SrTiO3 remains at the core of research on oxide electronics, owing to its fascinating properties and wide applications as a commercial substrate. Heterojunctions based on Nb-doped SrTiO3 (NSTO), including both metal/NSTO Schottky junctions (MSJs) and NSTO-based ferroelectric tunnel junctions (FTJs) have received considerable attention due to the colossal electroresistance (CER) effect. However, the mechanism underpinning the CER effect is still poorly understood. Here, we conduct a comparative study on the CER effects in Au/NSTO MSJs and Au/BaTiO3/NSTO FTJs. The two types of heterojunctions show many similarities in resistive switching characteristics, including hysteretic current–voltage curves with asymmetric shapes, absence of critical switching fields, switching times on the scale of ∼1.0 μs, and resistance relaxations of the Curie–von Schweidler type. These results suggest that the CER effects in the MSJs and FTJs may have a common origin, i.e., charge trapping/detrapping, as further revealed by scanning Kelvin probe microscopy. Using temperature-dependent current–voltage, capacitance–voltage, and photo-response measurements, we demonstrate that charge trapping/detrapping could modify both the Schottky barrier profile and the tunneling process, and in turn lead to different transport mechanisms in different voltage regimes. The charge trapping/detrapping-induced CER effect can be well described by a metal–insulator–semiconductor (MIS) model, which reproduces the hysteretic current–voltage curves fairly well over a large range of voltage sweeping and thus provides a unified framework for the CER effects in certain NSTO-based heterojunctions.


Glass tubing has been the traditional material used when constructing minirhizotrons for studying fine root dynamics in managed and natural terrestrial ecosystems. However, we have found that rocky soils, swelling smectite clays, large structural roots, and freezing soils frequently have broken glass minirhizotrons. We have developed a system to construct and install durable acrylic minirhizotrons. Acrylic tubing costs 42% less than glass and requires only 13% of the preparation time, resulting in a 121% savings vs. glass. The major time-saving device is a unique spring-loaded etching trough that places accurate, evenly spaced circles along the length of the tube in minutes. The design can be easily modified for many applications. Preliminary results in a mixed western larch (Larix occidentalis Nutt.)-lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta var. latifolia Engelm.) forest in western Montana indicate that the acrylic minirhizotrons are durable, the etching is visible, and the system can be used to examine fine root phenology


Future SARS-CoV-2 virus outbreak COVID-XX might possibly occur during the next years. However the pathology in humans is so recent that many clinical aspects, like early detection of complications, side effects after recovery or early screening, are currently unknown. In spite of the number of cases of COVID-19, its rapid spread putting many sanitary systems in the edge of collapse has hindered proper collection and analysis of the data related to COVID-19 clinical aspects. We describe an interdisciplinary initiative that integrates clinical research, with image diagnostics and the use of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and radiomics with the aim of clarifying some of SARS-CoV-2 open questions. The whole initiative addresses 3 main points: 1) collection of standardize data including images, clinical data and analytics; 2) COVID-19 screening for its early diagnosis at primary care centers; 3) define radiomic signatures of COVID-19 evolution and associated pathologies for the early treatment of complications. In particular, in this paper we present a general overview of the project, the experimental design and first results of X-ray COVID-19 detection using a classic approach based on HoG and feature selection. Our experiments include a comparison to some recent methods for COVID-19 screening in X-Ray and an exploratory analysis of the feasibility of X-Ray COVID-19 screening. Results show that classic approaches can outperform deep-learning methods in this experimental setting, indicate the feasibility of early COVID-19 screening and that non-COVID infiltration is the group of patients most similar to COVID-19 in terms of radiological description of X-ray. Therefore, an efficient COVID-19 screening should be complemented with other clinical data to better discriminate these cases.


Abstract. Shallow marine cumulus convection over the Atlantic ocean near Barbados is studied with observations by airborne and spaceborne lidar instruments performed during the field campaign Next-generation Aircraft Remote Sensing for Validation Studies (NARVAL). For the first time airborne lidar measurements with the DLR high spectral resolution lidar system WALES on-board the German research aircraft HALO were conducted over the tropical North Atlantic Ocean. In the course of NARVAL several CALIPSO satellite underflights were performed, which allow comparisons of detected cloud top edges from the two lidar instruments (i.e. WALES and CALIOP on-board CALIPSO). The study concentrates on the comparison and investigation of detected cloud top height distributions derived from measured WALES and CALIOP lidar profiles by use of a newly developed cloud detection algorithm. This allows to test the utilization of satellite based lidar systems for the observation of shallow marine convection. The distribution of cloud top heights during wintertime measurements shows a two-layer structure with maxima in ∼1000 m and ∼2500 m in both WALES and CALIOP measurements. Cloud top heights vary with latitude. The analysed WALES and CALIOP data shows most frequent cloud tops in 10° to 20° N at heights from 1500 to 2500 m. A meridional decrease of detected cloud top heights over the subtropical North Atlantic Ocean, with lower values in the North, is observed. Approximately 36 % of all clouds in the Atlantic trades are detected to have a horizontal extent of less than 1 km in the winter season. Cloud gaps shorter than 1 km dominate the Atlantic trades. They make up approximately 45 % of all detected cloud gaps.


This paper will deal with a brief study on the prohibition of the use of the Islamic veil in the precedents of the Court of Justice of the European Union, through the analysis of judgments C-157/15 and C-188/15. Firstly, it will look at the main nuances of the scarf in the Islamic religion, including the models used, its origin and also the importance of clothing in the religion. It will then analyze the right to freedom of religion and its manifestations, as well as the right for the State to uphold secularism. Next, it will examine the legislation of European countries that have sought to restrict the use of Islamic garments, which brought into play the interpretation of the European Court of Human Rights on this subject. Finally, the paper will do a detailed analysis of judgments C-157/15 and C-188/15 of the Court of Justice of the European Union, examining positions both in favor and also against the subject


Language of the Snakes traces the history of the Prakrit language as a literary phenomenon, starting from its cultivation in courts of the Deccan in the first centuries of the common era. Although little studied today, Prakrit was an important vector of the kāvya movement and once joined Sanskrit at the apex of classical Indian literary culture. The opposition between Prakrit and Sanskrit was at the center of an enduring "language order" in India, a set of ways of thinking about, naming, classifying, representing, and ultimately using languages. As a language of classical literature that nevertheless retained its associations with more demotic language practices, Prakrit both embodies major cultural tensions—between high and low, transregional and regional, cosmopolitan and vernacular—and provides a unique perspective onto the history of literature and culture in South Asia. "Andrew Ollett's book is one of those scholarly breakthroughs that happen, with luck, once or twice in a generation. It reveals the richness of Prakrit language and literary modes with a precision and depth of insight never seen before." DAVID SHULMAN, Professor Emeritus, Hebrew University "Ollett offers a brilliant, original, and thoroughly engaging investigation of the complex language order of premodern India. Bringing to the fore the less-studied role of the literary Prakrits, his work makes a major contribution to our understanding of the history of language and literature in early India and beyond." R. P. GOLDMAN, Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor in Sanskrit and India Studies, University of California, Berkeley ANDREW OLLETT works on the literary and intellectual traditions of premodern India.


The present article proposes a semantic map for the domain of impersonal constructions. Following Keenan, we assume that different varieties of impersonal constructions register loss of the functional subject properties (such as definiteness, topicality and agentivity). It is argued that different functional varieties of impersonal constructions (where the subject lacks some of the functional properties of a prototypical subject) are coded by different types of impersonal constructions, although certain constructions have a broader range of applications. On the basis of this partial overlap between different coding strategies for different functional varieties of impersonal constructions, we construct a semantic map for the impersonal domain, which can be used to represent and constrain variation of coding of impersonal constructions across languages.


The quality of magnetic resonance images (MRI) is often limited by anisotropic voxels necessitated by acquisition considerations. Examination of the 3D anatomy and post-processing of such images is challenged by the partial volume effects due to such anisotropic voxels. We propose a method based on the separable wavelet transform to fuse anisotropic clinical images, which are often acquired in perpendicular directions, for example axial, sagittal and coronal, into a single fine-resolution image. We investigate several possible wavelet filters, fusion rules and the number of decomposition levels. Our method shows promising results of restoring features apparently lost due to the partial volume effect.


User experience has been extensively discussed in literature, yet the idea of applying it to explain and comprehend the conceptualization of Mobile Learning (ML) is relatively new. Consequently much of the existing works are mainly theoretical and they concentrate to establish and explain the relationship between ML and experience. Little has been done to apply or adopt it into practice. In contrast to the currently existing approaches, this paper presents an ontology to support Citywide Mobile Learning (CML). The ontology presented in this paper addresses three fundamental aspects of CML, namely User Model, User Experience and Places/Spaces which exist in the city. The ontology presented here not only attempts to model and translate the theoretical concepts such as user experience and Place/Spaces for citywide context for Mobile Learning, but also apply them into practice. The discussed ontology is used in our system to support Place/Space based CML.


Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBO) is the use of 100% oxygen, breathed under pressure and delivered to tissues by the circulation, to achieve a therapeutic benefit. Under hyperbaric conditions oxygen attains medicinal properties. Time and pressure of the exposure provide the specific "dose" and "tissue level" required to achieve the effect. HBO provides a pressure-related increase in plasma-borne oxygen. This increases total blood oxygen content by 20-25% and markedly improves free (i.e. dissolved) oxygen delivery to tissues, increasing the diffusion distance from the capillaries into tissues several fold. At these increased tissue levels, oxygen initiates a series of distinct physiological and pharmacological effects.


Title of dissertation: ACTIVE DATA COLLECTION TECHNIQUES TO UNDERSTAND ONLINE SCAMMERS AND CYBERCRIMINALS Young Sam Park, Doctor of Philosophy, 2016 Dissertation directed by: Professor Elaine Shi Department of Computer Science Nigerian scam, also known as advance fee fraud or 419 scam, is a prevalent form of online fraudulent activity that causes financial loss to individuals and businesses. Nigerian scam has evolved from simple non-targeted email messages to more sophisticated scams targeted at users of classifieds, dating and other websites. Even though such scams are observed and reported by users frequently, the community's understanding of Nigerian scams is limited since the scammers operate "underground". To better understand the underground Nigerian scam ecosystem and seek effective methods to deter Nigerian scam and cybercrime in general, we conduct a series of active and passive measurement studies. Relying upon the analysis and insight gained from the measurement studies, we make four contributions: (1) we analyze the taxonomy of Nigerian scam and derive long-term trends in scams; (2) we provide an insight on Nigerian scam and cybercrime ecosystems and their underground operation; (3) we propose a payment intervention as a potential deterrent to cybercrime operation in general and evaluate its effectiveness; and (4) we offer active and passive measurement tools and techniques that enable in-depth analysis of cybercrime ecosystems and deterrence on them. We first created and analyze a repository of more than two hundred thousand user-reported scam emails, stretching from 2006 to 2014, from four major scam reporting websites. We select ten most commonly observed scam categories and tag 2,000 scam emails randomly selected from our repository. Based upon the manually tagged dataset, we train a machine learning classifier and cluster all scam emails in the repository. From the clustering result, we find a strong and sustained upward trend for targeted scams and downward trend for non-targeted scams. We then focus on two types of targeted scams: sales scams and rental scams targeted users on Craigslist. We built an automated scam data collection system and gathered large-scale sales scam emails. Using the system we posted honeypot ads on Craigslist and conversed automatically with the scammers. Through the email conversation, the system obtained additional confirmation of likely scam activities and collected additional information such as IP addresses and shipping addresses. Our analysis revealed that around 10 groups were responsible for nearly half of the over 13,000 total scam attempts we received. These groups used IP addresses and shipping addresses in both Nigeria and the U.S. We also crawled rental ads on Craigslist, identified rental scam ads amongst the large number of benign ads and conversed with the potential scammers. Through in-depth analysis of the rental scams, we found seven major scam campaigns employing various operations and monetization methods. We also found that unlike sales scammers, most rental scammers were in the U.S. The large-scale scam data and in-depth analysis provide useful insights on how to design effective deterrence techniques against cybercrime in general. We study underground DDoS-for-hire services, also known as booters, and measure the effectiveness of undermining a payment system of DDoS Services. Our analysis shows that the payment intervention can have the desired effect of limiting cybercriminals' ability and increasing the risk of accepting payments. ACTIVE DATA COLLECTION TECHNIQUES TO UNDERSTAND ONLINE SCAMMERS AND CYBERCRIMINALS


The accounting and ethical issues at Xerox in the late 1990s were many and highly interesting. It appears that Management at Xerox Corporation faced with strategic mistakes and a tough economic environment including Japanese competition resorted to creative accounting practices to meet financial targets and Wall Street expectations. This case presents a brief history of Xerox Corporation going back to 1906 when Xerox was founded in New York. This is followed by a discussion of Xerox's corporate culture in the 1980s and 90s and the SEC investigation of its accounting practices in the 1990s. The focus of the case is the actions of an assistant treasurer, James Bingham, one of several finance managers that top management used to guide Xerox through tough economic times and help make financial results go their way. Mr. Bingham, at least initially, viewed helping management meet financial targets as a challenge. However, in due course he realized that all he is doing is help mask bigger and bigger problems that would lead Xerox in only one direction-bankruptcy. A short teaching note is also included. The teaching note includes several suggested questions along with a brief discussion. The focus in the teaching note is on the actions of James Bingham and ethical issues. The case also presents an opportunity to present or reintroduce the Institute of Management Accountant's Statement of Ethical Professional Practice to students. The IMA's Statement of Ethical Professional Practice provides guidance for accountants to act in a responsible and ethical manner in conducting their day to day activities. The case requires the students to apply the IMA's Statement of Ethical Professional Practice to the actions of James Bingham and other accounting personnel at Xerox Corporation.


From the Publisher:
All the tools you need to create the full range of Visual Basic(r) color graphics applications
Expert Rod Stephens provides you with everything you need to add advanced graphics to your applications in this in-depth introduction to graphic programming with Microsoft Visual Basic. From images using as few as 16 colors to "true-color" applications that use more than 16 million, he shows you how to create the full range of color graphics applications. You'll learn how to use Visual Basic controls to create impressive graphic effects without having to buy expensive add-on products.
This book/CD-ROM package also explains how to integrate imaging, animation, and two- and three-dimensional graphics into an application. And you'll find the tools to manipulate color images, overlay one image on another, build scrolled windows, and much more.
The Second Edition covers:
*New API functions
*Bitmap image morphing
*New algorithms for hidden surface removal
*Print preview with multiple pages and scales
*Image processing, including high color and true color
*Examples of controlling animation using simulation
*New examples that demonstrate shape-distorting transformations
*New examples of fractals and tilings
*Gouraud shading, Phong shading, and texturing
*Ray tracing speed improvements
*Ray tracing for new kinds of objects
The CD-ROM includes:
*More than 400 complete, ready-to-run example programs
*Pictures to use with the example programs
*Images generated by the programs
*Color images of many of the figures from the book
*Source code for all example programs from the First Edition


A fundamental algorithmic problem at the heart of static analysis is Dyck reachability. The input is a graph where the edges are labeled with different types of opening and closing parentheses, and the reachability information is computed via paths whose parentheses are properly matched. We present new results for Dyck reachability problems with applications to alias analysis and data-dependence analysis. Our main contributions, that include improved upper bounds as well as lower bounds that establish optimality guarantees, are as follows: First, we consider Dyck reachability on bidirected graphs, which is the standard way of performing field-sensitive points-to analysis. Given a bidirected graph with n nodes and m edges, we present: (i) an algorithm with worst-case running time O(m + n · α(n)), where α(n) is the inverse Ackermann function, improving the previously known O(n2) time bound; (ii) a matching lower bound that shows that our algorithm is optimal wrt to worst-case complexity; and (iii) an optimal average-case upper bound of O(m) time, improving the previously known O(m · logn) bound. Second, we consider the problem of context-sensitive data-dependence analysis, where the task is to obtain analysis summaries of library code in the presence of callbacks. Our algorithm preprocesses libraries in almost linear time, after which the contribution of the library in the complexity of the client analysis is only linear, and only wrt the number of call sites. Third, we prove that combinatorial algorithms for Dyck reachability on general graphs with truly sub-cubic bounds cannot be obtained without obtaining sub-cubic combinatorial algorithms for Boolean Matrix Multiplication, which is a long-standing open problem. Thus we establish that the existing combinatorial algorithms for Dyck reachability are (conditionally) optimal for general graphs. We also show that the same hardness holds for graphs of constant treewidth. Finally, we provide a prototype implementation of our algorithms for both alias analysis and data-dependence analysis. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that the new algorithms significantly outperform all existing methods on the two problems, over real-world benchmarks.


We report on a method of making dielectric loaded surface-plasmon-polariton waveguides by nanoimprint lithography from master structures fabricated using two-photon polymerization. This method employing molds from polydimethylsiloxane allows rapid reproduction of waveguide structures using a large variety of resist and substrate materials. Both master and imprinted samples are characterized and compared. Measurements are performed on the imprinted samples using leakage radiation microscopy.


This article argues that traditionalist opposition to same sex marriage can be understood as a cultural property claim - the sort of claim that is often made by Native American tribes and other indigenous or subordinated cultural groups of a right to control the uses of sacred or culturally central rituals, places and objects. Ultimately, the article disagrees with the traditionalist position, and suggests several arguments against allowing traditionalists to claim a property-like right to exclude same sex couples from marriage. Nevertheless, the stakes in the part of the marriage equality controversy that centers around name and status are not adequately understood, and this article offers an analytical advance by bringing the idea of a cultural property claim to bear. The protection of shared cultural symbols, rituals and traditions can be approached doctrinally and understood culturally in several ways in addition to a cultural property claim, including trademark dilution (especially trademark tarnishment), intellectual property rights that protect against unauthorized performance, laws against blasphemy and desecration, and environmental prohibitions of pollution and contagion. The article examines each of these, shedding light on the unexplored mechanics of the signal congestion that often lies at the heart of the traditionalist concern. The article focuses not only on the name and status of marriage, but also on the daily performances of gender roles that marriage authorizes and facilitates, and that same sex marriage apparently threatens to dilute or disrupt. The article thus applies both property concepts and gender performance theory to the same sex marriage controversy. The gender performance analysis also leads to a place-based argument in favor of disestablishing marriage, as a way of facilitating a multicultural approach to a deep-seated controversy.


The advancements in digital technology and the resultant economies of scale offered by high capacity fibre transmission systems have enabled network operators to provide more cost-effective telecommunications services to their increasing customer base. However, with the deployment of such systems, the emphasis on service quality and network reliability has increased considerably. To address this and many other network management issues, the SDH digital transmission standard was established. While supporting enhanced network management functionality, it was only through the subsequent development of highly intelligent Network Elements (NEs) that the inherent cost benefits of SDH have been realised. Each NE is characterised by its own topology and associated restoration schemes. As the economic viability of these survivable topologies are dependent on varying network conditions, it has been shown that the most cost-effective networks will be based on a combination of these topologies. The complexity of these highly integrated networks and the immense capital investment involved suggests that much consideration should be given to the design and optimisation of such networks. This research work concerns an investigation into this particular area of network optimisation. It involves the development of an optimisation design package that facilitates the generation and analysis of survivable SDH networks through the implementation o f highly efficient optimisation techniques. Existing optimisation techniques are utilised to this end, and enhanced upon to address aspects of the SDH design model that were previously not taken into consideration. This results in the development of innovative and highly efficient algorithmic procedures for solving this particular design problem, and "NetOpt" - a prototype design tool for implementing such procedures. Based on a set of generated test case networks, a detailed analysis and evaluation o f these procedures and the resultant network solutions is presented. In conclusion, it is shown that CAD-based tools are essential for the generation and analysis of survivable SDH networks.


Normal 0 21 false false false FR JA X-NONE Thanks to a vibrant community united by a few core principles, plus detailed policies and safeguards against trolls and vandalism, Wikipedia has already become a piece of the knowledge ecosystem. Like science, its aim is to propose a synthesis of existing knowledge and conflicting interpretations of reality. It also changes the way people interact with knowledge thanks to its extensive use of hyperlinks, portals, and categories. As a consequence, I suggest academics contribute to articles in their field. They could also use Wikipedia as a course assignment and make sure that the topics related to their discipline are fairly presented in this encyclopedia.


Abstract. The ice nucleation of bioaerosols (bacteria, pollen, spores, etc.) is a topic of growing interest, since their impact on ice cloud formation and thus on radiative forcing, an important parameter in global climate, is not yet fully understood. Here we show that pollen of different species strongly differ in their ice nucleation behaviour. The average freezing temperatures in laboratory experiments range from 240 to 255 K. As the most efficient nuclei (silver birch, Scots pine and common juniper pollen) have a distribution area up to the Northern timberline, their ice nucleation activity might be a cryoprotective mechanism. Far more intriguingly, it has turned out that water, which has been in contact with pollen and then been separated from the bodies, nucleates as good as the pollen grains themselves. The ice nuclei have to be easily-suspendable macromolecules located on the pollen. Once extracted, they can be distributed further through the atmosphere than the heavy pollen grains and so presumably augment the impact of pollen on ice cloud formation even in the upper troposphere. Our experiments lead to the conclusion that pollen ice nuclei, in contrast to bacterial and fungal ice nucleating proteins, are non-proteinaceous compounds.


In this thesis, we study four systems of ordinary differential equations, which model the interrelationships between different cell populations while tumor cells exist, and treatments, such as immunotherapy, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy, are applied. For the first two models, we only consider the case with radiation treatment. For the first model, we consider a single general cell population with its corresponding radiated cell population. Meanwhile, two different kinds of radiation are studies separately: constant and decay; for the second model, we consider the host and tumor cell populations together with their corresponding radiated cell populations, which behave in the same way as that in the first model. For the third and fourth models, we consider both the immunotherapy and chemotherapy. The third model includes three cell populations: host cells, tumor cells, and immune cells, as well as the drug concentration. We study the properties of its null-surfaces, equilibria, and the stability of them; in the fourth model, we not only extend the previous model into one with six populations, with the immune cells in the third model being specified into three different ones: CD8T cells, circulating lymphocytes, and IL-2. but also focus on the situation when controls are added in a linear manner. We investigate the existence of controls and find the characterization of optimal bang-bang control.


Protein p53 is a tumor suppressor that acts by arresting the cell cycle and inducing apoptosis. Ryan et al. show that NF-κB activity can be anti-apoptotic or pro-apoptotic depending on the stimulus. Stimulation of NF-κB was essential in mediating p53-induced cell death, but stimulation of NF-κB was important for inhibiting cell death induced by tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α). The data suggest that p53 regulates NF-κB by mechanisms distinct from that activated by TNF. p53 activates NF-κB by stimulating the mitogen-activated protein kinase, MEK1, which phosphorylates and activates pp90rsk, which could then phosphorylate and inactivate IκB leading to NF-κB activation. Thus, one possible explanation for the divergent roles of NF-κB in the programmed cell death pathways activated by p53 and TNF-α may be the different mechanisms of activation of NF-κB. These dual roles for NF-κB have important implications for targeting NF-κB by chemotherapeutic agents to treat cancer: Inhibiting NF-κB in tumors with normal p53 function may actually decrease therapeutic effectiveness, whereas inhibiting NF-κB in cells with mutated p53 may increase therapeutic effectiveness. Ryan, K.M., Ernst, M.K., Rice, N.R., and Vousden, K.H. (2000) Role of NF-κB in p53-mediated programmed cell death. Nature 404: 892-897. [Online Journal]


While previous research has been conducted with sheltered homeless women, there is a gap in scientific knowledge relevant to the health-promoting behaviors of sheltered homeless women and factors associated with these behaviors. Using Pender's Health Promotion Model as the framework, a cross-sectional, correlational design was used to obtain data from a convenience sample of 126 sheltered homeless women in central North Carolina. Measures used for the study were the Health Promotion Lifestyle Profile II, Self-Rated Abilities for Health Practices Scale, and Personal History Form. Descriptive statistics and correlation coefficients were calculated. The majority (54%) of the women using the shelters were African American. The average age was 42 years old and 70% were 40 years or older. Most reported being single, high school graduates, unemployed, and lacking health care coverage. Many of the women reported they were not the primary caretaker of their children. Homeless women reported many barriers to health care services, although most reported they were able to access the multiple health care services available for physical health problems and for preventive care check-ups. Access to mental health and substance abuse treatment services and dental care were, however, difficult. Although more than half of the women reported their health was good to excellent, significant physical and mental health problems such as chronic physical disorders (e.g., hypertension, asthma, arthritis, STDs) were reported. More than half the women reported symptoms of depression but fewer than half reported symptoms of anxiety. There were positive significant correlations between health rating and the scores on HPLP II total scale and all subscales (health responsibility, physical activity, nutrition, spiritual growth, interpersonal relations, and stress management) and the SRAHP total scale and the subscales of psychological well-being and nutrition. There were positive correlations between social and emotional support and the HPLP II total scale and subscale scores (spiritual growth, interpersonal relations, and stress management. There were significant positive correlations among all scores on the SRAPH and the HPLP II. Self-efficacy for health practices and social and emotional support were significant predictor variables for health promoting behaviors and explained 55.1% of the variance in health promoting behaviors. This study is the first to use Pender's HPM to examine the relationships between self-efficacy for health practices, mental health, and health-promoting behaviors of sheltered homeless women.


This paper was set out to investigate the main cultural differences between Saudi and British participants making apologies with a focus on the role of the gender of the addressee in the selection of apology strategies in gender-segregated vs. coed societies. Written questionnaires were used to collect data from 80 participants: 20 Saudi males, 20 Saudi females, 20 British males and 20 British females. Three apology situations were presented; in the first two situations the hearer (H) was a male, in the third, the H was a female. Data was analyzed based on Brown and Levinson's (B & L) politeness theory and according to the Cross Cultural Speech Act Research Project (CCSARP) apology strategy coding system. Generally, the results of this study indicated differences between the Saudi and the British apology strategy selections. Moreover, in particular, there were significant differences between the mean scores of apology situations where the gender of the addressee was a male.


Learning graph generative models is a challenging task for deep learning and has wide applicability to a range of domains like chemistry, biology and social science. However current deep neural methods suffer from limited scalability: for a graph with $n$ nodes and $m$ edges, existing deep neural methods require $\Omega(n^2)$ complexity by building up the adjacency matrix. On the other hand, many real world graphs are actually sparse in the sense that $m\ll n^2$. Based on this, we develop a novel autoregressive model, named BiGG, that utilizes this sparsity to avoid generating the full adjacency matrix, and importantly reduces the graph generation time complexity to $O((n + m)\log n)$. Furthermore, during training this autoregressive model can be parallelized with $O(\log n)$ synchronization stages, which makes it much more efficient than other autoregressive models that require $\Omega(n)$. Experiments on several benchmarks show that the proposed approach not only scales to orders of magnitude larger graphs than previously possible with deep autoregressive graph generative models, but also yields better graph generation quality.


This essay examines how four women in Kate Chopin's The Awakening contribute to telling the story about the main character Edna's development as a woman in the late nineteenth century. The four female characters analysed in this essay are Adele Ratignolle, Mademoiselle Reisz, Madame Lebrun and Madame Antoine. This essay will show that all four of these women contribute to telling the story about Edna's personal development even though some of their qualities are hidden to Edna but it is also the actions of some of the characters which contribute to Edna's suicide.


We study the online decision problem where the set of available actions varies over time, also called the sleeping experts problem. We consider the setting where the performance comparison is made with respect to the best ordering of actions in hindsight. In this paper, both the payoff function and the availability of actions is adversarial. Kleinberg et al. (2008) gave a computationally efficient no-regret algorithm in the setting where payoffs are stochastic. Kanade et al. (2009) gave an efficient no-regret algorithm in the setting where action availability is stochastic.
 However, the question of whether there exists a computationally efficient no-regret algorithm in the adversarial setting was posed as an open problem by Kleinberg et al. (2008). We show that such an algorithm would imply an algorithm for PAC learning DNF, a long standing important open problem. We also show that a related problem, the gambling problem, posed as an open problem by Abernethy (2010) is related to agnostically learning halfspaces, albeit under restricted distributions.


Is there a bias in the against women's representation in Wikipedia biographies? Thousands of biographical subjects, from six sources, are compared against the English-language Wikipedia and the online Encyclopaedia Britannica with respect to coverage, gender representation, and article length. We conclude that Wikipedia provides better coverage and longer articles, that Wikipedia typically has more articles on women than Britannica in absolute terms, but Wikipedia articles on women are more likely to be missing than articles on men relative to Britannica. For both reference works, article length did not consistently differ by gender.


Nanoemulsions have attracted great attention in research, dosage form design, and pharmacotherapy. This is as a result of some attributes peculiar to nanoemulsions such as optical clarity, ease of preparation, thermodynamic stability and increased surface area. Poor water solubility remains the main culprit for the formulation scientist which can be overcome by canonization. Nanoemulsion is a kinetically stable and isotropic system of two immiscible liquids in the submicron size range. Nanoemulsions are composed of oil droplets dispersed in an aqueous medium and stabilized by surfactant molecules. Many parenteral nutrition and drug emulsions on the market confirm the safe use of NE over the years. Parenteral emulsions loaded with APIs (active pharmaceutical ingredients) are considered as drug delivery systems (DDS). DDS focuses on the regulation of the in-vivo dynamics, such as absorption, distribution, metabolism, and extended bioavailability, thereby improving the effectiveness and the safety of the drugs. Nanoemulsion is the thermodynamically stable isotropic system in which two immiscible liquid (water and oil) are mixed to form a single phase using an appropriate surfactant or its mix with a droplet diameter approximately in the range of 0.5-100 μm. Nanoemulsion droplet sizes fall typically in the range of 20-200 nm and show narrow size distributions. Problems such as creaming, coalescence sedimentation, and flocculation are not a concern for nanoemulsions due to their small droplet size. A comprehensive review is presented to give basic ideas about nanoemulsions, their preparation methods, and stability aspects. In this review, the attention is focused on giving brief regarding nanoemulsion formulation aspect, a method of preparation, characterization techniques with special emphasis on various applications and explains the components required, low and high energy processes involved in the preparation of nanoemulsions. This review sheds light on the current state of nanoemulsions in the delivery of drugs and other bio-actives. The morphology, formulation, characteristics, and characterization of nanoemulsions were also addressed.


This study documents a significant and positive impact of country-level ESG improvement on economic growth using a comprehensive sample across 109 countries. The economic benefits of country-level ESG improvement are robust after alleviating endogeneity concerns using instrumental variable regression, dynamic panel GMM approach and placebo tests. Further, according to the subsample analyses, we find that the positive influence of country-level ESG improvement on economic growth is more pronounced in countries with a stronger incentive to improve ESG performance, and more powerful CSR responsive and law enforcement. Our findings provide policy implications for promoting sustainable economic growth.


Mesovortices in the eyewall region of a hurricane are intriguing elements of the hurricane engine. In-situ measurements of them are sparse, however, and our understanding of their overall role in the physics of a hurricane is incomplete. To further understand their dynamics an experimental apparatus using a homogeneous fluid (water) has been constructed to emulate the lower tropospheric flow of the hurricane eye/eyewall region. For experimental configurations possessing a central aspect ratio less than unity, a primary and secondary circulation similar to the in flow layer of an intense hurricane, and a similar radius-to-width ratio of the curvilinear shear layer bordering the eye and eyewall region, the flow supports two primary quasi-steady vortices and secondary intermittent vortices. The vortices form through Kelvin–Helmholtz instability of the curvilinear shear layer bordering the slowly upwelling fluid in the centre and the converging fluid from the periphery. The primary vortices are maintained by convergence of circulation from the periphery and merger of secondary vortices spawned along the shear layer. The horizontal flow field is measured using a particle image velocimeter. Despite the relatively strong secondary circulation through the parent vortex the horizontal flow is found to be approximately uniform in the direction parallel to the rotation axis. The peak tangential velocity is found to occur in the mesovortices and is roughly 50% greater than the parent vortex that supports them. The measurements provide insight into recent observations of excessive wind damage in landfalling storms and support the hypothesis that intense storms contain coherent vortex structures in the eyewall region with higher horizontal wind speeds locally than the parent hurricane.


The research is divided into two parts. In the first
part the structural behaviour of sandwich beams using
timber-based facings and foamed plastic cores was
studied. Various available theories were examined and
the most appropriate theory for this type of panel was
identified. In an extensive test programme the relevant
properties of the constituent materials were measured
and the data used in the proposed theory of structural
behaviour to predict beam deflections and core and
facing stresses. Corresponding sandwich beam tests were
carried out on the range of skin/core combinations and
the theoretical and experimental behaviours were
compared. Good agreement was confirmed within the range
of span/depth ratios investigated, confirming the
applicability of the theory for semi-thick timber-based
facings. A variety of timber based facings were
investigated and those most suitable for sandwich
construction were identified.
This type of panel construction has many advantages but
lacks the benefit of good fire resistance. The recF.iired
fire resistance could be provided by a suitable core
material.
Part two of the research concentrated on the development
of a new core material which was intended to have good
structural properties at reasonable density, and to have
adequate fire resistance free from the production of smoke and toxic fumes. Coated paper honeycombs were
chosen for the study. The properties of the constituent
materials were investigated in detail and then the
structural properties of the developed cores were
measured using methods drawn from national and
international standards. One particular coating
combination proved to be effective in terms of
stiffness, fire resistance, freedom from micro cracking
and strength retention at high temperature. This was
based on a mixture of sodium silicate and ball clay.
Cores were tested both with cells empty (to be blocked
by intumescence) and with cells filled (e.g. with
lightweight filler). In the best of the developed cores,
shear stiffness and transverse stiffness were much
higher than in normal core materials. On the basis of
the test programme, panels can be designed to give a
fire resistance defined by insulation of up to two hours.


Abstract The nonlinear diffusion acceleration (NDA) method is an efficient and flexible transport iterative scheme for solving reactor-physics problems. This paper presents a fast iterative algorithm for solving multigroup neutron transport eigenvalue problems in one-dimensional slab geometry. The proposed method is defined by a multilevel system of equations that includes multigroup and effective one-group low-order NDA equations. The eigenvalue is evaluated in an exact projected solution space of the smallest dimensionality. Numerical results that illustrate the performance of the new algorithm are demonstrated.


There has been a shift in manufacturing companies from developing products and services that merely work well and are easy to use, towards also considering how to create positive user experiences. Volvo Cars is a company that strives for this approach in the design of both cars and car-related products and services, including Volvo On Call – a built-in safety assistance system accompanied by a smartphone app. The purpose of this master thesis project was to thoroughly investigate the user experience of Volvo On Call and how it influences the car experience. The aim was to explore opportunities for how Volvo On Call can be further developed and improved from a user experience perspective. This was carried out with a user-centered and experience driven approach in a two-step process consisting of the main phases Exploration and Creation. Users were involved throughout the project. The major part of the first phase Exploration consisted of a qualitative user study. The goal was to achieve an understanding for how the Volvo On Call concept is experienced today by collecting and analyzing user narratives, and thereby identify possibilities for how the service can be further developed. The user study showed that Volvo On Call elicits overall positive user experiences, and adds another dimension to the car experience. It was concluded that the best way of improving and further developing Volvo On Call was to build on its already established values; simplifying and enriching everyday life when it comes to car-related activities, and extending and enhancing the car experience. Based on implications found in the user study, the Creation phase explored how these values could be achieved by incorporating a smart and more assistive behavior in Volvo On Call, as well as consider how the interplay with the car could be improved. The end result was a User Experience Vision as well as a selection of early concept ideas, which were assessed in the form of storyboards together with users. This was done in order to get an indication of how the proposed functionality and behavior would be received, and how well it corresponds to the users' expectations. It could be concluded that a smart and assistive Volvo On Call is a viable and desirable continuation of the current concept within a near future. However, the proposed concept comes with new demands which need to be fulfilled in order to achieve the intended user experience. In addition, several possible directions for the future development of Volvo On Call were identified during this project, which highlights a need for making strategic decisions about how the concept should evolve, taking into account the holistic experience of the app and the car, the progression of technology development, and potential changes in the automotive industry.


The Million Mom March (favoring gun control) and Code Pink: Women for Peace (focusing on foreign policy, especially the war in Iraq) are organizations that have mobilized women as women in an era when other women's groups struggled to maintain critical mass and turned away from non-gender-specific public issues. This article addresses how these organizations fostered collective consciousness among women, a large and diverse group, while confronting the echoes of backlash against previous mobilization efforts by women. We argue that the March and Code Pink achieved mobilization success by creating hybrid organizations that blended elements of three major collective action frames: maternalism, egalitarianism, and feminine expression. These innovative organizations invented hybrid forms that cut across movements, constituencies, and political institutions. Using surveys, interviews, and content analysis of organizational documents, this article explains how the March and Code Pink met the contemporary challenges facing women's collective action in similar yet distinct ways. It highlights the role of feminine expression and concerns about the intersectional marginalization of women in resolving the historic tensions between maternalism and egalitarianism. It demonstrates hybridity as a useful analytical lens to understand gendered organizing and other forms of grassroots collective action.


This paper examines the effect of giant oil and gas discoveries on foreign direct investment in developing economies using a new project-level dataset. We document a large increase in non-extraction FDI in the 2 years following a giant discovery, an event which is unpredictable due to the uncertain nature of exploration. We find that FDI in ows increase by 73% and that this wave is driven by a 37% increase in the number of FDI projects as well as a 22% increases in source countries and a 17% increase in target sectors. We interpret this FDI response as evidence for the news-driven business-cycle hypothesis within a developing country setting and highlight FDI bonanzas as an important development channel for resource rich economies.


An efficient multiscale approach is established in order to compute the macroscopic response of nonlinear composites. The micro problem is rewritten in an integral form of the Lippmann-Schwinger type and solved efficiently by Fast Fourier Transforms. Using realistic microstructure models complex nonlinear effects are reproduced and validated with measured data of fiber reinforced plastics. The micro problem is integrated in a Finite Element framework which is used to solve the macroscale. The scale coupling technique and a consistent numerical algorithm is established. The method provides an efficient way to determine the macroscopic response considering arbitrary microstructures, constitutive behaviors and loading conditions.


In this work we are investigating the learning benefits of e-Learning principles (a) within the context of a web-based intelligent tutor and (b) in the "wild," that is, in real classroom (or homework) usage, outside of a controlled laboratory. In the study described in this paper, we focus on the benefits of politeness, as originally formulated by Brown and Levinson and more recently studied by Mayer and colleagues. We test the learning benefits of a stoichiometry tutor that provides polite problem statements, hints, and error messages as compared to one that provides more direct feedback. Although we find a small, but not significant, trend toward the polite tutor leading to better learning gains, our findings do not replicate that of Wang et al., who found significant learning gains through polite tutor feedback. While we hypothesize that an e-Learning principle such as politeness may not be robust enough to survive the transition from the lab to the "wild," we will continue to experiment with the polite stoichiometry tutor.


Radiation damage restricts the useful lifetime for macromolecular crystals in the X-ray beam, even at cryotemperatures. With the development of structural genomics pipelines, it will be essential to incorporate projected crystal lifetime information into the automated data collection software routines. As a first step towards this goal, a computer program, RADDOSE, is presented which is designed for use by crystallographers in optimizing the amount of data that can be obtained from a particular cryo-cooled crystal at synchrotron beamlines. The program uses the composition of the crystal and buffer constituents, as well as the beam energy, flux and dimensions, to compute the absorption coefficients and hence the theoretical time taken to reach an absorbed dose of 2 × 10^7 Gy, the so-called `Henderson limit'. At this dose, the intensity of the diffraction pattern is predicted to be halved. A `diffraction–dose efficiency' quantity is introduced, for the convenient comparison of absorbed dose per diffracted photon for different crystals. Four example cases are considered, and the implications for anomalous data collection are discussed in the light of the results from RADDOSE.


Several demand response (DR) programs, such as critical peak pricing (CPP), stipulate that electric utilities may schedule events only a limited number of times per year. Utilities must therefore use these events judiciously in order to maximize their benefits from the DR program. Traditionally, they have used rather simple decision rules to schedule such events (e.g., when temperature exceeds a certain threshold). In this paper, we present an option value approach for determining when to invoke these events. This approach calculates a dynamic threshold value, which represents the option value of deferring the use of one the events for use at any future point in the planning horizon (typically a year or cooling season). This threshold enables utilities to make the decision on whether or not to call an event based on the expected current benefits versus potential future benefits. This paper presents an example based on an actual DR program, which uses a simple, temperature based threshold, and compares it with our option based approach. Our approach can also be applied to any other criteria besides temperature such as reserve margins and generation cost. Our approach may also be classified as an optimal stopping rule or optimal secretary problem in the operations research literature.


A Deep Geologic Repository (DGR) for Low and Intermediate Level (L&IL) Radioactive Waste has been proposed by Ontario Power Generation for the Bruce Nuclear site in Ontario Canada. The DGR is to be constructed at a depth of about 660 m below ground surface within the argillaceous Ordovician limestone of the Cobourg Formation. The objective of this thesis is to develop a regional-scale geologic conceptual model for the DGR site and to describe modelling using FRAC3DVS-OPG that provides a basis for the assembly and integration of site-specific geoscientific data. The numerical model is used to explain and illustrate the influence of conceptual model, parameter and scenario uncertainty on predicted long-term geosphere barrier performance. The modelling also provides a framework for hydrogeologic and geochemical investigations of the DGR, serves as a basis for exploring potential anthropogenic and natural perturbations to the DGR system, and demonstrates the long-term stability of the deep system. In the geologic framework of the Province of Ontario, the Bruce DGR is located west of the Algonquin Arch within the Bruce Mega-Block at the eastern edge of the Michigan Basin. Well logs have been used to define the structural contours at the regional and site scale of the up to 37 units that may be present above the Precambrian crystalline basement rock. The regional scale domain is restricted to a region extending from Lake Huron to Georgian Bay. While the selection of a larger domain might decrease the contribution of boundary condition uncertainty to any uncertainty in any site-scale performance measure, it significantly increases the contribution of the uncertainty in the spatial characterization to the uncertainty of the selected measure. From a hydrogeologic perspective, the domain can be subdivided into three horizons: a shallow zone characterized by the units of the Devonian; an intermediate zone comprised of the low permeability units of the Silurian and the shale units of the upper Ordovician; and a deep groundwater domain or zone characterized by units, such as the Cobourg formation, with stagnant water having high total dissolved solids concentrations that can exceed 200g/l. Hence, the conceptual model of the Bruce DGR site required the development of constitutive models that relate the fluid density and viscosity to the fluid total dissolved solids (TDS), temperature and pressure. The regional-scale hydrogeologic modelling will help demonstrate that at the proposed repository horizons, there are low energy gradients and that the combination of the low permeabilities and gradients will result in diffusional groundwater systems with favourable retardation properties.


The carrier distillation method is considered a quick way to analyze impurities within refractory compounds. However, it is less accurate than most analysis methods. This may be attributed to various causes, among which, one of the most important is the lack of arc stability resulting in large fluctuations of the impurity emission rate vs time. This leads to poor reproducibility and to the need for computing averages of line intensities over several spectra of the same sample. Many means of improvement have been suggested, such as monitoring the electrical characteristics, controlling the operating atmosphere, or using a special cathode. This report covers a series of tests performed with a spectrograph equipped with a stabilized power unit. Results obtained on plutonium oxides with or without intensity stabilization are compared.


Provision 2 of the Charter of the Royal College of Pathologists (RCPath) included the following: 'In this our Charter the word 'pathologist' means a person professionally engaged in one or more of the disciplines of laboratory medicine from time to time recognised as being a discipline of pathology, and which may include morbid anatomy and histopathology (including forensic pathology), medical microbiology (including parasitology), chemical pathology (including toxicology), haematology (including blood transfusion), genetics, immunology, virology and disciplines subsidiary to or derived from any of these. The word "pathology", shall be construed accordingly.' This text incorporates Privy Council amendments to July 2000.

At the annual general meeting of the RCPath in 2013, the College establishment proposed the following as a replacement amendment to Provision 2 of the Charter following the words which may include 'cellular pathology (including forensic pathology), medical microbiology, clinical biochemistry, haematology (including blood transfusion), toxicology, genetics, immunology, virology, veterinary pathology, clinical embryology, histocompatibility and immunogenetics, perinatal and paediatric pathology and disciplines derived from any of these. The word "pathology" shall be construed accordingly.'

Disquiet among chemical pathologists as a consequence of their existential obliteration in the halls of the RCPath is not surprising. Nomenclatures do have meaning, and clinical biochemists are not chemical pathologists. No amount of sophistry can change that. Registration, continuing professional development and practice differences between chemical pathologists and biochemists have been outlined recently.1

Education developments at third level in Europe aim to facilitate the recognition of degree programmes across EU member states through the Bologna Process agreed in 1999.2 It is impossible to ignore the ramifications of this agreement on policy in which 46 countries now participate. It now should feature as an indispensable component of any third level education programme which is being developed.

Qualification frameworks are dependent on specified …


The increase in the energy consumption and the expected growth in the nuclear capacity make it necessary to look on for new technologies based in more sustainable and safe principles, such as lead-cooled reactors. This technology has been studied intermittently since the 1950s and is being considered nowadays as one of the six Generation IV reactor designs. New fuels compatible with lead coolant are also being studied and nitride fuels seem to be the best alternative.
The aim of this work is to offer an overview about the use of lead as coolant in fast reactors and to study the use of Uranium Nitride (UN) as fuel in this technology. UN seems to have proper thermal and physical
characteristics and is chemically stable, but its production presents some difficulties and radioactive 14C is
generated when it is irradiated inside the core.
This work is focused in studying the 14C production in lead-cooled reactors and determining the necessary 15N fuel enrichment to produce a similar amount of 14C as in thermal nuclear reactors. With this purpose, a Monte Carlo code named Serpent is used to run several pin cell simulations with different 15N enrichments. The results obtained show a clear dependence between the 14C production and the 15N enrichment, as it was expected, and also a linear relation between 14C production and burnup.


In this paper, we show that the propagation distance of the long range plasmon wave mode guided by a finite thickness gold metal film can be extended several orders of magnitude longer if we place intermediate dielectric layers on both sides of the metal film and choose the layer thickness properly. The propagation distance goes to infinite if the intermediate layer thickness approaches a critical thickness.


Information security is a critical issue for hospitals, and users play an active role in their security process. The aim of this study was to evaluate the information security in a hospital from the users' perspective. In this cross-sectional study 424 hospital staff (medical: 258 / administrative: 166) were included. Face-to-face interviews were used to gather data in answer to a scaled questionnaire regarding information security. Items in the questionnaire were coded by a 5-point Likert scale (ranging from 1 point: strongly disagree to 5 points: strongly agree). After the factor analysis, it was possible to identify five subgroups relating to information security: Access and Authorisation, Security Applications, Service Delivery, Organisational Security and Security Policy. The items in the Service Delivery subgroup were scored lower by the medical staff than the administrative staff (p<0.05). Both the medical and administrative staff educated in HIMS gave higher scores to the information security subgroup (p<0.05). The roles and responsibilities of staff and their being educated in HIMS are crucial factors for information security. Since information security is a critical issue in hospitals, it is necessary to develop and share information security policies for all staff in such organisations.


This paper investigates practical solutions for low-bandwidth, teleoperated mobility for RoboSimian in complex environments. Locomotion planning for this robot is challenging due to kinematic redundancy. We present an end-to-end planning method that exploits a reduced-dimension rapidly-exploring random tree search, constraining a subset of limbs to an inverse kinematics table. Then, we evaluate the performance of this approach through simulations in randomized environments and in the style of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Robotics Challenges terrain both in simulation and with hardware. We also illustrate the importance of allowing for significant body motion during swing leg motions on extreme terrain and quantify the trade-offs between computation time and execution time, subject to velocity and acceleration limits of the joints. These results lead us to hypothesize that appropriate statistical "investment" of parallel computing resources between competing formulations or flavors of random planning algorithms can improve motion planning performance significantly. Motivated by the need to improve the speed of limbed mobility for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Robotics Challenge, we introduce one formulation of this resource allocation problem as a toy example and discuss advantages and implications of such trajectory planning for tractable locomotion on complex terrain.


This Article argues that current nonprofit organization theories must be refined to account for the ways in which these organizations take responsibility for public spaces. Nonprofit organizations ("NPOs") take responsibility in two ways that reduce the cost of monitoring their performance and, consequently, allow them to harness residual demand for the public good of public spaces, helping to create positive outcomes for these spaces. First, NPOs as single entities assume physical responsibility for public space in a way that contrasts strongly with the diffuse accountability of governmental managers and makes their performance easier to monitor. Second, NPOs centralize responsibility for the financial success of the public space in a way that both contrasts strongly with insulated civil servants and reduces the cost of monitoring the attainment of a critical mass of funding for the space. Taking responsibility also places the burden on the NPO, instead of on individuals outside the organization, to compile and communicate information about their operation for monitors. Private managers, therefore, are more accountable for their actions than overnmental managers because they are more responsible and, thus, less costly to monitor. NPOs in Central Park and Bryant Park illustrate these principles.


The misdemeanor courts that preside over the majority of criminal cases in the United States represent the "front porch" of our criminal justice system. These courts vary in myriad ways, including size, structure, and method of judicial appointment. Each also has its own culture – i.e., a settled way of doing things that reflects deeper assumptions about the court's mission and its role in the community – which can assist or impede desired policy reforms. This Article, written for a Symposium issue of the Hofstra Law Review, draws upon the insights of organizational culture theory to explore how leaders can alter the culture of misdemeanor courts. Although certain features make these courts particularly challenging institutions in which to pursue cultural change, nevertheless there are reasons to be optimistic. The Article describes the experiences of three selected misdemeanor courts where innovative judges are championing significant changes to the conventional way of doing things, which lend credence to the methodology identified in the theoretical literature on cultural change.


Spectral measurements of complex heterogeneous types of mixture samples are often affected by significant multiplicative effects resulting from light scattering, due to physical variations (e.g., particle size and shape, sample packing, and sample surface, etc.) inherent within the individual samples. Therefore, the separation of the spectral contributions due to variations in chemical compositions from those caused by physical variations is crucial to accurate quantitative spectroscopic analysis of heterogeneous samples. In this work, an improved strategy has been proposed to estimate the multiplicative parameters accounting for multiplicative effects in each measured spectrum and, hence, mitigate the detrimental influence of multiplicative effects on the quantitative spectroscopic analysis of heterogeneous samples. The basic assumption of the proposed method is that light scattering due to physical variations has the same effects on the spectral contributions of each of the spectroscopically active chemical components in the same sample mixture. On the basis of this underlying assumption, the proposed method realizes the efficient estimation of the multiplicative parameters by solving a simple quadratic programming problem. The performance of the proposed method has been tested on two publicly available benchmark data sets (i.e., near-infrared total diffuse transmittance spectra of four-component suspension samples and near-infrared spectral data of meat samples) and compared with some empirical approaches designed for the same purpose. It was found that the proposed method provided appreciable improvement in quantitative spectroscopic analysis of heterogeneous mixture samples. The study indicates that accurate quantitative spectroscopic analysis of heterogeneous mixture samples can be achieved through the combination of spectroscopic techniques with smart modeling methodology.


By Chen Hong (China Daily) Original Available here: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-10/09/content_11389573.htm Polled workers claim illegally forced overtime and exploitation SHENZHEN Taiwan IT giant Foxconn faces new accusations of forcing employees in its mainland factories to work excessive overtime and of exploiting interns. The results of a survey of employees at Foxconn came just months after a spate of suicides at the company's plants on the mainland, including 10 at its Shenzhen facility, which employs an estimated 400,000 workers. Researchers questioned 1,736 employees at 12 plants in nine cities and found they worked an average of 83.2 hours of overtime a month more than twice the maximum of 36 hours allowed under Chinese law, the Shanghai-based China Business News reported on Friday. Foxconn is the world's largest maker of computer components. It assembles products for some of the world's biggest companies, including Apple and Nokia. The company, which employs about 900,000 across the mainland, said it has conducted investigations into the accusations and is expected to release the results over the weekend. "We are not going to make any comment on the accusations now," Liu Kun, head of Foxconn's media office, told China Daily on Friday. "The official statement will come out soon." The researchers were from more than 10 mainland universities, two Hong Kong universities and a Taiwan university, China Business News said, without saying when the survey was conducted. Workers claimed Foxconn skimped on overtime payments, forced student interns to work more than the statutory eight hours a day and provided inadequate medical checkups for employees exposed to poisonous and harmful substances, the report said. Students have been widely used as interns in most of the surveyed factories and were forced to work 10 hours or more a day, it also said. "The students intended to learn and practice skills during internship," Lu Huilin, an associate professor of sociology at Peking University, who helped conduct the survey, told China Daily on Friday. "But they were used by Foxconn as simple working machines and failed to receive any professional job training." Guo Yuhua, a Tsinghua University sociology professor, who also participated in the project, said the interns have no choice but to work like robots at Foxconn, as the internship is required for graduation. She pointed out that the problem should also be blamed on the education authorities and schools that signed contracts with Foxconn. Foxconn was exposed to intensive public criticism following a series of suicides among its workers in the first half of this year. The government had launched official investigations into the company while many labor rights activists blamed the suicides on harsh working conditions in its factories. But the official results have not yet been released. Zhang Xiaojian, vice-minister of human resources and social security, the ministry that led the investigations, said in June that the suicides at Foxconn were not simply work-related but, rather, were caused by many factors. These included the company's management practices and the young workers' psychological problems. Foxconn responded to the deaths by installing a suicide hotline, hiring Buddhist monks and counselors to help at-risk employees, pledging to retrain supervisors and installing safety nets outside buildings. It also increased salaries for assembly line workers by about 70 percent. Survey accuses Foxconn of more labor law violations http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/newscast/51


Mexican National Cinema and Beyond Mexico's cinema: a century of film and filmmakers. Edited by Joanne Hershfield and David R. Maciel. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Books. 1999. With its inclusion of the work of an unusually wide range of scholars, both Mexican and North American, and articles that range from commissioned contributions to new translations of classic texts by such famous names as Carlos Monsivais, Hershfield and Maciel's volume becomes the second major anthology to be published in English on the subject of Mexican cinema. Like its predecessor, Paulo Antonio Paranagua's Mexican Cinema, Hershfield and Maciel's anthology aims to cover the subject both in breadth and depth. In terms of breadth, twelve articles are divided into three main sections covering 'The Silent Era,' 'The Golden Age' and 'The Contemporary Era.' Two articles on the silent era briefly sketch out the emergence of the Mexican film industry in the first years of the twentieth century and its response to the technical innovations of the 'talkies' in the 1930s. In the section on 'The Golden Age,' six articles approach the period of the 1940s and 1950s from as many different perspectives, culminating with an article on the demise of the Golden Age in the 1960s. Finally, the section on 'The Contemporary Era' contains four articles that articulate some of the main trends and debates in Mexican cinema since the 1970s. The anthology thus spans a period of just over one hundred years, and clearly aims to provide the reader with a sense of historical continuity. In terms of depth, the approach is interdisciplinary and includes detailed readings of specific films from aesthetic, thematic and/or sociopolitical points of view, along with broader characterisations of genres, directors, actors, and chronicles of specific epochs. It also offers a detailed analysis of the industry's relationship with the Mexican state and with Hollywood. The overarching theme that unites all the articles is of a national order: the anthology centers on the national characteristics of Mexican cinema, the industry and the art form, and on the role of cinema as a vehicle for the creation of narratives of Mexican national identityboth the monolithic mestizo state version, and the more subtle hybrid versions created by individual filmmakers. A number of articles are worthy of special mention in this context. Maciel's fascinating investigation into the Mexican state's role in contemporary film production sheds new light on the question of state censorship of cinema and its attempts to manipulate the construction of national identity through cinema. Hershfield's study of race and ethnicity in Golden Age cinema, and Maciel and Hershfield's account of female directors' representation of women in contemporary films, provide convincing arguments for the pivotal role of race and gender in the cinematic construction of alternative Mexican national identities. A number of important essays deal with the involvement of the United States, and of Hollywood in particular, in the development of Mexican cinema, both in terms of the politics and economics of the industry, and in terms of the creation of versions of Mexican national identity. …


Epiphytism is a strategy by which opportunistic species such as hydroids, escape the intense levels of competition in marine hard bottom communities. Species of the macroalgae Cystoseira have a seasonal turnover of the frond, and we hypothesise that epiphytic hydroids colonising such an unstable substrate might show some degree of specialisation. Here the first systematic study on hydroid-Cystoseira communities is presented. In particular, the seasonal and spatial distribution of epiphytic hydroids on three species of Cystoseira at two sites of different wave exposure at Porto Cesareo (Ionian Sea/Italy) were investigated. Thirty-two hydroid species were recorded which are well known from other substrates and thus are not specific to Cystoseira ; dominant species were all thecates. The influence of biological factors such as competition and the structure and abundance of the host, seem to have little influence on the hydroid community. The factors of greatest influence were mostly abiotic: sedimentation rate, nutrient levels, temperature and most especially water movement. The importance of water movement was evident in the higher colonisation of algal stems, higher hydroid frequency, larger colonies, reduced colony height, species composition, and distribution on the stems at the wave-exposed site.


The objective of the paper is to study how the tax burden arising from an exogenous stream of public expenditures and transfers should be distributed between labor and capital in a scale-less endogenous growth model, where the engine of growth are successful innovations. Our laboratory is a prototypical quality ladder model with a labor/leisure choice where R&D productivity is decreasing in the size of the economy. This decreasing productivity removes scale effects, which are a controversial prediction of first-generation endogenous growth models. Our contribution is to show that even when labor supply has no effects on growth in the long run, it will still be optimal to tax capital, for reasonable parametrizations of the model. This is true even if the long-run growth rate decreases, with respect to the initial situation in which capital income is not taxed.


Climate variability is one of the most important forces affecting the distributional range dynamics of species and consequentially plays a significant role in shaping biogeographic patterns. This study aims to infer the role of climate in the recent evolutionary history of the Common Grackle Quiscalus quiscula. Studies of other migratory North American birds have shown that their populations were isolated in two or three refugia in southern North America during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). In contrast, preliminary genetic work suggests that Common Grackles may have occupied a single refugium during that time. They subsequently became widespread and northern populations evolved highly migratory behaviour. We used an ecological niche modelling approach that involved the use of three general climate models for the past (the LGM, approximately 22,000 years before present) and for present environmental conditions to identify climatically stable areas. Extrapolations to the past showed contraction to a large continuous refugium located in the southern part of North America, and projection to the present showed expansion that covers much of eastern and middle North America. The most important bioclimatic variable for model predictions was annual mean temperature, which explained 74% of the variation in the model. Results suggest that the Common Grackle has expanded its distributional range by more than 300% after the LGM.


We study association between macroeconomic news and stock market returns using the statistical theory of copulas, and a new comprehensive measure of news based on textual review and classification of news wires. We find the impact of economic news on equity returns to be nonlinear and asymmetric. In particular, controlling for economic conditions and surprises associated with releases of economic data, we find that the market reacts strongly and negatively to the most unfavourable macroeconomic news, but appears to largely discount the good news. Further, the most-unfavorable news creates price drift, and we document that selling stocks short in the wake of unusually-bad news yields annual abnormal gross returns greater than four percent.


Living in society requires a co-ordination of interests, and one of the co-ordination rules is a rule of justice. Subjective justice judgements are related to a degree to which an individual accepts a resolution of a situation. Justice judgements are very important in cases of argument and dispute resolution. Subjective justice judgement is a compromise between self-interest situation resolution and necessity to follow socially acceptable norms and rules of justice. The author analyses factors influencing subjective justice judgements in a dispute resolution context. Some problems of practical application of justice theories are also outlined.


Regional advisers, faculty secretaries of the Royal College of General Practitioners, heads of academic departments of general practice and primary care, and heads of RCGP research units were invited to complete a semistructured questionnaire to determine the nature and availability of current sources of advice for general practitioners participating in research activities and the demands placed on the available sources in the United Kingdom. The principal source for research advice was university departments of general practice, yet these have insufficient resources to cope with requests and few have spare capacity to stimulate research. Regional advisers and faculty secretaries do not seem to be kindling a spirit of inquiry and they seem somewhat complacent about both the lack of requests for research advice from general practitioners and the difficulties of academic departments. Proper development of research capability in general practice and primary care is unlikely to occur without more resources to create training posts in academic departments and a greater spirit of inquiry in vocational training programmes, which should lead to both review (audit) and research.


This dissertation focused on the subject of Nitrate Vulnerable Zone (NVZ) regulation, the aim was to determine the farmer's perception of the regulation with the main objectives set to investigate how farmers perceive their responsibility to the general environment and the importance of water pollution control, whether they consider the methods used to designate a NVZ fair, if they agree with the restrictions imposed by the regulation and to see if there is a significant difference between the attitudes of farmers who are subject to the regulation and those who are not. It is important to uncover the reasons and extent of the disagreement to help regulators to understand why there is opposition to NVZ regulation. To complete this research a closed question survey was developed which focused on environmental protection, NVZ restrictions and the methods used to designate a NVZ, the answers were split into responses from farmer in a NVZ and farmers not in a NVZ and compared, the results showed a trend in the opinions with the majority disagreeing with the methods, restrictions, additional costs whilst also recognising why NVZs are needed. The most significant findings were that the trend differed when the farmers were asked about their opinions on the restrictions. This result showed much more of a difference in opinion between farmers in a NVZ and those farmers not in a NVZ.


The authors attempted to replicate prior group brain correlates of deception and improve on the consistency of individual results. Healthy, right-handed adults were instructed to tell the truth or to lie while being imaged in a 3T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. Blood oxygen level-dependent functional MRI significance maps were generated for subjects giving a deceptive answer minus a truthful answer (lie minus true) and the reverse (true minus lie). The lie minus true group analysis (n = 10) revealed significant activation in 5 regions, consistent with a previous study (right orbitofrontal, inferior frontal, middle frontal cortex, cingulate gyrus, and left middle frontal), with no significant activation for true minus lie. Individual results of the lie minus true condition were variable. Results show that functional MRI is a reasonable tool with which to study deception.


Top-tier customers—that is, those 20% of customers that typically bring in 80% of all profits—are extremely valuable to companies. In the many instances in which organizations attribute top-tier status to customers based on their consumption behaviour within a specific period, such as a year, it becomes very important to determine, during this period, how likely those gold customers are to retain their top-tier status going into the next period. This allows better planning at the corporate level, but can also allow for corrective measures or special retention efforts to be deployed. However, while models exist to predict customer churn or customer lifetime value either at the beginning of a period or on a continuous basis according to the evolution of inter-purchase time, no model allows for a continuous re-estimation of customer status or value according to calendar time, based on historical data and year-to-date information. To address this problem, we develop a model of intra-periodic forecasting of customer behaviour that uses nonhomogeneous Poisson processes with random effects. We then empirically assess the performance of this model using data from the loyalty program at a major commercial airline.


With anecdotal reports of viral shedding from COVID-19 patients for several weeks, there is a need to quantify the prevalence of long-term SARS-CoV-2 shedding. Here, we characterize the temporal distribution of diagnostic SARS-CoV-2 PCR outcomes from nasopharyngeal swabs and associated EHR-derived features over two months for 874 COVID-19 patients with longitudinal data. Among a cohort of 379 COVID-19 patients with at least one positive follow-up SARS-CoV-2 PCR test, 53 patients remain SARS-CoV-2-positive after four weeks of initial diagnosis. Surprisingly, a majority of COVID-19 patients with long-term viral shedding are not hospitalized (40 of 53 patients), and have no enrichments among symptoms, demographics, or medical history. In a cohort of 370 COVID-19 patients that transition to a confirmed negative status, the upper bound of viral shedding duration has a mean of 21.2 days with standard deviation of 9.3 days. Of the 81 PCR-confirmed COVIDpos patients who have undergone serologic testing, 68 patients have developed anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG to date, with a mean upper bound of time to seroconversion of 38.1 days (95% C.I. = 35.2-41.1 days). Given that SARS-CoV-2 PCR testing may detect replication incompetent virus and that serologic tests do not imply neutralizing immunity, we suggest that the development of novel assays for measuring infectious viral load in non-hospitalized long-term shedders may help mitigate community transmission. This study motivates a platform that can link longitudinal diagnostic and serologic testing with real-time epidemiological data, towards proactively identifying and managing emerging hotspots of COVID-19.


Although there have been several studies of women in legislatures in Canada, a cabinet position is a much stronger position from which to wield power in an executive-centered and party-disciplined parliamentary system. In the past decade, the increase of women's share of legislative seats, for majority parties as well as others, has led to more women being appointed to cabinet portfolios. This article utilizes data from the ten Canadian provinces over an 18-year period, from 1976 to 1994, to assess patterns of such appointments by province, party, percentage of women in the governing party, and percentage of women in the legislature. The proportion of women in the governing party far outweighs other variables in its impact on the percentage of women in the cabinet, in contrast to a previous study of West European cabinets which found that more women in the legislature was of greater importance. Although a high level of multicollinearity indicates caution in attempting to distinguish between the impact of these two variables, the differences in these studies may be due to Canadian provinces having single-party majority governments while West European cabinets are often coalitions.


Tin oxide has been demonstrated to possess outstanding optoelectronic properties such as optical transparency and high electron mobility; therefore, it was successfully utilized as an electron transporting layer in various kinds of solar cells. In this study, for the first time, highly dispersible SnO2 nanoparticles were synthesized by a microwave-assisted non-aqueous sol–gel route in an organic medium. Ethanol dispersion of the as-prepared nanoparticles was used to cast a uniform thin layer of SnO2 without the aid of an aggregating agent and at low temperatures. Organohalide perovskite solar cells were fabricated using SnO2 as the electron transporting layer. Morphological and spectroscopic investigations, in addition to the good photoconversion efficiency obtained, evidenced that the nanoparticles synthesized by this route have optimal properties such as small size and crystallinity to form a continuous film. Furthermore, this method allows high reproducibility and scalability of the film deposition process.


It is often assumed that government intervention is required to bring to fruition large scale infrastructure projects because the large initial capital outlays such projects require must be funded from the public purse. In Wheels of Fortune, Fred Harrison shows that large scale infrastructure projects can be made self-funding and hence completed without direct government involvement. Infrastructure projects almost always bring about a large increase in the value of adjoining land. For example, it is estimated that the Jubilee Line extension increased adjoining land values by close to 3 billion BPS. When such infrastructure projects are funded by government they therefore involve a substantial transfer of wealth from a large number of taxpayers to a small number of property owners. Harrison argues that a fairer and more efficient means to fund infrastructure projects is to capture and use the increases in land values that they bring. This monograph sets out a free market case for a land tax or some form of levy on land as a means of achieving the goal of self-funding infrastructure and ensuring that those who receive the benefits of such projects meet the costs. It will be essential reading for those concerned with how large scale infrastructure projects can efficiently be completed and those interested in fairer and more efficient tax regimes.


ABSTRACT The ability of certain strains of herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) to cause encephalitis or neuroinvasive disease in the mouse upon peripheral infection is dependent on a combination of activities of specific forms of viral proteins. The importance of specific variants of ICP34.5 to neuroinvasive disease potential and its correlation with small-plaque production, inefficient glycoprotein processing, and virus release were suggested by comparison of ICP34.5 from the SP7 virus, originally obtained from the brain of a neonate with disseminated disease, and the tissue culture-passaged progeny of SP7 (SLP5 and SLP10) and the KOS321 virus. SLP5, SLP10, and KOS321 are attenuated and exhibit a large-plaque phenotype, including efficient glycoprotein processing and viral release. We show that expression of the KOS321 ICP34.5 protein in cells infected with SP7 or ICP34.5 deletion mutants promotes large plaque formation and efficient viral glycoprotein processing, while expression of the SP7 ICP34.5 protein decreases efficiency of viral glycoprotein processing. In addition, a recombinant virus, 4hS1, with the SP7 ICP34.5 gene replacing the KOS321-like ICP34.5 gene in the SLP10a background, rescues the small-plaque phenotype and neuroinvasive disease. The major difference in the ICP34.5 gene product is the number of Pro-Ala-Thr repeats in the middle region of the protein, with 18 for SP7 and 3 for KOS321. Strain-dependent differences in the ICP34.5 protein can therefore alter the tissue culture behavior and the virulence of HSV-1.


In today's economy, consumers demand experiences. From Star Wars to Harry Potter, fans do not just want to watch or read about their favorite characters -- they want to be them. They don the robes of Gryffindor, flick their wands, and drink the butterbeer. The owners of fantasy properties understand this, expanding their offerings from light sabers to the Galaxy's Edge®, the new Disney Star Wars immersive theme park opening in 2019.
Since Star Wars, Congress and the courts have abetted what is now a $262 billion a year industry in merchandising, fashioning "merchandising rights" appurtenant to copyrights and trademarks that give fantasy owners exclusive rights to supply our fantasy worlds with everything from goods to a good time. But are there any limits? Do merchandising rights extend to fan activity, from fantasy-themed birthday parties and summer camps to real world Quidditch leagues? This Articles challenges the conventional account, arguing that as the economic value of fantasy merchandising increases in the emergent "experience economy," intellectual property owners may prove less keen on tolerating uncompensated uses of their creations In fact, from Amazon's Kindle Worlds granting licenses for fan fiction, to crackdowns on sales of fan art sold on Internet sites like Etsy, to algorithms taking down fan videos from YouTube, the holders of intellectual property in popular fantasies are seeking to create a world requiring licenses to make, do and play. This Article turns to social and cultural of art as experience, learning by doing, tacit knowledge, and performance to demonstrate that fan activity, from discussion sites to live-action role-playing fosters learning, creativity, and sociability. Law must be attentive to the profound effects these laws have on human imagination and knowledge creation. I apply the insights of these theories to limit merchandising rights in imaginative play through fair use, the force in the legal galaxy intended to bring balance to intellectual property law.


Apart from morphology and genetic characteristics, species status of Pythium zingiberis and P. myriotylum may also be confirmed based on their pathogenicity and host range. An Australian putative P. zingiberis isolate and imported type isolates of P. myriotylum and P. zingiberis were subject to both in vitro and in vivo pathogenicity tests. In vitro tests were carried out on excised carrot, ginger, potato, radish, and sweet potato tuber/root sections, and on seeds and seedlings of cucumber, cauliflower, millet, rye, sweet corn, tomato, and wheat. In all assays conducted, the Australian isolate was found to be the most pathogenic, followed by type specimen of P. zingiberis (UOP 275), and then the type specimen P. myriotylum (CBS 254.70). An in vivo experiment on ginger plants at 35°C (with 10 h day light) in quarantine conditions showed that the ginger plants inoculated with the Australian isolate and also the type specimen of P. zingiberis died at 21 days after inoculation, whereas those inoculated with P. myriotylum CBS 254.70 were still green and healthy. Along with cardinal growth rate, the Australian isolate was confirmed to be closely related to P. zingiberis. This is also the first direct comparison in pathogenicity of P. zingiberis and P. myriotylum.


Populations of cultivable cells of a citrus variegated chlorosis (CVC) disease strain of Xylella fastidiosa in stems and leaf veins of sweet orange (Citrus sinensis (L.) Osbeck) seedlings were estimated by dilution plating at 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 weeks after needle inoculation. Cell populations ranged from log 4 to log 5 CFU/g of tissue after 1 week and increased to log 5 to log 7 CFU/g (median log 6) after 8 to 16 weeks. Recovery of greater than log 5 CFU/g from stem nodes distal to the inoculation site indicated systemic movement of the bacteria. Foliar symptoms in inoculated seedlings first appeared after 8 weeks. Population estimates from leaf veins of CVC-affected trees in citrus groves were in the same range but slightly lower (average log 5.8 CFU/g). X. fastidiosa was isolated from citrus more efficiently in periwinkle wilt-GelRite (PWG) and periwinkle wilt (PW) media than in charcoal-yeast extract with ACES buffer (BCYE) medium The relatively lower populations of cultivable cells of X. fastidiosa in citrus with CVC symptoms, compared with those reported in grapevines with Pierce's disease, suggest that most cells of X. fastidiosa within symptomatic citrus may be dead, explaining in part the low rates of vector transmission from citrus to citrus.


The present work addresses traffic rescheduling in case of electric infrastructure failure. The power available for train traction is restricted and the traffic must be reorganized according to this constraint. The system behaviour is computed using a dynamic multi-physics railway simulator which gives physi- cal quantities such as the train speed profiles, voltage along the catenary lines and temperatures. The rescheduling problem relies on this non-linear model, with a large number of continuous and discrete variables, constraints on dynamic outputs (typically voltage limits) and a high computation cost. We propose a rescheduling process based on sensitivity analysis in order to analyse the behaviour of this complex system and obtain information about the adjustment operations needed in order to reschedule the traffic in an optimal way. Our approach is based on statistics, with predefined variation ranges of the input parameters. In a first stage, variance decomposition-based sensitivity analysis (generalized Sobol indexes) is used for prioritization and fixing factors; then regional sensitivity analysis is used for factor mapping. The proposed approach has been tested on a simple case, with a nominal traffic running on a single-track line. The considered incident is the loss of a feeding power substation. The variables to be adjusted are the time interval between departure times and speed reduction in the vicinity of the faulty substation. The results show that increasing the time interval between trains is the most influential vari- able. Pareto-optimal fronts are also built in order to perform multi-criteria analysis according to travel- ling time, train delays and traction energy.