We prepare Six(ZrO2)100?x composite films using the co-sputtering method. The chemical structures of the films which are prepared under different conditions are analyzed with X-ray photoemission spectroscopy. Thermal treatment influences on optical property and resistance switching characteristics of these composite films are investigated by spectroscopic ellipsometry and semiconductor parameter analyzer, respectively. With the proper Si-doped Six(ZrO2)100?x interlayer, the Al/ Six(ZrO2)100?x/Al device cell samples present very reliable and reproducible switching behaviors. It provides a feasible solution for easy multilevel storage and better fault tolerance in nonvolatile memory application.


Since the global financial crisis, insolvency and restructuring law have been at the forefront of law reform initiatives in Europe and elsewhere. The specific topic of business rescue appears to rank top on the insolvency law related agenda of both the European Union (EU) and national legislators faced by a rapid growth of insolvencies, which clearly highlighted the importance of efficient mechanisms for dealing with distressed, but viable business. For the European Law Institute (ELI), this fuelled the momentum to launch an in-depth project on furthering the rescue of such businesses across Europe. The European Law Institute, established in 2011, is an independent non-profit organisation established to initiate, conduct and facilitate research, make recommendations and provide practical guidance in the field of European legal development. Building on the wealth of diverse legal traditions, ELI's mission is the quest for better law-making in Europe and the enhancement of European legal integration. By its endeavours, ELI seeks to contribute to the formation of a more vigorous European legal community, integrating the achievements of the various legal cultures, endorsing the value of comparative knowledge, and taking a genuinely pan-European perspective. As such, its work covers all branches of the law: substantive and procedural; private and public.
In September 2013, the ELI Council approved the proposal for a project on the 'Rescue of Business in Insolvency Law' ('Business Rescue Project') and appointed Prof. em. Bob Wessels (Leiden, Netherlands) and Prof. Stephan Madaus (Halle-Wittenberg, Germany) as Project Reporters to lead this two-stage project. The first stage comprised the drafting of National Inventory and Normative reports by National Correspondents (NCs) from 13 EU countries. In addition, Gert-Jan Boon, University of Leiden, prepared an inventory report on international recommendations from standard-setting organisations, such as UNCITRAL, the World Bank, the American Bankruptcy Institute or the Nordic-Baltic Business Rescue Recommendations, under the supervision of the Reporters. Based primarily on these detailed reports, the second stage consisted of drafting the ELI Instrument on Business Rescue ('ELI Business Rescue Report') that elaborates recommendations for a legal framework enabling the further development of coherent and functional rules for business rescue in Europe. After the Project Team finalised the draft Instrument in early 2017, ELI Fellows and Members of the ELI Council voted to approve the 'ELI Business Rescue Report' at the ELI General Assembly, representing ELI Members, and Annual Conference in Vienna (Austria) on 6 September 2017 with no objection. It consists of 115 recommendations explained on more than 375 pages. Oxford University Press will published it soon. The Report is electronically available here as well as on the website of the ELI.
The Rescue of Business in Insolvency Law project is timely and may have a significant and positive impact on the harmonisation efforts of the European Commission as laid down in the November 2016 Proposal for a Directive on preventive restructuring frameworks. The Report contains recommendations on a variety of themes affected by the rescue of financially distressed businesses: legal rules for practitioners and courts, contract law, treatment and ranking of creditors' claims, labour law, laws relating to transaction avoidance and corporate law.
The Report's ten chapters cover:
(1) Actors and procedural design,
(2) Financing a rescue,
(3) Executory contracts,
4) Ranking of creditor claims; governance role of creditors,
(5) Labour, benefit and pension issues,
(6) Avoidance transactions in out-of-court workouts and pre-insolvency procedures and possible safe harbours,
(7) Sales on a going-concern basis,
(8) Rescue plan issues: procedure and structure; distributional issues,
(9) Corporate group issues, and
(10) Special arrangements for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) including natural persons (but not consumers).
The Report also includes a glossary of terms and expressions commonly used in restructuring and insolvency law.
The topics addressed in the Report are intended to present a tool for better regulation in the EU, developed in the spirit of providing a coherent, dynamic, flexible and responsive European legislative framework for business rescue. Mindful of the European Commission's commitment to better legal drafting, the Report's proposals are formulated as comprehensibly, clearly, and as consistently as possible. Still, the recommendations are not designed to be overly prescriptive of specific outcomes, given the need for commercial flexibility and in recognition of the fact that parties will bargain in the 'shadow of insolvency law'. The Report is addressed to the European Union, Member States of the EU, insolvency practitioners and judges, as well as scholars. The targeted group many times flows explicitly from the text of a recommendation or the context in which such a recommendation is developed and presented. The Reporters cherish the belief that the report will assist in taking a next, decisive step in the evolutionary process of the European side of business rescue and insolvency law.


[1] Global images of ion intensities are deconvolved from TWINS ENA images during the main and recovery phase of a CIR storm on 22 July 2009. The global spatial ion images taken at different times, along with solar wind data, geomagnetic activity indices, geosynchronous orbit observations, and in situ measurements from the THEMIS mission provide a picture of the evolution of the ring current during both the main phase and early recovery phase of the storm. Major features of the evolution are consistent with expectations based upon time dependent geomagnetic indices, e.g., SYM/H and ASY/H, and geosynchronous orbit detection of dipolarizations from GOES 11 and 12. Direct comparisons are made with in situ THEMIS ESA and SST spectral measurements. The peak energy of the ion spectrum in the ring current is seen to decrease in the recovery phase. The time evolution of the ion energy spectra over the range from 2.5 to 97.5 keV at the spatial peaks of the ring current in the inner magnetosphere obtained from ENA images is presented for the first time.


We will examine two topics in this thesis. Firstly we give a result which improved a bound for a question asking which values the Lebesgue density
of a measurable set in the real line must have (joint work with Toby O'Neil
and Marianna Csornyei). We also show how this result relates to the results obtained by others. Secondly, we give several results which indicate when a
Lebesgue measurable function has a random Riemann integral which converges, in either the weak and strong sense.
A Lebesgue measurable set A, subset of R, has density either 0 or 1 at almost
every point. Here the density at some point x refers to the proportion of a small
ball around x which belongs to A, in the limit as the size of the ball tends to 0.
Suppose that A is not either a nullset, which has density 0 at every single point,
or the complement of a nullset, which similarly has density 1 everywhere. Then
there are certain restrictions on the range of possible values at those exceptional
points where the density is neither 0 nor 1. In particular, it is now known that if δ < 0.268486 ..., where the exact value is the positive root of 8δ^3+8 δ^2+ δ1 = 0,
then there must exist a point at which the density of A is between δ and 1 - δ, and that this does not remain true for any larger value of δ.
This was proved in a recent paper by Ondrej Kurka. Previous to his work our result given in this thesis was the best known counterexample. We give the background to this, construct the counterexample, and discuss Kurka's proof of
the exact bound.
The random Riemann integral is defined as follows. Given a Lebesgue measurable function f : [0, 1] \rightarrow R and a partition of [0, 1] into disjoint intervals,
we can choose a point belonging to each interval, independently and uniformly with respect to Lebesgue measure. We then use these random points to form
a Riemann sum, which is itself a random variable. We are interested in knowing whether or not this random Riemann sum converges in probability to some
real number. Convergence in probability to r means that the probability that
Riemann sum differs from r by more than \varepsilon, is less than \varepsilon, provided that the
maximum length of an interval in the partition is sufficiently small.
We have previously shown that this type of convergence does take place
provided that f is Lebesgue integrable. In other words, the random Riemann
integral, defined as the limit in probability of the random Riemann sums, has
at least the power of the Lebesgue integral. Here we prove that the random
Riemann integral of f does not converge unless |f|^1-e is integrable for e > 0
arbitrarily small. We also give another, more technical, necessary condition
which applies to functions which are not Lebesgue integrable but are improper
Riemann integrable.
We have also done some work on the question of almost sure convergence.
This works slightly differently. We must choose, in advance, a sequence of partitions (Pn)n∞=1, with the size of the intervals of Pn tending to zero. We form a
probability space on which we can take random Riemann sums independently on each partition of the sequence. Almost sure convergence means that the
sequence of random Riemann sums converges to some (unique) limit with probability
1 in this space. There are two complementary results; firstly that almost
sure convergence holds if the function is in Lp and the sequence of partition sizes is in l^p-1 for some p \ge 1. Secondly, we have a partial converse which only applies
to nonnegative functions, and if the ratio between the lengths smallest and biggest intervals in each partition is bounded uniformly. This says that if for some p \ge 1 f is not in L^p and the partition sizes are not in l^p-1, then the sequence of Riemann sums diverges with probability 1.


A null mutation of the Drosophila calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II gene (CaMKII) was generated using homologous recombination. Null animals survive to larval and pupal stages due to a large maternal contribution of CaMKII mRNA, which consists of a short 3′-untranslated region (UTR) form lacking regulatory elements that guide local translation. The selective loss of the long 3′UTR mRNA in CaMKII-null larvae allows us to test its role in plasticity. Development and evoked function of the larval neuromuscular junction are surprisingly normal, but the resting rate of miniature excitatory junctional potentials (mEJPs) is significantly lower in CaMKII mutants. Mutants also lack the ability to increase mEJP rate in response to spaced depolarization, a type of activity-dependent plasticity shown to require both transcription and translation. Consistent with this, overexpression of miR-289 in wild-type animals blocks plasticity of spontaneous release. In addition to the defects in regulation of mEJP rate, CaMKII protein is largely lost from synapses in the mutant. All phenotypes are non–sex-specific and rescued by a fosmid containing the entire wild-type CaMKII locus, but only viability and CaMKII localization are rescued by genomic fosmids lacking the long 3′UTR. This suggests that synaptic CaMKII accumulates by two distinct mechanisms: local synthesis requiring the long 3′UTR form of CaMKII mRNA and a process that requires zygotic transcription of CaMKII mRNA. The origin of synaptic CaMKII also dictates its functionality. Locally translated CaMKII has a privileged role in regulation of spontaneous release, which cannot be fulfilled by synaptic CaMKII from the other pool. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT As a regulator of synaptic development and plasticity, CaMKII has important roles in both normal and pathological function of the nervous system. CaMKII shows high conservation between Drosophila and humans, underscoring the usefulness of Drosophila in modeling its function. Drosophila CaMKII-null mutants remain viable throughout development, enabling morphological and electrophysiological characterization. Although the structure of the synapse is normal, maternally contributed CaMKII does not localize to synapses. Zygotic production of CaMKII mRNA with a long 3′-untranslated region is necessary for modulating spontaneous neurotransmission in an activity-dependent manner, but not for viability. These data argue that regulation of CaMKII localization and levels by local transcriptional processes is conserved. This is the first demonstration of distinct functions for Drosophila CaMKII mRNA variants.


Our aim was to determine the overall rates of general and sexual re-offending of youth (i.e. aged under 18 at the time of offence) charged with sexual offences, ranging from indecent exposure to rape, over 6.5 years in South Australia and whose cases were finalised in court, by conference and by formal caution (N = 365). Controlling for previous offending, we examined if re-offending varied by site of finalisation or by referral to Mary Street, a specialist treatment program. Follow-up times ranged from six to 84 months. We applied a parametric form of survival analysis by fitting the Weibull 'mixture model' to the Kaplan-Meier cumulative distribution of failure times (time to re-offend). Covariates, such as prior offending or referral to Mary Street, were introduced to test for differences in survival rates, immune proportions or both between groups. By the cut-off date, 54% of youth had been charged with new non-sexual offences but only 9% with new sexual offences. Court youth had a higher rate of re-offending than conference youth, but these differences were largely explained by prior offending. For the subgroup with no previous offending, however, a significantly slower rate of re-offending was observed for conference youth and for those who were referred to Mary Street. We were able to control for the main effect of prior offending, but complex interactions between co-variates such as offence types, early admissions to offending and legal and therapeutic responses could not be disentangled in our small sample, and we could not explore factors linked specifically to sexual re-offending. Future research should examine the enmeshment of key factors that set youth on differing legal pathways; this phenomenon affects studies comparing conference and court outcomes, whether in naturalistic settings or in randomised field experiments.


The Cold-Gas Dynamic-Spray process also known as Cold Spray (CS) has been researched for three decades. The CS process is a solid-state deposition technique via supersonic velocity of powder particles at a temperature significantly below the melting point of the spray material. This thesis presents background on the overall CS process parameters, and additional information on the microstructural and mechanical properties of typical Cold Sprayed materials. This Thesis primarily presents a study on the microstructural annealing response of CS Al 6061. It should be noted that for this study, the term "annealing" is used in the sense of the classical metallurgical definition of annealing, and not a specific temper designation for the 6061 alloy. Cross sections of CS Al 6061 were imaged with a scanning electron microscope (SEM) in secondary electron (SE), backscatter electron (BSE), and electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) imaging mode for quantitative and qualitative information on the grain size and orientation of the CS microstructure. The detailed SE, BSE and EBSD mode images present the grain size and grain orientation of the original powder, as received (AR) state and after heat treating at 200°C for 1 hour, 10 hours, and 100 hours. Three different regions, characterized with distinctly differing microstructures, are labeled as low, medium, and high deformation regions, and their microstructures, and evolving features are discussed. Vickers microhardness testing are performed to examine the differences in hardness values between different heat treatments, and for correlation with the level of deformation and grain refinement in the microstructure. SEM imaging was used in BSE mode to correlate microhardness variation to the different regions within the CS microstructure.


In this paper, we first study an important but unsolved dilemma in the literature of subspace clustering, which is referred to as ldquoinformation overlapping-data coveragerdquo challenge. Current solutions of subspace clustering usually invoke a grid-based apriori-like procedure to identify dense regions and construct subspace clusters afterward. Due to the nature of monotonicity property in apriori-like procedures, it is inherent that if a region is identified as dense, all its projected regions are also identified as dense, causing overlapping/redundant clustering information to be inevitably reported to users when generating clusters from such highly correlated regions. However, naive methods to filter redundant clusters will incur a challenging problem in the other side of the dilemma, called the ldquodata coveragerdquo issue. Note that two clusters may have highly correlated dense regions but their data members could be highly different to each other. Arbitrarily removing one of them may lose the coverage of data with clustering information, thus likely reporting an incomplete and biased clustering result. In this paper, therefore, we further propose an innovative algorithm, called "nonredundant subspace cluster miningrdquo (NORSC), to efficiently discover a succinct collection of subspace clusters while also maintaining the required degree of data coverage. NORSC not only avoids generating the redundant clusters with most of the contained data covered by higher dimensional clusters to resolve the information overlapping problem but also limits the information loss to cope with the data coverage problem. As shown by our experimental results, NORSC is very effective in identifying a concise and small set of subspace clusters, while incurring time complexity in orders of magnitude better than that of previous works.


The considerable growth of the platform economy has focused attention on the issue of whether a provider who is engaged through a transaction platform should be classified as an employee of the platform operator within the purview of workplace protective legislation or, rather, as an independent contractor outside the scope of such legislation's protections. This Article focuses specifically on whether the operator's reservation of the right to impose quality control standards on the provider ought to give rise to employment obligations running in favor of the provider and against the operator. This narrow issue is of great importance to the future of the platform economy. Quality control standards promote trust between platform consumer and provider and, thus, enable leveraging of network effects, to the benefit of the platform operator, consumer and provider. Yet, if the law considers the operator's right to impose quality control standards on the provider as a factor that will weigh in favor of finding that the provider is an employee of the operator, the operator is more likely to forego the right to impose such standards.
With respect to much workplace protective legislation, neither the statutory language nor the legislative history is even minimally helpful in defining "employment." Thus, this Article engages in a structural-purposive inquiry into the definition of employment as applied to the platform economy. The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, the Article explores the structure of workplace protective legislation generally and identifies a "control bargain" implicit in that structure pursuant to which the state imposes a scheme of workplace protective regulation on the firm only if the firm retains a certain type and degree of control over its worker. Second, the Article examines the nature of the platform economy and the function of quality control standards within that economy. From this examination, the Article concludes that the nature of the platform economy suggests that the platform operator's retention of the right to impose quality control standards on providers should be seen as outside the scope of the control bargain and, therefore, should not weigh in favor of finding an employment relationship. Finally, the Article considers case law addressing the meaning of employment in the similar context of the franchisor-franchisee relationship. This case law supports the Article's principal conclusion by demonstrating that the control bargain allows for exceptions to the rule that the firm's retention of control over a worker weighs in favor of finding that the firm employs the worker, that the firm's reservation of the right to impose quality control standards can be such an exception, and that such an exception can be discerned from the nature of the relevant workplace structures.


Nitrification control is complicated and expensive, especially when nitrification has reached a severely nitrifying stage. Under this condition, utilities usually apply re-chloramination with limited success. Adjusting pH may benefit utilities. However, it is not clear whether pH should be moved up or down, and pH adjustment will also alter the chloramine decay profile (biocide) and ammonia (food) concentration. It is important to understand how this behaviour will ultimately impact nitrifying bacterial activity. We collected samples from severely nitrifying bulkwaters and adjusted the pH within a practical range to know which pH benefits the most. Results showed that even a slight increase in pH can help in protecting the chloramine residual and suppressing nitrifying bacterial


The goal in petrophyscial studies is very often to obtain representative capillary pressure curves in conjunction with Sw-RI relationships for log interpretation. The most frequently used techniques today are centrifugation, the porous plate and the mercury injection techniques.Unlike the other methods, the strength of the porous plate technique is the possibility to establish both primary drainage, spontaneous imbibition, forced imbibition and secondary drainage without changing set up, conditions or method. In addition, the technique can be combined with resistivity measurements. The weakness is that the method requires a long experimental turnaround time.Even though techniques like the membrane technique6, the continuous injection technique7, and the semi dynamic method8 have been introduced to the industry with a significant reduced turnaround time, the porous plate method is still believed to be the most representative method.Its popularity in special core analysis has not dropped even after these new techniques were introduced to the industry.The aim of this study is to experimentally test layered porous plate prototypes in capillary experiments for different capillary sequences, using all types of fluid pairs at different conditions, varying from ambient to extreme reservoir condition. The layered porous plate method is identical to the porous plate method, except for ceramic construction. In addition to this, the aim is to investigate if there is possible hysteresis between the two porous plate techniques, and investigates if this is related to reduced turnaround time. In other words, investigate how and when diaphragms influence drainage and imbibition rates in capillary experiments.Another aim is to investigate if the layered porous plate technique can improve the continuous injection technique.In this study a method of quantifying the influence of porous plates on effective rates at any stage and capillary sequence has been developed. The method is based on analysing transient capillary behaviour.


The authors first observe that both the widespread popularity of saving in tax-deferred retirement vehicles such as IRAs, Keogh plans, and 401(k) programs and the magnitude of the dollar flows into such saving are almost prima facie evidence that at the margin they provide significant gains over saving in traditional taxable accounts, at least for those wanting to defer some part of lifetime consumption to their retirement years. They focus on the gains arising solely from shifting taxable income from the working (i.e., accumulation) years to the retirement (i.e., distribution) years. They turn to the advantages of tax-deferred investing and to the motivation for focusing on the intertemporal shifting of taxable income. Finally, they propose an informal model of the gains from such income shifting and illustrate the magnitude of the gains for levels of annual wage income ranging from $50,000 to $200,000. They show that the gain (as measured by the difference in after-tax retirement income from tax-deferred and taxable accounts) increases with wage income and ranges from 1.7% to 11.4%. A formal theoretical model is provided in the appendix to the article.


One technique to visualize the training of neural networks is to perform PCA on the parameters over the course of training and to project to the subspace spanned by the first few PCA components. In this paper we compare this technique to the PCA of a high dimensional random walk. We compute the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the covariance of the trajectory and prove that in the long trajectory and high dimensional limit most of the variance is in the first few PCA components, and that the projection of the trajectory onto any subspace spanned by PCA components is a Lissajous curve. We generalize these results to a random walk with momentum and to an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes (i.e., a random walk in a quadratic potential) and show that in high dimensions the walk is not mean reverting, but will instead be trapped at a fixed distance from the minimum. We finally analyze PCA projected training trajectories for: a linear model trained on CIFAR-10; a fully connected model trained on MNIST; and ResNet-50-v2 trained on Imagenet. In all cases, both the distribution of PCA eigenvalues and the projected trajectories resemble those of a random walk with drift.


RUNNER-UP for the Cedric Smith Prize 2014, a prize for the best piece of peace and conflict research awarded by the Conflict Research Society. NOMINATED for Peace Science Society's 2014 Walter Isard Award for the Best Dissertation in Peace Science.

This thesis offers an alternative narrative why the Juba Peace Talks between
the Government of Uganda and the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and
its political wing, the Lord's Resistance Movement (LRM), did not produce a
Final Peace Agreement. Widely considered the most promising peace effort
in the history of a violent conflict that began in 1986, talks were mediated
by the Government of Southern Sudan from 2006 to 2008. During this time,
the parties signed five separate agreements on a range of issues, yet in
2008 the LRA's leader, Joseph Kony, failed to endorse them through a final
signature. An aerial attack on the LRA by the Ugandan army spelled the
end of the Juba Talks.
It is commonly argued that as the first peace talks conducted with people
wanted by the International Criminal Court, the Juba Talks collapsed
because the arrest warrants made a negotiated agreement impossible.
Another widely accepted reason is that the LRA/M were not committed to
peace. This thesis, however, argues that how the LRA/M experienced the
muddled and convoluted peace talks was the crucial factor because the
dynamics of the process confirmed existing power dynamics. Internally, the
LRA/M's dynamics were profoundly influenced by their perception of being
trapped in an established hostile system, causing a struggle to transform
their own dynamics constructively.
Offering an analytical chronology of the Juba Talks with an empirical
emphasis on the perspective of the LRA/M and an analysis of LRA/M
structures and behavioural patterns that emerged in the process, this thesis
further outlines that judging success or failure of a peace process on
whether agreements have been signed is misplaced. Despite not producing
a final agreement, the Juba Talks contributed to peace and change in
Uganda.


Although cardiovascular (CV) mortality is the principal cause of death in individuals with type 2 diabetes (T2DM), reduction of plasma glucose concentration has little effect on CV disease (CVD) risk. Thus, novel strategies to reduce CVD risk in T2DM patients are needed. The recently published BI 10773 (Empagliflozin) Cardiovascular Outcome Event Trial in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Patients (EMPA-REG OUTCOME) study demonstrated that in T2DM patients with high CVD risk empagliflozin reduced the primary major adverse cardiac event end point (CV death, nonfatal myocardial infarction, nonfatal stroke) by 14%. This beneficial effect was driven by a 38% reduction in CV mortality with no significant decrease in nonfatal myocardial infarction or stroke. Empagliflozin also caused a 35% reduction in hospitalization for heart failure without affecting hospitalization for unstable angina. Although sodium–glucose cotransporter 2 inhibitors exert multiple metabolic benefits (decreases in HbA1c, body weight, and blood pressure and an increase in HDL cholesterol), all of which could reduce CVD risk, it is unlikely that the reduction in CV mortality can be explained by empagliflozin's metabolic effects. More likely, hemodynamic effects, specifically reduced blood pressure and decreased extracellular volume, are responsible for the reduction in CV mortality and heart failure hospitalization. In this Perspective, we will discuss possible mechanisms for these beneficial effects of empagliflozin and their implications for the care of T2DM patients.


This book, edited by the author, contains two of his original contributions; part of a boxset exploring Healthcare, Housing, and Education architecture in Northern Ireland (ISBN 9780955872853). Commissioned by The Arts Council NI, and published by PLACE Ltd., the set showcases projects completed since 2002, critiques project shortcomings, and makes recommendations to Government and statutory authorities about future public investment and architectural procurement. Healthcare and Architecture presents four case-studies. From a peer-reviewed shortlist of architects with previous healthcare design and research experience, the PLACE Board invited the author to edit the healthcare volume, contribute a case study on Grove Wellbeing Centre, and write the Foreword. As vehicles for debate, aimed primarily at a non-professional audience – policy makers in government and statutory bodies – responsible for capital decision-making and procurement, these contributions concentrate on architectural analysis and evaluation, necessarily abbreviating discussions about research methodology.The Grove is a distinctive UK project, combining healthcare with leisure and education functions in a single high-quality designed facility. The author's case study updates a previously published 2009 article (Perspective, Journal of The Royal Society of Ulster Architects). The revised building analysis includes additional feedback from the architects, public-body clients and Centre staff. It evaluates the continuing importance of architecture and construction to the project's success, arguing that higher initial investments in quality architecture and a unique cross-departmental procurement help improve lifecycle-costs and services delivery while contributing to wider neighbourhood regeneration efforts. The chapter concludes that the project is a model for collaborative strategic planning and capital investment in a time of cutbacks. In the Foreword, further scholarship and data about current healthcare issues to contextualise all four case study contributions, and to emphasise how quality design – a fraction of life-time costs – needs to remain at the forefront of considerations for future service delivery and capital expenditure.


The aquatic eddy‐correlation technique can be used to noninvasively determine the oxygen exchange across the sediment‐water interface by analyzing the covariance of vertical flow velocity and oxygen concentration in a small measuring volume above the sea bed. The method requires fast sensors that can follow the rapid changes in flow and the oxygen transported by this flow to calculate the momentary advective flux driven by turbulent motions. In this article, we demonstrate that fast optical oxygen sensors, known as optodes, represent a good alternative to the traditional Clark‐type electrochemical microelectrodes for such measurements. Optodes have the advantage over microelectrodes of being insensitive to flow, less susceptible to signal drift, more durable under typical field conditions, less expensive, and repairable. Comparisons of the response times of optodes and microelectrodes to rapid oxygen changes showed that optimized optodes had the same response time (162 ± 66 ms) as the microelectrodes (160 ± 57 ms) and were fast enough to capture the oxygen fluctuations that are relevant for the eddy correlation flux calculations. Side by side comparisons of benthic O2 flux data collected with microelectrode‐based eddy correlation instruments and optode‐based eddy correlation instruments in freshwater and marine environments showed no significant differences between the measured fluxes. The optodes allow the development of more user‐friendly eddy correlation instruments that combine the advantages of non‐invasive measurements and integration of fluxes over a large footprint area, using a relatively rugged and less expensive sensor.


A normative explanation for elderly women's lack of male friends is developed by showing that cross-sex friendship is defined as romance, that there are norms inhibiting romance during old age, and that other norms encourage them to reject potential mates who can no longer meet traditional sex role demands. The data were derived from in-depth interviews and observations of 70 non-married, white, elderly women who lived in a middle-class Chicago suburb. It can be expected that future cohorts of elderly women who will have been exposed to models of non-romantic cross-sex friendships early in their lives will have more of these friendships during old age.


Remote exploration of detailed virtual environments (VEs) on mobile devices with acceptable frame rates has become a challenging and interesting research topic. With recent advances in mobile computing devices with communication and multimedia capabilities, remote VE walk-through and real-time streaming for mobile devices have opened a new class of 3-D VE exploration-based applications such as virtual guides and malls, online gaming, training, and monitoring, just to name a few. Furthermore, emergency preparedness types of applications can benefit from mobile 3-D visualization systems to support emergency responders with critical information about the disaster area. The combination of sensor networks with VEs can provide a physical environment monitoring and measurement system with live information about the target environment that can be visualized in real time. The challenge lies in how to provide a rich and detailed 3-D VE on thin mobile devices that are known for their lack of proper resources to process large-scale 3-D geometric data. Our approach consists of moving the demanding geometry-rendering task to a dedicated remote rendering server that streams the rendering output to a client, leaving only the displaying and certain minor image-based rendering tasks to the local, less-powerful mobile hardware. In addition, wireless networks pose significant challenges to multimedia streaming due, for the most part, to the mobility-induced changes in bandwidth and errors in the wireless channel. In this paper, we focus on the implementation, measurement, and analysis of an image-based VE streaming strategy. We define a new approach to remote rendering and interactive visualization of 3-D VEs on thin mobile devices. To this end, we propose end-to-end streaming and rate control protocols, as well as buffering and scheduling mechanisms to support the requirements of bandwidth-demanding multimedia systems. The main purpose of our proposed rate control scheme is to achieve both high end-to-end throughput and low frame-rate fluctuation to adapt data traffic to the frequent changes of the bandwidth and error rate present in wireless networks. We discuss the design of our proposed solutions and report on their performance evaluation through an extensive set of simulation experiments.


Publication of scientific documents as research reports and original papers has an important place in displaying the authors' knowledge, integrity, responsibility, and honesty. The same is true for the reviewers and editors. The authority of a publisher strongly depends on the qualifications of the experts who review the manuscripts, and the recommendations they provide to the authors and editors. The honesty of the authors, reviewers, and editors is of the utmost importance. The author of the paper titled "Analytical Methods in Quality Control of Scientific Publications", which was published in theAmerican Journal of Analytical Chemistry, 2012, 3, 443-447 (DOI: 10.4236/ajac.2012.36058) had criticized the paper published by Dongreet al., "Application of GC-EI-MS for the Identification and Investigation of Positional Isomer in Primaquine, an Antimalarial Drug, "Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis, 2005, 39, 111-116 (DOI: 10.1016/j.jpba.2005.03.019), for presenting falsifications in this publication. Neither the reviewer northe Edi-tor-in-Chief Bezhan Chankvetadze of the Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysishas reacted to accusations of falsification. If a reviewer and editor are poorly qualified, unprincipled, or even corrupt, as was suggested by Bob Grant inThe Scientistmagazine (http://www.the-scientist.com/display/55679/#ixzz0mmsPoMIS), it is not good enough to consider simply that the publisher / journal has a high ranking and is indexed in PubMed or the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). In this editorial, we report a profound misunderstanding oralack of knowledge by the authors Shixue G., Zhuoyu L., and Wei W., in their paper published in ZhongguoYaoye China Pharmaceuticals, Vol. 14, No. 4, 2005, pp. 36-37 and a similar lack of professionalism by reviewers and editors. The influence and the role of internationally used pharmacopeias, such as The British Pharmacopoeia, European Pharmacopoeia, The United States Pharmacopeial Convention, and United States Pharmacopeia are shown as the main initiators and drivers of these misunderstandings.


No espionage case in recent decades has been anything like the Wen Ho Lee affair. As Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman describe in "A Convenient Spy," an astonishingly inept investigation of a crime that may never have occurred ended in a national disgrace. A weapons-code scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lee was hunted as a spy for China, indicted on fifty-nine counts, and held in detention for nine months as a threat to the entire nation. But after pleading guilty to just one count, he went home -- with an unusual and emotional apology from a federal judge. Prosecutors' claims that Lee had stolen America's "crown jewels" of nuclear security simply evaporated. Yet Lee's motives have never been satisfactorily explained, and his often-repeated excuse that he was just backing up his work files does not stand up to scrutiny. As Stober and Hoffman report, Lee's lies and his unexplained connections to foreign scientists spanned eighteen years. He was a security nightmare. Tapping at his keyboard, he assembled a private collection of the computer programs used to design America's nuclear weapons, then left them vulnerable to hackers and foreign intelligence services for years. The FBI's belated discovery that he had also put the codes on portable cassette tapes launched a frenzied worldwide search that eventually carried agents to the Los Alamos landfill. And yet today, the tapes have never been found. In 1995, Lee was just another American, a Taiwanese immigrant striving to support a family he cherished and to make a name for himself in scientific circles. Unknown to him, however, scientists working in the secret world of nuclear-weapons intelligence examined purloinedChinese documents, studied spy reports, and wondered: Had China stolen the secrets of the W88, America's most advanced nuclear weapon? Scientific hunches rapidly evolved into a criminal investigation aimed at Lee. He had been overheard by the FBI while telephoning a spy suspect, and he was warmly embraced by a high-ranking Chinese nuclear-weapons official whom he wasn't supposed to know. The FBI noted that he was "ethnic Chinese." And in this uncertain period after the Cold War, many politicians played up China as a threatening new enemy. Energy Secretary and vice presidential hopeful Bill Richardson was eager to fire Lee and appear decisive in protecting national security. In this stormy confluence of intelligence and politics, Lee became a convenient spy. But was he guilty? Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman tell the story of the Wen Ho Lee fiasco dramatically and authoritatively, providing an objective account that no partisan version of the story can match.


Bassein examines the pervasive linkage between women's sexuality and death in Western thought and literature and concludes that there is no reasonable basis for much of it. She first explores how language reveals and reinforces the bond between women and death. She then discusses traditional Christianity as a vehicle for perpetuating this tie and demonstrates that negative attitudes and brutality associated with women find expression in otherwise commendable works of art. The author examines nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction and poetry to show the different ways writers have handled women in sexual situations. Bassein concludes that tracing the origins and prevalence of the automatic association and seeking alternatives help us recognize the irrational and unconscious tendencies that are at the basis of stereotype formation and tacit acceptance of brutality.


Quaternions play a vital role in the representation of rotations in computer graphics, primarily for animation and user interfaces. Unfortunately, quaternion rotation is often left as an advanced topic in computer graphics education due to difficulties in portraying the four-dimensional space of the quaternions. One tool for overcoming these obstacles is the quaternion demonstrator, a physical visual aid consisting primarily of a belt. Every quaternion used to specify a rotation can be represented by fixing one end of the belt and rotating the other. Multiplication of quaternions is demonstrated by the composition of rotations, and the resulting twists in the belt depict visually how quaternions interpolate rotation.
This article introduces to computer graphics the exponential notation that mathematicians have used to represent unit quaternions. Exponential notation combines the angle and axis of the rotation into concise quaternion expression. This notation allows the article to present more clearly a mechanical quaternion demonstrator consisting of a ribbon and a tag, and develop a computer simulation suitable for interactive educational packages. Local deformations and the belt trick are used to minimize the ribbon's twisting and simulate a natural-appearing interactive quaternion demonstrator.


T. H. Huxley (1825-1895) was not only an active protagonist in the religious and scientific upheaval that followed the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution but also a harbinger of the sociobiological debates about the implications of evolution that are now going on. His seminal lecture Evolution and Ethics, reprinted here with its introductory Prolegomena, argues that the human psyche is at war with itself, that humans are alienated in a cosmos that has no special reference to their needs, and that moral societies are of necessity in conflict with the natural conditions of their existence. Seen in the light of current understanding of the mechanisms of evolution, these claims remain as controversial today as they were when Huxley proposed them. In this volume George Williams, one of the best-known evolutionary biologists of our time, asserts that recent biological ideas and data justify a more extreme condemnation of the "cosmic process" than Huxley advocated and more extreme denial that the forces that got us here are capable of maintaining a viable world. James Paradis, an expert in Victorian studies, has written an introduction that sets the celebrated lecture in the context of cultural history, revealing it to be an impressive synthesis of Victorian thinking, as well as a challenge to eighteenth-century assumptions about the harmony of of nature. With Huxley's lecture as a focal point, the three parts of this book unite philosophy and science in a shared quest that recalls their common origins as systems of knowledge.Originally published in 1989.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


Transpirational drying and in-woods production of microchips potentially improve the economic efficiency of energy production from forest-derived feedstocks, but yield materials with moisture contents, bulk densities, and particle size distributions that differ from more conventional feedstocks. Ongoing research suggests that transpirational drying reduces the moisture content and wet-basis bulk density of forest biomass, and may affect chip size distribution. In-woods microchipping produces smaller chips and has little effect on moisture content or bulk density.


In high impact human activities, much of the impact shock wave is dissipated through internal body structures, preventing excessive accelerations from reaching vital organs. Mechanisms responsible for this attenuation, including lower limb joint compression and spinal compression have been neglected in existing whole-body simulation models. Accelerometer data on one male subject during drop landings and drop jumps from four heights revealed that peak resultant acceleration tended to decrease with increasing height in the body. Power spectra contained two major components, corresponding to the active voluntary movement (2 Hz 14 Hz) and the impact shock wave (16 Hz 26 Hz). Transfer functions demonstrated progressive attenuation from the MTP joint towards the C6 vertebra within the 16 Hz 26 Hz component. This observed attenuation within the spine and lower-limb joint structures was considered within a rigid body, nine-segment planar torque-driven computer simulation model of drop jumping. Joints at the ankle, knee, hip, shoulder, and mid-trunk were modelled as non-linear spring-dampers. Wobbling masses were included at the shank, thigh, and trunk, with subject-specific biarticular torque generators for ankle plantar flexion, and knee and hip flexion and extension. The overall root mean square difference in kinetic and kinematic time-histories between the model and experimental drop jump performance was 3.7%, including ground reaction force root mean square differences of 5.1%. All viscoelastic displacements were within realistic bounds determined experimentally or from the literature. For an equivalent rigid model representative of traditional frictionless pin joint simulation models but with realistic wobbling mass and foot-ground compliance, the overall kinetic and kinematic difference was 11.0%, including ground reaction force root mean square differences of 12.1%. Thus, the incorporation of viscoelastic elements at key joints enables accurate replication of experimentally recorded ground reaction forces within realistic whole-body kinematics and removes the previous need for excessively compliant wobbling masses and/or foot-ground interfaces. This is also necessary in cases where shock wave transmission within the simulation model must be non-instantaneous.


This paper provides an overview of solid waste management by local authorities in the Sucre municipality in Caracas, Venezuela. Sucre is currently faced with serious demographic, economic, social, urban, and administrative challenges in solid waste management. The municipality, called Petare, has one of the largest slums in Latin America. It is estimated that more than a million people live in Petare, and 30% live in poverty. Venezuela is also facing a political problem that has affected the solid waste management throughout the country. Local authorities in Sucre have worked with communities to develop solutions to confront these difficulties.


European urban and metropolitan regions are characterized by the concentration of activities in a limited area and by transit systems which coexist with individual transportation. Traditionally, travel demand management (TDM) policies have been applied to enhance the efficiency, sustainability and safety of the transportation systems, often via an increased use of transit modes. This strategy is one of the most effective to ensure: i) lower road-space occupation; ii) lower pollution; iii) lower energy consumption; iv) higher safety. Moreover, an increased transit use also has positive effects on the mobility still remaining on individual modes. Many TDM policies have been proposed in the past, based on push (say, disincentives of the car-mode) and pull (say, incentives of the transit mode) strategies, impacting at different levels on the mobility and on the activity patterns of travellers. Within the push strategies, measures can be based on regulation by quantity (limitation of use, as in restricted access areas) or by-pricing (e.g. road/area pricing). A more recent concept involves the use of tradable driving rights. The approach has already been claimed to be feasible; however, it has not reached a significant popularity among the transportation analysts nor within the decision-makers, perhaps because of difficult technical and administrative implementation, as well as some residual equity/redistribution issues. In this paper the potential of a new-generation of tradable driving rights, based on ITS (Intelligent Transportation System) is analysed. Driving rights are intended here as allowance/permits, acquired by travellers in exchange for virtuous mobility. Virtuosity is related to the contribution toward the efficiency, sustainability and safety of the mobility behaviour. Permits can be spent in exchange for nonvirtuous behaviour. The proposed approach is tested on a real network and with real data; two scenarios with different strategies in assigning permits are assessed in order to show the ability of the model to forecast the effects of innovative travel demand policies.


Protein similarity search is a fundamental step for taxonomic classification and function annotation of sequencing data from metagenomic and metatranscriptomic projects. Currently, the most popular tool for similarity search is BLAST (or specifically, the blastx), which have proved very efficient in aligning conventional sequencing data such as Sanger reads. The application and extension of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology, which generates massive sequencing data, poses new challenge for classical algorithms of sequence comparison and similarity search. If we use BLAST to precede NGS sequences, the speed will be too slow. To address this challenge, RAPSearch [12,13] has been developed. It is a fast protein similarity search tool, which utilizes reduced amino acid alphabet to speed up the similarity search a few magnitudes and meet the demand of NGS sequence analysis. Paired end sequencing is a common technique used in NGS. It produces two reads from proximal locations of a target DNA or RNA molecule in both forward and reverse direction, which could be potentially utilized to enhance the alignment precise and coverage. RAPsearch has two versions (RAPsearch and RAPsearch2), both can only treat single-end sequences. Here, I will present a method applying to RAPSearch2 that combine paired-end reads as one hit and evaluate the significance in the similarity search to improve sensitivity of alignment. Based on the RAPSearch2 algorithm, I built a new module that could process the paired-end reads simultaneously. By using the paired end sequences aligned on the proximal locations on the same subject sequences, the method could increase the searching sensitivity by about 0.5%~0.6%, comparing to the similarity search by using each of the paired end sequences individually.


Abstract Empirical and experimental calibration of single element solubility thermometers, such as Zr-in-rutile, Zr-in-titanite, Ti-in-zircon, and Ti-in-quartz, within the past 13 years has greatly expanded our ability to assess the pressure and temperature conditions of individual minerals associated with specific textures in metamorphic rocks. Combined with advances in in situ techniques for analyzing trace concentrations, this has led to an increase in the combined use of single element thermometers, geochronometers, and isotope ratios, often simultaneously, in metamorphic minerals. Here we review the calibration and application of single element thermometers at the pressure and temperature conditions of interest in metamorphic rocks. We discuss to what extent accessory phase equilibrium and trace element equilibrium are attained in metamorphic systems, and the thermodynamic and kinetic framework within which trace element equilibrium is assessed. As an example, we present a comprehensive study of trace element distribution during rutile replacement by titanite in rocks that experienced high-temperature amphibolite-facies overprinting and those that underwent low-temperature blueschist-facies overprinting from a variety of subduction-related terranes worldwide. We find that trace element distributions approach equilibrium partition coefficients in rocks from amphibolite-facies overprinted terranes, whereas trace element distributions do not approach equilibrium in rocks that experienced blueschist-facies overprinting. We caution that single element thermometers that rely upon slow-diffusing high field strength elements should not be applied to rocks equilibrated at


In The Government Machine, Jon Agar traces the mechanization of government work in the United Kingdom from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. He argues that this transformation has been tied to the rise of "expert movements," groups whose authority has rested on their expertise. The deployment of machines was an attempt to gain control over state action -- a revolutionary move. Agar shows how mechanization followed the popular depiction of government as machine-like, with British civil servants cast as components of a general purpose "government machine"; indeed, he argues that today's general purpose computer is the apotheosis of the civil servant.Over the course of two centuries, government has become the major repository and user of information; the Civil Service itself can be seen as an information-processing entity. Agar argues that the changing capacities of government have depended on the implementation of new technologies, and that the adoption of new technologies has depended on a vision of government and a fundamental model of organization. Thus, to study the history of technology is to study the state, and vice versa.


This study set out to investigate habitat fragmentation and its implications for wildlife conservation. It focused on Emboreet Ward in the Arusha region of Tanzania, which is in close proximity to the Tarangire National Park. This area, traditionally occupied by the Maasai pastoralists, has undergone several changes, not least of which are changes in the local livelihoods in response to a need for cash and deterioration of state support for animal health care. Dominating these changes is a shift in livelihood strategies from pastoralism to a mix ofpastoralism and cropping. Increasingly, land is being cultivated and agricultural opportunities are changing lifestyles, livelihoods and habitat integrity for wildlife. Fragmentation of habitats outside the national park has serious implications for the future of pastoralism and conservation, especially since some species of wildlife migrate seasonally between this park and the adjoining plains. It also has significance for the Maasai whose approach to domestic livestock management is deeply rooted in a culture that does not comfortably accord with the market economy. The study adopted a case study approach, was mainly qualitative, and relied on both primary and secondary data sources. Interviews played a critical part in sourcing primary data from the respondents. Documentary analysis was critical to gathering secondary data. The study shows the future of Tarangire National Park to be intricately woven into the complex and dynamic interaction between the changing economy, the responses of the Maasai whose culture separates them from the market economy, migrants into the area, and the government agencies whose intentions appear to be neither clearly expressed nor interpreted. The study concludes that empowerment lies at the heart of the envisaged change. This is shown to be a necessity for all stakeholders operating within a proposed integrating structure.


The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act was Congress's second attempt to undo the Supreme Court's decision in Employment Division, Department of Human Resources v. Smith, and thus increase the level of scrutiny used in evaluating land use laws under the Free Exercise Clause. This Note first analyzes the constitutionality of the Act, concluding that the Supreme Court would likely find the Act unconstitutional, even though lower federal courts may hesitate to do so. Second, regardless of the constitutionality of the Act, this Note concludes that it does not serve the purpose it was designed for, as the exceptions written into Smith cover the situations the Act was designed to "protect." More detrimentally, the mere existence of the Act dissuades further development of free exercise jurisprudence.


How fast do butterflies fly? Does a butterfly have ears? Do they sleep? Does a caterpillar have a skeleton? How does a moth get out of its cocoon? What is the difference between a butterfly and a moth? And just what is a skipper?Every year, thousands of people visit butterfly conservatories to stand in quiet awe of the simple beauty displayed by these magical creatures. Hazel Davies and Carol A. Butler capture the sense of wonderment and curiosity experienced by adults and children alike in this book about butterflies and their taxonomic cousins, the moths and the skippers. Beautifully illustrated with color and black and white photographs, and drawings by renowned artist William Howe, this book is an essential resource for parents, teachers, students, or anyone who has ever been entranced by these fascinating, fluttering creatures.Covering everything from their basic biology to their complex behaviors at every stage of life to issues in butterfly conservation, Davies and Butler explore wide-ranging topics and supply a trove of intriguing facts. You'll find tips on how to attract more butterflies to your garden, how to photograph them, and even how to raise them in your own home. Arranged in a question and answer format, the book provides detailed information written in an accessible style that brings to life the science and natural history of these insects. In addition, sidebars throughout the book detail an assortment of butterfly trivia, while extensive appendices direct you to organizations, web sites, and more than 200 indoor and outdoor public exhibits, where you can learn more or connect with other lepidopterophiles (butterfly lovers).


learners' performance in writing. Sixty-four intermediate-level learners were randomly assigned to either a no-feedback control condition or a corrective feedback, including three treatment conditions. The first is the "track changes" feature of Microsoft Word 2010 which double strikes through deletions and marks insertions in a different color. The second is recast feedback while the third is metalinguistic feedback. Over the course of eight weeks, each student was required to provide corrective feedback on drafts written by another group member and to discuss it with the group members. The study yielded three major findings. First, students who received computer-mediated corrective feedback while writing achieved better results in their overall test scores than students in the control condition who did not receive feedback. Second, there was a significant effect for the track changes made in the corrective-feedback type when compared with that made in the recast and metalinguistic feedback types. Students in the recast treatment condition also obtained higher significant mean scores than those who received metalinguistic corrective feedback. The study concluded with suggestions for further research and pedagogical implications.


This essay explores how professional women wrestlers from Lucha Libre Femenil actively engage in peacekeeping the global south as gender twisted women. In this federation, they are communicatively able to work toward peace in the public sphere given their performative space in the ring. Performatively, the LLF peacekeeping wrestlers are advocating gender issues relating to economic development, legal reforms, the media, gender stereotypes, peacekeeping non-profit work, local politics, and for a select few, national politics. Struggles and obstacles are presented for the LLF wrestlers in the attempt to continue their peacekeeping activities. Simultaneously their global audience struggles to take notice of their peacekeeping agenda because of the objectified nature of their business.


Abstract: On September 24, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made clear that he would run again for the presidency. This news and the speculation leading up to it provoked a rash of comparisons in the Russian media between Putin and Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader from 1964 until his death in 1982. Their personalities, methods of rule, and the outcomes of their tenure--or, in Putin's case, predicted outcomes--stood at the center of the analyses. This essay aims to flesh out these comparisons in broad brush-strokes, presenting my own views alongside those of Russian commentators. This comparison is important because it helps to shed light on the future of the Putinist system. The journalist Nikolai Troitsky reacted to a July 29, 2011, Reuters report speculating that Putin was about to announce his candidacy with an article entitled "Putin is the Brezhnev of Today." (1) In addition to the fact that both leaders came to power and restored order in the wake of the chaotic regimes of their predecessors Khrushchev and Yeltsin, Troitsky held that: "The main thing they have in common is their philosophy, world-view, and mentality, the essence of which is that in Russia nothing should be changed. More exactly, order must be restored, but then let everything proceed as before, without reforms, without wild leaps, without upheavals.... Let everyone steal and filch from top to bottom, let corruption penetrate everything: nothing can be done about all that. Doing anything would require upsetting the system, and that would be dangerous, harmful, and destructive. Yes, progress is slowly and quietly proceeding, but God preserve us from any substantive modernizations or innovations." (2) Putin's declaration of September 24 that he would run again provoked an escalation of such discussions. Since he'd already been in power for 12 years, and could now be headed for two more 6-year terms, his total number of years as Russia's ruler might reach 24. This would be six years longer than the 18-year rule of Brezhnev, who, in the 1970s, had seemed to be depressingly immortal. In this context, during a TV program on October 5, Putin's press secretary Dmitri Peskov admitted: "It's true that many people are talking about the Brezhnevization of Putin.... But you know, Brezhnev is not a negative figure in the history of our country; he's an enormously positive one. He laid the foundations of the economy, of agriculture, and so on." In an eloquent reply to these claims, an anonymous editorialist on the critically inclined website gazeta.ru interpreted the new PR ploy on Putin's behalf as presenting the following false message: "Brezhnev does not represent stagnation (zastoi), nor 'an economy that's addicted to oil,' nor the suffocating atmosphere of dogmatism, nor the political gerontocratism of the authorities that led to the Afghan fiasco, but, rather, he represents political stability and a calm and steady development." As for Putin in today's real world, the writer went on, he "is returning to power to be president of the essentially Soviet majority of the population, people who live in an economic and political environment that differs little from that of the Brezhnev era." For these people, he is presented as their "only hope and support." The Brezhnev-created illusion that "nothing will ever be changed, nothing will ever disrupt the status quo" is exactly the same message that "will be drilled into the Russian people now." (3) The fact that Putin soon rejected the comparison between himself and Brezhnev, preferring to be compared to Franklin Roosevelt, who was elected president four times, did not deter the critics. Nor did his claims, first that "If two or three incorrect steps are taken, then all this [the horrors of the 1990s that he had just enumerated] could once again rain down on the country," and therefore, second, his re-election as an experienced former president was essential. (4) This article will now analyze and compare, briefly and somewhat schematically, the Brezhnev and Putin systems. …


This book brings together a wide range of contributors from across the common law world to identify and debate the principal moral and systemic challenges facing private law in the remaining part of the twenty-first century. The various contributions identify serious problems relating to complexity and overload, threats to research and education, the law's unintelligibility, the unsatisfactory nature of the law reform process and a general lack of public engagement. They consider the respective future roles of statutes, codes, and judge-made law (in the form of both common law and equitable rules). They consider how best to organise the private law system internally, and how to co-ordinate it externally with other public and economic systems (human rights, regulation, insurance markets and social security frameworks). They address the challenges for private law presented by new forms technology, and by modern demands for the protection of new and intangible forms of moral interest, such as interests in privacy, 'vindication' and 'personal choice'. They also engage with the critical contemporary debates about access to, and the privatisation of, civil justice. The work is designed as a source of inspiration and reference for private lawyers, as well as legislators, policy-makers and students.


Pseudonoise sequences generated by linear feedback shift registers [1] with some nonlinear combining function have been proposed [2]–[5] for cryptographic applications as running key generators in stream ciphers. In this correspondence it will be shown that the number of trials to break these ciphers can be significantly reduced by using correlation methods. By comparison of computer simulations and theoretical results based on a statistical model, the validity of this analysis is demonstrated. Rubin [6] has shown that it is computationally feasible to solve a cipher proposed by Pless [2] in a known plaintext attack, using as few as 15 characters. Here, the number of ciphertext symbols is determined to perform a ciphertext-only attack on the Pless cipher using the correlation attack. Our conclusion from the analysis is that the pseudonoise generator's output sequence and the sequences generated by the linear feedback shift registers should be uncorrelated. This leads to constraints for the nonlinear combining function to be used.


Bayesian structure learning allows inferring Bayesian network structure from data while reasoning about the epistemic uncertainty -- a key element towards enabling active causal discovery and designing interventions in real world systems. In this work, we propose a general, fully differentiable framework for Bayesian structure learning (DiBS) that operates in the continuous space of a latent probabilistic graph representation. Contrary to existing work, DiBS is agnostic to the form of the local conditional distributions and allows for joint posterior inference of both the graph structure and the conditional distribution parameters. This makes our formulation directly applicable to posterior inference of complex Bayesian network models, e.g., with nonlinear dependencies encoded by neural networks. Using DiBS, we devise an efficient, general purpose variational inference method for approximating distributions over structural models. In evaluations on simulated and real-world data, our method significantly outperforms related approaches to joint posterior inference.


Recent critiques of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit have focused on the court's reluctance to embrace cohesive policy approaches in its patent jurisprudence, particularly when it comes to questions of patent scope. This Article suggests that the Federal Circuit's tendency towards more formalistic decision-making derives in part from the jurisprudential heritage of one of its predecessor courts, the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals. The modern doctrines of patent scope were shaped by the CCPA's decisions in the years following the 1952 Patent Act, especially its decisions interpreting §§ 103 and 112 of the Act. When the Federal Circuit adopted the CCPA's precedent in its first decision, the CCPA's law displaced that of other courts previously charged with administering aspects of the patent system. But the CCPA's patent decisions were uniquely shaped by three imperatives peculiar to the court and its place in the patent system: the nature of the court itself; its need to exert and legitimize its control over Patent Office decisions; and its exclusive focus on patentability rather than patent enforcement. Though the modern Federal Circuit has far different jurisprudential needs than did the CCPA, the CCPA's legal methodologies are so deeply engrained in patent law that they continue to shape Federal Circuit decision-making today. Those doctrines and methodologies may have served the CCPA well; but they may not answer the needs of the modern patent system.


The purpose of my study is to highlight the importance of play for children's social development in preschool. The study is based on active preschool teachers' perceptions and personal experience on the importance of play for children's social development. What are their own thoughts about children who rarely play and how you react as a teacher to the children who rarely plays with other children? The study is based on qualitative interviews with five preschool teachers who work in different sections in preschools. I chose to use my interviews to illuminate the preschool teachers' own view and experiences out of children's play and how it may affect the child's social development.The results of my interviews showed that preschool teachers agree that play is an important part of children's social development and that it is in the game, children can develop their imagination, motor skills and interaction with other children. In the game and the interaction with other children they observes first one another and imitate what other children are doing before there is time for the children themselves to laugh and play together. The results also showed that it is important that a preschool teacher is included in the children's play, not always active but present in the room where the children themselves play. It is also important that the child feel secure in being at the preschool in order to play and that as a preschool teacher is a guide for the children who rarely play together with other children to help them into the other children´s play.


Nowadays, the indicators used to determine the real estate_s contribution to business activities in most organization are primarily focused on cost reduction or capital minimization. However, what is often not realized is that property can also assist revenue enhancement. This paper highlights the synthesis of previous studies from 1990 to 2010 in relation to the corporate real estate function. The considerations include the task of CRE executives that influence the shareholder_s wealth. The trends of the corporate real estate function are discussed. In summary, by recognizing the important of CRE function, it will provide the greatest support to CRE executives in public listed companies to enhance share price performance and dividend growth.


In order to survive in today's competition, organisations are faced with a challenge of continuous improvement. At the core of any improvement efforts in the production and marketing of goods and services there is. quality improvement. Product or service quality has become one of the elements that give an organisation a competitive edge over its competitors, since today's customers logically take purchasing decisions based on what they pay for versus the price paid. For businesses, a race to customer satisfaction is infinite, customer satisfaction is no longer a choice but the only means for survival for many organisations. Therefore, organisations do all that is in their powers to satisfy customers, retain or increase the market share, make profit and survive in the business. In view of such a tough business environment it has become necessary to study the two important business concepts namely product quality and customer satisfaction. The question is whether the efforts put on producing and supplying the best quality of products enhance customer satisfaction. In other words, are the two concepts related in some way? The aim of this study is to describe relationships between product quality and customers satisfaction in the aviation market of the oil industry, specifically Air BP market. Since customer satisfaction is also manifested through other ways like product demand and customer loyalty, the research also studies the relationships between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, as well as' customer satisfaction and product demand. Finally the relationships between product quality, product demand and customer loyalty are studied as indications of customer satisfaction. While emphasising on relationships, the study also describes the significance and importance of various quality dimensions to Air BP customers. It explains various quality definitions and dimensions and determines the most significant ones to the aviation market. The study also looks at the importance of product quality in comparison with price and service given to customers. Finally conclusions are drawn on the hypotheses and recommendations are given to Air BP. While the study recommendations are not prescriptive, they provide necessary information relevant to Air BP Marketing in a pursuit for customer satisfaction, customer retention and market share.


Some form of health insurance is offered to employees by approximately 60% of private organizations. While 59% of private organizations with less than 100 employees offer health insurance, this benefit is offered by 93% of those organizations with 100 or more employees. Approximately 24% of all employers pay the full cost of health insurance and 13% pay for the cost of family coverage (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2007). The average total monthly cost of health insurance for the employee is $428 and an average of 81% is paid by the employer. The average total monthly cost for family coverage is $1078 with the employer paying approximately 71% of cost (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2007). In a survey of 400 firms, it was reported (U. S. Chamber of Commerce, 2008) that the average annual cost of medical insurance for an employee is $5924. This amount represented approximately 14.5% of total payroll cost in 2005 and is an increase from the 11.9% reported in 2004. Based on per hour worked, these data are consistent with governmental data (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2010) that show an increase of 94% from 1999 to 2009, and an increase in the annual cost of health insurance of 36.8% from 2004 to 2009. Employers began to observe increased cost associated with providing health insurance beginning in the 1970s and 1980s (Park, 2000). Such increases continue today and it is expected that these costs will continue to increase into the foreseeable future (Covel and Spors, 2008). As employers were negatively impacted by increasing health benefit costs, they identified and explored a number of cost control options. In general, these options can be considered as direct or indirect cost controls. While each option is focused on cost reduction, the process and impact on the employee are different. Consequently, the two general options are briefly discussed below. Direct Cost Control Risk management through beneficial selection was a major tool for controlling health care costs prior to the passage and enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Before ADA, what might be referred to as risk avoidance or reduction was based on pre-employment medical exams, which were, for some organizations, extended to family members. By selecting low risk employees with low risk families, organizations could significantly reduce their exposure to increased health care costs based on employees' and dependents' health care utilization. After passage of the ADA, which, in general, prohibits preemployment physicals, the use of this form of risk reduction has been severely limited. That is, ADA does allow pre-employment physicals when it is determined that the applicant's health is a bona fide occupational qualification for job performance. It cannot be denied, however, that employers may secure health data from other sources (Kapur, 2004). The prohibition of beneficial risk selection as a risk reduction tool caused employers to focus on direct cost reduction efforts. In its most extreme form, a direct cost reduction effort is represented by the elimination of the health care benefit. Because of the unfavorable variability of premiums, the elimination of health care benefits appeals primarily to small employers (Monheit and Schone, 2003). Larger employers seldom experience wide variations in premiums and, consequently, have fewer reasons to discontinue health care benefits. Because of the assumed relation between health care benefits and the employer's ability to attract applicants (Monheit & Vistnes, 1999), employers appear to view elimination of health care benefits as a last resort. Many employers identified cost-sharing as a reasoned approach to counter increased health benefit costs. Cost-sharing can take a number of forms, but some are best viewed as cost-limiting. Imposing limits on covered benefits or the elimination of certain types of health benefits can be considered as cost-limiting efforts. …


This thesis considers the leaden seals which were attached to textiles from the
late 14th- to the early 19th century in England as part of a system of industrial
regulation and taxation. Almost all of the 1,345 seals and related items which
are described here individually were recovered from the ground. This total
comprises all the English seals examined which refer to their place of origin in
the legends (many of these are alnage seals), all the known English seals of
medieval date, and the English matrices for the cloth seals. The unsorted
information about each item is presented, just as recorded, in Appendix 1. The
historical context and development of cloth sealing in this country are discussed,
and a chronological framework for the various stamped devices and forms of seal
is proposed. Following a more detailed account of the known medieval seals are
brief summaries of the main aspects of local textile industries and a synthesized
description of the recorded seals county by county. A concluding section
assesses the information provided by the known seals, and the degree of
correspondence with data from historical sources. Directions for future studies
are suggested. Further appendices provide statistical tables and maps of
documentary-based information on levels of textile production at different
periods, detailed discussions of the provenances and findspots of the recorded
seals, an account of the largest known group of English seals, and documentary
evidence for the dating of some of the seals from Norfolk.
For the first time information has been presented systematically, and assessed in
detail, both on the extent of survival and on the potential academic value of
cloth seals found during excavations.


Research shows that changes in our moods can affect our performance on cognitive tasks. Most studies to date have used young adults and the interaction between mood, cognitive performance and age have rarely been examined. There are age-specific changes in executive functions and mood regulation. This study examined the effect of mood on set switching and inhibitory control by comparing performances in young and older adults after neutral, positive and negative mood inductions using forced cued based switching tasks. In a neutral mood, older adults showed reduced set switching abilities and inhibitory control compared to young adults. Consistent with the literature, young adults showed reduced switching performance in a positive mood; they made more switching errors in a visual switch task. Older participants improved their switching abilities following mood inductions in a negative or positive direction when compared to a neutral mood induction. The relationship between mood and task switching performance was significant even after controlling for working memory, reaction time and inhibitory processes. Young and older adults made different types of errors during the switching task. Proposed explanations for findings are discussed.


White-nose syndrome (WNS) in North American bats is caused by an invasive cutaneous infection by the psychrophilic fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd). We compared transcriptome-wide changes in gene expression using RNA-Seq on wing skin tissue from hibernating little brown myotis (Myotis lucifugus) with WNS to bats without Pd exposure. We found that WNS caused significant changes in gene expression in hibernating bats including pathways involved in inflammation, wound healing, and metabolism. Local acute inflammatory responses were initiated by fungal invasion. Gene expression was increased for inflammatory cytokines, including interleukins (IL) IL-1β, IL-6, IL-17C, IL-20, IL-23A, IL-24, and G-CSF and chemokines, such as Ccl2 and Ccl20. This pattern of gene expression changes demonstrates that WNS is accompanied by an innate anti-fungal host response similar to that caused by cutaneous Candida albicans infections. However, despite the apparent production of appropriate chemokines, immune cells such as neutrophils and T cells do not appear to be recruited. We observed upregulation of acute inflammatory genes, including prostaglandin G/H synthase 2 (cyclooxygenase-2), that generate eicosanoids and other nociception mediators. We also observed differences in Pd gene expression that suggest host-pathogen interactions that might determine WNS progression. We identified several classes of potential virulence factors that are expressed in Pd during WNS, including secreted proteases that may mediate tissue invasion. These results demonstrate that hibernation does not prevent a local inflammatory response to Pd infection but that recruitment of leukocytes to the site of infection does not occur. The putative virulence factors may provide novel targets for treatment or prevention of WNS. These observations support a dual role for inflammation during WNS; inflammatory responses provide protection but excessive inflammation may contribute to mortality, either by affecting torpor behavior or causing damage upon emergence in the spring.


This GSoD In Focus provides a brief overview of the global state of democracy at the end of 2019, prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, and assesses some of the preliminary impacts that the pandemic has had on democracy globally in 2020. Key findings include: • To address the COVID-19 pandemic, starting in March 2020, more than half the countries in the world (59 per cent) had declared a national state of emergency (SoE), enabling them to take drastic temporary (and in most cases necessary) measures to fight the pandemic. These measures have included in most cases temporarily curbing basic civil liberties, such as freedom of assembly and movement, and in some cases postponing elections. • International IDEA's Global Monitor of COVID-19's Impact on Democracy and Human Rights finds that more than half the countries in the world (61 per cent) had, by the end of November 2020, implemented measures to curb COVID-19 that were concerning from a democracy and human rights perspective. These violated democratic standards because they were either disproportionate, illegal, indefinite or unnecessary in relation to the health threat. • Concerning developments have been more common in countries that were already non-democratic prior to the pandemic (90 per cent) and less common, although still quite widespread, in democracies (43 per cent). • The democracies that have implemented democratically concerning measures are those that were already ailing before the pandemic. More than two-thirds were democracies that were either backsliding, eroding or weak prior to the pandemic. • Almost a year since the first outbreak of COVID-19, the pandemic seems to have deepened autocratization in most of the countries that were already non-democratic. However, in at least 3 of those countries (Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand), the pandemic has also tapped into existing simmering citizen discontent and may have been the tipping point in unleashing massive protest waves demanding democratic reform. The pandemic has also seemingly deepened democratic backsliding processes and exposed the democratic weakness and fragility of new or re-transitioned democracies (Malaysia, Mali, Myanmar, Sri Lanka). In a few cases, the pandemic has also exposed countries that showed no apparent sign of democratically ailing prior to the pandemic, but where concerning democratic developments have occurred during the pandemic and which risk seeing a significant deterioration in their democratic quality as a result (i.e. Argentina, El Salvador). • The aspects of democracy that have seen the most concerning developments during the pandemic are freedom of expression, media integrity, and personal integrity and security. However, the freedoms that have been restricted across most countries are freedom of movement and assembly. Another core democratic process that has been heavily affected by the pandemic is the electoral, with half the elections scheduled between February and December 2020 postponed due to the pandemic. • The pandemic has also shown democracy's resilience and capacity for renovation. Innovation through accelerated digitalization has occurred across most regions of the world. And democratic institutions, such as parliaments, courts, electoral commissions, political parties, media and civil society actors, have fought back against attempts at executive overreach and democratic trampling or collaborated to ensure effective responses to the pandemic. The review of the state of democracy during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 uses qualitative analysis and data of events and trends in the region collected through International IDEA's Global Monitor of COVID-19's Impact on Democracy and Human Rights, an initiative co-funded by the European Union.


OBJECTIVE--To describe the characteristics of patients using non-orthodox health care and their pattern of use of conventional health care with respect to a particular problem. DESIGN--Postal survey of all 2152 practitioners of acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, naturopathy, and osteopathy identified from 11 national professional association registers. Patients attending a representative sample of 101 responding practitioners completed questionnaires covering demographic characteristics, presenting problems, and use of the health service. SETTING--Practices of practitioners of non-orthodox health care in England, Scotland, and Wales. SUBJECTS--Qualified, non-medical practitioners of non-orthodox health care working in Great Britain and 2473 patients who had attended one of the sampled practitioners in an allocated time period between August 1987 and July 1988. RESULTS--An estimated 1909 practitioners were actively practising one of the study treatments in Great Britain in 1987. Of the estimated 70,600 patients seen by this group of practitioners in an average week, most (78%) were attending with a musculoskeletal problem. Two thirds of the patients were women. Only 2% were aged under 16, but 15% were aged 65 or over. One in three patients had not received previous conventional care for their main problem; 18% were receiving concurrent non-orthodox and conventional care. Twenty two per cent of the patients reported having seen their general practitioner for any reason in the two weeks before the surveyed consultation. CONCLUSIONS--Patients of non-orthodox health care, as provided by this group of practitioners, had not turned their backs on conventional health care. Non-orthodox treatment was sought for a limited range of problems and used most frequently as a supplement to orthodox medicine.


Cell surface receptors are important communicators of external stimuli to the cell interior where they lead to initiation of various signaling pathways and cellular responses. The largest receptor family is the seven-transmembrane receptor (7TMR) family, with approximately 1000 coding genes in the human genome. When 7TMRs are stimulated with agonists, they activate heterotrimeric guanine nucleotide-binding proteins (G proteins), leading to the production of signaling second messengers, such as adenosine 3′,5′-monophosphate, inositol phosphates, and others. Activated receptors are rapidly phosphorylated on serine and threonine residues by specialized enzymes called G protein–coupled receptor kinases. Phosphorylated receptors bind the multifunctional adaptor proteins β-arrestin1 and β-arrestin2 with high affinity. β-arrestin binding blocks further G protein coupling, leading to "desensitization" of G protein–dependent signaling pathways. For several years, this was considered the sole function of β-arrestins. However, novel functions of β-arrestins have been discovered. β-arrestins are now designated as important adaptors that link receptors to the clathrin-dependent pathway of internalization. β-arrestins bind and direct the activity of several nonreceptor tyrosine kinases in response to 7TMR stimulation. β-arrestins also bind and scaffold members of such signaling cascades as the mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs). β-arrestins are crucial components in 7TMR signaling leading to cellular responses that include cell survival and chemotaxis. β-arrestins act as endocytic adaptors and signal mediators not only for the 7TMRs, but also for several receptor tyrosine kinases.


The neurobiology and psychology of attention have much to learn from each other. Neurobiologists recognize that responses in sensory cortex depend on the behavioral relevance of a stimulus, but have few ways to study how perception changes as a result. Psychologists have the conceptual and methodological tools to do just that, but are confounded by the multiple interpretations and theoretical ambiguities. This book attempts to bridge the two fields and to derive a comprehensive theory of attention from both neurobiological and psychological data. It highlights situations where attention can be seen to alter both neural activity and psychophysical performance/phenomenal experience. This "bicultural" approach contributes not only to attention research but to the larger goal of linking neural activity to conscious experience. The book focuses mainly on the effects of visual attention on the ventral and dorsal streams of visual cortex in humans and monkeys and the associated changes in visual performance. Several larger findings emerge: attention may involve more than one neural system; attention modulates all stages of cortical visual processing; the effect of attention is constrained by the intrinsic connectivity of cortex and the resulting contextual interactions; and the notion of a "saliency map" remains central to thinking about visual attention. The book also considers several approaches to evaluating the same variable through different methods, such as behavioral measurements, functional imaging, and single-unit recording. Contributors: Narcisse P. Bichot, Erik Blaser, Geoffrey M. Boynton, Jochen Braun, Maurizio Corbetta, Sean M. Culhane, Florin Cutzu, Sophie Deneve, Robert Desimone, John Duncan, Sunil P. Gandhi, Charles D. Gilbert, David J. Heeger, James W. Holsapple, Alexander C. Huk, Minami Ito, Laurent Itti, Christof Koch, Peter E. Latham, Nilli Lavie, D. Kathleen Lee, Zhong-Lin Lu, John H.R. Maunsell, Carrie J. McAdams, Brad C. Motter, Alexandre Pouget, Adam Reeves, John H. Reynolds, Jeffrey D. Schall, Christian Scheier, Shinsuke Shimojo, Gordon L. Shulman, George Sperling, Kirk G. Thompson, John K. Tsotsos, Katsumi Watanabe, Erich Weichselgartner, Gerald Westheimer.


Using a privacy calculus perspective, this study examines how Facebook users' social networks, privacy concerns, understanding of privacy policies, and privacy protection behaviors influence electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). It further investigates whether gender difference exists in relationships among variables. The results of an online survey of Korean adults ( N = 522, 49.4% females) showed that users' social networks, privacy concerns, and privacy protection behaviors are significant factors in the increase of eWOM. Conversely, understanding privacy policies has no significant impact on eWOM. The findings about gender difference revealed that women, who have more actual friends, were more likely to engage in eWOM than were men, and that women prefer to create eWOM when they have a higher level of privacy protection behavior. Further implications are discussed in light of expanding social networks and effective privacy settings as well as the need for a gender-sensitive social media marketing strategy.


The production of beef in Malaysia is inadequate to meet the demand, due to the rapid
increase in consumption and population. The Target Area Concentration (TAC) project is
expected to be a major contributor to boost beef cattle production. This study examines
the efficiency of resources used in the beef cattle production in the TAC in Johor,
Malaysia. It addresses the issues on productivity and technical efficiency of beef cattle
operations and their relationship with management inventory, farm performances, animal
husbandry practices, as well as socio economic and demographic factors.
The translog and Cobb-Douglas stochastic frontier production functions were used to
examine the issues of technical efficiency in the TAC project. The frontier regression
model was estimated using the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) technique. The
translog stochastic frontier model was found to be suitable in representing the sample
data and provide better estimates than the Cobb-Douglas model.
iv
The results indicated that the beef operation in the TAC has an increasing return to scale.
The average computed technical efficiency for individual farm units is 0.6829. The
majority of the farms (51%) were between 40% to 80% of technical efficiency. The total
loss in production due to inefficiency was estimated about 3,094 heads of beef cattle in
Animal Unit (AU) per year. The study also found that there was a significant different in
average technical efficiency by TAC location. However, the technical efficiency was not
significantly different by farm types, ownership, and sizes.
The findings of this study suggest that there is room for expansion, through the adoption
of best practice technology and optimal resource allocation. The farm's technical
efficiency could be improved by better planning and controlling skills by the
farmers/managers, longer experience, proper training, more frequent of advisory services
by extension agents, higher calving rate, involvement by DVS in breeding and health
management services and by using cross breed cattle


Using peripheral quantitative computed tomography (pQCT), we evaluated and analyzed age-related changes in bone mineral density and other properties at the site of the distal radius in two catarrhines: chimpanzees and Japanese macaques. We found that the age changes in patterns are quite similar between the two species and the patterns are composed of three stages. Quantitative differences were found between the two species in the amount of bone mineral content and age of inflection points in the age-change diagrams. These differences appear to reflect differences in scaling effect and the life span between chimpanzees and Japanese macaques. Moreover, the age-change pattern of cortical bone density in chimpanzees and Japanese macaques closely resembled that in humans. This may reflect a similar pattern of bone turnover (metabolism of bone) throughout the life-cycle within catarrhines.