Disease in wildlife raises a number of issues that have not been widely considered in the bioethical literature. However, wildlife disease has major implications for human welfare. The majority of emerging human infectious diseases are zoonotic: this is, they occur in humans by cross-species transmissions from animal hosts. Managing these diseases often involves balancing concerns with human health against animal welfare and conservation concerns. Many infectious diseases of domestic animals are shared with wild animals, although it is often unclear whether the infection spills over from wild animals to domestic animals or vice versa. Culling is the standard means of managing such diseases, bringing economic considerations, animal welfare and conservation into conflict. Infectious diseases are also major threatening processes in conservation biology and their appropriate management by culling, vaccination or treatment raises substantial animal ethics issues. One particular issue of great significance in Australia is an ongoing research program to develop genetically modified pathogens to control vertebrate pests including rabbits, foxes and house mice. Release of any self-replicating GMO vertebrate pathogen gives rise to a whole series of ethical questions. We briefly review current Australian legal responses to these problems. Finally, we present two unresolved problems of general importance that are exemplified by wildlife disease. First, to what extent can or should 'bioethics' be broadened beyond direct concerns with human welfare to animal welfare and environmental welfare? Second, how should the irreducible uncertainty of ecological systems be accounted for in ethical decision making?


Abstract Purpose: To evaluate the effect of punctal plug use in preventing dry eye after laser in situ keratomileusis (LASIK). Materials and Methods: A randomized clinical trial at a tertiary eye care center, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Participants underwent LASIK for myopia in both eyes and a lower punctal occlusion in one eye only while the other eye served as control. Both eyes received the same postoperative medications except for lubricant duration (subject eye: four times per day for one week; control eye: four times per day for 6 months). Participants were evaluated at 1 week, 2, and 6 months after surgery for signs and symptoms of dry eye. The main outcome measures were visual acuity; ocular surface parameters; and Ocular Surface Disease Index questionnaire. Results: Seventy-eight eyes of 39 patients were included in this study. The Ocular Surface Disease Index scores of eyes with punctal plugs were better at all follow-up visits, and the differences between both eyes were statistically significant (1 week, p < 0.0001; 2 months, p < 0.0001; 6 months, p = 0.008). At the final follow-up visit, the percentage of normal eyes was higher in eyes with punctal plugs for all ocular surface parameters (Schirmer 1 test, 94.9%; tear breakup time, 77.8%; punctate epithelial keratitis score, 71.8%) compared to eyes without occlusion (Schirmer 1 test, 92.3%; tear breakup time, 58.3%; punctate epithelial keratitis score, 53.8%); however, such differences were not statistically significant. Conclusion: Punctal plug insertion after LASIK surgeries may minimize the need for frequent lubricant application and hence improve patient satisfaction.


This paper draws lessons on the future of knowledge management (KM) from the experiences of a process aimed at integrating KM and learning into projects in East and Southern Africa, supported by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). KM in IFAD has mainly been aimed at enhancing knowledge sharing at headquarters, and in projects through regional networks. The challenge in the initiative in Eastern and Southern Africa was to make KM and learning practical enough and fully connected with innovation, leading to continuous improvement of project performance, so that project staff would embrace it, rather than seeing it as just another imposed idea. The action learning experiment over four years was successful with impact in many levels, and enabled in-depth learning about how to improve large development projects and programmes through a systemic learning approach. However, unless KM has a clear purpose and is fully integrated into business processes aimed at performance improvement, and its effectiveness can be measured, it will sooner or later fall prey to budgets cuts and other priorities. Unless results are evident, KM might end up like so many other interesting concepts in development organisations. Organisational development and KM need to become one continuous process. All of this throws into question the future of KM in large development organisations unless a very strong leadership and motivation to improve effectiveness throughout the hierarchy persists over a long term.


The "less is more" hypothesis suggests that one reason adults and children differ in their language acquisition abilities is that they also differ in other cognitive capacities. According to one version, children's relatively poor memory may make them more likely to over-regularize inconsistent input (Hudson Kam & Newport, 2005, 2009). This paper investigates this hypothesis experimentally and computationally. Experiments in which adults were placed under a high cognitive load during a language-learning task reveal that in adults, increased load does not result in increased over-regularization. A computational model offers a possible explanation for these results, demonstrating that over-regularization should occur only in the presence of memory limitations as well as a strong prior bias for over-regularization. Taken together, these findings suggest that the difference in over-regularization between adults and children may not be attributable solely to differences in memory capacity between the two groups.


In 1995-97 British popular music saw an increase in the visibility of musicians of South Asian descent and in the audibility of musical elements which originate in or evoke South Asia. Some British-Asian musicians have drawn on elements of South Asian folk, classical, and pop music to express a distinctive British-Asian identity. Examples discussed include Bally Sagoo, whose Dil cheez was the first Asian-language hit in the UK charts; the group Asian Dub Foundation (ADF), whose song Rebel Warrior juxtaposes short looped samples of Asian instruments and vocals against a punk-style guitar riff; and Nitin Sawhney, whose Market Daze uses sampled Indian flute music, recorded in India, as the other part of a duet in which Sawhney plays the piano. Amar, a 17-year-old British-Asian girl, recently signed a huge record deal with Warner Music; in one of her recent recordings, she shifts from a Hindi lyric sung in Indian pop style to an English lyric sung in an Anglo-American soul style. The white British pop group Kula Shaker has achieved popularity with singles that use Sanskrit lyrics and seem to advocate a wholesale adoption of Vaishnava Hindu philosophy; the reaction of British-Asians to their success is equivocal.


Summary This paper presents the recent development on active steering for railway vehicles, and carries out a technical appraisal of different actuation schemes and control approaches. It brings together the latest research activities and findings for the full active steering techniques for rail vehicles with the solid-axle wheelsets, independently-rotating wheelsets and wheel-pairs without axles, but relevant work on passive and semi-active solutions is also briefly described. Potential benefits of the use of a combination of modern control technology and mechatronic approach are evaluated, and in particular solutions for the difficult design trade-off between the stability and the curving performance are presented. Various actuation configurations are discussed, and advantages and drawbacks of those schemes are investigated. The outline design using a number of control methods is analysed, and measurement requirement and state estimation techniques essential for implementation of the active steering schemes are also explored. In addition the issue of safety criticality is highlighted and a possible approach for developing fault-tolerant systems is proposed. Overall the paper provides an authoritative assessment of the major advances in actively-steered wheels and addresses outstanding critical issues.


The accessibility and reuse of legal data is paramount for promoting transparency, accountability and, ultimately, trust towards governance institutions. The aggregation of structured and semi-structured legal data inevitably leads to the big data realm and a series of challenges for the generation, handling, and analysis of large datasets. When it comes to data generation, LEOS represents a legal informatics tool that is maturing quickly. Now in its third release, it effectively supports the drafting of legal documents using Akoma Ntoso compatible schemes. However, the tool, originally developed for cooperative legislative drafting, can be repurposed to draft parliamentary control documents. This is achieved through the use of actor-oriented software components, referred to as software agents, which enable system interoperability by interlinking the text editing system with parliamentary control datasets. A validated corpus of written questions from the Hellenic Parliament is used to evaluate the feasibility of the endeavour, and the feasibility of using it as an authoring tool for written parliamentary questions and generation of standardised, open, legislative data. Systemic integration not only proves the tool's versatility, but also opens up new grounds in interoperability between formerly unrelated legal systems and data sources.


This thesis introduces a model of empathy as a basis for helpful behaviour in teams consisting purely of artificial agents that collaborate on practical problem-solving tasks, and investigates whether the performance of such teams can benefit from empathic help between members as the analogy with human teams might suggest. Guided by existing models of natural empathy in psychology and neuroscience, it identifies the potential empathy factors for artificial agents, as well as the mechanisms by which they produce affective and behavioural responses. The performance of empathic agent teams situated in a microworld similar to the Coloured Trails game is studied through simulation experiments, with the model parameters optimized by a genetic algorithm. For low to moderate levels of random disturbance in the environment, empathic help is superior to random help, and it outperforms rational help as rational decision complexity grows, in particular at higher levels of environmental disturbance. --P. ii.


Although academic library exhibitions have been referred to as "illegitimate children," (1) tangential to the chief mission of their institutions, literature on the subject substantiates their significance to both public relations and educational goals. (2) The latter objective, in tune with the fundamental service mission of libraries, is perhaps so widely touted because of its altruistic aspect. Yet interest in the forum as a showcase for public consumption of library treasures is often more pragmatic, arising in part from the need to broaden bases of financial support to compensate for a decrease in traditional sources of revenue. The incompatibility of these two goals poses something of a dilemma for exhibit designers and curators. Creating exhibits with a level of scholarship rigorous enough to engage the specialist will not necessarily attract large audiences; exhibitions must be comprehensible co both "the uninitiated as well as the initiated." (3) Yet, satisfying the public relations goal means drawing in large numbers of viewers, many of whom may have more interest in being entertained than in being educated. At the University of Virginia (UVa) Library, exhibitions had been an integral part of library public relations efforts since the mid-1940s. (4) As the groundbreaking date loomed for the construction of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library and its exhibition space, to be housed in the Mary and David Harrison Institute for American History, Literature, and Culture, the library's exhibitions program underwent reorganization. The position of library exhibits coordinator was created and filled, and an exhibitions committee was formed with the following charge: "to generate and develop ideas for exhibits in Special Collections that would attract audiences, especially of students and faculty; raise the library's visibility; and further the library's development program." (5) As a member of that committee, I had become aware of the difficulties involved in inveigling likely curators, due to the time-consuming nature of the work and the strict deadlines imposed by the exhibits schedule. (6) Nevertheless, lured by the prospect of becoming better acquainted with the rare-music collections and armed with the promise of release time and collegial support, I accepted the invitation to curate the fall 2001 exhibition, scheduled for a five-month run from September 2001 to mid-February 2002. My task would be to choose a music topic with sufficient audience appeal, select exhibit materials, draft commentary for display labels and text, and consult on related topics during the various stages of exhibit planning and installation. The following narrative presents a compendium of useful strategies and techniques that I garnered through contact with a network of experienced colleagues during our year of collaboration on Lift Every Voice. Much of what worked well for us can be adapted to libraries of various types and sizes, and the lack of expert staff or a large exhibitions budget need not deter any interested party from carrying out an equally successful endeavor. While many case studies of library exhibitions have been published, (7) the literature pertaining to music displays is scanty, and it is my hope that this example of a successful music exhibition may help fill that gap. TARGETING AN AUDIENCE A number of forces conspired in the choice of the theme for Lift Every Voice, chief among them the library's stated goal of attracting and entertaining a wide cross section of visitors, especially from faculty and student populations. Examining registrar's rolls for courses offered by the McIntire Department of Music, I noted healthy attendance at Anglo-American Folk Music and Dance, History of Jazz, African Dance and Drum Ensemble, All Shook Up: Elvis Presley, Great Ladies of American Song, Introduction to Music in American Sound Cinema, and Popular Culture and Music, which suggested a strong level of interest in American and African vernacular genres. …


Environmental sustainability is a horizontal issue that appears at all level of economic activities and private life. Due to the increasing complexity of regulations, particularly in case of EU funded developments, all the projects need to meet a lot of criteria on environment protection issues. These activities include the conduction of environmental studies, data collection, future emission estimations, improving social attitude, acquiring necessary permissions and environment friendly equipment and finally all the administrative activities to monitor everything mentioned previousThe project management organization increasingly needs a special expertise to meet all the requirements no matter what is the original scope of the project. The study collects different type of knowledge and expertise to manage environment economic issues during project management on four different categories, such as legal, technical, financial or human. The summary of the different type of knowledge provides logical conclusion on how the project management organization should meet the challenges of climate change in terms of daily work and organizational operations.


We estimate the extent of the moderating effect of varying regional ownership structures on the relationship between the VAT reform and industrial upgrading in a panel differences-in-differences framework, using a natural experiment of the China's 2004 value-added tax (VAT) reform pilot that introduces a permanent 17%-tax credit for fixed investment in six industries in the North-eastern regions. Results reveal that the VAT reform helps firms increase their capital-to-labor ratio, labor input, and labor productivity, indicating the positive effect of VAT reform on fixed asset renewal and industrial structure upgrading in the region. As for the role of regional ownership structure, the positive effects of the VAT reform on labor input and labor productivity are significantly suppressed in areas with large market shares of state-owned enterprises. In another words, the VAT reform significantly promotes industrial upgrading in areas with market-sensitive economies.


A special observation mode of the Odin satellite provides the first simultaneous measurements of water vapour, temperature and polar mesospheric cloud (PMC) brightness over a large geographical area while still resolving both horizontal and vertical structures in the clouds and background atmosphere. The observation mode was activated during June, July and August of 2010 and 2011, and for latitudes between 50 and 82 degrees N. This paper focuses on the water vapour and temperature measurements carried out with Odin's sub-millimetre radiometer (SMR). The tomographic retrieval approach used provides water vapour and temperature between 75 and 90 km with a vertical resolution of about 2.5 km and a horizontal resolution of about 200 km. The precision of the measurements is estimated to 0.2 ppmv for water vapour and 2K for temperature. Due to limited information about the pressure at the measured altitudes, the results have large uncertainties (> 3 ppmv) in the retrieved water vapour. These errors, however, influence mainly the mean atmosphere retrieved for each orbit, and variations around this mean are still reliably captured by the measurements. SMR measurements are performed using two different mixer chains, denoted as frequency mode 19 and 13. Systematic differences between the two frontends have been noted. A first comparison with the Solar Occultation For Ice Experiment instrument (SOFIE) on-board the Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) satellite and the Fourier Transform Spectrometer of the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment (ACE-FTS) on-board SCISAT indicates that the measurements using the frequency mode 19 have a significant low bias in both temperature (> 15 K) and water vapour (> 0.5 ppmv), while the measurements using frequency mode 13 agree with the other instruments considering estimated errors. PMC brightness data is provided by OSIRIS, Odin's other sensor. Combined SMR and OSIRIS data for some example orbits is considered. For these orbits, effects of PMCs on the water vapour distribution are clearly seen. Areas depleted of water vapour are found above layers with PMC, while regions of enhanced water vapour due to ice particle sedimentation are primarily placed between and under the clouds.


From beginning  autonomy  region now, every  region must have  to develop  ability get source income  region  for expenditure  APBD and which one with use maximum  tax assignment  region. For then needed a new system development to encode for processing on computer tax region and to increase service towards public. This  research  intend  for knowing everything about excellent  foundation income tax region and how  to processing data from obligation  tax  report, when  tax obligation  from  they tax and doing  registration,  fill up SPTPD  after processing will persistent value  tax  region must pay  for hotel and restaurant. Afterwards SPTPD to encode for processing on computer then result data mold form SKPD. Mold SKPD will give to obligation tax and can do payment with bring SKPD for get SSPD all of them will encode for processing with use language program Borland Delphi version 7.0 and for save database use SQL SERVER 2000. Result  this  research  showed  that system working  as of precisely  comply with a request service  public, however a lot of tax obligation  feel decrease  concept mechanism  reporting,  process  and pay for  tax obligation  until enthusiastic society community  less.


Hypertension is a major, independent risk factor for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. However, this pathology can arise through multiple pathways, which could influence vascular disease through distinct mechanisms. An overactive sympathetic nervous system is a dominant pathway that can precipitate in elevated blood pressure. We aimed to determine how the sympathetic nervous system directly promotes atherosclerosis in the setting of hypertension. We used a mouse model of sympathetic nervous system-driven hypertension on the atherosclerotic-prone apolipoprotein E-deficient background. When mice were placed on a western type diet for 16 weeks, we showed the evolution of unstable atherosclerotic lesions. Fortuitously, the changes in lesion composition were independent of endothelial dysfunction, allowing for the discovery of alternative mechanisms. With the use of flow cytometry and bone marrow imaging, we found that sympathetic activation caused deterioration of the hematopoietic stem and progenitor cell niche in the bone marrow, promoting the liberation of these cells into the circulation and extramedullary hematopoiesis in the spleen. Specifically, sympathetic activation reduced the abundance of key hematopoietic stem and progenitor cell niche cells, sinusoidal endothelial cells and osteoblasts. Additionally, sympathetic bone marrow activity prompted neutrophils to secrete proteases to cleave the hematopoietic stem and progenitor cell surface receptor CXCR4. All these effects could be reversed using the β-blocker propranolol during the feeding period. These findings suggest that elevated blood pressure driven by the sympathetic nervous system can influence mechanisms that modulate the hematopoietic system to promote atherosclerosis and contribute to cardiovascular events.


Though the integrated services model and resource reservation protocol (RSVP) provide support for quality of service, in the current Internet only best-effort traffic is widely supported. New high-speed technologies such as ATM (asynchronous transfer mode), gigabit Ethernet, fast Ethernet, and frame relay, have spurred higher user expectations. These technologies are expected to support real-time applications such as video-on-demand, Internet telephony, distance education and video-broadcasting. Towards this end, networking methods such as service classes and quality of service models are being developed. Today's Internet is a heterogeneous networking environment. In such an environment, resources available to multimedia applications vary. To adapt to the changes in network conditions, both networking techniques and application layer techniques have been proposed. In this paper, we focus on the application level techniques, including methods based on compression algorithm features, layered encoding, rate shaping, adaptive error control, and bandwidth smoothing. We also discuss operating system methods to support adaptive multimedia. Throughout the paper, we discuss how feedback from lower networking layers can be used by these application-level adaptation schemes to deliver the highest quality content.


Embodied theories hold that understanding what another person is doing requires the observer to map that action directly onto his or her own motor representation and simulate it internally. The human motor system may, thus, be endowed with a "mirror matching" device through which the same motor representation is activated, when the subject is either the performer or the observer of another's action ("self-other shared representation"). It is suggested that understanding action verbs relies upon the same mechanism; this implies that motor responses to these words are automatic and independent of the subject of the verb. In the current study, participants were requested to read silently and decide on the syntactic subject of action and nonaction verbs, presented in first (1P) or third (3P) person, while TMS was applied to the left hand primary motor cortex (M1). TMS-induced motor-evoked potentials were recorded from hand muscles as a measure of cortico-spinal excitability. Motor-evoked potentials increased for 1P, but not for 3P, action verbs or 1P and 3P nonaction verbs. We provide novel demonstration that the motor simulation is triggered only when the conceptual representation of a word integrates the action with the self as the agent of that action. This questions the core principle of "mirror matching" and opens to alternative interpretations of the relationship between conceptual and sensorimotor processes.


Although the event management field has grown considerably over the last decade, critical, social-scientific studies of the international events industry are rare. This book intends to help fill this void. It focuses on power, social and political relations, conflicts and controversies in the context of international events, popular festivals and famous spectacles. It draws on recent primary research and offers a diverse range of new and intriguing case studies, for example the Arirang Festival in North Korea, the Gay Games, the Gymnaestrada, horse-racing events, the London 2012 Olympics, regional and rural festivals, the World Baseball Classic, World Fairs/Expos and U2 concerts. The main aim of this volume is to bring the critical, social-scientific analysis of events, festivals and spectacles more into the core of the teaching of events management degree programmes. The book draws extensively upon the disciplines of politics, sociology, cultural studies and history. In the process, it addresses key themes such as: political economy, politics of popular culture, the global and the local, regionalism and globalization, nations and nationalism, international relations and foreign policy. This groundbreaking collection of essays is unique and innovative.


The study of germline stem cells and of germline cells has deep implications for the understanding of fertility, development and cancer. Nowadays, we are experiencing the very fascinating challenge of application of – OMICS technologies to this issue, which is opening new and unexpected horizons in virtually all the branches of biology. Here, we carried out a review of signalling systems involved in maturation of male germ cells and in the process that leads them to become fully fertile. In particular, we discuss the control mechanisms involved in capacitation and acrosome reaction that act at membrane level. Indeed, spermatozoa membranes play key roles in determining the achievement of fertility: they are the interface with the surrounding environment, they locate the signal trans- duction systems and they are active in recognizing and binding the oocyte. In addition, we discuss the effect of several compounds that could exert a negative effect on reproduc - tive activity, by interfering with the endocrine axis, the so-called endocrine disruptors.


You can succeed in your course and prepare to enter the nursing profession with this easy to read and highly practical text. This Eighth Edition of Leddy & Pepper's Conceptual Bases of Professional Nursing provides a broad overview of the nursing profession, addressing philosophical, developmental, sociocultural, environmental, political, health care delivery, and leadership issues vital for career enhancement. The authors cover professional nursing roles and client care issues, stimulate you to learn more about presented content, and present strategies that will help you deal with the emotional and ethical dimensions of professional practice. The following text features help enhance learning: Clinical, real-life scenarios begin and end each chapter to bring the content to life; Hood's Professional Nurse Contributions Model combines the cognitive, behavioral, and psychomotor domains of professional practice; From Theory to Practice questions links key chapter points to daily practice; Think Time questions throughout the text relate life experiences to the topics discussed; Focus on Research demonstrates how research informs clinical practice; Professional Building Blocks highlight clinical and professional implications; Your Digital Classroom provides opportunities for study and reflection using online resources; and Key terms and concept s are highlighted throughout. You can learn what to expect when you enter the nursing profession with practical coverage of nursing standards, time management skills, interviewing tips, and more.


User identification and access control have become a high demand feature on mobile devices because those devices are wildly used by employees in corporations and government agencies for business and store increasing amount of sensitive data. This paper describes SenGuard, a user identification framework that enables continuous and implicit user identification service for smartphone. Different from traditional active user authentication and access control, SenGuard leverages availability of multiple sensors on today's smartphones and passively use sensor inputs as sources of user authentication. It extracts sensor modality dependent user identification features from captured sensor data and performs user identification at background. SenGuard invokes active user authentication when there is a mounting evidence that the phone user has changed. In addition, SenGuard uses a novel virtualization based system architecture as a safeguard to prevent subversion of the background user identification mechanism by moving it into a privileged virtual domain. An initial prototype of SenGuard was created using four sensor modalities including, voice, location, multitouch, and locomotion. Preliminary empirical studies with a set of users indicate that those four modalities are suited as data sources for implicit mobile user identification.


Two approaches, i.e., a diffraction model considering Fresnel reflection and a paraxial beam propagation method are utilized to optimize the design of wedge-shaped lensed fibers for coupling between laser diodes of highly asymmetrical beam and single-mode fibers. It is demonstrated for the first time that, in contrast to the prevailing view, the non-Gaussian fiber-mode shape modification by the wedged fiber tip greatly reduces the coupling efficiency when the wedge angle is relatively large, while the Fresnel reflection is found to play an insignificant role. The fundamental cause of the non-Gaussian shape effect is fully explored and, consequently, a novel design is proposed to suppress this effect and increase coupling efficiency. Moreover, the novel design is relatively simple, and it does not complicate the fiber tip fabrication process.


Based on a landmark twenty-year study of 115 members of the Harvard Business School's Class of 1974, this vital and important book describes how the globalization of markets and competition is altering career paths, wage levels, the structure and functioning of corporations, and the very nature of work itself. The "New Rules" include: New Rule #1: Conventional career paths through large corporations no longer lead to success as they once did; New Rule #4: The greatest opportunities have shifted away from professional management in manufacturing to consulting and other service industries; New Rule #7: Success requires high personal standards and a strong desire to win.


Cholesterol is an important lipid that contributes to membrane fluidity and the formation of membrane microdomains. Changes in cholesterol levels can alter signaling processes in cells. Cholesterol is commonly considered to be a constituent of the plasma membrane. Clarke et al. challenge this view with data from human and rat skeletal muscle immunostained with an antibody that recognizes cholesterol. They find that the cholesterol-specific antibody recognizes primarily a structure that morphologically resembles the sarcoplasmic reticulum. Furthermore, the cholesterol antibody colocalized with an antibody against the Ca2+ ATPase of the sarcoplasmic reticulum and did not overlap with an antibody against the plasma membrane-localized dihydropyridine receptor. Clarke, M.S.F., Vanderburg, C.R., Bamman, M.M., Caldwell, R.W., and Feeback, D.L. (2000) In situ localization of cholesterol in skeletal muscle by use of a monoclonal antibody. J. Appl. Physiol. 89: 731-741. [Abstract] [Full Text]


Expressions like women are the "the mother of evil" (source of evil), that stealthiness is an innate born feature of women, and that men on the other hand have had to learn it much afterwards were taken word by word from Walter Rüben's"Ozean der Märchenströme. I. Die 25 Erzählungen des Dämons. (Vetalapancavimsati.) Mit einem Anhang über die 12 Erzählungen des Dede Korkut. 287 pp. 1944. FFC 133, beginning on thepage 183 "B) Über die Städter und die bürgerliche Moral der Hindu."Great effort has been spent during the translation of the due manuscript to avoid any kind of additions. Four works have been taken into consideration in the due manuscript. They are Vetālapañcaviṃśati,Vikrama-carita, ŚukasaptatiandPañcatantra. Rüben here had put forward the commercial life and besides this mentioned about the socio-cultural structure of women. This socio-cultural structure had of course been delivered by a point of view of a German. As a matter of fact persons working upon this subject, having a good deal of knowledge on it most certainly may wish to make some comments on the due subject.


In order for machine learning to be trusted in many applications, it is critical to be able to reliably explain why the machine learning algorithm makes certain predictions. For this reason, a variety of methods have been developed recently to interpret neural network predictions by providing, for example, feature importance maps. For both scientific robustness and security reasons, it is important to know to what extent can the interpretations be altered by small systematic perturbations to the input data, which might be generated by adversaries or by measurement biases. In this paper, we demonstrate how to generate adversarial perturbations that produce perceptively indistinguishable inputs that are assigned the same predicted label, yet have very different interpretations. We systematically characterize the robustness of interpretations generated by several widely-used feature importance interpretation methods (feature importance maps, integrated gradients, and DeepLIFT) on ImageNet and CIFAR-10. In all cases, our experiments show that systematic perturbations can lead to dramatically different interpretations without changing the label. We extend these results to show that interpretations based on exemplars (e.g. influence functions) are similarly susceptible to adversarial attack. Our analysis of the geometry of the Hessian matrix gives insight on why robustness is a general challenge to current interpretation approaches.


Coral reef fish have considerable larval behavioral capabilities that can lead to successful completion of the early pelagic life phase. In particular, vertical migration during ontogeny increases retention near natal reefs and decreases losses due to transport by currents. For those larvae that are not returning home, the relative influence of behavior (biology) and currents (physics) on their arrival pattern among adjacent and distant reefs is not known. Moreover, interactions of the naturally small-scale larval movements with those of larger-scale currents need to be evaluated with regard to the spatial patterns of recruitment. We used an offline Lagrangian stochastic modeling approach to explore the relative influence of physical (i.e. eddy perturbation, diffusion) and biological processes (i.e. vertical movement, mortality) on the connectivity of the coral reef fish population in the western Caribbean, a region with complex geomorphology and circulation. This study revealed that the impact of larval behavior extends beyond enhancing the process of self-recruitment by changing population connectivity patterns. Connectivity was significantly influenced by larval vertical movement, survival, and by the eddy field, all controlling arrival patterns near reefs. A sensitivity analysis was done to gauge the robustness of the results by varying the model parameters. We found that particle-tracking models with homogeneous parameterization of the sub-grid motion tended to bias dispersal from and along the reef track, which can be mitigated by using spatially explicit parameters calculated from the Eulerian velocity fields. Finally, larval survival emerged as a key component for connectivity estimates, the study of which poses a great challenge in tropical ecosystems.


Since the initial annotation of miRNAs from cloned short RNAs by the Ambros, Tuschl, and Bartel groups in 2001, more than a hundred studies have sought to identify additional miRNAs in various species. We report here a meta-analysis of short RNA data from Drosophila melanogaster , aggregating published libraries with 76 data sets that we generated for the modENCODE project. In total, we began with more than 1 billion raw reads from 187 libraries comprising diverse developmental stages, specific tissue- and cell-types, mutant conditions, and/or Argonaute immunoprecipitations. We elu-cidated several features of known miRNA loci, including multiple phased byproducts of cropping and dicing, abundant alternative 5 9 termini of certain miRNAs, frequent 3 9 untemplated additions, and potential editing events. We also identified 49 novel genomic locations of miRNA production, and 61 additional candidate loci with limited evidence for miRNA biogenesis. Although these loci broaden the Drosophila miRNA catalog, this work supports the notion that a restricted set of cellular transcripts is competent to be specifically processed by the Drosha/Dicer-1 pathway. Unexpectedly, we detected miRNA production from coding and untranslated regions of mRNAs and found the phenomenon of miRNA production from the antisense strand of known loci to be common. Altogether, this study lays a comprehensive foundation for the study of miRNA diversity and evolution in a complex animal model.


Objective: Extreme trauma exposure is common among refugees and is associated with severe mental and public health illnesses. Current medical curricula often provide limited training in the management of this patient group about assessment and follow-up. This study was aimed to evaluate the users' opinions on a dedicated virtual patient (VP) system for refugee trauma cases that were developed as a tool to enhance clinical, interpersonal and intercultural competence and examine learners' expectations and attitudes regarding the system and their acceptance of it. Methods: The authors developed an innovative educational tool based on VP methodology portraying a traumatized refugee patient, mediated by video sequences as a learning platform to train medical students in the clinical management of this patient group. The tool was tested by group (N = 32) of resident psychiatrists and studied using a mixed methodology, including self-reported data about expected and experienced attitudes, emotional attachment towards the patient and insights and feedback about the system. Results: The participants responded in a positive way towards this new educational system, ranking high in terms of experienced realism (median value 4 on a 5-point scale), engagement (median value 4.5 on a 5-point scale), concentration (median value 5 on a 5-point scale), and in terms of its ability to provoke emotional attachment toward the VP. The feedback module was considered a very important learning element. Conclusions: This VP system demonstrated high acceptance among participants and good potential as a training tool for the clinical management of refugee patients.


An essential feature of the production of all microbial control agents is an effective quality control system. Well-defined product specifications with accompanying quality control procedures help to maximize product performance, ensure product safety, standardize manufacturing costs and reduce the risks of supply failure, thus building user confidence. A production system that does not have a quality control system is one whose output is uncontrolled and a lack of thorough quality feedback can result in batches of product with variable concentrations of active agent. This results in products with variable performance leading to control failures by users and serious loss of user confidence. Strict quality control procedures are not only essential for product consistency, but also for safety. Where quality control is inadequate, microbial contamination of the final product is inevitable. In most of such cases this will merely lead to a loss of efficacy due to dilution of the active ingredient by competing microorganisms, but also the potential of producing human pathogens must be ruled out. Recognition of contaminants and quantification of the degree of contamination are therefore important in determining any possible risk to human health. Many low technology production systems in use around the world have minimal or no quality control procedures. This is unacceptable and can damage the reputation of microbial control in addition to possibly posing health risks to those that produce or are exposed to the product. Two case studies from developing countries, are used to illustrate how the lack of quality control procedures can lead to the production of low viability, highly contaminated products with low or negligible concentrations of the active ingredient. However, it is also demonstrated that low technology production systems in developing countries can produce high quality products, provided appropriate quality control procedures are firmly implemented. It must be recognized that quality control procedures can be more complex and technologically demanding than the production procedures themselves, but it is largely on the effectiveness of these control procedures that the long-term acceptability of fungal and viral products depends. This paper details the quality control procedures considered necessary in the mass production of fungi and viruses for use as biocontrol agents, and attempts to suggest reasonable standards that can be achieved by all producers.


This document describes the Mapping Service for the Locator/ID
Separation Protocol (LISP), implemented by two new types of LISP-
speaking devices -- the LISP Map-Resolver and LISP Map-Server -- that
provides a simplified "front end" for one or more Endpoint ID to
Routing Locator mapping databases. By using this service interface
and communicating with Map-Resolvers and Map-Servers, LISP Ingress
Tunnel Routers and Egress Tunnel Routers are not dependent on the
details of mapping database systems, which facilitates experimentation
with different database designs. Since these devices implement the
"edge" of the LISP infrastructure, connect directly to LISP-capable
Internet end sites, and comprise the bulk of LISP-speaking devices,
reducing their implementation and operational complexity should also
reduce the overall cost and effort of deploying LISP. This document
defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community.


This paper provides guidance for developing country-specific policy recommendations from the broad policy principles of the new OECD Jobs Strategy. To this end, it identifies countries' main policy challenges and develops broad policy packages to address them. It highlights the importance of considering countries' initial conditions – in terms of the state of the business cycle, fiscal and administrative capacity, past reforms, preferences and demography – for tailoring policy recommendations to country specific challenges, capabilities and needs. It also contains a checklist with key questions for each of the broad dimensions of labour market performance that should be considered when developing country-specific recommendations.


Abstract. The Martial Este Glacier in southern Tierra del Fuego was studied in order to estimate the surface mass balance from 1960 until 2099. For this reason a degree-day model was calibrated. Air temperature and precipitation data obtained from 3 weather stations as well as glaciological measurements were applied. The model was driven using a vertical air temperature gradient of 0.69 K/100 m, a degree-day factor for snow of 4.7 mm w.e. K−1 day−1, a degree-day factor for ice of 9.4 mm w.e. K−1 day−1 and a precipitation gradient of 22%/100 m. For the purpose of surface mass balance reconstruction for the time period 1960 until 2006 a winter vertical air temperature gradient of 0.57 K/100 m and a summer vertical air temperature gradient of 0.71 K/100 m were added as well as a digital terrain model. The key finding is an almost continuous negative mass balance of −772 mm w.e. a−1 throughout this period. While the calculation of the mass balance for the period 1960–2006 is based on instrumental records, the mass balance for the years 2007 until 2099 was estimated based on the IPCC SRES A2-scenario. To accomplish this estimation, the dataset of the global climate model HadCM3 was statistically downscaled to fit local conditions at Martial Este Glacier. Subsequently, the downscaled air temperature and precipitation were applied to a volume-area scaling glacier change model. Findings reveal an enduring deglaciation resulting in a surface area reduction of nearly 93% until 2099. This implicates that the Martial Este Glacier might be melted off at the beginning of the 22nd century.


Health information systems are an important planning and monitoring tool for public health services, but may lack information from the private health sector. In this fourth article in a series on district decision-making for health, we assessed the extent of maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH)-related data sharing between the private and public sectors in two districts of Uttar Pradesh, India; analysed barriers to data sharing; and identified key inputs required for data sharing. Between March 2013 and August 2014, we conducted 74 key informant interviews at national, state and district levels. Respondents were stakeholders from national, state and district health departments, professional associations, non-governmental programmes and private commercial health facilities with 3–200 beds. Qualitative data were analysed using a framework based on a priori and emerging themes. Private facilities registered for ultrasounds and abortions submitted standardized records on these services, which is compulsory under Indian laws. Data sharing for other services was weak, but most facilities maintained basic records related to institutional deliveries and newborns. Public health facilities in blocks collected these data from a few private facilities using different methods. The major barriers to data sharing included the public sector's non-standardized data collection and utilization systems for MNCH and lack of communication and follow up with private facilities. Private facilities feared information disclosure and the additional burden of reporting, but were willing to share data if asked officially, provided the process was simple and they were assured of confidentiality. Unregistered facilities, managed by providers without a biomedical qualification, also conducted institutional deliveries, but were outside any reporting loops. Our findings suggest that even without legislation, the public sector could set up an effective MNCH data sharing strategy with private registered facilities by developing a standardized and simple system with consistent communication and follow up.


The Common Core Standards for the English Language Arts (CCSS) provide explicit guidelines matching grade-level bands (e.g., 2–3, 4–5) with targeted text complexity levels. The CCSS staircase accelerates text expectations for students across Grades 2–12 in order to close a gap in the complexity of texts typically used in high school and those of college and career. The first step of the band at second and third grades is examined because it marks the entry into the staircase and a critical developmental juncture. In this article, we examine the theoretical and empirical support for three assumptions that underlie the acceleration of text complexity in Grades 2–3. Then we identify patterns in American reading achievement and instruction to illustrate the potential and far-reaching consequences of an increase in the first step of the CCSS staircase.


Most solid particles of practical interest are irregular in shape. In fixed- bed and fluidized-bed reactors, shape of particles can influence bed permeability, gas flow distribution, diffusion of mass and heat and reaction rates. The most popular empirical factor to describe non-spherical shapes of particles is sphericity. In this study sphericity of Highveld coal particles in the range 4.7- 106 mm and chars formed by devolatilization of this coal in the range 3.4-45 mm was determined using 3-D laser scanning technique. It was found that the relative variation in sphericity of the coal particles does not exceed 15% and, therefore, it can be possible to describe Highveld coal particles using an average value of sphericity calculated for all size classes. This average value is 0.793 (standard deviation 0.034) and it is very close to the sphericity of particles in the +37.5-53.0 mm size class (φS = 0.798). In contrast to this, the sphericity of devolatalized coal particles were observed to decrease slightly with increasing particle diameter, assuming an average value of 0.749 (standard deviation 0.042)


This paper focuses on the piping design of the nitrogen cooling system of the cold trap in PFBR. The stresses acting on the pipe were discussed and the displacement on the pipe during the nitrogen flow is also considered. The design as well as analysis is carried out in the system software called CAESAR II.


One of the main advantages of continuous scintillators is the excellent depth of interaction identification capability. We present the results of the Monte Carlo program OPTICS simulating the light response of a gamma-ray detector module comprising a continuous scintillator and an avalanche photodiode array to determine the effect of scintillator surface treatment on the ability to determine the three-dimensional position of interaction. We investigated the effect of optical coupling compounds, surface treatment, and depth of interaction on the distribution of scintillation photons reaching the photodetector pixels. We show that a black coating material without an air gap leads to improvement.


There is a growing number of dogs kept as companion animals, and the methods by which they are trained range broadly from those using mostly positive punishment and negative reinforcement (aversive-based methods) to those using primarily positive reinforcement (reward-based methods). Although the use of aversive-based methods has been strongly criticized for negatively affecting dog welfare, these claims do not find support in solid scientific evidence. Previous research on the subject lacks companion dog-focused research, investigation of the entire range of aversive-based techniques (beyond shock-collars), objective measures of welfare, and long-term welfare studies. The aim of the present study was to perform a comprehensive evaluation of the short- and long-term effects of aversive- and reward-based training methods on companion dog welfare. Ninety-two companion dogs were recruited from three reward-based (Group Reward, n=42) and four aversive-based (Group Aversive, n=50) dog training schools. For the short-term welfare assessment, dogs were video recorded for three training sessions and six saliva samples were collected, three at home (baseline levels) and three after the training sessions (post-training levels). Video recordings were then used to examine the frequency of stress-related behaviors (e.g., lip lick, yawn) and the overall behavioral state of the dog (e.g., tense, relaxed), and saliva samples were analyzed for cortisol concentration. For the long-term welfare assessment, dogs performed a cognitive bias task. Dogs from Group Aversive displayed more stress-related behaviors, spent more time in tense and low behavioral states and more time panting during the training sessions, showed higher elevations in cortisol levels after training and were more 'pessimistic' in the cognitive bias task than dogs from Group Reward. These findings indicate that the use of aversive-based methods compromises the welfare of companion dogs in both the short- and the long-term.


OBJECTIVE
Muscle involvement is a frequent histopathologic feature of sarcoidosis, but its clinical presentation has been rarely reported and its longterm outcome is unclear. We describe the features and outcome of 5 patients with muscle sarcoidosis.

METHODS
A retrospective study from hospital charts over the period 1985-2001 in 2 academic rheumatology centers.

RESULTS
Muscle involvement was identified in 5 patients (3 women, 2 men) aged 37 to 61 years, out of a cohort of 45 patients with sarcoidosis. No symptomatic muscle involvement was observed in the 20 patients with Lofgren syndrome of our series. Muscle involvement was the initial feature of the disease in 2 patients. Three patients had nodular type and the 2 others the myositic type. Chronic myopathy was not observed. Followup of patients with muscle disease ranged from 30 to 144 months (mean 72.6). Prednisone was used at a starting dose from about 0.33 to 1 mg/kg/day in all patients, then progressively tapered, and was associated with use of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) in 2 cases. One poorly compliant patient was persistently prescribed 40 mg/day prednisone and HCQ by his general practitioner and was still complaining of diffuse myalgia at the last 30-month followup visit. One patient also receiving HCQ experienced cardiac and renal relapse, leading to transient increase in steroid dosage, but remained symptom-free 3 years after steroid discontinuation. Muscle relapses occurred in the 3 other patients. Muscle symptoms disappeared after readministration of corticosteroids or increase of prednisone dosage. The first patient was symptom-free without any treatment at the last followup visit. The second was still taking 10 mg/day 144 months after disease onset because of steroid-dependent myalgia. The last patient was asymptomatic with 10 mg/day prednisone at the last evaluation.

CONCLUSION
Symptomatic muscle involvement may be an initial feature of chronic, and usually the systemic form of, sarcoidosis. It responds to corticosteroid therapy, but relapse seems to be frequent.


In this paper we introduce a new algorithm to train Support Vector Machines that aims at the minimisation of the PAC-Bayes bound on the error instead of at the traditional maximisation of the margin. The training of the classifier proceeds in two stages. First some data are used to estimate a prior distribution of classifiers. Then, an optimisation procedure based on quadratic programming determines the classifier as the centre of the posterior distribution that minimises the PAC-Bayes according to the previously obtained prior. The computational burden of the new algorithm is comparable to that of a standard SVM training including an N-fold cross validation based model selection. In this sense, the PAC-Bayes bound itself can be used to perform the model selection. The experimental work show that this new algorithm achieves classifiers with tighter PAC-Bayes bound that the original SVM and with sometimes better generalisation capabilities. c ©2005 Amiran Ambroladze, Emilio Parrado-Hernández and John Shawe-Taylor. Ambroladze, Parrado-Hernández and Shawe-Taylor


Today's large-scale computations, for instance, in the cloud, are subject to a multitude of risks concerning the divulging and ownership of private data. Privacy risks are mainly addressed using encryption-based techniques. These make data private, but costly to operate. Furthermore, today's computations have to ensure privacy properties in the context of complex software compositions, however, no general support for the declarative definition and implementation of privacy-preserving applications has been put forward. This article presents an approach to the correct composition of privacy-preserving applications in the cloud. Our approach provides language support for the composition of encryption-and fragmentation-based privacy-preserving algorithms. This language comes with a set of laws that allows us to verify privacy properties. Finally, we introduce implementation support in Scala that ensures privacy properties by construction using advanced features of Scala's type system.


This paper maps the changing nature of European equality regimes in order to establish the extent of variation or convergence across Europe and to evaluate the role of transnational policy paradigms and state-level institutions in shaping the emerging European equality regimes. We identify two significant tendencies in respect to European equality institutional regimes. First, a growing complexity in the institutional arrangements designed to address inequalities, with pre-2000 institutional arrangements increasingly augmented by newer equality institutions that adopt a judicialized approach to dealing with inequalities. Second, a Europe-wide tendency to widen the scope of equality policy thinking from a very small number of privileged inequality grounds (most frequently gender and ethnicity) to a much wider range of inequalities to be addressed by state policies. The overall impact of these two changes has been to create equality regimes characterized by a wide variety of forms and levels of protection for the different inequalities. This suggests that while a transnational policy paradigm has framed the evolving nature of equality regimes across Europe, the implementation of this paradigm is moulded by the power dynamics embedded in national and local equality institutions, creating a fragmented and complex patchwork of equality regimes that defy easy regional classification and complicate overly generalized narratives about the influence of global policy paradigms.


In the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, French revolutionaries proclaimed the freedom of speech, religion, and opinion. Censorship was abolished, and much like the early American Republic, France appeared to be on a path towards freedom, tolerance, and pluralism. Four years later, however, the country slid into a period of political terror. Thousands were indicted for speech crimes, many of whom were guillotined. The revolutionary government also set out to morally regenerate society, monitoring and engineering public opinion in ways scholars have characterized as totalitarian.

Charles Walton traces the origins of this tragic reversal back to the Old Regime. He shows that early advocates of press freedom only sought to abolish pre-publication censorship. Most still believed that injurious speech — or "calumny" — was a criminal offense, even treasonous, if it undermined the honor of sovereign authority or collective moral values.

In 1789, when institutions that had regulated honor and morality collapsed, calumny exploded, envenoming politics and society. Drawing on wide-ranging sources, from National Assembly debates to local police archives, Walton shows how relentless calumny and struggles to set legal and moral limits on free speech radicalized politics, leading to the brutal repression of "calumniators" and fanatical efforts to remake society's moral foundation during the Terror of 1793-1794.

In addition to advancing a bold, new interpretation of the origins of the Terror, Walton offers a groundbreaking approach to the study of the French Revolution. This moment of democratic transition — when old punitive reactions based on social hierarchy and authoritarianism mixed with new liberal but vaguely defined principles — was hampered by weak political legitimacy. The result: revolutionaries obsessed with securing honor, deference, and the moral restraint of the masses to shore up an abrupt regime change.


An approach to boundary evaluation and a boundary representation are presented. The approach uses nonmanifold topology (NMT) to overcome editing and coverage limitations associated with the manifold nature of existing boundary evaluation schemes. It merges the input primitives into a single representation and selects the entities in the merged set that constitute the result of the Boolean operations. Because this approach maintains a complete description of the input primitives, it provides some significant performance advantages when editing. In addition, the domain of 3D Boolean operations is extended to include surface and wireframe information as well as the traditional solid information. The implementation and testing of the approach are discussed.<<ETX>>


Context: The utility of prediction models in empirical software engineering (ESE) is heavily reliant on the quality of the data used in building those models. Several data quality challenges such as noise, incompleteness, outliers and duplicate data points may be relevant in this regard. Objective: We investigate the reporting of three potentially influential elements of data quality in ESE studies: data collection, data pre-processing, and the identification of data quality issues. This enables us to establish how researchers view the topic of data quality and the mechanisms that are being used to address it. Greater awareness of data quality should inform both the sound conduct of ESE research and the robust practice of ESE data collection and processing. Method: We performed a targeted literature review of empirical software engineering studies covering the period January 2007 to September 2012. A total of 221 relevant studies met our inclusion criteria and were characterized in terms of their consideration and treatment of data quality. Results: We obtained useful insights as to how the ESE community considers these three elements of data quality. Only 23 of these 221 studies reported on all three elements of data quality considered in this paper. Conclusion: The reporting of data collection procedures is not documented consistently in ESE studies. It will be useful if data collection challenges are reported in order to improve our understanding of why there are problems with software engineering data sets and the models developed from them. More generally, data quality should be given far greater attention by the community. The improvement of data sets through enhanced data collection, pre-processing and quality assessment should lead to more reliable prediction models, thus improving the practice of software engineering.


The alongshore variability of beach-dune systems and the response and recovery from extreme storms remains poorly understood. The height and extent of foredunes along barrier islands varies over a range of spatial scales, implying that during extreme storms, the beach-dune system should respond in different ways depending on the elevation and volume of the dunes relative to the storm surge. The purpose of this study is to use Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) and vibra-cores to investigate the internal structure of small, intermediate and large dunes along a 2.5 km transect of beach in Padre Island National Seashore, TX with particular attention to storm impacts. A series of dune normal and parallel GPR profiles were collected to capture the variation in beach-dune morphology at the three sites. Site locations were chosen along a transition from dissipative to intermediate beach states. Following the Sallenger (2000) storm impact model, the small dune is defined by low-lying topography that is susceptible to overwash and inundation depending on the size of the storm surge. The large dune is characteristic of the "collision regime", while the intermediate dune represents a transition between "overwash" and "collision regimes", with the underlying assumption that all three dunes would be impacted by the same level of surge during a single storm event. Results from the GPR survey suggest that each site contains a bright, laterally continuous radar reflector that is interpreted with the aid of the sedimentary data as an erosional layer. Different characteristic radar facies and sequence boundaries provide evidence as to how each dune evolved through and after the storm. Results from XRF scans and grain size analysis show a direct comparison between the GPR reflectors at the storm surface and spikes in calcium counts from XRF scans to distinct changes in grain size parameters at the same depth. It is argued that the location of each shell layer corresponds to a storm surface generated during a single storm, which means it is possible to interpret different recovery mechanisms. The presence of the storm layer across the backbeach and dunes provides evidence for the height and extent of the surge during the storm event. The data suggests that the small dune was overtopped by the surge, experiencing minimal erosion and recovery. The intermediate dune was completely eroded by the surge, but showed the greatest recovery of all the dune sites. The large dune was scoured at the base with marginal impact along its crest and shows minimal recovery after the storm. These results suggest that the evolution (i.e., transgression) of a barrier island varies considerably over short distances.


Poor initial planning processes have been implicated in the high failure rate of rural water and sanitation development projects. This research explored the relationship between local-level planning processes and long-term project sustainability from an implementer's perspective, through interviews with 30 water and sanitation development professionals from a range of regions and organizational types. Despite agreement among informants that the issues are social and institutional rather than technical, poor technology choice was the most commonly mentioned reason for failed projects. Sensitization of stakeholders to sustainability criteria by which technology can be matched to its intended social and institutional context appears fundamental to increased success. Other proposed improvements to planning include a more intensive phase of acquiring contextual data and understanding, an emphasis on human relationships for the project and the selection of individuals with passion, commitment, and integrity, an...


Self-employed media and cultural workers are key users of co-working spaces, where a growing number of independent workers share desks and office amenities, escape the isolation of working from home and seek contacts for paid work. Informed by interviews with coworking space operators and members, this article assesses coworking as a response to precarity. We argue that social and political ambivalence is intrinsic to the culture of coworking. First, we situate coworking in a political–economic context, claiming that coworking emerged as a worker-developed response to changing economic conditions but, in its current form, is increasingly commodified and ultimately reinforces labour flexibilization. Second, we survey meanings attached to coworking, highlighting tensions between coworking's counter-corporate identity and its recapitulation of neoliberal norms. Third, we address subjectivity formation, proposing that coworking spaces are a stage for the performance of network sociality. We conclude by considering coworking's political potential as a platform for collective action. This article forms part of the Special Issue 'On the Move', which marks the twentieth anniversary of European Journal of Cultural Studies.


Atomic scale computer simulation techniques are used to predict the thermal conductivity and defect properties in Li2O and Bi4Ti3O12 ceramics. Li2O represents a simple model system while Bi4Ti3O12 is a complex layered oxide ceramic with potential engineering applications due to its highly anisotropic thermal conductivity. The efficacy of the available pair potential models for Li2O are evaluated by comparing with experimental properties such as lattice parameters, elastic constants, thermal expansion and bulk modulus. Other properties, such as the Li ion superionic transition temperature, activation energy and diffusion coefficients for lithium diffusion are also compared with experimental data. The empirical potential set of Chroneos et al. [1] was found to best replicate the experimental diffusion data; therefore this potential was used to calculate the reaction energies of the intrinsic disorder properties and then used in the investigation of the thermal properties of Li2O. The thermal conductivity of Li2O was calculated using the velocity exchange methodology within molecular dynamic simulations. The calculated thermal conductivity was compared to experimental data. A number of corrections have been suggested to improve the agreement between the simulated thermal conductivity and the equivalent experimental value. These corrections and the underlying physics are also discussed within the context of Li2O. The extent of the isotope effect on thermal conductivity was investigated by comparing a supercell, in which there is a random distribution of 6Li and 7Li atoms, to a supercell where all the atoms are given a fractional average mass. The results show that the effect of a non-homogeneous distribution of Li mass can lead to a significant decrease in the thermal conductivity at low temperatures but this effect gradually decreased up to the superionic transition temperatures, where it disappears altogether. Two different structures have been proposed for low temperature Bi4Ti3O12, one with a monoclinic space group (B1a1 ) and the other with a very similar structure i but an more symmetric orthorhombic space group (B2cb). A combination of empirical pair potential and first principles density functional simulations are employed to compare the two structures. Both techniques suggest the monoclinic structure has the lower energy of the two candidate structures. The enthalpy of formation of Bi4Ti3O12 is calculated using first principles simulation. The macroscopic properties of a material are determined by the concentration and behaviour of point defects such as vacancies and interstitials. Therefore, density functional theory (DFT) simulations were performed to investigate the formation energies and defect volume of vacancy defect in Bi4Ti3O12. The pair potential set of Islam et al. [2] and Snedden et al. [3] which replicate the structural properties of Bi4Ti3O12 were used to predict the anisotropic thermal conductivities of Bi4Ti3O12 in x, y and z direction. The sound velocity and mean free paths were calculated and used to explain the temperature independent thermal conductivity in the z direction and the anisotropic thermal conductivity. Finally, the Debye temperature as a function of temperature was computed.


ABSTRACT A total of 73 soil samples were initially analyzed for lead (Pb) concentration as an indicator of the environment impact of smelter activity in the Port Pirie, South Australia. Chemometric techniques were used to assess the ability of near-infrared (NIR) reflectance spectroscopy to predict soil Pb using spectrally active soil characteristics such as soil carbon (C). The result indicated a strong linear relationship between log-transformed data of soil Pb and spectral reflectance in the range between 500 and 612 nm with R2 = 0.54 and a low root-mean-square error (RMSEv = 0.38) for the validation mode with an acceptable ratio of performance to deviation and ratio of error range (1.6 and 7.7, respectively). This study suggested that NIR spectroscopy based on auxiliary spectrally active components is a rapid and noninvasive assessment technique and has the ability to determine Pb contamination in urban soil to be useful in environmental health risk assessment.


Abstract
Peer learning has become a well-used (and well-researched) learning strategy for tertiary students in disciplines as far apart as physics, music, tourism, dental hygiene and outdoor education. However, while there is anecdotal evidence peer learning is used in some journalism schools, there is almost no academic literature to answer the basic questions: how, when, why, where and who—and importantly, does it help journalism students learn?

AUT University introduced peer review (students giving feedback on each other's weekly news stories) into journalism classes in 2008. This action research study used questionnaires and collaborative group meetings to gather the views of third year News Reporting students and their tutors on the benefits of peer review to student learning, and the challenges of the process.

The study found the students saw benefits arising in two separate areas: those from giving feedback, and those from receiving it. Initially, before the feedback took place, they envisaged more benefits arising from the latter, but this changed when they carried out the reviews, with reviewing seen as the most beneficial. This reflects findings in literature (Falchikov, 2007; Topping, 2009) about the benefits for the 'teacher' in reciprocal peer learning, but also reflects students' perceived frustrations from the process, and from their classmates' engagement in it.

The study concluded there is good reason to believe journalism students can benefit from peer review. However there is a risk with journalism students that the active process of 'peer reviewing' (the giving of feedback on news stories), be confused with 'peer editing' (the more passive journalistic activity where editors make changes to reporters' stories). While students wanted their peers to point out grammar and punctuation errors before their stories were seen by their tutor, there is the risk that such directive or superficial feedback (Cho & MacArthur, 2010; Hattie & Timperley, 2007) reduces the benefits to student learning; it may even hinder learning in some cases.

The study also found participants believed preparation, training, modelling and monitoring to be crucial parts of the peer review process. Moreover, without the opportunity to discuss the feedback with each other, potential benefits of peer review could be lost. There are also additional benefits for students when they also discuss with their peers their learning from the peer review process itself.

The importance of the structure of the peer review process means that while on the surface, peer review might appear to exclude the tutors, in fact their role is critical. When faced with challenges to the process, the study found many students default to the traditional, passive: 'teacher, sort this out' model. However, this research identified the role of the teacher in peer review as someone there to scaffold the student through the process of arriving at learning—not through the learning itself.


The Family Archive device is an interactive multi-touch tabletop technology with integrated capture facility for the archiving of sentimental artefacts and memorabilia. It was developed as a technology probe to help us open up current family archiving practices and to explore family archiving in situ. We detail the deployment and study of three of these devices in family homes and discuss how deploying a new, potentially disruptive, technology can foreground the social relations and organizing systems in domestic life. This in turn facilitates critical reflection on technology design.


This study explores through descriptive analysis the similarities of structured group learning experiences such as first-year seminars, learning communities, orientation, success courses, and accelerated developmental education programs, in terms of their design features and implementation at community colleges. The study takes as its conceptual starting point the hypothesis put forth by Hatch and Bohlig (2013) that such cohort- or group-structured programs designed to equip students with skills, knowledge, and support networks for successful college-going, and which often go by different names, may be in fact better characterized as variations or instances of a more general type of program due to the similarities of their programmatic and curricular structure. This article explores program features beyond curricular design to consider target audience, mandatory status, reported participation rates, program duration, credit-bearing status, and the roles of involved personnel, among other features. Using data from the 2012 national administration of the Community College Institutional Survey (CCIS) and the Community College Survey of Student Engagement ([CCSSE], Center for Community College Student Engagement, 2013), we provide evidence that all five programs are indeed similar in important ways, even while revealing important dissimilarities that corroborate the need for more detailed accounting of program features noted in the literature. The findings provide baseline data for practitioners and researchers alike in their efforts to further understand why these high-impact practices work, for whom, and under what circumstances, so as to know how to deploy scarce resources.


Embedded systems are shaping a new world. There is no sector immune to their adoption and the effects in the long term are unpredictable and fascinating. Embedded systems are designed by embedded system engineers. What technical education and what kind of practical skills these new engineers will need? This is a complex and unanswered question. In this paper we describe our proposal to equip engineering students with knowledge and experience: REPTAR. REPTAR (Reconfigurable Embedded Platform for Training And Research) is a feature rich complex embedded system designed for giving the opportunity to tomorrow's engineers of having hands-on experience on modern technologies and learning by doing. As a side effect REPTAR revealed itself as an invaluable tool for rapid prototyping and research explorations.


Recent years have seen a flurry of activities in designing provably efficient nonconvex procedures for solving statistical estimation problems. Due to the highly nonconvex nature of the empirical loss, state-of-the-art procedures often require proper regularization (e.g. trimming, regularized cost, projection) in order to guarantee fast convergence. For vanilla procedures such as gradient descent, however, prior theory either recommends highly conservative learning rates to avoid overshooting, or completely lacks performance guarantees. This talk uncovers a striking phenomenon in nonconvex optimization: even in the absence of explicit regularization, vanilla gradient descent enforces proper regularization implicitly under various statistical models. In fact, gradient descent follows a trajectory staying within a basin that enjoys nice geometry, consisting of points incoherent with the sampling mechanism. This "implicit regularization" feature allows gradient descent to proceed in a far more aggressive fashion without overshooting, which in turn results in substantial computational savings. Focusing on three fundamental statistical estimation problems, i.e. phase retrieval, low-rank matrix completion, and blind deconvolution, we establish that gradient descent achieves nearoptimal statistical and computational guarantees without explicit regularization. In particular, by marrying statistical modeling with generic optimization theory, we develop a general recipe for analyzing the trajectories of iterative algorithms via a leave-one-out perturbation argument. As a byproduct, for noisy matrix completion, we demonstrate that gradient descent achieves near-optimal error control — measured entry wise and by the spectral norm — which might be of independent interest. Bio: Since January 2018, I am an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Carnegie Mellon University, where I hold the Robert E. Doherty Career Development Professorship. I am also an affiliated faculty member in the Machine Learning Department in the School of Computer Science. Previously I was with the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Dept. of Biomedical Informatics at The Ohio State University. I completed my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 2012, where I was fortunate to work with Prof. Robert Calderbank. I received a M.A. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 2009, and a B.Eng. in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2007. My research is motivated by the challenge of efficiently extracting information embedded in a large amount of data, as well as collecting data efficiently to gather actionable information. I am interested in the mathematics of data representation that take advantage of structures and geometry to minimize complexity and improve performance. Specific topics include mathematical and statistical signal processing, machine learning, large-scale optimization, sampling and information theory, with applications in sensing, imaging and big data. I am a recipient of NSF CAREER Award, AFOSR Young Investigator Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, ORAU Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award, Google Faculty Research Award, IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award, IEEE ICASSP Best Student Paper Award, among others. SEMINAR NOTES: (REFRESHMENTS SERVED AT 4:00 PM) ECE Seminar Committee Aswin Sankaranarayanan firstname.lastname@example.com


The IS-IS routing protocol (Intermediate System to Intermediate
System, ISO 10589) requires reliable protocols at the link layer for
point-to-point links. As a result, it does not use a three-way
handshake when establishing adjacencies on point-to-point media. This
paper defines a backward-compatible extension to the protocol that
provides for a three-way handshake. It is fully interoperable with
systems that do not support the extension. Additionally, the
extension allows the robust operation of more than 256 point-to-point
links on a single router. This extension has been implemented by
multiple router vendors; this paper is provided to the Internet
community in order to allow interoperable implementations to be built
by other vendors. [STANDARDS-TRACK]


OBJECTIVE The post nasal drip is a very common symptom of sinusitis, allergic rhinosinusopathy, the gastroesophageal reflux disease, but there are some patients, who have a post nasal drip, sensation of a foreign body in the nasopharynx and a non-specific irritant cough with no other symptoms or signs of sinus inflammations or allergy. In the posterior rhinoscopy mucus discharge is seen. Ethiology and pathogenesis of this syndrome evolution are still unclear. The aim of the study was to identify the neuropeptide appearance and distribution in nasal and nasopharyngeal mucosa in the patients with the isolated post nasal drip syndrome and the control group, for the comparison of the data. MATERIALS AND METHODS. We investigated the biopsies of nasal and nasopharyngeal mucosa from 11 adult patients, who had the isolated post nasal drip syndrome, and from 2 control group patients without post nasal drip, by conventional light microscopy and immunohistological techniques for the protein gene product 9.5 (PGP), Neuropeptide Y (NPY), serotonin, Substance P (SP), vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP), Calcitonin gene related peptide (CGRP) and Chromogranin A (CgA). RESULTS. The conventional light microscopy showed a very thick basal membrane, the sclerosis of small blood vessels, the hyperplasia of mucosal glands- the neurogenic inflammation, mostly in nasopharyngeal mucosa. The abundance of PGP-containing nerve fibres was found around glands, sclerotic arterioles in almost all the cases. The main neuropeptides that were found in the mucosa of the patients were VIP, NPY, CgA, mostly in the nasopharyngeal mucosa. There were differences in PGP-containing structures and the selective neuropeptide (NPY, CgA, and VIP) distribution in nasal and nasopharyngeal mucosa in comparison with the control group. CONCLUSIONS. The main histological changes in the patients with the isolated post nasal drip syndrome are a thickened basal membrane, the hyperplasia of basal cells, pronounced hyperplasia of mucosal glands, the sclerosis of small arterioles. The main neuropeptides that are found in nasal and nasopharyngeal mucosa samples are PGP 9.5, vasoactive intestinal peptide, neuropeptide Y and chromogranin in the post nasal drip syndrome group. There is an imbalance of common neuropeptide-containing innervations, mainly sympathic nerves, the precursors of neuropeptides- chromogranins in the nasopharyngeal mucosa of the patients with the post nasal drip syndrome. SP and CGRP are not the most characteristic neuropeptides in the case of the post nasal drip syndrome pathogenesis.


A desert daily exoatmospheric radiance model (DERM) based on a well-calibrated (reference) geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) satellite visible sensor can be used to transfer the calibration to a (target) GEO sensor located at the same equatorial longitude location. The DERM is based on the reference GEO daily radiances observed over a single pseudoinvariant calibration site (PICS) being that the daily angular conditions are repeated annually for any historical or successive colocated GEO. The GEO-specific PICSs used in the study are first inspected using the well-calibrated Aqua-MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) exoatmospheric reflectances for stability. The Libyan Desert site was found to be stable within 1 % over ten years. The average clear-sky daily local-noon interannual variability based on Meteosat-9 0.65- μm top-of-atmosphere radiances over the Libyan Desert is 0.74 %, which implies that the combined surface and atmospheric column is invariant. A spectral band adjustment factor, based on Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Cartography spectral radiances, is used to account for sensor spectral response function (SRF) differences between the reference and target GEO. The GEO reference calibration was based on the GEO/Aqua-MODIS ray-matched radiance intercalibration transfer technique. The reference Meteosat-9 DERM and ray-matched calibration consistency was within 0.4 % and 1.9 % for Meteosat-8 and Meteosat-7, respectively. Similarly, GOES-10 and GOES-15 were calibrated based on the GOES-11 DERM using the Sonoran Desert and were found to have a consistency within 1 % and 3 %, respectively.


Generally, forward osmosis (FO) membrane performance is defined based on its intrinsic parameters, namely the water permeability (A), solute permeability (B), and structural parameter (S). This study was conducted to examine the performance of the commercial membrane NF2 in an FO system and to validate and compare the intrinsic value of A, B, and S obtained by single stage-stage and two-stage methods. The NF2 membrane was unable to demonstrate a good configuration for an FO membrane due to its membrane structure. Comparing the two different orientations in the single-stage method, it appears that both orientations display distinct sets of intrinsic values for the same membrane type.
A comparison on the two-stage methods between the pressure-retarded osmosis -FO and reverse osmosis (RO)-FO methods reveals a new standard for the two-stage methods where higher fluxes must be produced from the first stage in order to attain an accurate value of S at the second stage.
Additionally, the RO-FO methods were found to be not relevant for testing the ability of a membrane for FO application due to the hydraulic pressure involved during the compaction procedure. The two-stage method with proposed new standards can be the ideal testing procedure for the membrane in FO applications. This is because all the intrinsic values can be separately determined considering all the possible concentration polarization that might occur with both orientations compared with the attempts of fitting all possible values in the generated equations, as in single-stage methods.


We present an automatic vehicle detection system for aerial surveillance in this paper. In this system, we escape from the stereotype and existing frameworks of vehicle detection in aerial surveillance, which are either region based or sliding window based. We design a pixel wise classification method for vehicle detection. The novelty lies in the fact that, in spite of performing pixel wise classification, relations among neighboring pixels in a region are preserved in the feature extraction process. We consider features including vehicle colors and local features. For vehicle color extraction, we utilize a color transform to separate vehicle colors and non-vehicle colors effectively. For edge detection, we apply moment preserving to adjust the thresholds of the Canny edge detector automatically, which increases the adaptability and the accuracy for detection in various aerial images. Afterward, a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) is constructed for the classification purpose. We convert regional local features into quantitative observations that can be referenced when applying pixel wise classification via DBN. Experiments were conducted on a wide variety of aerial videos. The results demonstrate flexibility and good generalization abilities of the proposed method on a challenging data set with aerial surveillance images taken at different heights and under different camera angles.


Increasing number of transgenic and knockout strains of laboratory rodents has been developed to provide reliable models of human cardiovascular diseases. Due to apparent differences in platelet physiology, morphology, biochemistry, etc. between rodents and men, methods employed to study blood platelets in rodents should always consider these differences in a reasonably critical way. Flow cytometry is a conven‐ ient tool that enables to easily cope with the minute amounts of the available biologi‐ cal material and providing an extremely versatile information. This review focuses on the practical and methodological aspects of flow cytometry, pointing to the key elements of the commonly used protocols for determining of multiple parameters of blood platelet (patho)physiology in mice and rats. We summarized and critically reviewed the available procedures, as well as figured out how to overcome possible obstacles, shortcomings, drawbacks or artefacts that a researcher may encounter when monitor‐ ing various phenomena intimately associated with blood platelet biology. Flow cytometry assays have been also collated with some alternative techniques (intravital fluorescence microscopy, in vitro platelet adhesion under flow conditions). We hope that our paper may further facilitate other researchers to study mouse and rat platelets with the use of the most optimal and the least artefact-prone procedures.


The aim of this thesis was to measure inequalities in the burden of vaccine-preventable disease and vaccine uptake amongst older individuals in England, using primary care electronic health records (EHR) linked to hospitalisation and deprivation data. Social factors previously associated with vaccination amongst older individuals in Europe were first determined by conducting a comprehensive systematic review. Methods were developed to identify and investigate the recording of these factors in the linked UK EHR data. These methods were then applied in two cohort studies, focussing on herpes zoster (a common debilitating condition in older populations), to identify the social determinants of (a) zoster incidence in the decade before zoster vaccine introduction, 2003-2013 and (b) uptake of zoster vaccination in 2013-15 (the first two years after vaccine introduction). The methodological study showed that, among 591,037 individuals aged ≥65 years, completeness of recording of individual social factors varied from 1.6-80%. The ethnic distribution, and prevalence of deprivation, living alone, living as a couple and care home residence, were all comparable with data from the 2011 English Census. In the first cohort study of 862,470 older individuals, those at higher risk of zoster in the prevaccination era included females, those in care homes, those of White ethnicity and nonimmigrants, with increased zoster incidence in these groups ranging from 10-100%. Known clinical risk factors for zoster (co-morbidities and immunosuppressive treatment) explained little of these increased risks. In the second cohort study of 35,333 individuals, social factors associated with lower uptake of zoster vaccination included: care home residence (adjusted odds ratio (aOR):0.64 (95% confidence interval: 0.57-0.73)), living alone (aOR:0.85 (0.81- 0.90)), and being of non-White ethnicity (for example: Black ethnicity versus White ethnicity: aOR:0.61 (0.49-0.75)). Uptake decreased by increasing deprivation: aOR (most deprived areas versus most affluent): 0.69 (0.64-0.75). Lower uptake was also seen amongst females in the older catch-up group. The findings from this thesis should help inform specific interventions to mitigate zoster vaccine inequalities, including amongst doubly disadvantaged groups (with higher zoster burden and lower vaccine uptake) such as care home residents. The methods developed 5 can also be used to examine other health inequalities in older UK populations. Future linkages to other data sources, such as the Census, would further enhance the availability of information for studies of the social determinants of health.


This is an in-depth, comprehensive, and totally updated guide to the legal issues relating to common exemption clauses, and the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999. The expert analysis covers both the incorporation and construction of the key clauses, the relevant legislation, plus the recent Law Commissions' proposal for a single piece of unfair terms legislation. This indispensable information is presented in a clear and practical fashion enabling practitioners to quickly access the vital guidance and knowledge, and advise with certainty.


ETFs are baskets of securities designed to track the performance of an index. They are designed to provide exposure to broad-based indexes at a lower cost. We first analyzed why ETF should be the choice for an investment. We provide a brief history of this segment, key attributes of ETFs, and investments strategies and implementations with ETFs. The article then presents data analysis and a series of forecasting methods with data analysis techniques to evaluate the performance of each method. The data analysis and the forecast evaluation is to determine the best forecasting model for a single ETF (SPY). The different techniques considered include single exponential smoothing, Holt's exponential smoothing, simple linear regression, multiple regression and various versions of Box-Jenkins (ARIMA) models. Based on the evaluation of a decade of past historical data, we provide a guidance for the price of our ETF (SPY) using the multiple regression technique (with an R-square of 98.4%), which produced promising results (with low forecast errors of 1% across several forecast metrics), among the different techniques evaluated. Promising results were also obtained using the Multiple regression technique on several other popularly traded ETF's.


Parallel processing has been applied for time domain simulations of power system transient behavior in order to implement real-time dynamic security assessment. In this paper, two different algorithms have been implemented and compared: the Shifted-Picard (SP) and the Very DisHonest Newton (VDHN). The former has been proved to be effective when parallelism-in-time is adopted whereas the latter is an effective solver when parallelism-in-space is exploited. Furthermore, two different parallel computing architectures have been considered: namely, the Sequent Symmetry computer with 26 processors which is a data shared memory machine and the nCUBE characterized by 128 CPUs which is a typical message passing parallel machine. A realistic network with 662 buses has been used to assess the performance of the different implementations. The comparison of the results allows the reader to understand both the limitations of the algorithmic approaches and the constraints imposed by the two parallel architectures. An optimal grain of the parallelism associated to the problem can be identified through the reported experience.