Anthropogenic influences alter tree mycorrhizal associations inducing nutrient acceleration in the U.S. forests. Plant-fungal symbioses play critical roles in vegetation dynamics and nutrient cycling, modulating the impacts of global changes on ecosystem functioning. Here, we used forest inventory data consisting of more than 3 million trees to develop a spatially resolved "mycorrhizal tree map" of the contiguous United States. We show that abundances of the two dominant mycorrhizal tree groups—arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) and ectomycorrhizal trees—are associated primarily with climate. Further, we show that anthropogenic influences, primarily nitrogen (N) deposition and fire suppression, in concert with climate change, have increased AM tree dominance during the past three decades in the eastern United States. Given that most AM-dominated forests in this region are underlain by soils with high N availability, our results suggest that the increasing abundance of AM trees has the potential to induce nutrient acceleration, with critical consequences for forest productivity, ecosystem carbon and nutrient retention, and feedbacks to climate change.


Introduction The frequency, the clinical characteristics, and the prognosis of dengue is highly variable. Dengue fever is associated with a range of neurological manifestations. The objective of the present study was to determine the incidence of neurological signs and their predictive factors using data from cases of dengue seen and followed in Cayenne Hospital during the Dengue 2 epidemic in 2013. Methods In 2013, a longitudinal study using data from all cases of dengue seen in Cayenne hospital was collected. Medical records used a standardized form to collect demographic information, clinical signs and biological results and the date at which they were present. The analysis used Cox proportional modeling to obtain adjusted Hazard ratios. Results A total of 1574 patients were included 221 of whom developed central nervous system signs. These signs were spontaneously resolutive. There were 9298person days of follow-up and the overall incidence rate for central nervous system signs was 2.37 per 100 person-days. The variables independently associated with central nervous system anomalies were headache, Adjusted Hazard ratio (AHR) = 1.9(95%CI = 1.4–2.6), bleeding AHR = 2 ((95%CI = 1.3–3.1), P = 0.001, abdominal pain AHR = 1.9 ((95%CI = 1.4–2.6), P<0.001, aches AHR = 2.1 ((95%CI = 1.5–2.9), P<0.001, and fatigue AHR = 1.5 ((95%CI = 1.3–1.7), P<0.001. Discussion Overall, the present study suggests that neurological signs of dengue are not exceptional even in patients without the most severe features of dengue. These manifestations were spontaneously resolutive. Here it was not possible to distinguish between encephalitis or encephalopathy. Further studies would require more in depth exploration of the patients.


This paper investigates to what extent Structuralism influenced the work of the Japanese Metabolists.

In 1960, the Metabolists stepped onto the international architectural scene with the presentation of their manifesto Metabolism 1960 at the World Design Conference in Tokyo. Throughout the 1960s, they proposed a series of urban schemes where the city was envisioned as a growing and changeable organism constituted by two parts: a primary long-life ever-expanding infrastructure which supports secondary disposable elements necessary for urban life such as prefabricated housing capsules. Their schemes were characterized by an impressive use of technology and mega-structural scale.

Obvious similarities can be observed between Metabolism's and Structuralism's design strategies such as, the use of identifiable repetitive elements, the allowance for growth and change, a distinction between primary structures with long-life cycle and secondary in-fills with shorter life cycles. However, the application of such methods and principles of design is not necessarily grounded in the theory of Structuralism. In their texts, the Metabolists argue that their theory and practice are firmly grounded in Japanese history and culture. Still, they were surely informed about the Structuralist ideas of Team 10; if not directly then through their mentor Kenzo Tange, who attended the 1959 CIAM in Otterlo and underpinned his Tokyo Bay Plan (1960) with a structuralist analysis.

This paper examines Metabolist writings, projects and built works and observes the transition of concepts from texts to drawings to buildings. It detects the disparities between Metabolists theory and practice, tests the claims of the Metabolists of a purely Japanese architecture and thus draws conclusions on the influence of Structuralism on Metabolism in theory and practice.


The thesis presents an argument that through employing metafictional techniques, experimentation with textual and graphic space and allusions to hypertextual devices, Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves seeks to remind the reader of the presence of the book in print fiction.

Danielewski dispenses with traditional textual formats in order to provoke the reader to realise the presence of the physical book in their hands. This is mirrored in the narrative as two of the main characters both obtain a copy of the very same book that the reader is holding. The author employs metafictional characteristics such as characters that acknowledge their fictional status whilst writing a book within a book. The first chapter of the thesis examines the potential of metatexts and criticism in the twenty-first century and a questioning of its continued relevance.

Danielewski challenges textual space that potentially distances the reader from the narrative. There is an overwhelming amount of blank space in the text where there could have been narrative. The reader is told on several occasions that parts of the narrative are missing. Chapter Two is concerned with references to the book and the unconventional page aesthetics that encourage the reader to initially look at the page before actually 'looking through the page'.

The final chapter compares House of Leaves with the hypertext fictions that it so often mirrors. The two forms of literature, whilst initially seeming quite different are actually very similar in narrative and form. House of Leaves appears to draw on some of the conventions associated with hypertext fiction in order to provide the reader a more active role in the reading of the text, whilst allowing them to understand the conventions of the writing.

The experimentation with conventional textual space, metatextual techniques and references to electronic literature in House of Leaves challenge the nature of the physical book and its presence in contemporary prose fiction.


We use techniques from sample-complexity in machine learning to reduce problems of incentive-compatible mechanism design to standard algorithmic questions, for a wide variety of revenue-maximizing pricing problems. Our reductions imply that for these problems, given an optimal (or /spl beta/-approximation) algorithm for the standard algorithmic problem, we can convert it into a (1 + /spl epsi/)-approximation (or /spl beta/(1 +/spl epsi/)-approximation) for the incentive-compatible mechanism design problem, so long as the number of bidders is sufficiently large as a function of an appropriate measure of complexity of the comparison class of solutions. We apply these results to the problem of auctioning a digital good, the attribute auction problem, and to the problem of item-pricing in unlimited-supply combinatorial auctions. From a learning perspective, these settings present several challenges: in particular the loss function is discontinuous and asymmetric, and the range of bidders' valuations may be large.


The time-dependent response of sediment suspension to water velocity was explored by modeling field measurements collected in the surf zone during a large storm. Both linear and nonlinear input-output models were formulated with water velocity as input and suspended-sediment concentration as output. A sequence of past velocities (velocity history), in addition to velocity from the same instant as the measurement of suspended-sediment concentration, were used as input. The velocity-history length was allowed to vary. The models also incorporated a lag between input (instantaneous velocity or velocity history) and output (suspendedsediment concentration). Instantaneous horizontal water velocity, or velocity to a power, does not contain enough information to predict suspension in the surf zone. Unlike steady uniform flow, more than one velocity is necessary to parameterize pick-up and mixing of sediment into the water column. Using a velocity history improves predictions of suspension by more fully specifying flow conditions (including accelerations and changes in accelerations) responsible for suspension. Suspension in the future is better predicted than suspension at the same instant as velocity measurements. Incorporating such a lag between velocity and concentration improved predictions, with optimum lag time increasing with elevation above the sea bed (from 1.5 seconds at 13 cm to 8.5 seconds at 60 cm for linear models). These lags are largely due to the time for an observed flow event to effect the bed and mix sediment upward. Nonlinear models relating suspension to velocity do better than linear models using the same velocity history. Nonlinear models are able to exploit changing relationships between suspension and velocity history for different wave shapes. For the environmental conditions of our study, the optimal model (correlation coefficient of 0.58) used 3 seconds of velocity history (approximately one-quarter wave period) and a 1.5 second lag to predict suspension. 1 U. S. Geological Survey, 345 Middlefield Rd., Menlo Park, CA 94025 2 US Geological Survey, Center for Coastal Geology, 600 4th St. South, St. Petersburg, FL 33701


Design of the DSSL Testbench Hardware Architecture for Rapid Development and Execution of Hardware-in-the-Loop Control Clayton Chu Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Mehran Mesbahi UW Aeronautics & Astronautics This thesis discusses the development of the MATLAB-based Distributed Space Systems Lab (DSSL) Hardware Architecture (or DHA), a software stack and design methodology to allow for rapid hardware and software development for controlling vehicles in MATLAB. The layers of the architecture are discussed in levels of increasing abstraction. The interaction between a MATLAB vehicle object and other objects is also considered, including interaction with controllers designed in Simulink. Several examples of the entire development cycle of a vehicle are provided (hardware, software, mathematical modeling), including a ground-based, two-wheel differential drive robot; and a two-propeller, vectorable-thrust blimp. The possibility of using the DHA for multi-agent systems is also discussed. A developer's guide is also provided.


An inelastic dynamic analysis method was developed for reinforced concrete frame structures. The analytical model was able to account for stiffness characteristics related to cracking of the concrete, yielding and strain hardening of the reinforcement, bond slip of tensile reinforcement in a joint core, and stiffness degradation due to load reversals. The location of point of contraflexure in a member was taken into consideration to account for the distribution of inelastic deformation. The analysis method was tested by comparing calculated response waveforms with observed response waveforms of a small-scale three-story one-bay reinforced concrete frame structure, which was subjected to an intense base motion on the University of Illinois Earthquake Simulator. The observed waveforms at large amplitudes were favorably simulated by the analytical model based on the material properties and geometry of the test structure.


Direct union elections, a new institutional arrangement in grassroots trade unions in China, have been introduced experimentally in coastal regions since 2000. Using matched employer–employee data, this study examines the effects of direct union elections on workers' economic wellbeing. Results reveal that 1) union members with directly elected leaders receive higher wages than those without and 2) direct union elections are positively correlated with worker satisfaction. Additional evidences suggest that effects of direct elections work through stronger union leadership and harmonious industrial relations, resembling the voice-response face of unionism. The effect of direct elections significantly weakens or disappears when we exclude the large firms from the analysis. Meanwhile, the effect of union membership regains its significance. We argue that direct elections are a government-sponsored experiment in which large firms are selected to form an incentive-compatible framework among local governments, firms, and workers for explaining union effects with Chinese characteristics.


Using lupin as a break crop and for soil fertility improvement is one of the practices to enhance productivity and improve soil fertility in Ethiopian conditions. However, the use of this practice by smallholder farmers is limited. Therefore, the major objective of this study was to empirically examine factors influencing farmers' decision to allocate land for lupin crop production as a break crop in North Western Amhara Region of Ethiopia. In this study, stratified sampling procedure was used to select 253 sample households from four Districts (137 household who use lupin in their crop rotations and 116 that do not). The required data were collected using interviews with a structured questionnaire. Logistic regression analysis was used to identify factors influencing farmers' decision to allocate land for lupin production as a break crop. The results of the logit regression analysis indicate that family size, total farmland holdings and contacts with extension workers were the most important factors influencing the decision of the farmer to practice crop rotation with lupin. Hence, emphasis should be given to improve the human capital through training and providing extension service to bring farmers' awareness to practice improved technologies and best indigenous knowledge.


We develop the hypothesis that culturally evolved accounting principles (e.g., Objectivity) have their roots in how the biologically evolved human brain evaluates the desirability of reciprocal exchange. Our analysis is communicated in two related parts. In this first essay, Part I, we provide background on the structure and evolution of the brain, the measurement of brain activity during economic decision-making using neuroscientific methods, and the brain's central role in building economic institutions. In the second essay, Part II, we describe the emergence of modern accounting principles and review the neuroscientific evidence suggesting a mapping from brain function to the principles of modern accounting. Our analysis of NeuroAccounting is important because it extends Basu and Waymire (2006) to provide a new way to scientifically view accounting, which can prove useful for evaluating the desirability of implementing new policies that run contrary to long-established accounting principles.


THE LANDSCAPISTS
Critically Redefining Landscape Relations

Guest-edited by Ed Wall
January/ February 2020
Profile No 263 | Volume 90 | No 1
ISBN 9781119540038

Who defines the landscapes around us? What practices are employed as contemporary landscapes are produced? This issue argues that landscapes are made and remade through interrelations between people and the worlds around them – from geographers investigating the lives of urban wastelands to landscape architects projecting future cities, and from migrants navigating border systems to artists working with local residents. In contrast to tendencies to emphasise the physical forms of landscapes, with their potential to be redesigned and represented in drawings, this issue brings to the forefront the social constructedness of landscapes by focusing on a range of critical practices and daily actions. As conventional frames of landscape are challenged, other ways of measuring, mapping, imagining, designing, building and occupying them are revealed. For centuries, artists and designers have represented landscapes of power in paintings and have transformed them through their design proposals. But in recent years a number of researchers, designers, artists and activists have explored an expanded field of landscape, investigating populations fleeing conflict zones, reimagining cities facing ecological challenges, questioning territorial claims, and critiquing processes of urbanization. This issue focuses on some of these individuals whose work and lives encompass a diverse range of practices, brought together through their critical redefinition of landscape relations.

Contributors: Pierre Belanger, Harry Bix, Neil Brenner and Nikos Katsikis, Luis Callejas and Charlotte Hansson, James Corner, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, Gareth Doherty and Pol Fite Matamoros, Matthew Gandy, Christina Leigh Geros, Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, Kate Orff, Toya Peal, Neil Spiller, Tiago Torres Campos, and Tim Waterman.

Featured practices: Advanced Landscape and Urbanism, Design Earth, East Anglia Records, Estudio Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, Furtherfield, James Corner Field Operations, Larissa Fassler, LCLA office, OPSYS and SCAPE.


The Q/U Imaging ExperimenT (QUIET) has observed the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at 43 and 95 GHz. The 43 GHz results have been published in a previous paper, and here we report the measurement of CMB polarization power spectra using the 95 GHz data. This data set comprises 5337 hr of observations recorded by an array of 84 polarized coherent receivers with a total array sensitivity of 87 μK. Four low-foreground fields were observed, covering a total of ∼1000 deg2 with an effective angular resolution of 12.′8, allowing for constraints on primordial gravitational waves and high signal-to-noise measurements of the E-modes across three acoustic peaks. The data reduction was performed using two independent analysis pipelines, one based on a pseudo-Cℓ (PCL) cross-correlation approach, and the other on a maximum-likelihood (ML) approach. All data selection criteria and filters were modified until a predefined set of null tests had been satisfied before inspecting any non-null power spectrum. The results derived by the two pipelines are in good agreement. We characterize the EE, EB, and BB power spectra between ℓ = 25 and 975 and find that the EE spectrum is consistent with ΛCDM, while the BB power spectrum is consistent with zero. Based on these measurements, we constrain the tensor-to-scalar ratio to r = 1.1+0.9 − 0.8 (r < 2.8 at 95% C.L.) as derived by the ML pipeline, and r = 1.2+0.9 − 0.8 (r < 2.7 at 95% C.L.) as derived by the PCL pipeline. In one of the fields, we find a correlation with the dust component of the Planck Sky Model, though the corresponding excess power is small compared to statistical errors. Finally, we derive limits on all known systematic errors, and demonstrate that these correspond to a tensor-to-scalar ratio smaller than r = 0.01, the lowest level yet reported in the literature.


Heterotopic ossification (HTO) is the dystrophic formation of mature lamellar bone outside the confines of normal osseous tissues. It is frequently a complication which occurs following traumatic insult, both iatrogenic and non-iatrogenic, and neurological compromise. While mild degree of disease is often asymptomatic, significant pain and mobility limitations may result in reduced quality of life in advanced cases. Currently, the commonly accepted management for patients experiencing significant symptomatic HTOs is a combination therapy of surgical excision with prophylactic radiotherapy in the immediate perioperative period. In this article, we present a patient who achieved satisfactory pain relief and improvements in overall quality of life with the sole use of external beam radiation to illustrate the possibility of using radiotherapy alone for symptomatic management of HTO.


Abstract. This project aimed to establish a subsurface microbial observatory in ultramafic rocks, by drilling into an actively serpentinizing peridotite body, characterizing cored rocks, and outfitting the boreholes for a program of long-term observation and experimentation to resolve the serpentinite-hosted subsurface biosphere. We completed drilling in August 2011, drilling two boreholes with core recovery and possibility for down-hole experimentation, and six smaller-diameter monitoring wells arrayed around the two primary holes, in the Coast Range ophiolite (CRO) locality in the UC-Davis McLaughlin Natural Reserve, Lower Lake, CA. Every effort was made during drilling to keep the cores and wells as free of drilling-induced contamination as possible: clean, purified water was used as drilling fluid, fluorescent microbead tracers were suspended in that water for quantification of drilling fluid penetration into the cores, and high resolution next generation sequencing approaches were used to characterize the microbial populations in the drill fluids and core materials. In December 2011, we completed installation of well pumps (slow flow bladder pumps) in the monitoring wells, and have deployed a set of in situ incubation experiments in the two uncased boreholes. Preliminary findings illustrate natural variability in actively serpentinizing strata, and confirm distinct groundwater flow regimes and microbial ecosystems in (a) shallow, surface-impacted soil water horizons and (b) deeper, ultramafic bedrock-sourced formation fluids.


To test for equality of variances in independent random samples from multiple univariate normal populations, the test of first choice would usually be the likelihood ratio test, the Bartlett test. This test is known to be powerful when normality can be assumed. Here two Wald tests of equality of variances are derived. The first test compares every variance with every other variance and was announced in Mather and Rayner (2002), but no proof was given there. The second test is derived from a quite different model using orthogonal contrasts, but is identical to the first. This second test statistic is similar to one given in Rippon and Rayner (2010), for which no empirical assessment has been given. These tests are compared with the Bartlett test in size and power. The Bartlett test is known to be nonrobust to the normality assumption, as is the orthogonal contrasts test. To deal with this difficulty an analogue of the new test is given. An indicative empirical assessment shows that it is more robust than the Bartlett test and competitive with the Levene test in its robustness to fat-tailed distributions. Moreover, it is a Wald test and has good power properties in large samples. Advice is given on how to implement the new test.


There are over 25 million refugees in the world today and most of them—especially those in developing countries—do not have formal labor market access (LMA). That is, they do not have the right to work or own businesses. In this paper, we argue that granting refugees formal LMA has the potential to create substantial benefits for refugees and their hosts, including reduced vulnerability and higher incomes for refugees, improved labor market outcomes and higher incomes for natives, and positive fiscal effects for the host governments. Overall, even short of formal LMA according to our definition—wherein refugees' access to the labor market is unrestricted by the government in law and in practice—greater rights around work and business ownership enable greater benefits. Moreover, the fewer barriers there are to realizing these rights in practice—whether related to government policy or otherwise—the greater the benefits. But there may also be costs associated with granting formal LMA for certain groups in the host population and the full range of benefits is not guaranteed. The existence and magnitude of these benefits and costs is determined by key contextual factors, including the current extent of informal LMA for refugees, characteristics of the labor market, the skill and demographic profiles of refugees, the geographic location and concentration of refugees, and, crucially, policy choices and the political context. By creating and implementing policies that support vulnerable people regardless of status, help natives adjust to and benefit from changes, facilitate refugee labor market integration, and grant refugees the complementary rights that will help them succeed (such as freedom of movement), policymakers can amplify the benefits of formalization and mitigate the costs—making formal LMA a critical lever for generating positive outcomes from the presence of refugees.


Palaeoenvironmental investigations not only provide information about past climate, geomorphological changes, and vegetation, but also can give a unique and complementary perspective to archaeological studies relating to the history of human settlement. The IARII Laguas core on the west coast of Guam yielded 28 meters of sedimentary deposition dating back 9,300 years from the present. Pollen analysis indicates that forested conditions dominated the upland and coastal landscape of southern Guam during the early part of the Holocene. At 4,300 cal. B.P. the earliest charcoal particles appear, suggesting human colonization. By about 3,900 cal. B.P. Lycopodium and Gleichenia ferns first become noticeable in the core record, probably indicative of gardening and resource collecting activities by small human populations. At 2,900 cal. B.P. these and other disturbance indicators (e.g., grasses, charcoal particles) become continuously present in quantity, signalling the demise of the upland forests in southern Guam and development of the degraded savanna landscape seen today. By 2,300 cal. B.P. there are only remnant patches of native forest in evidence. The sedimentary record of the Laguas core and another nearby sampling location suggest increased hillslope erosion along the coastal margins after about 1,700 cal. B.P., which is accompanied by higher charcoal particle concentrations. Although the exact date of major coastal deposition remains unresolved by the Laguas evidence—it could have been much later than 1,700 cal. B.P.—other studies of erosion and coastal deposition on Guam suggest a time frame sometime between the early first millennium B.P. and late second millennium B.P.


Background: Atorvastatin is the most commonly used drug for the treatment of dyslipidaemia. Long term administration of statins helps in the reduction of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality associated with dyslipidaemia. Number of studies have shown that alternate day dosing of statins is efficacious and safe alternative to daily dosing. Objectives: To compare the efficacy and tolerability of daily & alternate day regimen of Atorvastatin in the treatment of naïve dyslipidaemic South Indian patients. Materials & Methods: It is an open labeled, prospective, parallel, comparative interventional study. Ninety patients satisfying the inclusion criteria were randomized in to group 1 (n=45) and group 2 (n=45) and received atorvastatin 10 mg daily and alternate days respectively for 3 months. Pretreatment and post treatment anthropometric measurements, biochemical and lipid parameters were recorded. Patients were followed at fortnightly intervals for 3 months to check the patient compliance and adherence to treatment. Data were analyzed by suitable statistical methods. Results: There was a statistically significant reduction of total cholesterol, triglycerides, LDL, VLDL and increase of HDL cholesterol in both groups. Post treatment between group comparison shows a significantly higher reduction of LDL in group 1 than group 2 patients. All other lipid parameters were significantly similar between the groups at 12 weeks follow-up. Daily and alternate day treatment were well tolerated by the patients of both the group and there was no untoward incident during the study period. Conclusion: Alternate day administration of atorvastatin causes a beneficial alternation of lipid parameters which helps in reducing the cost and adverse effects.


High-technology venture firms are considered to play an important role in the knowledge-based economy. In Japan, policy makers have belatedly advocated the creation of such firms, focusing on two primary fields - biotechnology and information technology (IT) - which are expected to make major economic contributions to Japan's international competitiveness, to the creation of new industries and to employment opportunities. Although a number of empirical studies have been conducted into such high-technology venture firms in the West, very few, if any, comparable studies have been undertaken in Japan using data from indigenous firms. This paper addresses this gap by using firm-level data from an original questionnaire survey. Our purpose is to profile several firm-level and managerial characteristics of biotechnology and IT venture firms in Japan to understand how they differ, if at all, from those in the West.


Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at 3.0 T has become increasingly available for clinical usage. Its clinical impact on diagnostic outcome compared with 1.5 T still remains unclear, however, because no larger case series have been published until now. In addition, the further development of clinical applications is still limited at 3.0 T due to the lack of availability of dedicated coils and the sensitivity of 3.0 T to artifacts. However, especially in the MR imaging of small joints, there seems to be a great potential in improving the diagnostic performance of MRI with increased signal-to-noise ratio by increasing the spatial resolution. ForMR imaging of the wrist, smaller case series describe better visualization of the interosseus ligaments and the triangular fibrocartilage complex at 3.0 T compared with 1.5 T using comparable coils and imaging protocols. The diagnostic performance in the detection of cartilage lesions still remains unclear, as it remains independent of field strength on the anatomical location. This article addresses the technical considerations of using 3.0 T for wrist imaging and the initial results on clinical applications, focusing on optimized techniques for wrist imaging and the diagnostic accuracy in the detection of cartilage lesions and the important anatomical structures.


Prior to the Sarbanes�Oxley Act of 2002, audit partners experienced economic pressure to grow revenue from the sale of nonaudit services to their audit clients. To an auditor who is highly rewarded for revenue generation and growth, nonaudit services may represent a particularly strengthened economic bond with the client. Prior research shows that, in general, nonaudit service fees received in the current period do not impair audit quality. We examine a different setting. We propose that auditor independence can become impaired, and audit quality compromised, when clients that currently purchase relatively low amounts of nonaudit services, increase their purchases of nonaudit services from the auditor in the subsequent period. We test our prediction in the context of earnings management as a proxy for audit quality, measured by (a) performance-adjusted discretionary accruals and (b) classification shifting of core expenses. Our results indicate that prior to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, rewards to the auditor in the form of future additional nonaudit service fees from current-year high fee-growth-opportunity clients adversely affects audit quality. This effect is particularly strong among companies with powerful incentives to manage earnings. Our findings indicate that regulators should consider the multiperiod nature of the client�auditor relationship when contemplating policies that restrict nonaudit services, as well as the overall environment in which audit partners operate. This might include partner compensation arrangements that put pressure on audit partners to focus on increasing revenue at the expense of audit quality.


Maximizing reader insights into the roles of intelligent agents in networks, air traffic and emergency departments, this volume focuses on congestion in systems where safety and security are at stake, devoting special attention to applying game theoretic analysis of congestion to: protocols in wired and wireless networks; power generation, air transportation and emergency department overcrowding. Reviewing exhaustively the key recent research into the interactions between game theory, excessive crowding, and safety and security elements, this book establishes a new research angle by illustrating linkages between the different research approaches and serves to lay the foundations for subsequent analysis. Congestion (excessive crowding) is defined in this work as all kinds of flows; e.g., road/sea/air traffic, people, data, information, water, electricity, and organisms. Analysing systems where congestion occurs which may be in parallel, series, interlinked, or interdependent, with flows one way or both ways this book puts forward new congestion models, breaking new ground by introducing game theory and safety/security into proceedings. Addressing the multiple actors who may hold different concerns regarding system reliability; e.g. one or several terrorists, a government, various local or regional government agencies, or others with stakes for or against system reliability, this book describes how governments and authorities may have the tools to handle congestion, but that these tools need to be improved whilst additionally ensuring safety and security against various threats. This game-theoretic analysis sets this two volume book apart from the current congestion literature and ensures that the work will be of use to postgraduates, researchers, 3rd/4th-year undergraduates, policy makers, and practitioners.


Background: CancerSupportSource (CSS) is a 25-item distress screening tool implemented at community-based cancer support organizations and hospitals nationwide. CSS assesses distress over 5 domains: (1) emotional concerns (including depression and anxiety risk screening subscales), (2) symptom burden, (3) body and healthy lifestyle, (4) healthcare team communication, and (5) relationships. This study developed a short form of CSS and examined its psychometric properties. Methods: 2,379 cancer survivors enrolled in the Cancer Support Community's Cancer Experience Registry. Participants provided demographic and clinical background and completed CSS-25 and PROMIS-29, a measure of health-related quality of life. Item reduction was conducted with a subsample of 1,435 survivors and included external item quality (correlations between items and PROMIS-29 scales), internal item quality (inter-item and inter-factor correlations, factor loadings and structure, and item communalities from an exploratory factor analysis of CSS-25), and professional judgement (ranking/prioritization of items by CSS-25 developers, accounting for theoretical and practical implications). Pearson correlations and confirmatory factor analysis were conducted on a separate subsample of 944 survivors to corroborate psychometric properties and dimensionality of the shortened scale. Results: Scale refinement resulted in a 15-item short form of CSS (CSS-15). At least 1 item from each of the 5 CSS-25 domains was retained to preserve multidimensionality, including anxiety and depression risk screening subscale items. Additionally, 1 item about tobacco/substance use was kept due to clinical significance for risk assessment. In confirmatory factor analysis, the model explained 59% of the variance and demonstrated good fit (RMSEA=0.068, 90% CI=0.061–0.075; SRMR=0.033; CFI=0.959; χ2(68)=334.75, P<.001). Correlation between CSS-15 and CSS-25 was 0.986, P<.001. Total distress was associated with PROMIS subscales (rs=−.65–.75, ps<.001); internal consistency reliability was excellent (α=.92). Conclusions: CSS-15 is a brief, reliable, and valid multidimensional measure of distress. The reduced measure retained excellent internal consistency and a stable factor structure, while correlating well with CSS-25 and PROMIS-29. CSS-15 can serve as a practical tool to efficiently screen for distress among cancer patients and survivors.


Autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC) has been universally applicable in the construction of internal and external walls. In order to be able to correctly use AAC in new buildings, the properties of this construction material need to be analysed in order to safeguard compliance with resistance and functional requirements laid down in the Construction Products Directive 89/106/EEC. Aerated concrete has been commonly known to exhibit favourable thermal properties, high fire resistance and high compressive resistance at relatively low density. However, little attention has been devoted to the sound insulation performance of aerated concrete partitions. This paper presents the results of studies on acoustic properties of AAC partitions aimed at identifying the effect of specific factors on AAC sound insulation performance. The following AAC properties have been taken into account in the studies: concrete density, resistance, humidity, and structural factors, i.e.: wall thickness, type of connections between wall elements (mortar, etc.), and surface finish. Single-leaf walls have been mainly examined. The tests have been carried out in close cooperation with acousticians, aerated concrete production engineers and design engineers in order to account for the latest achievements in concrete production and construction methods along with the most common structural solutions. A variety of acoustic problems with AAC partitions still remain unsolved, in particular, flanking sound transmission, which may be of importance in estimating sound insulation performance in buildings on the basis of the properties of AAC elements. Selected study outcomes referring to flanking sound transmission have been also summarized in this paper.


The human brain is the locus of all human experiences. The substantial microstructural and neuroelectrical differences between the two cerebral hemispheres predicts two major classes of mystical experiences which involve the sensed presence and the out-of-body experience. Their occurrence and their attributions to cosmic origins have been reported for centuries and have been the bases for social belief systems. Direct cerebral electrical stimulation during the 20th century evoked these experiences. In the 21st century the non-invasive, external transcerebral application of complex, physiologically-patterned weak magnetic fields has been shown to produce similar experiences that can be correlatively mapped by quantitative electroencephalographic inferences of interhemispheric coherence. The experimental production and control of these powerful experiences by more sophisticated technologies might be employed to understand the intricate nature and function of mystical/altered states within large populations of human beings.


De Quervain's release is a surgical procedure performed to curatively treat stenosing extensor tenosynovitis of the first extensor compartment of the wrist, after nonoperative management fails. This procedure involves surgical release of the first dorsal compartment with care taken to fully release the abductor pollicis longus (APL) and extensor pollicis brevis (EPB) tendons from their respective sheaths, while protecting the radial sensory nerve, in order to decompress the extensor tendons. This video outlines the operative technique used by Dr. Asif Ilyas for performing a De Quervain's release on a cadaveric wrist.


Eosinophilic coronary monoarteritis is an unfamiliar cause of acute myocardial ischemia. Most commonly, it presents as a left-sided chest pain or sudden death in middle-aged women with no traditional risk factors for coronary artery disease. Because the abrupt onset leaves almost no time for intervention, the symptoms readily lead to death, and most cases are diagnosed at necropsy. Dissection of the coronary artery wall with resultant occlusion of the lumen, which commonly affects the left anterior descending artery, is a consistent gross finding. An inflammatory infiltrate, which is predominantly composed of eosinophils in the tunica adventitia and tunica media and is often accompanied by a hematoma in between these 2 layers, is observed histologically. The etiology remains unclear, but an increase in the activity of eosinophils because of hormonal interactions during pregnancy has been suggested. Interplay of hormones is thought to culminate in the release of histolytic agents by the eosinophils, which initiate the dissection process. Currently, there is no specific treatment for eosinophilic coronary monoarteritis, but cyclophosphamide and prednisone have shown positive results in the treatment of spontaneous coronary artery dissection with unspecified periadventitial inflammation. Percutaneous coronary procedures have also resulted in favorable outcomes in a subset of patients. Because of the high, sudden death rate in eosinophilic coronary monoarteritis, deciphering the underlying pathophysiology of this almost invariably fatal disease remains both a challenge and a key to developing screening methods that will allow timely detection and thus treatment.


In order for artificial intelligence to become truly useful in real-world applications and environments it is necessary to identify, document, and integrate into automated systems the human knowledge that people use to solve their real-world problems. This process has been found to be difficult, and is a critical part of what has become known as the knowledge acquisition bottleneck. The primary contribution of this dissertation is the development and application of a general methodology for modeling and representing an expert's problem-solving knowledge that supports ontology import and development, teaching-based intelligent agent development, and agent-based problem solving. The methodology provides practical guidance to subject matter experts on how to express the way they solve problems using the task reduction paradigm. It identifies the necessary concepts and features to be represented in the ontology; identifies the tasks to be represented in the agent's knowledge base; guides the rule learning and refinement processes; supports natural language generation of solutions and justifications, and is natural and easy to use. The methodology is applicable to a wide variety of domains and has been successfully used in military planning, course of action critiquing, and strategic center of gravity identification problems. This research is part of a much larger effort with the goal to develop an advanced approach to expert knowledge acquisition based on apprenticeship multi-strategy learning, in a mixed-initiative framework.


To the Editor: Intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg) is used to treat bacterial and viral infections in patients with primary immunodeficiency disease and those with autoimmune and inflammatory disorders (1). IVIg contains pooled IgG from >1,000 blood donors and antibodies against various common human pathogens, including influenza virus A.

We tested the efficacy of commercial preparations of IVIg (50 mg/mL of highly purified immunoglobulin) against homosubtypic influenza viruses A (H1N1 and H3N2) and their cross-reactivity against avian influenza virus A (H5N1). IVIg preparations (Octagam; Octapharma, Vienna, Austria and Flebogamma; Instituto Grifols, Barcelona, Spain) had hemagglutination inhibition (HI) titers against subtypes H1N1 and H3N2 ranging from 20 to 40. Human Immunoglobulin, pH 4.0, (Harbin Sequel Bio-Engineering Pharmaceutical, Harbin, People's Republic of China) had lower HI titers against homosubtypic avian influenza viruses (10 for subtype H3N2 and <10 for subtype H1N1). As expected, we did not detect antibodies against hemagglutinin (HA) of subtype H5N1 (A/open-billed/stork/Nahkonsawan/BBD0104F/2004) in any of the IVIg preparations (HI titer <10).

Human influenza subtype H1N1 shares the same neuraminidase (NA) subtype (human N1) as subtype H5N1 (avian N1). We therefore tested whether IVIg preparations would react and inhibit NA activity of human and avian influenza viruses by using a neuraminidase inhibition (NI) assay (2). NI titer was defined as the reciprocal of the highest dilution that gave 50% reduction compared with that of the virus control.

All 3 IVIg preparations inhibited NA activity of human N1 (NI titer against subtype H1N1 range 258–986) and human N2 (NI titer against subtype H3N2 range 1,309–3,274). Enzyme activity of avian N1 (7:1 reassortant; PR8 + NA [A/Vietnam/DT-0361/2005 H5N1]) was inhibited by all IVIg preparations (NI titer range 143–231). These findings support the recent observation of neutralizing antibodies against human N1 in human serum, which could inhibit enzyme activity of avian N1 from subtype H5N1 (3,4). We also tested IVIg preparations against reverse genetics subtype H5N3 virus in which the N3 NA was derived from H2N3 virus (6:1:1 reassortant; 6 internal genes from PR8 + HA (A/Vietnam/DT-0361/05 H5N1) + NA (A/duck/Germany 1207 H2N3) and observed no effect (NI titer <10). The N3 subtype belongs to avian influenza NA. Thus, antibodies against NA in IVIg appear to be specific for those circulating human influenza viruses (human N1 and human N2).

Unlike HA and NA, virus matrix 2 ectodomain (M2e) is highly conserved. Its presence on the surface of the viral particle makes it a potential target of antibody response similar to that for HA and NA (5,6). We assessed reactivity of IVIg preparations against a consensus M2e peptide derived from human influenza viruses of H1, H2, and H3 subtypes (MSLLTEVETPIRNEWGCRCNDSSD) and those derived from A/Hong Kong/156/97 H5N1 (MSLLTEVETLTRNGWGCRCSDSSD and A/Thailand/ SP-83/2004 H5N1 (MSLLTEVETPTRNEWECRCSDSSD) by using ELISA (7). Antibody titer was defined as the reciprocal of the highest dilution that had an optical density of 0.5 at 414 nm in our assay.

Results showed considerable variation among IVIg preparations, caused by M2e peptides derived from different influenza viruses (titer range 88–23,614). Among the 3 preparations, Human Immunoglobulin, pH 4.0, IVIg showed the highest titers against all M2e peptides (consensus, 9,639; H5N1 Hong Kong, 3,519; and H5N1 Thailand, 23,614). Variation of antibody titers against M2e in IVIGs may be geographically dependent. Unlike Octagam and Flebogamma, Human Immunoglobulin, pH 4.0, IVIg was likely derived from blood donors in China. Octagam and Immunoglobulin, pH 4.0, IVIg were more reactive with M2e of avian influenza virus (H5N1) (A/Thailand/SP-83/2004) than with other M2e peptides.

We measured the ability of IVIg preparations to inhibit influenza subtype H5N1 replication by using a plaque-reduction assay. Subtype H5N1 (A/open-billed stork/ Nakhonsawan/BBD0104F/2004) was maintained as described (8). MDCK cells were infected with virus and agar containing various concentrations of IVIg was layered on top of these cells and incubated for 2 days. Results are shown in the Figure. IVIG inhibited plaque formation in a dose-dependent manner. Although plaques of heterogeneous size were observed in infected plates without IVIg, larger plaques were preferentially neutralized with increasing concentrations of IVIg in the agar (Figure).

Figure

Neutralization of avian influenza virus A (H5N1) by intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg) preparations measured by percentage reduction in plaque number (A) and plaque size (B). Monolayers of MDCK cells were infected with virus and overlaid with agar containing ...

Premixing excess M2e peptide with IVIg to absorb M2e-specific antibodies had no effect on plaque formation, indicating that antibodies against M2e in IVIg preparations were not responsible for neutralization of influenza subtype H5N1. Antibodies against M2e may have a role in protection against subtype H5N1 by another mechanism.

Our data suggest that the neutralizing activity against influenza subtype H5N1 in all 3 IVIg preparations was likely contributed by cross-reactive antibodies against avian N1. IVIg has been reported to have antiinflammatory activity (9,10). The immune suppressive effect of IVIg may benefit patients by reducing the cytokine storm. These data suggest use of IVIg, especially preparations containing high neutralizing activity against subtype H5N1, as adjunctive treatment for infection with highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (H5N1).


Karyotypes of southern African Myrmeleontidae are descriptionbed for the first time and were found to be as follows: Myrmeleon alcestris Banks, 2n 12 + XV; Myrmeleon obscurus Rambur, 2n = 12 + XV; Centroclisis brachygaster (Rambur), 2n 12 + XV; Palparidius concinnus Peringuey, 2n = 16 + XY and Palpares sobrinus Pennguey;. 2n = 20 + XV. These species have a typical neuropteroid karyotype, displaying distance segregation, male XV-sex chromosome setup and relative stability in terms of chromosome number and morphology.


This textbook is designed to fill two basic needs. One is for a clear and straightforward presentation of the rudiments of articulatory phonetics which is geared specifically to the requirements of the (future) language teacher, and not exclusively to the student of linguistics, and in which the basic concepts and terminology are introduced via English as opposed to a variety of languages. An even greater need, perhaps, and one that has gone unfulfilled for too long, is for a simple but reasonably complete overview of the phonetic inventory of North American French.


Extracellular biosynthesis of silver nanoparticles (Ag-NPs) using the Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Yeast) was carried out. The pH of the medium play a vital role in the synthesis of control shaped and sized nanoparticles. Morphological observation and characterization of biosynthesized silver nanoparticles were performed by UV-Visible spectroscopy, Scanning electron microscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The biosynthesized silver nanoparticles showed a maximum absorption in the visible region Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains showed a maximum absorption at 420-460 nm respectively and the size was ranged from 60-110 nm and 10-40 nm respectively. The antibacterial activities of silver nanoparticles (Ag-NPs) were studied with Staphylococcus aureus (Gram-positive) and Escherichia coli (Gram-negative). The silver nanoparticles were synthesized at pH 6 that showed maximum antibacterial activity. This method is a promising eco-friendly alternative to chemical method.


The decades-old conflict in Mindanao, southern Philippines, is often framed as a Muslim–Christian conflict and reinterpreted as such within the US-led global war on terror, with the Muslim secessionist movement standing accused of providing a hub for international jihad. In the meantime, global economic integration has made it easier to ignore the agrarian roots of violent conflict in Mindanao, enabling national and sub-national actors, including the international community and the Muslim or Moro separatists, to dismiss the issue of agrarian justice. We counter these arguments by using an agrarian political economy framework to uncover the roots of resilient violence in Mindanao, using historical narratives of the region from the end of the nineteenth century that accentuate the links between state-making, control of land and labour, and processes of agrarian modernization. We emphasize the critical role played by the Muslim landed elites who shaped processes of state-making by brokering the interests of their clans with exogenous actors at the national and international level. We shed light on emerging state policies and competing interests among other landed and agribusiness elites that resulted in the spread of a parallel underground economy, renewing opportunities for violence and crime within semi-autonomous social worlds.


Abstract. Global distributions and associated climate effects of atmospheric aerosols were simulated using a global aerosol climate model, SPRINTARS, from 1850 to the present day and projected forward to 2100. Aerosol emission inventories used by the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) were applied to this study. Scenarios based on the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) were used for the future projection. Aerosol loading in the atmosphere has already peaked and is now reducing in Europe and North America. However, in Asia where rapid economic growth is ongoing, aerosol loading is estimated to reach a maximum in the first half of this century. Atmospheric aerosols originating from the burning of biomass have maintained high loadings throughout the 21st century in Africa, according to the RCPs. Evolution of the adjusted forcing by direct and indirect aerosol effects over time generally correspond to the aerosol loading. The probable future pathways of global mean forcing differ based on the aerosol direct effect for different RCPs. Because aerosol forcing will be close to the preindustrial level by the end of the 21st century for all RCPs despite the continuous increases in greenhouse gases, global warming will be accelerated with reduced aerosol negative forcing.


ABSTRACT New approaches to British imperial history and the rise of Atlantic history have had a strong influence on historians specializing in the history of the British-colonized Caribbean during the era of slavery. Caribbean scholars have always stressed the importance of transatlantic and colonial connections, but these new perspectives have encouraged historians to rethink the ways that Caribbean colonies and the imperial metropole shaped one another and to reconsider the place of the Caribbean region within wider Atlantic and global contexts. Attention to transatlantic links has become especially important in new work on abolition and emancipation. Scholars have also focused more of their attention on white colonizing elites, looking in particular at colonial identities and at strategies of control. Meanwhile, recent calls for pan-Caribbean approaches to the history of the region are congruent with pleas for more detailed and nuanced understandings of the development of slave and post-slave societies, focusing on specifically Caribbean themes while setting these in their wider imperial, Atlantic, and global contexts.


A reliable, affordable and secure supply of energy is important for economic development. This has been true for the past and present and will remain valid for the future. However, over time, changes have taken and will take place with regard to energy use, both with regard to the amount as well as with regard to the type of energy used. Many factors have played a role in bringing these changes. Availability, security of supplies, price, ease of handling and use, external factors like technological development, introduction of subsidies, environmental constraints and legislation are some of these factors. The following research paper is an in-depth scenario and analysis of the micro hydro energy in Bangladesh. We represent a look into a time tested, yet underused technology driven by water. Included within this document is an introduction to micro hydro system and how they apply specifically to power generation. Yet the source of micro hydro energy (lakes, rivers, and streams) remains untapped. The exploitable hydro capability in Bangladesh is one of the foremost primary energy resources but the current utilization of this potential is very low. The overall energy scenario will be ameliorated, if this exploitable source of energy could be harnessed using sustainable technology.


Un-enacted projects are those projects that have not been officially evaluated by the project portfolio management but do exist although they are not known to a company's project portfolio. As a consequence, resources thought to be available often prove to be actually unavailable and that unofficial initiatives eventually compete for scarce resources. One particular type of these un-enacted projects are bottom-up initiatives. Bottom-up un-enacted projects are unofficial initiatives on which employees spend time without order but with which they intend to benefit their organizations. While previous research highlights the great potential of bottom-up un-enacted projects, they only focus on the individual level but leave the organizational level for further research. To address this research gap, this study aims at gaining a deeper understanding of the organizational drivers of bottom-up un-enacted projects. We draw on deviance theory to develop a conceptual model for explaining the occurrence of these projects. In order to triangulate the emerging model with insights from practice, we use interview data to crosscheck and refine the theory-driven model. Our results advance the theoretical discourse on the concept of un-enacted projects and enable practitioners to understand the levers with which to steer respective activities in the intended direction.


Abstract Rather than viewing the recent violence in the Thai South largely as a product of long-standing historical and socioeconomic grievances, this article argues that the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has played a crucial role in provoking conflict in the region. Early in his premiership, Thaksin decided that the South was controlled by forces of "network monarchy" loyal to the palace and to former prime minister Prem Tinsulanond. Thaksin sought to reorganize political and security arrangements in the deep South in order to gain personal control of the area, but in the process he upset a carefully negotiated social contract that had ensured relative peace for two decades. As the violence increased, royal displeasure — articulated mainly by members of the Privy Council — forced Thaksin to make certain concessions, notably the creation of a National Reconciliation Commission to propose solutions for the growing crisis. Network monarchy had struck back, albeit from a position of weakness. This analysis seeks to demonstrate that the southern violence is actually inextricable from wider developments in Thailand's national politics.


This paper presents a summary of reported studies on the Open Access citation advantage. There is a brief introduction to the main issues involved in carrying out such studies, both methodological and interpretive. The study listing provides some details of the coverage, methodological approach and main conclusions of each study.


Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) were often used to collect sensitive data and the entire network was particularly vulnerable to various threats at different layers of the protocol stack. With this in mind, there was need to improve security solutions that were inevitable and advantageous to the successful deployment of the wireless sensor networks. The vast research conducted to provide security solutions against various attacks in the WSNs so far was based on the layered approach. In this study, we emphasized that the layered approaches have noticeable shortcomings such as the redundancy and/or inflexibility of the security solutions, which made the layers security solutions often inefficient and inadequate. It was, however, beneficial to construct the security approach for the WSNs based on cross-layer interaction between all components in different layers of the protocol stack. Consequently, these new approaches surely gave a new direction towards the issue of security for wireless sensor networks. The outline of the existing cross layer security schemes in literature was presented, while some new novel security solutions were proposed. More so, the synopsis of the proposed cross-layer based comprehensive security framework (CLBCSF) as the framework model for hierarchical clustering wireless sensor networks was also presented. Nonetheless, the open problems in this area were debated too.


This article provides a comparison of the changing patterns of export share, product mix, industry structure and export growth among China and ASEAN-4 (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand) as exporters of primary commodities, labour-intensive goods as well as capital-intensive manufactures to their common U.S. import market. The degree of export rivalry or competition among China and ASEAN-4 in the US. market is examined by using a conventional shift-share methodology. Changes in ASEAN-China's relative real exchange rate, export composition, as well as changes in their trade patterns, insofar as they might have effects on the export shares of the ASEAN-4 and China to the United States, are considered. The study points unequivocally to some rivalry effects from China on the ASEAN4's exports to the United States. Some of the possible approaches to attaining a propitious outcome of the competition, and ways to ameliorate adverse effects of the rivalry are raised and discussed. Introduction China and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations)' have experienced strong economic growth over the last two decades or so. The dynamic growth of these economies are attributed, inter alia, to their successful reforms, industrial restructuring and export-led industrializations. Aside from sharing similar rates of growth, there are some other common features between China and the ASEAN countries. For example, in their initial stages of growth, China and ASEAN were predominantly specializing in the production of primary-based and labour-intensive commodities (for example crude minerals, textiles, and clothing), in contrast to the newly-industrialized economies' (NIEs) and Japan's production of largely capital- and technology-intensive products.2 Another similarity is that both China and the ASEAN countries are heavily dependent on the United States and Japan as important destinations for their exports. By exporting similar products (for example labour-intensive goods) to the same markets, these economies tend to face a high degree of export competition or rivalry among themselves. This article aims to provide a comparison of the changing pattern of export competitiveness among China and the four ASEAN countries comprising Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand (hereafter ASEAN-4) as exporters of primary commodities, labour-intensive goods as well as technology-intensive manufactures in the U.S. market. Competitiveness is defined as country A's ability to gain market share on a common export destination (such as the U.S. import market).3 There are many possible factors contributing to the changing level of competitiveness of a trading country. In this article, we confine our analysis to evaluating how important relative changes in real exchange rate, product composition, industry structure and growth rates are in influencing export competitiveness of China and ASEAN-4 in the U.S. import market. The degree of export rivalry among China and ASEAN-4 is examined by using a shift-share model (see, for example, Herschede 1991). In particular, the model assesses the effects of different industry structures and growth rates on the export performance of China and each of the four ASEAN countries in the U.S. market. This article is organized as follows. In the next section, the changing trends and patterns of China and the ASEAN-4's total (primary and manufactured) exports to their major trading partners, namely the United States and Japan, are examined. We then confine our subsequent analysis to the case of the United States as ASEAN and China's common export destination. Issues of changes in real exchange rate and product composition, insofar as they might have effects on the ASEAN-4 and China's export growth rates and on their market share in the U.S. import market, are considered in the article. The shift-share methodology is presented in the following section for assessing and comparing the differences in competitiveness among China and the ASEAN countries in the U. …


The management of puerperal hematomas after normal delivery has always been challenging for obstetricians. Vulvar, vulvovaginal, or paravaginal hematomas are common. On the other hand, retroperitoneal hematomas are uncommon and can be life-threatening. The diagnosis of vascular injury is rarely made preoperatively as atonic or traumatic postpartum hemorrhage (PPH), uterine rupture and amniotic fluid embolism are more common differential diagnoses. Injury to internal pudendal and uterine vessels is extremely rare in cases of vaginal delivery and, therefore, the literature on this topic is very scarce. We present a rare case of both internal pudendal and uterine artery rupture in a normal vaginal delivery, which led to massive postpartum hemorrhage. The diagnosis was made on Magnetic Resonance imaging (MRI) and arterial embolization was performed. This case stresses on the need for careful post-delivery monitoring for revealed postpartum hemorrhage. Vascular injury is a rare life-threatening cause of obstetric shock, and active; and timely operative intervention can prevent morbidity and mortality.


We collected modern foraminiferal samples to characterize the foraminiferal environments and investigate the role that temporal and spatial variability may play in controlling the nature and significance of foraminiferal assemblages of the mangroves of Kaledupa, Wakatobi Marine National Park, Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. The study of foraminiferal live and dead assemblages indicates that dead assemblages are least prone to vary in time and space, and furthermore, they accurately represent the subsurface assemblages that are the focus of paleoenvironmental reconstructions.

Further analyses of the dead assemblages indicate a vertical zonation of foraminifera within the intertidal zone. Zone D-Ia is dominated by agglutinated foraminifera Arenoparrella mexicana, Miliammina fusca , M. obliqua and Trochammina inflata . Zone D-Ib has mixed agglutinated/calcareous assemblages with species such as T. inflata and Ammonia tepida. Zone D-II is dominated by numerous calcareous species including A. tepida , Discorbinella bertheloti, Elphidium advenum and Quinqueloculina spp. Zone D-Ia is found to be the most accurate sea-level indicator and its assemblages are omnipresent world-wide. Zones D-Ib and D-II are subject to both spatial and temporal variations which must be included in any sea-level reconstructions.


Social grooming is conspicuous in group-living mammals. Bats are gregarious and may groom each other, but the motivation for such social behaviour remains unclear. Here, we describe patterns and infer function of social grooming in tent-making Indian short-nosed fruit bats. Combining field and captivity observations, we found that males and their harem of females mutually groom and apply bodily secretions to one another in tight clusters. Mutual grooming is more commonly initiated by females, before emergence flight at dusk, and during the non-mating season. The within-harem association pattern suggests males may recognize female reproductive status via social grooming. Chemical analysis of the secretions applied during grooming revealed volatile organic compounds that may be involved in chemosensory-mediated communication and/or mate choice. These fruit bat harems were previously seen as simple aggregations, with limited interactions among individuals. Our findings suggest social grooming is multi-functional, with potential implications for the bats' social lives.


Do Not Disturb addresses the sometimes thorny issue of when occupants of a hotel room have standing under the Fourth Amendment to object to an illegal search of the room. This becomes particularly problematic when the occupant is not a typical hotel guest or violates a hotel policy. The Tenth Circuit requires an occupant to prove that he or she is a registered guest of the hotel, while the Sixth Circuit holds that invalid registration is the hotel's concern alone. Although hotel room rooms pose interesting Fourth Amendment problems, such as invalid registrations, fake names, guests of guests, and guests who stay beyond the rental period, this paper argues that the expectation of privacy in hotels should be measured in the same way that the Fourth Amendment deals with other types of residences and proposes that courts universally apply a rule requiring the hotel to act first to terminate the expectation of privacy of a guest who violates hotel policy.


By installing a cool roof at DOE, the federal government and Secretary Chu are helping to educate families and businesses about the important energy and cost savings that can come with this simple, low-cost technology. Cool roofs have the potential to quickly and dramatically reduce global carbon emissions while saving money every month on consumers' electrical bills.


Objective: To determine whether cumulative lead dose in former organolead workers was associated with MRI measures of white matter lesions (WML) and global and structure-specific brain volumes. Methods: MRIs, tibia lead, and other measures were obtained from 532 former organolead workers with a mean age of 56 years and a mean of 18 years since last occupational exposure to lead. Cumulative lead dose was measured by tibia lead, obtained by X-ray fluorescence, and expressed as μg lead per gram of bone mineral (μg Pb/g). WML were evaluated using the Cardiovascular Health Study grading scale. A total of 21 global and specific brain regions were evaluated. Results: A total of 36% of individuals had WML grade of 1 to 7 (0 to 9 scale). Increasing peak tibia lead was associated with increasing WML grade (p = 0.004). The adjusted OR for a 1 μg Pb/g increase in tibia lead was 1.042 (95% CI = 1.021, 1.063) for a CHS grade of 5+ (≥5 vs <5). In linear regression, the coefficient for tibia lead was negative for associations with all structures. Higher tibia lead was significantly related to smaller total brain volume, frontal and total gray matter volume, and parietal white matter volume. Of nine smaller specific regions of interest, higher tibia lead was associated with smaller volumes for the cingulate gyrus and insula. Conclusions: These data suggest that cumulative lead dose is associated with persistent brain lesions, and may explain previous findings of a progressive decline in cognitive function.


With his March 2000 presidential victory, Vladimir Putin is ready to put his mark on Russian politics after Boris Yeltsin's chaotic regime,(1) Earlier, 60 percent turnout in the 19 December 1999 elections voted for a Duma that, with Communist Party support, will likely agree to continue the war in the northern Caucasus indefinitely. Putin's political party, Yedinstvo, also known as "Unity" or "The Bear" won votes based on the idea of subverting Chechnya, erasing crime and terrorism from the Russian Federation, and reversing any notion that Russia is "a failing state." The new Duma may likely support an anticriminal, antiterrorist platform following the March 2000 presidential election. Clearly, discipline and order are the new tenets of Russian society as the country enters the twenty-first century. An emerging Russian ideal of statehood carries broad implications for stability, security, and emergence of democracy in the Russian Federation. The Rise of Putin and Shoigu In March 1999, Putin was appointed secretary of the Russian Security Council while he also headed the domestic intelligence service, or FSB. In the Security Council, Putin coordinated policy between the Ministries of Defense and the Interior, the FSB, foreign intelligence, and others. Putin headed the FSB through the Kosovo conflict and, in the period before the Chechen incursion into Dagestan. Then Russian president Boris Yeltsin gave Putin and the FSB the task of "safeguarding" the Duma and presidential elections--a mission interpreted by analysts to mean ensuring the election of Yeltsin allies. On 9 August, Yeltsin sacked Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin for failure to stop the Dagestani events, appointed Putin to the post, and declared him heir apparent to the presidency, an unprecedented move in post-Soviet Russia. One month later, in September 1999, the Kremlin nominated Sergei Shoigu, minister of Civil Defense, Emergency Situations, and Natural Disasters, and a close ally of the acting president, to lead Yedinstvo in the 1999-2000 elections. Shoigu's qualifications for national office include his youth, his handling of economic and political disasters at home, important foreign policy missions to Yugoslavia, Libya, and Cuba, and his sending his troops to Germany and the United States for disaster and emergency training. Moreover, Shoigu supervises civil defense assets, including seventy thousand men and their equipment that were stripped from the Ministry of Defense in the early 1990s. Shoigu's national prominence has escalated with Chechnya, which has demonstrated his allegiance to Putin's policy in the Caucasus and his ability to steer clear of serious corruption allegations under the Yeltsin regime. In February 2000, Shoigu's ministry was responsible for restoring energy, gas and water supplies, sewage systems, outpatient clinics, hospitals, and schools in northern Chechnya, which provided him with more national visibility. He also supports Yedinstvo's creation of a "young bears" movement, similar to the old Soviet Komsomol, and the organization's slogan, "Those who don't want to work will be made to work."(2) Most important, however, is Shoigu's support for the Russian armed forces and state stability. He asserted that "to criticize the actions of federal troops in Chechnya means to betray the interests of the country and the Russian army."(3) What Shoigu is doing is following Putin's lead in rallying the Russian populace against Chechen intransigence and, ultimately, state collapse. Shoigu has been rewarded for his allegiance to Putin by being appointed deputy prime minister, while still retaining the power and far-reaching assets of the Emergencies Ministry. Specifically, Putin rewarded Shoigu by giving him responsibility for coordinating the State Committee on Far North Affairs, the Federal Migration Service, the Federal Service of Railway Troops, the Russian Agency for State Reserves, and the Federal Mines and Industrial Supervision Agency. …


OBJECTIVE
Isolation of adult animals represents a form of psychsocial stress that produces sympatho-adrenomedullar activation. The aim of this work was to investigate the changes in gene expression and protein levels of catecholamine biosynthetic enzymes: tyrosine hydroxylase (TH), dopamine-beta-hydroxylase (DBH) and phenylethanolamine N-methyltransferase (PNMT) in the adrenal medulla of naive control and chronically (12 weeks) socially isolated adult Wistar rat males and the response of these animals to additional immobilization stress (2 h).

METHODS
TH, DBH and PNMT mRNA levels were quantified by quantitative real-time RT-PCR (qRT-PCR). TH, DBH and PNMT immunoproteins were assayed by Western Blot.

RESULTS
In chronically isolated rats, gene expression levels of catecholamine biosynthetic enzymes in the adrenal medulla were decreased, but only TH mRNA was significantly decreased. However, protein levels of TH, DBH and PNMT of these animals were elevated by 55%, 20% and 18%, respectively, in relation to the corresponding control. Naive control and chronically socially isolated rats exposed to additional 2-h-immobilization showed increased gene expression of the examined enzymes, the increase being greater in socially isolated rats as compared to the controls. Additional immobilization of naive controls did not affect TH, DBH and PNMT protein levels. In contrast, this stress produced increased TH, DBH and PNMT protein levels in long-term socially isolated rats.

CONCLUSION
We can conclude that psychosocial stress expressed a differential influence on gene expression and protein levels of catecholamine biosynthetic enzymes in the adrenal medulla of adult rats. The results indicate a possible adaptation of catecholamine-synthesizing system at the level of TH gene expression in adrenal medulla of chronically isolated animals.


Nowadays, the design flow of complex signal processing embedded systems starts with a specification of the application by means of a large and sequential program (usually in C/C++). As we are entering in the multicore era, sequential programs are no longer the most appropriate way to specify algorithms targeted to run on several processing units. The new ISO/MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding (RVC) standard is proposing a new paradigm for specifying and designing complex signal processing systems. The RVC standard enables specifying new codecs by assembling blocks, or so called Functional Units (FUs) from a standard Video Tool Library (VTL). Flexibility, reusability, and modularity are the key features of RVC. This new way of specifying algorithms clearly simplifies the task of designing future video coding applications by allowing software and hardware reuse across multiple video coding standards. Specifications are provided in the form of an actor and dataflow-based language called CAL. Although the RVC standard does not imply any specific implementation design flow, it is an appropriate starting point for targeting multiple processing units platforms. This paper describes a new model-driven design flow which considers both algorithm and architecture to map RVC codec specifications onto heterogeneous and multi-core systems.


The paper motivates, presents, demonstrates in use, and evaluates a methodology for conducting design science (DS) research in information systems (IS). DS is of importance in a discipline oriented to the creation of successful artifacts. Several researchers have pioneered DS research in IS, yet over the past 15 years, little DS research has been done within the discipline. The lack of a methodology to serve as a commonly accepted framework for DS research and of a template for its presentation may have contributed to its slow adoption. The design science research methodology (DSRM) presented here incorporates principles, practices, and procedures required to carry out such research and meets three objectives: it is consistent with prior literature, it provides a nominal process model for doing DS research, and it provides a mental model for presenting and evaluating DS research in IS. The DS process includes six steps: problem identification and motivation, definition of the objectives for a solution, design and development, demonstration, evaluation, and communication. We demonstrate and evaluate the methodology by presenting four case studies in terms of the DSRM, including cases that present the design of a database to support health assessment methods, a software reuse measure, an Internet video telephony application, and an IS planning method. The designed methodology effectively satisfies the three objectives and has the potential to help aid the acceptance of DS research in the IS discipline.


This report examines the experiences of involuntary immobility of urban refugees living in Bangkok, Thailand. Thailand has not ratified the 1951 Convention or the 1967 Additional Protocol and lacks the legal and administrative mechanisms to identify and protect refugees. As a consequence, Bangkok's refugees are criminalized and regarded as irregular migrants as a matter of Thai law. Caught between an inability to return home and settle in a third country, they live with circumscribed political and legal rights, limited agency, and restricted mobility within the city. This report has three objectives: (1) to conceptualize immobility as a state of being that shapes the rights, agency, and mobility of urban refugees, (2) to broadly describe the immobility experiences of Bangkok's urban refugees, and (3) to explore some of the ways UNHCR, non-governmental organizations, and civil society groups help refugees navigate Thailand's restrictive immigration framework.


We investigated whether hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance were associated with hypertension independent of obesity in young (mean age 20 years) Japanese men. Subjects were classified as hypertensive if their systolic or diastolic blood pressure (BP) was≥40 or≥90mm Hg, respectively. Subjects were classified as obese if their body mass index (BMI) was≥26. We divided 88 subjects into four groups: 29 nonobese normotensives (NONT), 12 nonobese hypertensives (NOHT), 28 obese normotensives (ONT), and 19 obese hypertensives (OHT). We conducted a 75g oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) and measured plasma glucose and serum insulin at 0, 30, and 60min. We found similar glucose levels at fasting and during OGTT in all groups. Compared with the NONT group, the insulin levels at fasting and during OGTT were significantly higher in the NOHT group. No difference was found between the NOHT and ONT groups. The glucose/insulin ratios and the ratio of glucose area to insulin area were significantly lower in the NOHT group than in the NONT group; no difference was found between the NOHT and ONT groups. The OHT group had higher fasting insulin levels and lower fasting glucose/insulin ratios than the NOHT or ONT group. The fasting glucose/insulin ratio was correlated with the mean BP when the normotensives and hypertensives were combined. In a multiple regression analysis including BMI, the mean BP was still significantly related to the fasting glucose/insulin ratio. Our data indicate that hyperinsulinemia is associated with hypertension and is independent of obesity in young Japanese men. (Hypertens Res 1994; 17: 133-136)


This essay explores Charlotte Brontë's 1849 novel Shirley as a literary endeavour to recreate the sibling dynamic of the Brontës' childhoods, and the psychological effect of being the 'surviving' sibling of a formally collaborative unit. In their adolescent years, the Brontës famously forged fictional kingdoms together, known collectively as "The Glass Town Saga". Throughout adulthood, each Brontë continuously returned to these stories, oftentimes due to nostalgia and occasionally for creative reinvention. However, by the summer of 1849, their familial collaboration was at an end. Charlotte was the last sibling standing, having lost all her co-authors in the space of nine months. In despair, as a form of catharsis, she turned to her writing and this essay will focus on how protagonist Caroline Helstone became an elegy for both Branwell and Anne Brontë. Mere weeks before Charlotte began volume 1 of Shirley, Branwell was determined to return to a heroine created in his childhood, also named "Caroline (1836)". This juvenilia piece explores themes of waning sibling connections, death and heartbreak – issues which tormented Branwell and Charlotte throughout his prolonged final illness. Yet Caroline Helstone's ethereal femininity and infantilization mirrors Anne Brontë's reputation as the 'obedient' sibling, as well as the views expressed in her semi-autobiographical novels Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).


This study assessed how various combat experiences related to post-deployment adjustment among 289 Iraq/Afghanistan veterans. The study examined the relationships among three predictor variables (combat exposure, agency, perceived threat), one mediator (guilt), and two criterion factors (posttraumatic stress disorder/PTSD, and psychological wellbeing/PWB). It distinguished agency (e.g., firing or killing) from combat exposure (e.g., being fired at or witnessing). The study sought to: a) examine whether combat exposure differs from agency as constructs of combat experiences; b) determine the contributions of three predictors to the degree of PTSD and PWB; and c) determine whether guilt mediated the relationships between the three predictors and the two criterion factors. Instruments used included the Combat Experiences Subscale, the Post-Battle Subscale, and the Perceived Threat Subscale from the Deployment Risk and Resilience Inventory (DRRI), the Atrocities Exposure Subscale, the Laufer-Parson Guilt Inventory, the PTSD Checklist (PCL – Military), the Satisfaction With Life Scale, the Self-Acceptance Subscale and the Purpose in Life Subscale developed by Ryff (1989). Factor analyses, correlational analyses, hierarchical regression analyses, and Sobel Tests were used to analyze the data. Results indicated that exposure and agency were two constructs with shared commonalties (especially those involving injuring and killing of enemy combatants). Agency-Civilian-Casualties emerged as a new variable that merits further exploration due to the increases in civilian causalities in modern warfare. Atrocity also appeared to be a distinct variable that needs further examination. About 96% of participants reported having been under fire. However, 41% reported never having fired at the enemies. About 72% reported having at least one moderate PTSD HUANG, HSIN-HSIN, 2010, UMSL, iv symptom, and 43% could be identified as PTSD positive. All three predictors were highly correlated with guilt, PTSD, and PWB. PTSD was found to be highly (negatively) correlated with PWB. Together, the three predictors accounted for 58% of the total variance for PTSD, and 46% for PWB. When guilt was included in the regression, the four variables accounted for 78% of the total variance for PTSD, and 64% for PWB. Guilt mediated between exposure and PTSD, agency and PTSD, and agency and PWB. Implications of these findings were discussed.


3D modelers often wish to showcase their models for sharing or review purposes. This may consist of generating static viewpoints of the model or authoring animated fly-throughs. Manually creating such views is often tedious and few automatic methods are designed to interactively assist the modelers with the view authoring process. We present a view authoring assistance system that supports the creation of informative view points, view paths, and view surfaces, allowing modelers to author the interactive navigation experience of a model. The key concept of our implementation is to analyze the model's workflow history, to infer important regions of the model and representative viewpoints of those areas. An evaluation indicated that the viewpoints generated by our algorithm are comparable to those manually selected by the modeler. In addition, participants of a user study found our system easy to use and effective for authoring viewpoint summaries.


Concurrency errors, like data races and deadlocks, are difficult to find due to the large number of possible interleavings in a parallel program. Dynamic tools analyze a single observed execution of a program, and even with multiple executions they can not reveal possible errors in other reorderings. This work takes a single program observation and produces a set of alternative orderings of the synchronization primitives that lead to a concurrency error. The new reorderings are enforced under a happens-before detector to discard reorderings that are infeasible or do not produce any error report. We evaluate our approach against multiple repetitions of a state of the art happens-before detector. The results show that through interleaving inference more errors are found and the counterexamples enable easier reproducibility by the developer.


Sharing information across organizational boundaries in support of a governmental response to crises requires intergovernmental collaboration and information sharing. Examining these efforts provides an opportunity to explore questions about the role of various actors in such response efforts; in particular, informal leaders. This paper, based on a comparative case analysis of the response to West Nile virus (WNV) in two US states, New York and Colorado, extends what is known about leadership by providing new understanding about how informal leadership affects collaborative information sharing. The case analysis contributes to current knowledge about government leadership in complex networked environments such as a public health crisis. A set of propositions drawn from the analysis provides a preliminary model of the mechanisms through which informal leadership affects intergovernmental information sharing in crisis response. The findings also provide lessons about the role informal leaders play in cross-boundary information sharing and, consequently, in generating government capacity to respond to complex public problems as well as the foundation for a set of recommendations for practitioners.


The resonant x-ray scattering technique was applied to study the directional covalent bonds (orbital ordering) in KNbO, associated with ferroelectricity by scanning the incident x-ray energy through the K edge of niobium.The orbital ordering was determined by measuring the real part of the x-ray anomalous dispersion f', with the photon polarization parallel and perpendicular to the orbital ordering vector. The orbital characteristics were assessed through the dependence of f' on the momentum transfer, Q, since the matrix element for the quadrupolar transition into the d states is dependent on Q, while that for the dipolar transition into the p state is not.


Due to the historic unusualness of the recent 2016 presidential election, many are unsure of what to think of the political climate in the United States. Many of the well respected polling organizations were incorrect about the outcome of the election, and this has led many to question what the issues people find most relevant when voting are. One of the reasons they were so off is because many experts didn't believe someone could act the way Donald Trump acted, and still win. Of course, they were wrong and he is not the current President. In hopes of answering why his behavior didn't cost him the election, the purpose of this study is to determine the factors that are most important to people when voting for elected officials. The factors that I focused specifically were social issues, economic issues, and international issues. I created the survey in the hope that I would be able to determine which issues are most important to each respondent. It will also help to see whether people tend to agree with one political party on all of these issues, or perhaps people support issues from opposing parties and choose the party that shares their opinion on their most important issue. This study should help to answer which of these factors is most important in driving people to vote for candidates, and whether these important factors are different for people of differing wealth, age, education, sex, and political identity. The hope is that this can provide a better understanding in the future to what issues are important to these various groups and which issues are most likely to encourage voting. This would mean fewer surprises in predictive polling data for future elections. Degree Type Open Access Senior Honors Thesis Department Political Science First Advisor Jeffrey L. Bernstein


It has been shown experimentally that the load carrying capacity of the spine significantly increases when compressive loads are carried along the follower load (FL) direction. However, it is necessary to modify the current FL concept because a certain amount of shear force is produced during activities in daily life. In this study, a clinically allowable range of shear force was investigated using the modified FL concept. The shear force allowance was defined as the maximum ratio of the shear force to the follower force at each vertebral body center. Then, it was shown that the appropriate shear force allowance was within approximately 0.2 ~ 0.5 from the investigation of the follower forces, the shear forces, and the muscle force coordination. The predicted shear force allowance indicated that the resultant joint force is directed to a certain inside region between a half vertebral body and whole vertebral body.


Data-flow analysis computes its solutions over the paths in a control-flow graph. These paths---whether feasible or infeasible, heavily or rarely executed---contribute equally to a solution. However, programs execute only a small fraction of their potential paths and, moreover, programs' execution time and cost is concentrated in a far smaller subset of hot paths.This paper describes a new approach to analyzing and optimizing programs, which improves the precision of data flow analysis along hot paths. Our technique identifies and duplicates hot paths, creating a hot path graph in which these paths are isolated. After flow analysis, the graph is reduced to eliminate unnecessary duplicates of unprofitable paths. In experiments on SPEC95 benchmarks, path qualification identified 2--112 times more non-local constants (weighted dynamically) than the Wegman-Zadek conditional constant algorithm, which translated into 1--7% more dynamic instructions with constant results.


Nowadays, trash has become a problem in the society and the ecosystem due to the way people get rid of it. Most of garbage is buried or burnt or even kept in places to which it does not belong. Big volumes of garbage thrown away and the methods used to store it cause air, water, and soil pollution. Fortunately, people can count on other methods to reduce the quantity of produced litter. An answer is recycling by re-using the materials. Currently, the traditional way to separate waste is to use different containers for each kind of waste separating trash manually, which does not always work. The aim of this paper is to present an Intelligent Waste Separator (IWS) which can replace the traditional way of dealing with waste; the proposed device receives the incoming waste and places it automatically in different containers by using a multimedia embedded processor, image processing, and machine learning in order to select and separate waste.


Molecules of the cadherin and integrin families involved in cell-cell and cell-matrix adhesion have been implicated in epithelial differentiation, carcinogenesis and metastasis. Having observed that a colon cancer cell line bound avidly to collagen type I, inducing integrin-triggered glandular differentiation, we investigated the regulation of integrin function in these cells. We modified a mammalian expression cloning system that used monoclonal antibody selection to clone cell surface molecules. Using attachment to collagen type I to select for adhesive phenotype, we isolated a complementary DNA clone that increases cell adhesion to components of the extracellular matrix. The corresponding gene (cell adhesion regulator, CAR) is located on the long arm of chromosome 16 (16q) and encodes a protein of 142 amino acids, which has an N-terminal myristoylation motif and a consensus tyrosine-kinase phosphorylation site at the C terminus. Removal of this tyrosine residue abolishes enhancement of cell-matrix adhesion. This gene may encode an adhesion signal transduction molecule that functions in the suppression of tumour invasion.


Whistle-blowing is usually regarded as a way to identify abuse and wrongdoing on the part of governments and corporations. In this paper we show how, at a micro level, whistle-blowing can be used as a designer tool to prevent opportunistic behavior, that takes the form of collusion or blackmail, on the part of members of a simple hierarchical structure. We focus on a three layered principal-supervisor-agent structure and show how the principal can use whistle-blowing as a way to prevent the supervisor and the agent from colluding to the detriment of the principal. To understand our mechanism we need to explicitly define the penalty a party has to incur for walking away from a collusive agreement. Rewarding whistle-blowing, creates incentives for the uninformed colluding party to walk out of the side deal and report to the principal that collusion took place. This threat clearly reduces the informed party's incentive to participate in side deals. It also serves as a potential blackmail threat between the colluding parties. However, careful use of whistle-blowing allows the principal to eliminate opportunities for blackmail.


Empirical tests are provided to determine the optimal leverage adjustment in transitional economy. Econometric model of agricultural firm capital structure is specified and estimated in order to analyze, how different factors affect agricultural firm's capital structure. Issues in financial structure, that under particular ownership type should be considered in responding to changes in the operating environment, are found. The evidence suggests that profit, income tax, depreciation have an influence on increase in financial leverage. Results indicate that increase in firm's profits may induce firms to increase financial risk through capital structure adjustments.


Perceptual, "context-aware" applications that observe their environment and interact with users via cameras and other sensors are becoming ubiquitous on personal computers, mobile phones, gaming platforms, household robots, and augmented-reality devices. This raises new privacy risks. We describe the design and implementation of DARKLY, a practical privacy protection system for the increasingly common scenario where an untrusted, third-party perceptual application is running on a trusted device. DARKLY is integrated with OpenCV, a popular computer vision library used by such applications to access visual inputs. It deploys multiple privacy protection mechanisms, including access control, algorithmic privacy transforms, and user audit. We evaluate DARKLY on 20 perceptual applications that perform diverse tasks such as image recognition, object tracking, security surveillance, and face detection. These applications run on DARKLY unmodified or with very few modifications and minimal performance overheads vs. native OpenCV. In most cases, privacy enforcement does not reduce the applications' functionality or accuracy. For the rest, we quantify the tradeoff between privacy and utility and demonstrate that utility remains acceptable even with strong privacy protection.