The forensic toxicologist faces challenges in the detection of drugs and poisons in biological samples due to transformations which occur both during life and after death. For example, changes can result from drug metabolism during life or from the use of formalin solution for post mortem embalming purposes. The former requires the identification of drug metabolites and the latter the identification of chemical reaction products in order to know which substances had been administered. The work described in this thesis was aimed at providing ways of tackling these challenges and was divided into two parts. Part 1 investigated the use of in vitro drug metabolism by human liver microsomes (HLM) to obtain information on drug metabolites and Part 2 investigated the chemical reactions of drugs and a carbamate pesticide with formalin solution and formalin-blood.
The initial aim of part I was to develop an in vitro metabolism method using HLM, based on a literature review of previous studies of this type. MDMA was chosen as a model compound to develop the HLM method because its metabolism was known and standards of its metabolites were commercially available. In addition, a sensitive and selective method was developed for the identification and quantitation of hydrophilic phase I drug metabolites using LC/MS/MS with a conventional reverse-phase (C18) column. In order to obtain suitable retention factors for polar drug metabolites on this column, acetyl derivatives were evaluated for converting the metabolites to more lipophilic compounds and an optimal separation system was developed. Acetate derivatives were found to be stable in the HPLC mobile phase and to provide good chromatographic separation of the target analytes.
In vitro metabolism of MDMA and, subsequently, of other drugs involved incubation of 4 µg drug substance in pH 7.4 buffer with an NADPH generating system (NGS) at 37oC for 90 min with addition of more NGS after 30 min. The reaction was stopped at 90 min by the addition of acetonitrile before extraction of the metabolites.
Acetate derivatives of MDMA metabolites were identified by LC/MS/MS using multiple reaction monitoring (MRM). Three phase I metabolites (both major and minor metabolites) of MDMA were detected in HLM samples. 3,4-dihydroxy-methamphetamine and 4-hydroxy-3-methoxymethamphetamine were found to be major metabolites of MDMA whereas 3,4-methylenedioxyamphetamine was found to be a minor metabolite. Subsequently, ten MDMA positive urines were analysed to compare the metabolite patterns with those produced by HLM. An LC/MS method for MDMA and its metabolites in urine samples was developed and validated. The method demonstrated good linearity, accuracy and precision and insignificant matrix effects, with limits of quantitation of 0.025 µg/ml. Moreover, derivatives of MDMA and its metabolites were quantified in all 10 positive human urine samples. The urine metabolite pattern was found to be similar to that from HLM.
The second aim of Part 1 was to use the HLM system to study the metabolism of some new psychoactive substances, whose misuse worldwide has necessitated the development of analytical methods for these drugs in biological specimens. Methylone and butylone were selected as representative cathinones and para-methoxyamphetamine (PMA) was chosen as a representative ring-substituted amphetamine, because of the involvement of these drugs in recent drug-related deaths, because of a relative lack of information on their metabolism, and because reference standards of their metabolites were not commercially available.
An LC/MS/MS method for the analysis of methylone, butylone, PMA and their metabolites was developed. Three phase I metabolites of methylone and butylone were detected in HLM samples. Ketone reduction to β-OH metabolites and demethylenation to dihydroxy-metabolites were found to be major phase I metabolic pathways of butylone and methylone whereas N-demethylation to nor-methylone and nor-butylone were found to be minor pathways. Also, demethylation to para-hydroxyamphetamine was found to be a major phase I metabolic pathway of PMA whereas β-hydroxylation to β-OH-PMA was found to be a minor pathway.
Formaldehyde is used for embalming, to reduce decomposition and preserve cadavers, especially in tropical countries such as Thailand. Drugs present in the body can be exposed to formaldehyde resulting in decreasing concentrations of the original compounds and production of new substances. The aim of part II of the study was to evaluate the in vitro reactions of formaldehyde with selected drug groups including amphetamines (amphetamine, methamphetamine and MDMA), benzodiazepines (alprazolam and diazepam), opiates (morphine, hydromorphone, codeine and hydrocodone) and with a carbamate insecticide (carbosulfan). The study would identify degradation products to serve as markers for the parent compounds when these were no longer detectable.
Drugs standards were spiked in 10% formalin solution and 10% formalin blood. Water and whole blood without formalin were used for controls. Samples were analysed by LC/MS/MS at different times from the start, over periods of up to 30 days.
Amphetamine, methamphetamine and MDMA were found to rapidly convert to methamphetamine, DMA and MDDMA respectively, in both formalin solution and formalin blood, confirming the Eschweiler-Clarke reaction between amine-containing compounds and formaldehyde.
Alprazolam was found to be unstable whereas diazepam was found to be stable in both formalin solution and water. Both were found to hydrolyse in formalin solution and to give open-ring alprazolam and open-ring diazepam. Other alprazolam conversion products attached to paraformaldehyde were detected in both formalin solution and formalin blood.
Morphine and codeine were found to be more stable than hydromorphone and hydrocodone in formalin solution. Conversion products of hydromorphone and hydrocodone attached to paraformaldehyde were tentatively identified in formalin solution. Moreover, hydrocodone and hydromorphone rapidly decreased within 24 h in formalin blood and could not be detected after 7 days.
Carbosulfan was found to be unstable in formalin solution and was rapidly hydrolysed within 24 h, whereas in water it was stable up to 48 h. Carbofuran was the major degradation product, plus smaller amounts of other products, 3-ketocarbofuran and 3-hydrocarbofuran. By contrast, carbosulfan slowly hydrolysed in formalin-blood and was still detected after 15 days.

It was concluded that HLM provide a useful tool for human drug metabolism studies when ethical considerations preclude their controlled administration to humans. The use of chemical derivatisation for hydrophilic compounds such as polar drug metabolites for analysis by LC/MS/MS with a conventional C18 column is effective and inexpensive, and suitable for routine use in the identification and quantitation of drugs and their metabolites. The detection of parent drugs and their metabolites or conversion and decomposition products is potentially very useful for the interpretation of cases in forensic toxicology, especially when the original compounds cannot be observed.


This paper introduces the concept and discusses the implications of immersive journalism, which is the production of news in a form in which people can gain first-person experiences of the events or situation described in news stories. The fundamental idea of immersive journalism is to allow the participant, typically represented as a digital avatar, to actually enter a virtually recreated scenario representing the news story. The sense of presence obtained through an immersive system (whether a Cave or head-tracked head-mounted displays [HMD] and online virtual worlds, such as video games and online virtual worlds) affords the participant unprecedented access to the sights and sounds, and possibly feelings and emotions, that accompany the news. This paper surveys current approaches to immersive journalism and the theoretical background supporting claims regarding avatar experience in immersive systems. We also provide a specific demonstration: giving participants the experience of being in an interrogation room in an offshore prison. By both describing current approaches and demonstrating an immersive journalism experience, we open a new avenue for research into how presence can be utilized in the field of news and nonfiction.


Four sett sizes (1, 2, 5, and 10 g) of ginger (Zingiber officinale Rosc.) and three spacings 12 cm W12 cm, 15 cm W 15 cm, and 15 cm W 23 cm) were studied for their effect on sprouting, vegetative growth, yield, and multiplication ratio. Percent sprouting in moist sawdust under greenhouse conditions was highest for the 10 g sett class and decreased with reduction in sett size. The largest and the smallest sett sizes had 100 and 75 per cent sprouting, respectively. There was a direct relationship between sett size planted and both vegetative growth and rhizome yield. The contrary was observed in sett size to rhizome ratio (multiplication ratio). The smallest sett size yielded a multiplication ratio of 9.85 compared to 4.78 for the largest sett size. Of the three spacing regimens investigated, the wider spacings produced higher vegetative growth as well as rhizome yield per plant. However, rhizome yield/ha was adversely affected by wider spacing. The highest yield of 29.69 t/ha was produced from the largest sett size (10 g) planted at the closest spacing of 12 cm W 12 cm. The combination of smallest sett size and widest spacing produced the lowest rhizome yield of 3.37 t/ha.
 Ghana Jnl agric. Sci. Vol.31(2) 1998: 175-180


Both thyrotoxicosis and hypothyroidism are associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes. There also is concern about the effect of overt maternal thyroid disease on fetal development. In addition, medications that affect the maternal thyroid gland can cross the placenta and affect the fetal thyroid gland. This document reviews the thyroid-related pathophysiologic changes that occur during pregnancy and the effects of overt and subclinical maternal thyroid disease on maternal and fetal outcomes. This Practice Bulletin has been updated with information on the diagnosis and the management of thyroid disease in pregnant women and includes a new clinical algorithm on management of thyroid disease in pregnancy.


Data mining is an iterative and interactive process that explores and analyzes voluminous digital data to discover valid, novel, and meaningful patterns (Mohammed, 1999). Since digital data may have terabytes of records, data mining techniques aim to find patterns using computationally efficient techniques. It is related to a subarea of statistics called exploratory data analysis. During the past decade, data mining techniques have been used in various business, government, and scientific applications. Association rule mining (Agrawal, Imielinsky & Sawmi, 1993) is one of the most studied fields in the data-mining domain. The key strength of association mining is completeness. It has the ability to discover all associations within a given dataset. Two important constraints of association rule mining are support and confidence (Agrawal & Srikant, 1994). These constraints are used to measure the interestingness of a rule. The motivation of association rule mining comes from market-basket analysis that aims to discover customer purchase behavior. However, its applications are not limited only to market-basket analysis; rather, they are used in other applications, such as network intrusion detection, credit card fraud detection, and so forth. The widespread use of computers and the advances in network technologies have enabled modern organizations to distribute their computing resources among different sites. Various business applications used by such organizations normally store their day-to-day data in each respective site. Data of such organizations increases in size everyday. Discovering useful patterns from such organizations using a centralized data mining approach is not always feasible, because merging datasets from different sites into a centralized site incurs large network communication costs (Ashrafi, David & Kate, 2004). Furthermore, data from these organizations are not only distributed over various locations, but are also fragmented vertically. Therefore, it becomes more difficult, if not impossible, to combine them in a central location. Therefore, Distributed Association Rule Mining (DARM) emerges as an active subarea of data-mining research. Consider the following example. A supermarket may have several data centers spread over various regions across the country. Each of these centers may have gigabytes of data. In order to find customer purchase behavior from these datasets, one can employ an association rule mining algorithm in one of the regional data centers. However, employing a mining algorithm to a particular data center will not allow us to obtain all the potential patterns, because customer purchase patterns of one region will vary from the others. So, in order to achieve all potential patterns, we rely on some kind of distributed association rule mining algorithm, which can incorporate all data centers. Distributed systems, by nature, require communication. Since distributed association rule mining algorithms generate rules from different datasets spread over various geographical sites, they consequently require external communications in every step of the process (Ashrafi, David & Kate, 2004; Assaf & Ron, 2002; Cheung, Ng, Fu & Fu, 1996). As a result, DARM algorithms aim to reduce communication costs in such a way that the total cost of generating global association rules must be less than the cost of combining datasets of all participating sites into a centralized site.


TREATMENT OF DISEASES WITH ANIMAL ORIGIN MATERIALS IN BYZANTINE MEDICAL TEXTS: CONTRIBUTION TO THE STUDY OF CONCEPTIONS ABOUT DISEASES AND THERAPIES IN BYZANTIUM  Byzantine doctors generally dealt with several issues of human health, following the patterns of the ancient Greek physicians and in particular Hippocrates, Dioskourides and Galen. One of the most important issues included in their texts is diet and its relation to health. As a result, a basic category of byzantine medical texts are nutritional manuals. The authors refer to nutritional value of foods, and the medicinal properties of each food, because they consider that there is a direct interaction between food and a proportion of the four fluids (χυμοί) of the human organism, according to ancient Greek medical concepts: blood, phlegm yellow bile and black bile . Disruption of the proportion of fluids (χυμοί) in the human organism is considered as primarily responsible for the appearance of malfunctions and disease. On the contrary, a balanced ratio of fluids is crucial for maintaining good health. Animal products are frequently mentioned in byzantine medical texts, either as dietary items, or as pharmaceutical preparations for the prevention and treatment of several diseases. In the present study suggested remedies of diseases with the use of animal products are mentioned analytically, as recorded in the texts of byzantine physicians. In an addendum diseases are described as they are recorded in the texts, aiming at a comparatively studying their appellation both in Byzantine and Modern medicine.


Funded by Muslim-American donors, legitimate U.S.-based Muslim charities for decades provided crucial funds and services in geographic areas ravaged by natural disasters, many with Muslim populations. These charities' humanitarian aid, offered directly or through local non-governmental organizations, benefited the affected people, winning their gratitude and allegiance during the rescue, relief, recovery, and reconstruction operations following tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, and other such catastrophes. Their assistance also conserved and expanded opportunities to provide development aid to these same regions and individuals, not only to improve their communities and lives but also to secure their hearts and minds. The U.S. government's "war on terror" dramatically impacted these constructive influences and relationships. The post-9/11 counterterrorism laws and their stern enforcement fomented fear and anger among Muslim-Americans, substantially diminishing their goodwill toward the government. The government's actions also engendered an inhospitable philanthropic environment for Muslim-Americans. These resulted in a significant reduction in Muslim-Americans' charitable giving to legitimate U.S.-based Muslim charities for humanitarian relief and development aid abroad without a commensurate expansion in their giving to U.S.-based secular charities. The chilling effect on legal overseas assistance efforts to extremely needy Muslim populations has increased opportunities for foreign terrorist organizations, including those with dual militant and social welfare purposes, to obtain funding through unregulated or under-regulated channels. These conniving organizations then provide post-disaster and development aid to these especially vulnerable people, capturing new adherents. For years, the Muslim-American community has asserted without apparent success that the relevant counterterrorism laws and the government's actions violate their rights protected by the First Amendment's Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses. This article advocates that new strategies to address these pressing issues should be considered. It first suggests reframing the underlying issue for "the court of public opinion" and policymakers as a governmental denial of a specific core human right: human dignity. It then proposes that a step toward restoring such human dignity could be for the government and the Muslim-American community to collaboratively work to cultivate new legitimate U.S.-based Muslim humanitarian relief organizations as responders to natural disasters affecting Muslims abroad. Implementation of these approaches might help reclaim the hearts and minds of disaffected Muslim-Americans, as well as set the stage for rebuilding the longer-term loyalty of Muslims assisted overseas.


The New Urbanism is one of the most influential planning movements since the
late 20th century. The planning ideas and successful projects of New Urbanism
are leading us to pursue the better living conditions. Under the influence of
globalization, as the world's fastest growing countries, the urban construction
of China inevitably affected by the impact of new ideas. Meanwhile, during the
process of construction emerged some urban problems.
In the growing process of urbanization and suburbanization, the planning of
Chinese residential areas still remain the mode of function division and sprawl
development. Therefore, the application of advanced new ideas to improve the
planning of Chinese residential area is well worth researching.
This paper starts with issues about Chinese contemporary residential community
planning, and then confirms the research question. After that, this paper
introduces the related concepts to define the objects of research. Through the
theoretical study, extract the New Urbanism community design concepts. And
then, analysis the design concepts, study three practical cases of New Urbanism
residential community and two cases of Chinese residential community, combining
with the site observation, summarize the possibilities and opportunity of
residential community planning in China. Meanwhile, proposed the planning
ideas, which is on the basis of the research before, and design a proposal in
Beijing to implement the research question. Finally, evaluate the proposal and
clarify the research result, points out the problems that need further
investigation.


Abstract. It has been suggested that increasing terrestrial water discharge to the Arctic Ocean may partly occur as submarine groundwater discharge (SGD), yet there are no direct observations of this phenomenon in the Arctic shelf seas. This study tests the hypothesis that SGD does exist in the Siberian Arctic Shelf seas, but its dynamics may be largely controlled by complicated geocryological conditions such as permafrost. The field-observational approach in the southeastern Laptev Sea used a combination of hydrological (temperature, salinity), geological (bottom sediment drilling, geoelectric surveys), and geochemical (224Ra, 223Ra, 228Ra, and 226Ra) techniques. Active SGD was documented in the vicinity of the Lena River delta with two different operational modes. In the first system, groundwater discharges through tectonogenic permafrost talik zones was registered in both winter and summer. The second SGD mechanism was cryogenic squeezing out of brine and water-soluble salts detected on the periphery of ice hummocks in the winter. The proposed mechanisms of groundwater transport and discharge in the Arctic land-shelf system is elaborated. Through salinity vs. 224Ra and 224Ra / 223Ra diagrams, the three main SGD-influenced water masses were identified and their end-member composition was constrained. Based on simple mass-balance box models, discharge rates at sites in the submarine permafrost talik zone were 1. 7 × 106 m3 d−1 or 19.9 m3 s−1, which is much higher than the April discharge of the Yana River. Further studies should apply these techniques on a broader scale with the objective of elucidating the relative importance of the SGD transport vector relative to surface freshwater discharge for both water balance and aquatic components such as dissolved organic carbon, carbon dioxide, methane, and nutrients.


Purpose

Resilience in agri-food supply chains (AFSCs) is an area of significant importance due to growing supply chain volatility. While the majority of research exploring supply chain resilience has originated from a supply chain management perspective, many other disciplines (such as environmental systems science and the social sciences) have also explored the topic. As complex social, economic and environmental constructs, the priority of resilience in AFSCs goes far beyond the company specific focus of supply chain management works and would conceivably benefit from including more diverse academic disciplines. However, this is hindered by inconsistencies in terminology and the conceptual components of resilience across different disciplines. The purpose of this study is to use a systematic literature review to identify which multidisciplinary aspects of resilience are applicable to AFSCs and to generate a novel AFSC resilience framework.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper uses a structured and multidisciplinary review of 137 articles in the resilience literature followed by critical analysis and synthesis of findings to generate new knowledge in the form of a novel AFSC resilience framework.

Findings

Findings indicate that the complexity of AFSCs and subsequent exposure to almost constant external interference means that disruptions cannot be seen as a one-off event; thus, resilience must concern the ability to not only maintain core function but also adapt to changing conditions.

Practical implications

A number of resilience elements can be used to enhance resilience, but their selection and implementation must be carefully matched to relevant phases of disruption and assessed on their broader supply chain impacts. In particular, the focus must be on overall impact on the ability of the supply chain as a whole to provide food security rather than to boost individual company performance.

Originality/value

The research novelty lies in the utilisation of wider understandings of resilience from various research fields to propose a rigorous and food-specific resilience framework with end consumer food security as its main focus.


Blogs provide an open space for scholars to share information, communicate about their research, and reach a diversified audience. Posts in academic blogs are usually hybrid texts where various genres are connected and recontextualized; yet little research has examined how these genres function together to support scholars' activity. The purpose of this article is to analyze how the affordances of new media enable the integration of different genres and different languages in research group blogs written by multilingual scholars and to explore how various genres are coordinated in these blogs to accomplish specific tasks. The study reported in this article shows that the functionalities of the digital medium allow research groups to incorporate myriad genres into their genre ecology and interconnect these genres in opportunistic ways to accomplish complex objectives: specifically, to publicize the group's research and activities, make the work of the group members available to the disciplinary community, strengthen social links within their community and connect with the interested public, and raise social awareness. Findings from this study provide insights into the ways in which scholars write networked, multimedia, multigenre texts to support the group's social and work activity.


This thesis attempts to describe lexical relationships
between sentences in text and between utterances in
discourse in the light of pragmatics and psycholinguistics. It was inspired by Halliday and Hasan's pioneering effort
to describe relationships of cohesion in text but it goes beyond their taxonomy of lexical cohesion to include
pragmatic aspects that can serve the purposes of PL
reading research
Thus, the motivation of the present research is twofold:

i To describe lexical cohesion as a "competence"
phenomenon by determining the factors contributing to its achievement in text.
ii To provide an account of lexical cohesion as a
"performance" phenomenon by investigating the factors
affecting its interpretation in FL reading comprehension.
The articulation of the thesis reflects these two
issues: the first Chapter is a linguistic account of
lexical cohesion in English. It lays out the basis on
which cohesion and lexical cohesion should be distinguished
from coherence and lexical coherence, and reviews the
literature which has treated these phenomena in relation to the theoretical framework adopted for the present study. Thus, two main categories are proposed for the analysis of lexical cohesion as a competence and performance phenomenon: lexicosemantic cohesion which accounts for the
connectedness of "text" and lexicopragmatic coherence
which is a feature of the connectedness of "discourse".
The Chapter also provides detailed analysis of the lexical
devices of cohesion and coherence in the light of theories
of semantics and pragmatics.
Chapter Two examines the involvement of the cognitive factor in the analysis of lexical cohesion. It deals with the concept of "background" or "schematic" knowledge viewed as an essential component of the reading process and investigates the role of top-down and bottom-up processes in the making of linguistic and pragmatic inferences
specifically when unknown vocabulary items are encountered in reading (comprehension). In Chapter Three an experimental investigation of the linguistic and non- linguistic features of the interpretation of lexical
cohesion in reading comprehension is proposed. It seeks to inquire into the processing of lexicoreferential, lexicosubstitutional and "conjunctive" relationships of cohesion and coherence by non-native readers of English and attempts to answer the following three research questions:
iii
1 How do FL learners 1
linguistic cohesion
inferencing unknown
2 How does the use of
coherence vary as a
3 How does the use of
coherence vary as a
ztilise lexical resources or links of
and pragmatic coherence when
meaning while reading?
lexical resources of cohesion and
function of FL proficiency?
lexical resources of cohesion and
function of language background?
Four experiments were designed to that effect and nullhypotheses
were formulated to test the performance of
subjects on a cloze test in four types of independent
variables. The findings which reveal that the use of
lexical resources of cohesion and coherence were a function
of language proficiency rather than language background, bear some pedagogical and other implications which are
discussed in the final Chapter.


Let $\{X_t\}_{t \geq 0}$ be a symmetric, nearest-neighbor random walk on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ with exponential holding times of expectation $1/d$, starting at the origin. For a potential $V: \mathbb{Z}^d \to [0, \infty)$ with finite and nonempty support, define transformed path measures by $d \hat{\mathbb{P}}_T \equiv \exp (T^{-1} \int_0^T \int_0^T V(X_s - X_t) ds dt) d \mathbb{P}/Z_T$ for $T > 0$, where $Z_T$ is the normalizing constant. If $d = 1$ or if the self-attraction is sufficiently strong, then $||X_t||_{\infty}$ has an exponential moment under $\mathbb{P}_T$ which is uniformly bounded for $T > 0$ and $t \in [0, T]$. We also prove that ${X_t}_{t \geq 0}$ under suitable subsequences of ${\hat{\mathbb{P}}_T}_{T > 0}$ behaves for large $T$ asymptotically like a mixture of space-inhomogeneous ergodic random walks. For special cases like a sufficiently strong Dirac-type interaction, we even prove convergence of the transformed path measures and the law of $X_T$ as well as of the law of the empirical measure $L_T$ under ${\hat{\mathbb{P}}_T}_{T > 0}$.


The objective of this research is the analysis of the driving performance of drivers with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), on the basis of a driving simulator experiment, in which healthy "control" drivers and impaired drivers drive in different driving scenarios, following a thorough neurological and neuropsychological assessment of all participants. The driving scenarios include driving in rural and urban areas in low and high traffic volumes. The driving performance of drivers impaired by the examined pathologies (AD and MCI) is compared to that of healthy controls by means of Repeated Measures General Linear Modeling techniques. In this paper a sample of 75 participants is analyzed. Various driving performance measures are examined, including speed, lateral position, steering angle, headway, reaction time at unexpected events etc., some in terms of their mean values and some in both their mean values and their variability. The results suggest that the two examined cerebral diseases do affect driving performance, and there are common driving patterns for both cerebral diseases, as well as particular characteristics of specific pathologies. More specifically, drivers with these cerebral diseases drive at lower speeds and with larger headway compared to healthy drivers. Moreover, they appear to have difficulties in positioning the vehicle on the lane. Cerebral diseases also appear to significantly affect reaction times at incidents.


Soil tillage serves a number of purposes such as control of weeds, incorporation of crop residues and manures, and maintenance or improvement of soil mechanical properties, including seedbed preparations. As a side-effect, soil tillage may affect turnover of organic matter (OM) by changing the particle size and spatial distribution of crop and manure residues in soil and by increasing the intimacy of residue/soil contacts. By breaking soil structural elements, tillage may contribute further to N mineralization by exposing physically protected organic matter to microbial turnover. Therefore, adjusting the time, intensity and frequency of soil tillage operations may enable optimization of synchrony, defined as the matching through time of N availability and crop N demand. This idea was experimentally investigated in the present study.


Whether we are speaking of Hudson v. Michigan, Herring v. United States, Arizona v. Gant, Thornton v. United States or even though slightly older Illinois v. Wardlow, these cases represent a trend by the high court to limit the scope of both the 4th amendment and the exclusionary rule. The result is that law enforcement will obtain greater freedom to engage in stop and frisk as well as search and seizure without fear that the evidence may be excluded during the course of any subsequent criminal trial. The problem with these cases may be that they fail to recognize the societal costs of giving police such free reins without consequences. In this 25 page paper, the author summarizes and examines these and other recent United States Supreme Court cases and concludes that they are often being interpreted by lower courts to create broader powers in the police than the cases themselves actually provide. In some respects, this article is both an examination of what the cases "could" stand for if interpreted either broadly or narrowly. There is much for prosecutors in these cases, but there is also a surprising amount left to be argued by defense counsel, who may still find arguments for exclusion in the modifiers that are provided by either an essential 5th vote concurrence or by the majority opinion itself. If nothing else, this article provides a quick summary of the essentials of these transformative cases.


SEDA is an acronym for staged event-driven architecture, and decomposes a complex, event-driven application into a set of stages connected by queues. This design avoids the high overhead associated with thread-based concurrency models, and decouples event and thread scheduling from application logic. By performing admission control on each event queue, the service can be well-conditioned to load, preventing resources from being overcommitted when demand exceeds service capacity. SEDA employs dynamic control to automatically tune runtime parameters (such as the scheduling parameters of each stage), as well as to manage load, for example, by performing adaptive load shedding. Decomposing services into a set of stages also enables modularity and code reuse, as well as the development of debugging tools for complex event-driven applications.


Thirty-five semivolatile compounds from the phenolic, chlorinated hydrocarbon, and polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbon classes are analyzed with the use of lightpipe-based gas chromatography/infrared spectrometry in order to determine the minimum identifiable quantities (MIQ) as defined in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Method 8410. MIQs for all compounds studied are in the range of 1 to 20 nanograms. The present results represent an improvement of about an order of magnitude over those reported earlier in U.S. EPA studies. An important factor in achieving this improvement is the use of selected wavelength chromatogram reconstructions for locating high-noise chromatogram data files. These data suggest that target analysis of complex semivolatile environmental organic samples is achievable by lightpipe GC/FT-IR.


In this study, we report the fabrication of a high performance flexible micro-supercapacitor (MSC) with an organic gel electrolyte containing a redox-active additive, referred to as poly(methyl methacrylate)-propylene carbonate-lithium perchlorate-hydroquinone (PMMA-PC-LiClO4-HQ). Hexagonal MSCs fabricated on thin polyethylene terephthalate (PET) films had interdigitated electrodes made of spray-coated multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) on Au. The addition of HQ as a redox-active additive enhanced not only the specific capacitance but also the energy density of the MSCs dramatically, which is approximately 35 times higher than that of MSCs without the HQ additive. In addition, both areal capacitance and areal energy density could be doubled by fabrication of double-sided MSCs, where two MSCs are connected in parallel. The double-sided MSCs exhibited stable electrochemical performance during repeated deformation by bending. By dry-transferring the double-sided MSCs based on PMMA-PC-LiClO4-HQ on a deformable polymer substrate, we fabricated a stretchable MSC array, which also retained its electrochemical performance during a uniaxial strain of 40%. Furthermore, a wearable energy storage bracelet made of such an MSC array could operate a μ-LED on the wrist.


This paper seeks to assess the impact of oil price shock and real exchange rate volatility on real economic growth in Nigeria on the basis of quarterly data from 1986Q1 to 2007Q4. The empirical analysis starts by analyzing the time series properties of the data which is followed by examining the nature of causality among the variables. Furthermore, the Johansen VAR-based cointegration technique is applied to examine the sensitivity of real economic growth to changes in oil prices and real exchange rate volatility in the long-run while the short run dynamics was checked using a vector error correction model. Results from ADF and PP tests show evidence of unit root in the data and Granger pairwise causality test revealed unidirectional causality from oil prices to real GDP and bidirectional causality from real exchange rate to real GDP and vice versa. Findings further show that oil price shock and appreciation in the level of exchange rate exert positive impact on real economic growth in Nigeria. The paper recommends greater diversification of the economy through investment in key productive sectors of the economy to guard against the vicissitude of oil price shock and exchange rate volatility.


This thesis analyzes the life histories of women who served in the Second World War
British auxiliary services (the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the Women's Auxiliary Air
Force, and the Women's Royal Naval Service) who migrated to Canada as war brides (the
wives or fiancees of Canadian servicemen). It argues that understandings of womanhood
which connect ideal femininity with domesticity operate on the ways in which war bride
veterans view themselves as veterans and how they remember their experiences as
servicewomen. In their oral histories, these women portrayed themselves both in
accordance with and in opposition to traditional feminine roles. However, identities
associated with traditional femininity such as 'sweetheart,' 'wife,' 'mother,' and
'grandmother' were frequently most prevalent. My findings indicate that war brides who
had more satisfying and smooth transitions to Canadian life generally remember and
emphasize their war bride past over their military history and view themselves as having a
Canadian identity. Alternatively, those who had more difficult experiences of migration
gain composure in remembering their experiences as servicewomen since these
experiences were less troubling and complicated. These women tend to assert their British
identities. This project contributes to scholarship in gender history, memory studies, and
studies of migration though unpacking how cultural discourses regarding gender in
wartime and national identity intersect with stories of migration in the life history
narratives of war bride veterans. It provides a new framework for the study of women in
war in Britain, as well as war bride history in Canada. This thesis produced and draws from
eighteen comprehensive life history interviews with war bride veterans. Part I begins with
a chapter exploring theoretical concepts setting out the combined material and cultural
epistemology of this project, including popular memory theory, as well as understandings
of gender and nationality that assisted the methodology developed for analyzing war bride
veterans' narratives in relation to historical and cultural research. This methodology based
on the work of T.G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, Michael Roper, and Richard Johnson,
recognizes the circular and nuanced relationships people have with cultural codes and
memories. The historical context chapter examines historical understandings regarding
appropriate roles for men and women in wartime through primary source research and
contemporary gender historical theory. It also examines how war brides have been
recognized in Canadian cultural memory. Part II applies this work with three chapters
centred on life history interviews with Wendy Turner, Victoria Sparrow, and Penny
MacDonald (pseudonyms).


Penicillin G acylase is the second most important enzyme used by industry in an immobilized form. Penicillin hydrolysis is its main application. This reaction is used to produce 6-aminopenicillanic acid (6-APA), an intermediate in the synthesis of semisynthetic antibiotics. This work aims to compare catalytic properties of different penicillin G acylase (PGA) derivatives obtained by multipoint immobilization of the enzyme on macroporous silica. Enzyme amino groups react with different aldehyde groups produced in the support using either glutaraldehyde or glyoxyl activation. In the former method, silica reacts with g-aminopropyltriethoxysilane (g-APTS) and glutaraldehyde; in the latter, a reaction with glycidoxypropyltrimethoxysilane (GPTMS) is followed by acid hydrolysis and oxidation using sodium periodate. This work determines the influence of degree of activation, using glutaraldehyde, on immobilization parameters. PGA was immobilized on these two different supports. Maximum enzyme load, immobilized enzyme activity (derivative activity), rate of immobilization and thermal stability were checked for both cases. For glutaraldehyde activation, the results showed that 0.5% of the g-APTS is sufficient for all the hydroxyl groups in the silica to react. They also showed that degree of activation only affects immobilization yield and reaction velocity and that reduction of the glutaraldehyde derivatives with sodium borohydride does not affect their thermal stability. In comparing the derivatives obtained using glyoxyl and glutaraldehyde activation, it was observed that the glyoxyl derivatives presented better immobilization parameters, with a maximum enzyme load of 264 IU/g silica and a half-life of 20 minutes at 60 °C.


This article regards exclusive conceptions of citizenship as the principal stumbling block to developing alternatives to repressive penal policies. Indeed, exclusive communities foster mistrust and suspicion of the Other, leading to punitive responses to 'outsiders'. It is therefore argued that the very notion of citizenship needs to be 'reimagined' in such a way that it is genuinely inclusive and encourages shared responsibility, thus enabling us to go beyond exclusive communities and penal policies generative of irresponsibilities. The idea of an inclusive citizenship of the common, founded on justice and responsibility, is promoted as a real utopian vision. Transformative justice is put forward as one means of realising this vision by allowing citizens to collectively institute a genuinely new penal rationality.


Genetically improved Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst.) and Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) are used extensively in operational Swedish forestry plantations to increase production. Depending on the genetic status of the plant material, the current estimated genetic gain in growth is in the range 10–20% for these species and this is expected to increase further in the near future. However, growth models derived solely from data relating to genetically improved material in Sweden are still lacking. In this study we investigated whether an individual tree growth model based on data from unimproved material could be used to predict the height increment in young trials of genetically improved Norway spruce and Scots pine. Data from 11 genetic experiments with large genetic variation, ranging from offspring of plus-trees selected in the late 1940s to highly improved clonal materials selected from well performing provenances were used. The data set included initial heights at the age of 7–15 years and 5-year increments for almost 2000 genetic entries and more than 20 000 trees. The evaluation indicated that the model based on unimproved trees predicted height development relatively well for genetically improved Norway spruce and there was no need to incorporate a genetic component. However, for Scots pine, the model needed to be modified. A genetic component was developed based on the genetic difference recorded within each trial, using mixed linear models and methods from quantitative genetics. By incorporating the genetic component, the prediction errors were significantly reduced for Scots pine. This study provides the first step to incorporate genetic gains into Swedish growth models and forest management planning systems.


At The Crossroads: Not-For-Profit Leadership Strategies for Executives and Boards Philip Goltoff WILEY (2010), 181 Pages, hardback, $ 27.95Running a not-for-profit organization requires a dedicated staff along with highly committed board members. Dedication and commitment are important in order to overcome the challenges they are likely to face and to successfully move forward toward the achievement of the organization's mission. Staff members must understand the funding needs, donation collection process, accountability, being fair and transparent with the donors, and the communities they intend to serve nationally or internationally. In this book, At the Crossroads: Not-For-Profit Leadership Strategies for Executives and Boards, Philip Goltoff writes in a reader-friendly and conversational manner about the internal and external dimensions of not-forprofit organizations. In his writing, he provides different points of views on how employees and volunteers can best serve their constituents.Responsibility and transparency are important elements of success for every not-for-profit organization. The book provides numerous examples on serving the entire community and taking responsibility in different situations such as 9/11, earthquakes, disasters, and tsunamis. The author emphasizes the transparency dimension of not-for-profits by encouraging employees to make the organization's outcomes and results visible to the public. Similar to other organizations, two other important factors for the success of a not-for-profit institution are effective communication and proper networking skills with others in the community. Another important factor for success is securing funds in a timely manner. This book highlights and emphasizes the following elements when working in a not-for-profit institution:1. Understanding the roles and responsibilities of the not-for-profit to the community.2. Providing public reflections and feedback through the social work of professional managers and the CEO.3. Focusing on priority issues based on needs, public policy and government relations.4. Securing the needed resources and tools which help in making sure leaders and teams have what they need to be successful.5. Creating a cohesive environment between the board of directors and the chief executive officer.6. Raising money, managing budgets and creating strong relationships through advance planning.7. Evaluating and training human resources to bring about relevant changes in the organization. …


The article examines walls of names commemorating the victims of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade in US heritage sites and museums. By exploring how, during the twentieth century, memorials of wars and genocides in Europe, Africa, and the Americas have featured walls of names to honor the dead, this article proposes a genealogy of the walls of names, by emphasizing the various contexts in which this device has been employed. Whereas naming has been a long-standing practice to honor the dead since antiquity, naming enslaved individuals in ship manifests or farm books was part of a process of dehumanization. Yet, during the last 30 years, emerging initiatives commemorating slavery incorporated walls of names to recognize the humanity of enslaved men, women, and children. By looking at a few case studies in the United States, the article seeks to understand how effectively this specific kind of memorial has been employed to recognize and pay homage to the victims of slavery.


Abstract The iron (oxyhydr)oxides hematite (α-Fe2O3) and goethite (α-FeOOH) are natural and reactive minerals common in soils and sediments, and their adsorption of Fe(II) produces reactive surface sites that facilitate reduction of oxidized environmental pollutants. Single-exposure experiments with 4-chloronitrobenzene showed that hematite is more reactive than goethite, when normalized by surface area loading. Interestingly, the product of Fe(II) oxidation is a mixture of goethite and hematite, and the goethite to hematite ratio depends on the distribution of Fe(II) activated surface sites, which is a function of aqueous Fe(II) concentration, surface area loading, and pH. More goethite is produced under conditions of higher Fe(II), lower surface area loading, and higher pH. Recurrent-exposure experiments showed a substantial decrease in reaction rate after one to three exposures, a trend suggestive of reaction contributions from the increasing goethite surface area over time. Using known atomic surface geometry for goethite and hematite, the hematite {012} facet is proposed as the site of primary mineral growth with goethite {021} at the interface between the two minerals. These results have implications in contaminant fate modeling, where the mineral phases present in the environment, the minerals likely to form, and the surrounding aqueous conditions all have an impact on contaminant reaction rate.


Introduction Although arts are largely an urban phenomenon, recent study demonstrates the existence of numerous rural centres in Canada specialising in the production of some form of art (Bunting and Mitchell 2001). However, very little is known about artists who choose to reside in rural locales. We do not yet know, for example, whether those living in the Canadian countryside are part of the counter-urbanisation movement that has periodically embraced North America since the mid-twentieth century. This paper seeks to extend our knowledge of the spatial distribution of rural artists who work in the visual arts and, in doing so, to advance our understanding of the metropolitan-to-non-metropolitan population dynamic. The research is guided by two objectives. The first objective is to determine whether artists living in, or adjacent to, two rural arts centres (Elora and Parry Sound, Ontario, see Figure 1) have relocated from larger urban settings. If so, we can conclude that in this sense their migration behaviour is part of the movement commonly referred to as counter-urbanisation (Mitchell 2004). The second objective is to identify what types of migration are occurring, as revealed in an analysis of migrant motivations and place of work. We set the context for this study by briefly reviewing literature related to two areas of scholarship: that dealing with the counter-urbanisation movement and that focusing on the spatial distribution of artists and the importance of 'place' to those engaged in the visual arts. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] The Context The counter-urbanisation movement Beginning in the early 1970s, many communities occupying the lower echelons of the settlement hierarchy experienced an unexpected wave of growth (Beale 1974, 1976; Champion 1981; Hugo 1986). Although rates of increase were to subside somewhat by the end of the decade (Engels and Healy 1979), evidence again surfaced in the late 1980s and mid-1990s of population revival in selected non-metropolitan regions (Champion and Townsend 1990; Johnson and Beale 1994). This phenomenon prompted a flurry of research activity. It was generally concluded that growth was occurring because of the decision of urban residents to seek out 'rural' settings, a search that has occurred in the context of increased mobility, promoted by mass automobile and home ownership and widespread highway expansion. This movement, which is frequently referred to as counter-urbanisation (Mitchell 2004; Halliday and Coombs 1995; Boyle and Halfacre 1998; Swaffield and Fairweather 1998; Champion 2000), has generated considerable debate about the motivations that prompt residents to leave urban areas. According to Champion (1998, p. 22): A key theme in this debate is the extent to which those moving into rural areas are motivated by a desire for 'rurality' in terms of rural living environment and lifestyle--in essence making a 'new start' that represents a 'clean break' from their past--as opposed to choosing (or even being forced) to move because of a geographical redistribution of elements that have always been important to their quality of life such as jobs, housing, services and safety. Moves driven by economic need or environmental attraction are well documented in the literature. (1) Dozens of studies in North America (e.g., Davis 1993; Thomson and Mitchell 1998) and Europe (e.g., Harper 1987; Bolton and Chalkley 1990; Cloke and Goodwin 1992; Jedrej and Nuttall 1996; Champion 1998) have attempted to uncover the motivations behind the decision to take up rural residence. (2) If one must draw a generalisation from this research, it is that perceived rural amenities--both tangible (attractive, natural and built landscapes) and intangible (peaceful, quiet, safe of friendly places)--have played an increasingly important role in the migration decision of urban out-migrants. …


Studies on the chemical constituents of the fruits of Rhazya stricta have led to the isolation of four new alkaloids: rhazimanine, bhimberine, RA-l and RA-2. In addition, five more alkaloids have also been reported for the first time from this plant. Modern spectroscopic methods were employed to determine their structures including two-dimensional NMR experiments ego COSY, NOESY and J-resolved. DEPT experiments were carried out to determine the multiplicity of each carbon atom. The stereochemistry of various asymmetric centres was established by extensive NOE difference studies. Biosynthetic routes to the isolated alkaloids are also proposed.Investigations on the chemical constituents of the seeds of Nigella sativa resulted in the isolation of four new alkaloids: nigellicine, nigellimine, nigellimine N-oxide and NS-l. Their structures have been established by extensive NMR studies. Two of these alkaloids possess a novel skeleton which was confirmed by x-ray diffraction. The structures of the other two alkaloids were confirmed by synthesis. Biosynthetic routes to these alkaloids are proposed.As a result of studies on the non-alkaloidal constituents of this plant, a saponin has been isolated and its structure is presented. Antimicrobial testing of various chemical constituents of Nigella sativa has been carried out.Studies on the behavior of 19-5-vindolinine in solution have revealed a remarkable isomerization to 19-R-vindolinine. 13C-solid state CP-MAS spectrum of 19-5 vindolinine is also presented.


A pair of mobile robots acting on opposite sides of a thin plate is developed for a class of tasks where robots have to work together, carrying a pair of end-effectors and traversing across a plate surface. Using powerful magnets, the paired robots attract each other, support themselves against gravity, and generate traction force to move across the panel. First, the design concept of paired mobile robots is presented, followed by dynamic modeling and magnetic analysis. Conditions for preventing the robot from falling as well as from slipping on the plate surface are examined. Time-optimal control of the paired robots subject to the no-fall, no-slip conditions is formulated and solved numerically. Precision positioning control using a laser beacon is designed and tested. A prototype of the paired robots using Halbach array permanent magnets and Lorentz force actuators is developed, and the control methods are implemented and tested on the prototype.


For safety purposes, many photovoltaic (PV) systems are designed using galvanic isolation and transformers. The main problem in the existing topologies is that transformers are expensive, heavy and large. Another problem is that at conversion stage, the overall frequency is reduced. The efficiency of a PV inverter which is equipped with a transformer is usually between 91 and 94%. To tackle this issue, a transformerless (TL) PV system is proposed which has high efficiency and is lighter and cheaper. Due to stray capacitance, harmful leakage current will flow to the grid and PV array. H5, HERIC, H6 and oH5 are different types of existing TL inverter, and may be used to solve this problem. Each configuration has its drawbacks like shoot-through issues of switches, high conduction losses, metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor reverse recovery issues, or to avoid shoot-through fault when dead time requirements and grid voltage are nearly zero. The efficiency of the proposed TL inverter presented in this study is compared with other existing configurations. It shows that the proposed inverter efficiency is better than the conventional hard switching inverters. Moreover, to increase reliability, the inverters do not contain any shoot-through issues.


Aerosols are involved in a complex set of processes that operate across many spatial and temporal scales. Understanding these processes, and ensuring their accurate representation in models of transport, radiation transfer, and climate, requires knowledge of aerosol physical, chemical, and optical properties and the distributions of these properties in space and time. To derive aerosol climate forcing, aerosol optical and microphysical properties and their spatial and temporal distributions, and aerosol interactions with clouds, need to be understood. Such data are also required in conjunction with size-resolved chemical composition in order to evaluate chemical transport models and to distinguish natural and anthropogenic forcing. Other basic parameters needed for modeling the radiative influences of aerosols are surface reflectivity and three-dimensional cloud fields. This large suite of parameters mandates an integrated observing and modeling system of commensurate scope. The Progressive Aerosol Retrieval and Assimilation Global Observing Network (PARAGON) concept, designed to meet this requirement, is motivated by the need to understand climate system sensitivity to changes in atmospheric constituents, to reduce climate model uncertainties, and to analyze diverse collections of data pertaining to aerosols. This paper highlights several challenges resulting from the complexity of the problem. Approaches for dealing with them are offered in the set of companion papers.


The voluntary recall of a defective product, whereby a manufacturer or seller encourages purchasers to return a defective item, looks like a much happier phenomenon than what it fends off: injury for the buyer, liability for the seller, burdens on regulators. Acknowledging these advantages, this Article reviews other aspects of the voluntary-recall fix. First, the term recall has no consistent definition or usage in the United States Code and the Code of Federal Regulations. Second, product recalls are not really voluntary: sellers and buyers alike do not make informed, uncoerced choices to participate in this remedy. The Article concludes with two sets of recommendations to reform the law of product recalls, the first modest and the second ambitious.


The synthesis and characterization of emissive boron difluoride (BF2) complexes of 3-cyanoformazanate ligands produced using copper-assisted azide–alkyne cycloaddition (CuAAC) chemistry is described. Detailed spectroscopic and electrochemical characterization of benzyl-functionalized complexes served as models and demonstrated that triazole formation at the N-aryl substituents of the formazanate ligand scaffold led to red-shifted absorption and emission maxima and more difficult electrochemical reduction compared to alkyne-substituted precursors. CuAAC chemistry was also used to append ferrocene and tetraethylene glycol substituents to the formazanate backbone. In the case of the ferrocene-substituted complexes, fluorescence was quenched and a reversible oxidation feature (in addition to the reduction features associated with formazanate complexes) was observed using cyclic voltammetry. Treatment with NOBF4 oxidized ferrocene to ferrocenium and resulted in the reestablishment of fluorescence. Tetraethylene glycol substitution produced the first water soluble BF2 formazanate, which was shown to distribute throughout the cytoplasm and nucleus of mouse fibroblast cells when studied as a fluorescence imaging agent.


In placebo-controlled cross-over trials in dogs, two 'identical' operations were performed on the forelimbs of each animal with an interval of 28 days, to evaluate how daily doses of 1.5 g paracetamol, 1.5 g acetylsalicylic acid (ASA) and 0.5 g ASA might modulate an acute post-operative inflammatory reaction. On the third post-operative day the reductions in swelling compared with placebo averaged 33% with 1.5 g paracetamol (P = 0.02), 24% with 1.5 g ASA (P = 0.03) and 15% with 0.5 g ASA (P = 0.18); while the reductions in pain estimates averaged 47% with 1.5 g paracetamol (P = 0.01), 32% with 1.5 g ASA (P = 0.07) and 28% with 0.5 g ASA (P = 0.21). There were no clinical signs of adverse drug effects, such as vomiting, haematochezia, cyanosis or depression. The results disagree with the traditional view that paracetamol has little or no anti-inflammatory effect, and demonstrate that paracetamol may reduce an acute inflammatory reaction, at least as efficiently as ASA. The potential pro-inflammatory effect of ASA in low doses is discussed. It is concluded that paracetamol appears to be a valuable drug against post-operative or post-traumatic sequelae in the veterinary as well as in the human clinic.


Over the last several decades, the U.S. agricultural sector has sustained a high rate of productivity growth, driven largely by the Nation's agricultural research system, encompassing Federal-State public research as well as private research (see chart on page 39). Economic analysis finds strong and consistent evidence that investment in agricultural research has yielded high returns per dollar spent. These returns include benefits not only to the farm sector but also to the food industry and consumers in the form of more abundant commodities at lower prices. While studies give a range of estimates of returns to agricultural research, there is a consensus that the payoff to society from the government's investment in agricultural research has been high. ERS analyzed findings from 27 studies that estimated the economic return to public agricultural research in the United States. These studies assessed both farm sector and economy-wide impacts. Although study methodology and coverage varied, more than four out of five of the estimated rates of return to research ranged between 20 and 60 percent, with a median estimate of 45 percent. This is an exceptional return on a public investment, given that a common benchmark for such investments is 3 to 4 percent per annum (the interest paid on government borrowing). Research is an investment that pays off slowly over time as innovations are developed by scientists and adopted by farmers, providing long-term economic benefits (as long as 30 years). Given the cost of public funds and the median estimate of the rate of return to public research from the reviewed studies, each dollar spent on public agricultural research has returned roughly $10 in benefits to the economy. Furthermore, the studies found that these benefits are shared widely throughout the economy. As a result, the social returns earned by investments in agricultural research are likely to be much higher than the private returns a company could earn from such investments. Returns to research have been high for most crop and livestock commodities. Furthermore, technology developed in one State or region is often applied in other regions or countries. These agricultural research "spillovers" are typically higher for livestock-related research than they are for crop research. And while fewer studies are available on the benefits of private sector research, it appears that here, too, society as a whole benefits. Important gaps in our knowledge of research returns still exist. Notably, there has been limited empirical work assessing returns to agricultural research on nonmarket objectives such as natural resource quality, food safety, economics, and policy. Since the private sector is unlikely to invest in much research in these areas, they are major goals for public agricultural research.


Objectives: The role of statin use in the treatment of acute coronary syndromes (ACS) is not clear. The aim of our study was to evaluate the role of statins in ACS. Methods: Using data from the Acute Myocardial Infarction in Switzerland (AMIS Plus) Project, we compared the effects of chronic statin use, statin therapy after admission and no statin therapy on presentation mode and outcomes in ACS. Results: Available data from the period 2001–2006 including 11,603 patients were analyzed. Major cardiac event rates and in-hospital mortality were more common in statin-naive patients compared to patients who received statins. Conclusions: Our results support the importance of statin treatment in ACS. Chronic statin therapy seems to alter the initial presentation of ACS but it is questionable whether it provides an additional effect on early outcomes compared to the establishment of statin therapy after admission in statin-naive patients.


In this article, the authors offer a blueprint for effective closing arguments. The closing argument presents unique challenges and opportunities for trial lawyers. It requires the mastery of a wide range of skills, from explaining the relevant law and integrating it with trial testimony, to incorporating selectively recalled testimony into a comprehensive theme, mitigating or integrating damaging evidence and arguments, and striking the proper emotional tone. And advocates must do all of this with the ultimate goal of persuading the trier of fact to view the case from their perspective. Relying on empirical data from the social sciences and drawing on closing arguments by master advocates, including Abraham Lincoln, Clarence Darrow, Louis Nizer, and Gerry Spence among others, the authors identify ten principles that guide and shape effective closing arguments. The authors, in analyzing the closing argument from both practical and theoretical perspectives, draw on the practical wisdom that comes from past successes and the empirical truths that come from social-science observation and experimentation. Those perspectives reveal that ultimate success comes when advocates are credible, organized, thematic, clear, direct and brief; when they reason through the evidence with the jury; when they use analogies, stories, and demonstrative aids, and connect the case to each juror's emotions.


The idea initiating the birth of the journal APSTRACT was initiated by Andras Nabradi, during a 2005 AGRIMBA1 executive board meeting held in Aberdeen, UK. AGRIMBA is an open international network of academics and professionals from universities and related institutions dealing with education and research in agribusiness (Csapo et al., 2010). Currently, the Network is especially active in Central and Eastern Europe (Heijman, 2015). The main objective of the Network is to set standards based on best practices for programmes it oversees and to accredit them on the basis of these standards. The International MBA Network was established in 1995, by founding members from Wageningen University, Scottish Agricultural College, the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, Warsaw Agricultural University, University College Cork and the University of Wolverhampton. Between 2000 and 2009, the following universities joined the Network: Humboldt University Berlin, the University of Debrecen, Arkansas State University, the Agricultural University of Ukraine, the Timiryazev Academy in Moscow, the University of Belgrade and the University of Zagreb (Heijman, 2015). The Universities of Belgorod (Russia) and Kazan (Russia) has also joined the network last year.


The Sustainable Development Report 2019 points out that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) might not be achieved, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa (sic). This paper tries to investigate alternatives to the hegemonic "development" discourse and ideas of "development": what would be the notion of "development" in Ubuntu? The paper proposes a contextual understanding of "development" rooted in tradition, religion and culture by using Michel Foucault and Ferdinand de Saussure as a theoretical basis. The heterogenous understanding of Ubuntu and its diverse understanding definition of "development" are an argument against universalising "development" ideas, but for tailor-made solutions. The paper follows the hypothesis that the SDGs rely on premises of epistemologies of the Global North which are (post)colonial. It also proposes that failing "development" strategies rely on epistemologies from the Global North which are excluding, imperial, Eurocentric and rely on abyssal – extractive and postcolonial – productions of knowledge (Sousa Santos 2018). The paper is a contribution to the decolonisation of knowledge in the Global North, to challenge hegemonic northern epistemologies and to bring them into contact with knowledge from epistemologies of the Global South.


In this study, a new higher order hyperbolic shear deformation theory for mechanical analysis of cross-ply and angle-ply multi-layered plates is developed. Analytical solution to the static and buckling responses of symmetric and anti-symmetric composite laminates is presented. The proposed theory considers secant hyperbolic function of thickness coordinate in the displacement field. Also the developed theory assumes non-linear distribution of displacements and ensures that the top and lower surfaces of the plates have zero shear stresses. The equilibrium equations are obtained by applying the principle of virtual work (PVW). The stiffness characteristics of cross-ply and angle-ply laminates are taken into account when solving these governing equations. The closed-form Navier solution satisfying the corresponding boundary conditions are derived for simply supported (SS) composite plates. The results for non-dimensional deflections, and stresses of composite laminates under the effect of sinusoidal and uniform distributed load are thus obtained. The uni-axial and bi-axial loading force are used to evaluate critical buckling loads. Further, the impact of span-thickness ratio, aspect ratios, fiber orientation, and modulus ratio, etc. on static and buckling analysis plates is also studied. The validity of present formulation is demonstrated by comparing our results with some of the available results in literature.


Adult human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) grown in vitro can differentiate into adipocytes, chondrocytes, or osteoblasts, depending on their exposure to growth factors and on the density of cells in the culture. Although the pathways whereby growth factors affect differentiation have been extensively studied, little is known about the mechanisms whereby density--which affects cell shape, proliferation, contact with other cells, and exposure to paracrine secretions--influences cell fate. To specifically investigate the effects of cell shape, McBeath et al. plated solitary hMSCs on "islands" of adherent substrate surrounded by regions to which they could not adhere. Cells grown on small islands (forced to remain rounded) developed markers for adipocytes, whereas cells grown on large islands (which flattened out) developed markers for osteoblasts. Cells grown under "osteogenic conditions" (low density and appropriate medium) were flat and showed increased activity of the small guanosine triphosphatase RhoA. Inhibiting the Rho effector ROCK (Rho kinase), which interfered with cytoskeletal tension without causing cell rounding, blocked osteogenesis in flattened cells. Undifferentiated hMSCs expressing constitutively active RhoA became round and differentiated into osteoblasts, whereas cells expressing dominant-negative RhoA became flattened and differentiated into adipocytes, in both cases overcoming the effects of soluble factors in the media. Constitutively active RhoA did not, however, promote osteogenesis when expressed in round cells grown on small islands, whereas constitutively active ROCK did. Thus, cell shape, RhoA, and ROCK all appear to play key roles in hMSC fate determination, with RhoA acting downstream of soluble differentiation factors and ROCK acting downstream of cell shape-mediated signaling as well. R. McBeath, D. M. Pirone, C. M. Nelson, K. Bhadriraju, C. S. Chen, Cell shape, cytoskeletal tension, and RhoA regulate stem cell lineage commitment. Devel. Cell 6, 483-495 (2004). [Online Journal]


We present a platform for real-time transmission of immersive audiovisual impressions using modeland databased audio wave-field analysis/synthesis and panoramic video capturing/projection. The audio subsystem considered in this paper is based on microphone arrays with different element counts and directivities as well as weakly directional loudspeaker arrays. We report on both linear and circular setups that feed different wave-field synthesis systems. In an attempt to extend this, we present first findings for a data-based approach derived using experimental simulations. This data-based wave-field analysis/synthesis (WFAS) approach uses a combination of cylindrical-harmonic decomposition of cardioid array signals and enforces causal plane wave synthesis by angular windowing and a directional delay term. Specifically, our contributions include (1) a high-resolution telepresence environment that is omnidirectional in both the auditory and visual modality, as well as (2) a study of data-based WFAS realistic microphone directivities as a contribution towards for real-time holophonic reproduction.


The American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare adopted ending homelessness as one of its 12 Grand Challenges for Social Work. The National Center for Excellence in Homeless Services supports this Grand Challenge through its National Homelessness Social Work Initiative. This initiative is being carried out through a consortium of schools of social work nationally, emphasizing workforce development and policy advocacy. This major, multiyear initiative applies innovative strategies to service and policy design and social work education. This article describes the overall mission of the Homelessness Initiative and key activities used to strengthen social work curriculum, expand homelessness-related field placement opportunities for students, and impact services through the policy advocacy and dissemination of best practices.


Service robots have recently drawn a lot of attention from the public. Integrating with the artificial intelligence of computer science, modern service robots have great potential because they are capable of performing many sophisticated human tasks. In this paper, the service robot named "MiABot" as receptionist robot is described, it is a mobile robot with autonomous platform being used with a differential drive and controlled by mini PC. The MiABot could sense its surroundings with the aid of various electronic sensors while mechanical actuators were used to move it around. Robot's behaviour was determined by the program, which was loaded to the microcontrollers and PC with Artificial Intelligence. The experiment results demonstrated the feasibility and advantages of this predictive control on the trajectory tracking of a mobile robot. Service robots are designed to assist humans in reception tasks. Robots will interact closely with a group of people in their daily environment. This means that it is essential to create models for natural and intuitive communication between humans and robots.The theoretical basis of artificial intelligence and its application in the field of natural language processing. Besides, robot software architecture is designed and developed. Robot operation modes and implementation are addressed and discussed, they contain information on algorithm for human – robot interacting in natural language, thus a simple approach for generating robot response in arm gesture and emotion. Finally, system evaluation and testing is addressed.


Metaprogramming is a technique that consists in writing programs that treat other programs as data. This paradigm of software development contributes to a multitude of approaches that improve programmer productivity, including code generation, program analysis and domain-specific languages. Many programming languages and runtime systems provide support for metaprogramming. Programming platforms often distinguish the notions of compile-time and runtime metaprogramming, depending on the phase of the program lifecycle when metaprograms execute. It is common for different lifecycle phases to be hosted in different environ- ments, so it is also common for different kinds of metaprogramming to provide different capabilities to metaprogrammers. In this dissertation, we present an exploration of the idea of unifying compile-time and runtime metaprogramming in Scala. We focus on the practical aspect of the exploration; most of the described designs are available as popular software products, and some of them have become part of the standard distribution of Scala. First, guided by the motivation to consolidate disparate metaprogramming techniques available in earlier versions of Scala, we introduce scala.reflect, a unified metaprogram- ming framework that uses a language model derived from the Scala compiler to run metaprograms both at compile time and at runtime. Secondly, armed by the newfound metaprogramming powers, we describe Scala macros, a language-integrated compile-time metaprogramming facility based on scala.reflect. Thanks to the comprehensive nature of scala.reflect, macros are able to work with both syntactic and semantic information about Scala programs, enabling a wide range of previously impractical or impossible use cases. Finally, based on our experience and user feedback, we identify key strengths and weaknesses of scala.reflect and macros. We propose scala.meta, a new unified metapro- gramming framework, and inline/meta, a new macro system based on scala.meta, that take the best from their predecessors and address the most important problems.


Background: Tinospora crispa (L.) is used to alleviate the symptoms of diabetes mellitus in folk medicine. It is also used for hypertension and to treat malaria, remedy for diarrhea, and as vermifuge. Materials and Methods: Stems of T. crispa were collected, sun dried for several days followed by oven dried for 24 h at a considerably low temperature and then ground into coarse powder. The powdered stems were soaked in methanol at room temperature for 14 days with occasional shaking. The extract was collected by filtration, and the solvent was evaporated under reduced pressure in a rotary evaporator to obtain a solid residue which was then subjected to fractionation using the modified Kupchan partitioning method into n-hexane, CCl4, CHCl3and aqueous soluble fractions. The n-hexane soluble fraction was chromatographed over sephadex (LH-20) and the column was eluted with n-hexane: CH2Cl2:MeOH (2:5:1) followed by CH2Cl2:MeOH (9:1) and MeOH (100%) in order to increase the polarities. The column fractions were then concentrated and subjected to thin layer chromatography screening and the fractions with a satisfactory resolution of compounds were rechromatographed over silica gel to isolate the pure compounds. Results: Four new furanoid diterpenes of clerodane types, Crispene A, B, C, and D (1–4), including one known furanoid diterpene glucoside, borapetoside E (5), were isolated from the stems of T. crispa. The structures of these compounds were elucidated by means of extensive spectroscopic analysis and by comparison of their spectral data with closely related compounds. Conclusion: We have reported four new furanoid diterpenes of clerodane types, including one known furanoid diterpene glucoside. This is the first report of any clerodane diterpene having olefinic bond between C-6 and C-7.


Embedded systems are unique in the challenges they present to application programmers, such as power and memory space constraints. These characteristics make it imperative to design customized compiler passes. One of the important factors that shape runtime performance of a given embedded code is the register allocation phase of compilation. It is crucial to provide aggressive and sophisticated register allocators for embedded devices, where the excessive compilation time can be tolerated due to high demand on code quality. Failing to do a good job on allocating variables to registers (i.e., determining the set of variables to be stored in the limited number of registers) can have serious power, performance, and code size consequences. This paper explores the possibility of employing a hybrid evolutionary algorithm for register allocation problem in embedded systems. The proposed solution combines genetic algorithms with a local search technique. The algorithm exploits a novel, highly specialized crossover operator that takes into account domain-specific information. The results from our implementation based on synthetic benchmarks and routines that are extracted from well-known benchmark suites clearly show that the proposed approach is very successful in allocating registers to variables. In addition, our experimental evaluation also indicates that it outperforms a state-of-the-art register allocation heuristic based on graph coloring for most of the cases experimented.


Following the 2018 election and a long phase of negotiations, Lega and the Five Star Movement (FSM) appointed the first cabinet in Western Europe that does not include any mainstream party family. The 'elective affinities' between the electorates of these two challenger parties had been quite evident for some time, but in the present work we argue that there are further traits that the two parties had shared well before 2018 that could help to further prove their proximity. We propose a new dimension of analysis that should be taken into consideration when studying (new) challenger parties: their relationship vis-à-vis the other opposition parties. We would expect them to enter parliament for the first time with both the goals usually related to the two different opposition status (temporary vs. permanent) in mind: leaving the opposition and exploiting the opposition. Furthermore, we would expect them to stand apart from the other parties, no matter whether the latter are in government or in opposition. This is, in fact, one of the main reasons for their electoral success and, in the end, their essence. We will test these expectations by employing Social Network Analysis methods and analysing and comparing the cooperation attitudes of the Lega and FSM with the other opposition parties, using as an indicator the amount of legislative co-sponsorship during their first term in parliament (respectively 1992-1994 and 2013-2018) and the amount passed together while in opposition (2013-2018).


Since the launch of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals in 2000, discourse on sustainable development has emphasised the pivotal role of women in the development process. However, development aid channelled through women empowerment interventions has had limited impact than anticipated. This trend has largely been attributed to socio-economic and political dynamics borne of different cultural perspectives and ideologies.
This research investigates discrepancies between the egalitarian assumptions of aid providers in women empowerment and the lived experiences of women in patriarchal Zimbabwe. Furthermore, the research seeks to highlight how culture infiltrates into decision-making and policy formulation structures and reinforce patriarchal attitudes and values. In-depth interviews were conducted with representatives from a sample of government ministries, donor agencies and grassroots non-governmental organisations. A critical analysis of the Eurocentric and Afrocentric ideologies of human rights was conducted in order to establish the cultural discrepancies between the government, donor agencies and grassroots non-governmental organisations in Zimbabwe. Data was analysed using discourse analysis methodology. Although Zimbabwe has policies, institutions and practices that enable women empowerment, it lacks policy coordination and coherence measures that promote the implementation, monitoring and evaluation of these initiatives because the social structures remain largely patriarchal. There is need for resuscitating communication and engagement between the three major stakeholder groups in Zimbabwe to ensure a coordinated support to the implementation of women empowerment interventions. The three stakeholders need to create new partnership modalities and strengthen those that are already in existence by using a human rights prism. The research recommends that stakeholders establish partnerships to help synergise policies so that the implementation processes create an enabling environment for development aid effectiveness in women empowerment projects the country.


In the Philippines, farmers have often cited the lack of access to capital as the main impediment to increasing agricultural production. Production and marketing ex penditures of smallholder farmers are predominantly financed by traders and household savings. Product, input and credit markets are strongly interlinked and involve both formal and informal sectors. This research aims to understand the existing financial systems available to smallholder livestock farmers in Western Leyte, Philippines. It investigates the constraints and problems faced by livestock farmers in relation to access to capital, identifies opportunities to overcome credit constraints and formulates recommendations for improving access of smallholder farmers to credit.


This article presents a comprehensive overview of some of the research conducted within Mobile VCE's Core Wireless Access Research Programme, a key focus of which has naturally been on MIMO transceivers. The series of articles offers a coherent view of how the work was structured and comprises a compilation of material that has been presented in detail elsewhere (see references within the article). In this article MIMO channel measurements, analysis, and modeling, which were presented previously in the first article in this series of four, are utilized to develop compact and distributed antenna arrays. Parallel activities led to research into low-complexity MIMO single-user space-time coding techniques, as well as SISO and MIMO multi-user CDMA-based transceivers for B3G systems. As well as feeding into the industry's in-house research program, significant extensions of this work are now in hand, within Mobile VCE's own core activity, aiming toward securing major improvements in delivery efficiency in future wireless systems through cross-layer operation


Agricultural land abandonment is recognized as one of the main environmental drivers in Southern Europe, affecting ecological communities. Lizards, as ectothermic species with low dispersal capacity, are particularly prone to the threats associated with land use changes. We investigated the effect of land abandonment on lizards in a remote mountainous area in Greece, using line transect sampling, in 20 randomly selected sites [1 km × 1 km], along a four grade abandonment gradient in terms of forest encroachment. We recorded four species: Algyroides nigropunctatus, Lacerta viridis/ trilineata, Podarcis tauricusand Podarcis muralis, the latter being the most abundant. Our results did not provide evidence for a significant effect of forest encroachment or grazing on lizard diversity, given the dominance of P. muralis, the availability of all microhabitat types along the gradient and the low grazing intensity in the study area. Environmental parameters at the macrohabitat scale did not prove determinant for habitat variance, but microhabitat analysis showed a clear preference of P. muralisto bare ground. Despite the non-significant effects of land abandonment on lizard diversity, the dominance of P. muralistends to indicate a lizard community shift towards species inhabiting forested habitats. The preservation of open microhabitats, such as bare land, is considered of great importance for promoting high levels of lizard diversity, as their loss would affect even species currently widespread in forested ecosystems. Low intensity grazing, as well as the enhancement of wild ungulate populations in abandoned areas, can contribute to halting forest encroachment and maintaining the required habitat heterogeneity.


The aim of the present study was to investigate the factors associated with goals and goal scoring opportunities in soccer taking into consideration a broader range of performance indicators. The study was part exploratory but, based on the current literature, we also developed some a priori predictions. In particular, it was predicted that (a) most goals would be scored within the penalty area (> 70%); (b) approximately 30% of goals would be scored from set plays and (c) the majority (> 70%) of goals would be scored from a relatively short (< 4) passing interchange. Data was collected from 1788 attempts and 169 goals for an English FA Premier League season. The Web-soft snapper performance analysis tool was used to time code when attempts on goal were made and the associated behaviours relating to the attempt on goal. All a priori predictions were supported. The binary logistic regression identified 3 covariates which had a significant (P < 0.05) impact on goals scored. This included position of attempt; goal keepers' positions and type of shoot. Transitions in play accounted for 63% of all goals scored and well over half of all attempts on goal. Although similarities were evident between this and previous literature, this investigation also highlighted the importance of other key variables associated with goals and goal scoring opportunities. The high contribution of factors associated with transitions in play helped to uncover the importance of tracking goals and goal scoring opportunities back to their point of origin.


Abstract. The rural–urban interface (RUI), known as the area where structures and other human developments meet or intermingle with wildland and rural area, is at present a central focus of wildfire policy and its mapping is crucial for wildfire management. In the Mediterranean Basin, humans cause the vast majority of fires and fire risk is particularly high in the proximity of infrastructure and of rural/wildland areas. RUI's extension changes under the pressure of environmental and anthropogenic factors, such as urban growth, fragmentation of rural areas, deforestation and, more in general, land use/land cover change (LULCC). As with other Mediterranean countries, Portugal has experienced significant LULCC in the last decades in response to migration, rural abandonment, ageing of population and trends associated with the high socioeconomic development. In the present study, we analyzed the LULCC occurring in this country in the 1990–2012 period with the main objective of investigating how these changes affected RUI's evolution. Moreover, we performed a qualitative and quantitative characterization of burnt areas within the RUI in relation to the observed changes. Obtained results disclose important LULCC and reveal their spatial distribution, which is far from uniform within the territory. A significant increase in artificial surfaces was registered near the main metropolitan communities of the northwest, littoral-central and southern regions, whilst the abandonment of agricultural land near the inland urban areas led to an increase in uncultivated semi-natural and forest areas. Within agricultural areas, heterogeneous patches suffered the greatest changes and were the main contributors to the increase in urban areas; moreover, this land cover class, together with forests, was highly affected by wildfires in terms of burnt area. Finally, from this analysis and during the investigated period, it appears that RUI increased in Portugal by more than two-thirds, while the total burnt area decreased by one-third; nevertheless, burnt area within RUI doubled, which emphasizes the significance of RUI monitoring for land and fire managers.


The literature on market timing of long-term debt issuance yields mixed evidence that managers can successfully time their debt-maturity issuance. The early results that are indicative of debt-maturity timing are not robust to accounting for structural breaks or to other measures of debt maturity from firm-level data that account for call and put provisions in debt contracts. The author applies the analysis from some recent U.S. studies to aggregate Canadian data to determine whether the market-timing results are robust. Although the relation between debt maturity and future excess returns is in the same direction as in the United States, it is not statistically significant. This mixed evidence, combined with the difficulties in interpreting predictive regressions of this nature, provides little support for the notion that firms can effectively reduce their cost of capital by varying the maturity of their debt issuance to take advantage of market conditions. Managers do, however, try to time their debt-maturity issuance, given that long-term corporate debt issuance in both Canada and the United States is negatively related to the term spread.


Most countries of the world use a progressive scale to tax individuals. However, the level of taxprogression decreased a lot thanks to a lower number of rates and their fall in the first twodecades of the XXI-st century as liberal ideas had spread in the middle of the XX-th century.Individuals' income can be taxed either at a progressive or a flat scale of rates. At the sametime, there is no straightforward position, which scale to choose in the economic theory.Tying the personal income tax rate not to the absolute figures of income, but to suchcategories as a household's subsistence level, a budget of a household in comfortablecircumstances would be reasonable in conditions of a dynamic Russian market environmentburdened with inflationary phenomena. This model of the personal income tax and the use of a progressive scale in a city with population numbers of up to 20 million people shows that the tax will rise by a mere US $4.7 compared with the current 13% for low wage workers under the recommended model, while the income tax for medium paid workers will rise by US$ 57.8. At the same time the figure rose by US$ 372.9 for highly paid employees.The use of this model ensures a significant increase of budget income of a region and closureof the gap between wages of highly and low paid workers employed in the economy.


Scientific data/documents play a significant role in academic research and industrial applications. In the era of information fusion, building knowledge and content management systems is necessary, particularly in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research. This paper discusses an overview about the impact of XML in knowledge and content management systems in science and technology; extends to the integration and implementation including the discussions of infrastructures, methodologies, some typical examples in case studies; finally, it ends with future research and development in a new challenge in information and knowledge engineering. It concluded that XML will make significant contributions to the next generation in information processing for scientific content management systems.


Between 1964 and 1974 Margaret Laurence (1926-1987) produced a body of fiction which established her as a major woman writer in a Canada where the emergence of post-war nationalism created a readiness to accept, buy and read books by Canadians about Canada. For this she created the town of Manawaka - partly based on her home town of Neepawa, Manitoba - which became the symbol of all Canadian small towns. The thesis is an examination in chronological order of her work: The stone angel, A jest of god, A Bird in the House (short stories).The Fire-Dwellers and the Diviners. Her writing deserves attention because it portrays Canadian life with integrity. As fiction by a woman about women, her work shows none of the romantic fantasising of the lesser novelist. Happy endings are never guaranteed; relationships have unharmonious elements. She reveals a society which imposes restraints on women, making it difficult to achieve self-fulfilment in a male-oriented environment where traditional role patterns stifle legitimate female aspirations. However, her novels are feminist by implication and not in an obtrusive or polemical way. An emergent theme is the injustice suffered by disadvantaged minorities represented by the metis of Manitoba whom she saw as dispossessed of their land by the Anglo-Saxon settlers. Mrs Laurence's technique was always experimental and developed from novel to novel. She employed variations of time and voice: the inner monologue is used to evoke an immediate response, the movement between past and present to highlight mood and temperament. These devices are examined in the thesis, as are her use of distinctive idiom and the symbolic elements of her writing. Finally, her honest attempt to depict the extraordinariness of ordinary people in carefully worked and sympathetically conceived stories speaks to the universal longing to learn about ourselves.


The concept of multiple modernities has been developed with a view to highlighting the ways in which modern societies differ from each other. Other sociological approaches, by contrast, emphasize such societies' commonalities. But does the juxtaposition of convergence and divergence in the form of a mutually exclusive, binary opposition really make sense? Might it be that there is convergence in some respect, while diversity persists in other respects; that there are dimensions of social change that exhibit common trends across regions and cultural zones, while other aspects of social life show remarkable resilience against homogenization? The present paper argues that our observation of convergence or diversity might be less a matter of truth or falsity than an artifact of our chosen methodologies. Based on this premise, the concept of multiple modernities will be rejected as sociologically meaningless, conceptually flawed and empirically dubious. It is sociologically meaningless because its advocates fail to spell out sufficiently clearly what they mean by modern as against non-modern societies; it is conceptually flawed because it does not provide criteria for distinguishing theoretically significant from insignificant (or less significant) differences, and it is empirically dubious because it misrepresents the state of the world's development.


Mobile devices and mobile services have been around long enough for the research community to start thinking about the next step in studying them: larger user groups and longer periods of time. Strictly quantitative methods are not very useful when it comes to studying user experience so we need to find scalable ways to support our qualitative methods to be able to take this next step. This paper reflects on automatic gathering of context data as one such way.