This study considers the approach in recent African-American and Black British
fiction toward the cultural memory of Africa. Following a brief consideration of the
relationship between contemporary conceptions of African-American and Black
British cultural identities, I examine the ways in which the imaginative journeys and
geographies, evoked by the ideals of Africa and 'Africanness', are employed in the
negotiation of historical memory, and in the endeavour to situate black identity in
the context of contemporary American and British society.
My discussion addresses these questions, initially, in four novels by African-American
writers: Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Toni Morrison's Song of
Solomon (1977), Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1983), and John Edgar
Wideman's Philadelphia Fire (1990). I argue that African-American writers situate
a memory of an African past within an African-American present, through a form of
historical memory which is sensitive not only to tradition, but also to the practice of
'possession'. This fluid form of memory, characteristic of a voodoo tradition, and
also, these writers suggest, of a diversity of African-American artforms, allows
knowledge of African tradition to be situated within the American present, but is
broadly denied by an American trend of forgetfulness toward the past, and devalued
by institutionalised racism. African-American texts present uses of language in
which the linguistic and the pre-linguistic realms are felt to be continuous with one
another, in response to an American language which is centrally occupied by the
fraught relationship between black and white Americans.
The second half of this study examines the memory of Africa in three Black British
works, including Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River (1991), S.1. Martin's
Incomparable World (1996), and Bernardine Evaristo's Lara (1997). I suggest here
that Black British authors employ the cultural memory of Africa not as an
inheritance which is connected to a known 'tradition', but as one of a diverse
number of inheritances which are negotiated as part of the process of situating
identity as flexible, individual, and unfinished. The memory of Africa is figured as
frozen in the past, along with a range of other cultural inheritances, which are taken
up and redramatised in the present as part of an attempt to recover the inherent
diversity at the heart of an oppressive British fiction of linearity, and of uniform
'whiteness'. Where Britain, historically, has been silent on Britain's black presence,
Black British writers simply speak into that silence.
Emerging from this fruitful comparison between the two literatures is a sense of the
contrasting approaches which are made by black writers toward notions of tradition
and the performance of identity, in the context of two very different national
histories, and as part of fundamental strategies of survival employed in
contemporary social settings. These dramatisations are interrogated against
continuous issues of race and racism, but also as diverse solutions for identity where
national contexts bear a contrasting significance in an age which is increasingly
globalised, and in which imperial power has shifted, and continues to shift, between
Britain and America.


Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.umt.edu/plrlr Part of the Administrative Law Commons, Cultural Heritage Law Commons, Energy and Utilities Law Commons, Environmental Law Commons, Indian and Aboriginal Law Commons, Land Use Law Commons, Natural Resources Law Commons, Oil, Gas, and Mineral Law Commons, Property Law and Real Estate Commons, Science and Technology Law Commons, and the Water Law Commons


Abstract Costa Rica's long-term standing as one of the few countries in Latin America with a stable democracy has prompted many to view its polity as an inevitable outcome of a racially homogeneous and relatively egalitarian society. Without ignoring the importance of sociological factors, this article contends that institutional arrangements played an equally important – if not more central – role in the development of a stable democratic regime in this country. The structure of Costa Rican presidentialism encouraged incumbents to maintain control of the state while it, as a consequence, incited the opposition to rebel against central state authorities. Political competition became more peaceful as parties that failed to hold or to capture the presidency were nevertheless compensated by being allowed to occupy legislative seats.


A simple and efficient system for generating wavelength-tunable optical short pulses from a self-seeded, gain-switched Fabry–Perot laser diode is presented. The laser's external cavity consists only of a tunable optical filter. The side-mode suppression ratio is better than 30 dB over a relatively wide wavelength-tuning range of 26 nm. In addition, a constant repetition frequency of 534.65 MHz can be maintained during wavelength tuning.


Public law adjudication has grown dramatically in recent decades in many English-speaking countries. In the United States, and increasingly in other countries where it used to be rare for public questions to be decided in court, controversial questions of public policy are tried as constitutional or human rights issues and decided by court order. But in other areas of law - in everyday tort, contract, and property cases - court decisions are typically much less dramatic and seldom if ever announce controversial innovations in public policy. Yet in private law cases too there are implicit questions of social justice.In common law countries, perhaps not surprisingly, tort, contract, and other private law cases are often decided on common law principles. Common law has a style and ethos of its own. It is based on precedent and, although precedent is open to modification, the common law style is anything but radical. With roots in the nineteenth century and earlier, common law often reflects classically liberal ideas, more or less consciously and more or less robustly.Instead of approaching private law cases with a common law mindset, should judges not treat these cases the way they might treat public law cases? Should courts not promote a vision of justice and human rights through private law adjudication, just as they sometimes - and in many countries increasingly - do in notable public law decisions?This article suggests several reasons why they should not. Turning private law more public in such a way would have considerable costs in legal stability, transparency, legitimacy, and judicial habits of neutrality and impartiality. Each of these considerations in turn is associated with what is generally thought of as the Rule of Law. The classically liberal ideas in the common law bloodstream themselves have at least some association with political freedom and the Rule of Law. And even if one is sceptical about classical liberalism and enthusiastic about today's public law, one might consider that public acceptance of ambitious public law adjudication may depend at least in part on the credit that courts build up through morally and politically unambitious day-to-day common law adjudication.


"We expand upon previous research performed on creating a lightweight infrastructure for the purpose of achieving interoperability among XML data sources. The approach is based on enriching local sources with semantic declarations so as to enable interoperability. These declarations capture the information content and concepts of the sources through mappings to a common application specific vocabulary. We design and implement a peer-to-peer network architecture through which global queries are initiated and responded to. We further examine and implement a methodology for merging the XML results of global queries into a single XML formatted response."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.


Abstractα-OFDM, a generalization of the OFDM modulation, is proposed. This new modulation enhances the outage capacity performance of bursty communications. The α-OFDM scheme is easily implementable as it only requires an additional time symbol rotation after the IDFT stage and a subsequent phase rotation of the cyclic prefix. The physical effect of the induced rotation is to slide the DFT window over the frequency spectrum. When successively used with different angles α at the symbol rate, α-OFDM provides frequency diversity in block fading channels. Interestingly, simulation results show a substantial gain in terms of outage capacity and outage BER in comparison with classical OFDM modulation schemes. The framework is extended to multiantenna and multicellular OFDM-based standards. Practical simulations, in the context of 3GPP-LTE, called hereafter α-LTE, sustain our theoretical claims.


Lobbying is an activity with tremendous influence on the function of the federal government; however, it is only understood and studied through the limited lens of registered lobbyists. This thesis takes a more holistic look at the political influence efforts of private firms by studying the revolving door of senior congressional staffers not only to registered lobbying positions but also to unregistered political influence positions at for-profit enterprises. The unique dataset used in this analysis demonstrates that over half of all senior congressional staffers take private political influence positions when they leave Congress. In addition, it was theorized that unregistered political influence positions are very similar in function to registered lobbying positions, and that the choice to not register is based on legal, political, and administrative disincentives. There have been notable instances where high profile political actors have been accused of acting as lobbyists without registration. Stable lobbying revenue and falling lobbying registration also suggests that fewer members of the political influence industry are disclosing their activities. This hypothesis—that there is a "black market" of unregistered lobbyists—has not previously been tested in academic research. Multinomial logit regressions show that the characteristics of senior congressional staff do have statistically significant effects on their next job. I find that the characteristics of staffers who take unregistered political influence jobs are substantially different from those who take registered lobbying jobs. This implies


February 2001 JAE 54/3 Journal of Architectural Education, pp. 140–148 © 2001 ACSA, Inc. This paper examines the relationships between diverse technical design strategies and competing conceptions of ecological place making. It highlights the conceptual challenges involved in defining what we mean by calling a building "green" and outlines a social constructivist perspective on the development of sustainable architecture. The paper identifies six alternative logics of ecological design which have their roots in competing conceptions of environmentalism, and explores the ways in which each logic prefigures technological strategies and alternative visions of sustainable places. Finally, the paper discusses the implications of the contested nature of ecological design for architectural education, practice, and research.


Project Description: Context and Aims of the Volume From the massive immigrant marches in the United States in 2006 under the banner of "A Day Without Immigrants" to the groundswell of immigrant resistance movements across the globe, immigrant protests have garnered considerable visibility in the last decade. Shared through globalized media technologies, immigrant protests, counter-hegemonic acts of dissent, and practices of resistance play an increasingly significant role in exposing the local violences and exploitations experienced by migrant populations. Immigrant Protest will be the first volume to explore the rise of immigrant protest in a global context. With a specific focus on the centrality of aesthetics to migrant resistance movements, it will examine dissent, resistance, and revolt against the conditions and social attitudes faced by regular and irregular migrants, asylum seekers, refugees and other unwanted and "illegal" persons, within a range of national and regional border-zones. Immigrant Protest showcases work by a group of international scholars, visual and performance artists and activists. It offers a rich and exciting series of accounts and analyses of protests and protest materials, and examines the critical relationship between visibility, power, and representation, an arena that is under-represented and under-explored in migration studies. The chapters in Immigrant Protest variously document and examine protest in a range of mediums and theoretical dimensions, towards a shared goal of reimagining foreignness beyond the xenophobic logic of negativity, inadequacy, and deficiency. Within this framework, the individual contributions address immigrant protest in everyday, local, and wider national and global contexts. Employing a variety of feminist, transnational and postcolonial methodologies, they explore forms of social, political, and aesthetic engagements in migrant politics. They examine, in different contexts and in a diverse range of mediums, immigrant experience and in particular, but not exclusively, state violence, injustice, racialized and gendered oppression, and logics of exclusion and othering. We have selected essays and visual art projects which discuss political engagements by refugees and non-status migrants as well as less obvious instances of protest such as expressed through small acts of resistance in everyday life, political art, or pedagogical practices. Our aim in this regard is also to open up the question of what counts as protest, and to think about the significance of local and informal practices in challenging oppressive forms of governance. Indeed, one of the central aims of the book is to document resistant perspectives which are often unheard or are culturally illegible. One of the distinguishing contributions of Immigrant Protest is that it opens up a dialogue between a diverse range of scholars and artists, and tracks the important relation between theoretically orientated work and art activist practices. Indeed, two of the chapters involve a scholar activist in dialogue with art-activists. Theoretically, this collection of interdisciplinary essays situates itself at the intersection of migration studies, transnational studies and visual studies. Immigrant Protest takes theoretical inspiration from scholarship on political aesthetics, such as Jacques Ranciere's The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2004), which underscores the importance of representational practices within movements for social justice. The collection aligns itself conceptually with and builds on an interdisciplinary body of writing, bringing together social sciences literature on globalism and migration and arts orientated scholarship on protest and resistance. For example, Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, Vassilis Tsianos's Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-first Century (2008), the art-activist collection, Notes from Nowhere, We are Everywhere: the Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (2008), Stanley Aronowitz, Heather Gautney's (eds.) Implicating Empire: Globalization and Resistance in the 21st Century World Order (2003), Steve Cohen, Beth Humphries, Ed Mynott's (eds.) From Immigration Controls to Welfare Controls (2002), Christian Hundertmark's The Art of Rebellion 2: World of Urban Art Activism (2006), Guillermo Gomez-Pena's Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy (2005), Chandra Mohanty's Feminism without Borders (2003), Zygmunt Bauman's Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (2004), and Ella Shohat's Talking Visions (1998). The authors variously employ these and other cutting edge texts of social and cultural theory, gender studies, and visual, literary, and cinematic analysis to engage issues of widespread relevance: migration and globalism, the rise of new nationalisms, increased surveillance, new forms of anti-immigrant activism, and recent oppositional art that exposes the hypocritical construction of the discourses of globalization and mobility. Through this interdisciplinary approach, Immigrant Protest develops a comparative, non-nationalistic approach to immigrant protest, foregrounding the aesthetic dimensions of protest and the affective consequences of social inequalities and human displacement. The case studies demonstrate the importance of breaking the silence which often accompanies immigrant experiences and, in doing so, offer counter-narratives to anti-immigrant actions and politics on a global scale.


This article presents findings from a survey of the experiences of child protection workers in England when working with parents who exhibit aggression and violence. This work explores the effects on workers in their professional lives, and on themselves and their families in their private lives. The article examines workers' thoughts and experiences about the effects of parental hostility on workers' ability to protect children. The article also details workers' experiences of the nature and effectiveness of training and support in this area. These findings are then examined in the light of the results of an analysis of the literature, including the findings from serious case review (SCR) reports in England (official inquiries into the causes of child deaths where the children are known to social and health services). The majority of the 590 respondents in the survey were social workers (n = 402; 68%), reflecting the fact that case management of child protection cases in the United Kingdom is the responsibility of social workers working in statutory agencies. This article addresses, from a consideration of the secondary analysis and the original research findings from the survey, how individual workers, managers, and agencies can best understand and then respond effectively to aggressive parental behaviors.


In this paper, we propose a new geometric super-resolving approach that overcomes the geometric resolution reduction caused by the spatially large pixels of the detector array. The improvement process is obtained by applying an axial scanning procedure. In the scanning process, several images are captured corresponding to focus applied at several axial planes. By applying an iterative Gerchberg-Saxton-based algorithm, we managed to retrieve the phase and to reconstruct the original high-resolution image from the captured set of low-resolution images. In addition, the paper also presents a numerically efficient algorithm to compute the free space Fresnel integral.


Mobile Sensors and Context-Aware Computing is a useful guide that explains how hardware, software, sensors, and operating systems converge to create a new generation of context-aware mobile applications. This cohesive guide to the mobile computing landscape demonstrates innovative mobile and sensor solutions for platforms that deliver enhanced, personalized user experiences, with examples including the fast-growing domains of mobile health and vehicular networking. Users will learn how the convergence of mobile and sensors facilitates cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things, and how applications which directly interact with the physical world are becoming more and more compatible. The authors cover both the platform components and key issues of security, privacy, power management, and wireless interaction with other systems. Shows how sensor validation, calibration, and integration impact application design and power management Explains specific implementations for pervasive and context-aware computing, such as navigation and timing Demonstrates how mobile applications can satisfy usability concerns, such as know me, free me, link me, and express meCovers a broad range of application areas, including ad-hoc networking, gaming, and photography


In the West democratic constitutionalism is grounded on the premise that democracy occurs outside of the organs of state, through elections and discourse. Chinese constitutional theorists have begun to elaborate a distinct view — that democratic constitutionalism may also be grounded on the premise that democracy occurs within the organs of state and the political apparatus of the nation, through collective and representational decision making. Hu Angang has most recently expressed a theory of socialist democracy around the notion of a collective presidency. This essay considers Hu Angang's theory and defense of the role of the CCP in China's constitutional system, with particular focus on the evolution of the premises of collective action merged with democratic theory and applied to the operations of a party-state system. Its object is to theorize internal democratic structures of the CCP, and through them, of the government as a whole. Its focus is on the development of collective leadership. Part I first considers the theoretical underpinning of the theory of collective presidency — grounded in China's history, context and its political ideology. The object is to better situate the history and utility of a collective presidency within the political structures and ideological premises of Chinese constitutionalism, and then to consider the connection between that construction and global principles of constitutional democracy. Part II then considers the arguments advanced for the efficiency and representation-reinforcing elements of the collective presidency — collective succession, collective labor division and cooperation, collective learning, collective research, and collective decision-making. Part III briefly considers the work that remains to be done as the CCP continues to scientifically develop the theory of democratic socialism and attends to the harder task, not of drawing theory form facts, but of living theory through practice. The essential insight of the Chinese move toward a distinct socialist democracy is not that that there can only be one best approach, but its opposite — that it is not which state is more democratic in accordance with a singular formula, but whether every state develops democratic structures effectively responsive to its own conditions. It is only in this context that comparison becomes useful.


A nonlinear sounding retrieval algorithm is used to produce vertical-temperature and water-vapor profiles from coincident observations taken by the airborne High-resolution Interferometer Sounder (HIS) and the ground-based Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer (AERI) during the SUbsonic Contrails and Clouds Effects Special Study (SUCCESS). Also, clear sky Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) and AERI radiance measurements, achieved on a daily real-time basis at the Department of Energy's Oklahoma CART (Cloud and Radiation Testbed) site, are used to demonstrate the current profiling capability by use of simultaneous geostationary satellite and ground-based remote sensing observations under clear-sky conditions. The discrepancy principle, a method to find the proper smoothing parameters from the minimum value between the normalized spectral residual norm and the a priori upper bound, is used to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of on-line simultaneous tuning of the multiple weighting and smoothing parameters from the combined satellite/airborne and ground-based measurements for the temperature and water-vapor retrieval in this nonlinear-retrieval process. An objective method to determine the degrees of freedom (d.f.) of the observation signal is derived. The d.f. of the radiance signal for the combined GOES and AERI measurements is larger than that for either instrument alone; while the d.f. of the observation signal for the combined GOES and AERI measurements is larger than that for either instrument alone and of the combined GOES and AERI measurements. The use of simultaneous clear-sky AERI and GOES data now provides improved vertical temperature and moisture soundings on an hourly basis for use in the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement program [J. Appl. Meteorol. 37, 875 (1998)].


After finite element discretization of incompressible Navier-Stokes equation, a sparse linear system is obtained in every iteration, and GMRES provides an efficient approach to solve this system. However, if the size of the original PDE model is large, the solution speed of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equation is still slow. Since the linear system from the incompressible Navier-Stokes equation is saddle point problem, we find that large portion of computational efforts for solving the linear system is occupied by the vector projection in GMRES. In this paper, by our parallel Gram-Schmidt process based GMRES and newly developed preconditioner Hermitian/Skew-Hermitian Separation (HSS), we develop a fast solver HSS-pGMRES for the saddle point problem from incompressible Navier-Stokes Equation. Theoretical analysis shows that, HSS-pGMRES decreases the computational complexity of finite element solver for incompressible Navier-Stokes equation from O( m 2 n ) to O( mn ), where m is the grid size. Computational experiments show that, the fast solver HSS-pGMRES significantly increases the solution speed for the saddle point problem of incompressible Navier-Stokes equation than the conventional solvers.


We present novel data sets of rare earth element (REE) distributions in a hydrothermal vent field at Yonaguni Knoll IV in the Okinawa Trough. Vertical REE profiles in three water columns showed horizontal variation of REE concentrations within 1000‐1200 m. Hydrothermal plumes were discovered by anomalous values of methane, manganese and transmissometry at that site. Europium anomalies in the North Pacific deep water (NPDW) (Nozaki et al., 1999) normalized pattern decreased with distance from the hydrothermal vent site, indicating that the dilution of hydrothermal fluid in the plume can be traced using REE. The horizontal variation of negative Ce-anomalies represents the continuous scavenging of REE by suspended matter in the plume. In addition, we measured nine hydrothermal fluid samples. The REE geochemistry of hydrothermal vent systems had been investigated intensively at sediment-starved mid-oceanic ridges, but few studies had examined sediment-hosted hydrothermal systems like those of the Okinawa Trough. The chondrite-normalized REE patterns of the fluids collected at Yonaguni Knoll IV show typical lighter rare earth elements (LREE) and Eu enrichment similar to at the Mid-ocean Ridge sites. A remarkable characteristic of the Yonaguni Knoll IV fluid pattern is its higher concentrations of heavier rare earth elements (HREE) and La composition than the hydrothermal fluids of the sediment-starved East Pacific Rise and Trans-Atlantic Geotraverse. Such a feature is explainable by influences of covering sediments in the back-arc basin Okinawa Trough. At the hydrothermal vent, lighter REE (LREE) in the fluid was reduced systematically during fluid mixing with seawater within the chimney. Light REE elimination resembles fractionation caused by particle scavenging within the water column. However, the lack of Ce depletion, which is a typical REE feature in the water column, along with distinctive Eu reduction, were unique in the Yonaguni Knoll IV fluid, suggesting that fluid REE fractionation at the vent site was induced predominantly by coprecipitation with hydrothermally originated minerals (e.g. sulfate and carbonate), not by adhesive removal by Fe and/or Mn oxide particles. Previous studies had shown that REE removal and fractionation of the hydrothermal system were observed only in deposit samples. Results of this study elucidated REE fractionation in fluid samples using previous analytical data. We were also able to distinguish REE removal mechanisms occurring at the vent site and water column using REE pattern characteristics.


Aim
The hospital environment as a workplace has undergone rapid changes over the last 50 years. Despite this, there has been very little research exploring how dietitians working in hospitals perceive their workplace. Moreover, previous studies in this area have focused predominantly on examining the North American experience of dietitians. Only a handful of previous studies have investigated the experiences of Australian dietitians at different stages of their careers. Therefore this study, in part, addresses a gap in the extant literature by examining how New South Wales (NSW) public-hospital dietitians perceive their workplace and its influence on their ability to function as healthcare professionals.

Methods
In 2011, 32 in-depth interviews were conducted with dietitians from 11 NSW public hospitals. Participants were selected from four career stages: new graduates, mid-career, specialists and managers. Data from the interviews were analysed through a grounded theory approach.

Results
Data analysis revealed that dietitians sought validation of their work experience from five sources within the workplace. In this paper, these five sources have been depicted as a conceptual model labelled the 'Five Sources of Value'. The five sources identified were: acquisition of knowledge; relationships with others; work culture; role clarity; and personal attributes. This study also found the relative importance of these values changed according to the career stage of the individual dietitian.

Conclusions
The retention and engagement of staff within a hospital environment is an ongoing issue for dietetic managers. The 'Five Sources of Value' identified through this study and their relative influence at different career stages may assist managers in developing workplace strategies that addresses the major areas of concern for many staff. As a result of the qualitative nature of this exploratory study, the generalisability of the findings are limited. To address this limitation, future research may follow a more quantitative approach.


A new type of remote-sensing radiometer based upon the Fabry-Perot (FP) interferometric technique has been developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and tested from both ground and aircraft platforms. The sensor uses direct or reflected sunlight and has channels for measuring the column concentration of carbon dioxide at 1570 nm, oxygen lines sensitive to pressure and temperature at 762 and 768 nm, and water vapor (940 nm). A solid FP etalon is used as a tunable narrow bandpass filter to restrict the measurement to the gas of interest's absorption bands. By adjusting the temperature of the etalon, which changes the index of refraction of its material, the transmission fringes can be brought into nearly exact correspondence with the absorption lines of the particular species. With this alignment between absorption lines and fringes, changes in the amount of a species in the atmosphere strongly affect the amount of light transmitted by the etalon and can be related to gas concentration. The technique is applicable to different chemical species. We have performed simulations and instrument design studies for CH4, 13CO2 isotope, and CO detection.


Reasoning in the real world is not divorced from situations. How to capture the present knowledge from surrounding situations and perform reasoning accordingly is crucial and challenging for machine intelligence. This paper introduces a new benchmark that evaluates the situated reasoning ability via situation abstraction and logic-grounded question answering for real-world videos, called Situated Reasoning in Real-World Videos (STAR). This benchmark is built upon the realworld videos associated with human actions or interactions, which are naturally dynamic, compositional, and logical. The dataset includes four types of questions, including interaction, sequence, prediction, and feasibility. We represent the situations in real-world videos by hyper-graphs connecting extracted atomic entities and relations (e.g., actions, persons, objects, and relationships). Besides visual perception, situated reasoning also requires structured situation comprehension and logical reasoning. Questions and answers are procedurally generated. The answering logic represents by a functional program based on the situation hypergraph. We compare various existing video reasoning models and find that they all struggle on this challenging situated reasoning task. We further propose a diagnostic neuro-symbolic model that can disentangle visual perception, situation abstraction, language understanding, and functional reasoning to understand the challenges of this benchmark.


Parkinson disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder after Alzheimer, affecting 0.16% of the population in the USA1. This disease is most common in the elderly, what makes it a prominent health problem in developed countries, where the elder population is expected to importantly increase in the future. The mechanism generating the disease is the death of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc), a small brain region from the brain stem. These neurons release the neurotransmitter dopamine to the basal ganglia, a large and complex brain structure implicated in motor control and reinforcement learning. Once SNc neurons have died, the basal ganglia starts showing prominent features of malfunction, and the characteristics symptoms of Parkinson's disease began to be observed in the patient (i.e. general difficulty or inability to execute motor movements and limb tremor, among others). Modern theory of Parkinson's disease focuses on the abnormal brain activity oscillations observed in the basal ganglia, which are consistently observed in parkinsonian patients and correlate with their symptoms. This paper develops a mathematical model of the basal ganglia, which reproduces the experimentally recorded neuronal activity of this brain structure in health and disease. Studying this model numerical and analytically, we draw conclusion on how and where these oscillations are generated within the brain. If the conclusions of this mathematical model are further confirmed experimentally, we think they pave the way towards controlling such oscillations pharmacologically or through electrode stimulation in the future.


The escalation of communication demands and the emergence of new telecommunication concepts such as 5G cellular system and smart cities requires the consolidation of a flexible and manageable backbone network. These requirements motivated the researcher to come up with a new placement algorithm for the Controller of Virtual Network (COVN). This is because SDN and network virtualisation techniques (NFV and NV), are integrated to produce multiple virtual networks running on a single SD-WAN infrastructure, which serves the new backbone. One of the significant challenges of SD-WAN is determining the number and the locations of its controllers to optimise the network latency and reliability. This problem is fairly investigated and solved by several controller placement algorithms where the focus is only on physical controllers. The advent of the sliced SD-WAN produces a new challenge, which necessitates the SDWAN controllers (physical controller/hosted server) to run multiple instances of controllers (virtual controllers). Every virtual network is managed by its virtual controllers. This calls for an algorithm to determine the number and the positions of physical and virtual controllers of the multiple virtual SD-WANs. According to the literature review and to the best of the author knowledge, this problem is neither examined nor yet solved. To address this issue, the researcher designed a novel COVN placement algorithm to compute the controller placement of the physical controllers, then calculate the controller placement of every virtual SD-WAN independently, taking into consideration the controller placement of other virtual SD-WANs. COVN placement does not partition the SD-WAN when placing the physical controllers, unlike all previous placement algorithms. Instead, it identifies the nodes of the optimal reliability and latency to all switches of the network. Then, it partitions every VN separately to create its independent controller placement. COVN placement optimises the reliability and the latency according to the desired weights. It also maintains the load balancing and the optimal resources utilisation. Moreover, it supports the recovering of the controller failure. This novel algorithm is intensively evaluated using the produced COVN simulator and the developed Mininet emulator. The results indicate that COVN placement achieves the required optimisations mentioned above. Also, the implementations disclose that COVN placement can compute the controller placement for a large network ( 754 switches) in very small computation time (49.53 s). In addition, COVN placement is compared to POCO algorithm. The outcome reveals that COVN placement provides better reliability in about 30.76% and a bit higher latency in about 1.38%. Further, it surpasses POCO by constructing the balanced clusters according to the switch loads and offering the more efficient placement to recover controller-failure.


Ken Robinson, author of the international bestseller The Element and the most viewed talk on TED.com, offers a practical guide to discovering your passions and natural aptitudes, and finding the point at which the two meet: Finding Your Element. The Element has inspired readers all over the world to change their lives and this new companion is a practical guide containing all the tools, techniques and resources you need to discover the depth of your abilities and unlock your potential. Among the questions it answers are: How do I find out what my talents and passions are?; What if I love something I'm not good at - or I'm good at something I don't love?; What if I can't make a living from my Element?; and How do I do help my children find their Element? No matter what you do, or where you are in life, if you're searching for your Element, this book will help you find it. "Relevant, imperative...It will help you to find yours". (Vanity Fair). "Happiness really is within your grasp". (Guardian). "Leads readers to a place where natural aptitudes and abilities converge with one's passions:. (Kirkus Reviews). Sir Ken Robinson, PhD, is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation, and human potential. He advises governments, corporations, education systems, and some of the world's leading cultural organizations. The videos of his famous 2006 and 2010 talks to the prestigious TED Conference have been seen by an estimated 200 million people in over 150 countries. Lou Aronica is the author of two novels and coauthor of several works of nonfiction, including The Culture Code (with Clotaire Rapaille) and The Element.


This report aggregates various issues surrounding federal crime control into five broad themes: violent crime control, combating fraud and theft, drug control, sentencing reform, and state and local justice assistance. Within these themes, the report examines more specific issues that confronted the 111th Congress. Issues discussed under the umbrella of violent crime control include hate crimes, gangs, and gun control. Issues related to the federal government's efforts to combat fraud and theft include identity theft and organized retail crime.


For over 40 years, the Bicoid-hunchback (Bcd-hb) system in the fruit fly embryo has been used as the model to study how positional information in morphogen concentration gradients is robustly translated into step-like responses. A body of quantitative comparisons between theory and experiment have since questioned the initial paradigm that the sharp hb transcription pattern emerges solely from diffusive biochemical interactions between the Bicoid transcription factor and the gene promoter region. Several alternative mechanisms have been proposed, such as additional sources of positional information, positive feedback from Hb proteins or out-of-equilibrium transcription activation. By using the MS2-MCP RNA-tagging system and analysing in real time, the transcription dynamics of synthetic reporters for Bicoid and/or its two partners Zelda and Hunchback, we show that all the hb expression pattern features and temporal dynamics are compatible with an equilibrium model with a short decay length Bicoid activity gradient as a sole source of positional information. Meanwhile, Bicoid's partners speed-up the process by different means: Zelda lowers the Bicoid concentration threshold required for transcriptional activation while Hunchback reduces burstiness and increases the polymerase firing rate.


Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6), a network-based localized mobility protocol, allows a mobile node (MN) to move around within the same PMIPv6 domain by keeping the same IP address. However, PMIPv6 does not support the global handover since it supports only an intra-domain handover. To support the global handover, MNs need to load the protocol stack for the global mobility. Our proposed scheme enables the MN's session to be connected without any support of PMIPv6 protocol during the global handover. In addition, it reduces the packet transmission delay by performing the Route Optimization (RO) after the MN's global handover. In this paper, we compare our proposed scheme with the existing Roaming scheme. As a result, the proposed scheme reduces the packet transmission delay by 25% and the packet loss by 78% compared with the existing one. In other words, our scheme supports the seamless and reliable handover for MN.


A distributed method for mobile robot navigation, spatial learning, and path planning is presented. It is implemented on a sonar-based physical robot, Toto, consisting of three competence layers: 1) Low-level navigation: a collection of reflex-like rules resulting in emergent boundary-tracing. 2) Landmark detection: dynamically extracts landmarks from the robot''s motion. 3) Map learning: constructs a distributed map of landmarks. The parallel implementation allows for localization in constant time. {\it Spreading of activation} computes both topological and physical shortest paths in linear time. The main issues addressed are: distributed, procedural, and qualitative representation and computation, emergent behaviors, dynamic landmarks, minimized communication.


OBJECTIVE: To understand whether previous styrene exposure increases the human liver's ability to convert styrene into styrene oxide. METHODS: The hypothesis was tested that the average linear metabolic rate constant kappa was the same in both exposed and unexposed groups, when the exposed group comprised people with a history of styrene exposure and the unexposed group had no exposure. In an experimental chamber, these two groups of subjects were exposed to a concentration of 80 ppm styrene for two hours. A three compartment pharmacokinetic model was used to define kappa. Based on large sample theory, the comparison of estimated mean values of kappa in the exposed and unexposed groups was shown to be equivalent to a comparison of the estimated mean values of the hepatic clearance X in the two groups. A method was developed to estimate X for each subject in both groups from the subject's height, weight, and estimated asymptotic styrene decay constant alpha. Here, alpha was estimated individually from observed blood concentrations over time when sufficient time had elapsed after the controlled exposure. RESULTS: The proposed methodology of comparing the estimated mean values of kappa in exposed and unexposed groups reduced the number of specific physiological variables involved to three, all of which were estimable from data based on simple direct measurements. In contrast, other methods based on pharmacokinetic models usually involved many variables that were non-estimable on an individual basis. Consequently, statistical comparisons were impossible. These methods were applied to analyse previously published data on the time course of styrene concentrations in arterial blood of subjects in both exposed and unexposed groups. A Wilcoxon non-parametric rank sum test with the individually estimated X values was used, and no significant difference in the means of X in the two groups was found. CONCLUSION: The linear metabolic rate constant kappa for humans is probably not altered by previous exposure to styrene. This result is in agreement with some experimental studies on animals. However, in the data analysis, it was noted that the number of subjects in each group was small (6-7) and that the styrene concentration data did not exactly reflect true behaviour of asymptotic decay. Further studies are still needed to draw more definitive conclusions.


Animated graphs that demonstrate statistical ideas and methods can both attract interest and assist understanding. In this paper we first discuss how animations can be related to some statistical topics such as iterative algorithms, random simulations, (re)sampling methods and dynamic trends, then we describe the approaches that may be used to create animations, and give an overview to the R package animation (Xie, 2012a), including its design, usage and the statistical topics in the package. With the animation package, we can export the animations produced by R into a variety of formats, such as a web page, a GIF animation, a Flash movie, a PDF document, or an MP4/AVI video, so that users can publish the animations fairly easily. The design of this package is flexible enough to be readily incorporated into web applications, e.g., we can generate animations online with Rweb (Banfield, 1999), which means we do not even need R to be installed locally to create animations. We will show examples of the use of animations in teaching statistics and in the presentation of statistical reports using Sweave (Leisch, 2002) or knitr (Xie, 2013b,c). In fact, this paper itself was written with the knitr and animation package, and the animations are embedded in the PDF document, so that readers can watch the animations in real time when they read the paper (the Adobe Reader is required). Animations can add insight and interest to traditional static approaches to teaching statistics and reporting, making statistics a more interesting and appealing subject.


This thesis describes the relations between objects, practices, and individuals. The main objective is to explore the role of artefacts in user-centred participatory design research, specifically for expressing and communicating personal experiences and creating meaning. In a broad sense I draw on experiences from three practices in order to define the scope of the thesis. The first is practice-led research, the second is design research specifically in the user-centred and participatory design traditions, and the third is concerned with the ways lay persons in general express themselves by and through objects and technology. The focus will be on the exchange of knowledge and experiences between two individuals: the researcher and the informant. One issue of interest is how communication can be made possible. Another is the use of artefacts for personal expression. A third is the constant balancing act when using the experiences and knowledge of a single or a few informants in design research.

The first half of the thesis is based on two design cases. Their common denominator is the exploration of how people can introduce their personal perspectives on their health situation into the medical context through the use of expressive artefacts. The first is a study of personal visualisations of experienced health (papers I, II). A future practice of routinely creating and using (instrumental) images based on emotions, meaning and subjectivity in rehabilitation and healthcare is proposed. The second case describes the development of a personal digital device, the Memory Stone used for storing and sharing personal and clinical information (papers III, IV). The case involves pregnant women but the device can be used wherever there is an interest in keeping personal diaries, handling medical information in novels ways, and interacting with information technology at home and in healthcare.

The second half of the thesis is an explorative venture grounded partly in the empirical work described in the first half, partly in extensive reading of literature from a wide range of disciplines. Three main areas have been included to discuss the relationship between humans, objects, technology, and self-narratives: a technology of the self (the self as image and data), a science of the self (autoethnography), and autobiographies. The intention is to set the stage for a critical and productive discussion on how the notion of autobiographic practice can inform and enrich design research methodology.


Between 2004 and 2009, the United States Supreme Court relied numerous times on habeas corpus to protect the rights of citizens and of aliens detained after 9/11. Various claims could be marshaled to bracket the 9/11 decisions - as "war" cases; "Guantanamo" cases; "torture" cases; aberrational responses to documented procedural unfairness; unusual instances of federal pretrial detention; and either as extraordinary judicial rejections of challenges to the Court's authority or as disappointingly narrow procedural remedies licensing forms of preventive detention. Further, one could argue that the specter of terrorism raises normative questions distinct from those related to confinement for other reasons.But neither the problems nor the law produced through 9/11 detention are exotic. Rather, they are continuous with judicial responses to decisions by governments trying to maintain peace and security and, hence, incapacitating some individuals feared likely to inflict grave harm. Officials deal with uncertainty about which persons are threatening in the contexts of 9/11, of ordinary criminality, and of border regulation. In response, more than two million persons are detained in the United States, and some 25,000 segregated in solitary confinement in "supermax" facilities. Courts in turn have, over the last several decades, addressed or demurred on claims about the illegality of both the length and conditions of confinement, and Congress has repeatedly sought to structure or limit routes that various kinds of detainees may take to court.Therefore, the 9/11 decisions are exemplary of what Henry Monaghan termed the "timeless" questions within the federal courts canon about the role of courts in this constitutional order. One sees, repeatedly, the many effects of "foreign" law on U.S. precepts, as well as the distinctive contributions made by courts, obliged to function independently, to treat all persons as equally entitled to dignity, and to work in public. But the limited role for courts is also vivid; even as adjudication can frame some parameters of confinement, the protection of human dignity depends on a diverse set of officials interacting at all levels and in all sectors of government.


In Classic Maya society, the stela was an important medium through which historical information was conveyed. Stelae are free-standing stone slabs carved in low relief that usually depict portraits of rulers, which are accompanied by hieroglyphic texts recording the rulers' identity and actions. Recent research has focused on the stela not only as a carrier of information but also as an important cultural symbol in its own right. In 1985, Linda Schele and David Stuart proposed that the Classic Maya called the stela a te'-tun, or stone-tree. This identification led to the recognition of cultural continuities among the Highland Maya in Chiapas who, on occasion, substitute trees for individual crosses on their cross shrines. In 1996, Stuart suggested that the ancient Maya word for stela was lakamtun, or big stone, emphasizing that the stela was an embodiment of the royal self in the sense that it shared some of the divine essence of the ruler. Drawing on epigraphic research, anthropological theory, the ethnographic literature, as well as personal field observations, I propose that certain spiritual and symbolic concepts of the stela continue to live in the crosses among the Maya today and that these concepts should be considered when we evaluate ancient contexts of meaning for the Maya stela.


A scientometrics-informed peer review exercise is described, as applied at the "Babeș-Bolyai" University in Romania for an internal young researcher short-term grant competition. The applicants were graded from A ("internationally-leading") to B ("regionally-leading"), C ("nationally-leading") and D ("low-impact"). Judgment was delegated to panels of three evaluators per applicant, and was informed by such criteria as number of corresponding-author articles in higher-impact journals (as defined mainly by those in a range of highest impact factors per field, or variations thereof), citations, patents, books present in large numbers of libraries, and others. Importantly, the grade was dictated solely by the applicant's own achievements within their field, rather than by comparison to other applicants. Furthermore, the criteria specifically rest it upon the evaluators to judge the quality of the scientific content, to the extent where a higher grade may be refused in spite of an apparently satisfactory "number of high-impact papers". Moreover, the evaluators were allowed to consider any type of achievement as argument for any of the grades – ranging from rewarding notable contributions even if not in journals of high impact factors, to such achievements as translations of books of large impact for humanities, key archeological research, and others. At the end of the evaluation procedure, with a small number of exceptions all applicants graded "A" received funding, regardless of their field – even though an imbalance was noted to bias experimental sciences; a small number of applicants with grades ranging from B to A were also funded, within limits set per domain, and within a total of 60 grants per university. For a following competition round, a simplification of the criteria is proposed, defining just three grades – "IE-of significant impact in internationally-accepted terms", "IR – of significant impact in regionally-accepted terms", and "IP-of potential impact". For cases where the number of applicants with maximum grades exceeds the funding resources available, supplementary criteria were proposed – number of papers in internationally recognized papers, age, interdisciplinarity, and practical applications.


Roots (40-60 g) of MD-304 sweet potato (Ipomea batatas) were immersed for 5 min in solutions of the systemic nematicide oxamyl containing 0, 1.5, 3.0, 6.0, 12.0, 18.0, and 24.0 g a.i./l. The treated roots were shaken and planted one per pot containing 1 kg of a sandy loam from a soybean field naturally infested with phytoparasitic nematodes. Each treatment was represented by 8 pots arranged in a completely randomized design in the greenhouse. After 6 weeks soil samples were collected, and adventitious roots examined for galls and damage caused by Meloidogyne incognita. Roots were then incubated for 72 hrs in water to determine the number of endoparasitic nematodes; after which time the eggs of M. incognita were extracted. The number of galls and eggs per gram of root and galling index declined with oxamyl concentrations between 0 and 12 g/l with little additional decline at higher concentrations; the 12 g/l solution resulted in a 95% reduction in number of eggs and galls per g of fre


Candida albicans is able to grow in a variety of reversible morphological forms (yeast, pseudohyphal and hyphal) in response to various environmental signals, noteworthy among them being N-acetylglucosamine (GlcNAc). The gene CaGAP1, homologous to GAP1, which encodes the general amino acid permease from Saccharomyces cerevisiae, was isolated on the basis of its induction by GlcNAc through differential screening of a C. albicans genomic library. The gene could functionally complement an S. cerevisiae gap1 mutant by rendering it susceptible to the toxic amino acid analogue mimosine in minimal proline media. As in S. cerevisiae, mutation of the CaGAP1 gene had an effect on citrulline uptake in C. albicans. Northern analysis showed that GlcNAc-induced expression of CaGAP1 was further enhanced in synthetic minimal media supplemented with single amino acids (glutamate, proline and glutamine) or urea (without amino acids) but repressed in minimal ammonium media. Induction of CaGAP1 expression by GlcNAc was nullified in C. albicans deleted for the transcription factor CPH1 and the hyphal regulator RAS1, indicating the involvement of Cph1p-dependent Ras1p signalling in CaGAP1 expression. A homozygous mutant of this gene showed defective hyphal formation in solid hyphal-inducing media and exhibited less hyphal clumps when induced by GlcNAc. Alteration of morphology and short filamentation under nitrogen-starvation conditions in the heterozygous mutant suggested that CaGAP1 affects morphogenesis in a dose-dependent manner.


Independent attempts from the computing and telecommunications worlds to provide wireless access resulted in networks with very different characteristics. This has given rise to a number of issues, such as the management of user mobility, power consumption, contingency when a communication session is interrupted etc. The result is significant Quality of Service fluctuation. A particular issue arises in an environment where more than one wireless networks offer coverage over the same area making the decision about which network to connect to, rather complex.

The thesis offers the hypothesis that a unified architecture can meet the current QoS demands of qos-sentitive applications. It provides the framework that can effectively include, activate, configure and orchestrate disparate communication enhancement tools. The architecture must be extensible, flexible, and provide means for the incorporated modules to interoperate. Finally, it must allow the QoS requirements to be specified in platform independent ways and QoS adaptation to be effected under application, application manager, or user control in a continuous and dynamic way.

The Vertical Handoff paradigm is studied as an illustration of a communication enhancement module of this architecture. Consider a two layer wireless network. Layer one offers high bandwidth but short-range coverage, while layer two offers low bandwidth but wide range coverage. A mobile host moving fast will experience high bandwidth with frequent handovers when connected to layer one or low bandwidth with fewer handover interruptions if connected to the bigger cells of layer two. This and other scenarios are studied in this research in order to test the hypothesis that the use of local and/or network cache can result in significant performance enhancement in terms of frequency of interruptions due to handovers and overall quality of the communication's service depending on factors such as the host's mobility, the population density, etc.


Title: SOOT OXIDATION IN HYDROCARBON-FREE FLAMES Haiqing Guo, Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Directed by: Associate Professor Peter B. Sunderland Department of Fire Protection Engineering There are high uncertainties in the existing models of soot oxidation rates. To ameliorate this, soot oxidation in flames was examined using a novel ternary flame system, advanced diagnostics, and a detailed examination of past studies. The ternary flame system comprises a coflowing propylene/air diffusion flame to generate a steady soot column that flows into a hydrogen ring flame. The soot is thereby oxidized in a region far separated from soot formation, which is unlike any past study of soot oxidation in diffusion flames. Nonintrusive optical diagnostics were developed using a digital color camera to measure temperature and soot volume fraction. These diagnostics were validated using a steady laminar ethylene/air diffusion flame and were then applied to the ternary flame. Also measured in the soot flame were velocity, soot primary particle diameter, and stable species concentrations along an axial distance of 45 mm. Temperatures were between 1500 to 1750 K, and O2 partial pressures were between 10 -2 to 10 -1 bar. The soot flame was found to be lean, and its OH (with partial pressures between 10 -4 to 10 -3 bar) was expected to be equilibrated owing to the catalyzed radical recombination in the presence of soot. Soot flux and soot oxidation rates (0.5 to 6 g/m 2 -s) were determined. Soot burnout was 90% at 55 mm height. New soot oxidation mechanisms for O2 and OH were developed from a large body of published soot oxidation measurements. The resulting O2 mechanism has an activation energy of 195 kJ/mol, and the OH mechanism has a collision efficiency of 0.10. Predictions using the new mechanisms are within ±80% of the present measurements in the ternary flame system. SOOT OXIDATION IN HYDROCARBON-FREE FLAMES


I. INTRODUCTION The game's premise is simple: the player controls an escaped convict named James Earl Cash as he fights for his life through the gritty streets of a fictional American city. In doing so, players of the hit video game, Manhunt, first released in 2003, are immersed in a detailed, interactive world, offering a wide range of possibilities to the creative gamer. In the game, Cash is enlisted as the protagonist in a series of snuff films by "the Director," who is eerily omnipresent due to his use of strategically positioned video cameras and an earpiece. The Director's mandate: kill or be killed. To carry out the Director's bidding, Cash has at his disposal a variety of deadly options. Cash can kill other characters "by suffocating them with a plastic bag, slicing them up with a chainsaw, shooting them point blank with a nail gun, stabbing them in the eyeballs with a glass shard, or beheading them with a cleaver," among other methods.1 The more grisly the killing, the more points players earn. All the while, the Director eggs the player on - emphasizing the need to please his waiting audiences and the Director's own sexual gratification.2 While games like Manhunt have grown enormously popular among both children and adults,3 these games have increasingly drawn the ire of state regulators over the past two decades. Numerous states and political subdivisions have passed legislation seeking to restrict minors' access to violent video games.4 Many other political bodies have either attempted to enact such legislation or are currently attempting to do so.5 Without exception, each legislative effort has met staunch opposition from a broad coalition of gamers, industry leaders, and First Amendment advocates. Federal courts have responded by invalidating, on First Amendment grounds, any state effort to restrict minors' access to video games based on violent content alone.6 Federal appellate courts grappled with the constitutional implications of violent video game regulation for ten years before the Supreme Court took up the issue. In 2011, the Court decided Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Ass'n,7 upholding a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that invalidated a California law prohibiting the sale of violent games to minors. Although Brown did clarify some ambiguities in the law created by the various lower court decisions, this Comment identifies two fundamental questions that remain unanswered: First, will a video game (or similar form of interactive media) ever receive anything less than strict First Amendment scrutiny? Second, will a state ever meet its burden under the strict scrutiny standard? This Comment argues that although Brown does not squarely address either question, Brown and prior lower court decisions demonstrate that both questions must be answered in the negative. By focusing on the theoretical underpinnings of violent video game regulation, this piece brings a fresh look to the two questions above, which underlie an extensive, cross-disciplinary debate that has raged for over ten years. This Comment critiques many of the arguments advanced by jurists and scholars - most of which find voice in the various opinions in Brown - to demonstrate that prevailing constitutional norms leave virtually no room for regulation of violent video games. Accordingly, Part II proceeds by offering a brief background of video game regulation and its interplay with the First Amendment. Part III discusses the first question identified above. At first blush, Brown appears to answer the question as to whether regulation of violent video games will ever be afforded less then strict scrutiny. However, Part III underlines arguable differences between video games and other media, some of which are discussed in Justice Alito's concurring opinion in Brown. Ultimately, this Part concludes, however, that none of these differences are likely to persuade the Court to afford video games less rigorous First Amendment protection, regardless of how realistic or interactive they are or become. …


There is little authority on discovery of electronically stored material, but these countries have rules supporting the duty of broad disclosure AGAINST the backdrop of fast-developing information technology, the proliferation of electronic communications and the use of increasingly sophisticated computerised document management systems, U.S. case law and commentators have led the way in drawing attention to the implications for confidentiality and the dangers that lie in wait for litigants in the discovery process.1 Other jurisdictions have been slower to come to terms with the ramifications of procedural rules and the way in which lawyers approach discovery.2 The law on discovery of material in electronic media is undeveloped in these jurisdictions, and few firm conclusions can be derived from existing case law. However, it is settled law that the definition of document encompasses media such as photographs, films and computer discs. An English court said as long ago as 1908, "There is a document wherever there is writing or printing capable of being read, no matter what the material may be upon which it is impressed or inscribed."3 The courts are likely to protect documents or other information from disclosure in circumstances where privilege would be upheld if the records were held in the form of paper. In Britain, Canada and Australia, the rules relating to discovery and inspection of documents are found in the procedural rules of the courts and the associated body of case law. In the High Court of England and Wales, procedure is governed by the Rules of the Supreme Court (RSC). The county courts have an overlapping jurisdiction, although in the main, actions with a value of L50,000 or more will be in the High Court. The County Court Rules (CCR) are broadly the same as the RSC.4 The rules of civil procedure for Ontario provide the source of all Canadian examples to follow. Notwithstanding that the rules vary within the common law provinces (Quebec is governed by the civil law), they remain fairly consistent throughout Canada. The Ontario rules roughly reflect the Canadian position on documentary discovery. In Australia, each court has its own set of rules, which are largely similar. Separate rules exist for the High Court, Federal Court, and the state supreme courts. In addition, the lower courts in each state (the district court and local court or equivalent) also have their own rules. However, the position in New South Wales in relation to its state Supreme Court Rules is now different because of recent amendments, aspects of which will be discussed. In addition, in Australia, the common law has been modified by virtue of Evidence Acts enacted in 1995 by the Commonwealth of Australia and the New South Wales parliaments. In these jurisdictions, parties generally are required to disclose all relevant documentary materials, unless they are subject to privilege, in contrast to the U.S. procedure of providing discovery in response to an opponent's requests. This frequently requires lawyers having to advise and make judgments about the relevance of individual documents or classes of documents to the issues pleaded. An English court stated: . . . any document must be disclosed which it is reasonable to suppose contains information which may enable the party applying for discovery either to advance his own case or to damage that of his adversary or which may fairly lead him to a train of inquiry which may have either of these two consequences. Discovery is thus not necessarily limited to documents which would be admissible in evidence.5 This will include documents adverse to the client's case, as explained by Sir John Donaldson, Master of the Rolls, in Davies v. Ely Lilly & Co., when he observed that: The right [to discovery] is peculiar to the common law jurisdiction. In plain language, litigation in this country is conducted "cards face up on the table. …


The effective integration of technology into teaching and learning has been a focus of universities and governments for the past decade. Yet progress towards this goal has been limited to date. Knowledge of how to integrate technology has become a necessity for university lecturers and effective models of support are needed to facilitate this often challenging process. However, little is known about how the individual lecturer designs and what methods of support might best help his or her knowledge of how to integrate technology. One reason that this area has been under-researched may be the inherent challenges in investigating design processes which are by their very nature difficult to observe. This paper describes a case study methodology designed to overcome these challenges in order to study lecturers' use of learning designs and the development of technological, pedagogical and content knowledge while designing a course (or unit of study).


Nowadays, technology has become the key element to carry out the management, organization and fulfillment of the electoral process. The electoral process should be understood as the actions that entail the making of the electoral roll, citizen identification, the act of voting, the counting of votes and the reporting of the results. The act of voting is considered as the software system to be specified, using as the source of information the National Electoral Code of Argentina Republic. The scenario technique is applied in order to obtain the system requirements, with the purpose of reducing the semantic gap between the legal written documentation and the implementation of an electronic voting system. Constraints regarding the compliance with the current legislation, the specific vocabulary, and the need to have, at least, one stakeholder that interprets the Law are analyzed. An elicitation technique, which emphasized the role of Language of the Universe of Discourse, is proposed. Finally, it is stressed the importance of having a requirements specification with the necessary steps for the casting of the vote, including all the alternative situations, from which a software design can be done.


Campylobacter jejuni is the leading cause of bacterial gastroenteritis, which has motivated the monitoring of genetic profiles circulating in Luxembourg since 13 years. From our integrated surveillance using a genotyping strategy based on an extended MLST scheme including gyrA and porA markers, an unexpected endemic pattern was discovered in the temporal distribution of genotypes. We aimed to test the hypothesis of stable lineages occurrence by implementing whole genome sequencing (WGS) associated with comprehensive and internationally validated schemes. This pilot study assessed four WGS-based typing schemes to classify a panel of 108 strains previously identified as recurrent or sporadic profiles using this in-house typing system. The strain collection included four common lineages in human infection (N = 67) initially identified from recurrent combination of ST-gyrA-porA alleles also detected in non-human samples: veterinary (N = 19), food (N = 20), and environmental (N = 2) sources. An additional set of 19 strains belonging to sporadic profiles completed the tested panel. All the strains were processed by WGS by using Illumina technologies and by applying stringent criteria for filtering sequencing data; we ensure robustness in our genomic comparison. Four typing schemes were applied to classify the strains: (i) the cgMLST SeqSphere+ scheme of 637 loci, (ii) the cgMLST Oxford scheme of 1,343 loci, (iii) the cgMLST INNUENDO scheme of 678 loci, and (iv) the wgMLST INNUENDO scheme of 2,795 loci. A high concordance between the typing schemes was determined by comparing the calculated adjusted Wallace coefficients. After quality control and analyses with these four typing schemes, 60 strains were confirmed as members of the four recurrent lineages regardless of the method used (N = 32, 12, 7, and 9, respectively). Our results indicate that, regardless of the typing scheme used, epidemic or endemic signals were detected as reflected by lineage B (ST2254-gyrA9-porA1) in 2014 or lineage A (ST19-gyrA8-porA7), respectively. These findings support the clonal expansion of stable genomes in Campylobacter population exhibiting a multi-host profile and accounting for the majority of clinical strains isolated over a decade. Such recurring genotypes suggest persistence in reservoirs, sources or environment, emphasizing the need to investigate their survival strategy in greater depth.


An automatic speech recognizer uses acoustic knowledge and linguistic knowledge. In large vocabulary speech recognition, acoustic knowledge is modeled by hidden Markov models (HMM), linguistic knowledge is modeled by N-gram (typi-cally bi-gram or trigram), and these models are stochastically integrated. It is thought that humans also integrate acoustic and linguistic knowledge of speech when perceiving continuous speech. Automatic speech recognition with HMM and N-gram is thought to roughly model the process of human perception. Although these models have drastically improved the performance of automatic speech recognition of well-formed read speech so far, they cannot deliver sufficient performance on spontaneous speech recognition tasks because of various particular phenomena of spontaneous speech. In this paper, we conducted simulation experiments of N-gram language models by combining human acoustic knowledge and instruction of local context and assured that using two words neighboring the target word was enough to improve the performance of recognition when we could use only local information as linguistic knowledge. We also assured that coarticulation affected the perception of short words. We then compared some language models on speech recognizer. We calculated acoustic scores with HMM and then linguistic scores calculated from a language model were added. We obtained 37.5% recognition rate only with acoustic model, whereas we obtained 51.0% with both acoustic and language models, thus the relative performance improvement was 36%. On the other hand, we obtained a 16.5% recognition rate only with the language model, so the acoustic model improved the performance relatively 209%. The performance of the language model on spontaneous speech is almost equal to that on read speech and thus, the improvements of the acoustic models is more effective than that of the language model.


Literature on social protection in Kenya shows progress in implementation of cash transfers but not the social health insurance scheme. With a dearth of explanation for this contrasting promotion of social protection, this paper examines the role of Kenya's political settlement and the interests of donors. It argues that whereas the competitive clientelist political settlement is conducive to the supply-oriented cash transfer programmes, it is averse to the demand-oriented social health insurance scheme that requires clients to contribute and also threatens the market interests of donors. The paper therefore concludes that the scaling up of social protection is dependent on the convergence between the clientelist interests of politicians and the motivations of donors.


Mutational loss of the D2 porin causes imipenem resistance in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. It was found that this mechanism could function only when the chromosomal beta-lactamase was expressed. Mutants lacking both the beta-lactamase and the D2 porin were almost as susceptible as those that lacked the beta-lactamase but retained the porin. Thus, imipenem resistance reflected an interplay of the enzyme and impermeability, not either factor alone. These findings suggest that the activity of a carbapenem more beta-lactamase stable than imipenem should be less affected by the porin loss. Meropenem approached this behavior.


: Construction projects suffer various problems and complex factors such as cost, duration, quality and safety. Construction sector is diverse as it contains contractors, consultants, designers, owners, and others. The aim of this paper is to identify factors affecting labour productivity at a building construction project. A literature review and factors recommended by experts were considered to categorize the factors. 40 factors, categorized into 5 groups, were analysed and ranked considering Relative Importance Index. The questionnaires were distributed to Project Manager, Project Engineer, Architecture, and Others (Scheduler, and Estimator). It was concluded, final cost of the projects were higher than estimated cost. It's recommended to develop human resources through proper and continuous training programs frame a strong assignment, vision and a planned approach to overcome the disturbances on the performance of the construction projects. The discussed factors are expected to assist in completing construction projects successfully.


This article discusses the information dimension of marketing from a technical, theoretical and behavioral perspective. It also comments the relationship between marketing and the library and information science (LIS). It is an exploratory and descriptive study and its qualitative approaches are carried out through classic documentary analysis. From the technical perspective, it addresses the presence of information in all marketing management processes, from market research to the final preparation of the marketing plan. From the theoretical perspective, it addresses the frameworks for marketing information processing, the influence of the information value theory and the application of techniques from dissimilar areas of study to analyze the information. From the behavioral perspective, it shows empirical evidence of human information behavior of marketing managers and other actors, based on cognitive and social viewpoints. Regarding disciplinary relations, marketing and LIS share theories related to information behavior, information management, and systems analysis and design. The marketing approaches is more noticeable on LIS studies than LIS approaches on marketing studies, considering the analysed literature. Information, as a link between both disciplines, makes way to delve into new research, academic and practical scenarios.


Processing biomass into multifunctional products can contribute to food, feed, and energy security while also mitigating climate change. However, biorefinery products nevertheless impact the environment, and this influence needs to be properly assessed to minimize the burden. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is often used to calculate environmental footprints of products, but distributing the burdens among the different biorefinery products is a challenge. A particular complexity arises when the outputs are a combination of energy carrying no mass, and mass carrying no energy, where neither an allocation based on mass nor on energy would be appropriate. A novel hybrid mass–energy (HMEN) allocation scheme for dealing with multifunctionality problems in biorefineries was developed and applied to five biorefinery concepts. The results were compared to results of other allocation methods in LCA. The reductions in energy use and GHG emissions from using the biorefinery's biofuels were also quantified. HMEN fairly distributed impacts among biorefinery products and did not change the order of the products in terms of the level of the pollution caused. The allocation factors for HMEN fell between mass and economic allocation factors and were comparable to energy allocation factors. Where the mass or the energy allocation failed to attribute burdens, HMEN addressed this shortcoming by assigning impacts to nonmass or to nonenergy products. Under the partitioning methods and regardless of the feedstock used, bioethanol reduced GHG by 72–98% relative to gasoline. The GHG savings were 196% under the substitution method, but no GHG savings occurred for sugar beet bioethanol under the surplus method. Bioethanol from cellulosic crops had lower energy use and GHG emissions than from sugar beet, regardless of the allocation method used. HMEN solves multifunctional problems in biorefineries and can be applied to other complex refinery systems. LCA practitioners are encouraged to further test this method in other case studies.


A water distribution system requires constant and thorough maintenance in addition to well-organised running procedures. Once built, it must be considered susceptible to malfunctions and therefore in need of continual supervision. Neglecting a water distribution network is a grave error which may result in the total deterioration of the entire system. First and foremost, a water distribution system requires the monitoring of leaks. There is no such thing as a leak-free water network and such losses are always of some importance even in the best maintained systems. In order to determine the entity of leaks it is necessary to conduct accurate water measurements at source, at entry to tanks and at entry to the distribution system, and then compare these flows to one another and to the readings taken at the individual distribution meters. This paper aims to analyse the process for identifying and monitoring leaks in water systems with particular reference to the use of computerised systems which, once in place, can undertake the continuous number-crunching task of comparing the water flows. 'Intelligent' water distribution calls for an integrated system of products, solutions and processes which afford managers the continual remote monitoring and identification of any critical situations; this will enable them to define priorities and establish maintenance interventions and will provide them with the data needed to optimise the performance of the water distribution network. A survey conducted around the world has shown that intelligent water systems can help distribution companies save up to 12.5 billion dollars per year.


Biological invasion by exotic species is considered one of the main threats to biodiversity conservation in protected areas. Due to its aggressiveness, Melinis minutiflora P. Beauv (molasses grass) is considered as the grass that has caused the highest impact on the native flora of the Brazilian Cerrado. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the invasive potential of two cultivars of Melinis minutiflora. Field and laboratory evaluations showed a seed production of 192 kg/ha (71946 viable seeds/m2) and 171 kg/ha (81690 viable seeds/m2) and 171 kg/ha for the cultivars Cabelo-de-Negro and Roxo, respectively. Recently collected seeds presented high viability and dormancy. As for colonization, the burial of seeds up to 3 cm of depth did not hinder seedling emergence, but the seeds of both cultivars buried at 4 cm did not emerge. The emergence of seedlings occurred from December to March. However, adverse factors such as shade, inter and intraspecific competition, low soil fertility and water stress did not completely eliminate all of the recently established individuals in the last rainy season. These cultivars of molasses grass showed similar behavior and the factors studied help to partially explain the success of this grass in colonizing natural habitats in the Brazilian Cerrado.


The main objective of this paper is to better understand the nature and patterns of students' socialization patterns in relation to the adoption of Instant Messaging (IM) systems. A model based on the Extended Planned Behavior Theory (EPBT) was applied to a sample of 80 students of software engineering at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Based on the EPBT model, a questionnaire was administered to these students. A number of key concepts were identified in relation to the students' adoption of IM. It was also found that students use IM to support a number of task-related purposes such as collaborating with their classmates about group work and assignments, as well as for scheduling and coordinating meetings and significant results were obtained.


This paper presents the origins and development of the EU's
involvement in sport through the examination of the landmark
decisions that have shaped its approach over time. The initiation
and development of that policy can be considered an example of '
task expansion', in which the EU has extended the scope of its
activities as a consequence of actors instrumentalising institutional
venues to their own benefit. It draws on concepts from agendasetting
to argue that the initial insertion of sport in the EU's
systemic agenda can be explained by the commercialisation of
sport in the 1980s and 1990s. However, actor centered agendasetting
models may be more suitable to explore the consideration
of sport in the institutional agenda after the 1995 Bosman case.
Two routes of agenda-setting are identified: the high politics route
and the low politics route. At first, sports policy was just regulatory
in nature, being introduced through the low politics route. The
response to the Bosman case from actors both outside and within
the system (mainly sports federations and European Council)
moved the issue to the high politics route, focusing more on the socio-cultural and educational particularities of sport.


When Major Michael Donnelly was instructing his U.S. Air Force student pilots, he used to tell them three things: Timing is everything; it's nice to be lucky; and there is no justice. Highly decorated fighter pilot, proud young patriot, loyal friend with a mischievous sense of humor, loving husband and father of two, he could not have imagined the tragic meaning those words would assume just a few years after his tour of duty in Desert Storm. In 1996 Major Donnelly was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease, at the unusually young age of 35; the onset of this illness marked the beginning of a kind of torture beyond the scope of even the most rigorous military survival training. Betrayed by his body, eventually paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, he experienced another betrayal perhaps even more difficult to comprehend-betrayal by his country. For despite the fact that over 110,000 Desert Storm veterans are sick, many dying of mysterious cancers and neurological diseases, including more than ten times the normal incidence of ALS-and despite all evidence pointing to U.S. troops having been dosed by low levels of Iraqi nerve agents and exposed to chemical weapons' fallout-the Pentagon adamantly denies any connection between their illnesses and their service in the Gulf War. Falcon's Cry: A Desert Storm Memoir, Michael Donnelly's unforgettable story, is his courageous attempt to unearth the truth and force an acknowledgment of that truth by the government he and his fellow veterans defended with their lives. Flying 44 fighter jet combat missions in a war fought on an all-or-nothing scale was thrilling for Michael Donnelly. When the war was won, he and his country rejoiced in the knowledge that, unlike in Vietnam, America had gotten it right in the Persian Gulf. Less than a decade later, the world is learning what veterans and their families have known since Desert Storm-we did not get it right at all. Saddam Hussein is still terrorizing a large portion of the globe. Moreover, we did not learn the lesson of Agent Orange which the Department of Defense denied for decades was the cause of early deaths and birth defects among Vietnam veterans and their families. Yet, thanks largely to the testimony of the author before the House of Representatives in 1997, a first step has been taken toward justice for the tens of thousands of Desert Storm veterans who are suffering virtually in isolation, many without any medical or disability benefits. Major Donnelly believes the truth about Gulf War Illnesses will be uncovered by studies funded in the recently passed Omnibus Appropriations bill, as well as through stories like his own, and he fervently hopes that America can, at last, get it right.


Existing estimates of the income elasticity suggest that, in the absence of price increases, US imports will eventually exceed US income. That the United States will change from being a largely self-sufficient economy to one that cannot cover its imports has received a great deal of attention in developing models for imports: allowance for simultaneity in the import market, recognition of dynamic adjustments and optimization, disaggregation of imports across product and countries, removal of measurement errors in official data, and differentiation between cyclical and secular forces. I show that previous methods to resolve the puzzle, though insightful, are not successful: three decades of methodological improvements in modeling and estimation yield estimated income elasticities for imports much greater than one. I resolve this puzzling estimate by removing the representative-agent assumption and addressing the substitution bias embodied in official import prices stemming from their exclusion of new products. I follow Feenstra to address the substitution bias induced by the omission of new-products' prices. To remove the representative-agent assumption, I start with an individual's demand for imports depending on income and relative prices. Then, consistent aggregation of the micro relations yields a macro equation with income, relative prices, and the variances of the distributions of imports, income, and relative prices. These variances embody individuals' heterogeneity which I model using the share of foreign-born individuals in the United States. For parameter estimation, I use the cointegration method of Johansen (1988). Recognizing either the substitution biases in import prices or the heterogeneity induced by immigration point to unitary income elasticities. Excluding these factors and using the conventional model yields estimated income elasticities much greater than one.


Presence of variant form of the lipid-sensing G protein–coupled receptor GPR120 with impaired function is associated with obesity. Although free fatty acids are typically viewed as nutrients, they can also interact with G protein–coupled receptors (GPCRs) to initiate downstream signaling pathways. Ichimura et al. used mice lacking GPR120, a receptor for unsaturated long-chain free fatty acids, to investigate the role of this GPCR in metabolism. Although body weights of wild-type mice and GPR120-deficient mice fed a normal diet were similar, when fed a high-fat diet, GPR120-deficient mice showed increased body weight compared with wild-type mice, as well as increased adipocyte size, white adipose tissue (WAT), and liver fattiness, and more severe obesity-induced insulin resistance. Gene expression analysis combined with quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction and Western analysis revealed a decrease in insulin signaling in WAT and liver of GPR120-deficient mice fed a high-fat diet, as well as a decrease in adipocyte differentiation in WAT and an increase in lipogenesis in liver. Moreover, lipidomics analysis uncovered abnormalities in lipid composition in WAT, plasma, and liver. Analyses of lean and obese humans indicated that obesity was associated with an increase in GPR120 mRNA abundance in adipose tissue, and GPR120 exon sequencing identified a nonsynonymous p.R270H mutation associated with obesity. Stimulation of calcium signals by the GPR120 agonist α-linoleic acid (ALA) was impaired in human T-REx 293 cells expressing a transgene encoding the p.R270H receptor compared with those expressing wild-type GPR120, and coexpressing the p.R270H variant suppressed the response of the wild-type receptor. Moreover, ALA induced GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide-1) secretion from human intestinal NCI-H716 cells expressing the wild-type receptor but not those expressing the p.R270H variant. The authors thus conclude that GPR120 dysfunction can contribute to obesity in both humans and mice. A. Ichimura, A. Hirasawa, O. Poulain-Godefroy, A. Bonnefond, T. Hara, L. Yengo, I. Kimura, A. Leloire, N. Liu, K. Iida, H. Choquet, P. Besnard, C. Lecoeur, S. Vivequin, K. Ayukawa, M. Takeuchi, K. Ozawa, M. Tauber, C. Maffeis, A. Morandi, R. Buzzetti, P. Elliott, A. Pouta, M.-R. Jarvelin, A. Körner, W. Kiess, M. Pigeyre, R. Caiazzo, W. Van Hul, L. Van Gaal, F. Horber, B. Balkau, C. Lévy-Marchal, K. Rouskas, A. Kouvatsi, J. Hebebrand, A. Hinney, A. Scherag, F. Pattou, D. Meyre, T.-a. Koshimizu, I. Wolowczuk, G. Tsujimoto, P. Froguel, Dysfunction of lipid sensor GPR120 leads to obesity in both mouse and human. Nature 483, 350–354 (2012). [PubMed]


Early detection of methicillin resistant Staph. aureus (MRSA) is critical for both the management of infected patients and the timely institation of appropriate infection control measures. To compare conventional phenotypic methods for detection of MRSA in routine laboratory practice with the wellestablished molecular method, mecA gene detection, this study was conducted on 50 patients with pyogenic infections. Samples were cultured on selective media and isolated Staph. aureus was identified using standard methods. MRSA isolates were identified using disc diffusion, salt agar screen test and BBL crystal MRSA ID system. Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) with primers specific for mecA gene was done for all isolates. MRSA was identified in 33.3% of the isolates by mecA-PCR as compared to 25%, 27.8% and 27.8 by the disc diffusion and agar screen and BBL crystal methods respectively. When mecA was used as gold standard the sensitivity was 75%, 83.3% and 83.3% for the disc diffusion, salt agar screen and BBL crystal method respectively and the specificity was 100% for all. It is concluded that although mecA-PCR is a reliable method for diagnosis of methicillin resistance Staph. aureus, the rapid and cheap conventional tests offer an acceptable alternative for smaller, non reference laboratories and reduce the dependency on PCR in larger laboratories for routine confirmation. ethicillin resistant


Abstract Standardized educational tests have important consequences for both minority and non-minority students. However, there are inconsistencies across these groups with respect to their understanding of the importance of these consequences, and with respect to their test preparation activities. In this study, we worked with teachers from two elementary schools that served predominantly minority populations. The teachers were surveyed regarding their attitudes towards and knowledge of standardized tests. After these data were gathered, a workshop was conducted to discuss the strengths and weakness of standardized tests. Before the workshop, teachers exhibited primarily negative attitudes towards standardized tests and demonstrated limited knowledge of important testing concepts such as reliability and validity. Those teachers who illustrated better understanding of these concepts tended to have more favorable attitudes towards standardized tests. The implications of improving teachers' attitudes and knowledge of standardized tests for improving the test performance of minority students is discussed. ********** In this paper we report the results of the first stage of a study designed to improve minority students' performance on standardized tests. It is a common finding that schools and school districts comprising predominantly minority students tend to do poorer on standardized educational achievement tests than those comprising predominantly non-minority students. Many causes for this difference have been hypothesized, such as differences in educational resources and opportunity to learn, and factors related to test bias or inappropriate testing practices. However, cultural and psychological factors that could lead to test performance differences among groups have not been widely investigated (an exception is research conducted by Claude Steele and his colleagues, discussed in the next section). For example, many students in the United States are taught at an early age that tests are important and that they should try their best to do well on them. Other students are completely unfamiliar with the consequences tied to their performance on standardized tests. A hypothesis motivating the present study is that increasing minority students' motivation to do well on standardized tests will result in meaningful improvement in their performance on these tests. Thus, our goal is to create a culture of testing success. One way to improve students' knowledge of and motivation to do well on standardized tests is to work with their teachers. Several studies revealed that elementary and secondary school teachers lack general knowledge of standardized testing and appropriate test preparation activities (Impara, Divine, Bruce, Liverman, & Gay 1991; Impara & Plake, 1995; Nolen, Haladyna, & Haas, 1992; O=Sullivan & Chalnick, 1991; Popham, 1991; Taylor & Walton, 1998). Similarly, many teachers have negative attitudes towards standardized tests (Green, 1992; Nolen, et al., 1992). Thus, our first goal in raising minority students' test scores was to work with their teachers to improve their understanding of standardized testing, including how to prepare students for taking these tests, and how to use standardized test results to improve instruction. Our initiation of these activities in pursuit of a culture of testing success is consistent with the suggestions of Steele (1997) who argued that changes in minority students' expectations could lead to improvements in their test performance. Steele and his colleagues (e.g., Steele, 1997; Steele & Aronson, 1995) describe several psychological factors that could negatively affect minority students' academic performance. Paramount among these situational factors are "stereotype threat" and "disidentification" with school. The phenomenon of stereotype threat applies to high achieving students who are engaged in school and for whom academic success becomes part of their self-concept. …