of racial violence typically silences the reasoned public deliberation and exchange necessary to construct interracial community. The norms and narratives of community and criminal justice heard at the trials of private racial violence by no means ordain this result. Reflecting the institutional and regulatory complexity of multiple prosecutorial roles and burdens, those norms and narratives grant both freedom and constraint in the prosecution of racially motivated violence. Guided by the lessons of law reform movements and the teachings of grassroots community organizations, the challenge for prosecutors in race cases is to overcome the burden of silencing tradition and to explore the discretionary freedom of reconstructing interracial community.


When it comes to hospitalisation, it's not often that we think of it as needed for our mental health, but rather for supporting and restoring our physical wellbeing. Patients are also generally far more accepting of the necessity for a medical procedure than they are of a psychiatric or psychological intervention. "There's a lot of stigma and fear surrounding psychiatric hospitals, because of they way they have been portrayed," says PsychMatters clinical psychologist, Sheethal Behari. All of this makes it more complicated to determine when a mentally ill patient needs in-hospital care and how to go about ensuring they receive the kind of treatment necessary.


Implementing clinical audits is an internationally recognised way of getting evidence into practice. There is an increased emphasis towards conducting audits within the Health Service Executive. Drug treatment centre pharmacies, due to the nature of the specialised services that they provide, are situated at different sites, and variations in practices were expected and accepted.

The aim of the project was to develop and implement an audit programme across eight pharmacies within an eight month period. The objectives were to design/develop and test the audit tool by collecting data across all pharmacies in collaboration with the staff. The HSE Change Model was used for implementing the project. The stages of initiation, planning, implementation and mainstreaming were followed. Both qualitative and quantitative tools were used to inform the change process. Resistance to change was managed by participation and involvement of the staff. The audit tool was successfully developed and tested by collecting data. A comparison of results of the first audit with the re-audit revealed positive progression towards standardisation. In conclusion, this project demonstrated the potential for improved practice standards through the development and implementation of a healthcare audit tool and process. Using a structured approach to the change process proved to be the success factor for sustained change delivery.


Very little is known about what factors predict variations in responses to positive events among youth. Consequently, we examined young adolescents' positive emotional reactions and their savoring and dampening responses to their most intense positive event across a four-day period. The investigated predictors were parent-reported adolescent temperament, adolescent-reported attachment security with mothers and fathers, and researcher-coded event characteristics. The sample was 56 youth (31 boys, 10–14 years of age). More support was found for temperament than attachment. Specifically, effortful control predicted more savoring and sustained positive affect (PA) about the events, whereas negative emotionality predicted more dampening. Adolescents' reports of more secure attachment to fathers were marginally linked to more savoring of their positive event. Girls reported higher levels of initial PA yet endorsed more dampening responses than boys. Event type (interpersonal vs. not) was unrelated to responses to the events. Overall, this study offers new information on the development of PA regulation and responses to positive events in youth.


A number of studies have stressed the role of movements in U.S. interest rates and country spreads in driving business cycles in emerging market economies. At the same time, country spreads have been found to respond to changes in both the U.S. interest rate and domestic conditions in emerging markets. These intricate interrelationships leave open a number of fundamental questions: Do country spreads drive business cycles in emerging countries or vice versa, or both? Do U.S. interest rates affect emerging countries directly or primarily through their effect on country spreads? This paper addresses these and other related questions using a methodology that combines empirical and theoretical elements. The main findings are: (1) U.S. interest rate shocks explain about 20 percent of movements in aggregate activity in emerging market economies at business-cycle frequency. (2) Country spread shocks explain about 12 percent of business-cycle movements in emerging economies. (3) About 60 percent of movements in country spreads are explained by country-spread shocks. (4) In response to an increase in U.S. interest rates, country spreads first fall and then display a large, delayed overshooting; (5) U.S.-interest-rate shocks affect domestic variables mostly through their effects on country spreads. (6) The fact that country spreads respond to business conditions in emerging economies significantly exacerbates aggregate volatility in these countries. (7) The U.S.-interest-rate shocks and country-spread shocks identified in this paper are plausible in the sense that they imply similar business cycles in the context of an empirical VAR model as they do in the context of a theoretical dynamic general equilibrium model of an emerging market economy.


Manual of Business French is the most comprehensive, single-volume reference handbook for students and professionals using French. Designed for all users, no matter what level of language skill, this manual comprises five parts: * A 6000-word, two-way Glossary of the most useful business terms * A 100-page Written Communications section giving models of 50 letters, faxes and documents * An 80-page Spoken Situations section covering face-to-face and telephone situations * A short reference Grammar outlining the major grammar features of French * A short Business Facts section covering esential information of the country or countries where French is used Written by an experienced native and non-native speaker team, this unique volume is an essential, one-stop reference for all students and professionals studying or working in business and management where French is used.


Governments worldwide are starting to give incentives to promote the use of (hybrid) electrical vehicles to achieve cleaner and more energy-efficient road transport with a low carbon footprint. Through tax/VAT reductions and free additional services — such as free parking, and/or battery charging or lower traffic congestion taxes — private users, public organizations and car fleet operators are stimulated to adopt the plug-in (hybrid) electrical vehicle (PHEV). This upcoming breakthrough of PHEVs will impose various challenges to the power grid, such as a significant increase of the load in residential areas and parking spaces as the limited range requires frequent charging. Another challenge is the seamless driver and car identification and fraud-sensitive measuring of the charged energy anywhere a car is charged. On the other hand new opportunities are created as these vehicles allow the storage of power on a wide scale, and typically offer some flexibility during the charging process which can be exploited by smart charging services to balance demand and supply or maximize the local consumption of renewable energy. In this paper we discuss the main actors involved in the charging of leased cars in public parking spaces. We present a novel service architecture and detail the security aspects. Furthermore we discuss how a market-based smart charging algorithm that is plugged into the architecture can exploit the flexibility of the parked cars to maximize the consumption of local generated wind energy. We conclude this paper with the presentation of a new business model for the smart charging of leased cars in public parking spaces, detailing the different actors and value flows.


Axenfeld-Rieger syndrome (ARS) is a rare, autosomal dominant condition characterized by ocular, craniofacial, dental, and periumbilical abnormalities. Relatively little information exists on this syndrome within the dental literature despite the fact that midface hypoplasia and maxillary hypodontia are classical presenting features of this syndrome. This is a case report of a 7-year-old Caucasian female with ARS who presented with significant ocular and dental anomalies. She was also found to have osteopenia. Her dental condition is described, her immediate treatment is shown, and her long-term treatment needs are discussed.


The oceans comprise 70% of the surface area of our planet, contain some of the world's richest natural resources and are one of the most significant drivers of global climate patterns. As the marine environment continues to increase in importance as both an essential resource reservoir and facilitator of global change, it is apparent that to find long-term sustainable solutions for our use of the sea and its resources and thus to engage in a sustainable blue economy, an integrated interdisciplinary approach is needed. As a result, interdisciplinary working is proliferating. We report here our experiences of forming interdisciplinary teams (marine ecologists, ecophysiologists, social scientists, environmental economists and environmental law specialists) to answer questions pertaining to the effects of anthropogenic-driven global change on the sustainability of resource use from the marine environment, and thus to transport ideas outwards from disciplinary confines. We use a framework derived from the literature on interdisciplinarity to enable us to explore processes of knowledge integration in two ongoing research projects, based on analyses of the purpose, form and degree of knowledge integration within each project. These teams were initially focused around a graduate program, explicitly designed for interdisciplinary training across the natural and social sciences, at the Gothenburg Centre for Marine Research at the University of Gothenburg, thus allowing us to reflect on our own experiences within the context of other multi-national, interdisciplinary graduate training and associated research programs.


Background/Context A growing body of literature addresses the experiences of transnational students, but relatively little research has focused on students who negotiate international border crossings on a regular basis. This study documents the role of cross-border mobility in the lives of university students in Brownsville, Texas (U.S.)/Matamoros, Tamaulipas (Mex.) and links students' transnational experiences to their development of critical cosmopolitan identities and perspectives. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This study explores South Texas university students' lived experiences of cross-border mobility at a time of sociopolitical upheaval in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and illuminates how specific forms of mobility can shape students' educational and social subjectivities. Research Design An insider-outsider researcher and two undergraduate insiders collaborated to design and implement the study. An online survey was used to gather basic information about students' cross-border mobility and educational experiences; subsequently, 16 focal participants were selected to participate in ethnographic interviews. Interview data were analyzed in NVivo using a two-cycle coding process and triangulated with survey data. Findings/Results Cross-border mobility offered academic and social benefits to the participants, but the benefits of mobility were inextricable from its drawbacks. Participants acknowledged the everyday difficulties associated with cross-border mobility; they also believed that these difficulties made them more responsible and successful. In addition, while participants spoke openly about the impact of violence on the borderlands, having to navigate this reality allowed them to develop a powerful form of insight connected to "knowing two versions" (one from each side of the border) of events. Conclusions/Recommendations The results invite researchers and educators to engage more critically with the cosmopolitan voices of students from areas often regarded as sites of marginality, poverty, and violence, such as the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Participants' cross-border experiences simultaneously challenged and benefited them; these experiences gave them opportunities to construct, traverse, and inhabit a wider range of emotional geographies where they could make sense of their relationships to people, events, and places on both sides of the border. On the border, conflict of the heart or of the nation has but one cure: recognition of jointness


Introduction: Motivation and retention of village health workers (VHWs) are crucial for the continuity, sustainability, and success of health programs. VHWs are the first point of contact for rural communities, providing health services to improve access and health coverage which, for a variety of logistical reasons, cannot be reached by the district health care system. Thus VHWs are critical for ultimately ensuring universal health coverage. However, systematic review revealed that there are numerous factors that affects their motivation and retention, leading to high dropout rates and hampering the delivery of health services to the community. This review intends to examine contextual factors affecting motivation and retention of VHWs in their roles and identify recommendations and strategies to motivate and retain them in the systems. Method: Five electronic databases and two search engines were accessed. Nineteen studies met the inclusion criteria for the final review. An in-depth reading of all the articles was undertaken to gather and compile the relevant themes. Content analysis was done based on the list of specific categories that are relevant to motivation and retention. Result: Findings from the systematic review revealed different levels of factor affecting motivation and retention of village health workers. It was finally contextualized and categorized into four main domains such as individual, family, social or community and organizational or systems levels. Financial incentives under the organizational factors was highlighted for the demotivation and the discontentment for the VHWs. Conclusion Financial factors under the organization were often key in the studies reviewed. However, there were also many other factors, sometimes surprising or unintuitive, influencing the motivation and retention of village health workers.


Understanding how large neural networks avoid memorizing training data is key to explaining their high generalization performance. To examine the structure of when and where memorization occurs in a deep network, we use a recently developed replica-based mean field theoretic geometric analysis method. We find that all layers preferentially learn from examples which share features, and link this behavior to generalization performance. Memorization predominately occurs in the deeper layers, due to decreasing object manifolds' radius and dimension, whereas early layers are minimally affected. This predicts that generalization can be restored by reverting the final few layer weights to earlier epochs before significant memorization occurred, which is confirmed by the experiments. Additionally, by studying generalization under different model sizes, we reveal the connection between the double descent phenomenon and the underlying model geometry. Finally, analytical analysis shows that networks avoid memorization early in training because close to initialization, the gradient contribution from permuted examples are small. These findings provide quantitative evidence for the structure of memorization across layers of a deep neural network, the drivers for such structure, and its connection to manifold geometric properties.


Water plays a pivotal role in economic activity and in human well-being. Because of the prominence of water in production (primarily for irrigation) and in domestic use (drinking, washing, cooking), conict over water and the effects of gender-inuenced decisions about water may have far-reaching consequences on human well-being, economic growth, and social change. At the same time, social conicts and social change are shaped and mediated, often in unexpected ways, by the natural conditions in which water occurs. The social relations of water are poorly understood. This article introduces a framework for disaggregating condi- tions of access to water and uses it to examine three pressing questions in Bangladesh. First, extraction of groundwater for irrigation has made many drinking-water hand pumps run dry. Second, increasing use of groundwater for drinking has been associated with the poisoning of at least 20 million people through naturally occurring arsenic in groundwater. Third, the article examines some of the ways access to water has been changed by the rise of shrimp aqua- culture for export. This article highlights new directions for the analysis of interactions among water, class, and gender. The existing literature has tended to focus on the implications of gender analysis for government policy, especially development projects and water resources management, and for women's organi- zation. In this article we begin to sketch some questions that arise from a concern to understand the broader context of social change.