In a centuries-old debate among contracts scholars, one group supports a presumption favoring a text-centered approach to the interpretation of a written agreement — the plain meaning taken from the four corners — while opponents urge a broader understanding of context — what the parties intended and the circumstances of their negotiation. The contending positions have so hardened that, in a jarring juxtaposition this Essay will reveal, recent academic classifications of the same state laws are exactly opposite to each other: contextualists classify certain states as contextualist that textualists say are textualist!
Yet despite the persistence of acute polarization, the author also documents — and applauds — promising trends in the literature toward hybridization and compromise, a search for factors to guide the selection of interpretive tools rather than putting some off limits or setting up default rule presumptions. While scholars have thus long obscured a common-sense reality, a new wave of research is making it clearer to all sides that text and context are both useful, depending on the details of different jobs.
More modern, advanced, and sensible, this new view of contract interpretation replaces a stubborn "winner-take-all" approach to the debate with a flexible and practical "best-tool-for-the-job" approach. To illuminate its importance and value — call it contract interpretation 2.0 — this Essay turns to Warren Buffett's contracting philosophy and practices. The famous investor and businessman is also a polyglot teacher, and his approach to contracts, especially acquisition agreements and employment arrangements, illustrates the imperative of using the right tool for the job.


Too often we evaluate worship as a matter of taste without examining the presuppositions that inform worship in a given congregation. The authors help church leaders see that worship is a public event, which must be continually renewed and revitalized. They identify sources of conflict in worship, provide creative approaches to resolving these conflicts, and examine five road maps for revitalized worship.


The directed assembly of colloidal rods, spheres and their mixtures in external fields such as gravity, electric fields and shear flow was investigated. Using confocal microscopy we determined the experimental phase diagram of a binary mixture of colloidal silica rods and spheres that form a binary smectic (Sm2) phase from sedimentation-diffusion equilibria. In this way we were able to directly determine thermodynamic quantities such as osmotic pressure, local and global order parameters. The results were compared with results from computer simulations of hard spheres and hard rods bulk. Moreover, we were able to follow the sedimentation dynamics of binary mixtures of silica rods and spheres over time. We investigated two systems: in the first system silica spheres were smaller than the rod diameter, this mixture forms a Sm2-phase; in the second system the spheres were larger than the rod diameter. In the first system the Sm2-phase nucleated from a nematic layer at the bottom of the sample, once the pressure and volume fraction of particles was high enough. In the second system a transition occurred from a homogenous to a heterogeneous mixture with small clusters of rods. This structure did not evolve in time and appeared to be kinetically trapped. Next, we investigated the electrophoresis of silica particles using confocal microscopy. We showed that using crosscorrelation for image analysis; we decreased the measurement time of electrophoresis experiments for silica rods in the limit of thin double layers. At intermediate double layers, silica rods showed an electrophoretic mobility that was dependent on the orientation of the rod with the applied electric field. We measured this orientation-dependent mobility versus the relative double layer thickness. As the relative size of the double layer increased, the anisotropy in the electrophoretic mobility of the rods increased. However, as the double layer became thicker than the rod diameter, the trend reversed; the anisotropy in mobility of the rods decreased. We investigated the directed assembly of colloidal rods and spheres into thin films using shear alignment. We used spin coating to obtain thin films of colloidal rods, with the silica rods radially aligned along the direction of flow. Moreover, using doctor blade coating (DBC) crystalline colloidal films composed of silica spheres were obtained. The process of DBC was visualized in real-time with a confocal microscope. We established that, with the DBC setup used, capillary forces determined the properties of the obtained colloidal crystalline film. Moreover, we made the colloidal films permanent by polymerizing the continuous phase using UV-light. To conclude, the optical properties of supraparticles composed of CdSe/multishell nanocrystals were investigated. These supraparticles did not suffer from non-radiative recombination, but showed stable and bright photoluminescence. We observed bright emission from multiexciton states at high excitation powers, while supraparticles excited with two-photon excitation did not show emission from multiexciton states. Furthermore, these supraparticles exhibited shape-dependent optical properties. Supraparticles, deposited on a surface, showed the onset of whispering gallery modes in microscope images. Moreover, supraparticles that retained their spherical shape exhibited sharp Mie modes, while multiexciton emission was absent.


This thesis uses the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, which was framed as a catalyst for economic growth and broader development, to consider the relationship between global sporting events and pro-poor priorities. The study is driven by three main questions. To what extent did the World Cup deliver on its expectations; are event-driven strategies compatible with pro-poor needs; and why, given a priori doubts about the effectiveness of mega-events as development instruments, do political elites and publics embrace them? I find the event piqued international interest and improved perceptions, potentially boosting tourism and foreign investment, but its other impacts were negligible and came at the expense of more critical needs and the marginalized communities it aimed to uplift. The priorities of FIFA and mega-events' assumptions about economic growth suggest mega-events are incompatible with pro-poor principles. Yet regardless of significant tolls, financial and otherwise, mega-events are embraced based on factors other than the public good, influenced by dynamics of decision-making, perceptions of personal benefit, and symbolic appeal.


This paper studies the value of information on future price behaviour. We consider a one-period inventory modelling framework with random period length and two order opportunities. The selling price is determined dynamically and the demand is price-sensitive. The second ordering-pricing decision reflects the updated information on future price behaviour on supply chain flexibility. We consider three models with different levels of flexibility: the static model, the quantity flexible model and the combined quantity and timing (fully) flexible model. We compare between the values of three different features in the supply chain: updated information on price behaviour, dynamic pricing and supply flexibility. And we demonstrate the effect of holding cost and demand uncertainty on these three values. We also consider a specific condition with fixed selling prices. We give explicit analysis on the optimal order decisions, and analytically show the impact of information and quantity flexibility on the optimal order decisions.


We introduce a method for recognizing algorithms based on programming schemas, which are generic conceptual knowledge with details abstracted out, and beacons, which are key statements that suggest existence of specific structures in code. First, the method detects the schemas related to the implementation of the target algorithm and next it computes the characteristics and algorithm-specific beacons from the detected code and uses them as the learning data to construct a classification tree for recognizing new unseen instances. We demonstrate the method and its performance for searching, heap, basic tree traversal and graph algorithms implemented in Java (N = 222). The results show that 94.1% of the schemas are detected correctly and the estimated accuracy of the classification measured by leave-one-out cross-validation technique is 97.3%.


"Many of the powerful emperors of China's last dynasties— the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) — were patrons, collectors, and casual practitioners of the arts. They used art to legitimize and glorify their rule. It served many functions: for state rituals, for expressing piety, to dazzle palace visitors, to build diplomatic relations, and for personal pleasure. The emperors' officials oversaw the palace painting academy, imperial porcelain factory, and numerous other workshops. Their artists creatively reworked earlier traditions, which bolstered the emperors' legitimacy by showing their command of China's long history. Many emperors supported international trade with Japan and Korea, Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, and the Indian subcontinent as well as the Islamic world and Europe. These exchanges helped shape the development of Chinese art, especially in the early fifteenth-century and eighteenth-century courts emphasized in this gallery. While the Ming and Qing courts followed many of the same practices in government and art, the Ming emperors were native Chinese, and the Qing rulers were not. Heirs of Manchu chieftains who swept into China on horseback from the north, the Qing emperors embraced all things Chinese, but also steadfastly maintained their own traditions." From the exhibition description, https://www.freersackler.si.edu/exhibition/ looking-out-looking-in/


In recent years, a lot of work has been done in an effort to incorporate Swarm Intelligence (SI) techniques in building an adaptive routing protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). Since centralized approach for routing in MANETs generally lacks in scalability and fault-tolerance, SI techniques provide a natural solution through a distributed approach for the adaptive routing for MANETs. In SI techniques, the captivating features of insects or mammals are correlated with the real world problems to find solutions. Recently, several applications of bio-inspired and nature-inspired algorithms in telecommunications and computer networks have achieved remarkable success. The main aims/objectives of this book, "Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: Bio-Inspired Quality of Service Aware Routing Protocols", are twofold; firstly it clearly distinguishes between principles of traditional routing protocols and SI based routing protocols, while explaining in detail the analogy between MANETs and SI principles. Secondly, it presents the readers with important Quality of Service (QoS) parameters and explains how SI based routing protocols achieves QoS demands of the applications. This book also gives quantitative and qualitative analysis of some of the SI based routing protocols for MANETs.


In order to establish the history and conditions of nucleation and growth of pyrite formed inside methane-derived carbonate chimneys collected in the seafloor of the Gulf of Cadiz, we compared the size distributions, morphologies, textures and geochemical compositions of framboidal and euhedral pyrite as well as iron oxyhydroxides pseudomorphs. More than 2400 framboids and crystals were measured and four types of statistical populations were identified. Framboid size (diameter) ranges from 6 to 12.5 μm with a mean size of 10.4 μm and a maximum value of 27.9 μm, whereas euhedral crystal size (maximum dimension) ranges from 6.3 to 9 μm with a mean size of 7.2 μm and a maximum value of 21.6 μm. Crystal size distributions (CSD) of different populations of framboidal iron oxyhydroxides show strongly negatively skewed shapes, close to the universal steady-state CSD curve for Ostwald ripening, an unequivocal signal of closed-system growth. Euhedral crystal populations of pyrite and iron oxyhydroxides present CSDs with lognormal or slightly negatively skewed lognormal shapes and low size variances, indications of open-system growth. This was confirmed by simulating framboidal and euhedral crystal populations with different growth mechanisms using the GALOPER (Growth According to the Law of Proportionate Effect) program. From CSDs shapes and the values of α and β 2 , the populations of framboids are inferred to have grown initially in an open system (surface and then transport-controlled) and then in a closed system (Ostwald ripening) and the populations of euhedral crystals only in an open system. In this case, the initial stage of surface-controlled growth is shorter than that deduced for the framboidal populations. We suggest that: (1) the concentration and availability of reactive iron and hydrogen sulphide are the main factors controlling the morphology and growth of pyrite, and (2) the higher reactive surface of framboidal textures would govern their preferential oxidation, dissolution and recrystallization during the closed-system growth and consequently the development of higher sizes in comparison with euhedral forms.


OBJECTIVE
The study aims were to estimate the prevalence of erosive tooth wear (ETW) in children and to specifically examine its association with race/ethnicity and obesity in the United States.

DESIGN
We analysed data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), 2003-2004. ETW was measured using the modified Smith and Knight Tooth Wear Index derived from the 1998 United Kingdom Adult Health Survey.

RESULTS
This study shows that 45.9% of children aged 13-19 years had evidence of ETW in at least one tooth. The prevalence of ETW was bilaterally symmetrical in all teeth examined and was most prevalent in mandibular [corrected] teeth. Females had significantly lower rates of ETW of any tooth compared to males. African Americans had significantly lower rates of ETW (except in the canines), and Hispanics had similar rates compared to whites. Compared to 'healthy weight' children, those 'at risk for overweight' had lower rates of ETW and the 'overweight' groups had higher rates, but results were not significant.

CONCLUSIONS
Substantial proportions of children in the US are affected by ETW. Compared to whites, African American children had significantly lower rates of ETW. Although not significant, 'overweight' (obese) children had increased odds of having ETW and those at 'risk for overweight' had lower odds compared to 'healthy weight' children.


Extracted from text ... O
Managing and resolving
conflict in the work place
52 Management Today October 2005
One of the most critical challenges that
are facing the work place today is how to
effectively deal with and handle conflict.
Some organisations fail to deal with this
'evil' as soon as it rears its head and hope
that time will solve it.
For every organisation, manager or employer
it is prudent that conflict resolution
mechanisms should be in place so as
to make the work place an enabling environment.
It is against this background that
Flanagan and Finger wrote: "Conflict is inevitable
in ..


Abstract. Ambrym Volcano (Vanuatu, southwest Pacific) is one of the largest sources of continuous volcanic emissions worldwide. As well as releasing SO2 that is oxidized to sulfate, volcanic plumes in the troposphere are shown to undergo reactive halogen chemistry whose atmospheric impacts have been little explored to date. Here, we investigate with the regional-scale model CCATT-BRAMS (Coupled Chemistry Aerosol-Tracer Transport model, Brazilian developments on the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System, version 4.3) the chemical processing in the Ambrym plume and the impact of this volcano on the atmospheric chemistry on both local and regional scales. We focus on an episode of extreme passive degassing that occurred in early 2005 and for which airborne DOAS (differential optical absorption spectroscopy) measurements of SO2 and BrO columns in the near-downwind plume between 15 and 40 km from the vents have been reported. The model was developed to include reactive halogen chemistry and a volcanic emission source specific to this extreme degassing event. In order to test our understanding of the volcanic plume chemistry, we performed very high-resolution (500 m  ×  500 m) simulations using the model nesting grid capability and compared each DOAS measurement to its temporally and spatially interpolated model counterpart "point-by-point". Simulated SO2 columns show very good quantitative agreement with the DOAS observations, suggesting that the plume direction as well as its dilution in the near-downwind plume are well captured. The model also reproduces the salient features of volcanic chemistry as reported in previous work, such as HOx and ozone depletion in the core of the plume. When a high-temperature chemistry initialization is included, the model is able to capture the observed BrO ∕ SO2 trend with distance from the vent. The main discrepancy between observations and model is the bias between the magnitudes of observed and simulated BrO columns that ranges from 60 % (relative to the observations) for the transect at 15 km to 14 % for the one at 40 km from the vents. We identify total in-plume depletion of ozone as a limiting factor for the partitioning of reactive bromine into BrO in the near-source (concentrated) plume under these conditions of extreme emissions and low background ozone concentrations (15 ppbv). Impacts of Ambrym in the southwest Pacific region were also analyzed. As the plume disperses regionally, reactive halogen chemistry continues on sulfate aerosols produced by SO2 oxidation and promotes BrCl formation. Ozone depletion is weaker than on the local scale but still between 10 and 40 % in an extensive region a few thousands of kilometers from Ambrym. The model also predicts the transport of bromine to the upper troposphere and stratosphere associated with convection events. In the upper troposphere, HBr is re-formed from Br and HO2. Comparison of SO2 regional-scale model fields with OMI (Ozone Monitoring Instrument) satellite SO2 fields confirms that the Ambrym SO2 emissions estimate based on the DOAS observations used here is realistic. The model confirms the potential of volcanic emissions to influence the oxidizing power of the atmosphere: methane lifetime (calculated with respect to OH and Cl) is increased overall in the model due to the volcanic emissions. When considering reactive halogen chemistry, which depletes HOx and ozone, the lengthening of methane lifetime with respect to OH is increased by a factor of 2.6 compared to a simulation including only volcanic SO2 emissions. Cl radicals produced in the plume counteract 41 % of the methane lifetime lengthening due to OH depletion. Including the reactive halogen chemistry in our simulation also increases the lifetime of SO2 in the plume with respect to oxidation by OH by 36 % compared to a simulation including only volcanic SO2 emissions. This study confirms the strong influence of Ambrym emissions during the extreme degassing event of early 2005 on the composition of the atmosphere on both local and regional scales. It also stresses the importance of considering reactive halogen chemistry when assessing the impact of volcanic emissions on climate.


This paper provides a behavioral foundation for the willpower as limited cognitive resource model which bridges the standard utility maximization and the Strotz models. Using the agent's ex ante preferences and ex post choices, we derive a representation that captures key behavioral traits of willpower constrained decision making. We use the model to study the pricing problem of a profit maximizing monopolist who faces consumers with limited willpower. We show that the optimal contract often consists of three alternatives and the consumer's choices reflect a form of the "compromise effect" which is induced endogenously.


'Let us say yes to who or what turns up' Jacques Derrida proposes, in a call for unconditional hospitality significant for being inseparable from a question of sexual difference. Unlike the conditional hospitality offered by host to invited guest, unconditional hospitality affirms the other who arrives at the border before any identification or determination of who they are, male or female. This affirmation of an absolute other means reconceiving of both self and other through sexual difference. It is a question of difference without identification where what the female is, or could be, opens towards unprecedented political identities irreducible to phallocentric oppositional logic. This paper explores how Chantal Akerman's film De L'Autre Cote/From the Other Side' (2002) inscribes unconditional hospitality through, and as, sexual difference. The film was shot on both sides of the US/Mexico border in the post-9/11 period of 'counter-terrorism' securitisation and features interviews with individuals on each side. On the Mexican side, they tell stories of traumatic loss and sacrifice in trying to cross to the US. On the US side, most interviewees express xenophobic hostility. I argue that it is not though these representations that the film makes propositions about unconditional hospitality, or sexual difference. At a formal level the film shows hospitality as an ethics of sexual difference by crossing aesthetic borders to defy self-sameness. By bringing her own footage to a relation of equivalence with footage from other sources, Akerman produces aesthetics of non-self identity, borderlessness and a non-hierarchical relation to otherness.


In this study I will discuss the ethical values of information disclosure, relevant to integrity in a corporation.
Information disclosure has a significant value in which a corporation demonstrates the consistency in its business behavior towards its commitment.
Integrity, an ethical value different from "seijitsu" in terms of the nature with independency and ego, should be eventually fulfilled by the consistency between the publicly disclosed commitment and the behavior including verbal representation made by a corporation.
 Integrity is a known ethical value which presents moral consistency, honesty, commitment and courage to pursue one's goal. To evidence the consistency between the commitment and the behavior, one can take advantage of information disclosure. The discrepancy between the fact and the presented data may unveil the dishonesty in a corporation and, the timing to disclose the facts or data relevant to the interests of a customer of corporation may tell the level of commitment to the corporate social responsibility for a corporation. In these senses, the quality of information disclosure by a corporation or, the decision if a corporation discloses negative information may be regarded as key component to prove itself a corporate entity with integrity.
Recent surveys regarding the evaluation of a corporation have shown how they have depended on the disclosure to prove its appropriateness as a corporation and get closer to a model corporation which is most concerned with corporate social responsibilities.
When consistency is regarded as an utmost ethical value in integrity, the disclosure of negative information may be worth publicly addressing as it is viewed the representation of integrity of a corporation.


Various factors in late 16th-century England contributed to an environment more hospitable to prose fiction than had existed previously - among them, changes in educational opportunities, socioeconomic structures, literacy rates and access to European literature. Such cultural alterations inevitably produced changes in modes of literary production. Furthermore, access to the bookstall and to a new class of readers altered the structures and subjects writers employed. Within this tumultuous context, the writers of fictional prose narrative negotiated - for themselves and their audience - a precarious definition of their identity within the Elizabethan literary world. In "Fashioning Authority" Constance C. Relihan examines the influence of Elizabethan prose fiction on early modern literary culture, emphasising the role of the non-aristocratic reader in the reception of literature, the importance of the marketplace in the production and reception of prose texts, and the growth of prose as the dominant mode of narrative presentation. Combining cultural analysis with a concern for narrative structure, Relihan explores six strategies by which the writers and readers of Elizabethan fiction struggled to achieve artistic authority: incorporating poetry into prose texts; using translated material; separating authorial from narrative voice; introducing a sense of place; depicting females; and representing non-European cultures. Relihan argues that Elizabethan fiction's unique position on the borders of literate and literary English culture, that is, its position as what M.M. Bakhtin calls "novelistic discourse," allows it to constitute a rich field for examining the ideological rifts of the period. Taking her primary examples from Barnabe Riche's "Farewell to Militarie Profession" (1581), but also considering texts by a variety of authors (such as Sidney, Deloney, Lyly, Gascoigne, Lodge, Breton, Greene, Harmon, Nashe, and Painter), Reliham demonstrates that regardless of their specific structural and thematic differences, the various modes of Elizabethan fiction all share a common origin in the upheavals of English culture during the later half of the 16th century. By examining novelistic discourse as a category, "Fashioning Authority" aims to strengthen our understanding of the nature and history of English fiction even as it broadens our sense of Elizabethan culture. The result is an exploration of how Elizabethan novelistic discourse established the cultural place of its newly literate readers and its generically marginal authors, creating literary comfort in narrative prose for those who failed to find it in verse.


While corporate sustainability has been defined as an approach that creates long-term value with minimum environmental damage, there is still little understanding of the time horizon over which improved environmental performance leads to improved financial performance. We investigate the relationship between environmental and financial performance under increasing likelihood of environmental regulation. We leverage longitudinal data for 1,095 U.S. corporations from 2004 to 2008, a period of increasing activity for climate change legislation, in order to estimate the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on short- and long-term measures of financial performance. We find that during this period, improving corporate environmental performance causes a decline in an indicator of short-term financial performance, return on assets. Nonetheless, investors see the potential long-term value of improved environmental performance, manifested by an increase in Tobin's q. These results suggest that limited uptake of proactive strategies may in part be attributable to short-term financial performance targets that guide managerial decision making.


The first step of reforms directed towards the formation of a market structure in Armenia was the privatisation of land, which started in February 1991 with the adoption of the Land Code and the Law on Peasant and Peasant Collective Household, and finished in April 1993 (Spoor, 2005). As a result of the land privatisation, almost 333 thousand peasant farms were created in contrast to the 860 Soviet-type kolkhoz/sovkhozes before (CFOA, Armenia Country Paper, 2003, Lerman and Mirzakhanian, 2001). Yet, the lack of adequate institutions, particularly financial institutions, supporting productivity increasing agricultural activities under private ownership, has remained one of the most serious deficits (Spoor, 2005). With the transition, the government rightly stopped previous costly programmes of directed agricultural credit. At the same time, Armenian commercial banks apart from the Agricultural Cooperative Bank of Armenia (ACBA), were not interested and had no experience in providing credit to smallscale private farmers (Ministry of Agriculture of Armenia, 2002). The paper is organised as follows: The theoretical link between social capital and access to resources is discussed in Section 2. Section 3 presents the data and methodology used in the analysis. The findings are summarized in Section 4 and Section 5 concludes the paper.


More then just a textbook, A Theory of Incentives in Procurement and Regulation will guide economists' research on regulation for years to come. It makes a difficult and large literature of the new regulatory economics accessible to the average graduate student, while offering insights into the theoretical ideas and stratagems not available elsewhere. Based on their pathbreaking work in the application of principal-agent theory to questions of regulation, Laffont and Tirole develop a synthetic approach, with a particular, though not exclusive, focus on the regulation of natural monopolies such as military contractors, utility companies, and transportation authorities. The book's clear and logical organization begins with an introduction that summarizes regulatory practices, recounts the history of thought that led to the emergence of the new regulatory economics, sets up the basic structure of the model, and previews the economic questions tackled in the next seventeen chapters. The structure of the model developed in the introductory chapter remains the same throughout subsequent chapters, ensuring both stability and consistency. The concluding chapter discusses important areas for future work in regulatory economics. Each chapter opens with a discussion of the economic issues, an informal description of the applicable model, and an overview of the results and intuition. It then develops the formal analysis, including sufficient explanations for those with little training in information economics or game theory. Bibliographic notes provide a historical perspective of developments in the area and a description of complementary research. Detailed proofs are given of all major conclusions, making the book valuable as a source of modern research techniques. There is a large set of review problems at the end of the book.


The present study is aimed to evaluate antioxidant activity of Pyrus pyrifolia fruit peel extracts by different extraction methods. The fruit peel extracts of Pyrus pyrifolia were prepared by using soaking and Soxhlet method with acetone, ethyl acetate and chloroform: methanol (4:1) solvents. The antioxidant activity of the extracts were determined by using DPPH (2, 2-Diphenyl-1- picrylhydrazyl) method. From the results obtained it becomes clear that Soxhlet method is best in terms of high extraction efficiency and extraction of antioxidant compounds. The extracts of soaking method showed less antioxidant activity than Soxhlet extracts. In Soxhlet extraction, the acetone extracts showed maximum antioxidant activity than ethyl acetate and chloroform: methanol (4:1) extracts. Out of the extracts prepared by soaking method of extraction, the extracts of chloroform: methanol (4:1) showed maximum antioxidant activity. Therefore, the antioxidant potential of fruit peel extracts of Pyrus pyrifolia depends upon the both, the extraction method and the solvent used for extraction.


Moderators of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) undertake a dual role. Their work entails not just facilitating an effective learning environment, but also identifying excelling and struggling learners, and providing pedagogical encouragement and direction. Supporting learners is a critical part of moderators' work, and identifying learners' level of critical thinking is an important part of this process. As many thousands of learners may communicate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week using MOOC comment forums, providing support in this environment is a significant challenge for the small numbers of moderators typically engaged in this work. In order to address this challenge, I adopt established coding schemes used for pedagogical content analysis of online discussions to classifying comments, and report on several studies I have undertaken which seek to ascertain the reliability of these approaches, establishing associations with these methods and linguistic and other indicators of critical thinking. I develop a simple algorithmic method of classification based on automatically sorting comments according to their linguistic composition, and evaluate an interview-based case study, where this algorithm is applied to an on-going MOOC. The algorithm method achieved good reliability when applied to a prepared test data set, and when applied to unlabelled comments in a live MOOC and evaluated by MOOC moderators, it was considered to have provided useful, actionable feedback. This thesis provides contributions that help to understand the usefulness of automatic analysis of levels of critical thinking in MOOC comment forums, and as such has implications for future learning analytics research, and e-learning policy making.


Cycle helmets have continued to increase in popularity since their introduction half a century ago. Many studies indicate that overall, head injury can be significantly reduced by wearing them. This study was conducted using two distinct sets of real-world cycling collision data from Ireland, namely cases involving police collision reports and cases involving admission to a hospital emergency department. The analyses sought to simulate and analyse the protective performance of cycle helmets in such collision scenarios, by comparing the Head Injury Criterion score and peak head accelerations, both linear and angular. Cycle collisions were simulated using the specialised commercial software MADYMO. From the simulation results, these key metrics were compared between the same-scenario helmeted and unhelmeted cyclist models. Results showed that the inclusion of bicycle helmets reduced linear accelerations very significantly, but also increased angular accelerations significantly compared to unhelmeted situations. Given the modest protective performance of cycle helmets against angular accelerations, it is recommended that cycle helmet manufacturers and international test standards need to pay more attention to head angular accelerations. (A) Paper to the session "Injury Prevention and Mechanisms" of the 5th International Conference on ESAR "Expert Symposium on Accident Research", 7th to 8th September 2012 in Hannover.


Genetic science permits, to a previously unimaginable degree, predictions as to the illnesses that a person might confront in the future. At the same time, information technology permits greater transmission, sharing, and storage of personal health care data at ever lower costs on a national and even international basis. Electronic health care records are becoming commonplace in the health care industry. The combination of easy electronic dissemination of highly sensitive data, such as personal genetic information, and use of these data to predict future health risks has already caused significant harm. The critical issue is how the law should structure the use of personal medical data by government and private enterprise alike. Privacy and the Economics of Personal Health Care Information proposes that a strong economic argument can be made in favor of information privacy. In the current marketplace for health care and employment-- and any such markets that we are likely to have in the future-- an economically efficient regulation for health care information requires rules that are tied to and follow these data through various uses. Once identifiable health care information is created, it should remain protected health information that is subject to fair information practices. These norms should take the form of multidimensional standards that create both background terms around which parties can negotiate and a smaller set of mandatory rules that will be binding. Such standards seek both to minimize the costs of contracting in the privacy marketplace and to force the party with superior knowledge about the use of personal information to disgorge it. This Article also develops the essential fair information practices that should be implemented in a federal health care privacy statute.


We present a bottom-up coarse-graining procedure to construct mesoscopic force fields directly from microscopic dynamics. By grouping many bonded atoms in the molecular dynamics (MD) system into a single cluster, we compute both the conservative and non-conservative interactions between neighboring clusters. In particular, we perform MD simulations of polymer melts to provide microscopic trajectories for evaluating coarse-grained (CG) interactions. Subsequently, dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) is considered as the effective dynamics resulting from the Mori-Zwanzig (MZ) projection of the underlying atomistic dynamics. The forces between finite-size clusters have, in general, both radial and transverse components and hence we employ four different DPD models to account differently for such interactions. Quantitative comparisons between these DPD models indicate that the DPD models with MZ-guided force fields yield much better static and dynamics properties, which are consistent with the underlying MD system, compared to standard DPD with empirical formulae. When the rotational motion of the particle is properly taken into account, the entire velocity autocorrelation function of the MD system as well as the pair correlation function can be accurately reproduced by the MD-informed DPD model. Since this coarse-graining procedure is performed on an unconstrained MD system, our framework is general and can be used in other soft matter systems in which the clusters can be faithfully defined as CG particles.


In this paper, we present a new economics-based power-aware protocol, called the distributed economic subcontracting protocol (DESP) that dynamically distributes task computation among mobile devices in an ad hoc wireless network. Mobile computation devices may be energy buyers, contractors, or subcontractors. Tasks are transferred between devices via distributed bargaining and transactions. When additional energy is required, buyers and contractors negotiate energy prices within their local markets. Contractors and subcontractors spend communication and computation energy to relay or execute buyers' tasks. Buyers pay the negotiated price for this energy. Decision-making algorithms are proposed for buyers, contractors, and subcontractors, each of which has a different optimization goal. We have built a wireless network simulator, called ESIM, to assist in the design and analysis of these algorithms. When the average communication energy required transferring a task is less than the average energy required to execute a task, our experimental results indicate that markets based on our protocol and decision-making algorithms fairly and effectively allocate energy resources among different tasks in both cooperative and competitive scenarios.


Insufficient skin for autologous grafts makes treatment of full-thickness extensive burns difficult. Poor long-term results from application of cultured keratinocyte sheets or suspensions to such wounds are thought to be due to the absence of a dermis. The porcine collagen-based biomaterial Permacol tm in sheet form is useful as a stable implant in reconstructive surgery, but its use as a dermal substitute has been hindered by slow cell penetration and vascularisation. Here, a paste formulation was evaluated as a dermal substitute in full-thickness wounds to encourage cellular infiltration.
Full-thickness biopsy and wound-chamber models were done in the large white pig under local ethics committee approval and government license. Biopsy model allowed 24 samples of 8mm diameter and the chamber-model allowed 6 samples of 4cm diameter per pig. Permacol was applied as a paste to the wound bed and covered with a split-thickness skin graft or non-adherent dressing, with suitable control wounds in parallel. Biopsies taken at specific time points were assessed for biointegration and neovascularisation using histological and immunofluorescent analysis.
Permacol paste accepted host dermal mesenchymal and epidermal cells. It was well penetrated by cells on day 2 and integrated into the host without causing excessive inflammation, indicating successful biointegration. host cellular infiltration of Permacol paste was much superior to Permacol sheet and very similar to Integra. Paste was visible within the tissue samples and intact up to day 27, indicating presence of a stable biomaterial. Early neovascularisation was noted at day 4, and functional microvessels with circulating blood cells were discovered at day 7 and confirmed by immunostaining for vascular endothelium. This was comparable to Integra, currently the gold standard dermal substitute.
This piolt study indicates that a paste formulation of Permacol successfully biointegrated into full-thickness wounds and may act as an alternative to current dermal substitutes.


A growing emphasis has been given on employee performance as a source of competitive advantage to promote responsiveness in enhancing overall organizational effectiveness. Although performance depends very much on personality traits, other external factors, also known as system factors or opportunities to perform, have a significant amount of influence on employees' task and contextual performance. Constraints to perform, such as bureaucratic structure and ineffective job design, will influence individual task and contextual performance negatively. Such circumstance inadvertently hinders high organizational performance.This paper proposes that organizational characteristics, namely formalization and centralization, have direct effects on employee task performance and organizational citizenship behavior(OCB). Also, this paper posits that job characteristics, namely skill variety, task identity, task significance,autonomy, and feedback, exert influence on employee task performance and OCB. To examine the applicability of the proposed framework, seven main propositions are identified and analyzed.


Li and Carthew set out to address how a transient signal can produce a long-lasting effect and used differentiation of the fly eye as a model. The fly eye is composed of ommatidium, and the first cell to differentiate is the R8 cell, which then signals to the neighboring cells to form seven photoreceptor (R7) cells, and then finally four nonneuronal cone cells are recruited. R8 cells release the ligand (Spitz) for the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) of the R7 progenitor cells, which triggers the phosphorylation of the transcriptional repressor Yan by extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK), leading to degradation of Yan and alleviation of gene repression. Li and Carthew showed that the microRNA miR-7 was present in the differentiating R7 cells and that overexpression of miR-7 increased the number of R7 cells. The abundance of Yan was also decreased in progenitor cells overexpressing miR-7. In cells with a constitutively active EGFR, miR-7 abundance was increased, and this appeared to be mediated by Yan. In cells expressing a Yan loss-of-function mutant or expressing a nonphosphorylatable form of Yan, miR-7 abundance was increased compared with that in wild-type cells. As with other targets of Yan, expression of miR-7 was increased by overexpression of the transcription factor Pointed-P1, which competes with Yan at target genes. Thus, in the eye, in cells in which EGFR is not activated, Yan represses gene expression, including the production of miR-7. The EGFR signal results in degradation of Yan, which alleviates repression of miR-7, which in turn further represses Yan production. This reciprocal feedback loop sets the stage for proper differentiation. X. Li, R. W. Carthew, A microRNA mediates EGF receptor signaling and promotes photoreceptor differentiation in the Drosophila eye. Cell 123, 1267-1277 (2005). [PubMed]


This paper describes several additional analyses and results that go beyond the basic impact findings from the evaluation of the Working toward Wellness (WtW) program in Rhode Island. WtW was a one-year telephone care management intervention for depressed parents who were Medicaid recipients. To encourage individuals with depression to seek treatment from mental health professionals, the WtW program randomly assigned depressed Medicaid recipients to a program group, which had access to telephone care management for up to a year, or to a control group, which had access to the usual mental health services available to Medicaid recipients. Results from the study found that telephone care management modestly increased in-person treatment for depression during the year of the intervention but not after that point. No impacts on average depression severity were observed for the sample as a whole.To understand which individuals showed reduced depression over time, the paper examines the relationship between participants' characteristics and changes in depression scores from baseline to six months and to eighteen months. The results do not, however, suggest a clear means of targeting services like WtW to those who are least likely to improve on their own. Other than baseline depression severity, few participant characteristics were found to be associated with reduced depression over time. This suggests that most subgroups of participants could have benefited from a more effective intervention.Also, because only about 40 percent of the study population participated in in-person mental health treatment, the paper examines which factors contributed to receiving treatment and the intensity of that treatment. The results suggest that a number of factors were associated with seeking mental health treatment. In particular, treatment occurred more frequently for those who were more severely depressed, those who were not working at baseline, white sample members, and those who had received treatment for depression prior to random assignment. This may suggest providing more resources and supports to encourage those groups to receive treatment who are least likely to participate, for whom the program might make a larger difference. It may also suggest excluding individuals with prior treatment for depression from future studies of similar interventions.Lastly, because the eighteen-month results showed that there were significantly fewer program group members in the very severely depressed group, the paper investigates which baseline characteristics are associated with being very severely depressed at follow-up. It was found that although some characteristics are associated with having severe depression at follow-up, the impacts on depression severity for this high-risk subgroup are not statistically significant.


Since its inception in 1986 the aim of Brown University's Women Writers Project (WWP) has been to bring to much wider attention the extensive body of pre-Victorian women's writing in English. In an initiative funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the WWP is creating "Renaissance Women Online" (RWO), a collection of SGML-encoded transcriptions of works in English by women writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This full-text database or "textbase" will be integrated into a Web site designed to help teachers and students access and appreciate these long-neglected works. This undertaking has three main aspects: preparing the electronic texts, organizing access to them, and presenting them in a way appropriate to the target audience. Preparing the texts involves both transcribing them and encoding them in a manner conformant with Standard Generalized Markup Language. The WWP has a close association with the work of the Text Encoding Initiative and has adopted its Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange as the Project's encoding scheme. The advantages of the TEl scheme for the WV/P he in its breadth of application, its flexibility, and its widespread adoption among other humanities text-encoding projects. To offer wide access to the RWO materials, the WWP will publish them on a dedicated Web site. In preferring this option over CD-ROM, flexibility is again a prime consideration. A textbase like RWO gets revised and updated with a frequency which would make the timely distribution of update discs burdensome and impractical. Also, RWO has some material which is available to anyone, and some which can only be accessed with the payment of a licence fee. A Web server can easily offer different levels of access to different users of a single site. The RWO site will not be simply a passive resource. While it does have archival value, it aims to be pedagogically useful and proactive. The design of the site must help students read the works, literally and critically. For the first, RWO uses the DynaWeb interface. Its ability to exploit documents' SGML encoding while serving them to a Web browser offers readers easy navigation through, and searching of, the textbase. To help students and non-specialist readers understand and critically approach what they read, supplementary materials specially written by scholars in the field introduce the works and explain the ideas and issues of concern to the women writers represented in the textbase. Publishing the Renaissance Women Online electronic resource is a crucial step for the Women Writers Project progress in fulfilling its aim, and not just because a Web site offers the chance of truly widespread distribution. For the WWP to continue its work it must move from grant-dependency towards financial self-sufficiency. RWO represents the Projects first large-scale effort to market its most valuable product, its textbase


The quality of an epenthetic vowel in a particular language may vary depending on segmental and prosodic factors, such as the quality of the surrounding consonants, the quality of other vowels in the word, and the position of the epenthetic vowel within the word. This last factor has received little attention in the literature. I have identified a number of cases in Italian in which the quality of the inserted vowel is determined by its position within the word. Through an in-depth study of loan word integration we see that the choice of the inserted vowel is influenced not only by phonology, but by phonetics and morphology as well.


I. INTRODUCTION II. TRANSPORTATION, LAND USE AND GLOBAL WARMING III. THE SMART GROWTH PEDIGREE: THE SLOW GROWTH MOVEMENT, AB 857 AND THE SACOG BLUEPRINT A. The Slow Growth Movement B. AB 857 C. The SACOG Blueprint IV. SB 375: STRUCTURE, IMPLEMENTATION AND THE ROLE OF CARB A. The Role of CARB B. The RTP and SCS C. The APS D. CEQA Exemptions and Streamlining i. Residential or Mixed-Use Projects Consistent With SCS/APS ii. Transit Priority Projects E. Housing Element Reform V. OBSTACLES TO IMPLEMENTATION A. Transportation Infrastructure: Smart Growth's Missing Link B. APS, Feasibility and the Breakdown of Internal Consistency C. California's Land Use Status Quo: Loose Ends, Local Ties D. California's Changing Landscape VI. RECOMMENDATIONS A. Infrastructure B. Actions by CARB i. Compliance Clarity ii. Provision of GHG Emission Evaluation Guidelines C. Consider Amendment VII. CONCLUSION I. INTRODUCTION On September 27, 2006, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law AB 32, (1) the Global Warming Solutions Act, widely considered the most comprehensive and progressive piece of legislation ever drafted to address the causes of anthropogenic climate change. The statute gives the California Air Resources Board (CARB) broad authority to regulate any source of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), including those from the transportation and land use sectors. (2) The eleventh-hour enactment of SB 375 in September, 2008 represents the first legislative step towards aligning the state's future land development with AB 32's emissions reduction goals. (3) Vaunted as a "trifecta of the impossible" by one of the statute's contributory drafters, (4) SB 375 seeks to harmonize three distinct areas--regional housing need, transportation infrastructure development and statewide air quality goals--in one comprehensive program. The law builds upon existing regulatory structures and seeks to incentivise compact development through a mix of project funding and process streamlining all targeted toward one end: reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT) among California's 23 million licensed drivers. (5) Whether SB 375 will herald a new era of smart growth or simply add additional strata to an already complex planning process remains to be seen. This Comment will look to past failures and present successes to determine what potential obstacles may arise in implementing the nascent law. Additionally, the Comment provides recommendations, both legislative and administrative, intended to bridge the gap between the untested language of the statute and practical achievement of its goals. Understanding both the promise and potential pitfalls of SB 375 requires analyzing the law's overall structure to find the balance between what its language mandates and what the statute hopes to achieve through incentive--determining what must be done and what is still left to the caprice of local and regional governments. Beginning with Part II, this Comment will explore the environmental crisis and regulatory context under which the statute was conceived and ultimately enacted. The global and regional effects of climate change will also briefly be discussed. Part III will look to California's historical attempts to legislate smart growth, evaluating both the efficacy and structure of previous programs. These early state efforts to constrain suburban sprawl are presented as the evolutionary predecessors to SB 375, informing our understanding of this newest legislative species and providing an historical base from which to evaluate its potential for success or failure. Part IV provides an overview of the statute's basic functional structure. The bill is not a stand-alone law but instead amends current regional transportation and environmental statutes. …


When the Bamford Review of Mental Health and Learning Disability completed its work in the autumn of 2007, it drew to a close an extensive consultation and analysis of mental health and learning disability services and the law in Northern Ireland. Its last report on A Comprehensive Legislative Framework made a compelling case for a major overhaul of the law that the Review team itself described as 'quite radical'. The Review identified the case for reform in the need to ensure that mental health law conforms to the requirements of human rights law, reflects changes to professional practice, reflects the needs of service users and their carers, and keeps pace with reform elsewhere in the UK. Alone of all the jurisdictions in the UK, Northern Ireland has been operating largely in a legislative vacuum in relation to mental capacity law. The Review's proposals for reform therefore extended to reform of mental health law and the introduction of mental capacity law. In the autumn of 2008 the NI Executive published its response to the Bamford Review indicating that it intended to develop the law sequentially: reform of the Mental Health (NI) Order 1986 by 2011 followed by the introduction of mental capacity law in 2014. Responses to the Executive's consultation resulted in the Department of Health Social Services and Public Safety (DHSSPS) revising its approach and it signalled its intention to bring forward mental capacity and mental health legislation together. This reated a unique opportunity in Northern Ireland for fusion of incapacity and mental health legislation. A further consultation paper was issued in January 2009, setting out the key approaches to the content of two bills. However as a result of the consultation, the Health Minister Michael McGimpsey announced in September 2009 that there would be a single bill with an overall principle of autonomy. His press statement noted: " A strong body of opinion, particularly from professional groups and lead voluntary organisations, which considered that separate mental health legislation continues to be stigmatising and recommended that mental capacity and mental health provisions should instead be encompassed into a single piece of legislation" This short paper provides an overview of the current direction of travel on law reform in Northern Ireland. It comments on the policy climate and arguments for a fusion of mental capacity and mental health legislation. It also highlights some of the key policy issues that will need to be further explored as the Department develops its law reform proposals and concludes with some hopes and fears for the new legislation.


Alkoxide-intercalated NiFe-layered double hydroxides were synthesized via the nonaqueous methanolic route. These nanoplatelets exhibit high crystalline quality as demonstrated by atomic resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy combined with electron energy-loss spectroscopy. Moreover, the presence of the alkoxide moieties has been unambiguously demonstrated by means of thermogravimetric analysis coupled to a mass spectrometer. These NiFe-LDHs can be exfoliated in water or organic solvents and processed into homogeneous ultra-thin films (<3 nm thick) with the assistance of O2-plasma. The study of their behaviour as water oxidation electrocatalysts has shown an outstanding performance at basic pHs (small overpotential of ca. 249 mV and Tafel slopes in the range of 52–55 mV per decade).


Starting with peaceful protests of people demanding democratic reforms and fundamental rights from the regime in Damascus, the Syria crisis developed into a full-fledged civil war causing large- scale death, injury, and displacement. During the first year of the crisis, violence in Syria was marked by the brutal crackdown of regime forces on protesters. Confronted with a high degree of violence from state forces, opposition groups gradually organized politically and militarily. This article focuses on international legal obligations of armed opposition groups in the course of this crisis. Such obligations are clearly contained in international humanitarian law, and arguably also in international human rights law. In order to determine the applicable law, the classification of the situation as either an armed conflict or one of internal tensions and disturbances is fundamental but controversial. This article examines at what stage of the crisis international human rights obligations and international humanitarian law obligations of non-state armed groups became pertinent, and provides reasons why this is the case. It shall be argued that even before the Syria crisis turned into a non-international armed conflict, opposition groups were bound by fundamental rules of international human rights law. In addition to these rules, all parties to the armed conflict became bound by international humanitarian law once the situation reached a sufficient degree of violence, and the non-state groups a sufficient degree of organization. By examining the Syria crisis, this article shall show what these abstract criteria mean in practice.


In high-dimensional data settings where p﾿﾿﾿n, many penalized regularization approaches were studied for simultaneous variable selection and estimation. However, with the existence of covariates with weak effect, many existing variable selection methods, including Lasso and its generations, cannot distinguish covariates with weak and no contribution. Thus, prediction based on a subset model of selected covariates only can be inefficient. In this paper, we propose a post selection shrinkage estimation strategy to improve the prediction performance of a selected subset model. Such a post selection shrinkage estimator PSE is data adaptive and constructed by shrinking a post selection weighted ridge estimator in the direction of a selected candidate subset. Under an asymptotic distributional quadratic risk criterion, its prediction performance is explored analytically. We show that the proposed post selection PSE performs better than the post selection weighted ridge estimator. More importantly, it improves the prediction performance of any candidate subset model selected from most existing Lasso-type variable selection methods significantly. The relative performance of the post selection PSE is demonstrated by both simulation studies and real-data analysis. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


In many machine learning applications, measurements are sometimes incomplete or noisy resulting in missing features. In other cases, and for different reasons, the datasets are originally small, and therefore, more data samples are required to derive useful supervised or unsupervised classification methods. Correct handling of incomplete, noisy or small datasets in machine learning is a fundamental and classic challenge. In this article, we provide a unified review of recently proposed methods based on signal decomposition for missing features imputation (data completion), classification of noisy samples and artificial generation of new data samples (data augmentation). We illustrate the application of these signal decomposition methods in diverse selected practical machine learning examples including: brain computer interface, epileptic intracranial electroencephalogram signals classification, face recognition/verification and water networks data analysis. We show that a signal decomposition approach can provide valuable tools to improve machine learning performance with low quality datasets.


Abstract. Remote sensing applications are directed to agricultural observation and monitoring. It has been huge of scientific papers are dedicated to the research of the contribution of remote sensing for agriculture studies. There are several global challenges needed to be considered within agriculture activities. It can be embraced by the main agriculture sector facing the obstacles impacting the production and productivity of the sector. These are the following options that can be pointed out: biomass and yield estimation; vegetation vigor and drought stress monitoring; assessment of crop phenological development; crop acreage estimation and cropland mapping; and mapping of disturbances and Land Use/Land Cover changes. In this study has been undertaken the realization of satellite-based Land Use/Land Cover monitoring based on various optical satellite data. It has been used satellite images taken from satellites AZERSKY, RapidEye, Sentinel-2B and further processed for Land Use/Land Cover classification. Following the complex approach of the supervised and unsupervised classification, the methodology has been used for satellite image processing. As the main satellite imagery for monitoring crop condition were AZERSKY taken during the growing season, from May to June of 2019 year. The study area was some part of the Sheki region, which covers the central part of the southern slope of the Greater Caucasus Mountain Range within Azerbaijan Republic. In this research work satellite imagery processing and mapping has been carried out on the basis of software application of ArcGIS Pro 2.5.


The textual content of a document and its publication date are intertwined. For example, the publication of a news article on a topic is influenced by previous publications on similar issues, according to underlying temporal dynamics. However, it can be challenging to retrieve meaningful information when textual information conveys little information or when temporal dynamics are hard to unveil. Furthermore, the textual content of a document is not always linked to its temporal dynamics. We develop a flexible method to create clusters of textual documents according to both their content and publication time, the Powered Dirichlet-Hawkes process (PDHP). We show PDHP yields significantly better results than state-of-the-art models when temporal information or textual content is weakly informative. The PDHP also alleviates the hypothesis that textual content and temporal dynamics are always perfectly correlated. PDHP allows retrieving textual clusters, temporal clusters, or a mixture of both with high accuracy when they are not. We demonstrate that PDHP generalizes previous work –such as the Dirichlet-Hawkes process (DHP) and Uniform process (UP). Finally, we illustrate the changes induced by PDHP over DHP and UP in a real-world application using Reddit data.


Evidence suggests that hospital mergers can reduce costs but less is known about their effects on patient outcomes. We study how a wave of mergers that led to the shutdown of one third of all Swedish maternity wards affected the health of mothers who gave birth and their newborns. Applying a difference-in-differences approach to register data on all births in Sweden over two decades, we show that the closures negatively affected the health of mothers, while effects on infant health were small and insignificant. The adverse effects on mothers are mainly driven by crowding effects at remaining wards rather than by increased distance to the wards. Moreover, the closures reduced the use of C-sections for high-risk births.


Global economic and social forces are affecting everyone, everywhere. However, their influence is shaped by local communities' interpretation of these forces and responses to them. Social identities provide a guide; they are the product of history, culture, economy, patterns of governance and degree of community cohesion. How the global and the local connect and reconfigure at various scales and through different cultures is explained in this forward-looking volume. The book's thesis, namely that localism is the crucial complement to globalism, is supported by a range of European case studies. Local responses to globalizing forces depend on the nature of the interlinkages in governance from international structures, through multilateral organizations to nation states, regions and localities, as these are mediated through social-local identity. The contributors draw on numerous themes in examining the interaction between the global and the local, such as decay and revitalization, local identity and empowerment, opportunism through sustainability and governance for the transition. This is a pioneering publication utilizing an innovative person-centred methodology. It makes an original and important contribution to the study of contemporary societies and is aimed at anyone interested in the social, economic, political, cultural and environmental implications of any move towards sustainability.


Suppose there are two locally compact group topologies on a group and that the sets of irreducible unitary representations of the group continuous with respect to each of the topologies coincide. Then the topologies are equal if they are comparable or there is a normal subgroup open and σ-compact in one of the topological groups. This is a result of Klaus Bichteler's, but the work presented here represents a much shorter method than that used by Bichteler, using little representation theory, but using results involving compatible topologies: Topologies containing in common a Hausdorff topology.


Due to the important role of forests in the global carbon cycle, it's necessary to pay more attention to these regions. Among forests biophysical parameters, Biomass estimation as the most influencing factor on the ecosystem is the most important. Due to limitations of traditional forest inventory technique to measure biomass, remote sensing has been widely used for biomass estimation in the past decade. In areas with complex structure, various species and multilayer vegetation cover, using microwave images would be the only solution because of the limitation of optical images. According to recent studies about biomass estimation with microwave images, the interferometry technique yields the best results but still is limited and not tested in all forest types. Because using microwave images has its own problems, focusing on the development of the new approaches which can handle multi source data, identify and decrease uncertainty sources in biomass estimation is required in future studies.


Celebrity endorsers have dominated advertising for many years (Cho, 2010). Their ability to cut through advertising clutter has contributed to their effectiveness as persuasive advertising sources (Kamen, Ahzari, & Kragh, 1975). More recently sports celebrities have been heavily utilized to endorse products and services (Charbonneau, 2006). However, not all celebrity sports endorsement advertising campaigns around the world have been successful. This has raised a number of issues regarding the use of celebrity sports endorsers in advertising. Theories such as credibility, attractiveness, match and meaning transfer have been offered as explanations for the persuasiveness of celebrity athletes in advertising. However, past study results have been inconclusive (Kahle & Homer, 1985; Kamins, 1989; McCracken, 1989). Therefore, a new perspective combining elements of current theory is proposed in the current research. Specifically, the research looks at situations where consumer perceptions of athlete performance enhancement by an endorsed product affect consumer attitudes toward advertising In addition, due to the global use of celebrity sports endorsement cultural values have been recognised to affect consumer persuasion and attitudes. The bulk of marketing literature has focussed on western perspectives (Triandis, 1996). Therefore, persuasion across two dissimilar cultures for celebrity sports endorsement advertising is also explored. The study examines the responses of 189 survey participants from New Zealand. Participants represented either individualists which were non-Maori, mainly white European New Zealanders (hereafter Pakeha) or collectivists which were Pacific Islanders resident in the South Pacific, Australia and New Zealand (hereafter Pasifika). The empirical findings of the research show that advertising which features products which appear to have an enhancing effect on sporting performance are evaluated more positively compared to products which do not appear to enhance sporting performance. The research also indicates that cultural values determine differences in persuasion and attitudes for individualist and collectivist consumers.


An analysis is made of the electric properties of frog muscle using the 'rectangular pulse' technique of Hodgkin & Rushton (1946). The experiments were made on isolated fibres and small bundles of the M. adductor magnus and on the M. extensor longus dig. IV. Sub-threshold currents of about 0.1 sec. duration were applied and wave form and attenuation of the extrapolar potential changes determined. In the vicinity of the cathode the relation between current and voltage across the fibre membrane is non-linear, and there is evidence of a local electric response with currents of more than 30% threshold strength. At the anode, however, the membrane behaves as a conductor of approximately constant resistance (section A). At an average temperature of 22 degrees C, the following mean values were obtained: (a) Fibre diameter: $75\mu $ in the bundles of M. adductor magnus, and $45\mu $ in M. extensor longus dig. IV. (b) Characteristic length of the muscle fibres: 0.65 and 1.1 mm. respectively. (c) Membrane time constant: 9 and 18.5 msec. (d) Specific resistance of the myoplasm: about 230 $\Omega \text{cm}$. (e) Transverse resistance of the fibre membrane: 1500 and 4300 $\Omega \text{cm.}^{2}$. (f) Membrane capacity: about 5 $\mu $F/cm.$^{2}$. The numerical differences between isolated fibres and whole muscle arose chiefly from a different value of the membrane resistance, the significance of which is discussed (section section B1 and D). The value of the membrane capacity of muscle is about five times higher than that reported for various other cell membranes and confirmed here for isolated crustacean nerve fibres. The large membrane capacity must be an important factor in determining the slow electrical time scale of muscle. The relations between the electric constants of the resting muscle fibre and some of its physiological properties (time factor of excitation, propagation velocity, rate of decline of the end-plate potential) are discussed (section E). The location of the membrane, or interface, at which electromotive changes occur is discussed, and a number of reasons are given which indicate that the site of the electrotonic potential changes must be at the surface of the muscle fibres.


Abstract Liquid-metal flows in the European helium cooled lead lithium blanket are strongly affected by the intensity and the distribution of the externally applied magnetic field required for plasma confinement. An experimental campaign has been performed to investigate the pressure distribution of magnetohydrodynamic flows in a scaled model of a liquid-metal blanket module. A variety of experiments has been carried out to asses the influence of flow rates and of the strength and non-uniformity of the magnetic field on the pressure distribution in the test-section. The magnetic field available in the laboratory is characterized by a large zone of uniform magnitude and gradients at the entrance and the exit. The mock-up has been located at various positions along the magnet axis to reproduce operating conditions in which the toroidal field varies in radial direction, i.e. it changes from the back plate to the first wall. Measurements show that the magnitude of the total pressure drop in the mock-up is significantly influenced by the strength of the local magnetic field at the manifolds, while gradients across the breeder units have minor effects. This study confirms the critical role of manifolds in determining the total pressure drop in the blanket.


This book offers a new perspective on the professional world of higher education. Using social practice theory, it presents a practice sensibility rooted in concepts which illuminate teaching and learning contexts. The book takes the reader through the social processes occurring within higher education institutions which shape contexts and influence the direction of change; for leaders and managers, educational developers, change agents, and academics, this sensibility will help to identify the successful paths to changes for enhancement and the patterns of policy implementation likely to occur as teaching and learning is enhanced. For researchers of higher education, the practice sensibility offers new possibilities for meaningful research into teaching and learning issues. Teaching and learning regimes are a key focus of the book. As a family of practices performed by a workgroup in higher education over extended periods, they comprise a number of 'moments'—characteristics derived from structural foundations which shape the workgroup's practices and frameworks of meaning. These moments condition how teaching and learning is fundamentally understood, what its aims are thought to be, what is considered 'normal' practice, how individuals see themselves and others, and how power operates within the workgroup. The material context is significant in this, as are the backstories, personal histories, and institutional sagas. This book develops a completely new approach to Trowler's concept of teaching and learning regimes. Using both his research and that of others in the field, it presents a more nuanced, fully developed, and sophisticated version of the concept which has great traction for empirical research, the management of change, and the enhancement of the student experience and learning outcomes.


Recent developments in legged robotics have found that constant stiffness passive compliant legs are an effective mechanism for enabling dynamic locomotion. In spite of its success, one of the limitations of this approach is reduced adaptability. The final leg mechanism usually performs optimally for a small range of conditions such as the desired speed, payload, and terrain. For many situations in which a small locomotion system experiences a change in any of these conditions, it is desirable to have a tunable stiffness leg for effective gait control. To date, the mechanical complexities of designing usefully robust tunable passive compliance into legs has precluded their implementation on practical running robots. In this thesis we present an overview of tunable stiffness legs, and introduce a simple leg model that captures the spatial compliance of our tunable leg. We present experimental evidence supporting the advantages of tunable stiffness legs, and implement what we believe is the first autonomous dynamic legged robot capable of automatic leg stiffness adjustment. Finally we discuss design objectives, material considerations, and manufacturing methods that lead to robust passive compliant legs. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Mechanical Engineering & Applied Mechanics First Advisor Dr. Mark Yim Second Advisor Dr. Daniel E. Koditschek Third Advisor Dr. Jonathan E. Clark


It is the author's aim to explore the ways in which the composer William Wallace (1860-1940), 'served his day and generation by multifarious activities' (Orsmond Anderton, 'A Protean Spirit', Musical Opinion 1920) and to demonstrate how those activities related to his musical work. As a musician, he was not solely composer but also critic, conductor, musicologist, historian, biographer, campaigner, translator, and innovator in British music at the turn of the century. These are among the issues to be discussed, primarily with a view to their influence on Wallace's composition, within the course of this document. Distinguishing between Wallace's activities is not an easy task. Many links and overlaps exist between diverse accomplishments and, in allowing different interests to influence each other, he created difficulties in determining the headings under which to categorise his work. For example, an interest in Wagner was to enrich the literary arts of biography and critical review as well as to enhance Wallace's own musical style. For ease, the categories into which Wallace's work has finally been divided here are the Visual arts. Literary arts. Performing arts and Campaigns for the promotion of British music. The contents of the supplementary Appendix n consist of a catalogue of Wallace's works, both musical and literary. Again, his musical works conform to four main categories namely Orchestral, Vocal, Theatrical and Chamber Music, while his Literary Works are subdivided into books, articles, academic papers or lectures, published letters and translations. Although not claiming to be definitive, this catalogue is the most comprehensive known guide to Wallace's works so far compiled and, to the author's knowledge, no previous detailed research into Wallace's work in general has been carried out since his death. This circumstance is here remedied through the collation of information essentially from primary material.


Researchers have been investigating the optimal route query problem for a long time. Optimal route queries are categorized as either unconstrained or constrained queries. Many main memory based algorithms have been developed to deal with the optimal route query problem. Among these, Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm is one of the most popular algorithms for the unconstrained route query problem. The constrained route query problem is more complicated than the unconstrained one, and some constrained route query problems such as the Traveling Salesman Problem and Hamiltonian Path Problem are NP-hard. There are many algorithms dealing with the constrained route query problem, but most of them only solve a specific case. In addition, all of them require that the entire graph resides in the main memory. Recently, due to the need of applications in very large graphs, such as the digital maps managed by Geographic Information Systems (GIS), several disk-based algorithms have been derived by using divide-and-conquer techniques to solve the shortest path problem in a very large graph. However, until now little research has been conducted on the disk-based constrained problem. This thesis presents two algorithms: 1) a new disk-based shortest path algorithm (DiskSPNN), and 2) a new disk-based optimal path algorithm (DiskOP) that answers an optimal route query without passing a set of forbidden edges in a very large graph. Both algorithms fit within the same divide-and-conquer framework as the existing disk-based shortest path algorithms proposed by Ning Zhang and Heechul Lim. Several techniques, including query super graph, successor fragment and open boundary node pruning are proposed to improve the performance of the previous disk-based shortest path algorithms. Furthermore, these techniques are applied to the DiskOP algorithm with minor changes. The proposed DiskOP algorithm depends on the concept of collecting a set of boundary vertices and simultaneously relaxing their adjacent super edges. Even if the forbidden edges are distributed in all the fragments of a graph, the DiskOP algorithm requires little memory. Our experimental results indicate that the DiskSPNN algorithm performs better than the original ones with respect to the I/O cost as well as the running time, and the DiskOP algorithm successfully solves a specific constrained route query problem in a very large graph.


Coal based nanofibers were prepared by electrospinning a mixture of polyacrylonitrile and acid treated coal. Coal based activated carbon fibers were further obtained by carbonization and steam activation. The effects of acid treatment on raw coal were studied to explain the enhanced solubility in various solvents. The solubility of coal was as high as 6.6 wt% in N,N-dimethylformamide. The electrochemical performance of supercapacitor electrodes using coal based activated carbon fiber mats was then studied. This binder-free electrode showed a specific capacitance of 230 F g−1 at a current density of 1 A g−1 and an excellent capacity retention of 97% after 1000 cycles.


In the nineteenth century, the discussion of personal health and wellbeing became almost a national pastime. With publications such as the British Medical Journal and Lancet freely accessible to the everyday reader, common medical terms and diagnoses were readily absorbed by the public. In particular, the nineteenth century saw the rapid rise of the 'nervous illness' – sicknesses which had no apparent physical cause, but had the capacity to cripple their victims with (among other things) delirium, tremors and convulsions. As part of the rich social life of this popular class of disorder, writers of fiction within the nineteenth century also participated in the public dialogue on the subject. Authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle all constructed narratives involving nervous sufferers, particularly hypochondriacs and victims of brain fever. Despite writing in a wide variety of genres ranging from Gothic to realist, the roles played by the illnesses within the texts of these authors remain a vital feature of the plot, either as a hindrance to the protagonists (by removing key players from the plot at a critical moment) or a method of revealing deeper aspects of their character. Nervous illnesses carried with them social stigmas: men could be rendered feminine; women could be branded recklessly passionate or even considered visionaries as ideas about the nerves, the supposed seat of emotion and passion, brought into sharp relief the boundaries between physical and mental suffering, and physical and spiritual experiences.  The central aim of this thesis is to examine the cultural understanding of nervous illness and how nineteenth-century texts interacted with and challenged this knowledge. It focuses on how nineteenth-century authors of different genres – particularly the Gothic, sensation and realist genres – use the common convention of nervous illness – particularly hypochondria and brain fever – to develop their protagonists and influence the plot. Through comparisons between literary symptoms and those recorded by contemporary sufferers and their physicians, this thesis analyses the way that the cultural concept of nervous illness is used by four principal Victorian authors across a range of their works, looking at how hypochondria and brain fever function within their plots and interact with gender and genre conventions to uphold and subvert the common tropes of each. Whether it aids or hinders the protagonist, or merely gives the reader an insight into their personality, nervous illness in the Victorian novel was a widely used convention which speaks not only of the mindset of the author, but also of the public which so willingly received it.


We develop a conceptual framework to highlight the role of ideas as a catalyst for policy and institutional change, making an explicit distinction between ideas and vested interests. We show how ideas and interests make separate contributions to the determination of policy, as well as how they feed into each other. In doing so we integrate the Keynes-Hayek perspective on the importance of ideas with the currently more fashionable Stigler-Becker (interests only) approach to political economy. The model allows us to distinguish between two kinds of ideational politics – the battle among different worldviews on the efficacy of policy (worldview politics) versus the politics of victimhood, pride and identity (identity politics). Our framework suggests a complementarity between worldview politics and identity politics. In particular, an increase in identity polarization may be associated with a shift in views about how the world works. Furthermore, an increase in income inequality is likely to result in a greater incidence of ideational politics. ∗VERY PRELIMINARY. Rodrik thanks his Kennedy School students in API-525 for their contributions


A series of Ti-doped diopsides were synthesised by flux growth in a boron-rich melt under low fO 2 conditions. Following chemical characterisation by EMPA and nuclear reaction microanalysis, their crystal structures were refined by single crystal X-ray diffraction. The diopside samples were doped with increasing amounts of Ti, resulting in a coupled increase in Na and B. The tetrahedral Si is substituted by Ti 4+ and B, whereas Mg is substituted by Ti 3+ and Ti 4+ in the M1 octahedron with simultaneous charge compensation by coupled substitution of Na for Ca in the M2 octahedron. The occurrences of Ti 4+ in the tetrahedral site and Ti 3+ in the M1 octahedron are in agreement with optical absorption studies performed on the same samples. The diopside framework is strongly influenced by the incorporation of Ti 4+ and Ti 3+ , with the M1 and M2 sites becoming more distorted as the substitutions increase, accompanied by a decreasing distortion of the T-site and the T-chain and an increase of the c lattice parameter.


A sweet water-soluble protein that reminds stable over wide ranges of temperature and pH, Brazzein has various applications. Its tastes like cane sugar but have no calories. However, the extraction of brazzein from its natural source is expensive and not applicable. In this study we used recombinant DNA technology to provide an alternative option for cheaper mass production of brazzein. A brazzein gene was designed, synthesized by using oligonucleotids and cloned into the pBlueScript vector. The synthetic fragment linked to the C-terminal of Maltose-binding protein (MBP) and Glutathion-S-Transferase (GST) for protein expression. The recombinant protein was expressed as a soluble form after induction by IPTG. The fusion protein was purified by amylose resin column and detected by SDS-PAGE. The best yields were achieved by producing brazzein as a fusion with MBP. MBP-brazzein system permits large-scale functional expression and purification of recombinant soluble proteins, providing a basis for the future study of structure and function of brazzein.


Beside an analysis of structural changes in the past, this paper focuses on an analysis of recent trends of productivity and labour resources in the European forest sector. The paper provides information about wages, safety and health of working places, as well as training and skills of workers. Based on these trends, the paper gives an outlook for social issues in European forestry, wood processing industry and pulp and paper industry. The analysis is linked to a discussion about possible future changes in the policy and market framework of the sector.


The Great Cyclothem is comprised of the Great Limestone and equivalents at the base, its upper part being formed by the Coal Sills Group and equivalents which immediately overlie the limestone. The detailed variations in this thin but widely persistent group of strata in its 6,500 square miles area of development in Northern England are considered and evaluated primarily in order to assess the conditions of deposition, sedimentary history and palaeogeography of the region during formation of the cyclothem. Critical palaeontological evidence is presented to show that the cyclothem lies at the very base of the Upper Carboniferous succession of Northern England, the base of the Great Limestone and equivalents being taken as the Visean-Namurian junction. A detailed stratigraphical and palaeontological consideration of the Great Limestone and equivalents is made. Separate detailed studies are also presented of the stratigraphy, petrology, sedimentary structures and palaeontology of the overlying Coal Sills Group and equivalents, these beds consisting of alternating shales, sandstones and coals with thin lenticular marine bands and a restricted chert development. An analysis of the above information is made and it is postulated that the cyclothem's basal limestone was laid down in a widespread shallow clear sea, the sea being eventually encroached upon by deltaic sediments consisting essentially of material now represented by the shales, sandstones and coals. The deltaic conditions built out from land to the north and north-west, the sediment source consisting predominantly of pre-existing sediments. Evidence exists to show that the deltaic conditions were subject to local and regional regressions during formation of the cyclothem, thus giving rise to the latter's composite nature, each sheet sandstone with its overlying coal seam representing the final stage in each phase of delta building. The control which the trough and block features of Northern England exercised upon the overall thickness of terrigenous sediments deposited is clearly illustrated and the complete wedging out of terrigenous sediments to the south-east is demonstrated. In the deltaic sediments the courses of prominent in filled river channels occupying washouts have been delimited. The restricted formation of chert is related to the deposition of primary colloidal silica under marine conditions, the required silica-rich waters having been fed into the specific area by a contemporaneous river "channel" whose course is delimited. The mechanism which controlled the formation of the rhythmic sequence of the cyclothem is discussed, and it is concluded that the major role was played by tectonic activity which involved uplift in the source area followed by erosion to base level, with complementary diastrophic subsidence in the area of deposition; the rhythmic tectonic activity is related to the pulsating movements of the Sudetic period which heralded the Hercynian orogeny. In an appendix the widespread and marked devolatilization of the coal seams on the Alston Block is discussed and tentatively related to greater than normal heat-flow from the pre-Carboniferous "Weardale granite". The first recorded occurrence in Great Britain of ovoidal bodies called nigger- heads is reported from these heat affected coals.


Aims: This project is looking at the development and application of the novel tool (International–Medicines-Use-Review-Health-Technology-Assessment; International-MUR HTA) in community practice that for the first time is able to meet better asthma control and secure added value service in asthma management. More specifically it allows to: evaluate the quality of care delivered in terms of economic impact (for patient-provider-society), health outcomes and patient benefits; collect real-world evidence and evaluate longterm effect of care; provide different stakeholders with evidence-based information that would help formulate health policies in community practice that are safe, effective, patient-focused and cost-effective, balancing access to innovation and cost containment. Crucially, the tool can also support the delivery of a cost-effective and cost-saving intervention for asthma patients based on the success of the Italian-Medicines-Use-Review (I-MUR) trial [1].

Methods: Evidence from the Italian-Medicine-Use-Review (I-MUR) trial showed that the I-MUR intervention provided by the community pharmacists in asthma is effective, cost-saving and cost-effective.1 The trial allowed to model a novel framework (International-MUR-HTA) that would enable to routinely deliver the intervention, but also collect and analyse patient relevant data on its clinical-effectiveness, quality-of-life and cost-effectiveness. I-MUR-HTA was discussed within three expert-panel discussions including policy-makers, commissioners, academics, healthcare-professionals and patientrepresentatives in Italy,2 UK3 and Brussels/Europe.4 The current plan includes testing the use of the tool in RW environment across European regions.

Results: Evidence collected from the expert discussions confirmed that International-MUR-HTA information is relevant to meet current NICE target for cost-effective service delivery and this is what is needed to support the evaluation of innovative effective and cost-effective health policies and promote their implementation across nations. Its implementation is underway and real-world pilots are planned to take place in different European regions.

Conclusion: the International-MUR-HTA appears to be an innovative tool to promote active patient involvement into policy-decision-making and community service implementation.


Although much effort has recently been devoted to training high-quality sentence embeddings, we still have a poor understanding of what they are capturing. "Downstream" tasks, often based on sentence classification, are commonly used to evaluate the quality of sentence representations. The complexity of the tasks makes it however difficult to infer what kind of information is present in the representations. We introduce here 10 probing tasks designed to capture simple linguistic features of sentences, and we use them to study embeddings generated by three different encoders trained in eight distinct ways, uncovering intriguing properties of both encoders and training methods.


The Open Access Movement proposes to remove price and permission barriers for accessing peer-reviewed research work—to use the power of the internet to duplicate material at an infinitesimal cost-per-copy. In this volume, contributors show that open access does not exist in a technological or policy vacuum; there are complex social, political, cultural, philosophical, and economic implications for opening research through digital technologies. The contributors examine open access from the perspectives of colonial legacies, knowledge frameworks, publics and politics, archives and digital preservation, infrastructures and platforms, and global communities. he contributors consider such topics as the perpetuation of colonial-era inequalities in research production and promulgation; the historical evolution of peer review; the problematic histories and discriminatory politics that shape our choices of what materials to preserve; the idea of scholarship as data; and resistance to the commercialization of platforms. Case studies report on such initiatives as the Making and Knowing Project, which created an openly accessible critical digital edition of a sixteenth-century French manuscript, the role of formats in Bruno Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, and the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), a network of more than 1,200 journals from sixteen countries. Taken together, the contributions represent a substantive critical engagement with the politics, practices, infrastructures, and imaginaries of open access, suggesting alternative trajectories, values, and possible futures.


The rock stratigraphic record exists as a rich, albeit complex and incomplete repository of Earth history, tracing the processes of biological evolution, climate change, oceanic and atmospheric chemistry, sea-level fluctuations, mountain-building and erosion, and basin subsidence. Without a detailed and precise temporal framework, however, the richness of the record, including global stratigraphic correlations, evaluation of cyclicity and rates of regional and global change, major sedimentary depositional hiatuses, and biological extinctions cannot be fully exploited.

In the past two decades major advances in U-Pb zircon geochronology have allowed us to evaluate the distribution of time in the rock record and rates of geological processes with unprecedented precision (see Parrish et al., this volume; Davis et al., this volume). While much work has focused on major transitions in Earth history, there is considerable promise for a highly calibrated time scale from the Neoproterozoic to Holocene that will permit increasingly more sophisticated questions to be addressed using the rock record. It has been long appreciated that there are dramatic events in the diversification and extinction of life such as the Cambrian radiation, the end-Permian extinction, and the end-Cretaceous extinction. However, important questions remain regarding the tempo and causes of evolutionary radiation and extinction. For example, what are the durations of mass extinctions? How long does ecological recovery take following a major extinction? Do evolutionary radiations correlate with changes in chemistry and temperature of the ocean-atmosphere system and global climate? Are there relationships between evolution and the aggregation and dispersal of supercontinents? Are apparently abrupt isotopic excursions in seawater chemistry globally synchronous and of similar duration? Although the biostratigraphic record has been historically used to address these questions, we are now moving into an era where an essential test of correlation and tempo will and must be high-precision geochronology of volcanic rocks interlayered with …